Tag: technology

Edmonton Code Camp 2008

edmonton code camp We’re just over two weeks away from a really cool event for local software developers – Edmonton Code Camp! What is code camp? It’s a free event by developers, for developers. It’s an opportunity for local developers to get together to share with and learn from one another. Similar to DemoCamp, slide decks are frowned upon – show us the code! It doesn’t matter what your programming language of choice is, everyone is welcome!

Code Camp is an annual event here in Edmonton, organized primarily by Steven Rockarts from EDMUG. I’m really looking forward to it! Here are the details:

WHEN: Saturday, November 29th, 2008 from 9:00am until 4:30pm
WHERE: Building #5, MacEwan Downtown Campus (map)
Click here to register!

[geo_mashup_map height=”200″ width=”575″ zoom=”15″]

You should be able to see the embedded map above also – I’m testing the WP Geo plugin. Works quite well I think! I’m now testing the Geo Mashup plugin – seems to work better, and I can specify the zoom on a per-post basis!

If you’d like to present something at code camp, let us know! You can add your name to the wiki, leave a comment here, or email Steven Rockarts. Just want to attend? That’s cool too! Just register here, and then tell your friends!

We’ll have more updates as we get closer to the event, so keep an eye on the website and wiki. Hope to see you there!

Netbooks are trendy

dell inspiron mini What kind of computer do you use? Most of my work is done at a desktop or workstation; a tower attached to three monitors. The rest of the time I’m using either my laptop or tablet. I’ve also got a little Sony UMPC but it doesn’t get used much. It was kinda cool for a while, but it’s not all that fast. And once I got my iPod touch, that pretty much fulfilled my small device needs.

My favorite to use is probably my tablet, even though it’s the slowest of the bunch. I think I like it mostly because of the form factor – it’s pretty small for a laptop (at 12 inches) but large enough that I don’t sacrifice a keyboard or full operating system.

A couple years from now though, my tablet might seem rather large thanks to the netbook trend. What’s a netbook? From Wikipedia:

A netbook is a small to medium sized, light-weight, low-cost, energy-efficient laptop, generally optimized for internet based services such as web browsing and e-mailing. Netbooks are also sometimes, but rarely referred to as a sub-subnotebook.

The form factor of a netbook is smaller than that of a notebook and they are very light in weight (usually 2 to 3 pounds). Common features include a small screen (usually around 7-inches to 10-inches diagonal), wireless connectivity, but no optical disc drive, and a smaller sized keyboard (usually 80 percent to 95 percent of normal size). There is also a trend of using solid-state drives instead of traditional hard disk drives.

Maybe it’s just me, but every second article on technology these days seems to mention netbooks! The blogosphere made a big deal this week out of the fact that Windows boss Steven Sinofsky demonstrated Windows 7 running on a netbook. And today, PC World declares that netbooks will soon cost just $99:

Subnotebooks like the Asus Eee PC, the Dell Mini 9 and the HP 2133 Mini-note will soon cost as little as $99. The catch? You’ll need to commit to a two-year mobile broadband contract. The low cost will come courtesy of a subsidy identical to the one you already get with your cell phone.

A monthly service fee for mobile broadband doesn’t appeal to me at all, but a $99 netbook certainly does. Heck, I’m already tempted by the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 (pictured above) and it’s nearly $500! If the cost of components fell enough so that a netbook was about half that price, I’d have no hesitations about picking one up and I doubt anyone else would either.

Netbooks are definitely trendy, but I think this is one trend that will last. A small device to check email, read and post blogs, and update Twitter is something that appeals to lots of people. Okay maybe not that last part 🙂

Recap: DemoCampEdmonton4

Tonight was without a doubt our best DemoCamp ever here in Edmonton. With six fairly solid demos, nearly 150 people in attendance, and no technical glitches in sight, it’ll be hard to top DemoCampEdmonton4 but we’re certainly going to try! It’s just amazing to see the community grow like this – thanks to everyone who came out.

