Who You Calling A Jesse?

Today I find myself at a car dealership in town that is willing to sacrifice a long standing relationship for $50. No more $150 oil changes, no more other service, certainly won’t buy new tires from them, etc all because they insist to charge me to figure out what is wrong with my less than three year old Saab. Talk about a short-sited customer service decision.

After leaving my car to sit for a few weeks while I was on vacation I returned to a car that was just a mess. The lights kept going out, there was a violent vibration from the back wheels (feel it in the seat not the steering wheel), and it just ran rough. Given it is generally a sleep in the garage car I assumed it just didn’t like being outside and/or it is showing its 65K of KM. Although for a Saab 9-5 that shouldn’t be a lot.

I finally managed to get into the dealership a month and a half later. The lights have been an ongoing concern (they have been replaced every time I bring it in) so no worries there, they will take care of it. The vibration might be warranty work or it might not. Just to find out I get the privilege of paying for the time to figure it out.

I realize it is common practice for mechanics to do this. After all, it takes them some time to figure it out (or simply plug in the computer and it tells you) and sure mechanics could spend all day diagnosing things and not get paid. But:

• is diagnosis not built into their $80/hr+ billing rate?
• I bought the car from that dealership and I might buy another (not now)
• The mechanic won’t feel the vibration anyway as he isn’t allowed to go fast enough to feel it (yes it is above the speed limit but not by much)

What I don’t understand is why do people accept this? If more people complained then there is no way it would continue. I am certain the irritation on customers over oil changes is why GM now covers that for the first few years… obviously the service cost is worth absorbing to make customers happy. BMW, Mercedes, and others offer free ‘scheduled’ maintenance as does Cadillac. They probably don’t charge to tell you if something is warranty work or not. Why? Over the ownership time they may have to absorb $200 per customer on average which is pretty cheap for happy people that spend 40k+ on a vehicle.

Our lease is up in a year and I am pretty sure I will not be going back to that dealership for much beyond handing them the keys.

The Canada 3.0 conference wrapped up the second day with speeches from the CEO of RIM, the Chair of the CRTC, and others all with a strong patriotic message as well as a surprising amount of useful vision and position stuff specifically from the the Chair of the CRTC. Day 2 did, sadly enough, start off with some rather dry and boring stuff that made for a fun game of buzz word bingo.

Between the speeches I attended the talk that included Waterloo’s own Jacqui Murphy from TechCapital. She took full advantage of having a mic and an audience to make it clear that startups shouldn’t be about seeking funding or exits with big companies buying you. You should dream big and focus on revenue generation. Some great messages to bring back to VeloCity I think.

The round table discussions in the afternoon felt like they lacked energy and urgency. The big rooms and groups just didn’t work well for that but I did meet some really interesting folks around my table. If nothing else, that was a huge bonus.

Overall, the strength of the Canada 3.0 conference was in the diversity of the folks that attended. There were some very obvious complaints about the lack of students attending but we really need to stop idealizing students, if they are interested they will come—if they aren’t there they really don’t care…. yet. There were enough student volunteers to suggest to me that the ones that are interested knew about it and made the effort to attend.

What I think was really missing was the younger entrepreneurs and leaders on the panels. Not the under-25s that the over 50’s marvel at, but the 25-40 yr old professional crowd that have the skills, experience, and know how to really push Canada’s ‘digital economy.’ I would have also liked to see more of an unconference stream. Being a Barcamp/Startup organizer I am already a fan of the format but we needed more conversation over round table sticky notes. I will even volunteer to organize that for next time ;)

I should also point out the technology situation. Stratford doesn’t have 3G, the wireless was overwhelmed by all the mobile devices and laptops begging for data (but we got the tweets out!), innovative things weren’t set up like streaming panels to the media room at the very least. Sure Igloo put together a good site but that was impressive a couple years ago, if this is ‘3.0’ then it should push the boundaries.

Honestly, it was an amazing conference. This should be the start of something… keep the buzz going, follow up with the business cards you collected, and start thinking big!

The Canada 3.0 started today in Stratford Ontario (45km west into farm fields from Waterloo) and surpassed a lot of people’s expectations I think. The morning had the typical political talk you would expect when government folks are given a microphone along with the University of Waterloo making it clear it is committed to the Stratford campus and all the potential developing such a campus may hold. What followed was a day of great conversation about communities, what to do to foster entrepreneurial talent, mobile technology, and more.

It was high level discussion mostly but it was honest discussion focused not on how great Canada is but where Canada needs work. Have a look at the twitter stream under the #can30 hash tag for some great bits of information. Day 2 promises to be more interactive with work groups tackling some of the issues presented today.

I spent a lot of they at the VeloCity booth talking to people that are interested in the idea and colleagues at other schools that are a bit envious that Waterloo has such a residence. I will be around for day 2, stop by the booth and say hi!

Over the past couple of days I have been driving the Chevrolet Traverse as part of a Twitter Test Drive arranged by Waterloo Auto Mall. Overall I think it is a great XUV (SUV is so 1990s) that does pretty much all of what a mini-van offers but with a much more solid vehicle that you can use on light off-road fun and snowy days.

• Back row of seats—although not entirely usable for adults (what back row is?) there are plenty of seat belts for when you need to move kids around town
• Even with the back row up you have space for stuff—something I didn’t expect given it isn’t a Yukon or Tahoe.
• The 3.6L engine can actually move the thing—it has enough acceleration to be fun
• Overall design of the interior—although not up to European quality of materials, it certainly is well designed and comfortable

• The stock GM technical parts that you see in 20-30K vehicles in this one that has a 50K+ price tag—The quality isn’t there in the 20 year old digital displays compared to similarly priced BMW’s and Mercedes.
• The exterior lighting—again, for the price I would expect xenon lights and less ‘cheap’ looking plastic
• Mileage—this vehicle isn’t broken in but but the avg economy on a highway drive between Waterloo and Hamilton was 12L/100km (~20 mpg). Why wouldn’t I just drive the V8 Tahoe?
• The one I had was front wheel drive only—for the price I would expect all wheel drive.

The two top things I don’t like is (I think) because this model has a 50K price tag but there is a 35K version. That is something that I think plagues GM vehicles as a whole. You can’t upgrade bits here and there and add that much to the price because you start getting into BMW and Mercedes land that have all those features and more in a much nicer designed package with quality finish. BMW and Mercedes just don’t have a lower priced option… GM needs to either upgrade more in a vehicle or stop trying to have premium domestic vehicles.

My verdict

If you can get an all wheel drive version at the 40K level you are getting a great vehicle. The quality, the performance, and the utility is certainly there. However, I am not convinced I wouldn’t look seriously at a Jeep Commander instead if I want a 4×4 that can do family stuff for ~35K.

Also: See the Edmunds report on the Traverse

About TwitterTestDrive

As far as I know the Waterloo Auto Mall is the only dealership trying to actually use social media and reach out to its customer base. I think it is a brilliant idea to try out and let the users of social media reach out to their online friends about a real experience that is essentially word of mouth marketing. I expect the #twittertestdrive hashtag will be filled of some honest and interesting experiences over this summer that will influence at least a couple car buying decisions out there.

Almost ready to have the sixth StartupCampWaterloo in just under two years. For this one it was decided to not get an opening speaker and just leave it to the community to drive the event. Our sponsors are still doing the same thing and making sure everyone has snacks and liquids. I am really looking forward to the event and meet some new folks as well as catch up with others. If you haven’t signed up and are coming, please head over to eventbrite!

After number six there will be some changes coming to StartupCampWaterloo. We didn’t get a chance to put them in place this time due to vacations (I didn’t post a thing in May) and overall being busy. If anyone has suggestions please post them here to drop me an email (jrrodgers on gmail).

Today I had the pleasure of presenting at the regional Higher Ed Web Conference that was held at Cornell University over the past two days. What a great conference put together by Jason Woodward and his team at Cornell. The speakers started off yesterday with a heavy focus on how to get the user involved in your web project from user testing to engaging folks through social media story telling.

Today we moved into an actual project aimed at a particular set of users at Cornell, into project management (my presentation), and off into the high level thinking about the future of higher ed with Mark Greenfield. My head is swimming with ideas and issues but even more focused on the purpose of the web in higher ed.

My presentation slides are here, thanks everyone for the great feedback and I look forward to continuing many of the conversations online and maybe even at the big Higher Ed Web conference in Milwaukee in the Fall:

After a few weeks of going back and forth with all the internal workings it is now official, I am one of two new Associate Directors at U of Waterloo’s incubator 2.0 residence, VeloCity. I join Virginia McLellan (the other Associate Director) and Sean (Director) as the new team to really push things into something really great (and fun).

The residence has come a long way in last 8 months since it started taking on students. With more investment in people to help push the direction we plan on building more of a community around VeloCity, trying out new things, and seeing where we can go. It is very exciting to be involved in such an innovative and fast moving project.

Can’t wait to get started.

Shortly after I started working in the Higher Education web space (2001) I came across the brilliant post by Jeffrey Zeldman on A List Apart that lead down all sorts of paths towards web standards and accessibility. I wasn’t alone. I think many web folks that were dealing with the internet bubble bursting were inspired by Zeldman’s call to arms to change things and many had the time to explore the possibilities. I did what I could in my position to influence the University of Waterloo web space and in 2004 we had a XHTML/CSS layout that was clean and accessible which was finally let loose on campus in early 2005.

Things changed on campus and I spent more time on usability testing and meeting with the few students that relied on adaptive technology. I wasn’t put off by the fact only two people might notice the enhancements as I knew UW was doing the right thing by fixing things. However, all of the applications students and staff rely upon were not going to be fixed or changed with even the course management system saying it was section 508 compliant but that version was even less usable than the main user interface. A problem that I have observed is that accessibility laws or regulations seem to force people under the covers in the HTML to make things work in screen readers (sometimes) but people ignored how usable the content or the application actually is.

It gets stranger by the day, developers demand unit tests they can meet to make the app accessible but there aren’t any… I don’t think. Laws and guidelines just compound the problem by giving people a false sense of compliance. In the case of learning environments most aren’t even all that usable but golly gee they are 508 compliant. It starts to drain hope.

Blame technology or developers?

A developer most certainly should make browser based apps (HTML/JavaScript/CSS apps) ‘professional’ grade by using semantic HTML, unobtrusive JavaScript, and sensible colour contrasts. That checks off a lot boxes in terms of Search Engine Optimization, re-usable code, dealing with rendering fun, and accessibility. There are different ideas of what it takes to make a web app or page accessible however, and I am not sure a developer should kill a load of time on certain things (that change with the project) like zoomable layouts—especially when browsers are implementing features that make that time wasted.

I am not sure that is inline with that Derek brings up in his post When is the right time for accessibility? as I think some (or a lot) of the things that are generally seen as making HTML as ‘accessible’ really should be the responsibility of a different team of developers (mainly those that make web browsers). I don’t disagree with the strategy of implementing accessibility later based on need and I think Derek’s post offers a bit of an olive branch to developers. You shouldn’t be expected to be all that accessible until you actually know that (a) people will use your product and (b) knowing how people will use your product.

What is my problem?

Honestly I don’t know. Call it a long winter, annoying problems repeating themselves for years, and new experts making the same mistakes.

I started this post sometime after I saw the small torrent of comments about a JavaScript framework which was summed up in Drew’s post The Cost of Accessibility. Drew is on that fence of innovation needs to take into account the reality of the web browser right now and I am not sure I agree.

At the same time I got into a few insane conversations about making the new job system for co-op on campus accessible and IE6 isn’t dead (like we had hoped) for an important 5% of our user base. Our development process makes it insanely difficult to spend time testing, fixing, and tweaking for accessibility (application is hiding behind a VPN and has a few other features that make it hard to access outside of our network). We use jQuery wisely, CSS, and HTML to the browser. AJAX is sprinkled in parts but nothing should depend on it. For a first version that isn’t really ready for user testing it has some good fundamentals but someone pulled the ‘yes but you are missing x’ and I just got deflated.

The problem, in my mind, goes back to the way people think about accessibility. The whole issue is an Art not a Science and certainly not engineering. Engineers have left us with this problem, with HTML, a stateless browser, and a crippled feature set that forces hacks, short cuts, etc. They are doing their part, slowly. Code artists like Derek Featherstone and Drew McLellan help spread the word and lower the barriers through simplified approaches and keeping the dialogue going.

HTML 5 gives me hope even if the Engineers aren’t too quick to drop it in our browsers! I am not really cynical ;)

A bit of a personal post… It is already March and the todo list starts to get pretty crazy. I thought going a masters and working was hard, came kid #1 while I still had to finish up the grad work. Then along comes kid #2 and I don’t understand how people do it. How do you balance the demands required to stay on top of the work game and still spend as much time as possible with these cute squishy things that seem determined to never allow me to sleep again?

My approach is to have fun. If you aren’t having fun doing what you are doing you should figure out how to make it fun.

What is the ideal structure for a web application development team that is using Agile methodologies? What is the process that results in the most bug free development possible? Over the past few weeks I have been documenting and tweaking team roles and process for our front-end development. It has been a lot harder than I thought it would be, especially when you throw co-op students in the mix.

In the past year roles on our team have evolved as we have had to figure out the limitations of our technology, backgrounds, and our skills but I think after about 12 months of a team functioning in a development mode things are pretty much set. What I have found is that you have to adjust certain roles to match people’s strengths and find their comfort level—especially if they are co-op students or recent grads. Once comfortable in their role people start to really shine.

The Web Development team

Every team is a bit different but this is what the Special Projects Group looks like at the moment:

• Design/UX Lead: Manages the front-end design work, participates in development, has responsibility for what is displayed on the screen and how it is displayed – satisfying the requirements set forth by the Client and Project Leads. Interacts with the Project Lead to determine what is ultimately on the screen and how the users interact with the system.
• UI Tester Lead: Design, manage, and execute testing. Collects and consolidates data for the Lead Design/UX.
• UI Designer/testers: Works on designs, incorporates feedback. They also do what would pass as unit testing on the application using a web browser.
• Client Lead: Provides input and has shared authority with Project Lead on screens.
• Project Lead: The person responsible for the project wrt development and satisfying project requirements. Interacts with the Client Lead to determine functionality, business logic, and general interface requirements. Interacts with the Lead Design/UX and Client Lead to develop the front-end requirements.
• Developers: Code the screens.

Like with any web app project and team, there is a creative process group that must meet up with a coding/logical process group. Ideally you throw some usability testing/feedback, client feedback, and a project lead that has sold a particular level of functionality to the client and you get into some fun. The above roles try and address this but they need an integrated process that all roles can work with.

Problems that had to be managed largely had to do with timing

A problem we have had is that coders can’t code a screen until a UI designer/tester has run the screen past a number of people within the client group. That has been cut down to one client lead who has his own process to run it past a larger client stakeholder group. There was another problem with the feedback loop from the client and project leads and when was the best time for them to provide it. This problem is still not fully addressed but hopefully the current process will solve it.

Embracing the issue tracker (or how I love bug reports)

Bug tracking, even the concept of what a bug is, along with having a reliable/useful system was our final problem to overcome. We started with Team Foundation Server then we switched over to Bugzilla and adopted a very religious approach to using it as an issue tracker. This worked out extremely well in providing focus and a task list for coders to pick up. The new problem it has caused is that if you are tracking issues in the system how or why would you use the sticky notes on the wall? Honestly, we are still working on it.

Our process, incorporating bug tracking with sprint planning

The above work flow works really well. What we have done is broken the project into milestones that fit a two week sprint planning process (or a series of planning sessions). The screens are developed quickly with paper, they are discussed, modified, and bounced back and forth in less than 48 hours. From there coding can begin.

We make an effort to switch modes on a screen so that our bug system isn’t overwhelmed. Our team members roles funnel decisions up to a contact point and then allow certain ‘bugs’ or issues to be incorporated in two weeks or less.

Translate agile to your team

Agile doesn’t mean you are infinitely changing things and incorporating feedback. You need to have a cycle that allows you to reach a milestone, provide time to iterate, and move on. You need to be able to classify the feedback and make decisions against the larger vision of what you are building. Where Agile works for us is that it provides an opportunity to catch major problems before too much time to it. Where it fails is when our process doesn’t incorporate the tools at our disposal effectively.

The goal of this process is to avoid being ‘too agile’ where the people in higher positions can cloud the process with mixed expectations and contact points. Using a big wall with sticky notes full of stories and tasks works great but as soon as you introduce bug tracking software it starts to slide a bit. The balance is hard to find but when you do it is worth the short term pain.

With the Facebook data drama getting mainstream media attention and people dropping their Facebook accounts out of protest it got me thinking… people don’t understand the web do they? If you have ever had a conversation with a person insisting you change the results in a Google search as it points to an old page or out of date content in the summary you know how hard it seems to be for people to get what happens to things once they are posted on the web.

The data is crawled, it is stored, it is copied and pasted, etc. It might get locked away in archive.org or on someone’s screen shot. Whatever happens to it you only have control over the source but once you drop those keystrokes onto something accessible by a web browser or by someone else on the network you don’t have control over what happens to it. Facebook might have tried to simply write it is as it is but people don’t seem ready to understand it.

Worry about accessing your data not where it may be copied.

The real battle over your data in my mind is whether you can access it if Facebook decides you can’t. If you can’t export it or access your content (like say with Twitter past whatever number of tweets they let you get at) then we have a problem.

There has been a bit of a discussion in the uwebd list about when is the right time to launch a higher ed web site. Thinking that launch is for new sites and re-launch is for re-branding and something you do with care, my first reaction was “why would you launch a new higher web site?” There is still a tendency in higher education to launch new designs on the campus community from time to time and I think, in modern web time, that is nuts.

Think of the people that use your web site, how they use it, how long they have been using, and who the redesign is for? Are they the same people? Flipping the switch on large changes (navigation, content, etc) is, at an informed guess level, expensive. Every day users are disrupted, new users don’t notice, and the occasional student user likely will think a refresh gets in the way and ask why does their online course environment still suck when you obviously have time to make changes on this site?

Major website overalls on public sites are a waste of resources with little ROI

Here is a generalized version of redesign process in higher ed:

• Someone says ‘we need a fresh look’ (usually fueled by marketing folks or recruitment ‘studies’)
• Committee is formed to look at ‘revamping’ the home page
• 6-24 months pass with around a dozen people on a committee discussing designs
• assumptions are based on personal preferences about what people want to see on the web
• Someone brings up implementing or changing the CMS, another committee is formed to look at that in parallel
• ‘three’ designs are chosen, CMS’s are investigated
• In a perfect world usability studies occur
• In the practical world, ‘previews’ are given to key politically sensitive areas on campus
• After some news releases and committee discussions at various levels some last minute ‘additions’ to menus or content are made for the flavour of the month
• page is launched
• users freak out, some love it, some hate it, all have to learn the new navigation to get on with what they have to do online
• more additions are required for political reasons

Have I gone through this? Yes, twice in seven years. I changed jobs just before my third time came around. In the 15 years or so of a web presence for most schools I would imagine they have done this an average of 4 times with the range between 3 and 8.

This cycle plays out just about everywhere in higher education and I think it largely because we ask each other what we did and copy/tweak/repeat. My guess is that the investment into this type of cycle is around:

• at least 3 FTE of ~45K salaries initially
• into the dozens of FTE for campus wide change
• if you buy a CMS ~100-500K plus more FTE

There is also a cost in disrupting people’s work flows (staff tend to have click patterns to things they need everyday, moving that causes cardiac conditions to worsen), committee time, and the other things that don’t get done.

What do you get back on that investment? Nothing. I don’t believe for one second that students decide to go to a particular higher education institution because their website looked cool, modern, etc. If high school students say that they are just telling you what you want to hear (teenagers do that? really?). Finding the information they need about what it is like to go to school there, programs, the city, the cost, etc would influence them but not a picture of a researcher up to their waste in sludge (grad students that care already know who that it and what they do).

Incremental changes by design and invest in content: clear, concise, informative

I am not saying you should never freshen up your website. You most certainly should but it should never require a re-launch unless you re-branding or something significant. Slight changes to navigation, content, colours, etc can occur without throwing it all out and starting fresh. Your previous design can’t be that bad (if it is, replace it by all means) but it is likely looking pre-web 2.0 or worse, way overboard on web 2.0ness. So clean it up, design change, but don’t do a demolition unless you absolutely have to.

Take your experience with other websites. If you have to be there to find something do you care what it looks like? No. You only care if you can’t find the information you need or if Google didn’t get you to a quality source on the first search. Students, staff, faculty, friends, etc all come to a higher education website not to hang out but they come to find out specific information. If they can find it and it is readable and your site isn’t some over designed 10px paradise with animated gifs they will have a positive experience.

I do believe things like HTML 5 and Microformats places more focus on the content then the look as the content becomes more portable. More and more people do not see your content in a look and feel that you have 100% control over (you never had 100% control) so why focus on that? Make it so your content is structured properly and relevant. Search engines will like you more as will the people using them.

Update: Smashing posted an Article on Feb 3rd on what being clear and effective in communication on the web means. Facebook offers a great example of continuous improvement in design without relaunching anything (the new design was launched once but changed many times) over a period of 5 years

Where design efforts should be focused: on the tools students use everyday

…and that is a whole other blog post. Fact is that higher education rarely spends time on the experience in web based applications that students, staff, faculty must use everyday. Why is that? I have some thoughts that I will post later ;)

Higher education institutions need to make far more clear separations between the core business that occur on a higher education campus. Research and education isn’t the same thing and neither is training. The public seems to blur education and training as do the institutions themselves. Institutions have made changes, smudging the definitions/roles, for funding reasons and higher education has failed the public in not even trying to explain it’s role (or doing such a bad job at it they might as well not have been trying).

Research is about the pursuit of something for the sake of it

Research can be seen as the endless pursuit of something for the sake of the research (generalization yes, but for the love all things we need to talk on more simpler terms in higher education). Research in Higher Education terms is gaining knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Spin off discoveries usually appear and the research projects may iterate many times before it becomes something tangible or it may just stop. Generally it generates revenue over a much longer term. It may develop expertise as well. It can be value-added to education but it is separate, it is expensive, and creating an environment for a wild range of research to occur is the whole reason a higher education institution exists.

Education is about learning how to learn

To an undergrad student in higher education is about learning how to learn. That includes skills like assessing the quality of a source, finding quality sources quickly, and packaging up your argument/research in a way that the target audience can understand it. The truth that no one seems to admit is that, except in special cases, it really doesn’t matter where you get your first four years done. Undergrad is generic, grad school is a different story.

As you move to graduate work you are applying that skill and developing expertise. That is where research plays a huge role in my mind. You can only develop certain type of expertise in a field if you are allowed to dedicated your time researching it. Higher Education has students so that there will be people to utilize the infrastructure and continue to pursue knowledge in a protected environment (what protected means to me – safe from dramatic government, corporate, or economic oversight).

That isn’t for everyone and far fewer students go on to graduate studies then enter the process out of high school. That is good. The skills are transferable to many jobs in the real world and civilization as a whole benefits from having critical, efficient thinkers that can communicate outside of the academic environment. The truly dedicated move on up the rungs of academia and hopefully have the passion that be shared with students in the future. Sadly I think many loose a certain passion and hide in higher education but they are exceptions.

Skills training is for corporations or is it?

Skills training for a specific job is something that I don’t think works well within Higher Education as it is currently designed. In Ontario we had clear division between College and University where one was skills training and the other was essentially academic training. The government and the public fails (or chooses not) to see the difference in practical terms. Pressure mounts on Universities to train students for real jobs and Colleges have lifted their educational profile by teaching academic courses.

I think Colleges have made the transition towards ‘academia light’ better than Universities have towards skills training and largely because the underlying culture conflict. Universities are run by academics that were trained as academics with the belief Higher Education just exists to pursue knowledge and the value to community is assumed, while College is run as a business. I think Higher Education shouldn’t be exclusively about the academics and it should stop trying to mix the two and be honest about what is being offered.

