InGeniusBlog.com

Fuzzy Time is a recent meme in the blogosphere - some design firm built a mockup of a clock that told the time - sort of. Instead of an exact time like 5:16pm, it would show “Five Fifteen” or “Quarter After Five.”

This sounded kind-of cool, so I built an HTML version of this clock. (Open in it’s own window, then resize the window to about 2 or 3 inches wide)

The app has a pretty decent list of time variants. Each minute it scans through all the time variants, chooses the ones which apply now, and then chooses a random one of the candidates to be displayed as the time. The whole source for the thing can be seen if you “view source” - check it out, and let me know if you come up with some time variants I haven’t thought of!

It’s nice to run this clock in a window on your desktop - and to do that, check out Bubbles! Bubbles lets you run HTML applications as though they are PC Desktop apps.

For more fuzzy clocks:

• http://store.artlebedev.com/office/verbarius/
• http://code.google.com/p/fuzzyclock/

InGenius is proud to be one of the finalists for a VON award for our innovative online application - the Mitel Application Builder. Winners will be announced at the VON show.

Application Builder is a tool used to build HTML applications which run on Mitel’s large-screen 5330 and 5340 phones.

Currently, you can build screen saver applications, and hospitality applications - and we’re planning to add many more applications over the next year.

Application Builder is innovative in that dealers or customers can sign up for free, and build trial applications for free. The tool supports online demos - you and your customers can see what your application will look like in our online phone simulator - then when you’re happy, download the application to your Mitel 3300 switch, and phones.

InGenius is happy to be in the company of many excellent finalists, including Alec Saunder’s iotum, another Ottawa firm.

Update: Well, we didn’t make the top 10, but we’re pretty happy with the exposure and recognition of our hard work. Thanks VON!

Check out Innocentive.com - this site matches “idea people” (solvers) with “seekers” who have a problem they need solved.

Most of the solutions pay between $5000 to $50,000 - some much higher.

For some reason, this meme keeps coming up lately - I guess with the Netflix Challenge coverage in Wired…

Nice to see that some of the challenges are designed to benefit 3rd world countries such as lighting ideas, and mosquito control using solar energy.

I’m a bit afraid of this one though: A stretch activated aroma... Invent something that gives off a pleasant odor when an elastomer is stretched…

We are just starting a new project here at InGenius, and needed a way to import a ton of cases into FogBugz (our bug tracking system).

Here’s our project workflow for now:

• First, develop a fairly detailed spec, then break the spec down into detailed work items. The idea here is not to come up with a complete detailed design, but to come up with a pretty good spec of how the app should work, the flow, the things we want to see on screens etc.
• The work items usually end up in a table in Word, since it’s easiest to edit this way.
• We then involve all the developers who add detailed comments and add their estimates in hours.
• This Word table is imported into excel, saved as CSV, then we run this app to import into FB.
• In FB, each area has a default developer assigned, so the work gets assigned this way.
• Once in FB, I select ‘em all, convert to Features and schedule items where appropriate.
• And we fine-tune the work assignments to balance the workload among developers.

The flow seems clunky, but it preserves the ease of editing and group sharing and input for as long
as possible, then it’s into FB, where it’s actually DONE.

So, based on one of the example apps that comes with FogBugz, we built a quick little CSV importer which makes it pretty easy to populate the cases for a project.

This work is in the public domain. Go ahead and modify and improve. Please send me a copy of your improvements!

Known Issues:
No error checking. VERY little testing. Basically, it worked once for me, and I’m happy.
WARNING: This app is a thrown-together hack done in about 10 minutes. It worked for me the one time I used it.

The columns in the excel spreadsheet I used are:
The Project,Area,Title,Description,Hours

Expects a file in EXACTLY this format:
Iceberg,Dev Items,test,Description of the ‘Item’,10
Iceberg,Dev Items,test2,22222,20
Iceberg,Dev Items,test3,”333′ ‘3′3 ‘3′”" “” 3rd Item, that I think is cool”,30

I think that project and area should match exactly the definitions in the FB database.Note: Saving as CSV in excel will automatically escape any embedded “’s as shown below. Nice.

