Puzzlepieces – tag ‘art’

StartupCamp Waterloo was last night. I was surprised at the crowd, a number of people came up from Guelph and Toronto, including Mr Toronto DemoCamp.

First up was Ali Asaria (of well.ca), whose honest presentation about his own abilities and knowledge was fantastic. I love when people are real, rather than some fake presentable version of themselves. Ali’s stories of dealing with VCs were great.

This Camp was well-sponsored, which was great. Nothing beats free food. Except maybe the awesome door prize I won, thanks to Tech Capital Partners. I’ve been hearing good things about them (especially their ability to make the right investment choices), and I’m not just saying that because of the prize.

Avery showed us all how easy a Windows app can make installation. I think it made a fool of every single other piece of Windows software. One-click, that was it.

Simon Clark presented on his neighbourhood website (for his and hopefully other neighbourhoods), which was nicely done, and I’m very interested in that sort of thing. Does everyone on a street really need a huge ladder? (hint: the answer is “no”). He also did well by pointing out that it’s not just the technology but needs to be lead by an enthusiastic community member.

I presented to talk about Zimride. Simon was managing the presentations and asked everyone a few things, including what we hope to get out of presenting. My answer of “to turn everyone in the audience into evangelists for Zimride” got a lot of laughs, although that wasn’t really the intention . I was presenting using Jesse’s computer, so there was a mildly embarrassing minute when I went to Facebook and realized Jesse was already logged in. Hopefully I didn’t show anything too sensitive from his or my own .

The Facebook hype (as we all know, of course) is completely insane. Two people immediately came up to me afterwards asking if I could build them a Facebook application. I’m not going to do that, but I think I can find them someone who will. Thats what’s so great about these events, I definitely made some good connections, and may have convinced one or two people to attend the Web Clinic events I run.

Robert Barlow-Busch (of UX Group) proposed some sort of UX Critique Camp, which I and many others seemed to think was a really good idea, so hopefully that will happen at some point.

Monish (link to his startup since he has no site yet) seems to have decided to start a blog listing Waterloo tech events, which is a good idea. There’s no real centralized place for that now, although there are a variety of obstacles.

Lastly, I finally got around to adding a new feature to Quizify, touching the code for the first time in nine or so months. Yay.

Tories and Liberals trade barbs over environment - it’s funny how things change. When I was in grade 4 (’93-’94), we had some group work on determining political party issues and campaign platforms, or something like that. I vaguely recall that I didn’t really know what issues were big, but I figured stuff like the environment, maybe education. Then I found that it was actually things like healthcare, which I would have never guessed.

Fast forward to 2006, and the Conservative government reduces environmental spending, and pretends that global change doesn’t exist. Now it’s 2007, and all the major parties are trying to out-green each other, or at least pretend that they are. While I’d rather have a non-Conservative party handling things, this will (and is) certainly improve matters.

Geeking with Greg: Findory rides into the sunset Greg and Peter Caputa are the two blogs I read by people who’ve taken the startup route and are very open about everything, which is truly great. Few people are ready to admit when it is time to move on. Congratulations to Greg, I say. While I was never a user of Findory myself, it did have some great ideas and very much influenced the bigger players. I’m sure we’ll see some cool things from Greg in the future.

work seems to be keeping me rather busy

Yesterday I got around to fixing a several-month-old bug with my University of Waterloo search engine. Turns out the problem was Yahoo having changed their query parser. The query I was sending used to be

search terms (site:example.com OR site:example2.com OR ... site:exampleN.com)

however example.com wasn’t showing up on the results… the fix was adding a space before the ending parentheses.

search terms (site:example.com OR site:example2.com OR ... site:exampleN.com )

I wish Yahoo would publicly document all of their advanced search syntax, including the maximum query length.

I’ve been meaning to do another OpenSearch Update post. I’ve recently started adding some of these to del.icio.us. Noticing lots of non-English blog posts on OpenSearch lately, which is very cool. Today someone asked about including thumbnails. I’ve replied suggesting Media RSS but asking for consensus (although my email still needs to be moderated).

Lots of neat stuff in the mapping space lately. Thanks to Mikel Maron, Virtual Earth now has georss feeds.

So for years I’ve been largely ignoring the social networking websites. Or to be more accurate, reading up on them a lot, but not actually using them. Among other things, I don’t want to waste my time, nor provide a lot of my personal data to some walled garden. Regarding the latter, PeopleAggregator has been out for a while, and I hadn’t gotten around to congradulating Marc and Phillip. Anyhow, Facebook came to my school (this year I believe) and I’ve found that I’m actually using it. Not much, but more than I’ve ever used another similar site. Unlike the first generation of these websites, it actually has a point to it. I’m still resisting uploading photos to it (if I annotate those photos, am I ever going to be able to export that? highly unlikely) and I don’t like using it for messaging, because it won’t be searchable and integrated with my email or instant messaging services. Amusingly enough, I do think Facebook will actually succeed in making money. Hmn.. I guess I don’t have any major point to make here..

Globe4D - this is fantastic. For a while I’ve envisioned something quite similar, although mine involved projection from the centre of the sphere, rather than from outside it. Clearly their method makes more sense

Every school in the world should have one. Via Phillip

MapCruncher turns static images into tiles suitable for use with Microsoft Virtual Earth (Windows Live Local), and presumably other tile-based mapping applications too. Very neat and useful, the existing hacks I’d seen to handle this on Google’s map API were relatively poor. Via VE blog.

Via Marc Canter, I learn that AOL is creating YAPP (yet another personal portal), in the DHTML/AJAX style. That’s by no means a bad thing, though.

So now we have all the major players with a personalizable home page: Yahoo!, Google, MSN (Windows Live), and AOL (okay, so theirs is alpha). 3/4 of those are ‘all cool and ajax-y,’ Yahoo! being the odd one out. Yahoo!’s is the oldest, and I’d be quite surprised if they weren’t planning a new version with a richer interface.

In the ajax-y arena, there are several which are just as good or better than the major players: Netvibes, Protopage, eskobo, and several others.

Looking at another facet, 3 of those major players, and none of the others that I’m aware of, allow third-party modules. I haven’t looked at Microsoft’s, but I did look at Google’s last month in Why is the Google Homepage API not HTML?. Surprise, surprise, AOL’s announcement today is that their API is a microformat (HTML).

Aside from the AJAX, does this remind anyone else of 1999? I’d accuse some of copying from others, but… well that’s life.

Update January 20: Yahoo!’s is now all ajaxy, although it doesn’t seem quite as well done as some of the others. No third-party modules yet, though.

NDP talking about tax cuts… Conservatives talking about child care….

so all the parties are going to win over voters from the other parties by being more like them… that’s a good plan, right?

since there are three main parties… and the leftmost is moving right and the rightmost moving left… everyone’s a Liberal? Seems like a good way to defeat the Liberal party, uh, right?

FlickrBlog: A guy who paints gum - fantastic