Globally we see specialty schools doing specific skills training for safety, nursing assistants, etc. There is a market for more specific training everyone and generally Higher Education (besides Colleges in Ontario) have not taken a lot of interest in exploited the market. Instead they try to train skills as well as have students explore their education. I think that is not being true to what the experience is supposed to be about and has created some bizarre dependency between Higher Ed and many companies.

Next: How can staff in higher ed help these three areas?

Part of the Higher Education revolution.

Note: This is all based on observations, experiences, thoughts, etc from working in Higher education for 8 years and being a student for another 5 in undergrad at two different schools. I did my Msc and my wife did her grad work through distance education for the last 3 years. My stint as President of the Staff Association at U of Waterloo is over and I find myself all fired up about how Higher Education needs to change. I am also really tired of seeing academics research problems and hiding that research in journals were only other academics will find it.

With the economy slowing (or grinding to a halt) mixed with credit being hard to find, higher education institutions might be facing a perfect storm that could shake poorly run institutions to the ground. Students with parents that have the money to pay for their education might be hard pressed to do so, jobs to pay for tuition might be harder to find, loans outside of state assistance might dry up, money for research might be cut, and public along with private donations will likely be even harder to get. This all spells trouble for organizations that wish to maintain a status quo. For those looking to fix some big issues the climate could be ideal.

What are the biggest issues facing higher ed both with regards to the organizational structure and the adoption of technology? My list is short (it is hard to keep short):

1. higher education has an identity crisis – a religious battle is going on internally between the ‘leave me alone, things are fine’ crowd and the ‘wow this is messed up, why are we here?’ crowd
2. the culture has created processes that make change slow and ineffective make sure that any change is painful
3. young talent is defeated by a management class that doesn’t know what management is (and I blame academics for that)

I have already posted my thoughts on how to deal with inefficient committees and the fun that surrounds item 2 and some of 3 above. The first is the illness with the following points the symptoms… I think. I want to explore my thoughts as to why we (higher education) are here and what we can do about it (besides better meetings, time on task tracking, etc). This is a series of blog posts as I don’t want to post some rant in big essay form.

Next post: What are research, educational, and training activities in Higher ed?

Quick question. If you have multiple devs working on a few different screens, each monkeying with CSS, it takes very little time to end up with a huge mess of CSS. How do you deal with that? Do you:

1. Delete the CSS and start again defining a common sheet?
2. Try to optimize the CSS.
3. Live with it.
4. Don’t ever let dev’s touch CSS… they are dirty.

I ran into a 6000+ line CSS file for a dozen pages. They each have some heavy js UI going on but 6000 lines? An auto-optimizer cut it to 2200 or so pretty quickly but you can’t work with that file. I decided to start again, clean.

The upside is that I know the site mostly works without CSS and it exposed some odd decisions with some of the HTML (yay for nekkid web sites). The downside is that we may have to deal with browser bugs all over again—but then again we do not support IE 6. Only IE 7+, FF (latest), Safari (latest).

Feature request for Dreamweaver CS5 – something to optimize my CSS!

Karlyn Morissette has set her ’biggest problem in Higher Education’ on the total inefficacy of higher education institution and how that is enshrined in the culture. I agree. From my viewpoint, Staff and Faculty in Higher Education spend far too much time in committees that have no mandate or authority (or even an agenda or a chair). The "building of consensus" for every little thing paralyzes progress and forces what I see as a continuous pursuit towards mediocrity.

Examples given in Karlyn’s post we see every day in higher ed (committees, endless pursuit of a pet project). The problem gets a lot worse when you look at some of the typical decision making processes that have layers of committees that stretch over months with 12 or so people on each of them. In the case of grad admissions or research funding, committees don’t make decisions but instead push an application up to another committee to consider. Finally someone might make a decision but usually that some one is in no position to make a proper decision as they have no idea what they are deciding on. They just sign the paper and move on.

Time is money except in Academia where time builds authority

To me this boils down to a lack of appreciation for people’s time (at least in Canada, specifically Ontario). It is understandable from the academic viewpoint, you have been in school all your life. Getting a phd is a long process and that process works. An academic’s time has little value over simply having their presence on campus as their entire purpose is to think and do research. Their work hours are open, this is their life. Unless the committees get in the way of their research or teaching there is no real cost.

However, staff time is different. At a guess, historically higher ed (being run by academics) hired clerical staff for clerical tasks. They weren’t required to make decisions as the academics were in charge. With 1000 or so students that might have made sense. As institutions grew they hired more professional staff. Professional staff hired more professional staff to help manage the business of the institution. These professionals are often more skilled and necessary to ensure a level of service. However, academics ensured the committee processes remained in place and that they had final say. This does nothing to empower staff and the skilled professionals that couldn’t accept that left higher ed in the 80’s (at Waterloo anyway). Larger, older institutions seemed to simply professionalize phd/academic roles which laid down the academic committee process that leaves decisions with academic chairs and Deans.

Note: The evolution of academia in North America and beyond is a thesis topic methinks… so my abridged assumptions shall end here ;)

The culture was enshrined over the 1990’s and the insane cut backs that higher education had to deal with. New staff didn’t come in, culture took over. I would assume that the reality of ‘it is easier to beg forgiveness’ always has been present but I found when I started working in Higher Ed that it was the only way to get anything new done. Sadly that approach is wrong (most of the time). It is wrong because sure you change things but you don’t have lasting change. You simply embarrass other people and get shut out of any future process. On the rare occasion you succeed in sparking lasting change but you have still marginalized yourself and others to get there. That isn’t a good way to do things.

Identify value, document process, and stop doing things that don’t need to get done

In order to have lasting change you need to participate in the process, ask questions, understand why people fear change, and give them a big nudge in the right direction. Lead by example, act professional, and be kind to those that will attack you for what you doing. It isn’t easy but in the medium term you will see change. After 8 years working in Higher Education I am convinced that no amount of positive change is worth treating people poorly. If someone makes it impossible to do anything then bulldoze them but I doubt you will have to fight the bully if you build support by other means.

There are a few simple things you can do that borrow from the world of Project Management, Drucker, Roberts Rules, and others:

• Ensure a committee meeting always has an agenda
• Identify the Chair, support the Chair in keeping the meeting on track
• Identify who makes decisions and what is required in order to have a decision made
• Identify who will carry out the decisions
• Do not take things personally even in the face of obvious personal attacks
• Track your time on task, report it to your manager on a weekly basis
• If you are working on a project, get agreement on what ‘finished’ means (open ended projects are probably the worst specific waste in higher ed)
• Identify what you expect to get out of the project
• Figure out what doesn’t need to get done and stop doing it

All these things help identify value in what you are others that are working with you are doing. That value will help make people feel better. If they feel better about what they are doing they are more likely to take risks on the current project or one in the future.

Organizational waste, inefficiencies, etc will not be fixed over night in higher education. But making an effort now (especially in the face of cuts) will help in the future.

Following what was an interesting 2007, 2008 proved to be one of personal and professional growth. Here is my reflection/projection post for the year.

Personally:

Probably the oddest thing about the last year was that it felt like I got very little done. I just didn’t feel productive in my work life nor did I feel like I was using my own time very well. Sure I got to spend a lot of time with my son and accomplished a lot at work but I think a lack of sleep just left me feeling a bit drowned in tasks for 2008. An overall goal for 2009 is manage my time better and enjoy myself more.

I also need to use more time for a hobby or two that isn’t web tech related. It may be time to re-invest into hockey equipment and/or my bike. At the very least I am going to bring my son fishing and try to get up north more often.

That said, things I feel good about personally:

• I finished my Msc (and my wife finished hers)
• Led the UW Staff Association as it doubled its operating budget, hired an Executive Manager, changed some key policies, and after 40 years the organization signed a formal Memorandum of Agreement with the University of Waterloo.
• Drove to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
• Besides Myrtle Beach I visited Las Vegas, Orlando, Wilmington, Clarksberg, Georgetown. All except Orlando were family trips!
  
• Spent a lot of time with Addison
• Welcomed an amazing baby girl into our family

Professionally

Working at the University of Waterloo has advantages and drawbacks. The drawbacks are largely the politics of the environment – a culture that suppresses creative problem solving has been set in for some time. I can honestly say that in 2008 I finally figured out how to get things done properly in such a place without becoming part of the existing culture. The organizational culture must (and will) change over time. Not sure if I will be around UW long enough to see it but who knows.

The past year was about being front and centre in campus wide politics. This coming year is going to be about building some pretty cool front ends, learning to really love (and hate) AJAX, AIR, MS servers, and design. I will be more behind the scenes on campus politics hopefully and I just focus on some good geekery for 2009.

I would also like to make a few more conferences this year. The creative spark that I get from conferences went missing last year. I need that back.

Community

This past year saw what I think was a huge success in the growth of a local tech/entreprenuer community outside of traditional channels. StartupCampWaterloo and BarCampWaterloo really started to take off. DemoCampGuelph contributed as well to what is a pretty interesting unconference community. It isn’t a huge community by any stretch but it is a very intelligent group of creative entrepreneurs. I am excited to see what 2009 will bring.

There is of course the other groups locally that add depth to the community. DevHouseWaterloo (hosted at AideRSS), local Twitter groups, Flickr groups, etc are all enriching and broadening community.

This year I want to get a local Adobe User Group off the ground. The region has a lot of Adobe users and I think they could all benefit from having a group that shares their experiences using software from Adobe. Being an Adobe Community Expert I should really get on that ;)

Bring on 2009!

Last week, on a cold November afternoon, a little girl joined our family. She was born at 15:17 at Grand River Hospital in Kitchener-Waterloo weighing 7lbs 3oz and 21 inches tall! She has an older brother that loves her loads and parents that are still getting over the whole OMG WE HAVE TWO NOW! We are truly blessed to have another amazing kid in our lives—these little humans certainly put things in perspective.

I was thinking about being off all of December but it seems that isn’t going to happen. Oddly I really feel like blogging more and organizing my home office. I just can’t get time in front of the computer because I would rather be playing with the toddler (the older brother) ;) It has been a really tough week and a half (yes that is sarcasm).

Seems RIM’s new Blackberry Storm has a raised a few eyebrows over web related things. In the first review I read there is a mention on the browser:

…had zero issues with the Storm’s browser. Zooming in and out is simple and it seems to load most pages fine, except the NYTs as it reverts to the mobile edition and doesn’t want to load the regular site. Anything with a lot of Javascript chorks, though. Everywhere else on the device there are scroll up/scroll down keys but they’re missing on the browser. Seems like an odd move, but the navigation bar would be a bit crowded. – CrunchGear

As a person that believes the browser is the platform I think the browser is where the mobile device will be won (or lost). As much as I love the app store I hate having all those silly icons scattered on my device just to access web based content. Let me use my browser (like google does). Likely a balance needs to be found but at the moment I have app icon overload…

Living in the town of RIM (Waterloo, Ontario) I often hear things at pubs, at events, or through some second hand gossip. What I hear is usually some pretty positive stuff but at the risk of calling out a specific person, when I hear something along the lines of “webkit doesn’t support Acid2 but the Storm browser does” as a point of discussion I get a little concerned.

First, the Acid tests for web browsers are not a target that makes your web browser bad ass. You can pass it one day but not the other for good reason. But what I don’t get is that Safari passed Acid2 in April of 2005. What that person said in that statement (to me) is that they made sure they passed a test they didn’t even understand! Sure if you run Acid2 on the browser on the iPhone it has a little issue but there could be a good reason for it. AND IT DOESN’T MATTER. Web standards are guidelines… just don’t break things and force me to customize my CSS or JS for your browser.

I don’t want to put down the folks at RIM (the value of my house is directly related to their success!), they made some huge improvements. Problem is that they are against a number of new competitors that have years on them with regards to utilizing the web… they need to come across as knowing what they are talking about, even in the local gossip pools.

The team I am on here at U of Waterloo is looking for jQuery or just JavaScript person that is more than just familiar with .NET to give us a hand for a few months (up to 8 months) as we make a big push to get this system ready to go… on time. If you are in the Waterloo area and interested, drop me an email (jrodgers at uwaterloo dot ca). Freelancers are welcome ;)

A twitter conversation got me rethinking about the concept of content vs design yet again. I am constantly in a battle with having to design an interface for content, actions, and requirements that are either contradicting or simply not known yet. That is hugely frustrating however there are ways to design some general things without knowing the specific content and through a few iterations you get there. That is usually what you are forced to do if you are trying to be truly agile.

In Higher ed, what rules is content or design? My feeling is that it is still content. Aside from Alumni and High School students, the gross majority of consumers of information in the higher ed web space are a captive audience. They are staff, students, and faculty that are simply doing their daily activities in a web space they have to use. Sweating over design and what that design should be may not be a fair trade off over just simple content organization. If content is so important I think the use of Microformats is as well because it allows the higher ed space to open up that useful content to a larger audience and potentially enables their internal audiences to use that content better.

Design (impressive, high end, etc) should be more important for micro-sites that are targeting external audiences. An impressive design can be that ‘wow’ factor that will attract those high school students or make your internal audience more comfortable to find information within your web space. However, content may still be more important in the form of a social media foot print in youtube, twitter, facebook, and other places where you don’t have control over design… only the content.

That is not to say good design isn’t needed but I think if you have only 1 day to spend fixing something in your higher ed web space, fix up the content.

As of today I will no longer be President of the University of Waterloo Staff Association. My last act as President was to chair the first half of the Annual General Meeting and then hand over new business to the new President. I take on the role of Past-President that involves co-chairing the Staff Relations Committee and moving to a more advisory role within the Staff Association organization. As President I have two staff that report to me and was in a leadership position. Now I have to step out of the leadership role but stay involved.

In some sense I am happy that my time is up—another kid is on the way and my sanity is getting harder to find!!! A lot was accomplished thanks to the efforts of the UWSA Executive. I can’t thank them enough for the support, the input, the feedback, and the initiatives they brought to the table. Ideas moved quickly and results are starting to show already. One last accomplishment was signing a Memorandum of Agreement between the Staff Association and the University of Waterloo. It was a necessary step that the organization had to do and the Executive made the decision to get it done without a drawn out feedback process from the membership on the basis that that it does not change the working relationship between the University and the employee only the relationship between the two organizations (UWSA and UW). That lack of process didn’t go over well with some in the membership but it was the right thing to do and I am glad we did it.

I have learned a lot about how a higher education institution functions over the past year. Far more than I learned in six years in the Communications and Public Affairs Office and certainly more than I would have an opportunity to in my current role in the IT department. It is a wonder that the organization functions at times but there is a certain value to the organizational structure that is hard not to admire. Now I am part of that structure co-chairing a committee that has oversight over many University Policies that are related to staff.

At the end of my tenure as President the UWSA seems to be getting back to business as usual. A failed union drive offered opportunity and purpose to strengthen the organization and time will tell if that was actually achieved. One remarkable thing that I have learned about the large group of staff in higher ed is that Peter Drucker needs to be required reading for all higher education workers. His management philosophies are applicable to higher education but sadly the execution of any institution wide management strategy is just isn’t there (yet). Another important thing is that some of the best people anywhere dedicate a lot of time and talent to higher education and academics, I would argue, play a lot lesser role in the ensuring higher education works then some would have you believe.

Tonight had to be the most unexpected StartupCampWaterloo yet and it was a load of fun! We had a fairly full room of new faces (60-70) that hadn’t been to a camp event before and really didn’t know what to expect. This left us in a bit of an odd situation as we had no one signed up on the board. So what happened? David Crow made his community pitch to the folks and then everyone introduced themselves as Mic got the names of startups in the room up on the white board.

The number of startups on the white board? 19. There was 19 new startups in the room that were all in fairly early stages. Once all the intros were done and we had a break, a mix of new and some evolved ideas were presented. It was totally not what he had expected for the fourth event but it is exactly what these events should be about. Everything from the project that is being worked on in the basement to a student from Velocity just throwing ideas out there.

The startup community in this town is inspiring.

A friend is working on a rails app for me that will run the voting for the UW Staff Association. We had some simple requirements and she threw together the app pretty quickly. The poll requires options like ‘select one of three’ or ‘select three of five’ so there had to be check boxes that have id values… look something like:

input id="option[ids][]" name="option[ids][]" value="36" type="checkbox" 

In the case of ‘select three of five,’ if you accept the value of the input you need to check someone didn’t just change the value of all the boxes to the same so they don’t vote three times for one thing. This was her quick fix:

  unless params[:option][:ids].uniq.size == params[:option][:ids].size
    flash.now[:error] = "You can't vote for the same thing multiple times in one poll?"
    return
  end

The check just makes sure the same id’s aren’t submitted twice. Being a total rails novice I expected rails would have some pretty way to do this. The above is good (it works) but I had expected a more elegant data validation… I must expect too much.

Email is something higher ed institutions have been providing to students since the beginning of email. Many long-term staff and/or faculty believe it to be a perk while others now simply see it as essential communication. With phones and paper no longer practical ways of official communication, higher ed has been approaching email like corporations when the client (students) see it in a completely different way.

The problem (and my assumption for this post) is that students have an email address before they get to higher ed and they will have it after. For the four years they aren’t going to use some feature crippled email and they aren’t going to switch their primary contact address.

There was an argument a number of years ago for higher ed to provide top notch email to students and encourage them to switch. They will then retain that service as Alumni and retain a great connection with campus. I am not sure that would work anymore.

What students (and Alumni) currently use is their @hotmail or @gmail or @yahoo and that creates a problem. Computers on campus can get compromised, when they do they usually result in the campus domain being blacklisted which means no email is received for a while. IT thinks you fix this by forcing students to use campus email. But that doesn’t change the fact that the higher ed institution can’t contact the rest of the world.

My thought: move your email to a different ‘email’ only domain or move machines on campus to a special domain and stop forcing students to use a bad service. Also stop spending money on a service that no one uses. Email services should be for staff, faculty, and grad students (optional) with forwarding to undergrads email address of choice.

Just a thought.

Do you want to make the system better? Do you want people to use your code? Do you want to work with me? It is close to the end of the first round in co-op here at Waterloo and we have a couple jobs posted. Here is the jobmine info so you can find it easier:

Winter 2009 Co-op 00092349 Software Developer
Winter 2009 Co-op 00092354 Software Developer – Q/A
Winter 2009 Co-op 00092662 User Advocate

We need some passionate students that are keen on web technology to get us to the pilot stage in the spring. Do you think you are up for it?

The technology you get to play with is mostly Microsoft – SQL, .NET, etc – but the GUI likes to use jQuery (before Microsoft decided it was cool).

How can you explain the state of mobile development (both web based on device installed) to non-mobile folks that are use to a windows dominated world that makes ‘adjustments’ for Mac from time to time? Here are my basic assumptions:

• CDMA devices are in some walled garden most of the time.
• Carriers don’t want to be a service provider, they want to control and profit from the whole experience.
• Long term contracts from carriers in North America slow down new device uptake.
• GSM devices are common and low barrier targets.
• Software on phones is rarely updated.
• No device is ‘easy’ to develop for, in fact most are like putting together an entire house worth of Ikea furniture along with all the little things.
• Mobile browsers suck.
• Microsoft doesn’t yet get mobile, but it will.
• RIM changed the game (with email, utility, service) but forgot about changing the rules.
• Apple changed the game further and re-wrote the rules (utility, Application store, touch it).

From those assumptions I am still at the same place I was over a year ago: supporting ‘all devices’ with regards to mobile development is not practical in North America. This includes mobile focused web sites and device installed applications. That isn’t to say there isn’t a market worth going after. Apple gives you access to a lot of people through it’s App store and you can target their browser easy enough. You can target Blackberry as well and if you target both I think you will hit a pretty good market.

The trick in my mind is defining where the market is. What developers need is good (unbiased, up-to-date) research on who is using what devices for what. Not because mobile developers don’t know their audience but because their paying clients, understandably, deserve some real numbers to decide what they need.

Last week I had the pleasure of participating in a meeting between a local mobile start-up and a mobile marketing start-up based out of Toronto. A major chunk of the meeting was spent discussing the various issues of platform and carrier issues.

The marketing group have a client that wants an app on ‘all phones’ – Bell, Telus, Fido, Rogers – but the local start-up can not justify the resources nor can they even think they could support all devices. The client wants to support all phones not because it thinks that is where their target market is but because they don’t know what devices their target market uses. If they new it would be easier for everyone.

This leaves me wondering… is it even possible to collect accurate information on device usage? Is it easier to just target the iPhone since they have data plans and are more likely to have users that want to try out stuff?

Today we opened up a blog dedicated to staff issues at the University of Waterloo that is hosted by the UW Staff Association. At the moment I am the only one writing for it but that is sure to change as other Past Presidents. The idea of the blog is to keep staff informed on issues and give them a chance to have a conversation on topics important to them.

I decided to go with Expression Engine for this blog. It offers a load of options and it has a pretty powerful template engine. Where it has driven me a bit nuts is just figuring out how it works. Being use to WordPress prettiness or even Simplelog on this site, Expression Engine has a lot of features. Thankfully you can ignore them! I will post more about Expression Engine when I get a chance.

Hopefully the UWSA blog will be useful to staff in all higher education institutions. I don’t think we will post only about Waterloo although there will be a lot of examples from Waterloo ;)

I don’t think people in larger organizations (maybe people in general) are use to the development processes of anything that could be considered ‘2.0’ so when they are participating in the early stages you need to be sensitive to that.

The system my team is building is essentially an enterprise 2.0 application for the higher education business of co-operative education. It is like some odd form of dating. It can seem like students are pimping their skills to the highest bidder (employer) but it’s not just about money. For students money can talk but so does being able to find a place to live for four months, having a job that isn’t just mindless work, nice office, helping their career afterwards, etc.

Oversimplifying the explanation of the project: Our goal is to create a web based application that does everything from building a resume to a job posting to applying to jobs and setting up interviews. We are designing it as a self-service collaborative environment that will eventually place the university staff in a position of oversight instead of direct service provision. This has to hook in with other university business applications.

When trying to be agile and include the user in our early stage development we have run into the fact that people that are use to business applications are not use to seeing a rough application. They treat it like it is production quality at the earliest of stages and in turn can bog down development. What happens is an overload of feedback and emotion which just takes the steam out of the user advocate and front-end team.

To add to the fun, we are an internal team so a loud backlash has political implications. We can actually get frozen in time until something at least is close to production level in the stakeholders eye. The result can be a big time sink but it may be a necessary evil of building an enterprise 2.0 application.

If you have an internal team that is replacing a Peoplesoft-like ‘take what you get’ mantra in enterprise application development you will need to account for the reality that end-users in business are use to that. In the past if they saw ‘early stage’ they didn’t see much difference once it hit production. I think it is unlikely that business users in general have been involved in truly early stage development.

Jen Dodd sent me an email about a pub night and panel taking place in Toronto on Sunday night:

Science 2.0: the future of online tools for scientists
A pub night and panel with Timo Hannay, Cameron Neylon, and Michael Nielsen, hosted by Nature Network Toronto

What does the future hold for the way we do science? Are online repositories such as GenBank and the physics preprint ArXiv, or social tools such as Nature Network, about to change science profoundly? To find out, join Nature Network Toronto for an interactive panel discussion over drinks at the pub.

Date: Sunday September 7 at 7:30pm
Place: Fionn MacCool’s

I know Michael Nielson is working on a book that is looking at the future of science and is sure to have some interesting insights to share. I think he has well defined a serious problem in academia as a whole with how information is published and how that has to change but that is whole other blog post. Not familiar with the other panelists but I am sure they will contribute to a really interesting conversation.

If you have an interest in where Science is (or should be) going, stop by the pub!

Just about a year ago I switched jobs on campus from one that focused on applying a broad range of web technology with a marketing and communications focus to a job where I was to focus on user experience of one particular project. I posted some thoughts on what I would have liked to have done in my previous job if I was still there. Have to say, after 12 months I have no idea if any of my list was achieved or even is a big deal to folks that are dealing with U of Waterloo’s web space but it is strangely still important me and I still feel a bit like I need to figure out how to achieve it.