Tonight we had six demos:

  • Sean from Orange Door Idealab showed us Surveyor, a mobile tool for conducting surveys using the iPhone or iPod touch.
  • Reg showed us Edistorm, a social brainstorming platform.
  • Brady showed us ElectionBuddy, a service that helps you run polls and elections via email.
  • Aaron came all the way from Regina to show us The History Books, a sort of social networking site.
  • Sam showed us PureInbox, an online email management system.
  • Grant Skinner showed us a bunch of Flash projects, including Adobe Kuler.

It wasn’t planned at all, but all of the products that were demoed tonight seemed really polished. The interfaces were all slick and professional looking!

DemoCampEdmonton4

I think my “demo of the night” goes to ODIL’s Surveyor. I really like the interface, and the application itself seems pretty solid for something so early-stage. ElectionBuddy and Edistorm also had great demos, and have lots of potential. I think PureInbox could have been a great demo, but unfortunately we didn’t get to see much of the app itself. The History Books was entertaining, but as I said on Twitter, it seemed like something that came out of a few late night domain name purchases. Grant did a wicked presentation, showing us eight different projects that his Flash design firm has been involved with. He was definitely the most captivating presenter.

Tonight was also the first public announcement for Edmonton Code Camp! It’s going to take place on Saturday, November 29th at the MacEwan campus downtown. You can find more information here, and the domain will be http://www.edmontoncodecamp.com (working through some DNS issues currently). We’ll share more details soon.

The venue worked well again this time, and once again I had Free Wifi going (though it could have been a bit more reliable). I live-twittered the demos, which you can find at Twitter Search along with updates from others in attendance.

I think lots of people like DemoCamp just for the networking opportunity afterward, and again we had a full house at The Windsor Pub. Was great to see a bunch of new faces in the crowd too! Thanks to Smibs for sponsoring tonight’s event.

If you’d like to be notified about future DemoCamp and BarCamp events in Edmonton, sign up for the mailing list here.

See you at DemoCampEdmonton5!

Microsoft Announcement Day 2008

windows logo Today was the first day of Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference, but they may as well have called it official announcement day! For anyone who uses Microsoft technologies on a day-to-day basis, today is a day to remember. Definitely one for the history books of technology.

The big announcement was Windows Azure:

Today, during a keynote speech at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2008 (PDC2008), Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Corp.’s chief software architect, announced Windows Azure, the cloud-based service foundation underlying its Azure Services Platform, and highlighted this platform’s role in delivering a software plus services approach to computing.

That’s a lot of marketing speak, but as usual Mary Jo Foley has a great post breaking Azure down. I’d suggest you read that to get a better idea of what exactly Azure is all about.

A few other interesting announcements:

That’s a lot of stuff for one day! As a developer, I’m a bit overwhelmed with the Azure announcement. It’s going to take a while to process. Very exciting though!

UPDATE: Colinizer has another great summary of today’s announcements on his blog. Check it out!

DemoCampEdmonton4

democampedmonton October and November are shaping up to be fantastic months for tech events here in Edmonton! Our next DemoCamp will take place on October 29th at 6:30pm, once again in ETLC on the University of Alberta campus. DemoCamp is always lots of fun – if you’ve never been to one I really encourage you to come check it out! You can read about our previous events (1, 2, 3) to get an idea of what they’re like.

Date: Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Time: 6:30pm (and drinks afterward)
Location: E1 017, ETLC, University of Alberta (map)
Cost: Free

Add your name to the wiki page to let everyone know you’re planning to attend (or if you’d like to demo). We’re also looking for help spreading the word:

We’d like to challenge everyone to tell a few people about DemoCamp and physically bring at least one new person to the event.

Additionally we’re looking for volunteers to help us target different groups of people in a more organized fashion. If you want to help us spread the word to schools, media, demoers or service providers, let us know.

Anything you can do to help would be great! We’ve got events on Facebook and Upcoming that you can send to people also. Be sure to tag things with democampyeg so that they are easier to find.

I also wanted to point out the interview that Peter Urban of Smibs did with Cam Linke. Smibs was “demo of the evening” at our first ever DemoCamp, and Cam is of course the driving force behind DemoCamp here in Edmonton. Check it out!

