InGeniusBlog.com

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:

Stopped by the Ottawa Demo camp tonight at the Clocktower Pub. Based on tonight’s turnout, I think they’re gonna have to move these to a bigger venue! The place was crowded - standing room only!

• Thintropy demoed a thin client that’s basically VNC on steroids - imagine playing a full screen video with audio on your home computer, and being able to view it at work or on your mobile. Cool - though they mentioned the need for some pretty huge bandwidth for the video. They are totally commited to open-source - and were pretty hard on MS. I think they’re missing their main market - doing a real fast VNC - you could even edit video remotely! Instead they’re focusing on hosted apps. Hmm.
• Bruce Tsuji of Carleton University demoed a cool text to speech app.
• Crowd favorites Iotum was there with their new Blackberry client & service. This client represents a new direction for Iotum - less dependency on the telcos adopting their solution - Iotum can manage the whole thing themselves, and release the app virally. The quick demo looks impressive.
• Peter Childs and Ian Graham demoed a cool shared calendar application that they’re commercializing just now. Nice to be able to share specific calendar events selectively across calendars in the system. Good for larger companies, cities, hospitals, etc.
• StraTerra demoed some software for capturing the analysis of core samples. It’s the first part of a product suite which will include the analysis of the core samples and help determine where to drill. The UI was a bit old-fashioned, but matched the existing paper forms people use now. Nice that their app converts hours of work to a few minutes effort.

Just got back from BarCamp Ottawa 2. Sat in on a few presentations:

• Mike Milinkovich: Eclipse Foundation - Mike is a great speaker, and always presents the Open Source case well. We’re not doing enough with Open source at InGenius - and every time I hear Mike talk I am reminded of this. We’ve used the Eclipse IDE on a few projects here, but we should just dive in and use it more. I’m talking with Sunir now about opensourcing some of our test bench stuff - I’ll let you know when that happens!
  
• Eric Pretlac: Integrating Skype and Asterisk - Pika is doing some really cool stuff, snuggling up to Asterisk and Skype to create some cool mashup products. I would have liked a few more technical details - in the BarCamp tradition I should have called him out on that - I’ll do better next time. Learned something cool though: embedding:
  
  <a href=”skype:PIKATechnologies?call”>
  in a web page will automatically make a Skype call if the user has Skype installed on their PC.
  
• Mitch Brisebois: Great Technology, Terrible Products - Mitch and I are friends from way back - we started our first business when we were 12 or so, and were entrepreneurs through high school and university. Mitch is a great entertaining speaker, and a lot of fun. His session was about some great Nortel products that failed - often because they misread the market, didn’t listen to the market, or just couldn’t find an appropriate use for the technology. In Mitch’s defence, if you don’t screw up
  once in a while, you’re not trying hard enough.
  
• Francis Moran: Francis’s Five Favourite Fictions - Francis is a fun speaker - with a lot of stories that I’d like to hear one day over a beer. Francis basically built the case for why companies need firms like his to communicate with customers in today’s market.

Spent last Saturday at Ottawa barcamp. As we expected it was a terrific event, with a ton of very interesting presentations. We particularly liked Craig Fitzpatrick's devshop.com demos - he's doing some terrific work - creating a web based app that works just like a desktop app. He's built an amazing abstraction layer to hide the browser dependencies which have plagued web developers for years. We can't wait to get our hands on the real product! Look for it this fall.

Thanks to all the organizers, presenters and attendees for making it such a success.

 Here's a picture of Rich (Mr. Ramones) presenting a talk on Telephony UI design.

You will definitely be interested in heading over to Ottawa barcamp tomorrow! It's an all-day geekfest held at the bitHeads offices in the Westgate shopping center. We'll be demoing our cool TelML technology running on the very cool VerizonOne phone.

See you all there!

We had our Christmas Party last night at “Collection / Bar 56″ and raised over $750 for Engineers Without Borders (www.ewb.ca)

Thanks to everyone who attended and helped out with contributions and good cheer!

Pictures Here

IMG_2371
Originally uploaded by RichLoen.

40 Lobsters, 25 People, and a whack of burgers! Even Nick had a lobster!

More Photos

IM000148
Originally uploaded by RichLoen.

Don’t I look like a pro! I’ve even got my own bowling shoes. I’m a bowling machine!

(I hate bowling)