What is truly strange about changing jobs and staying on the main campus is that I don’t really feel like I changed jobs, I just changed projects. Maybe it’s because in my previous job I had a pretty high profile across campus with regards to the web (being the first and only – for a number of years – person hired to work only on the web on campus) and with my current job we are working on a pretty high profile project.

When there was an opportunity for growth presented to me I felt like I had to take it but really wasn’t sure in my decision. However, I have learned a lot that I would not have learned in my previous job which makes the decision to switch jobs a good one a year later. Is my current position better or worse than my previous one? Neither, it’s just different. For me, the motivation to change jobs came from the desire to learn new things and gain from new experiences but there is always a risk in leaving the job you know (or established). I think for a lot of people that work in a large organization and are happy where they are, they can get trapped by the conflict between doing what they know vs the joy of learning something new vs the risk of finding yourself in a bad situation.

In my role as President of Staff Association I have tried to promote changing roles or jobs on campus is a good thing to do both personally and professionally. More needs to be done at Waterloo to encourage folks to move around and I have a feeling in higher education in general a culture of ‘moving around’ doesn’t exist. Given how phd’s don’t change departments… ever… it isn’t a surprise that would influence the culture of higher ed.

In my paper, my research focused on an assessment technique and possible application of Microformats on a higher education home page. What I don’t think I included in that report was a really good reason why you would apply the formats to your entire site or if the current formats are good enough. There are many   making the case out there that cover the ‘why’ with my favourite being that you can make your web site or web application your API. That line of thought is what I applied when UW Events was built.

How does that work in higher education specifically? In higher education there are many issues that make a universal application or Microformats fairly difficult. But higher education web sites have so many consistent patterns in content and design along with a general attitude of openness that there is a huge opportunity that could be realized through the application of current and future Microformats.

Using the following diagram you can apply a couple use cases.

One of the use cases that initially comes to mind is the student that is trying to figure out what courses are offered at what school and where those schools are:

• geo and hatom can give a student an idea of the location and the latest news coming out of the school
• a new format for course information (lets call it hCourse for now) can help a student compare courses across different schools
• hReview can mix in prof rating and/or course rating web sites that use hReview to mark up their ratings and a student can get a better picture of things.

Another would be a prof trying to determine where to spend their next sabbatical without knowing much about the smaller schools in a particular area:

• the geo information can accurately place the schools
• hatom would give them quick access to the latest news
• a format for course information (hcourse) can help them connect with new colleague with similar interests
• hreview can reveal a hidden quality a smaller institution might have

A third scenario might be a person that is looking for a good resource on a story or book. Usually that information is being sent to the typical media outlets.

• hatom identifies the news so it can be easily found through searches
• geo can tie that information to a particular area

This is just off the top of my head, I could probably go on for a while about how easier to find and more accurate content could enhance the experience for people that are looking for information. I can think of some political barriers to this but thankfully it doesn’t require a top down decision to apply it. In the spirit of higher education, application of Microformats can be done on a grass roots effort without any decisions needing to be made ;)

For the past few weeks I have slowed into a summer routine of not looking at my watch and just doing whatever comes to mind. It has been a nice pace over last summer where we were flying or driving all over the place and not being home for around 14 weekends in a row.

Besides my obsession with what has been going on in the NFL pre-season or finally being rewarded for attending a CFL game I really haven’t been getting into too much.

I do plan to catch up on stuff this week and get a few posts out… or maybe not. A week into August already and I am just going to enjoy this month ;)

Not that long ago Rogers/Fido announced their iPhone data packages. They started at 400MB and went up to 2GB for $60-$115. The really stupid part is the SMS packages with 75-300 in the range of packages… but the data is where the consumers focused their rage. In response a $30 for 6GB promotional rate was offered to tack on your current plan so I got one.

What I did this past week was try and use 3G as much as I could but not over the top. Really I just avoided the campus wifi and only used wifi at home, 3G everywhere else. I used Google maps a lot, email, downloaded apps (not many though), and used the web browser to constantly check stuff. In one week I used:

• 1.8MB sent
• 34.7MB recieved

That means if my first week is close to an average week I will probably just top 150MB in the month. Certainly I will try and use more ;) However, I think the original pricing Rogers offered was based on research and purely designed to discourage tethering. But I don’t get why they just didn’t offer unlimited plans. What a missed opportunity to be loved. It’s not like anyone but a few people will try and tether their iPhone to their laptop for a connection.

For the next few weeks I will try and use video more… but the other side of this is that heavy data usage kills your battery (as it does with your laptop). If I leave the iPhone as a ‘phone with benefits’ the battery could probably last days. If I use it as an online entertainment device the battery lasts 8-10 hours.

Almost a year ago now I started exploring the idea of a research paper on Microformats with regards to Higher Education. After doing some research I settled on assessing ten Higher Education web sites, their mark-up and their content, identify some common patterns and explore the viability of Microformats for the typical Higher Education home page.

• You can grab a version of my paper in acrobat.com but if you want a PDF version please leave a comment.

In my paper you will find a literature review, the method I used, all the data, and my results. I did write this over the winter so things might have changed a bit and it certainly isn’t a perfectly written paper… but I think it offers a way to approach semantic mark-up that I hope some people find useful.

From my research, I developed a process to identify a design pattern for Higher Education web sites in both the mark-up code and the content. It may not be the most efficient but it seemed to do the trick.

I used those design patterns to come up with a mock-up of what the University of Waterloo home page could be (not graphically, just semantically) and tried out how that could be useful. My mock-up has:

• hAtom for news
• hCal for event listings
• hCard for the University address with geo information

There is also some other semantic richness in there. I thought that maybe someone would find it useful as there really isn’t a lot of research with regards to applying Microformats and why.

update: I have another post that looks at how Microformats can help higher education

On Thursday (July 10th) I was writing a nice email as to why I wasn’t getting an iPhone. Then I started looking into my plan and the $30 data plan Fido started offering as a result of the public backlash (likely). I decided to wait it out a bit… but then an act of stupidity happened and I found myself making sure I was at the Fido store on time to pick up a 8GB iPhone 3G. Here is the original post and then what the heck I am thinking…

The original post

I have been waiting until today (July 10th) to make my decision on whether or not to get the CDN iPhone from Rogers or Fido. If you haven’t noticed, there has been a lot of discussion about the cost of the plans in Canada vs those in the US as well as the 3-year contract. Rogers/Fido have tried to meet the storm halfway by offering a 6GB for $30 a month added to your existing plan. However, that doesn’t remove the need for a 3-year contract which is my main concern.

I have been with Fido for 8 years now, I have two accounts with them, and I went there initially because they were the only provider in Canada that didn’t require a contract. I have managed a new phone for a low cost ($200 or less) every 12-18 months and haven’t had much to complain about. Not having a contract gives me a little negotiating power with them, I don’t want to loose that. Having any influence over the telecommunications service providers in this country is rare and I just can’t give up my position.

What I am doing out of protest is reducing both my non-contract accounts to the lowest plan Fido offers and making an effort to use my phone even less. Oh, and not getting an iPhone for the moment. Maybe I will go buy an iTouch for now.

Besides, I am guessing that after Christmas (at the latest) they will drop to a two year or even one year contract. Maybe even a no contract option. My nokia 6300 makes me happy as it is and I know a new iPhone is likely already designed and in prototype phase. I can wait ;)

Why did I end up getting one?

Forget that I destroyed by Nokia 6300 the night before (just after I wrote that original post), the primary reason why I got the iPhone is that Fido changed the package and gave people a $30 data option on top of their current plans. I constantly run up $10-$30 data charges monthly (with their stupid pricing) so $30 wasn’t a real big increase. But this is my package:

• $45 gets me 350 daytime minutes, unlimited evenings and weekends, unlimited North American long distance
• $8 FidoPro – an old package that gives me voice mail, call display, etc plus unlimited text messages
• $30 for 6GB of data (heavy use of iphone today saw a crushing 4MB of data transfer, 6GB might as well be unlimited I think)

That puts me at $83 a month for what is essentially an unlimited plan for everything but daytime minutes. I can live with that. Its not cheap, $53 a month was better but I could really use the phone for other stuff… I was going to buy an ipod anyway (own one pre-ipod photo). For now, at least, I think the device is pretty amazing.

Now why did I commit to a three contract if I was so against it? I haven’t even been married three years, how can I commit to a phone that long? Bell and Telus aren’t really impressive for starters. Talk about blowing an opportunity by coming off as the greater evil. I have been with Fido a long time, am I going to leave them? Not likely. So what the heck. It’s not an iphone plan, its a ‘3G phone’ plan. I can live with that.

Oh and it would have been stupid to reduce my plan… I would have had to pay two times as much for something similar in the future if I did. Lesson learned.

In part one I talked about the general format and in part two I looked at the technology used during my graduate education experience through distance education. In this part I look at the time I put into it and overall benefits with this style of education.

Time put in matches or exceeds a full-time Msc program

On average I would say that 16 hours a week went into any given course. With eight weeks a course, eight courses, around 1024 hours was spent just on course work. My dissertation required an additional 175 or so dedicated hours I believe (probably the same spent thinking/dreaming about it). That, rounded up to account a little for the conservative time estimate, is around 160 work days which, for the sake of argument, could be considered a normal years worth of dedicated time required in a typical UK Msc program. I completed that in two and a half years. I also worked (35+ hours a week) at a busy job and tried to have a life.

No matter how you look at that it is a crazy amount of time to dedicate to an ‘additional’ something (and I was paying to do it!!!). At first it was a novelty but around the third course in a row (~18 weeks in) I found the time commitment required to get decent marks started to put a strain on everything else in my life. I had to learn how to shape my evenings and weekends to allow for uninterrupted time otherwise assignments would drag out and my grades would suffer.

The pace was intense. If you ever get more than a week behind in a course (the instructors usually allowed that given life circumstances) the catching up became impossible. With the way the program is set up you can’t drop the course after 10 days without having to pay for the make up either. As it ends up, before you get 1/4 of the way in you are locked in (not entirely unusual practice in higher ed).

“Why did I do this to myself and why the f*#k was I paying to do that to myself?” That really hit me around course number four when an arrogant instructor that gave no feedback and was impossible to get a hold of nearly had me dropping out. Laureate (the people managing the program) did nothing to help other than to offer sympathy as well (again no different than any higher education experience I have had). I had to suck it up, focus, and get my stuff done in a way I had not experienced before.

Higher education is about more than specific knowledge gains

Looking back, when things hit that low I believe I gained the most from the experience. Sure I can hammer out 500-750 words with references in half a day, I know more about different internet based technology than I did before, and I found out that I just should never code because I was successfully completing my Java coding assignments but still have no idea how they actually worked. Like with my undergrad, I learned how to research and present it with confidence that I actually do know what I am talking about. But unlike my undergrad, I had to suck it up while sucking up a whole lot more at work and in life then I ever had too in my early 20’s.

I still need to focus to achieve that quality where confidence is well placed but I can call on that focus in much more productive bursts than ever before. I think that I am much more skilled at time/task management, learned how to harness my insane bursts of productivity, and had a good time on the journey.

What would you get out of distance education?

• Expanding your learning skills through formal academic experience is beneficial regardless of level and location.
• It requires a purpose: do not pursue graduate level education unless you really want to… it gets boring, frustrating, and you feel dumb. Then you finish.
• If you can’t afford it today but want to do it, do it. Worst thing that will happen is that you have to drop out… but at least you tried.

I do want to continue on and do research on web technology and how people interact with it. However, I don’t know where I could do that. Three years ago I would have never considered it though, it’s kinda cool my need to learn new things has come back… after a bit of rest this summer I am looking forward to getting into all kinds of crazy things again ;)

Not sure if this makes sense to anyone but me… just needed to get my thoughts out there. My next post on this should be my dissertation which was on ‘Microformats’ and assessing potential for their application on your home page.

This past week the front-end team that I lead (it includes GUI makers, User Advocates, and UI folks) along with the rest of the team (SOA enablers) are religiously entering a scrum cycle for the remainder of the summer. We have broken into two groups along the lines already mentioned.

The problem I am having is that my group is a mix of the pigs and chickens and I am not entirely sure how to have them all involved. My approach for the moment is to have the UA/UI folks participate as observers in the first 15 min daily with the UI folks really taking the time to go over their tasks from yesterday, for today, and tomorrow. They leave, then the UA/UI folks do their thing for 15 min.

The other challenge as I see it is that we can’t ‘lock in’ tasks for a two week period as the expectation is that clients are giving feedback and expect to see some adjustments on a very short cycle. To address that I have set up two days of ‘respond to feedback’ where we tackle any tasks that can be done in those two days. Anything that can’t fit goes on the list for the next cycle.

This is going to be a bit awkward at first I think… not entirely sure I have it organized properly yet. Hopefully by the next two week cycle I will get it ;) Wondering though, anyone have a similar problem? How do they handle front end development of web applications in a scrum cycle?

In part one I talked about the general format of my graduate education experience through distance education. This part will talk about the technology that was used to conduct the course.

The software that ‘did it all’ from running the courses to interacting with fellow students was from managed by Embanet, FirstClass, and is from OpenText. My first impression of it was along the lines of disbelief. It seemed like a really bad newsgroup manager with a clunky interface and slow beyond belief. After a few settings changes and things got better. Once I learned about some of the more useful features like ‘unsend’ messages I was less annoyed by it. It has a clunky UI but it works. Just this spring the program switched to blackboard, not sure what I think about that but I am glad I didn’t have to make the switch.

How we used the software was very similar to a newsgroup with a managed space for shared files. The courses had their own ‘group’ that was broken down to sub-groups that were based on each week. All assignments, group work, and correspondence with the instructor was done in that style. A shared folder for each week that was essentially just another newsgroup that gave only posting access is where assignments were handed in. The software did allow for live chats with classmates, audio chats, and a really useful set of collaboration features.

However, there was nothing in the software that I could not do in MSN, facebook, a newsgroup, blog, forum, etc. I am pretty sure the experience would have been better if they had a process that utilized tools that are more flexible than the software they gave us. I am not sure how you can manage distance education without a centralized ‘kitchen sink’ system to control access to content though. With on campus courses where students use online tools to compliment lab and/or classroom experiences I don’t know why you force students to use ‘kitchen sink’ software like blackboard if only to enforce control on access to content. Sadly if students try to do something in an environment they find useful academics can re-act in bizarre ways.

My grades, course information, and handbook was all handled in a web based solution that was just a .NET application with some simple tables displaying information. An odd management of documents had HTML files located on the web app but anything that was in Word documents or other templates was found over in the embanet software.

In courses themselves any software used was generally Open Source and/or platform independant. I only had one course that was VB.NET focused and it was XML Web Applications that focused largely on SOAP and XSLT, no the irony still isn’t lost. The IT Project Management course required MS Project but supplied a licence for it but not much for this OS X user. Thankfully I had an Intel Mac with Boot Camp so I managed the course.

Part three will talk about the time requirements and what I see as the benefits of this style of graduate education.

Another TODCon has come and gone in a haze of mojitos, great food, and great company. This year it was back in Orlando—my favorite place for it even though it was really hot and humid, I am getting bored with Las Vegas. This year had an amazing line-up of presentations which had little to do with ‘Adobe stuff’ and more to do with developing rich experiences on the web using whatever tools you use. Sure there was some from folks from Adobe showing off some things in CS4. Greg Rewis from Adobe gave a sneak peek of Flash CS4, there was a demo of Fireworks CS4 from Alan Musselman, and some discussion on Dreamweaver CS4.

Really looking forward to next years conference already as I think there are some changes afoot that will make it an even better community focused conference.

My two presentations were on AJAX strategy and Web Project Management. I have stuck both sets of slides up on slideshare but I don’t think they make much sense without the whole presentation ;)

It has been just around a month since I handed in my final paper (on Microformats, might post that soon) to complete the requirements for a Masters of Science, Information Technology from the University of Liverpool. Overall it was a really good experience, better than my undergraduate experience at the University of Waterloo but I am fairly certain that any graduate experience is better than the undergraduate experience at any school. Your mindset is different, at least mine was. Maybe its just my age and lack of anxiety over ‘when I grow up’ (as that will never happen and I embrace that). This experience was entirely different than ‘typical’ higher education as well, the entire experience is delivered through online tools.

The course format

Every course (there are eight of them) is broken into eight, one week sections. A week is broken into an initial reading period (Thursday-Saturday) with at least one discussion question (DQ) that requires just over 600 words of an opinionated response with citations to back up your opinion from at least three or four sources. Those had to be in on Sunday.

I then had until Wednesday to respond to at least two different posts from classmates with a total of about a dozen ‘significant’ contributions expected. On top of that you have an assignment due on Wednesday night.

Grades were handed out for each week and broken down to assignments, participation, and a grade for the initial discussion question responses. At times the grades felt they were arbitrary until you look at the ‘answers’ from the previous week. Usually that was the top answer from someone else in the course. I wasn’t sure were people found the time to create the documents they did.

Class mates

People in your class (around 14 people at most) are from all over the world. I had one course with people from India, Dubai, Kenya, Germany, England, Jamaica, United States, and Canada. It was a diverse group. All IT professionals from different areas of IT, facing different challenges in different parts of the world. That adds tremendous value in my mind as it exposes you to very different problems and solutions than what I would see locally or within my contacts.

Everyone I met was really nice, I only wish I kept in better contact with them.

Instructors

The people running the course really do make the particular valuable or not. For seven out of eight courses I had really good instructors. They engaged the class, challenged each student, and offered insights beyond being simple graders. None of them were University of Liverpool profs though. They were from all over the world with the majority located in the US for the courses I took.

One negative experience was with a particular instructor that was an ‘expert’ in a particular technology and bound to a particular way of utilizing it. In this case it was using Visual Basic to tease out XML services. This instructor was more concerned about the Visual Basic then he was about the architecture of XML based services and applications. Given my lack of Windows (Mac guy here), writing what were essentially ASP with VB Script apps was pretty hard. I got penalized for my ASP programming even though the course was supposed to be about XML service architecture.

That one negative experience was pretty bad and my program manager was of little help. In a distance education setting there isn’t an effective appeal process for marks (or it doesn’t feel like there is) and you can’t exactly go talk to the prof. Email isn’t an ideal way to communicate either when one party is not responsive.

A second negative experience was with an instructor that I already had a good experience with in a previous course. I went on vacation during my final course and had limited access to the internet and time to do my work. He seemed to understand that for one week by heavily penalized me for the second week. That took away my chance at getting a ‘distinction’ on my Msc which really left a sour taste. Again no appeals process.

My next post will cover software used and how the program is managed.

Adobe has made available a public beta of the next version of Dreamweaver. Go give it a try! Scott Fegette has a bit more about the release on his blog.

It is really good to see Adobe do this after they let Photoshop CS3 out in beta last year. The next version of Dreamweaver is a big improvement over CS3 for front end developers although I would like to have seen a bit more for application developers.

We are just a week away from the third StartupCampWaterloo at the Accelerator Centre on North Campus in Waterloo. If you work for, own, or are thinking about having anything to do with a startup in the Waterloo region you should come out and meet other like minded folks. All are welcome.

StartupCampWaterloo is a community run event that gives startups a chance to test their ideas on their peers. Everyone who wants to present is given 60 seconds to get the audience interested in hearing more. The audience then votes and we try to give at least the top five a chance to present and get some feedback from everyone.

If you just want to see what this all about and get some free pizza and chocolate bars, you are welcome to that too ;) Please sign up on either the wiki or the facebook event.

I noticed today that Fido (a Canadian mobile telco that is part of Rogers) is now offering the Nokia 6301 with UMA enabled if you buy their UNO router. The router thing is kinda dumb. Its just a crap average wifi router than might have some software installed to point your session to Fido/Rogers servers? Or maybe its just a wifi router for $80?

Anyway, kinda lame in how this is going out. I have heard Rogers is rolling it out as well. Perhaps it pains them to use Nokia devices to roll this out since Nokia likes to offer unlocked devices in the US for the same price Rogers sells them for with contracts? It is really cool technology and could, in theory, reduce costs all around. But pushing 802.11 routers that are special seems to be a bit odd.

UMA is: “Unlicensed Mobile Access or UMA, is the commercial name of the 3GPP Generic Access Network, or GAN standard. GAN is a telecommunication system which extends mobile services voice, data and IP Multimedia Subsystem/Session Initiation Protocol (IMS/SIP) applications over IP access networks.” Wikipidea.

My past few months have been complicated by issues that every new parent has had to deal with at some point. It all centres around daycare… They aren’t new to more experienced parents but they are new to me, so I post.

A certain local daycare that is on or very near campus finally called us up the other day after two years on the waiting list to say they have an infant spot in September for what will be our 19 month old son. Their recommendation was to stick him in the more expensive spot with cribs, supervision, and day plans, etc. What they don’t know is that our little ‘infant’ can tackle a four year old already. I don’t think he would do well in an institutional style daycare with kids younger than him… but who knows. We won’t find out as he isn’t going.

Currently he is in a home care environment with a an amazing family. He gets to play with all older kids that don’t really care he can’t speak a language they know yet. It is not ideal in that there is no back up if she is ill but in my mind it is a lot better experience. However, finding someone you trust is a lot harder. Finding someone at all in Waterloo is pretty hard.

Then there is paying for it. Generally Waterloo salaries are at a professional level with both parents working (when there are two parents). Even so, the cost is close to a mortgage payment if you find a spot. Do any regional employers help out employees with that? Sure you get some back in taxes but that first year is hard.

Even with daycare, kids get sick (a lot) and you don’t work

Then there is the issue of the bugs these kids share. It doesn’t matter what you do, the moment kids start interacting in groups they start sharing bugs.

The Baby started daycare in January of this year, by the end of the month he had his first cold. Four weeks of coughing later with fevers that would last a day or two then go away for a few days, he clearly had something more going on.

A whole rant on the good and bad service you get out of Ontario’s health care system could fill this void but lets just sum it with: three rounds of antibiotics, a few visits to emerg, and many days off of work later was topped off this weekend with the messiest of all viruses that had two newb parents celebrating solid poo in the nappy.

On a positive note we did get a week and a half away with no medical drama. Funny enough, the baby wasn’t in daycare for 5 days leading up to leaving on that trip… Having to live through virus spreading period of daycare has left me scrambling for time to do anything.

My wife and I are lucky though. We work at the University of Waterloo where generally you can take time to deal with things like a sick baby. What do other people do? Take vacation?

What could be fixed?

Not sure. I have a suspicion that larger employers in town do not do a whole lot to help out the young professional family starting out in the world but I could be wrong. University of Waterloo does nothing to help its staff or faculty get spots in daycare or afford them. It does try to encourage an environment that does give you time to deal with family issues though and that is worth something.

I think the ideal would be to make daycare a taxable benefit from the employer coupled with the ‘family focused’ environment for staff that allows them the time to at least ‘adjust’ working hours so that issues can more easily be dealt with. Burning precious vacation days only punishes young staff by taking away their only opportunity to actually get away. I certainly feel like I get the time but every month I wish I didn’t have to pay so much to have someone watch my kid so I can earn money so I can spend it to fuel the local, provincial, and national economy. Never mind the future tax payer.

“Suck it up, we had it worse” are normal comments I receive if I moan about this. I know the cost and availability is far worse in Toronto as well so I am thankful to be in Waterloo but it still isn’t great here either.

Our ‘plan b’ is to actually go with a live in nanny when the next one arrives. Its far less money than two times daycare costs!

I have moved my blog over from Textdrive to Joyent. Probably the most difficult part was the Joyent wiki. It has a load of useful, well written information that is easy to follow. But if you don’t watch what is in the URL you might be reading help files for the wrong hosting. Not a big deal unless you are bad at reading instructions like me.

I did stay with Simplelog even though it hasn’t been updated in over a year. It suits my needs and I just don’t want to bother converting over to WordPress or back to textpattern.

Not an overly difficult task for a windy/rainy long weekend Sunday.

