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!

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!

We’re heading off to Las Vegas Sunday for Mitel’s Forum 2007 show. Last I checked it was only 105 degrees in the shade…

We’re hoping that it will be a pretty exciting show for us. We’ll be demonstrating the following:

• Integrated Office Navigator
• Integrated Office Companion (Just became generally available Friday June 22!!!!!)
• Intelligent Directory (Coming out next month)
• Our New Online Hospitality Application Creator (See below)
• Our Emergency Broadcast Application

Find all this, and download it to play with at www.ingeniussoftware.com/mitel.

Our stuff will be highlighted in a ton of booths at Mitel Forum - though we’re not personally in any booth, we’ll be wandering around and available to talk. Look for our red InGenius shirts.

I’m giving a couple of presentations (Tuesday June 26 4:00pm and 4:20pm) on developing HTML applications for Mitel’s phones, and on Integrated Office Companion and Intelligent Directory. It totally sucks that I only have 20 minutes per presentation I’ve got an hour’s worth of slides…

If you’re interested, here’s the slide decks: Forum 2007 HTML Toolkit Presentation, Mitel Forum 2007 IOC and ID Presentation.

We’ll be demonstrating our Emergency Broadcast Application as well. This HTML application allows a centrally based administrator to trigger an emergency broadcast to every 53xx phone in a building or a whole site. The phones display an emergency message, with an escape route map or other graphic, and the phones play back an audio message at full volume. You can choose from a bunch of pre-defined broadcasts, or create one on the fly. This is a really terrific application for getting the message out in an emergency - whether or not people have PC’s or are near a PC. Simply put a bunch of Mitel 53xx phones throughout the buildings or campus. This product is in development now.

Another terrific application we’re demoing is an online hospitality application development tool. This is just SO COOL, you have to see it. We’ll be putting a demo online pretty soon. This application allows dealers to go online to our web site and create a complete Hospitality HTML Application for a hotel. Basically, you answer a series of questions online, fill in the appropriate extensions, choose the options you want, and it spits out a file ready to be uploaded to a Mitel 3300 Switch. You can demo the application on line - show it to the customer, test it, tune it, then deploy it when you’re done. It comes with tons of ready-made content like a welcome page, green statement, restaurant templates, airline speed-dials, LIVE weather forecasts, etc. YOU WILL BE BLOWN AWAY by this application, and the dealer’s customers will love it. Very cool.

If you want to meet up in Las Vegas, get in touch with us at “rich at ingeniuspeople dot com”

I mentioned a few days ago that my patent application had been picked up by ZDNet and Alec Saunders. I’m excited to report that today, it was on Engadget! It’s interesting to be mentioned on a blog I read daily!

References:

• Engadget,
• Textually,
• Mad4MobilePhones,
• Alec Saunders,
• Russel Shaw’s IP Telephony blog.

And HERE on this blog.

Our latest application, Intelligent Directory, is in customer trials now - and should be released to the public in June!

To quote the marketing material:

The Mitel 5300 Intelligent Directory application provides a simple, intuitive on-screen searchable directory of both corporate and personal contacts right on your phone display. The 5300 Intelligent Directory application is available on Mitel 5330/5340 sets.

The 5300 Intelligent Directory Application and Presence Upgrade automatically pull information from three different sources:

• Microsoft Active Directory Server for corporate phone numbers
• Microsoft Exchange Server Contacts for personal contact phone numbers
• Microsoft Live Communication Server for presence information in the case of Presence Upgrade.

The 5300 Intelligent Directory application lists names and phone numbers, and allows users to search on the phone for names and numbers, using the very familiar keypad search that users are accustomed to on their cellphones and handheld devices.

Key features:

• Extremely intuitive and easy to use – phone numbers are where you need them, on your phone.
• Instant phone number updates. When a new person is added to the centralized Microsoft Active, their phone numbers are automatically available to all 5300 Intelligent Directory users.
• Less administration, less expense, more accuracy. No more need to separately maintain corporate phone books for internal use.
• Up to 5 phone numbers can be displayed per person (corporate, cell, home, etc.).
• One-touch dialing - numbers selected are instantly dialed.
• Automatically displays a dynamic list of recent calls on default home screen.
• Add your favorite numbers to your home screen.
• Uses Microsoft dialing rules to automatically insert dialing prefixes when numbers are dialed.
• Supports Hot-Desking. 5300 Intelligent Directory requires users to enter their password to access personal contacts in Microsoft Exchange.

With Presence Upgrade, LCS Presence status is displayed beside the contact name, indicating whether he or she is available. With just a glance at the phone, users can determine whether and when to make that important call.

The application is structured as a .Net application that runs on Microsoft’s IIS Web Server, and uses a web service to connect to Active Directory, Exchange, and LCS. The architecture is shown below:

The application will be available soon - check HERE for updates.

And, if you just can’t wait, try it out on our HTML application demo page HERE!

I was surprised this week to discover that a patent application we had submitted a year ago was “in the news” on a few blogs.

We first got wind of it through Alec Saunder’s excellent VoIP blog - HE was surprised to see a reference to the Ottawa Senators in a patent application - just our little nod to the team!