Faster wireless, everywhere

As a tech geek I’m interested in a lot of things, but I have a particular interest in wireless technologies. I want to have the ability to connect to the Internet wherever I go, using whatever device I happen to have with me. Despite the progress we’ve made in recent years, that vision is still a long way from being realized. A couple of things I came across recently look promising though.

The first is an article in MIT’s Technology Review, discussing research to make wireless faster:

One way to achieve faster speeds is to harness the millimeter-wavelength frequency of the wireless spectrum, although this usually requires expensive and very complex equipment. Now, engineers at Battelle, a research and development firm based in Columbus, OH, have come up with a simpler way to send data through the air with millimeter-wave technology.

Apparently they’ve been able to achieve speeds of 10.6 gigabits-per-second in a point-to-point field test, with antennas 800 meters apart. In the lab, they’ve demonstrated 20 gigabit-per-second speeds. Those are fiber-like speeds! Of course this wouldn’t work for blanket-wireless (like a cell network), but it could have some really useful applications.

The second article discusses a new study by market researcher In-Stat:

In-Stat said that more than 294 million consumer electronics devices with Wi-Fi shipped in 2007. But that number is quickly growing and will likely reach 1 billion by 2012. The fastest-growing embedded Wi-Fi segment is mobile handsets. By 2011, dual-mode cell phones will surpass PCs as the largest category of Wi-Fi devices, the In-Stat report said.

The phenomenal growth of consumer electronics devices is nothing new, but the takeaway here is that wireless Internet access demand is going to grow quite a bit over the next few years. After all, what good is a device with Wi-Fi capabilities if there is no Wi-Fi network available? This is good news for the Free Wi-Fi project.

A world with faster, more ubiquitous wireless Internet access is a world I want to live in.

Text messaging is not dangerous, get over it

cell phoneThe people who create violent video games must be breathing a sigh of relief at the moment – text messaging is the new enemy. Increasingly the media has been publishing fluff pieces about the apparent danger that text messaging poses. With news that the train engineer at the centre of the crash in California last week was text messaging at the time of the accident, things are only getting worse for the technology.

Maybe it’s just the natural progression of things – become popular enough and you’ll undoubtedly gain enemies. Text messaging is more popular than ever, with over 75 billion messages sent in the US in the month of June alone. That’s an awful lot of messages! In fact, Nielsen Mobile estimates that more Americans send text messages than make phone calls. I would guess the numbers are similar here in Canada and elsewhere in the world.

Of course, there are no facts that prove text messaging is dangerous:

Though there are no official casualty statistics, there is much anecdotal evidence that the number of fatal accidents stemming from texting while driving, crossing the street or engaging in other activities is on the rise.

“The act of texting automatically removes 10 I.Q. points,” said Paul Saffo, a technology trend forecaster in Silicon Valley.

I am sure Saffo is completely qualified to make such a statement as a “trend forecaster” so let me make a few statements of my own. I would venture to say that you lose I.Q. points while using the good old fashioned voice functionality of your phone. You probably lose 10 I.Q. points while rocking out to music on your iPod. You undoubtedly lose I.Q. points while stirring your Frappuccino as you cross the street too.

My point is that text messaging is no different than any other distraction. You’ve always got to remember to pay attention to the task at hand.

Recap: DemoCampEdmonton3

It’s hard to believe that nearly four months have passed since our last DemoCamp here in Edmonton! Of course, we did have BarCamp back in July, but our last official DemoCamp was in May. It was about time for another one! Tonight’s event went very well, with an audience made up of both familiar and new faces.

DemoCampEdmonton3 featured six demos:

  1. Adam & Andy from dub5
  2. Aaron from SpatialQ
  3. Michael & Brendan from Edmonton Free Library
  4. Darren from Playerrs
  5. Kerri from Tynt
  6. The U of A’s Autonomous Robot Vehicle Project

I think every demo was slightly under the 10 minute mark, which meant more time for questions. Tonight was a night of firsts! Kerri was our first female presenter ever, and ARVP provided us with our first hardware demo. Very cool stuff.