Finally managed to take some proper vacation and head on down to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. On the way we stopped in to see Stef which was a nice way to start the week. She is only 1600 or so KM from where I live, short drive ;) All told we drove 3600 KM and managed a decent 7.1L/100KM in our car. The little guy seemed to like the drive as long as a bottle of juice was close at hand.

I would certainly go back there around the same time next year. The weather is about a month ahead of us and its nice to jump a bit ahead for a week or two.

After two full days of meetings I think taking only 1.5 weeks off was nowhere near enough. On the task list for me in the coming weeks is a bunch of stuff ranging from fixing this blog (it crashes way too much) to mapping out the GUI development for the summer on the new jobmine system and a bunch of blog posts that are floating around in my head.

In August of 2005 I was bored and frustrated. I decided to check out graduate education options even though my undergrad experience pretty much sucked. After looking around I decided to try out the University of Liverpool’s Masters of Information Technology. At the time it was a relatively new program and I was hesitant to take a Msc via distance learning. Plus I couldn’t afford it and work wasn’t going to pay.

Ignoring all that, I went ahead and applied. Since then I have hit highs and lows—distance education is a lot of work and takes a lot more discipline than I thought I had to get things done. But now, 2.5 years later I have just made my final submission for my dissertation. I hated it and I loved it… I certainly had the best education experience I have yet to have in my life and would do it again.

Once the paper is graded I will post more about that. I did it on Microformats ;) Nothing too exciting, just looking at how they could be applied… in 91 pages with appendices!

Illya posted some thoughts on Agile Release & Testing Procedures and instead of writing a big long comment I figured it was worth a blog post. At the University of Waterloo I have had experience deploying a number of different applications for a variety of audiences… it is next to impossible to get all the details in a post but here is the general truth: there are no enforced institutional wide procedures for web applications. You might think the lack of procedures is bad but it is a result of the relatively low risk environment (even though the campus community has a low tolerance for bugs and changes). There are rarely formal teams of developers, it is mostly the loan coder building a specialty application – enforced procedures would frustrate them.

When you are dealing with a simple web page, say the uni home page, I have essentially covered the typical user acceptance, performance, and stress tests when the page goes live. I go through the gamut of web browser testing, try some OS variations out, and then get it out there. There is a relatively low risk here as the users don’t interact with a database or a whole heck of a lot client side. Once rendering issues are dealt with, it is pretty much unlikely to have other issues. This is with 30 000 or more people seeing it within a short period of time too. I had relative success but I think it was more luck and the fact we kept web pages simple.

Stepping up the development a bit, throw in a Ruby on Rails or PHP application. My testing procedures involved pretty much the same as the web page testing: poke away at it, fix bugs as they appear, and get it ready to go off of the development server to production. We (co-op student and I) never really sat on changes very long. The thinking was that if it went bad on the production end we just roll back the version, fast. When I made the jump to Ruby on Rails development with Capistrano and SVN that became so easy it was scary. On many occasions we had new versions going up two or three times a day. Minor changes, but they add up. This meant a lot of bugs made it out to the community version but as a whole the community appreciated seeing the progress. Our harshest critics were few and usually the type of people that would sit on things until they are perfect, the web is never perfect.

Now I find myself in the .NET/C# development world. I am happily hacking away at the JavaScript on the front end but I still live in the development environment. Here we have a solid team, a lot of developers, some serious tools, and totally different requirements from the client relationship/expectations end. At the moment we are doing limited testing that makes sure it works and then pushing it to an environment that a group has a ‘sanity check’ and gives us feedback. Releases are going out on a weekly build routine with a daily routine for an internal release. The whole process is evolving as we go but in a very general sense we are aiming to maintain a weekly build schedule for one set of users, daily internally. Our goal is to not leave the application in a non-working state and at any time the build could go live. This habit takes time to develop though… I don’t expect us to be in the groove until over the summer.

That is the nutshell version of what I have had experience with, I suppose it is Agile without the buzz terms. Personally I don’t see a reason why any web application couldn’t work on a daily build process. If you break the big change down to a lot of little changes you reduce the risk of breaking it and you ensure stability (so the theory goes). The problem is that in order to break a big thing down to a bunch of little things you need to take the time to talk it out, plan it out, and scope out what goes into a big thing. It is a way of thinking and it doesn’t happen overnight, most people need experience thinking that way.

I am interested to know what other higher education folks are doing with release and testing procedures.

I have been using Minefield (Firefox 3 beta) for a little while now and just didn’t use any extensions. It is just too fast and way better than Firefox 2 I just couldn’t go back. Now extensions are starting to work – Web Developer now does and all I need is Firebug and life will be back to normal. Decided I should try out ScribeFire too. Using Simplelog means I can’t find a blogging tool that works (why don’t I just use Wordpress??? I like pain I guess) and it crashes every few days but generally I like it ;) Anyway, lets see how this post looks.

Update: seems to work well beyond not turning on comments, see what editing a post does (it removes comments, odd because they are set to ‘on’ by default).

This Saturday is BarCampWaterloo (number 6!) from 1pm to around 7pm (we may retire to the pub before that) at the Accelerator Centre. A much more toned down event compared to StartupCampWaterloo, BarCampWaterloo is where people come to explore ideas and maybe get themselves ready for a DemoCampGuelph (which happens to be April 9th at the Albion in Guelph). I might show some of the stuff I have been working on this weekend ;)

DesignCampWaterloo is March 26th (Wednesday)27th (Thursday) starting at 4:30pm in the Tathum Centre on the University of Waterloo campus. The first one was a bit difficult to follow being in the SLC and all so I am really looking forward to it in the TC. Plus I just have to go up two floors from my office to attend!

There is also a RailsNite next week on Monday at Ceaser Martini’s. Not sure of the start time but I think 7ish might work.

Update: RailsNite does start at 7pm and there is a Facebook event created for it.

Another update: Rick Segal is not coming to Waterloo for his VC roundtable, but he is coming to Guelph on April 28th… Perhaps Ali is influencing people now.

Yet another update: DesignCampWaterloo is Thursday not Wednesday.

You work on something for a couple weeks and then the due date comes close. There is a realization that you won’t meet the milestone unless you get a lot of code written today and deal with whatever UI issues and browser bugs you can. You order in some pizza, fill up on caffeine, and push through a 16 hour or more work day. There is something about that role you get on when you don’t leave your computer, things just make more sense.

My GUI team of co-op students have been pushing themselves this past week and this evening I think they achieved more tonight than all of last week. People will have to wait until May 1st to see it but our internal deadline is much earlier (demos to some stakeholders first and we need April to bug hunt). Maybe I will demo a bit at DemoCampGuelph in April or BarCampWaterloo ;)

Just wanted to post a just over mid-term thanks to Daniel, Shawn, Allen, and Michael for the commitment. They have gone from CS or Engineering students to fairly good AJAX developers in a very short time period. They have made some cool stuff, can’t wait to show it off.

Interesting conversation today that started off with (edited for dramatic effect):

• me: “I am pretty sure what we are doing is not going to be accessible and is going to cause us grief” (me went on about Ontarians with Disabilities Act, University’s commitment to accessibility, etc)
• softeng1: “What will? AJAX? I am sure it can be made accessible” – goes to google, pulls up an article from Juicy Studio
• softeng2: “What exactly is not following the law?”

At this point I probably got annoying because the problem with accessibility is that it is an art over a science. Laws are vague for good reason—there is no black and white, if there was technology would make the law redundant quickly (thinking PDF being a ‘bad technology’ in Australia). I went into the fact screen readers have a heck of a time when things change and there is no page refresh and how stuff not working, at least a little, without js is a problem.

The conversation went on with the software developers insisting there is a software solution. Which is understandable but that is because I got annoyed with the brush off instead of going into the problem. Making a web application accessible isn’t only about using screen reader, I missed that but I am not sure that would have helped…

After the conversation dragged on for a bit we started talking a similar language although the focus was on fixing it with software and testing. I am all for testing but I certainly don’t want to go back and test it in a year and then fix it. I would much rather consider it now. Making a web application accessible is as much about a philosophy as it is the technical considerations.

This left me thinking, my approach was wrong for how these folks think and their experience. Plus I was annoyed by the number of JavaScript reliant things we have already. My concerns are that even though we are spending a lot of time on user testing and usability analysis, technical accessibility would be sacrificed. Are my fears warranted? Probably given the amount of JavaScript, however if we approach it smartly from start we should be ok—that means now.

I have run into a similar conversation quite a few years ago when the web developers on campus weren’t sure what to think about web accessibility. They were far more open to the problem though, not software engineers (or Computer Scientists) as they can build a fix—so they think. What is missing from their world is the appreciation for how annoying web browsers can be and how people interact with them. With software there is more control over presentation and the user expectations are different.

I will need to think about an approach to ensure that the issue of accessibility is more relevant to them. Taking away their mice as they navigate the app might be a good start ;) Or degrading its performance. Most web developers seem to get the problem now but they have likely spent time reading about in the context of the web. Curious as to how others have approached this situation with those that build software, not web apps.

First I think I need to get a few good nights of sleep. The lack of that lately does not help!

With our second StartupCampWaterloo behind us here in Waterloo we hit a milestone. Over 100 people were in the main area of the Waterloo Accelerator Centre to talk with Startups and help each other with ideas (quick estimate based on 88 chairs in the room plus Ali’s colourful chairs). I am pretty sure all those that demo’d got some useful information and experience out of the evening.

A big thanks to Stefanus De Toit for opening up the evening and breaking-in the crowed by sharing insights like: Turning academic research into a product is hard if you don’t keep your paperwork in order; hire your friends; wow people with lots of 3D chickens to get investment (actually prove your concept with a solid demo). Another big thanks to Austin Hill for closing off the evening with a great presentation which included: don’t be afraid of sharing your ideas because someone already tried it – it is your execution that is important; Canada needs more of its successful entrepreneurs re-investing in the startup scene; beware the vulture investors; do a startup while you are a student; it helps to work for a startup if you are thinking about a startup as startup culture is infectious.

What was learned from this one is that 60 second intros with voting works out really well. Keeping things short and keeping the slides out of it kept the conversation interesting and focused. The big buzzer also helped. Only took one person being caught by it—no one else dared challenge their time limits. Plus it kept us on time, mostly.

I had a lot of good feedback and now can relax—until the next one. What are we going to do next? BarCampWaterloo is on March 29th, a DemoCampGuelph will be in April, and StartupCampWaterloo3 will be sometime in May. If you can’t figure out if you want to go, I have a post coming up tomorrow that will cover that ;)

Other folks to thank for making the trip from places afar and/or helping out last night… The Toronto folks venturing outside of the GTA in their large 4×4: David Crow – thanks for the books and disruption, Jevon McDonald,  Jonas Brandon.   Ali Asaria brought some chairs and name tags and Simon Law for came down from Montreal. The other organizers Simon Woodside and Mic Berman ensured that we appeared as unconference as possible ;)

Most importantly, the night was good because of the folks that were there. Waterloo has a great community.

It is interview time here at Waterloo. It happens once every four months, thousands of students and employers enter a dating game for talent and experience. Waterloo is a bit unique having a building dedicated to the process (just happens to be where my office is) and a frequency of three times a year for the process to run. Large companies like Google, RIM and Microsoft are hear hiring large numbers of students but so are local startups like AideRSS and Semacode along with all sorts of companies from different fields and different sizes. Posters on the walls with all the different information sessions show all the opportunities for students.

Why do the companies come here? Waterloo has the talent and I would argue there is far more and better talent than Stanford (update: Larry disagrees or does he?). Our students go to the Valley or Seattle or Boston or Ottawa and all points in-between to work for big names and get started on their carriers while they are working on their undergrad (or grad) degrees. A lot them stay local (Google and RIM are in Waterloo, along with a lot of other interesting employers) and even more would like to stay local for a term or two if a great job can be found.

For local web/tech startups this is a great opportunity. If you developing an idea and you need someone that can code and wants to contribute, for around 10K you can get a junior student for four months to do that. Senior students are more but you get higher quality and more experience. Just to prove a startup concept though, a junior co-op student is inexpensive and hugely beneficial.

The project I am working on depends on the quality of Waterloo Co-ops. We are building a new system to run the job/dating game and have a great bunch of students to do that. They code, they ask questions, they learn, they are excited, and they build really cool things from your ideas. Over the years I have worked with a number of different students and all of them made me look good—which is what you want when you hire someone, right? ;)

There is a side benefit to local startups hiring students I think as well. If you keep the students here, keep them engaged, and get them excited about trying out their ideas you help the local community build resources. I think it’s one part of the puzzle that may help Waterloo’s stealthy startup scene become even more open and exciting.

If you are wondering how to hire a co-op, contact CECS and they will have you set up in no time.

If you are in the Greater Waterloo Area (roughly Milton to Woodstock in highway 401 terms) and have a thing for startups you should come out to the second StartupCampWaterloo on February 26th. Our first one attracted a great group of participants and inspired similar events in Toronto and Montreal. The event is free, the refreshments are provided thanks to sponsors, and there is working wifi. All you need to bring is your expertise, ideas, and an open mind. We have undergrads, grads, alumni, startup inclined people, technologists, and other various characters in-between that make up a large group of people all eager to share and develop ideas.

This event is informal and fun. We aren’t expecting polished presentations. The audience would prefer that you use little to no slides if you present. What you should have is a passion for your idea/technology/etc and the ability to receive open and honest feedback. The schedule is set at the event by those at the event by the participants so be sure to get there on time (starts at 6pm, wiki has details).

Please sign up on the wiki, look forward to seeing you there!

The recent buzz online between WaSP members over IE 8 is approaching lunacy. With the respected Zeldman suggesting WaSP co-lead Drew was not doing his co-lead job of signing an NDA with Microsoft. Lets step back and think about the lay of the land for the moment.

WaSP has a Microsoft Task Force and an Adobe focused Task Force both with NDA requirements, both companies are now seriously competing for the web developer market. The lead of WaSP shouldn’t be NDA’d by either but they should be informed when an announcement is coming and that is the Task Force leads job.

WaSP needs to refocus and those in all the task forces need to shake their heads at recent events and figure out their next steps. Rachel asks what happens now? Well I am inclined to say re-state the goals of the organization, re-evaluate what each task force is doing and how that fits in the goals, and ensure process are developed to maintain a professional presence.

I also commented on Rachel’s blog that I believe SXSW is partly to blame for some of the recent mess. Why? People feel cut out of contributing if they don’t go to Austin. I know I do and what is worse I know that isn’t totally true. WaSP needs to distance itself from all events unless it runs them, at least for now. Let the participation focus around online venues and crank up the advocacy once things are figured out.

The next big challenge is in front of us. IT departments now have massive, poorly developed, monsters of web applications to maintain… or Sharepoint. They don’t want the browser to change, not now, not ever. WaSP, there is your new enemy.

For the record I don’t much care for the meta targeting but I won’t hate it… just think it is a quick fix, not well thought out, but isn’t that what ‘beta’ is for?

In my relative short career I have not had the pleasure of surviving a unionised environment except as a summer student doing landscaping work for the City of Sault Ste Marie. IT related work environments just don’t seem all that interested in a union, I would argue most knowledge workers have little interest in such a club. However here we are in 2008 at the University of Waterloo facing a vote in an attempt to certify OSSTF as a bargaining unit on campus. The vote is today however the outcome won’t be decide for approximately a month due to some dissagreement in who is in the bargaining unit.

The one thing that does get me about this entire process is how the law in this province favours unions over the individual. Maybe in industrial work environments the method used to unionize makes sense as workers generally may be easily replaced and can be easily bullied. However in a professional work environment, where it can take a few months to a few years before a worker performs at top form with higher education credentials, it feels like the whole process tramples on your rights no matter which side of the fence you sit. The behaviour out of the union itself just feels like they are after members, they don’t actually care about the workers otherwise they wouldn’t pursue unionization where the support is 50-50 at best (here it is 60% against, but they need to vote).

This whole experience has taught me a lot and I’d like to think I managed to get through it, up to this point, as President of the Staff Association (the opposing force) with only being called a few names: Meat puppet, lap dog, etc. Oh and apparently I have been paying people to vote… that would mean I had personal wealth large enough to do that. Cool, someone tell my bank manager ;)

Gary Barber, a friend I have only met through Twitter and another friend down in Australia, has passed along a nice “8 things you didn’t know about me” meme. Figure I should oblige…

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. List EIGHT random facts about yourself.
3. Tag EIGHT people at the end of your post and list their names.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

1. I have been a member (on and off) of the Canadian Ski Patrol since 1992 and was one of the first snowboarders to snowboard will on patrol. At the time no one knew what to do with snowboarders, my patrol leader didn’t mind.
2. On my 19th birthday I sat in a canoe on the snow with a draft ball (a northern Ontario thing – its a ball filled with beer).
3. I have a sister that is 13 years younger than me (same parents), mental age is a bit closer.
4. I lived in Dundas, Thunder Bay, and Sault Ste Marie (the Soo) growing up only to settle in Waterloo (all in Ontario). All in the same Province but 1491km to go to Thunder Bay from here, one way. The ‘Soo’ is what I call home.
5. My first job was driving a Dickie Dee ice cream bike, I was 14
6. To this day my favourite food is the original JuJubes from Dare.
7. I always wanted to be a marine biologist, studied Geography, coded until recently, and now work on user experience stuff. Still not sure what I want to be when I grow up.
8. My dream is to spend my life fishing and hunting away from cities, electricity, and bad drivers.

So who am I going to tag? Not sure I know 8 eight people that might respond but ah well. I will try and pick on folks in the Waterloo area ;)

1. Simon Woodside – Simon and I instigate the BarCamp’s around here
2. Gary Will – I have only met him relatively recently, seems like a good guy ;)
3. Larry Borsato – a general pain, Larry has coded more things in more places than I care to know but I am sure he has an interesting story.
4. Ali Asaria – The guy behind Well.ca
5. Norman Young – it has been a while since he has posted anything… maybe now he will.
6. Brydon Gilliss – A DemoCamp organizer from Guelph
7. Mic Berman – maybe she will have time between Mozilla and local startups
8. Jim Murphy – the ex-pat that has returned to the area, what is his story anyway?

Wow… 8 local bloggers. That’s it, so says the rules.

Over the past year or so the MMNP effort has been working on ways to utilize mobile and media based technology on campus. A year ago a pilot project looked at the possibility of students replacing their land lines in residence is relatively smart phones. Lots was learned (primarily that students are shell shocked by the telco cost and don’t really use them even when a large chunk of costs are covered) and the project moved on to different ideas. One of those ideas was a living environment that doubles as an incubator for entrepreneurial students.

Enter 2008 and the announcement of VeloCity. The Daily Bulletin article covers all the details. From the VeloCity site:

“It’s a place where some of UW’s most talented, entrepreneurial, creative and technologically savvy students will be united under one roof to work on the future of mobile communications, web and new media.”

I was involved with the project early on and it is great to see that Sean has taken his idea and made it a reality. I expect to see some exciting things come from this housing experiment. What a great opportunity for some students!

January first is upon us and after what was a hectic Christmas break I can sit down and reflect on the year that was 2007 and what might come technology wise for 2008. All this happened in my life:

• I became a Dad on January 19th
• finished my course load on my Msc
• changed jobs
• cities I visited outside of Ontario: Las Vegas, London, Cambridge, Oxford, Leeds, Harrogate, York, Liverpool, Wigan, Deddington, Buffalo, Quebec City, Montreal
• Drove 30 000 km (or so) and I live 2 km from work
• instigated 4 BarCampWaterloo’s and one StartupCampWaterloo meeting a load of really interesting people at all of them

…and that is what I remember. Last year I set some goals for myself and had a few comments on technology. If I wouldn’t have changed jobs all those could have been met (I think) but I didn’t foresee that I have an opportunity to work with an extremely talented team on an impossible project with technology I hadn’t ever worked with. That fuels my excitement for 2008.

For this year my goals are just as simple as last year:

• Finish my msc (I have to by April)
• Focus on user experience and UI development
• Spend every moment possible with my son

As far as web technology goes. I thought last year that Spry sucked and AJAX might be more accessible by year end. I think as the year went on Spry got better and folks like Derek figured out some best practices for more accessible AJAX experiences.

This year I think the big technology fight will be between Flash and Silverlight. Microsoft has to figure out how to convince Flash developers why they should forget all they have learned and change technology while Adobe needs to figure out how not to step in it and be seen as an arrogant company that doesn’t deserve the loyalty Macromedia had built. The buzz and reaction over the whole user tracking thing or updates is going to piss people off. How dare customers get upset? Indeed.

Microsoft’s UI with Silverlight trump card might be Sharepoint. This beast of a CMS is (I think) the most extensive and customizable business class CMS out there. It is the best of a really bad bunch and Silverlight could make it suck less from a UI perspective. We shall see.

Should be an interesting year ;)

Ever had a bit of technology your use dictated to you by an IT department? Does it not even come close to meeting your expectations or requirements? Is it usually web based technology that is letting you down? This type of problem stems from what I call a ‘square peg, round hole’ philosophy in IT – when decisions of what technology to deploy is based solely on the ability to provide support, not the requirements of the project and/or an analysis of features required by the user. It seems to happen far more often with web based technology.

In a conversation with a colleague over a beer I tried to understand why this happens. Sadly I still don’t understand why, but I do better appreciate the position of people that decide to hammer that square peg in. But I think it because they don’t understand or have an actual use for the web themselves (that is a totally different post).

I believe this happens in every IT department and it stems from the environment. IT finds itself in a situation with limited resources to hire new staff even though they are tracking time on/and tasks and there is an expectation that IT needs to support everyone regardless of expertise. There is a project or group or department that has decided to use a particular technology. Reality kicks in and the service end has to learn to support the technology so a decision is made to apply that same technology to others that have similar but not the same requirements as that project group.

What happens next is ugly. The clients expect something that usually different because they may want the same features but they would apply a different priority to the features they use/need. This influences their expectations on the total experience. Take a content management system (CMS) for example. One group might put a high priority on workflow management, another on user management, another wants a templating scheme, another wants a forum, and another group really wants a wiki. A CMS can do all these things but I can’t think of a CMS that can do them all as well or anywhere near as good as specialized software.

However, CMS vendors will promise support and the ability to meet the demands of the user. This pulls on the support strings of IT. Rarely, if ever, will you find a CMS that delivers to a diverse groups expectations. What happens is that any number of groups become disenfranchised with the software and the overall project of deploying that technology is doomed to failure or mediocre success at best. The CMS vendor comes off either not being paid and/or looking really bad. The IT department comes off looking unprofessional at best which puts pressure on them to produce, and the cycle continues.

What should happen is that the IT department assesses the features as well as the priorities. They evaluate the technology providers based on that clear idea of what are ‘deal killer’ features for people. If it reaches a thresh hold that makes it impossible to please even 70-80% of the clients then IT needs to break down the technologies and groups not force them all onto one.

The web offers the opportunity for this to be easy. Web services, web sites as your API, universal log ins, etc. all make it possible to integrate different solutions on the data level. Sadly I think IT still approaches web apps as black boxes that work in silos.

The moral of the story for anyone building a web based service is that to really be a hit with medium to larger organizations you need to offer integration and openness in your apps. If you can be the folks that develop the integration tools as well as offer your product you can likely charge more based on a successful track record. At least from where I am sitting ;)

In what I think is a good example for large institution web teams, the BBC has gone and offered an update to their home page. It is very Web two point oh with some widgets and gradients, big images, and larger text so its easier to read in this web world of increasingly high resolutions. They have some cool design elements like a classic looking clock, customization, and all the other bits you would expect on a site… except advertisements. The rationale for the design is offered in a blog post.

Issues to note about the BBC in my mind are:

• It is publicly funded and the public can take an ownership view on its web presence
• They have a large team but an even larger web presence
• Their primary audience is hugely diverse and crosses generations, from pre-teens to WWII vets

What I like:

• Their blog post explains what they thinking with regards to the big changes and invites conversation
• They point out there will be continuous changes (the web is not a static medium)
• It is a big change on look not content so they try to undersell it a little as a ‘lick of paint’ not a ‘redo’

Love it or hate it, its a pretty cool public process given all things.