And Alec found the patent app through Russel Shaw’s IP Telephony blog over at ZD Net. Russel apparently scans all new patent applications, looking for interesting VoIP applications, and ours made the grade.

Our patent application covers some of the applications that InGenius’ TelML technology makes possible on IP Phone sets with larger screens. Stuff like News, Weather, Sports, and advertizing on you kitchen phone. Very cool stuff - that we’re implementing now for a number of customers.

In fact, we’re releasing our first TelML-based product in the next couple of weeks - it’s called Intelligent Directory, and it allows access to your corporate Active Directory, including presence, from the screen of your phone! Think of it as a super intelligent and useful phonebook, that ties into your Active Directory,your personal Outlook contacts, and LCS/OCS for presence info - with easy searching based on name or company. It’s a great application, only possible due to Mitel’s adoption of our TelML technology on their desktop screen phones.

Integrating phones and PCs has been talked about for a long time now, but it’s rarely done well, if at all. I couldn’t even find any examples of this sort of integration in a quick web search - so we’ll use some softphones for our examples.

Designers seem to think that when using a phone via a PC, we want it to look like a phone! For some crazy reason, we’ll want to press keys on screen that look like the buttons on our phone, and we’ll want the same display. The reasons for this are obvious: The user is “used” to this interface, or the designers have simply ported the in-phone firmware to a PC, and wrapped it with an image of the phone. Or, maybe the phone started out as a lab simulator, got seen by marketing, and turned into a product.

Here’s a couple of examples:

Cisco

And Avaya:

These lovely bits of s/w engineering are great for debugging your phone programming, but suck as a phone replacement, even if you’re on the road. Who wants to look at a HUGE image of a phone on screen, even in Cisco’s “Screen-Only” view!

These things are hard to dial, hard to manipulate, and just plain huge!

The buttons on a phone are designed to be easy to press with your fingers, to provide tactile feedback, to be designed for the size of average fingers and hands, to be easy to manufacture, and to fit in your office. NONE of this translates to an effective UI on a PC screen.

Trying to take those design values, and building a PC-based phone is just silly.

What we did:

• We built the tiniest app we could,
• We started with a bunch of buttons, but quickly narrowed it down to two,
• We integrated with Active Directory and your Outlook contacts, so your phonebook is always up-to-date and accessible,
• We integrated with LCS and MSN Messenger for presence,
• We integrated with MSN Desktop search - so you can find things like files and emails based on caller ID,
• We pause your music when you’re on the phone,
• We’ll pop up an extremely unobtrusive toast window when an incoming call occurs (you can turn this off),
• If you want, we’ll open an Outlook contact, or do an MSN Desktop search on incoming call,
• You can drag a phone number into the wee text box, and we’ll dial it,
• You can highlight a number in ANY APP, and click one key - and we’ll dial it,
• We set your MSN presence to “On the phone” when you’re on the phone,
• We’ll set you MSN presence to Do not disturb when you set Do not disturb on your phone, and visa versa,
• And, we made it as small as possible!
• And, we made it smaller! This app runs down in your taskbar, or can be run completely from a tray icon!

Simply type a couple of characters of the first or last name (or company) of the person you want to call, and immediately, a list pops up with all the matches!

The app searches your corporate Active Directory and your Outlook contacts. It finds all phone numbers and pops ‘em up. Now, simply choose a number and click or hit Enter.

When you’re on a call, you can control the phone, put calls on hold, hang up, all from this wee UI.

When an incoming call occurs, the Caller ID is shown in the text box. You’ll see the caller’s name and number. You can create a contact with a click, do a MSN Desktop Search, program a speed dial, all with a click or two.

We think this is desktop telephony done right!

This application is available at the end of March for the Mitel Navigator, and a few weeks later for the new Mitel 5300 phone sets.

Update:

You can find the Mitel Navigator version of this application HERE.
You can find the Mitel 5330/5340 version of this application HERE. (soon)

I’m heading down to San Francisco and San Jose for the next couple of weeks to cover the COSN educational trade show, and then the Embedded Systems Conference.

We’re thinking about creating some EDU telephony applications so the COSN conference should be a good place to check out what’s happening in this space.

Our attendance at the ESC is less assured - we’re still waiting to hear from the organizers whether we’ll be allowed to attend. Wish us luck!

Stopped by the Branham 300 event last Thursday, straight off the plane from Orlando and VoiceCon. Wayne Gudbranson gave a nice welcoming speech, followed by a few words from Mayor Larry O’Brian. Larry gave a few callouts to his buddies in the crowd, then went into handshake mode, circulating among the crowd of be-suited executives.

Here’s a story with coverage focusing on Ottawa.

Here’s some photos of the event.

