InGeniusBlog.com

After reading about a guy who programmed his Mac to take a photo and email it to himself every time his Mac came out of sleep, I decided this was a pretty cool hack, and set about doing it myself. I found a command line app called camcapture which takes a photo  using the built-in camera,  then I wrote a simple automator script to take the photo and email it out to my gmail account. The last piece of the puzzle was getting the automator script to run on startup. Turns out this is pretty easy as well - solved by a simple google search. Looking back over the photos, the overwhelming impression is how mad I appear in most of the photos! I guess it’s because I’m kinda pissed, waiting for the mac to start up, and for the wireless to come on line. There are a few images taken on planes, images on vacation, at our cottage, etc. It’s funny to see how bad the colour is in most of the images - and yet how good it is in some.  Here’s the first 200 images!

At InGenius, our development processes and systems utterly depend on wiki’s. When a new project is started, the first thing we do is set up a wiki, then a build process, some shared dirs, etc. But the wiki is prime.

Up to now, we’ve been using an old standby, OpenWiki, which was one of the first ASP based wikis. OpenWiki has not really been in development for some time, and is beginning to show it’s age. We’ve tried a few other wikis (jotspot, pbwiki, flexWiki, etc) over the past few years, looking for a good replacement, but we keep going back to good old reliable OpenWiki, despite it’s failings.

We recently had a look at MoinMoin (German for a friendly hello), and it doesn’t look too bad. It’s Python based (which meshes nicely with our build environment and tools), and runs fine on IIS as well as Apache. A nice feature is that it supports a much better editor, file uploads, and doesn’t depend on a database. It’s easy to create multiple wikis, it has built-in security, and lots of nice macros like we’ve become used to with OpenWiki. We’re hoping that we can evolve our corporate recruiting engine to use a wiki based mechanism for recording interview notes, resumes, etc. as well as using it in our software development.

We haven’t switched yet, but we’re thinking about it!

Bloomberg and the Ottawa Citizen report today that Telus is bowing to the pressure of a few hundred complaints (Don’t they have millions of subscribers?) and is ending their foray into cellular phone porn. We’re not exactly fans of the content, but shouldn’t subscribers be able to view what interests them? The system was well thought out, with complete age verification. It really looks like they didn’t give this service a fair trial. Funny to have spent so much rolling it out, then to cave so quickly.

I recently purchased Apples new router, the Airport Extreme. It had a couple of features I really liked, so I thought I’d try it out.

The Features:

• 802.11n (it’s FAST!)
• Lets you share a hard disk and printer using USB
• Easy to configure
• It’s Apple Cool.

It arrived last week, and I hooked it up when I got home from work. Installation was easy (I used a mac to set it up. Dunno how easy this would be on a PC) since you use the airport admin tool to configure it. This is different and perhaps disconcerting to users accustomed to configuring routers by browser. Also, configuration was done over the air, which is a new, and a bit scary way of doing things. After figuring out that I’d reversed the WAN and LAN connections (I’m an idiot sometimes), the router was up and running.

I connected a Samsung CLP-300 colour laser printer and a 500Gig USB hard disk to the unit, then tried things out.

I could print easily from the mac, but the Windows PCs on the network couldn’t see the printer at all. I haven’t had a chance to dive into this - I was supposing that “Bonjour” technology would handle this, but apparantly not. After some quick research on the net, I found some mentions that the printer sharing may not work if printer drivers aren’t written to handle network sharing - maybe this is the issue?

The hard disk sharing worked well, again only on the mac’s connected to the network. The PC’s couldn’t see the shared drive at all. This is OK in my case since the drive is meant for the macs only. The drive is my main photo repository, so sees VERY heavy use through Aperture. This is the real test since Aperture places very heavy requirements on the disk sub-system. I found there was a noticable slowdown compared to having the drive directly connected to the Mac over USB 2.0. It appears to be something I can live with, but we’ll see.

Network access has been OK so far - but I’ve noticed that some web sites are VERY slow since I’ve installed the router. I’m hoping that it’s simply an ISP problem - Rogers is not exactly the most reliable ISP. For instance, some Youtube video’s I wanted to see have simply not played since I’ve installed the router. The big test will be to go back to the old router and compare.

I’ll keep you informed on long term testing as well. I’ve had really bad luck with routers in the past. My Linksys SRX200 had to be rebooted weekly as did my DLink DI713p. This is a piece of equipment you should be able to set and forget - and I hated having to reboot these when the network would fail.

I’ve got high hopes for the Apple Airport Extreme, hope they pan out.

UPDATE March 23: Early concerns about slow web site access were unfounded. The thing is fast - but I don’t really notice a huge improvement just surfing the web…

I have had to disconnect my shared 500G drive from the unit. Using it with Aperture was impossible - WAY too slow. Also, it was corrupting my Aperture library somehow - which Aperture handled nicely by rebuilding the thing. It works GREAT when I connect it straight to my Mac via USB 2.0, but just too slow wirelessly. Rats.

I haven’t been able to make the Samsung work from Windows when connected to the device. I’ve ended up connecting the Samsung to a Windows PC on the network, then connecting to that share from my Macs. Rats.

So, the USB port on the device sits unused at this time.