So, with that preamble, HERE’s the app, and .Net project. I hope you find it useful!

Check out this story! Scientists watching how water beetles skim across the surface of a lake have been able to duplicate this behavior in a tiny robot. The robot can skim across the surface at a very high rate of speed, considering it’s size.

Stefan pointed out a really cool you-tube video the other day. Johnny Chung Lee has used a Wii controller to create a multi-point interactive whiteboard. The hardware is really simple. He’s simply created a couple of pens with LEDs at the tips and switches mounted on the side of the pen. He then simply points the Wii controller at a screen where a projector is displaying his PC desktop. The Wii controller connects to the PC using Bluetooth. Johnny has written some code on the PC to tie it all together, and the result is astonishing!

Check it out!

I recently picked up an Asus eee PC, a tiny wonder of a PC. $399 at www.pccyber.com here in Ottawa.

The eee features:

• 7 inch screen,
• Full keyboard,
• 512Meg of RAM,
• 4Gig silicon hard disk,
• 900 MHz Intel CPU,
• 802.11g wireless
• 10/100 LAN jack
• 2 lbs
• Runs Linux,
• Ships with 40 applications, almost NONE of which I would classify as bloatware,
• 3 USB ports,
• VGA Port,
• Camera!,
• Built-in mic and speakers,
• SD Card reader,
• Can run Windows XP - ships with DVD that includes all necessary drivers.

What’s Great:

• The size. It’s awesomely small and fun.
• The weight. You can carry this everywhere.
• The apps. Great selection (Open office, Firefox, Skype, lots, lots more.)

What Sucks:

• The battery life does not appear to be the 3.5 hours that some people are reporting. I find it lasts about 1.5 hours, under normal use (browsing). So, carry the charger.
• The sleep mode (slamming the lid shut) seems to use WAY too much power. The battery drains way to quickly in this mode. I’m used to my Mac, which I NEVER power down. With the eee, I find I have to shut it down instead of closing the lid. Not too big a deal since it boots in less than 30 seconds.
• The charger is nice and small - but doesn’t appear to have the oomph to charge the machine while it’s in use. If I leave it going, and plugged in - then unplug it from the wall, it’s quite common to see the battery only at 80%. It charges fully when shut down, and plugged in.
• It doesn’t appear to remember wireless LAN’s as well as I’d like. I basically want it to automatically log onto my favorite networks at home and at work. I’m having to select the network manually right now. It appears that there are options that can make this easier, but I haven’t had time to play with that yet.

Let me tell you that this is a really amazing little PC. It’s cute, small, yet usable. I can actually recommend this PC for students, kids, and adults who aren’t married to Windows. The charger is very small (which is good, ’cause you’ll want to carry it with you…). This is a great PC that you can toss in a bag and use at hot-spots, or while travelling. A great backpacker’s PC! My co-worker Jacques dumped his Dell laptop a couple of days after buying his eee!

My Leopard disk arrived at noon today. And, was in my Mac by 12:01pm. I started the install running, then went off for lunch, leaving the Mac to update it self.

Upon my return from lunch, I see the Mac just finishing its upgrade, then starting a reboot, and it reboots to a pleasant blue screen, with a mouse cursor.

Well, I sat and stared at that screen for over an hour, with absolutely NO activity from the hard disk, thinking that the Mac was tidying up some tasks or other.

Then I gave it another hour.

Then I powered it down, and rebooted - to the same blue screen.

And there it sits, my beautiful Mac, with a blue screen, and a mouse cursor.

Turns out I’m not alone. This is happening a lot!

Update: I followed some of the instructions on the site - re-installing a number of times, till I finally did a reinstall with the Archive and Install option. And, a shiny new OS, with no lost data. It took from 1pm to 11pm that night to get my mac updated.

And, the new OS??? Generally, everything is exactly like it was before. I don’t find myself using any of the new features - except for spaces, which I use rarely. The stacks are cute, but not too useful. Seems like some apps like Firefox crash  more often… So, all in all, not as impressive an upgrade as I’d been hoping for. I sold all my Apple stock that day.

