What a term… Fall 2006 summary
Where to start? We worked a lot with Ruby on Rails, podcasts, events, and mobile devices. It has been a pretty good term for trying new things. This term I had the pleasure of working with Sasha Papo who is a computer engineering student here at the University of Waterloo. He was the first to prove to me that Ruby on Rails is the right platform for a work environment where you have multiple programmers working independently on the same web app (and we started using Capistrano along with Subversion for version control). In the winter term Catherine Mittelholtz, a co-op software engineer, will let me know for sure if Ruby on Rails works for the long term 
What did we actually do then?
- UW Opinion – A simple blog with community contribution the focus but it must be approved by an editor. Notifications and Kiwi authentication were the cool features here. This isn’t live yet.
- UW Podcast – CPA needed a place to start putting the rapidly growing collection of podcasts that go beyond lectures and such. We could use UW Blogs as the back end but having had time to sort it out yet.
- CPA home page – we redid the CPA home page to feature more of the content that CPA puts out there but don’t feature on the UW home page or in another micro-site that CPA maintains.
- UW Events tweaks – There have been a few things fixed but we also worked on some features such as user profiles, personal calendars, and notifications. It isn’t running smoothly yet but should be in January.
- UW home page tweak – The code for the UW home page has been updated so things float, flash gallery is 5px wider and new, and the page has tightened up its grid structure. The CSS is still messy but its valid and some classes have added some semantics for the final term project…
- UW home page mobile – With the new code in the home page we have added an auto redirect for mobiles. This new version has a number of links that just point to a script that parses out the content on the page by section. That is still being worked on and its open to suggestions. If you want some stuff added let me know and I will see what I can do.
For the first bit of 2007 I hope to go back and add in some features and get a couple apps into RubyForge. There is also a pretty cool project starting in January that I am a part of. A few emails have gone out inviting some students in residence to participate and over the next term I will blog lots more about it.
Adobe offers holiday gifts: Photoshop CS3 Beta and CSS Advisor Beta
For Mac users of Adobe software it seemed like there was no hope to getting Photoshop to run very well on an Intel based Mac. Having to wait until CS3 seems like cruel and unusual punishment… especially if you support people that want to run Photoshop on a Macbook. Well wait no more, a public beta is about to appear with a universal binary in the Adobe Labs site for current CS2 users. The speed improvements are welcome. I am sure many CS3 reports will flood the mac blogging world… all that I can say is try it out for yourself, its free so why not?
Adobe didn’t stop at software… oh no… For the CSS developer there is a new CSS Advisor web site that will allow anyone with an Adobe ID to post, rate and comment on articles. It is a sort of Adobe CSS wiki. Sure it seems like a duplication of efforts with the different sites out there but I must admit I like the idea of having a central resource to find this information. I do wish it existed outside the Adobe site though… some creative commons Adobe sponsored domain would be ideal. It will be interesting to see how the web standards community reacts—will this site take off?
Update: Photoshop CS3 is now in labs awaiting your download…
IE 7 is up to 16% of IE users on campus sites, Firefox is still 21%
About a month ago I posted that IE 7 users reached 6% of all IE users on the UW home page. It has now reached 16% of IE users on campus, on the weekend it jumps to 19% of users (managed machines on campus don’t have IE 7 and that influences stats a lot). Firefox usage is 23% on weekends and 21% during the week. The high usage of Firefox puts us inline with what is reported in Europe for Firefox usage.
I am encouraged by the jump in IE 7 users in one month, hopefully the trend continues and we can stop taking IE 6 seriously in 2008 Next browser report will be in the new year…
Microformats in Education: course catalog research starts
After a little delay, a couple weeks ago I started a page in the Microformats wiki to start collecting some examples and hopefully draft a format for course catalogue information. I see this as a really useful format to create for a number of different reasons.
Think about having an application that just search all universities course information and compare similarly numbered courses or courses with similar keywords? Think about how easy it would be for Universities when trying to translate transcripts for students that are transferring or heading to a school out of the country? Looking up that information yourself is not fun at the moment. Perhaps a Microformat can make it easy…
This should be a simple task. I am hoping to get some more examples of what currently exists from schools outside of Canada and maybe even some schema information on closed course information systems in the hope that some consistency exists already. I am fairly certain a draft format could be made quickly and easily but some research is required to ensure it works for the most amount of schools. Anyway have a look at the working space and add your 0.02.
Anyone can contribute really… so please do.
BarCampWaterloo take two: good times had by all
The second BarCampWaterloo was held last night in the Accelerator Centre on the north campus of the University of Waterloo (officially the Research and Technology Park). It is a perfect location for a BarCamp – loads of space designed for networking geeks and lots of free parking close by which is rare in Waterloo near the campus. We had around 20 people in attendance with six presentations followed by some beer and wings at the pub.
Most of those in attendance were at the last one with a couple new folks showing up. About half were students, a few from small companies located in the Accelerator Centre, and some other folks from around the area. For me, the most interesting one was by Kurtis McBride from Miovision. He and a few other UW Alumni have a company that creates image processing software that would enable you to track the number of people in a store accurately using existing surveillance cameras. He had a demo of counting cars in real time on a stretch of highway from an existing web cam feed. It was pretty cool.
About 12 of the attendees went to the Duke afterwards for some beer and wings. It was a good time even though I have a presentation today at WatITis and probably should not have stayed out too late Stay tuned for the next BarCampWaterloo in the end of January or early February. It has been decided by those in attendance to do a weekend BarCamp and an evening DemoCamp once a term…