My ‘other job’ at the moment is President of the University of Waterloo Staff Association which represents 1800 or so staff and today I initiated the public part of a process with our members that I believe will make the organization relevant, effective, and very unique. The UWSA is not a union nor does it conduct itself much like a union. People choose to be members of the organization and pay a relatively low flat fee, we don’t do collective bargaining, and we don’t resort to arbitration.

Instead we work with the University Administration to ensure staff have a voice on policies that directly effect them as keep on top of issues like working conditions, pensions and benefits. We also assist staff in navigating those policies, understanding their pensions and benefits, and answer any questions they may have about their employer. Just recently the UWSA finished re-writing the dispute resolution policy making it more ‘usable’ and effective for both staff and administration. Major changes were presented today.

This work along with the expectations of the staff for a level of service have made it nearly impossible to function effectively with the limited resources we have (we collect $5 a month from members currently). I introduced today a strategy that would have a new constitution for the organization approved by members no later than early Feb 2008, a new full-time position of Executive Manager created, and a small increase in resources through a staggered increase in fees in the near future with a an eye on a very large reserve of resources in the future. If you would like some detail, the slides are available in a PDF.

The idea isn’t to be a union but to be a more service oriented organization that has the ability to make some serious moves to assist members if it needs to. With more resources comes the ability to offer services such as (no way near exhaustive list here): interest free loans for education and training outside of UW, daycare subsidies, larger and more student awards for members children, awards for members children not attending UW, heavier discounted tickets for things, build a community presence, etc. This list needs to be expanded and other ideas need to be considered as yet.

With the lack of UWSA blog and/or forum I invite staff to comment here. Yes the comments are moderated (keeps SPAM away) but I will strive to post all comments on the topic. Ideas and feedback are welcome.

Last night I attended StartupCampToronto which was put on by the guys behind StartupNorth. It was a really good event with some intelligent entrepreneurs and a great audience that weren’t afraid to speak up. The format was simple, five minute presentation with roughly 15 minutes for questions. They did let it go over a bit if the conversation was a good one.

It wasn’t until the last presentation that I really go excited though. A couple of students from U of Toronto came with their idea and prototype for a really easy portfolio manager. They had a grand plan for how this can work which had its issues. The crowd jumped on it and offered some great advice which I hope helps them create a successful product. That, I believe, was Simon Woodside’s motivation behind StartupCampWaterloo. When he had an idea for his company/technology it was hard to get that advice to move it along. For students and researchers or anyone else really, it can be hard for them to understand the market their technology might work in. Yes there are organizations designed to help but the community nature of a StartupCamp I believe works better for a lot of people.

A lot of the talk about entrepreneurial learning curve is that you have to fail to succeed. StartupCamp was designed to encourage people to at least try with the support of the community to offer some guidance. Could some failures be avoided by the community helping them figure out the obvious mistakes?

A secondary benefit is the community is enhanced from the fresh ideas and energy out there. With that in mind, next StartupCampWaterloo is February 26th. Looking forward to it.

Next week (December 4th) sees two pretty exciting campus conferences happening. The first is WatITis – a one day conference for IT staff at the University of Waterloo. Would you believe there are just over 300 IT staff at Waterloo working in dozens of different departments? This will be the first year I am not presenting (current job’s stuff isn’t presentation ready yet) and I am not sure I will have time to attend… but it is a really good event.

The following day is the Power of IDEAS conference. This one is open to anyone for a really low price (below $100 for off campus folks, free to on campus people) and focusing on inclusive learning strategies, usability, and accessibility. Derek Featherstone did the keynote for the first one in the summer of 2006, this year he returns for the closing keynote. I will be presenting on building usable web applications and will offer a glimpse of what I am doing in the lower level of the TC as well as some reflection on other higher education home pages and other applications I have worked on over the years.

Keep an eye on the Power of IDEAS conference. Lead by the Office for Persons with Disabilities office, it will only grow (this year there are over 90 people from off campus registered, last year we had around 20). I think it is just great that a conference dedicated to promoting accessibility and usability.

Under what I think is the wrong category, the iPhone is named Invention of the Year by Time. It’s not an ‘invention’ at all though, unless you count the overall phone, PDA, and billing experience. Apple has maybe invented a better process for mobile computing and cellular networks. The iPhone is an enabling technology through its experience, not through its email, browser, etc. It makes the mobile device easy to use and thus inspires a load of developers to mimic that experience on their applications. For that, it is just amazing. The iPhone should get gadget of the year—which it probably will, voting is still open.

Having only played with an iPhone, owned a Blackberry and an Nokia E62, and still have to deal with the moronic customer service of Canadian cellular providers my opinion is purely based on observation but it is pretty obvious that the inability (or lack of motivation) to provide the activation, service, and billing experience that comes with AT&T in the US is what is stopping Rogers from offering the iPhone.

I still want a real keyboard btw… N810 with the iPhone OS would be perfect.

I have been on thing about figuring out coding patterns in HTML. Since I did the UW CLF back in 2004, I have been thinking about a macro-format for content generated on higher education web sites. Any CSS framework uses some abstract naming convention now—so I guess what I have been looking at is a “blueprint” that works specifically for higher ed.

What I did today was grab the code structure from about 10 higher ed web sites (three each from the UK, US, and Canada plus one more). It is just amazing how different HTML can be. Most sites are similar design wise, they have very similar content, and they supposedly trying to provide the same type of experience to the exact same audience.

Only three had Microformats on them, one had errors, and all are ‘valid’ HTML/XHTML. Good and bad ;) Well time for a break then on to more research and maybe even some prototyping. You can call what I am researching is a possible Macroformat for higher ed…

There has been a pretty interesting flame war that has erupted over a posting by Jeff Croft entitled What’s not to love about CSS frameworks? It seems like it has been quite a while since a good flame over web standards and best practices has played out. The tone of the post likely has really fueled the war but the topic itself seems to truly polarize some in the web standards community. Why is that? The devil is likely in the definition and I see it as the less formal art world colliding with the engineering world (something that has been slowly happening for a while with web development I believe).

Jeff Croft posted some follow ups: A follow up on CSS frameworks and The final word on frameworks, from someone way smarter than me. Andy Clarke interjected a comical What’s not to love about instant cake mixes in between that offered some satirical insight. The comments on the posts are shocking in some ways but once the definitions were clarified I think it comes down to artistic approaches meeting formal engineering process.

If you agree a framework is just a collection of reusable code that offers enough abstraction that you could apply it to whatever project you are working on then you have probably some engineering exposure ;) Reusing things is common practice, if you have a problem with that then you are just plain dumb with your time. This reuse of code features is part of what makes Dreamweaver CS3 such a good tool for rapid development. The CSS templates that come with it offer a powerful ‘framework’ to start with. Would you consider that a framework? I dunno. The ‘CSS Framework’ proper that is implied (blueprintCSS ) is in fact a more extensive framework that tries to solve more problems.

I think frameworks are great. I am building one now along with my GUI team of co-op students for a new system here. We are using a more formal engineering process to approach it but what we are essentially doing is creating a framework of GUI elements along with their HTML and JavaScript. Love them or hate them frameworks are just another thing the web dev world ‘re-invented’ from the software engineering world.

Is there a template out there for evaluating web page content in order to identify content patterns that would stand the test of academics? Surely there must be. So far I haven’t been able to find one as most of the research on semantics focuses on application based on a given content type you are creating or using. What I am trying to do is research a site, identify patterns, apply Microformats to the patterns, then figure out if there is a need for a new format based on the content.

What would need to identify a pattern in web content? Two years ago in WebPatterns and WebSemantics John Allsopp (the guy who wrote the Microformats book ) posted a great summary of what are patterns and how can you identify them. John mentions the area of web patterns is under-researched and references a great collection of patterns in web sites (that is missing the higher education pattern) but unfortunately for me I don’t think I can use that as key reference.

Interestingly enough, identifying web application patterns is exactly what my team and I have been doing with the new JobMine system. What I need to find out is where this has been before and in what capacity. Documenting UI elements is nothing knew but I think the criteria for the documentation is pretty loose and perhaps there is a need for one.

When I have my research criteria defined I will post it, any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated ;)

In what is probably the silliest post I have seen on 37Signals blog, they ask Is formal education important? The response?

“We’re more interested in someone’s experience, real work, and point of view than we are with their diploma, degree, or GPA. Formal education is probably last on our list of qualities we feel make someone qualified to work at 37signals.”

They aren’t saying a formal education doesn’t count but they do under state the value of higher education. I think it’s a common misunderstanding that higher education is about specific skills training. But I suppose higher education means different things to different people.

To me it’s about thinking outside of your comfort zone, meeting different people with radically different beliefs/values/etc, and gaining strategies/techniques that enable effective life long learning. Is it for everyone? No. You can certainly gain a similar value through work experience. But that takes some luck.

Update: What I do want to point out is that if you are up for a job against some one with the similar personality, same experience, skill, and passion and they have a degree and you don’t… guess who will likely get the job?

Last night (but dated today) an article on how the iPhone comes with a cost for Rogers appeared on the Globe and Mail web site. The article points out how Apple was able to simplify the silly billing practices of mobile carriers in the US and the EU (the iPhone launching in the EU November 9th). They compare the equivalent bill in Canada for the unlimited data/voice at $70 a month (leaving out the AT&T monthly charge with the exchange rate is actually lower in the US). Sadly in Canada if you try to use the data people have been seeing on their iPhone you could go well over $1000 a month. In theory, that is why Apple has not released the iPhone in Canada yet.

I know of a few people with an iPhone in Canada. Some not using their data, others lucky (or silly for paying that premium for so long) enough to have kept the old Fido (a GSM carrier that didn’t have long term contracts then either) unlimited data plan that was around in 2000 before the phones that would use said data were really in use.

Personally I think the iPhone is cool but the lack of iPhone in Canada doesn’t mean the carriers suck. It is the fact they refuse to have phones that are less than a year on the market in the US (never mind Europe), have wifi, with a two year plan still costs hundreds of dollars, and don’t in reality cost close to $150 a month if you actually use them for talking, texting, etc. Their inability to change this practice when the profits of AT&T, likely in part thanks to the iPhone, are stated is what makes them suck. Then of course there is the possibility that Canadians think both Bell and Rogers (CDMA and GSM carriers and our only real choice) are terrible companies in terms of customer service and technology adoption/reliability and that alone means they suck. They could be happy with the money they are making and fear change but that should mean the CRTC needs to stop protecting them and open up the market, now!

I have seen it stated before but I will say it here too… Apple’s big coup with the iPhone is not the technology, it is taking the position to tell the carriers to stuff it and change or loose out on the coolest technology out there (according to Apple’s marketing machine). One lesser mentioned observation I have had is that Nokia (and Motorola) is also sending a message to carriers but in a more subtle way, they are selling their phones unlocked for a decent price in North America (at least). With the US/CDN exchange rate just drop into a Nokia store in any trendy US mall ;) You will still be screwed on the data plans but you can always just use wifi where you can, maybe a little VoIP.

I can’t believe this but apparently if you are working some PHP or ASP files that have some HTML in them Dreamweaver CS3 is not going to like you. Adobe has a Tech Note on the issue and it only effects Windows users with CS3. I simply can’t imagine why that would do anything… but if you are swearing at Dreamweaver CS3 crashing after the time change, this is why.

Just a short post to mention my software set up. It involves running Leopard with VMware (which I now find better than Parallels) on top running Vista. Where it gets fun is with Leopard’s Spaces. I have one space for Vista and snap back to the other spaces with other stuff.

What I have found hard to get use to with Spaces is that if you have an application (browser) in one space, then you can’t really create a new one in another space. Clicking on the icons in the dock fling you back to the original spot. It takes some getting use to but I really like it.

Running Vista on VMware works really well in its own space. You can use the ctrl arrow keys still and apps like Office 2007 seem to run just as they do on a Dell laptop.

Overall a good experience with Leopard so far. It is a nice update…

It has been about two years since the unconferences started in Toronto. Shortly after it started, David Crow coined the community is the framework discussion and helped inspire folks to help build communities. It took me a while but September 29th, 2007 saw the first BarCampWaterloo. We are now six events (plus DemoCampGuelph) into it and I think with StartupCampWaterloo I feel confident saying there is a solid community in Waterloo that finds community driven events useful and are willing to participate.

Why organize these events? Personally I am not an entrepreneur with a few attempts or successes at starting my own business under my belt. I have not experienced the joys and fears of starting a business but I have experienced years of feeling isolated within both the University community and the larger regional community. I have had more web technology contacts in the US than I do in Canada, more of a sense of community when I attend the big Adobe MAX conference.

Starting and continuing a ‘BarCamp’ movement in Waterloo is about the entire tech community: the web developers in big companies, the entrepreneurs, the inventors creating things for fun, the people that are researching the application of technology and/or how people interact with it, the business minded folks that would love to help something grow. However, the desire for topic specific events is there and that is why we (Mic, Simon, Brydon and Ali in Guelph, and myself), with the help of the community, have broken the events into three main forms:

• BarCampWaterloo – something for everyone who attends. We have talked about how to age a good ham, use two keyboards at once, cool coding, and how to build the technology in your business. Its a day long event that strives to include everyone who attends.
• DemoCampGuelph – this event aims to showcase working projects. You demo something that works, no slides, no time to babble.
  
• StartupCampWaterloo – the most recent experiment that borrowed from the spirit of DemoCamp. This event focuses on the start-up experience and aims to give folks a place to get the feedback they need to keep going and succeed.

It is not that I don’t acknowledge the groups that have been organizing events for a while. The first one that comes to mind is WatStart which is an effort led by Gary Will. The launch of the new WatStart site I think offers a great place to organize community resources, I hope people start using it. Then there are some of our now regular BarCampWaterloo sponsors: Communitech and TechCapital, they have done a lot positive things for the entrepreneurs in the community.

Tags: community, BarCampWaterloo, StartupCampWaterloo

The BarCampWaterloo group brings a BarCamp/DemoCamp event to Waterloo that is aimed for those that are interested in or already have a start up. It is called StartupCampWaterloo and will run from 6pm to 9pm on the 23rd of October at the Accelerator Centre on North campus (295 Hagey Blvd). Sign up on the wiki if you are going to attend, all are welcome!

Addison (my son) had his 9-month visit to the doctor this past week. All things are good, he is developing quickly, healthy, etc. But when referencing the baby height/weight chart the nurse found he was 25th percentile in weight, 75th or so in height. Concerned for his weight meant a friendly lecture from the nurse and an order to increase the fat in Addison’s diet. Keep in mind, this kid has more energy than anything I have ever seen. If he is awake he is moving and/or making noise.

So my wife comes home, thinks about it, and then last night found a paper explaining the chart our doctor’s office uses. As it turns out the research they use is from one town in the mid-west US and has bottle fed babies. Breast fed babies deviate significantly and negatively, especially those from other parts of the world. So the chart’s data source is flawed yet modern nurses and doctors follow it.

I wonder where the obesity problem starts? ;) Lesson of the day, if you are handed facts and you are not comfortable with them always do a little research. The web is really handy for that.

My role at work has me looking at a UI for a fairly complex application (known as jobmine) that has three distinct audiences with three distinct reasons for using the web app. The web application is the primary business tool for the co-operative education process at the University of Waterloo. This process sees anywhere from 10-25K people using it at least a couple times every four months. Staff in the CECS department use it for their day-to-day activities.

What is a co-op system? My definition is based on being a student and now an alumni, it is no way the ‘official’ take. Co-operative education is an approach to education that gives students a chance to learn outside of the classroom (and in the case of UW, make some good money) and gain experience in the ‘real world.’ If you are a student you look for and apply to jobs, manage your resume/CV, and find out about interview times and locations, accept and decline job offers. For an employer you post jobs, sort through applications, arrange interviews, and offer jobs. For staff you make sure this all works by supporting both students and employers, generating reports, manage a massive amount of data. Generally speaking.

It would seem easy enough if you walked up to it from a user perspective. You have your role, an idea of what needs to get done, and off you go. The expectations aren’t a whole lot different than say Workopolis or Monster.com.

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Looking to browse book covers but not wanting to walk down to the book store? Check out Zoomii. You can fly around the book shelves and get a feel for the book size, select what you want, and then purchase it through Amazon.

Chris Theisson has been busy over the last few months showing off his new Amazon affiliate site Zoomii to folks at DemoCampGuelph, DemoCampToronto, and BarCampWaterloo.

This store shows you 20 000 or so book covers and their relative size. You can simply browse the shelf and check out the interesting looking books. For an AJAX based site it is just amazing to fly around the book shelves. I love how fast it is and the search results are just nicer than what Amazon normally gives you. If you are a visual person, this store is certainly more fun than the typical Amazon experience. You have to bounce over to Amazon to make your purchase (maintains your comfort level with Amazon).

If you want to try it out I have a couple invites available to me so just post a comment.

Transitioning to a new site is a pain. My old site has a good Google ranking, decent amount of traffic, and 3.5 years of posts. This place has been around for a while but I just don’t post here. So it doesn’t have much of a Google ranking, no one vists (yet), and no articles.

I have a post on Zoomii in the works and some more stuff about StartupCampWaterloo and hopefully over time this blog will grow.

With regards to Simplelog though. What a really cool blogging tool. I really like the back end environment, the theme management, and the ability to customize it. I don’t have a grand plan for the design but the stuff I could do is just so easy. Anyway… this post is just to say I am here and will be doing more shortly.

It looks like for the first time since I have been watching logs on the home page here at Waterloo (five years), IE is just below 70% (of that 61% are IE 7, 39% IE 6) usage. Firefox is at 25.25% and Safari is 3% with Mozilla at 1.63%. Another interesting thing on operating systems, the week the students arrived (and traffic went up) the Mac OS went from just under 5% to 6.36% of users. Normally it is around 5% with the labs and such so I wonder if more students have Macs? Of Windows users 84.77% are XP, 12.79% Vista.

Screen resolution is pretty much as it has been for a while. 800×600 is 2.13% and the rest are above that. 1024×768 is at 37.27% and 1280×800 (wide screen laptops?) are at 27.50%. Interestingly Flash versions are all pretty much at 9.0 or varients. Version 8 is just under 4% and 7 and below combine to 2.4%.

This is from 1.6 million visits according to Google Analytics.

Just a short note and a major annoyance with Contribute Publishing Server that had me in a near swearing fit last night. If you are using CPS with LDAP and you change your email address, CPS no longer knows who you are. You can still connect to CPS but it manages the sites according to the email address not the userid in front of the @. Something to be mindful of on a large scale CPS deployment if staff email changes.

After switching jobs my LDAP/ADS stored email goes to a different server on campus. My main @uwaterloo.ca still works but it goes to a different local server which is in my LDAP/ADS entry. That local server is what CPS is hooked on. So what happens is I load Contribute, it connects to CPS, but I have no sites. I have no idea why either, no error, no nothing.

I had to switch my ADS info back to the old server (that I still have access to) so all my @uwaterloo email goes there while I use Contribute. Then switch it back again. As of now I can’t figure out how to change sites gracefully.

%#$*@ that is annoying. This could be documented elsewhere but for my sake I am mentioning it here.

It has been 23 days since my last update! Wow does time fly. Figure I should update what has been going on in my little corner of the campus and of course mention for those that care, I finally got my blog up an running with Simplelog. Still monkeying around with the server settings and the template (it is the default template at the moment) but you can subscribe to that feed for things.

So the new job. Working with nine co-ops in a new space with a new job is pretty challenging. The co-ops are great, it is the change in all things but my main employer that is slowing me down a bit. That and the teething eight month old that sleeps in the nursery attached to my bedroom. There should be some really good things to post in the coming weeks so it should be interesting. As an added bonus I am now getting my head around MS Studio and Expression stuff—in a few months I will know with confidence which is better, Dreamweaver or Expression Web. Going into it I think it will be tie because you would use them in different situations. But anyway…

The other part of my spare time has been pulling together BarCampWaterloo5 for September 29th (a Saturday) from 11am-5pm in the Accelerator Centre. Yes Impact is the same day. The difference with BarCampWaterloo is that you can participate, the agenda is set by those in attendance, the goal is to share, learn, have fun, and you don’t need a suit. Oh, and its free.

After BarCampWaterloo is a StartupCampWaterloo on October 23rd at 6pm. This is going to be a little more like DemoCamp but focused on starting your own thing. The plans are still coming together for that one but I hope to have it all sorted out by BarCampWaterloo.

Not much else to report.

I have finally wrangled Simplelog into submission and have the new blog ready to go. I have decided to stop blogging at my old spot and start talking about the same topics here. What are those topics? Web technology and all the fun stuff that I come across in a day.

Enough for an intro post. Once I get the theme/design settled I will get my RSS feed sorted out and then it should be blogging as usual.

I have been doing a little cleaning up of this site and the layout. I have gone back to a white background and cleaned up the right column a lot. There you will find article listings from AideRSS and some other links. I tried to simplify it a bit and give it a new feel as I move to a different (but not much) role on the Special Projects team. Over the next little while I will clean it up even more and then see where things go.

Looking forward to this week and working with a bunch of new people!

As I effectively wrap up my position as the ‘keeper of the home page’ here at UW I can’t help but reflect on a few projects I would have liked to have started as well as those that I am in the middle of and would have liked to have finished. I will leave you to guess which ones were started, just being planned, or only far off ideas. Here is the list in no particular order:

1. redesign the UW home page for a more external audience focus
2. create specialist internal sites for the faculty, staff, and students
3. get UW Chatter off the ground as a web communication hub
4. see MMNP achieve its vision
5. identify what content people actually use in the UW web space, figure out what is missing
6. enhance the UW Search application; integrate mapping, more detailed information on people searches, better tagging of keywords, study search patterns, provide people with quick links to popular searches
7. apply microformats where possible
8. integrate a testing, development, and production server environments with a slick web GUI that integrates with Subversion and Capistrano
9. document things
10. podcasting, my goodness its easy, there should be more audio/video/etc
11. accessibility of campus sites through testing, education, and community
12. usability study swat team

On to the next thing! It will be interesting to look back at the above list and see what I think 6, 12, 18 months from now. Some things may come true, others may be less important.

The biggest challenge I see higher education web folks facing (it’s not just UW) is the ability to clearly define their target audiences and then build to suit. There is far too much ownership of the public facing web by internal audiences—not sure if that is the cause or the result of the lacking identity. Perhaps that is what makes higher education sites unique?

I wish the best of luck to Communications and Public Affairs as continue to tell the story of Waterloo to the world. For the next person in my role the best bit of advice I can give you: do not take this stuff personally and join the uwebd community. Great people.

This blog now switches it’s focus to that of a ‘Web Technology Specialist’ or I move over to my own blog that I never use. I will think about that this week, promise.

It has been just over a year now since I had put some serious thought into holding a BarCampWaterloo. Since then there have been four successful BarCamps, a couple DemoCamps down highway 7 in Guelph, and a few lunches to discuss making things grow even more. The regular community is small (30-40 people) and made up of a mix of students and entrepreneurs that have produced some cool things like AideRSS. A Facebook group exists now, a Google group, a WatCamp space to document it all, and we keep trying to figure out ways to get the word out.

What is next? Well this Fall will see BarCampWaterloo on September 22nd, StartupCampWaterloo is being discussed for the following month, and DemoCampGuelph will be held again sometime in November hopefully. Three un-conference events that are free and open to the community in the next four months.

What can you do? If you are interested, please come out. Although we encourage everyone to participate you are more than welcome to just lurk in the audience. You can bring someone with you to BarCampWaterloo, don’t come alone. Blog, post in facebook, and talk about BarCampWaterloo if you have been to one of the previous events. They are a great way to spend a day.

As today’s Daily Bulletin mentions, as of August 27th I will have a new job on campus as part of the Special Projects Group led by Ken McKay. This team is pretty exciting for campus as it is organized around a different model then what is normal for campus. Plus it has a load of Co-op students involved. I can’t wait.