We’ll be heading down to the Clocktower Restaurant on Bank Street tonight for the sixth Ottawa democamp. Looks like a pretty interesting lineup:

• Workspace - Obaid Ahmed - A quick overview of what Workspace - Online development environment.

• Trailpeak - Kurt Turchan - Canada’s largest trails/adventure wiki, 5 years later; a recap of technical and social (audience, volunteer) challenges for social networks and collaborative content.
• iotum - Alec Saunders - see the next version of iotum’s FREE Conference Call application for Facebook.
• MODASolutions - – Lesley Purtell – demo of eBillme, an payment option for online shopping
• XDS Inc. - Misha Nossik, Michael Richardson and Tyler Tidman: SimTone VDU - Virtual Desktop Utility
• Jetfire - Charles Wiebe and John Hansen: Jetfire - Write workflows quickly and easily

Sign up here if you want to attend.

Date: Monday, September 24, 2007 from 7pm to 9pm
Location: Clocktower Restaurant on Bank Street, just south of the Queensway.
Format for 6 demos: 2 minute introduction, 8 minute demo, 5 minutes for Q&A and discussion

We’re pretty excited around here! Our Intelligent Directory product is now available through Mitel. I’ve talked about Intelligent Directory before (check out the details here) - ID is an application that runs on your Mitel 5330 or 5340 phone, and provides a simple on-screen searchable directory of all your corporate contacts (from your corporate Active Directory), as well as your personal Outlook contacts.

The application has been in trials since May - it’s solid and really useful.

We have had to work very hard to make the application as responsive as possible when running on a Mitel phone. The CPU in the phone is nowhere near as fast as a desktop PC’s CPU - so you have to apply a ton of optimizations and special techniques to ring every bit of performance out of the device as possible.

In fact, we’ve made performance improvements throughout our beta cycles, improving performance by 5 times. We’ve also streamlined the User Interface, and added features as requests came in from our beta trial customers.

Some examples:

• The application used to run in “Corporate Contacts” mode or in “Outlook Contacts” mode. We found a way to largely get rid of this modality, and allow you to choose where your search will take place right when you are entering the characters you want to search for.
• We introduced the concept of “Favorites” and made it easy to add any Outlook or Corporate contact to your favorites list.
• Doing queries of your Outlook contacts through the exchange server was quite slow - something people complained about. So, we have changed the product to cache any Outlook contacts you save as “Favorites” so that they pop up very quickly.
• We added the ability to refine a search - if you enter a few characters of someone’s name, and get back too many results, you can easily refine your current search to narrow down your choices.
• We added AJAX style interactions on the phone pages, so as you click between pages, only the data on the pages change - none of the graphics or underlying code on the page have to reload.

The application has ended up being very usable and friendly.

Intelligent Directory is available here - download the application, the user guide and installation guide.

If you want to purchase the application, the Mitel part numbers are:

• Intelligent Directory 30 Pack:  51011224
• Intelligent Directory Presence Option 30 Pack:  51011225 (This upgrade to the basic product provides LCS presence indications on the phone beside each directory entry that is shown)

Have fun!

I’ve been playing with e lately, an editor based on one of the top Mac editors, Textmate. There’s a nice video on their site showing e in action - VERY nice that you can ctrl-click in a bunch of places in a file, start typing, and have characters appear, and editing occur in multiple places at once. Very nice.

The creators of e have thoughtfully included support for the vast Textmate bundle library - which are basically macros and shortcuts to make working in just about ANY programming language easy and efficient.

e also includes the Cygwin library - giving you easy access to a whole range of UNIX shell tools, and lets you extend e using Python, Ruby, or what-have-you.

There’s a famous video  showing David Heinemeier Hansson, one of the developers of Ruby on Rails, creating a RoR web site live at a conference. He’s up there, entering a few characters here and there, and this crazy editor he’s using is magically filling in text, adding stuff here and there, and just making everything look wonderful and easy. NO programmer saw that video without wondering about that editor, and how it worked.