I’m heading down to Orlando tomorrow for the VoiceCon tradeshow - I’ll be in the Mitel booth unveiling a bunch of terrific new software we’re releasing this month. Here’s the deets:

• Integrated Office Navigator and Integrated Office Companion - these two desktop applications work hand in hand with the Mitel Navigator phone and the new Mitel 5330 and 5340 phones. They are fantastic desktop applications that behave exactly the way PC based phone apps should - they are as near to invisible as you want them to be, utterly friendly, fast, and provide a ton of really useful features. At the minimum, the apps are simply a tray icon - or you can expand it out to be a desk-band application running in the task bar. The apps tie into Microsoft Exchange, Outlook and  Active Directory, to pull up your contacts with a couple of keystrokes of their name or company. They also tie into LCS or MSN Messenger for presence. If you want to call someone, type a couple of characters of their name, up it pops, click enter, and you’re dialing them! The apps have tons more features - pausing music when you’re on the phone, popping up contacts or MSN Desktop search on incoming calls, dialing highlighted numbers in *any* application, and on and on. VERY VERY cool applications.

• We’re also showcasing our new Intelligent Directory application, which runs ON THE 5330 or 5340 PHONE ITSELF! This amazing application allows you to access your Outlook contacts or your corporate Active Directory straight from the phone, with an extremely simple UI, full searching, customized speed dial list, automatic “most recently called” lists, etc. It’s a really fun application.

• We’re also demonstrating some financial applications in conjunction with the Mitel Turret phone, and some really cool Educational (K-12) applications for the 5330 and 5340 phones, built on the Mitel HTML Toolkit application platform. The EDU app includes tons of features like  managing attendance, dialing students and their parents, and some really cool broadcast announcement applications and duress capability.

We’re at the show from Monday to Wednesday, and we’d be very happy to demonstrate our stuff if you happen to drop by the booth!

Check back for more highlights from the show.

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!

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:

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.

We recently moved our office into the Mitel building here in Ottawa - and decided that we had to do something to differentiate ourselves from the Mitel masses. So, on the day we moved in we gave everyone in the shop Red Connies, more or less like this:

Turned out to be great fun - so we now get nice Red Connies for all our employees! And a Golf-Shirt too. How cool is that!

If you have a look through our web site, you’ll notice that InGenius is “two things” - a Software Engineering firm, and a Professional Services (or Consulting) firm. Does that make sense?

Turns out to be a really good thing for us to do. We’re all about smart people. We’ve been in the business of finding smart people since 1993, and we now have about 15,000 people in our database. Whether we’re designing a cool new phone and associated PC application for one of our clients, or whether we’re putting a team of people together for a government organization to build a new online application, what we’re always doing is: understanding exactly what our clients want to get done, and putting together the right people to GET it done, creatively, well, and fast. Good developers, good UI people, good support people, . . . our folks are what we’re all about. We know how to find and assess good folks, because we’ve been in the software development business for ages. We’ve run software product companies ourselves (that’ll be another blog entry), and we know what we need to do to produce high quality commercial software that’s deployable, supportable, useable and maintainable.

And of course, the amount of fun we have seems to be directly proportional to the smartness of our people - turns out smart and funny overlap after all!

So InGenius continues to develop products and systems in-house for customers who want to accelerate their own product development, and we continue to find good people to do contract work with the government and high-tech sectors. We’ve been doing it since 1986, through market upturns and downturns, and I’m glad to say upturns again - business is growing for us in both software engineering and consulting. For us, it’s all about people, and having both lines of business has been a smart thing to do.

Recently we’ve been using simple quiz questions while interviewing for our programming openings. This wasn’t a decision taken lightly - we researched what all the best-in-the-field companies do, and took the ideas that made sense to us, for the way we work.

I have been literally shocked at the outcome.

Candidates I thought were terrific have completely fallen apart when asked simple first year programming assignments (of the 5 lines of code variety). I’ve received blank pieces of paper, incomprehensible scribbles, and lots of answers that are just plain wrong. (I’ve also recieved plenty of excellent answers)

In some cases where a promising looking candidate has screwed up I’ve asked candidates to go home and try to solve the problem and send me the answer - giving them a second chance as it were. And they simply haven’t bothered to email or correspond at all. They just bail - which is confirmation that they aren’t the right candidates for us.

We ask simple first year programming questions that can be completed in 5 or 10 lines of code. We expect answers to be done in C, and we ask that the work is done on paper - this is tricky for some people.

As a baseline, I asked all our current programmers on staff to complete the same quiz question - using only pencil and paper. Admittedly, there is a lot less pressure for these guys, but it vettes the questions themselves as “doable” and reasonable. And, I got some cool answers too - some completely different ways of solving the problem.

So, if you are interviewing with us, please be prepared for a bit of programming fun!

I’ve interviewed hundreds of candidates over the years - looking for one thing. What we call “The light behind the eyes.” Some indication that the candidate is special, gifted, enthusiastic, and as Joel would say, is “Smart and Gets Things Done.”

If you’re interviewing with us for a programmers position, you will first meet with an account manager who will assess your general fit for the job, and your capabilities. Then, there’s a technical portion of the interview - you’ll meet with one of our technical staff who will hit you with some technical questions, probe into your work experience, and will ask you some quiz questions. Just try and answer the questions as best you can. The worst answer is “I don’t know” - we are trying to judge your thinking processes. Talk it out with us. Work with us so that we can gain an insight into your thinking and your creative process.