DemoCampEdmonton3

For those of you who couldn’t make it: Dub5 is a calendar/scheduling application that hopes to play well with existing applications and services. It features an SMS interface, which made for a neat demo. SpatialQ is a solution for geospatial search, a way to associate data sets with geographical information. The Edmonton Free Library project is a community site for sharing books, music, and videos. Playerrs is a sports analysis and research site which makes it easy to track your favorite teams. Tynt is a browser plugin that lets you annotate and share the web. And finally, the Autonomous Robot Vehicle Project is a research project at the U of A (with a fairly self-explanatory name).

I’d have to say that my “demo of the night” goes to dub5. The ARVP demo was really neat, especially to see the robot in action, but dub5 was both entertaining and impressive. I definitely think they have challenges ahead, but they seem like a smart group with a good idea and lots of passion.

We had over 80 people attend tonight, and roughly 30 of those people made it out to The Windsor Pub afterward – an awesome turnout, thanks to everyone who came! Also, thanks to Reg and the Zigtag team for getting that all arranged. I think the venue (ETLC) worked really well tonight – everyone could see and hear the demos with ease. Another positive tonight was that we had free wifi, provided by the Free WiFi project. Despite some initial connection issues, I managed to get our WiMAX router working properly! We had fairly consistent usage through the evening.

You can see my photos of tonight’s event here. If you’d like to be notified about future DemoCamp and BarCamp events in Edmonton, sign up for the mailing list here.

See you at DemoCampEdmonton4!

The Large Hadron Collider

At 4:28am EST today, scientists at CERN successfully turned on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle collider. After nearly 15 years of work and roughly $8 billion USD of investment, I’m sure everyone involved in the project breathed huge sighs of relief when it didn’t explode this morning.

Eventually, the collider is expected to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts and then smash them together, recreating conditions in the primordial fireball only a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Scientists hope the machine will be a sort of Hubble Space Telescope of inner space, allowing them to detect new subatomic particles and forces of nature.

The LHC has received lots of negative publicity (but publicity nonetheless) in recent months, as some individuals feared that the collider could create a black hole that would swallow the Earth in an instant. Scientists from around the world unanimously declared that such a notion was complete nonsense. But the naysayers persisted.

Fortunately, naysayers inspire comedy on the Internet!

Here are a few funny LHC-related things I came across today:

Also funny looking though it isn’t meant to be, is the official LHC website. I didn’t know 1994 was back in style!

I think the LHC is pretty exciting (apparently Google does too, as they devoted a Doodle to it). I hope it enables all of the discoveries that scientists think it might. To learn more, check out the Wikipedia article.

Please don't send me large files via email

email If you’ve ever sent me a large file through email, you probably know how much I hate it. No one escapes a lecture! Just because GMail and other services give you gigabytes of storage, doesn’t mean that it’s okay to send really large attachments. I was happy to read that one my favorite blogs posted about the subject today. From the Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog:

Putting any issues with your e-mail service provider’s limits on large messages aside, sending large attachments through e-mail is still a bad idea for a number of reasons.

In the post, Outlook Program Manager Ryan Gregg outlines a few of the reasons why you shouldn’t send large files via email – mail servers may reject large files, mailboxes may go over their quota, attachment bloat, attachments may be out of date, etc. He also outlines a number of alternatives, including SharePoint or a Shared File Server, Office Live, photo sharing sites like Flickr, and video sharing sites like YouTube.

When you use one of these alternative ways to share files with your friends, family, or colleagues you help them keep your mailbox and theirs clean, and you can be sure that your file will be available no matter what service or program your e-mail recipients are using.

I would add a couple more reasons to avoid sending large files: slow Internet connections and small devices. If I’m checking email on an unreliable connection, the last thing I want to do is wait for your images to download. If I’m checking email on my iPod touch or a cell phone, I might not be able to read the files anyway.

If you’re sending photos, why not stick them on Flickr and email a link? Same goes for video – use a site like YouTube. Some other alternatives include Box.net, Amazon S3, and SlideShare.

It doesn’t take a lot of extra effort to stick your file online somewhere first, so why not just do it? Send links to large files via email, not the files themselves!