Well, that was Textmate, and e is that magic editor, for Windows. (Beware, it’s 1.0, and *just* released, but looking good)

QNX has made some parts of it’s OS open source! Effective immediately, the Kernel, Memory Manager, Path Manager, Process Manager and C Library are available for download.

And, wait for it, their SVN Server has died. So, you can’t actually download anything right now…

I used QNX 1.0 on a 4.77 MHz PC-XT with 1Meg of RAM - around 1985. When I bought it, Dan Dodge personally copied the floppies for me, stuck the stickers on, and handed me the disks. I was SO SO excited to get it home and get it running. I remember criticising him for taking the floppies out before the little red light had turned off - he explained that he’d written the floppy drivers - and knew EXACTLY when he could pull the disks out. I shut up.

In fact, I used QNX for years on a PC before ever running DOS. I used to have 5 or 8 terminal windows open, a bunch of files open in the excellent editor, compiles happening in another window or 2, and a few windows open to run the apps and test them. I was fantastically productive. The QNX toolset was simply terrific - it was probably my favorite development environment of all time. ALL IN ONE MEG of RAM, at 4.77 MHz!!!!

We built a system controlling 8 serial terminals, with 8 serial touch screens, and 8 printers - selling ski lift tickets ALL running off ONE 4.77 MHz PC.

Then, one day, the project ended, and I loaded up DOS 2.0 or 3.0 on the PC.

I have never been so thoroughly disappointed and disgusted with an OS as I was with DOS. Everything that I took for granted with QNX simply ceased to be, and was not replicated until Windows NT, if even then.

I purchased Turbo C 1.0, and for my first project set about reproducing all the QNX command line utilities I knew and loved, and which were an essential part of my development process. I wrote all the obvious stuff like LS, CAT, GREP, etc, and the esoteric stuff like EO - a QNX utility that let you specify a file containing a bunch of file names, and a command to run on each named file. (For example eo myFiles “cc %1″) This coding exercise taught me all the internals of DOS, BIOS calls, Interrupts, the file system, etc, and set me on my way programming for DOS, Windows, and all the embedded systems I’ve worked on over the years. I wrote about 50 little utilities at the time, and carried those to every job, so I’d have a decent little development environment.

DOS NEVER caught up with QNX 1.0. I eventually added all the bells and whistles - extended memory managers, task switching applications, editors like Brief - but I could NEVER make DOS anywhere near as productive as that QNX 1.0 on it’s two or three 360K floppies.

So, now we can check out the source for QNX’s Kernel - how cool is that!

Iotum just released the first Facebook application I’ve seen that might actually be useful for business use. Their application: “FREE Conference Calls” (what a GREAT name!!!) - allows you to set up conference calls with your buddies on Facebook - AND your friends who aren’t yet on Facebook.

The application has a ton of nice features:

• Just a couple of clicks to set up a call.
• Enter a Time, Subject, and an Agenda,
• Add your Facebook friends or anyone else, by email or by phone number,

And your call is on!

Call quality is pretty good, and the app is very easy to use.

Best Feature: Your friends will receive a Facebook message,  email and/or a text message with the call info just before the call! Makes it simple to just click on the phone number in your Blackberry to join the call.

One quibble - it would be nice if the app sent the call organizer an email and SMS message as well. It’s really nice to be able to call in via a simple click.

Some Screenshots:

Step 1: Call Time and Title

Step 2: Agenda

Step 3: Invite your Facebook friends,  or ANYONE else!

Step 3a: Inviting a non-facebook contact to the call

Step 4: Manage and monitor your call

Nicely done Iotum!!

Came across this the other day on the blogs… A really old phone dialer application where you kept a box of cards on your desk, pulled out the card, and jammed it in the machine in order to dial the number. Pretty cool and elegant actually, considering the technology of the time…

Our blogging buddy Mitch over at Sensory Metrics pointed out a cool device a few months ago, and I picked one up, full of hopes that it would solve my Geotagging needs.

The Trackstick devices are GPS receivers that simply save positions and times in RAM, then you plug ‘em into your PC to extract the locations as a GPX file, suitable for use with Google Earth or a bunch of other programs.

