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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…