Implementation Details

I’ve been invited to present a speech at the University of Calgary as part of their Biomedical Engineering Distinguished Speakers Series. I’m going to present a speech titled “Image Metrology in Orthopedic Imaging”.   The lecture, aimed at undergraduate Biomedical Engineers, is going to touch on the issues on getting measurement from 2D x-rays, 3D planning, and surgical navigation all related to orthopedics.

The lecture starts at noon in the ICT Building.

I had the pleasure to attend the fourth annual Toronto Code Camp over the weekend.  It was my first code camp and I found it hit and miss.  The quality of the presentations varied greatly.

Here’s a review of the sessions I attended:

Get Setup with WiX, Colin Bowern

Having used WIX in a couple of projects, I was hoping to get something good out of this presentation.  Colin was an excellent speaker and covered the basics very well.  However, his coverage of patches was worth the price of admission alone – and would have been invaluable last week.  The session was an end to end coverage of Wix from the first installer, to patching, to upgrading.  Definitely focusing on breadth rather than depth.

Using Data Services with ADO.NET 3.5, Kristina Mandekic

Having seen a presentation by Scott Hanselman on Data Services, I’m not sure what I was expecting to get out of this one.  I’m facinated by the technology, but have no practical use for it right now.  This stuff seems to sink in more the second time around, although I think I’ll really have to code it to ‘get it’.  Krista admitted she was a first time speaker and although she was clearly pretty nervous, I thought she did pretty well.  I’m still confused about the security story surrounding ADO.NET data services, but otherwise the technology looks very cool.

How to improve testability with a modular architecture, Mario Cardinal

This was the best presentation of the day.  At the beginning of this one, I was thinking crap, he’s just going to say use layers and unit testing, but he really focused on designing what he called the ‘velcro’ between layers in an architecture.  He’s from Montreal and has a podcast in French.  Being a big podcast listener I’ve already checked it out and it sounds great!  These Quebecquois get going a little fast for my Ottawa bred and France trained ears but the content’s great.

How LINQ Works: A Deep Dive on Visual Basic 2008 , Jonathan Aneja

Another excellend presentation.  Again, LINQ is something that I’ve been following for a while.  I’ve used it in one project, but I really haven’t gotten the chance to really dig deep.  Jonathan did a great job providing info on how it works, touching on pretty much all the areas.

WPF and the Model-View-ViewModel Pattern, Elias Puurunen

I was looking forward to this one.  I’ve been looking at Prism and MVP patterns as a way to solve some of the isses I had in WPF in my last project.  What amazed me is that this guy was a second year university student presenting to a bunch of professional developers.  The kids got more balls than I do now.  I think he’s going places, but his presentation a little more suited to a classroom environment that conference, but I’m sure he’ll improve quickly.  I left early to get home and see my kids so I never got to see the meat of this presentation, but the pacing was off, and there was too much PowerPoint.

Next time I’ll choose sessions based more on their speakers rather than the topics.  I’m undeciced if I’ll attend again, the day was the most beautiful day of the year and I spent it sitting listening to programming talks with a bunch of nerds (especially that guy over there, wait, that’s a mirror).

I’ve been writing a blog for a while over at blogspot, but I’ve written rather intermittently.  I love reading blogs, and have often had great intentions on maintaining a good one.  A while ago I thought of what I thought was a really great name: Implementation Details.  Too bad for me, someone at blogspot already took it a few months ago so over to WordPress I go.

In any case, WordPress is crackin’ good.  It seems way more flexible than blogspot.

One thing I’ve noticed since I was a grad student, is the huge dependency that a given solution has on the minutia, the implementation details.

Since my background and work deals a lot with image processing, let’s take the Canny Edge detector.  Given one image, and the same set of parameters in the algorithm, you will come up with as many different results as you have implementations.  How do you represent your images in memory, how do you implement your Gaussian filter, what is the form of your gradient operator, what assumptions and simplifications do you make?  Despite the fact that the algorithm is generally acknowledged to be robust and well understood, many small decisions have to be made in the implementation that make the results not wrong, but different.

I’ve decided not to move my posts from blogspot, there’s nothing worthwhile to move.