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!