So what does this mean for my blog? No idea. I will still be doing web development (working on the RIA part of jobmine) and there will be plenty to write about. Ideally I would still like to get some more people writing on this thing but who knows. I do have my own blog off the campus web space that I never post to as well. Perhaps I will move things over there… for now its business as usual.

A very annoying lesson was learned today: if you have Contribute Publishing Server (CPS) controlling your site settings and you are sharing connection information with the users on the site (sometimes a good thing, most times not) and you change the server password of the shared connection you will be locked out of the site altogether. To fix it and retain the users on your site you have to do the following:

• change back to the original password
• change the user directory settings so each user must have their own connection information, enter yours as directed
• change the password on your server connection
• go back into Contribute and change the user directory settings back to the sharing option, re-enter information, done

If I am not sharing the connection, why does Contribute not just prompt me for a new password given I am the administrator and the keeper of said connection? Works fine if I am not sharing so I can only guess once you share all people become equal under the connection settings.

Locking the admin out is still dumb. You shouldn’t have to connect to the web server to admin the site if you have a CPS controlling it all. No idea why I hadn’t noticed before. I have only a few sites that share but it sure was a waste of time thinking of a way to get around it.

Forget the Starbucks popping up all over and the yuppiefied uptown core of the city, if you are looking for signs that Waterloo has a potential to really take off in the world of innovate web application development aideRSS is one of them. This site is just cool and relatively simple in its concept from what I can tell. It takes all your RSS feeds, ranks them based on the community reaction to the post, and gives you an optimized feed option so you only see what is worth reading in the eyes of the larger community. It seems to be a little like Technorati (or maybe a lot) but focused on your specific RSS feeds not just your blog.

The Techcrunch community seems to have a lot of positive things to say about it as well. I really hope these guys can make it out to the next BarCampWaterloo.

It has been over a year since I made a decision (inspired by a student, Mitch) to switch development focus from PHP to Ruby on Rails. It all started with the need to build an events management system in a way that other co-op students can pick up and understand quickly. We now have two version of UW Events, Kiwi, Opinion, Experts guide, a conference registration system, and a new app based on Twitter that is known as chatter (still very much a development version).

First the advantages; It is dead simple to manage, gems are just amazingly helpful, the community is great, applications are portable, stable, and expandable. All things you probably have heard from one source or another. What I find as the biggest advantage is that the Rails framework ideal for an environment where you have a different co-op student coding every four months.

What I mean by that is the framework enforces consistency in style and encourages code reuse. These two things have been the biggest problems when you have a new developer come in that just doesn’t code the same quality or style as the previous developer. Some are learning as they go (CS students that can code Java not Ruby), others are experienced and have their own style. That is not to say a PHP or ASP or Python framework wouldn’t achieve the same thing.

Related to the framework advantage is that it enables me, the manager, to be able to relatively easily jump into the code and check the quality. I haven’t done that as much as I should but that is because I haven’t seen ugly Ruby code yet (in just over a year) so I don’t feel the need to spend a load of time checking up on the student.

Now the negatives; server end support on campus is not ideal (not officially supported), other campus web folks aren’t using it, Dreamweaver and others tools of choice for front end don’t work with it, students aren’t confident with it, and the gems can let you down at times. The last point is actually the worst one for one big reason—you will hear ‘oh its easy just to rewrite it’ from the developer.

The moment you hear that is the moment you know the framework ideal is weak with this developer. You need to get back on top of things and see why the developer/student is thinking it needs a rewrite. It is a time sink to start mucking with gems so don’t do it unless it is absolutely necessary.

The server support probably needs an explanation. Server wise it is one part rails one part learning curve. Rails is easy if you just stick to fcgi, relatively simple sites, and lower traffic. The moment your traffic spikes is the moment you need to think about this differently. With our latest project we have taken on the whole mongrel cluster world, dove into proper subversion management, and use capistrano to publish the application. That learning curve is rough but worth it. It has certainly reduced the weight of the negative.

Fourteen months later I am still in love with Ruby on Rails even after the romance starts to fade.

We have been sputtering along a bit recently between vacations, newly acquired meetings, and other things here and here but UW Chatter (twitter clone) is still moving along with an eye for a stable ‘production’ launch in September. Starting soon UW’s Housing and Residences will make an effort to push out content via Chatter and we will see how it goes. So what is left besides bug fixes? Well an API.

I would like to see Chatter act as a communication hub for web applications on campus in much the same way Kiwi can be an authentication hub. A simple messaging API is easy enough but how one that:

• handles what group you want to post to remotely
• send direct private messages to one or more people (if their preferences allow)
• control your preferences for that particular application outside of Chatter and have that application honour your notification settings in Chatter

It starts to get complicated but Bobby and I have had some pretty good conversations about it. The issues of what to use (XML-RPC, SOAP, etc) with an eye fixated on REST is making this a little more focused but really it’s all on the table. How do we manage this?

Well we do have an idea ;) That will be another post next week… for now I am curious what people think need to be in an API for any web application never mind a twitter clone. A note on comments, I am on the road so approving them might be slow.

Today I finally uploaded an updated version of UW’s International website. It was a long time coming and its design is a collaboration between Matt Regehr in Graphics and myself. Matt did the heavy lifting design wise, I just offered some CSS skills and general design direction. Kevin Paxman from Graphics also offered some help.

The layout is very close to the original design for UW’s Common Look and Feel—before it was stripped down to bare bones and had a template scheme to make it easy applied to it. With it being wider (900px vs 680px) we took the opportunity to place the navigation further up the page and highlight the sub navigation better. The div class naming isn’t following convention (yet) but it was a bit of a rush between vacation schedules, content being agreed to, and the design coming to life.

I think it is a big improvement over the previous site that was based on the much older standard I developed in 2001. Hope people like it ;)

The list of web apps for the iPhone keeps growing with some mixed results reported. 37Signals went and announced their customized for the iPhone tada list, which is great but with all this it has me thinking—what about the other 99% or so of mobile users out there? All they really need is a solid browser that supports javascript like the iPhone does I would think. Could Opera Mini do that? I certainly hope so. Take a look at the iPhone interface in JavaScript to see what might be possible.

In my lost week last week Opera went and released version 4 of its Opera Mini browser in Beta. Their new features list sums up all there is to love about it. It loads the pages much like the Symbian Webkit browser but its fast, easy, and sorta looks like what the iPhone browsing quality does on the Apple site. The nice thing is that Opera offers a browser for everyone, not just a device.

I loaded it on my E62 and gave it a try over the weekend. What I really love about this is that it is a solid browser, no mobile version rendering. This should mean you can build a decent looking small screen version that will run nicely in your mobile device. What I need to do this week or next is try out the rendering and see what I can and can’t do.

Overall I really like the beta. With the iPhone coming the end of the week I really do think the mobile browsers are going to get used a lot more. I am just wondering how to raise awareness about Opera? Is it worth it? Should Adobe drop the Flash mobile and get me a plug in for the mobile browsers?

The past week is a bit of a blur but I figure I should update this thing with what has been going on. First off TODCon 2007. With a ratio of one Adobe person to every nine (or so) attendees it was a great opportunity for folks to speak their minds to the big red A. Along with the great line up of presenters and attendees made it another successful conference.

For those that have never been, TODCon is a small (110-125 people) conference of web folks that are mostly Dreamweaver and Flash enthusiasts (although that seems to be changing). It is a lot like an organized BarCamp with its atmosphere of collaboration and discussion. Thanks again Ray for putting it on, looking forward to TODCon 2008!

Around here I managed to just now get my head above water. Still haven’t caught up on three weeks of email and I doubt I ever will. In CPA we are close to putting Chatter and Kiwi into RubyForge. There are just some authentication issues to work out, you will need to plug kiwi into your LDAP or use kiwi’s database authentication in order to have Chatter work for you. For UW folks please do not install your own Kiwi. We are fixing the API key management so you can just use the one we have. It will support the whole log in once, have access to all kiwi enabled apps, as well. We just need to slowly modify our apps to support it.

Anyway, I will post here when we have that done (in the next few days).

After a two week vacation across the Atlantic visiting the inlaws and touring the English countryside I am now in sunny Las Vegas attending and presenting at TODCon. Today opens up with a presentation from Greg Rewis of Adobe talking about CS3 integration and the future. The day is packed with some great presentations and there are quite a few Adobe folks lurking around and talking to folks. Should be a great couple of days in Vegas!

I will probably post a daily summary of events once I have my presentation all polished up ;)

Contribute is an application that is so easy to use most people probably never take the time to look through the ‘how do I’ section or read up on its features. Rarely will you will run into problems but when you do sometimes it’s just a simple fix and you are done, other times it’s a bit trickier. This post is a collection of common problems and solutions I have had over the past few years as well as a couple picked up from the forum.

General Problem: I can’t connect to my server or Contribute is connecting very slowly or I can’t load my changes onto the server

Solution: Use network I/O logging to log operations and identify problems.

Why? The I/O logging is the first place to look to identify where your problem is occurring. You can quickly find server permissions issues or server speed issues.

Problem: I can’t edit files on the server even though I have it checked out.

Solution: Check to ensure group write permissions exist on the file you are editing. Certain Linux and Unix user set-ups can cause Contribute (and Dreamweaver) to not pick up the users umask settings and the files end up not being group readable.

Problem: I need to edit my source code.

Solution: Many people do not know about the ‘edit in external application’ feature in Contribute. This allows you to edit in your HTML editor of choice and smoothly go back into Contribute to edit the content or just put it back on the server.

Problem: Contribute is not rendering my page properly in edit mode or I want to highlight the places people can edit but I don’t want to use Dreamweaver Templates.

Solution: Design Time Stylesheets – you need to make sure you load the CSS to the server and the Dreamweaver Template itself has it included.

Problem: I need a section of text to have a certain div id or class name.

Solution: Contribute’s application of class or id names to items is stuck with adding them to the tags. So if you highlight a set of text and apply a style it will add that class name to the ‘p’ tags. Try using the library feature to insert a code snip that has the class or id name you want.

Tip: have a design time style sheet that adds a background at edit time so people know if they accidentally remove the region by deleting too much text. They can just insert it again.

Problem: I want to upload different file types to different directories.

Solution: Administer web site, user role settings, file placement.

Problem: I want to modify some style elements on the page

Solution: Page properties allow you to change some basic style elements.

Let me introduce to you UW’s very own Twitter clone called UW Chatter. It’s purpose, to act as notification resource for students, staff, faculty, departments, groups, etc. Features it has now:

• post to your groups and stream
• list friends, add groups, create groups, remove groups, etc
• jabber client (uwchatter@gmail.com)
• email to SMS notifications
• email notifications

What it still needs:

• SMS gateway
• other IM clients
• stable jabber
• a production server
• UI love
• twitter API hook in
• mobile version
• a way to post to groups from jabber, right now you can just post to your own stream

About the app…. We built this with Ruby on Rails. It lives on a development box with a Mongrel cluster and mySQL in the back end. The code itself will go to Rubyforge the end of June (as will the rest of our Ruby apps).

Please give it a go, create some groups, post some notes. Try it out! If you join the bug and notes group you can post your thoughts on the app and what you would like to see. We still haven’t written a help file yet so you really need to just try it out!

I was supposed to present this today at Design Camp Waterloo but I ended up running around campus chasing my tail…

Just sorting out my travel plans and really looking forward to TODCON 2007 in what I assume will be a much hotter Las Vegas than during the Adobe MAX conference. There is a great line up of presentations this year, Greg Rewis from Adobe will be opening things with a keynote that looks at the integration of things at Adobe, Stephanie Sullivan will be sharing some her CSS magic and show off those cool templates in Dreamweaver CS3, and Robert Hoekman jr will be talking about good design. I will be presenting on mobile web development. If you are going send me an email and maybe we can meet up for a pop or something!

There are a few events happening locally though. Sadly I will be missing two of them:

• CANHEIT which is hosted at Waterloo. For higher ed folks in Canada this is a great conference covering all sorts of issues related to technology and education.
• DemoCampGuelph – this should be a lot of fun
• Design Camp Waterloo – I sorta wish they followed the BarCamp model instead of the one they have but I am sure it will be a good time… maybe next time they can be a DesignCampWaterloo ;)

If you are in the Waterloo area be sure to get out to local events. They are a great way to build a community and meet some really talented people.

Since the tragedy at Virginia Tech just about every higher education campus is dusting off their emergency plan. Why the Montreal shooting in September didn’t have the same effect is beyond me. I suppose people related it more to high school, although a CGEP is more like a Univeristy campus than a high school… anyway people are looking at security and communication with students, staff, and faculty. For some reason they are fixating on mobile phones and SMS as theanswer to all this. That is wrong, it is only a part of the puzzle.

The problem

The problem is defined as how can we get a blast message out to people on campus immediately. I don’t think anyone is expecting to reach everyone at once but reach enough people that the word will get out quickly. SMS is really good for that. A recent poll of students on the Waterloo campus (1300 respondents) has just over 70% of students with mobile phones. If you have all their numbers and an application to blast it out and you assume most have their phone on, just hope they aren’t desensitized to SMS enough that they will check it within a few minutes of it being received. There you go, problem solved.

There are some problems with this theory though. Like the bouncing IM client on their desktop, how many students ignore the instant message part of SMS? How many have their phones on? How many have the same number they entered (likely more now thanks to number portability)? If students are following the rules, their phones are off or silent in class as well.

I think you will reach a lot students with SMS but I don’t think you would reach enough to rely solely on a SMS alert system. I think an alert needs to go out over SMS, email, IM, post on web pages, and ideally even send an alert over the Facebook Waterloo network (23 500 people in that now).

The solution: social networks.

If you look at a system like twitter, you have IM and phone settings but you also have an active user base. If you sent an alert over a social network that has an active user base I think you are far more likely to reach people. It is just amazing how quickly word gets out on twitter. Back to the Virginia Tech tragedy, students and the media turned to social networks for information. That certainly validates their utility.

With the social network theory as my motivation, I have been working with a great group of people under the banner MMNP to create a twitter like application for the UW community that will have an alert feature. It will send out an alert to all the communication venues the user has in their profile.

I will talk about this topic and demo our application this weekend at BarCampWaterloo. Then I will demo it again at Design Camp Waterloo (they really need to plug that into the BarCamp wiki) on the 17th of May. After that the app will go into public use mode but the server likely won’t be stable for a while. We are just finding our way with Mongrel clusters ;)

This weekend will be the fourth BarCampWaterloo and the third at the Accelerator Centre. This time we have even more sponsors, I have received a lot more emails asking about it, and more people are signed up! There should be a lot of interesting presentations. If you can just make it for a few hours come out anyway. Waterloo has a lot of innovators with great ideas, we just need a build a better community!

If you want more camping in the area, on June 6th there will be a DemoCampGuelph. As with GuelphCamp I decided to follow TorCamp create a WatCamp page. That page can act as a place to collect information about activities in the region.

I don’t know how long it has been there but I just noticed Facebook added a stats option. This is pretty cool because it gives you some idea how many people are in your network, what they are up to, what events are going on, etc. I am in the University of Waterloo (where I work), University of Liverpool (where I am doing my grad work), and Kitchener (because ‘Kitchener’ cover the Waterloo Region).

I am not totally surprised but there are 22 000 members in the Waterloo group. If you take all the staff, faculty, and students (rounded up a lot to around 25 000) that is 88%. Sure there are likely some Alumni in there now but still… That is a really high percentage. Kitchener in comparison has 61 600, the region has 500 000 people in it…

In Facebook stats you can poke around at other network summaries. WLU down the road has 11 500 people, U of Toronto has 50 000, UWO nearly 30 000, and Conestoga College doesn’t even have a space.

If you have an event or message to get out to the Waterloo community, Facebook seems to have a massive chunk of your audience. Just remember, UW Events lets you pull events you post in Facebook to UW Events… if you have one in there get it over to UW Events!

I really hate posting things like this but I don’t want to say too much about what I have been working on. Not because it is top secret or anything, just that I don’t want people to look at it until it is presentable. Instead, let me tell you about the technology I have been playing with:

• Dreamweaver, Contribute, and Photoshop CS3 – These great applications (I would have liked a UI update on the lines of other OS X pro apps but ah well, next time). The speed improvements alone make them fun to use. I have been working on some new CSS lately for a new ‘International’ web site and Dreamweaver CS3 has been so nice to me.
• Ruby on Rails – ya ya I am a big RoR convert. Not because I can code it though. I love it because I find it much easier to manage a project that is using it. We have a new Experts and Speakers application along with something else in the works and I just love rails. It is even more exciting at the moment because there is some time going into optimizing the server environment.
• Twitter – if I haven’t said it before, I will say it now… this is one addictive web app and it might actually be useful. It is a really good knowledge dump.
• BarCampWaterloo – just over two weeks until the fourth BarCamp in Waterloo. Hoping it is the biggest one yet!

…oh and Facebook is starting to get creepy. No idea why, after a year in there with a few UW folks I was comfortable hanging out. Now it just insane and insane in a way that those of you who just got to University might never understand as you haven’t lost touch with people for 10 years. That is another post ;)

Details coming on our cool app.. promise.

Like everyone else I am deeply saddened by what happened yesterday at Virginia Tech. From the shootings yesterday to the memorial today there has been a lot of second guessing VT’s communications. I have no idea what they might have got wrong but I would like to point out something they got right—their web site.

I first noticed yesterday they had stripped down their site and placed their official statements on there. That is what you would expect but I also noticed a podcast of a statement from the President of the University. Then a bit later a whole new design appeared. The page is 100% dedicated to getting important information out while expressing the feeling on the campus as a whole. They are using podcasts as the primary method of getting the word out with a counselling being discussed and a link over to a page that has even more updates and an archive.

Yesterday it appeared they might have had to move servers as the load increased with the media coverage. At the very least they optimized the site.

I am going to use this post to collect online reaction to the tragedy and how technology played a role or could play a better role:

• Cole Camplese has some thoughts about how technology can help in crisis situations like this.
• The Chronicle questioning the time of the email sent – requires you be on a campus that subscribes to the Chronicle.
• Timeline of how the VT home page changed over the day

The space is booked, posters are made, and we have a couple sponsors lined up already. The fourth BarCampWaterloo will hopefully be our biggest yet! There already a few people signed up, Simon and I are hoping to see us break that 50 mark this time. We know you folks are out there…

I will demo CPA’s latest Ruby on Rails creation which should be up and running by then. This project is part of the larger MMNP initiative and I hope folks around here will love it.

Once again it is CSS naked day and I decided to shed the CSS for this blog for just one day. It is nice to have a look at my site with no CSS and see how it works. I think web folks often create a site and then tweak the CSS, maybe monkey with the XHTML, and its done. It is nice to go back to 1994 ;)

I do have one thought on naked day though. It should be the last day of April so that when these sites get dressed again we can show off our new clothes as part of the CSS Reboot.

Update: Returning things back to normal now. I changed the CSS a bit and dropped the sFIR.

By no means is this a new idea but it is certainly bothering more now than ever before. Why must I fill out all the same information on every social network site I visit? Why can’t I use something like OpenID to store all those boxes and the social network can get it from there? Secondly why can’t I get my profile information out? Facebook’s API is decent but generally useless as I can’t really grab the profile information I want. Sure I can pull events but I can’t put any back… It’s the same boring information.

This annoyance was brought on finally by Virb. I love the site, I appreciate the Flickr integration, but the bands I like are sorta in Facebook (I got bored, couldn’t list them all) and I am too lazy to fill in the boxes again.

This has come up with applications here. I want to share contact information between applications but I can’t. We have centralized authorization but it just tells me who they are (with the name they gave HR) and not much else. I want to try and fix that for the apps CPA manages and offer it to others at UW who want to use it.

I am still in the planning stage but I propose an update for Kiwi that is a sort of add-on to the core service of authentication. Here is what I want to add:

• Profile creation – email preferences, SMS, etc. The fields should be flexible and will certainly grow.
• Sharing between apps that use Kiwi for authentication.
• Once Kiwi logs you in you can go to any Kiwi authenticated application without logging in again.
• OpenID will be allowed to be used to authenticate, Kiwi will manage that.

Yes this all exists in other applications out there but not here. I want to play with OpenID anyway so here is my chance. What do you think? Is the effort worth it?

Well it looks like this is my last post. Starting today the University will shut off its Internet connection due to security concerns. There was a move to simply remove all web browsers in favour of Lynx and firewall the campus so only port 80 worked but bandwidth concerns ended that.

“We just use too much internets,” states Yuri a network specialist in IST. “With the CS club choking the tubez and all the hackers from Romania attacking the networkz we need to just shut things down to protect us all from the internet.” Roger, Director of Networkz, adds “in the 24 years I have worked on networkz at UW it has been nothing but trouble, I think this will allow us to focus on core services.”

The faculty association has hinted that they will welcome this move as there has been concern that students are spending more time in Facebook than they are in Angel. They are even using MSN during class time.

With the loss of Internet it is anticipated that the productivity levels of all students, staff, and faculty should go up. I imagine the next surplus sale will attract many historical computing buffs looking for ancient network gear… ;)

I caught an announcement for a preview of Deepfish (IE for windows mobile) and it got me excited. Why? It renders like a desktop browser. The browsing experience appears to be a big improvement on the Nokia Webkit based browser that you find in the newer Nokia devices (and is really cool for being out for a long while now). Currently it doesn’t look like it will be a better experience than what the Safari browser in the iPhone promises but the point is the browser experience is getting much better for mobile devices.

I am not entirely convinced the desktop experience is a good thing for mobile devices over GSM or CDMA given the outrageous data plans we have in North America (although they are getting better in the US, not so much Canada). With dual mode (wifi + GSM or CDMA) devices it could be very cool. As this technology/experience improves I am reminded once again of the 1990’s and the web. Will developers even bother with the older WAP based slow browsers given most phones are replaced/dead/broken in two years or so? Do you take the time and invest in a stripped down site or do you just work on detecting the smaller screens and making some marginal improvements instead of big changes?

Figuring out if it is worth the effort is a tough call. Almost all the project participants here don’t use their devices for the web largely because they have a laptop nearby and the devices do not do what they want. What they want is the same experience they get on the PC. I think it is a good sign for RIA’s though. They might not need a J2EE version in the near future.

I am hoping to get my hands on a Windows mobile device running Deepfish this afternoon. I will report back if I do…

Adobe announcement of an announcement today is the big unveiling of their CS3 product line. Since Photoshop CS3 beta appeared in December there has been a lot of talk about the changes in the Adobe line but my thing is the Creative Suite CS3 Web Edition. More specifically I am interested in Dreamweaver CS3 and Contribute CS3.

I have been using both on campus here for a while and I can say they are both very nice upgrades from the previous versions. Adobe highlights the features of Spry integration for Dreamweaver but I have to say the new CSS based layouts that come with it are going to be the #1 hit. The templates are just basic layouts that offer a designer/developer a sound starting point to build a web site. The code is just amazingly simple and full of comments so you can easily understand what is going on. It is sorta what the campus CLF here was supposed to be but with no real style just straight structure.

That is not to say the Spry features aren’t cool either. Adobe has come a long way since last May with Spry and I think Spry integration will offer a lot of people a stepping stone into the tricky world of DOM scripting and AJAX. Spry stuff should be used wisely mind you ;) I am a bit worried that people might use it and not think about accessibility or usability but time will tell.

Contribute on the other hand… Version 4 was released what feels like just last month. This new version is a CS3 release and like all the other products is a universal binary for mac users. That along with the updated CS3 branding, blogging, integration with FLV, IE 7, Firefox, rendering improvements, and some other general clean up make the latest version of Contribute a lot more attractive to update from version 3.

I am really excited about these updated tools. It should be interesting to hear what other people think once the try copies are available for download (no idea when that will be).

“A moderated forum for members of the University of Waterloo community to discuss post-secondary affairs and campus issues” is now live. It is a sort of letters to the editor meets a blog thing and will hopefully be the place where some good opinions are posted (good or bad) from students, staff, and faculty. It is hardly an earth shattering web application but it does mark a positive move on the part of the university and I am glad to have had some role to play in that.

