Garage48 2012 Tallinn – impressions
Garage48 Tallinn Music 2012 – my third participation in the foundation’s startup weekends. This post was written on three subsequent nights at around 1am and expresses my personal opinion of the events of the weekend.
What is Garage48 Tallinn Music 2012?
Garage48 is a weekend hackathon, where people pitch ideas, form teams and build prototypes or sometimes full service over the weekend. This time we partnered with Tallinn Music Week, so we have a bigger focus on Music related ideas and our mentors are mostly from Music industry. But you can pitch all kinds of ideas, also outside of music industry.
- http://garage48.org/tallinn/faq
Friday, 23. March (23:50)
Arrived at the venue (Tehnopolis Ülemiste, also the host of Garage48 Tallinn 2011 – read my post about THAT weekend) right after work. Deadlines with school and work are both tight at the moment and I decided to cram in a weekend of sleeplessness. Oh, well…
The venue looked emptier than a year ago, with some vacant seats – I guess many of the previous startups really did start up and the authors are now busy conquering the world. Traditional intro, traditional, brutal pitching rounds with 90 seconds to convince the audience of the success of the idea.
The usual story – some pitchers did it well, some not so much.
Pro trip: don’t write your pitch as a note on your phone to read from: you WILL delete it during the presentation.
#garage48 - https://twitter.com/#!/AndoRoots/status/183237716547354625
Maybe I’m being dull or maybe it’s my (lack of) taste, but I found a lot less ideas appealing (as in Yes!, I’ll join the cause!) than previous times. Maybe the Music theme held some ideas back? That was, in fact, the reason I didn’t submit some of my own ideas to the discussion.
Translating text into Pig Latin with Java
I have a beginner level Java exam coming up tomorrow and I'm doing some last-minute studying. Here's a primitive Java program I wrote to translate English text into Pig Latin. It has some obvious shortcomings like lacking validity checks and inability to handle symbols.
The program is text based only. It asks for a file, reads it, loops over individual words and outputs and writes the resulting translation.
Java AWT MD5 applet-thingy
I made this little…thing as an exercise for my upcoming Java exam. It's a a graphical MD5 generator with a label, textbox and a button, using the AWT toolkit.
Coffee or Tea, that’s the question…
Have you ever caught yourself pondering over the following question: “Do I want to drink coffee or tea at the moment?”
If the answer is YES, fear no more! The following Java applet has the answer. Just click on the link below to get a 99.9% accurate recommendation on which beverage you secretly crave at the moment.
[Disclaimer: The authors of the applet can't be sued. Blame pseudo-random number generators.]
Whatever will it be? Whatever will it be? Will it be coffee? Will it be tea?
The Java source code for the applet is as follows:
About The Author
Ando “David” Roots is a college student and a software developer from Kunda, Estonia. Living, working and studying in Tallinn, he hopes to get his bachelor degree from the Estonian Information Technology College on IT Systems Development. 