Update Aug 31, 2007: I have now got the Samsung working through the Airport Extreme. I ended up installing the Apple Bonjour stuff on my PC’s, then using Bonjour to find the printers. It worked great - much better than trying to connect to a shared printer on a PC in a workgroup. Still not using the hard drive connected to the Airport - but I’ll try that again in light of the new firmware in the unit.

I recently helped Kevin Dee over at the Eagle Blog with a tiny HTML/CSS issue on his blog (it wasn’t rendering in Firefox). Kevin was kind enough to turn my 5 minutes of help into a nicely written blog entry about “People that make stuff happen.” I’m glad to help Kevin!

Here’s the post: The Eagle Blog: People that Make Stuff Happen!

We had a booth at the OCRI recruiting fair at the Ottawa Congress Center today. The format was exactly like speed dating - “speed recruiting” - we were scheduled to interview a candidate every 9 minutes, with no breaks for 4 hours. We ended up meeting almost 50 newly graduated candidates in that time! Whew!

The candidates were excellent, enthusiastic, and just as tired of it all as us at the end.

The event was covered on the local news channel. Check out Julie and Shezi right at the beginning of the video, then a short segment with Rich at about 1:16.

Here’s the video on Youtube:

A year ago, we saw an awesome demo of Jeff Han’s multi-touch input system running on a desktop monitor. It was jaw-droppingly cool - and required viewing for everyone here at InGenius doing UI design.

A month ago, Steve demoed the idea of multi-touch input system on their iPhone. Cool.

Well, they haven’t been sleeping over at Perceptive Pixel. You HAVE to check out this video of their latest work. The screen appears to be 10 feet wide, there’s TONS of multi-touch goodness, and the thing appears to be running on some screaming super computer. CHECK THIS OUT!

Martin Frey, a researcher and artist in Berlin has developed a display that uses a ferromagnetic fluid and a matrix of electro magnets to create a display! And it plays the classic game Snake! Check out the video.

Really nice touch: you control the snake by tipping the display.

This is cool for many reasons but… one of the first programs I wrote on my cool new IBM PC in 198x was a port of the snake game I’d played on my Apple ][.  It’s nice to see this game revived not only in cel phones, but in new media like this!

Ottawa’s a great place, large enough to have all the amenities of a decent size city, but small enough that it’s not clogged by traffic - so commutes aren’t too long.

Blogging is alive and well in Ottawa. Some of my daily reads are based out of Ottawa, and are attracting attention round the world:

• Alec Saunders .log - all about VoIP, running a startup, and a bit about wine!
• Mitch Brisebois and Jobe Roberts SensoryMetrics blog - covering the fine art of usability in a mobile world
• The Eagle Blog - all about the tech staffing industry, and sales in general.
• Zachary Houle’s meme.ca - a bit of everything viral
• ReviewOttawa.com - Restaurant and Contractor reviews. (run by friends of InGenius)

Alec has a great list of Ottawa blogs up here.

Here’s a REALLY cool video created by Michael Wesch showing the evolution of writing - from the pencil to Web 2.0. Really nice work.

A startup in Vancouver Sxip, is a partner in a new offering with Microsoft, and Verisign to roll out OpenID, which is first being tried at LiveJournal. If this scheme gets adopted, it may mean a whole new world of information sharing between your trusted web sites and a whole new world of convenience and features.

Digital Identity is important in the online world. It’s important for validating logons, ensuring that you are you for online purchases, banking, eBay, etc. If a trusted online identity can be established, and shared between web sites appropriately and securely, a complete, cross-site shared identity profile can be created - so you can bring your eBay or Amazon “credibility” with you to new sites.

Microsoft built Passport years ago - which took off - ONLY for Microsoft. Nobody else really adopted the Microsoft scheme.

Dick Hardt, the CEO of Sxip gave a fantastic presentation on Sxip a few years ago - the film is required viewing for anyone interested in the Lessig presentation style…

There’s an interesting article in the New York Times (via SlashDot) about the 10,000 wee items orbiting earth now. China’s test of an anti-satellite system earlier this year added 800 particles immediately, and through more collisions, will end up adding another 1000 objects.
What’s the problem? It’s now harder than ever to fly into orbit. NASA and anyone else planning a mission must track all these objects and plan their flight to avoid them. This is getting harder and harder - and it’s getting exponentially worse as the objects collide with each-other and break up.
If this keeps up, we’ll end up trapped on earth! We’ll have to invent some sort of huge space vacuum to clean up Low Earth Orbit!

We moved into our new office space (in the Mitel building at 350 Legget Drive in Ottawa) recently. We’d had the space completely made over for us - new walls, some nice wood flooring, cool carpet dots, etc.

However, we held back on the installation of a sink in our office since the estimates for the installation came back at about $10,000. Why? It turns out the installers would have to run hundreds of feet of copper pipe, down from our office, to the basement, and along the ceiling to suitable sources of water and drainage. AND they’d have to install a hot water heater specially for our unit.

We tried living without a sink for a couple of months - but boy did we miss it. Sure, we can get water in the nearby bathrooms or shared sink area, but what a pain to keep our kitchen area clean! And, really, what’s a kitchen without a sink!

SO, we finally bit the bullet, bought the sink, and even saved some $ since the installer found a shorter path to the drain!

Life is good and happy here at InGenius now, with our water, and our magic coffee machine - but that’s another story.