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=Free Software & Open Source Symposium=
== Introduction ==
This years year's FSOSS featured talks by more than 20 different individuals on a broad range of open source topics. The talks are spaced out in 4 different rooms with one per hour. This means that I was only able to attend 6 talks which made it a bit hard to choose which ones would be most beneficial to me.
In the end I went with the following lineup:
* 9AM - Creating a Twitter Widget using Processing.js (Alistair MacDonald, Hyper-Metrix.com)
Next came the demo I had been waiting to see. Al had created a widget for a web page that could grab twitter info and then aggregate it into the widget. The purpose of this demo was to show that with about 100 lines of code this technology could create a really professional looking animated feature for a personal website that could run on any modern browser using the canvas element for HTML5.
Al has a very supportive view on open source and allowing processing.js to leverage the full power of the web through a hopeful explosion of this technology in the near future. He mentioned some of the work the community has been doing and how to get involved in the community through the Google group or IRC. Al talked briefly about some of the contributions Seneca students have made already towards the project and how it is growing fast and being implemented at an increasing pace now.<br />
After showing the Twitter widget demo Al proceeded to show a couple of interesting demos of how processing.js is being used on the web. One of the most interesting ones was a visual search engine called '[http://askken.heroku.com/ Ask Ken']. It allows you to search for a topic and then presents you with a circular disc of results which you can then pick one and it will create an offshoot disc with a sub search of that choice and so on. It shows how even our most basic tasks like searching for information on the internet can be redefined as to how we do itusing processing.<br />A significant part of Al's presentation was a section titled 'Community and Mission' in which he talked about how the community is outward facing and open to anyone who wants to make contributions. He showed examples of how people can make contributions even if its not through writing code for the port itself. One of these examples was a website called [http://www.hascanvas.com/ HasCanvas] where you can go and paste a block of procesing code into a window and it will run the code for you in the browser and show you the output result much like the web based IDE only with a little more functionality and the ability to share a link to your creation with others. He also talked about the feature list and bug list the processing team has going on the mozilla wiki that shows who is working on what areas and what bugs are currently known. For anyone interested in getting started with processing, there is a simple web IDE on the processing.js website that allows you to just enter in some sample processing code and see how it works without the need to download the source and install it locally or on a web host and no need to configure the canvas etc etc. Al gave a brief demonstration of the processing web IDE during the presentation and showed a simple example and modified it a few times and re-ran it to show how easy it was to get started.<br />
== 3D in the Browser... More than just Doom ==
==Requirements==