Last term we started building an application that would act as a letters to the editor replacement for the old campus newspaper the Gazette. We got a working app done fairly quickly but it sat around for a while as people had other things on the go (the 50th Anniversary build up put off a lot of projects). We sat down a few weeks ago and pulled together the final parts and now it has the support of the top admin at the university.

It is a Ruby on Rails app that was started last term by Sasha Papo. Catherine finished it off nicely but we know there might be a few odd things going on. If you notice anything, let me know. Big thanks to the co-op students who worked on it.

Update: yes I forgot to link to UW Opinion, I fixed that ;)

Last week I mentioned a bit about the redirect script based on HTTP_USER_AGENT we use to send mobiles to a special version of the home page. This week I have some basic documentation written along with the PHP for download that we use on the mobile.php version of the home page.

Essentially all we are doing is parsing content from the static site and generating a mobile friendly version that is just content in smaller chunks. They are identified by their div class or id. Have a look at the documentation and let me know if anything needs more explanation.

It certainly isn’t perfect but it is pretty cool. Our big Ruby on Rails app, UW Events version 2.0 is now running in production with only a couple hiccups this morning. This long awaited update has:

• upcoming.org integration
• Facebook integration
• email and SMS reminders
• personal events – things that don’t need to be approved and appear in your own ical feed
• some profile information so the email and SMS work – it will only be used in UW Events, if that bugs you, don’t use the feature
• improvements in the search
• live-ish preview on the submission page and some tweaks on its layout

As with the previous version we have hCal all over the place, some hCard in the footer, and a simple approval process. After a few bug fixes and creating a mobile version, we are going to leave it alone for a bit unless something big is broken. Over the next few weeks we will fix some CSS oddness but beyond that we are done for now ;) We will have it in RubyForge by the end of April though so if you want new features, that will be your chance.

There is a pretty cool Ruby project that will consume April so look for that in May!

If anyone with a UWdir username/password wouldn’t mind, I could use some help testing out the next version of UW Events. It is at eventsbeta—please log in and:

• Try out facebook integration (we can pull your events from facebook)
• Try out upcoming.org integration (we can post and pull your stuff from there)
• Try out reminders – I think we have a server problem here
• Submit events
• Subscribe and add events to your personal iCal feed

For those without UWdir stuff you can poke around too but there is a lot less to see. The code is going to ruby forge after this is done so it will be free for anyone to use.

Let me know what you think.

Update: bugs have been fixed up to the point I made my comment (#6).

If you go to the UW home page in a Blackberry or Nokia device you will notice that you get a very different page than what you see on your laptop. I mentioned this change back in January. A few people have asked about how we are doing that and given a post on the quirksmode blog suggesting a similar idea I figure I should post the code for all.

In a PHP script that is included in the top of the index.php file, all we do is:

1. $ua = $_SERVER[‘HTTP_USER_AGENT’];
2. if (stristr($ua, “Windows CE”) || stristr($ua, “AvantGo”) || stristr($ua, “Mazingo”) || stristr($ua, “Mobile”) || stristr($ua, “T68”) || stristr($ua, “Syncalot”) || stristr($ua, “Blazer”) || stristr($ua,’BlackBerry’) || stristr($ua,’Opera Mini’) || stristr($ua,’Nokia’) || stristr($ua,’SymbianOS’ ))
3. {
4. $DEVICE_TYPE=”MOBILE”;
5. }
6. if (isset($DEVICE_TYPE) && $DEVICE_TYPE==”MOBILE”)
7. {
8. $location=’http://www.uwaterloo.ca/mobile.php’;
9. header (‘Location: ’.$location);
10. }

A bit of a headache was getting the right info for the user agent. Each device displays odd information that either tells you the browser or the device or the OS. A little trial an error was needed here.

Then in the mobile.php (uses the xhtml-mobile10.dtd) file we have minimal links but when clicked they parse content from the main index.php page. No duplication of content, just optimized. I will post more on that later ;)

It now looks like web folks are stuck testing at least three browsers to make sure their sites work. For February on the UW home page, IE was splitting 72.5% of users 60/40 between version 6 and version 7 while Firefox had 24% usage. Safari is a distant third at 2.18% but it is the only other browser above a half a percentage point of users.

What I think is more interesting this month is the platforms. Mac has a good hold on 4.8% and MS Windows 94.36% but Vista was 0.63% of Windows users for the month. Windows 98 has more at 0.75%. A look ahead at March so far has Vista up to 1% of Windows users so it is gaining ground and is probably something web folks on campus are going to need to consider for testing by the summer.

Since I am looking ahead… Firefox is up to 26.55% of users for March so far. No idea why Firefox has jumped in usage over the past two months but it is a good sign ;)

I was asleep at my RSS when I noticed Macworld has it from Adobe that CS3 will be available announced March 27th. This is pretty cool. For Mac users the added bonus is the promise of big speed improvements on your x86 machines. Looking forward to having some updated tools around…

Update: Adobe says it is just announcing it, it will be available in the spring sometime. Tsk Macworld for getting me excited.

The third BarCampWaterloo is over and even though we didn’t get over 30 people attending (I think we hit 30), half the people were new and came because they heard it was a lot of fun. So after organizing three BarCamps here is what I have learned:

• food is good, it can make the day, but people still enjoy themselves if there isn’t any
• getting the word out is hard, takes some time and effort
• the people that attend are all open minded and a lot of fun
• the space makes the event
• six hours goes by really fast
• sometimes powerpoint/s5/keynote is a good thing
• ad-hoc speaker organization works

Will there be a fourth? I certainly hope so. I think Simon and I have learned a lot about it and community interest outside of campus is really starting to build. The next one will certainly let us know what kind of traction BarCampWaterloo will have.

We have already starting planning the next one and it looks like early May is the target. Our goal should be to get 50 people attending/participating.

Final reminder that BarCampWaterloo is tomorrow. Thanks to some great support for this BarCampWaterloo there is going to be plenty of snacks and refreshments with some pizza for lunch. Plenty of geek fuel to keep everyone happy and chatty. Look forward to seeing everyone tomorrow… if you didn’t sign up on the sight please do so and if you really don’t want to bother that is ok too, just helps with food planning ;)

This Saturday’s BarCampWaterloo is shaping up to be a lot of fun. Looking forward to finally hearing about subletr, a Google Maps mash-up with off campus housing databases which is a great tool for students looking for a place to live. I will be presenting on a new little application that will be coming out the end of this week or early next and maybe mention something about the new version of UW events.

Hope the geeky crowd of the Waterloo region can make it out for a day of free food and good conversation.

A new version of UW Events is ready for testing although its not yet been prettied up. We have added upcoming.org and Facebook API features that lets you post to and retrieve events from Upcoming and pull from Facebook (Facebook doesn’t let you post). We also have profiles that you can maintain that will let you stick your cell phone number in there for SMS reminders at 15 min intervals. There are also custom streams for your events that might not make the main UW Events stream and you can subcribe to your stream (which is public) or hide it from people (but then you can’t subscribe).

Once we get some testing done we will polish it up and update the production version of UW Events. Then we will drop this Ruby on Rails app into Rubyforge for all to use and contribute to.

You will need a UW id to test and if you are interested in testing go to Events beta and give it a go. Let me know what you think. The data has been sync’d with the production version as of Monday so it is pretty much what you see on the production version. Around March 1st will start working on it again so you have until then to give some feedback.

The first month of billing has come in the project participants phone and it shows that even when it is free for them, students don’t seem to use their phone for data:

• avg = 8.1
• median = 5.2
• max = 37.35

• avg = 66.4/56.52
• median = 37/34
• max = 399/261

In the next couple weeks there will be a few chats with project participants, I am very interested to hear from them why they don’t appear to be taking advantage of the project. They only average two SMS a day? I beat that on my own phone. It could be that they use their current phone and aren’t too keen about moving their life to a device owned by UW. Not moving beyond the phone/SMS is not just observed here but I was expecting higher data and SMS usage.

Well we finally have a venue and a date! The third BarCampWaterloo will take place on Saturday March 3rd from 11am-5pm in the Accelerator Centre on North Campus here at the University of Waterloo. There is plenty of parking next to the building and loads of space.

We are looking for some sponsors to cover some snacks and such so please visit the site and either post to the wiki or grab Simon’s or my contact information and email us if you are interested.

This is open to anyone to attend and participate, come and participate in the fun!

Update: we already have a sponsor for the food and drinks… so there will be pizza!

I had an interesting meeting this morning with a newly formed mobile application development group that is tasked with coming up with something that is useful to UW students and runs on a mobile device for the next phase (Spring 2007) of the project. The usual suspects were bounced around: Quest (student information system), Jobmine (Co-op employer/employee management system), Library systems, calenders, etc. Besides targeted data sources we also bounced around the idea of should it be web based and designed for the unpredictable mobile browser or a java app or a Flash mobile app? Each with their own quirky limitations.

What it boils down to though is what do students actually want to do with their phones? Surely you don’t want to apply to courses and fill out long emails but I bet you want to get notifications, reminders, etc. Maybe access quick information on things, send short notes, text other students, look up phone numbers…

This is an open question to all students (and anyone else really), if bandwidth cost was not an issue what would you like to do on your phone besides call people?

Last week I spent a day in the Tathum Centre (Co-op building) interviewing a bunch of UW students for the position of Web Developer here in CPA. Later in the day I sat in on the end of Mike Potter’s (from Adobe) presentation on Flex/Apollo and the jobs Adobe has available for Co-ops. It was an interesting day for me and I just wanted to share some of my impressions…

At least a few students seem to think web jobs are simply copy/paste text or creating inventive ways to covert documents to HTML. I know some I interviewed have had those jobs and have stayed relatively clear of web jobs since… why those jobs are called a ‘Web Developer’ position is beyond me. It was good they asked me and it points out that I need to make sure it is clear in the job description what a day as a web developer entails. I am really surprised how shy they are with regards to web jobs.

As for how Flex/Apollo was received, I was a little surprised. At 4:30 pm the room was full (I am sure it had nothing to do with the pizza) and Mike was doing his thing. I missed a large part of it but I did get to listen in on the questions. Most had not seen Apollo before but instantly they had some good ideas, hopefully some of those ideas will appear on the web sometime soon as working projects.

But what got me is that the students in the room do not see that as a web job even though working on Flex/Apollo apps is essentially web application development. Is it that the classic software development world (the place these students are learning) is spending the majority of its time thinking about the browser as a platform? Perhaps.

Very interesting news out of Toronto that the public school board is looking at banning mobile phones for a number of legitimate reasons. I do agree with the a lot of the rationale but you can hardly blame students for their inappropriate use of the technology. How often have you been interrupted in the theatre? In a meeting? While eating at a fancy restaurant? Adults aren’t exactly setting a good example.

Perhaps it is how the article is written (I don’t see a pro-active approach mentioned, more just a knee-jerk ban) but I think it would be neat if the school board took the approach of requiring those caught using the phones at inappropriate times to attend a special class that will talk about how to use technology responsibly. They could do the same for those caught bullying or harassing other students on facebook or other sites.

By banning the mobile the school board is missing an opportunity to use the technology in the learning environment. If they required students phone numbers they could send them SMS for a whole host of things, provide other content and applications, maybe even negotiate a better package deal for their students. All the students in the public school board would have some serious buying power to influence change in the steeply priced service provider market.

That is the sort of the thing we are looking at here at Waterloo, maybe we should make a little more noise about what we are doing as an example in embracing technology instead of shutting it off.

As part of the ‘mobile tech project’ I have been using a Nokia E62. It is great but slow so I usually use my own Nokia 6680—it just works and I don’t mind typing SMS on the normal phone keyboard. Now that might change as I have my Oracle calender syncing properly (something I can’t even do with my Mac). I was directed to a post from a Oren Sreebny over at the University of Washington (another UW) where he posts how to fill out the sync profile for Oracle Calender in a E62.

This is great but he reports no luck with SSL and the only access to syncML on our campus set up is via SSL. I made a couple changes and it seems to work fine. The following are the settings I used:

Under a sync profile for a calender I used:

• Include in sync: Yes
• Remote database: ./Calendar/Events
• Synchronization type: Normal

Under Connection Settings:

• Server version: 1.1
• Data bearer: Internet
• Access Point: Always ask
• Host address: https://bookit.uwaterloo.ca/ocas-bin/ocas.fcgi?sub=syncml
• Port: 443
• User name: my Oracle Cal user name
• Password: my Oracle Cal password
• Allow sync requests: Yes
• Accept all sync reqs: Yes
• Network authentic: No

This is essentially the same thing as Oren’s posted settings besides the port number and host address. At a guess this might work on all modern Symbian phones for those that have Oracle Calendar.

Now I can just sync my E62 with iSync and iCal works… how cool is that? My 6680 doesn’t support syncML as far as I can tell :(

Rarely do I write a personal post on here but I think this is worth an exception—early Friday morning (January 19th) my son was born. He and his mom are happy and healthy. Addison Murphy-Rodgers came in at 8 lbs 7 oz and 21 inches long.

For the next two weeks I probably won’t be writing much or approving comments, I am going to spend some time at home.

About a month ago I posted that IE 7 was at 16% of IE users that access the UW home page (around 65 000 visitors a day). It is now up to 23.16%. It looks like the jump in IE 7 usage is following a pretty good trend. Starting next week, managed Windows systems will be updated to run IE 7 so I am imagine there will be a big spike in usage. I am hoping to see IE 6 drop below the 10% mark in February.

Overall IE (6 and 7) make up 74.25% of the traffic, Firefox at 21.93%, and Safari at 2.11%. The others are all under 1% (less than 2% combined).

Web Directions North is probably the best web conference in Canada for 2007 (wish it wasn’t all the way out in Vancouver) and it is now offering a deal for students. There are about 30 seats available for $195 (CDN) which is about $600 off. That might take care of the price of a flight from this side of Canada to the west coast ;)

If you are graduating this year and are looking at the web world for a job, the contacts you can make at this conference would certainly be helpful.

I wish they had edu pricing… and it was closer.

Tonight marks the start of a pilot project here at the University of Waterloo that will explore the feasibility of replacing land lines in Residence with mobile phones. There are, of course, a lot of other things we hope to learn from the project but what this first part needs to figure out is how:

• How useful are mobile phones really?
• How much will it cost (support, monthly service plans, device costs)?
• What is the coverage like on campus, in buildings, etc?

For this first pilot, we have around 50 students (half first year, half upper year) that live in residence. They get either a Blackberry Pearl or a Nokia E62 and are asked to use it as their primary device. There are a number of surveys to collect some data on how they use the devices as well as some group discussions planned.

The UW home page now redirects mobile devices to a customized version that is a lot lighter than the current home page you get on your computer. It has all the elements of the home page but in chunks.

This is part of a larger initiative being led by Housing and Residences to explore the use of leading edge (for Canada) technology in the living and learning spaces here at UW. I am really happy to be a part of the project team but more on the project later… I am really excited about this project and what it could lead to.

The reliable server that this site, the Daily Bulletin, the search off the home page, and UW Events (to name a few) runs on has been less than reliable lately. Not sure what is going on but I know the folks in IST are looking into it (even on a Sunday night). My apologies for any difficulties this may cause…

The Eduweb Buzz blog has only just recently appeared as a project started by Shelley Wetzel who runs the edu web conference that takes place in Baltimore every year. Every month it will have a new guest blogger that will look at issues relating to web development in education. For January the guest blogger is me! Go check out my first post on semantic web in 2007 and check out some of the earlier posts.

The first of January always seems to require a post or two about the past year and what to expect in the upcoming one. So here is mine ;) Looking at my post from last January I kept my predictions and goals pretty simple.

I can’t say I actually met all those goals – organizing myself better is something I still need to do – but CPA’s content is coming around, podcasts are finally starting to appear across campus (Faculty of Arts will have 7 profs podcasting in the Winter 2007 term), and the search has been improved. On December 22nd some new code appeared behind the home page, code that would allow for an elastic width or a zoom layout, and mobile version is a work in progress.

• Mobile phones will start to be used for more than just phoning people in Canada. Even with the poor state of data services in North America I think we will see larger demand for mobile friendly web services (but not all content, just for specific tasks).
• Ajax will develop into something more commonly accessible although I do think the adaptive technology developers need to do their thing as well. Adobe could have done something cool with Spry like make a really cool Flash/JavaScript hybrid framework—but they haven’t. I still think Flash could be part of the solution for accessible Ajax-like apps, just not sure how.

• Learn as much as I can about Ruby on Rails
• Make UW Events a top notch event system that integrates nicely with popular API’s and Oracle Calendar (used by staff on campus)
• Customizable UW home page
• Make Kiwi a simple and effective single sign-on tool for web apps
• …finish my Masters, think about more grad work

Simple enough? We shall see. Looking forward to the next year, I am sure it will be one heck of an interesting one.

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?

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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…
6. 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.

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…

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…

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.

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…

Over the past week and a bit I have been using a Blackberry Pearl for web and email. My main reason for trying this out was to get a better idea of what the ‘web experience’ is like on the small screen. If you want a review of the Pearl there are a few of themaround and all agree the device is pretty good. I am just going to talk about my web browsing experience with the Pearl.

Once I got use to the keyboard, installed some software like the gmail client and Google maps, I started to have a lot of fun with it. The Pearl comes with RIM’s own new version Blackberry browser that supports HTML and some hand-held CSS. It seems to allow for some javascript and cookies which is handy for sites that have authentication based on that. Like any browser for mobile phones it scales images oddly. Overall the browser works ok but the poor hand-held CSS support makes most websites a pain to use and it can be hard for CSS/HTML developers to design for them unless they have a mobile version that changes the html.

Where it gets interesting is with some of the push services that you can build for the browser. The Weather Network has my favourite so far—it simply just gives me the 5 day forecast. But it does it in a really nicely designed way for the small screen (really should have a screen shot). I think this feature is cool but it appears to require a Blackberry Enterprise Server to deliver it and… which isn’t good for most web folks but if you are in a Blackberry shop, it is a really cool option for delivering content to your co-workers.

I installed Opera Mini 3.0 on the Pearl as well. This browser has some interesting features like RSS support and good hand-held CSS support. It does make it possible for sites that support CSS/HTML to easily modify its design for the browser with a content folding technique that offers help to the user.

Because Opera Mini can run just about any phone made after 2001 it might be the hand-held browser to develop for.

Overall though the browsing experience isn’t very good which isn’t the fault of the Pearl at all. In fact its better than I have seen on a Windows Mobile environment, it is just that the bar is set pretty low. But what are you trying to do with device? For news, updates, and messages the Pearl (as with most modern mobile devices) is just amazing in a purely text environment. However, when developing for users of devices like these there are a number of challenges I think but the biggest is figuring how mobile device users interact with your content as it can be very different across devices.

My approach at the moment is to take the lead from Flickr and give mobile devices the basic content of the site and some functionality. In reality people will likely not be filling out large forms on the things so keeping any forms to no more than two screens worth is probably not a bad idea either. I am working on a mobile device friendly home page and version of UW Events… I will let you know when there is something to look at.

One thing for sure: Standards friendly code will help you, so might things like Microformats, as it gives you a solid base to parse from. Like with any site that pulls content from other sources, you may want to create a PHP script on an otherwise static site that will create a mobile friendly version on the fly. I should have an example of that soon

This is pretty cool, according to the IE blog Microsoft is offering up a time limited VPC image of Windows XP, IE 6, and IE 7 readiness kit (you don’t need to buy another Windows license). This should really help out all those web developers faced with the problem of developing/testing on IE 6 and 7 properly (cost of Virtual PC plus another XP license). They also mention they are looking at offering up images for other versions of IE. This is a nice move on Microsoft’s part. Check out the post on the IE blog site for links and such… if you have no idea what Virtual PC is, now is a good time to get to know it ;)

A short note: Drew McLellan has been hard at work all year dreaming up articles for 24ways. The opening article looks at a very cool text trimmer that add a little magic to a content heavy web page. This site is a great resource all year even though it is only active for the 24 days leading up to Christmas ;) Worth adding to your feed reader.

It feels like MAX was two weeks ago, not a month. December is coming quick and there is far too much to do… two big time wasters for me at the moment are Twitter and the Blackberry Pearl. Used in combination with Google Talk and productivity comes to a crawl. A post will come later on the Pearl. The first impression of its web browser makes this web person shake his head—why can’t a good browsing experience come to really good handhelds?

• a UW home page update that will offer a lot more links and content for people (due Jan 2nd 2007)
• a total take down of the 50th site and some polish for the launch
• personal profiles and calendars in UW events along with some bug fixes (out in two weeks)
• BarCampWaterloo
• WatITis presentation: UW on Rails
• Something else… something cool ;)

Lets see how much of this I get done in a month… I should just leave Thunderbird off for the month.

The whole IE 7 thing has been pretty entertaining thus far. You have IT folks everywhere hyper-ventilating over a browser update that will eventually help out web standards and you have web developers (myself included) being caught in tough spots because they failed to really test IE 7 while it was in beta. My mistake was ignoring the influence of a conditional comment on printing (placing a ‘gte’ in it seems to do the trick) but other than that UW pages should be fine if you don’t have anything above your DOCTYPE and you didn’t create more conditional comments with IE specific CSS.

Roger Johansson has summed up nicely the three top reasons sites break in IE 7. I think that covers 99% of the problems. The lessons learned with IE 7 is that having a CSS/HTML site is great but if you cut corners and worked towards IE 6 in quirks mode you are likely going to pay a hefty price when an IE 7 user views your site. If you having problems with IE 7 on your site, take a look at Roger’s post. The discussion that follows on his site should be helpful as well.

Update: Wake up and smell the IE7! – Vitamin feature

Thanks to the efforts of Simon Woodside we have a location and date for the next BarCampWaterloo – Tuesday December 5th at 5:30pm in the Accelerator Centre. This BarCamp will follow more of a DemoCamp format so come prepared to demo your software/web/tech project and leave the slides at home. It is open to everyone (you don’t have to be a Waterloo student), just be sure to sign up on the wiki. This is the evening before the campus IT conference, WatITis, but it isn’t connected. I think attendees of WatITis might enjoy BarCampWaterloo ;)

Either Sasha or I will demo the new features that will be built into UW Events and I hope to get a lot of really good feedback from everyone there.

Given the IE 7 mention in the Daily Bulletin today and a message I got from John Jaray in the Computer Store that Apple sales are up 69% this year over last, I thought maybe some numbers on what we have seen on the home page might be timely to give web folks. I am currently using Google Analytics on the UW home page to get these numbers and can compare with numbers from a two week long period last year in November of 640 000 users in 2005 to 682 000 for 2006 so far this month this year.

Sorry for the lack of pretty graphs. What to note in this is that:

• Firefox has increased 5% in the last year to 21% nearly (without a campus roll out),
• IE 7 is close to 6% of our IE user base
• Mac/Apple machines have increased from 2% to 4% of the user base over last year
• 800×600 use is under 4% (yet we still design for it)

With the number of users on the home page, 1% is a lot of people.

Once we get a full month of Analytics data (it was off for a year), I will post it in web.uwaterloo.ca for people to have a look. For now, here is what I have to compare…

Browsers Last year (Nov 05):

• IE – 80.1% (of that, 99.13% IE 6, 0.33% IE 5.5)
• Firefox – 15.89% (of that, 1.0.x approx 99%)
• Safari – 1.51%
• Netscape – 1.34%
• Others – under 1% (Mozilla, Opera, etc)

Platforms last year (Nov 05):

• Windows – 96.72%
• Mac/Apple – 2.32%
• Linux – 0.62%
• SunOS – 0.33%

Resolution (Nov 05):

• 800×600 or below – 6.36%
• 1024×768 – 59.27%
• 1280×1024 – 12.65%
• Others are above 1280×1024

For this year the test size for November is similar so far, 682K:

Browsers this year (Nov 06):

• IE – 75.90% (of that, 93.83% IE 6, 5.90% IE 7, 0.09% IE 5.5)
• Firefox – 20.73% (of that, 1.5.x 74%, 2.0 is 13%, and 1.0.x is approx. 13%)
• Safari – 1.93%
• Netscape – 0.71%
• Others – less than 1% (Mozilla, Opera, etc)

Platforms for this year (Nov 06):

• Windows – 94.92%
• Mac/Apple – 4.28%
• Linux – 0.61%
• SunOS – 0.16%

Resolution (Nov 06):

• 800×600 or below – 3.57%
• 1024×768 – 47.78%
• 1280×800/1024 – 32%
• Others are above 1280×1024

That is a lot stats ;)

Sasha (the Co-op) is slugging it out with the UW Events Ruby code, trying to create some new features for the folks on campus. What are those features? Well some are things Mitch and I considered while Version 1.0 was in the works, other things I think might be useful in the future, but generally they are features I hope the UW community will find useful (as well as others once the project goes to RubyForge).