What I wanted:

• A device I could simply leave in my camera bag for weeks or months at a time. It would save it’s location at all times.
• When I would download the photos from my camera, I’d add an extra step - run some magic software that would parse through the locations and times, and embed geotags into my photo’s EXIF lat, long, country, city fields. Ideally it would work with Aperture and my Mac.

Caveat:

The Trackstick’s primary market is not photographers, and they clearly state they don’t work with Macs…

What I got:

• The Trackstick is well built. A nice solid design, well made and nice materials.
• It’s bigger than I thought it would be - 3cm x  11cm.
• It came with a belt clip, and a magnet attachment for sticking it on cars, I suppose.
• It comes with decent software - it was a bit finicky to install on both my XP and Vista machines, but it reads the locations out of the unit, has OK links to Google Earth, and exports GPX files OK.
• The unit has a switch on the side to turn it on and off, and a single LED that reports its status.
• Nice feature - motion detector! It detects motion - so it can go to sleep when the unit is still, and only wake up to detect motion. I was really hoping this feature would be useful for my use - leaving the unit in my camera bag and having it start tracking only when I move it.

What’s Great:

• The unit worked right out of the box. Picked up its location, and started recording readings right away.
• The software works great with Google Earth - you can plot points, animate things, zoom in to view your track over time, and use the timeline feature to follow along on your trips.
• The unit is solid. I kinda busted the power switch when I was hacking around with it, but that’s totally my fault…
• Support is great. I got great support at both www.trackstick.com and www.trackstick.ca

What sucks:

•  Battery life just isn’t working out for me. It’s lasting only a day or two - much less than the advertised “over a month” of travel histories. I’ve written to the Canadian and US dealers, and they both report the same thing. Once the device is inside, and can’t get a fix - you better turn it off, or you’ll drain the battery quickly. I guess the motion detector is not working the way it should.
• The unit comes with tons of “INSTALL THE SOFTWARE BEFORE PLUGGING INTO USB PORT” warnings. Stickers on the device etc. This is generally an indication that there’s something fishy going on - they’ve clearly had a lot of support calls about this. The software installation was not smooth on my XP or my Vista machines. I had to re-install a few times to get it to work.
• The software is adequate, not great. The various options are not explained. It would be nice to have some built-in settings I could use like “Optimize for long life” or “Optimize for rapid movement”, etc. It is not obvious how to use the software, but with some minimal clicking around and playing, you get what you need.

• The unit is not supported on a Mac. Just for fun, I plugged it in. The red light came on, it was detected by the Mac, but nothing happened, and the device then appeared to lock up. It would have been SO NICE if it just appeared as a USB drive with a single, read-only GPX file that I could download. I have to download the file on a PC, then email it to my Mac. Rats.

My workflow:

• Stick new batteries in. Every day.
• Put the device in an outside pocket on my camera bag.
• Go out and shoot for the day.
• Plug the device into my PC.
• Export the data as a GPX file.
• Email it to my Mac.
• Run GPSPhotoLinker to geotag the photos before they are imported into Aperture!!! You could also use HoudahGeo, but it seems to have fewer features.
• And, finally import the photos into Aperture.

So, it’s finicky, but it does the job, and my photos are geo-tagged!

Found a list of the first 100 domain names ever registered (here). It’s interesting to see the pickup rate increase from 85 - 87 - 87. And, interesting to see who got in there first. And, what the heck is STARGATE.COM doing there??? Where’s SEX.COM??

1. 15-Mar-1985 SYMBOLICS.COM
2. 24-Apr-1985 BBN.COM
3. 24-May-1985 THINK.COM
4. 11-Jul-1985 MCC.COM
5. 30-Sep-1985 DEC.COM
6. 07-Nov-1985 NORTHROP.COM
7. 09-Jan-1986 XEROX.COM
8. 17-Jan-1986 SRI.COM
9. 03-Mar-1986 HP.COM
10. 05-Mar-1986 BELLCORE.COM
11. 19-Mar-1986 IBM.COM
12. 19-Mar-1986 SUN.COM
13. 25-Mar-1986 INTEL.COM
14. 25-Mar-1986 TI.COM
15. 25-Apr-1986 ATT.COM
16. 08-May-1986 GMR.COM
17. 08-May-1986 TEK.COM
18. 10-Jul-1986 FMC.COM
19. 10-Jul-1986 UB.COM
20. 05-Aug-1986 BELL-ATL.COM
21. 05-Aug-1986 GE.COM
22. 05-Aug-1986 GREBYN.COM
23. 05-Aug-1986 ISC.COM
24. 05-Aug-1986 NSC.COM
25. 05-Aug-1986 STARGATE.COM
26. 02-Sep-1986 BOEING.COM
27. 18-Sep-1986 ITCORP.COM
28. 29-Sep-1986 SIEMENS.COM
29. 18-Oct-1986 PYRAMID.COM
30. 27-Oct-1986 ALPHACDC.COM
31. 27-Oct-1986 BDM.COM
32. 27-Oct-1986 FLUKE.COM
33. 27-Oct-1986 INMET.COM
34. 27-Oct-1986 KESMAI.COM
35. 7-Oct-1986 MENTOR.COM
36. 7-Oct-1986 NEC.COM
37. 27-Oct-1986 RAY.COM
38. 27-Oct-1986 ROSEMOUNT.COM
39. 27-Oct-1986 VORTEX.COM
40. 05-Nov-1986 ALCOA.COM
41. 05-Nov-1986 GTE.COM
42. 17-Nov-1986 ADOBE.COM
43. 17-Nov-1986 AMD.COM
44. 17-Nov-1986 DAS.COM
45. 17-Nov-1986 DATA-IO.COM
46. 17-Nov-1986 OCTOPUS.COM
47. 17-Nov-1986 PORTAL.COM
48. 17-Nov-1986 TELTONE.COM
49. 11-Dec-1986 3COM.COM
50. 11-Dec-1986 AMDAHL.COM
51. 11-Dec-1986 CCUR.COM
52. 11-Dec-1986 CI.COM
53. 11-Dec-1986 CONVERGENT.COM
54. 11-Dec-1986 DG.COM
55. 11-Dec-1986 PEREGRINE.COM
56. 11-Dec-1986 QUAD.COM
57. 11-Dec-1986 SQ.COM
58. 11-Dec-1986 TANDY.COM
59. 11-Dec-1986 TTI.COM
60. 11-Dec-1986 UNISYS.COM
61. 19-Jan-1987 CGI.COM
62. 19-Jan-1987 CTS.COM
63. 19-Jan-1987 SPDCC.COM
64. 19-Feb-1987 APPLE.COM
65. 04-Mar-1987 NMA.COM
66. 04-Mar-1987 PRIME.COM
67. 04-Apr-1987 PHILIPS.COM
68. 23-Apr-1987 DATACUBE.COM
69. 23-Apr-1987 KAI.COM
70. 23-Apr-1987 TIC.COM
71. 23-Apr-1987 VINE.COM
72. 30-Apr-1987 NCR.COM
73. 14-May-1987 CISCO.COM
74. 14-May-1987 RDL.COM
75. 20-May-1987 SLB.COM
76. 27-May-1987 PARCPLACE.COM
77. 27-May-1987 UTC.COM
78. 26-Jun-1987 IDE.COM
79. 09-Jul-1987 TRW.COM
80. 13-Jul-1987 UNIPRESS.COM
81. 27-Jul-1987 DUPONT.COM
82. 27-Jul-1987 LOCKHEED.COM
83. 28-Jul-1987 ROSETTA.COM
84. 18-Aug-1987 TOAD.COM
85. 31-Aug-1987 QUICK.COM
86. 03-Sep-1987 ALLIED.COM
87. 03-Sep-1987 DSC.COM
88. 03-Sep-1987 SCO.COM
89. 22-Sep-1987 GENE.COM
90. 22-Sep-1987 KCCS.COM
91. 22-Sep-1987 SPECTRA.COM
92. 22-Sep-1987 WLK.COM
93. 30-Sep-1987 MENTAT.COM
94. 14-Oct-1987 WYSE.COM
95. 02-Nov-1987 CFG.COM
96. 09-Nov-1987 MARBLE.COM
97. 16-Nov-1987 CAYMAN.COM
97. 16-Nov-1987 ENTITY.COM
99. 24-Nov-1987 KSR.COM
100. 30-Nov-1987 NYNEXST.COM

(NOT me surfing)

Just back from Vacation in BC - excellent waves in Tofino for boogie boarding and lots of other great fun.

And, half-way through vacation, my new Blackberry busted. Nice failure mode - the backlight died - you could see the text on screen, if you squinted and held it to the light just so… Then, I cleverly figured out to reboot it, to see if that would magically fix the hardware (software nerds believe ANYTHING can be fixed by a reboot) - and when it started, it runs through some sort of self-test, determines that the backlight is dead, then refuses to boot!!! Rats.

The funny thing is that exactly a year ago, in Victoria, BC, I dropped my Blackberry into Victoria harbour (no, not on purpose).

So, this whole “Vacation in BC” thing is costing my a Blackberry a year.

And, you know, the only thing I missed was the phone - not the email or appointments. It was nice to be totally electro-dark for a while…

A box arrived from Sun the other day. We slid back the cover, and were amazed to see 48 - 500 Gig drives all nicely sitting in their little hot-swap bays. The Sun Fire X4500 box is pretty cool - 4 rack-units high, with dual core AMD CPU’s, 4 gigabit Ethernet ports, lots of slots, and LOTS OF DISK STORAGE. All for $1.5 per gig.

Apparently, this box is pretty popular with the porn sites.

Me, I’m thinking I could upload about 6.3 million MP3’s, or quite a lot of videos…

Or, I guess we could hold out for the 48 terabyte version…

I installed Dash today. Tried it for all of 10 minutes, then decided to purchase. Dash is a decent first implementation of Quicksilver, an essential Mac application that I absolutely rely on.

Basically, you get to define a hot-key, and when you press it, a window opens, and you can type in a keyword - to do things like run an app, send mail, do a Google search,  look up a word, open a Wikipedia article, etc. Once you are used to this, it is SO FAST to open apps - it saves all the clicking about with the mouse.

What’s Good?

• The app is small and fast.
• It makes it really easy to add keyboard shortcuts for MANY things I do every few minutes.
• The app stays out of the way when I don’t want it.
• It comes with a decent starter set of keywords.
• They claim to be making lots of plugins which will extend the capabilities of the app.
• They have a really nice video on their web site showing the app in use. Very slick - even a British voiceover, which is very classy.
• I bought it right away - so that’s a pretty good endorsement.

What Sucks? 

• The app has a trial version - but rather than a simple “enter a key” to unlock the REAL version, you have to download and re-install the app.
• The Email implementation is terrible. Yes, you can  send mails, but they all go out with the title “Note” which is silly. And, it doesn’t appear to be looking up names in my Outlook contacts. I use a plain vanilla installation of Outlook and Exchange - if they can’t support THAT out of the box, then they have totally missed the mark.
• Needs better support for Quicksilver style plugins to extend the capabilities of the app.

Summary:

It is a great 1.0 application, that you’ll get a ton of use out of right out of the box.

We’re looking around at new applications we can build here at InGenius, and of course, we’re looking at Facebook. One of the neatest things I’m finding about Facebook is the Applications you can load. I tend to keep an eye on my Facebook friends - and checking out what apps they are loading and deleting. The apps tend to be all over the map, from little graphical widgets, to complete, complex applications. It’s a nice thing that Facebook has done better than Flickr, MySpace, et al.

But, how long is Facebook going to be around, and be king? I’ve talked to a few people lately who say they are moving AWAY from Facebook! It was taking up too much of their time, and they weren’t getting much out of it aside from browsing photos. A year ago, we would have been considering doing an app for MySpace - but that isn’t even on our radar now. I’m wondering, is Facebook peaking now? If we’re going to spend the money developing an app, is Facebook the way to go? What will be next?

And, let me know if you find any cool Facebook apps - especially telephony ones!