Essentially we are going to allow public personal calendars that will be in both hCal and iCal (and import iCal) and have notifications/alerts by email and SMS. This means we have to extend our personal profile page and functionality without changing the core code of the system—something that seems relatively easy with Ruby on Rails. We will have to build a better profile for people as well so it can include custom data, not just what we get from UWdir. Not sure if that belongs in Kiwi or in the UW events app. Kiwi has a single job to do and it does it well, not sure I want it to be a profile system.

We are thinking about integrating the upcoming.org API and the Facebook API but we shall see how that goes. If you have any requests, make them now ;)

I have little choice but to turn comment moderation on given the onslaught of SPAM. Sorry about that, not a fan of moderating comments (especially when textpattern doesn’t notify me of new comments) but I have to otherwise there would be a lot of pr0n links in the comments.

… maybe SPAM is how you know your blog is mildly popular ;)

While poking around UW Events today I stumbled on a presentation/tutorial that is in the Flex lab tomorrow, presented by the Library, called Applying Social Web Tools to Your Research. It is great to see a seminar like that on campus and I hope it is well attended.

I know there are issues with the tools out there, especially Wikipedia, when it comes to research and academics. I experience it first hand with my grad work. From a total ban on Wikipedia by some profs to acceptance and encouragement by others, the web is just a tool where the same research rules apply. Wikipedia alone is not a good enough source (gasp) unless you are having silly arguments around the coffee shop. Other social networking and Web 2.0-esque tools are great for managing your online research, Backpackit has been essential in my renewed academic life.

The Library is the long standing home of research, it makes sense that they are reaching out and teaching people how to use this new media in research and academic life. I am going to try and make it… really curious to see the interest in such things around here ;)

I was far too sleepy when Apollo was introduced at MAX to really grasp what they were showing me. It looked cool but I heard ‘webkit’ and I thought web browser. Then I noticed the TUAW coverage of Apollo and realized how wrong I was. But now I am left wondering a few things like what is the difference between the web browser as the platform and Apollo?

According the FAQ:

What is Apollo?

Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to the desktop.

This really does beg the question: why? If you keep reading the FAQ you come across this…

Is Apollo a web browser?

No. Apollo is a cross-operating system runtime that runs outside of the browser.

Theoretically you could build a web browser on top of Apollo.

So the skeptic in me says that is what a web browser does. If gives developers a cross platform environment to deploy Rich Internet Applications (RIA). Although a web browser doesn’t give you the ability to package itself up and send it to someone and just work. But is that expecting a decent size change in people’s web browser centric thinking? I think so. There are advantages with regards to offline use an CD-ROM or Kiosk applications which I am guessing is a decent size audience (thinking distance education, part-time students, etc at UW). It could even enable you to create a custom podcast/vodcast reader for your school and thus take care of copyright/security concerns, just distribute it in house and autheticate with your internal system to install.

The talk at MAX was that Apollo would change a lot of things on the web, and it might if people create a web browser on top of it, but it really is just another tool you can try and use. Will people use it? Time will tell I guess. I think it is cool but like Flex I just don’t see a practical application in my everyday web work. Web apps can do the same thing, just not in as cool a way. I wonder if I will change my mind in the next few months?

Well after last night’s party at the Palms I was shocked that anyone made it to the sneak peak this morning… that is dedication indeed. The highlight of day 3 was the sneak peaks that was nicely live blogged by Jen de Haan. Besides that there were sessions and a lot of smirks and nods as everyone bonded over the Palms. You can see in the MAX 2006 Flickr group that a lot of fun is had at MAX… mixing learning with fun is always a good thing.

I did finally meet Mike Potter who promises that Adobe is going to focus a little more attention to Waterloo. There is a Flex demo on campus next week.

I will need to think a bit more about this years MAX before I write a summary. It was a bit odd for a MAX, Adobe certainly did some things differently (like where is the schwag?)… Overall though I finally got to meet some people that I have missed over the years and putting faces to email is always a good thing. I do think that the stuff we saw this year at MAX will change the web and make a lot of people happy—like how last years progressive downloading in Flash 8 for video enabled Youtube’s much loved simplicity.

An evening of rest and then a day of travel tomorrow. Should have a summary next week sometime ;)

So far MAX 2006 has been pretty much what you would have expected from the new Adobe. Although yesterday the introduction of Apollo was pretty darn impressive as are some of the implications. What is Apollo you ask? I am still not sure. It seems like the kitchen sink of rich internet applications but time will tell. Keynote day one coverage and keynote day two coverage is better than anything I could type ;)

What am I getting from MAX? Well Flash, mobile phones, and video are the source of a lot of really cool ideas. This morning’s keynote was all about making money creating Flash Mobile 2.1 applications for cell phones. I can see how, but it must be hard for developers to build and test their applications in the phones common in Europe and Asia but not so much here. George Fox brought my attention to the new mobile section of DevNet, it is worth a look if you want to know more. I am sure Flash mobile development would be dead easy for some students around here.

AJAX has been another hot topic as well with the Dreamweaver team being asked about it at the birds of a feather last night and again today at a presentation on Spry. They used this persona of a front end developer that looks interesting and probably true a year ago but I think front end developers know a lot more about JavaScript and AJAX then they assume now. I could be wrong… anyway, the Spry demo was cool.

Scott mentions a few things about tomorrow’s keynote but what I like most of all is that Flex 2 for OS X is available. If I had time to play with it, that would be nice but it’s off to another session for me!

Just about packed and ready to go. I will arrive in Las Vegas at around 10:30pm local time. This will be my third MAX in a row and my expectations are pretty high this year. With the merger in the past I am really interested to see what tools and tricks the software teams have up their sleaves. Given I work in an office that does both print and web publications/applications (natural fit really) I really would like to see how the print friendly Adobe stuff is going to work with the web focused Macromedia stuff. Hopefully I will leave MAX with a good idea of what CS3 might mean for my office.

Sure professional development is great and that is 99% of the reason why I am going, but there is something I should keep in mind while I am there. I go there as staff member of University of Waterloo which means I go there ready to introduce people to our campus every chance I get. Why? Well who knows who might be looking for a Co-op student to work for them or a place they could sponsor some research. Maybe run into an Alumni or two. Its not like I am going there to sell anything to make those relationships (it isn’t my job now is it?) but I will talk up the campus any chance I get that is appropriate.

Every time someone from UW (student, staff, faculty) goes someplace they leave an impression on people as to what UW is like. UW and the region is a great place full of great people. That is something that is on my mind as I get on a plane for what promises to be a great week in the desert ;)

No more RC status, IE 7 appears to be out and ready to go. The release notes have a bit of information for those that were testing it or looking to see what happens when you upgrade. Check out the post on the IE team blog as well. Not sure when it hits the Windows update and I am not booting over to Windows to find out ;)

This is good for the CSS/HTML folks although I imagine a lot of headaches testing as the switchover goes on. UW pages have a print issue with conditional comments hiding a call for CSS because IE 5.5 was picking up the print CSS. I honestly can’t remember the exact problem but it was two years ago… The fix is simple, remove the conditional comment and make that your standard print.css call.

RC 1 of IE 7 was in fact the warning shot across the web development community. IE 7 is coming soon and it will be almost everywhere before Christmas. The IE Blog has more details but it still makes me shake my head… Why must the web be ready for IE 7? Is IE 7 ready for the web? Do they care?

On a positive note, IE 7 should make a lot of things easier with web development… especially with CSS. I think it will take about 6-8 months before IE 6 drops to IE 5.5 numbers as most organizations (UW included) will not update IE for several months.

Check your pages and make yourself familiar with Virtual PC or VMWare, etc. You will need to have IE 6 around and running in XP for a while I am afraid ;)

It is now just over a week until I head down to Las Vegas for Adobe MAX.Last year in LA was just amazing, Adobe was about to take over Macromedia and everyone was speculating what that would mean for the community and the technology. There were a lot of great presentations and conversations (lots of talk about AJAX vs Flash) but the whole thing was overshadowed by the merger. Now this year the merger seems like ancient history… what will be the buzz of MAX 06?

I am guessing I will hear a lot about Spry, Flex, and Flash. The purchase of YouTube by Google will likely be mentioned as a huge win for Flash video. To me, Google has just given 1.65 billion reasons that Flash video is here to say. I am also planning on attending MiniMAX on the Sunday night which has both Tom Green and Scott Fegette talking about Flash video and such.

What I really want to look into, now more than ever, is mobile technology solutions. I probably won’t be able to talk about it much until January but I am involved in a project that makes mobile technology more important to me now ;) It is in the early stages but once a pilot is underway I will post more about that – its not me being secretive either, its just I have no idea where this project is going so its best to say very little about it but just so students around know we are trying to do cool things with technology.

I hope to learn lots, meet some interesting people, and refine some ideas while at MAX. At the very least I get to go to Vegas for my first time!

Contribute 4 has appeared on the Adobe site today with a couple of articles in the developer center. There are some pretty cool blogging features added that appear to work fine in the most common blogging software (I can’t get it to work all that well in Textpattern) and on Windows. Mac users you will not be happy to hear this is not a universal application and it feels kinda clunky compared to Contribute 3. The MS Office integration features don’t work for Mac users either but its not all bad news…

If you haven’t used Contribute before and you are on Windows, you will like version 4. Especially the publish from MS Word for Windows folks. The blogging features are pretty cool and offer an interesting opportunity outside of just blogging – you could create a XML-RPC link to your database driven content and maybe edit like a blog (haven’t tried as yet). CT3 users might like that a lot as well as the one major feature missing is the ability to edit content stored in a database.

There is a Firefox extension as well but be careful if you have Firefox 2 installed. I haven’t been able to get the extension to work on the lastest Firefox (like many other extensions until recently). The extension installs with Contribute 4 and it goes straight to the latest Firefox version you have. Re-installing it is a pain and I still can’t get it to install of FF 1.5 on OS X.

For the Contribute 3 user that wasn’t longing for better MS Office integration or blogging, you may be left scratching your head. There are some slight improvements for CSS and how it handles includes but overall the focus of this version appears to be blogging. No update for CPS has appeared either. I am still not sure one way or the other with Contribute 4 if it is worth the upgrade. I really loved Contribute 3 when it came out and I was excited for version 4. Perhaps I have yet to find that feature that will make me need version 4…. but I bet those office integration features will be enough for a lot of people to upgrade.

The University of Colorado at Denver and Health Science Center (heck of a name) has a nice little AJAXcourse management system that doesn’t yet plug into their main system but is designed to help make course registration easier. The basic functions do work if you have JavaScript off but you can’t save your work or use advanced functions. Fair enough. The list of browsers in the help might be a bit optimistic (IE 3.x?).

This is a pretty cool application for higher education though… probably the most relied upon application outside of course environments is setting up courses and I would be most schools systems are crude at best. This example of how it could be done is worth a peak – especially considering its not hidden behind a password ;) Any other schools have something similar?

With around 30 people present, just over 20 staying until the end even though we ran out of donuts half way through, I think the first BarCampWaterloo was a success. We had 10 presentations covering modifying 2 old IBM keyboards so you could have one for each hand, ASP.NET AJAX, getting programmers to write good documentation, WebStaffRoom demo, Web 2.0 marketting on the cheap, UWhub.ca demo, persudo.com demo, and more.

Oddly I think the keyboard one was my favorite… it certainly started the evening off on the right foot. Big thank-you to CECS for the space and Applied Vision for the snacks. At the end of the evening it was decided there will be another BarCampWaterloo this term, likely a Tuesday night from 5-10pm, and near the end of November. Then I think the plan is to try for one a term. The wiki will be updated when the space is found.

Looking forward to the next one…

Waterloo’s first BarCampWaterloo is today in the Tathum Centre at 2pm. With 23 people signed up I don’t think that is a bad number for a Friday with so much else going on this weekend. The plan for the afternoon is simple, come enjoy some coffee and tim bits, and talk about web technology.

The big things on campus this weekend, UW Expo and Homecoming is tomorrow. The speaker total this weekend includes:

UW Expo:

• Denise Donlon, Founder of Much More Music and former President of Sony Music Canada.
• George Roter and Parker Mitchell, Co-Founders and Co-CEOs of Engineers Without Borders
• Larry Smith, UW Economics Professor and Recipient of the Distinguished Teacher Award

Homecoming has the best speaker (I think):

• Steven Lewis – The politician, broadcaster and diplomat is a Companion of the Order of Canada and in 2005 was named by TIME magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world (along with The Dalai Lama, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, and Nelson Mandela). Stephen will speak about global issues and engage in a question and answer session with the audience.

Plus today starts Entrepreneur week. With a ton of other events going on… Think there is lots to do in the Waterloo Region?

Looks like Adobe is looking for a UW student to fill the role of Adobe Ambassador. It sounds like a similar role as the old Macromedia User Group organizers. I don’t think there was ever a MMUG (now Adobe User Group) in Waterloo, actually there are very few in Canada. If you are interested go check out the blog link and the contact information is at the bottom of the page. If you end up with the position, drop me an email ;)

I know other companies offer something similar to students… Pretty sure this is the first time Adobe has done it here.

It’s the last day to apply for jobs for the first round of the co-op process here at University of Waterloo and the web developer job in my office for next term is posted under #00046532. For those off campus readers, the Co-op Education system at Waterloo is one of the biggest and best in the world. Check out the Co-op site for more information.

For you co-op students: if you didn’t find the job posted, apply before the deadline for this round (tonight)! Next term should be fun too. Waterloo will be celebrating its 50th year and CPA has a redo of the UW home page to launch, a 50th site to maintain and launch, a bunch of apps to tweak, some stuff related to mobile technology, podcasting, and more.

It’s funny, I have been loosing that standards preaching feeling lately. It just seems like more people nod your heads when you mention standards. Should I feel like the Web Standards War (is it a war? I suppose you could call it that) is over since IE 7 is just catching up to Firefox and CSS seems to be everywhere? Do Web Standards still matter? Of course web standards still matter according to Roger Johansson in an article over on Vitamin. Roger Johansson makes a mention on his blog as well, you can follow the thread ;) Robert Nyman makes the point that the war is far from over – developers get it, well they might know the W3 exists, but do they really get why?

I must admit that I don’t get all the ins and outs of the XHTML vs HTML debate (and I really don’t care that much) but I do know that having valid code makes life so much easier. It is when you start using non-standard hacks is when you get into trouble. Same goes for coding and best practices (maybe not a W3 standard but certainly important). I am not a PHP guy by any stretch but if you follow best practices the code is nice for the next Co-op/Web Developer that comes along. This term Sasha has pretty much picked up where Mitch left off… That hasn’t happened that smoothly before.

When I think best practices and then look at something like Spry just coming out (or other AJAX frameworks for that matter) that appear to pretty much ignore best practices in order to make it easy for people to use, I realize web standards and best practices have a long way to go. Take the fact you can’t use Spry if you have to meet accessibility requirements – who thinks they shouldn’t make an effort to make their site accessble? Sure Microsoft, Adobe, and others have moved towards web standards with some stuff but the push of AJAX highlights the issue that people forget standards when it suits them…

I suppose its best to keep teaching myself more about web standards and best practices… and share ;)

Penn state’s iTunes site is the best resource on podcasting in higher education that I have seen yet. Of course I haven’t looked at of them ;) but still it is pretty cool. They have a nice blog set up for podcasts which offers a nice public space to catch podcasts (similar to our quitely released blogs and podcasts) and find information on how to podcast. They even offer an Introduction to the World of Podcasting for those still not sure what it is all about. Only downside is that iTunes U version is off limits to non-PSU folks, but ah well.

I know University of Calgary is working on a pilot, UW is considering one, UBC as well? Must go dig around some more.

Just about 3 weeks until BarCampWaterloo and it is about time to do a little more planning. First off we have a logo thanks to Mitch, the tractor is a nice touch, I have added the button to my site so people can check it out. We already have a location (Tathum Centure thanks CECS) and a sponsor for refreshments (thanks Applied Vision), now we need some more people to sign up!

If you are wondering what the heck a BarCamp is, you are best checking the web site. After going to BarCampToronto I have my own ideas but I get the feeling everyone is slightly different. Basically it is an attendee driven event with presentations and socializing. The theme is Internet technology but you can present on just about anything remotely related. The plan for the Waterloo version is to keep it short (2-7pm for presentations and such) and hopefully grow the idea on campus and for the wider Waterloo community.

Presentations can be about the latest web application your created, working with other media, insights from your co-op experience at a high tech company, your small business, etc.

This will be my last call for anyone who is interested in helping with organization. I want to do a little walk through of the space in the Tathum Centre next week and get a few things organized. If I have help great. Also if anyone else would like to sponsor this please let me know.

Well for all you Dreamweaver extension fans out there, Adobe went and bought one of the best companies making them… Interakt. Interakt has been working on some really interesting things with regards to AJAX development in Dreamweaver but the FAQ the AJAX extension has been discontinued so maybe they get to work on Spry? Wonder if Spry just got a boost from this? This should be interesting for Dreamweaver.

Not to sure what to think about it but a big congrats to Alexandru,Bogdin, and company ;)

Well September is here, nearly 6000 new faces on campus, and it is time to look back at what has been a really productive summer. The theme of this summer was Ruby on Rails, which has proven itself to be a very nice development environment that I hope to learn a lot more about. A new UW Events, conference site and authetication system are the already known things that have been built with Ruby on Rails but there are a couple of others that get there first mention here. A little PHP was improved as well. An improved feedback form and search application is out there now. Mitch Hargreaves was the lucky co-op student who had the position of Web Developer here in CPA and I think he did a pretty good job and deserves much of the credit for this stuff.

I will go over three big projects this summer: Blogs and Podcasts, UW Events, and Kiwi.

Blogs and Podcasts

Lets start with the new application: Blogs and Podcasts at Waterloo. This application is a fairly simple agregator that offers UW students, staff, and faculty a place to subscribe their blogs. It offers one large feed of all the blogs so you don’t have to subscribe to each on your own. To subscribe your feed you will need a UW Dir ID and password but this also means your stuff is associated with you at UW so if you are prone to rant please don’t subscribe your blog. You could create a UW topic in your blog though and subscribe the feed for that so you know what goes there and it is sort of ‘safe for work.’ You can also subscribe a podcast or vodcast feed.

UW Events

This application needs a whole lot more documention so I will just summarize:

• supports iCal and hCal
• there are streams you can subscribe to for different categories or pull into your website, if you think one should be added just email me
• people can be named admins for streams, so in the case of a Feds club they could control their own stream—but it doesn’t mean you can approve for the main UW events stream, just your own stream
• need UWdir to submit stuff

I think that is the highlights. I will be writting more detail documentation over the next couple of weeks.

Kiwi authetication

You have seen it with the Power of IDEAS conference and in UW Events. We now have a key generator for those that want to use it but keep in mind all it does is secure the authetication. If you have content transactions in your site that require confidentiality you need to have a SSL for the entire application (which means https). If all you want to do is make sure the login is secure, kiwi is for you.

Kiwi’s documentation is ugly but tells the story, check it out. The general gist is that your application controls which ID’s can access your site, all kiwi does is autheticate them with UWdir securely so you don’t have to take care of that. It also has a Wordpress plug-in so you can autheticate with UWdir in Wordpress but not through XML-RPC as yet, just the normal way. There is some potential here that you can have one sign on and lots of access as long as your cookie is good an active. Look for it maybe make its way to a customized home page for 2007.

Fall term and such

I will update the documentation on the search and have a post about that as well as the feedback form, some improvements for the 50th site, and some other little things. Overall this term has been crazy. It has been anything but a lazy summer but I hope you folks find some of the stuff useful.

Sasha Papo will be the web developer for the Fall and he starts on Wednesday. Should be another good term but I hope to pull back a bit and take care of bugs that will surely arise in the stuff we have. We are going to work on an update for the home page for the 50th anniversary, the 50th anniversary site itself, and some other things here and there. Sasha gets to pick a project as well so who knows ;)

Oh, and the job for winter term will be posted in the first round this time…

On Digital Web and Vitamin John Allsopp has written The Big Picture on Microformats and Add microformats magic to your site. If you have been wondering what the heck I have been talking about when I looking at Microformats in education then this might help. So far I have stuck hCard on the footer of the UW home page, had Mitch ensure UW Events supports hCal and even had him stick some hCard into the people search results on the search off the home page.

For those Dreamweaver users out there, after you have read John’s articles and you want to check this out, a great way to do that is just go and grab Drew’s extension for Dreamweaver and create a couple simple things. Look at the code.

I am just taking a look at how maintaining Microformats will work for Dreamweaver users that support Contribute folks. I have a feeling the extra classes to wreak some havoc but there may be a simple way to manage and even enhance it. If not I would like to know and hopefully find some workarounds.

Internet Explorer 7 has reached release candidate status which I think means it is pretty much done beyond any show stoppers that might appear. You really should have a copy of the latest build and you really should be testing because they will be forcing it on IE 6 users as a high priority update so it will likely have a large user base relatively quickly.

The IE team was nice enough to give everyone a list of things fixed, things yet to fix, and what isn’t fixed. Dave Shea points out that it is only a matter of time until we start to see the new bugs appearing and I imagine it is probably best you get testing your stuff in it now otherwise you could have some late nights ahead of you in the near future. He has a good point, get testing and document the quirks you see.

As far as UW goes, I have had a poke around with the latest IE 7 and I don’t see anything major or even minor. There were some reports of printing issues with the last beta of IE 7 but I can print any UW page just fine on Windows XP SP2 and IE 7 RC1. If you see anything though please let me know (a comment on this thread works).

Personally I hope IE 7 rids us of IE 6 much faster that IE 6 has removed IE 5.5. Maybe I speak too soon but IE 7 will make web folks jobs a lot easier…

Brown University has introduced a new public beta site to the world that is certain to cause a lot of discussion amongst the edu and even the design community. What is so bold about it is that it steps away from the traditional web site design into something more interactive and minimalist. For higher education there are few sites that try this (maybe because of the large amount of committee oversight) but those that do are often compared with MIT’s homepage whether they like it or not.

It uses javascript to establish an automatic accordion response on mouseover, which could be problematic for some if they aren’t expecting it or have fine motor control issues. It also has a dark background, light text (some people don’t like that very much) which does focus on brown oddly enough.

I like it. They use some elements I have thought about for UW’s 50th refit and I really like the darker background. Given UW’s colours of black and gold I am a little inspired by companies like Lightmaker to give it a try. We did have black background sites about 5 years ago here… they looked good too. Just way too many graphics and spinning logos.

Anyway, have a look at Brown’s test site and let me know what you think…

After a little thought about dates and talking with CECS, I can now say that BarCampWaterloo is a go for September 29th! We have a location now all I need is a few people to help out and maybe someone to donate some food budget (people that have food are always much happier). Oh and we need people to sign-up. Check out the site if you want to know more about what a BarCamp is and sign-up. Given that this will actually be my first BarCamp some experienced help would be greatly appreciated.

This event will be open to everyone in the community (staff, students, faculty, off-campus folks from other schools, alumni, etc). I know I talked about one the end of this month but that really isn’t a good idea given that this place is a ghost town that time of year. I will certainly post some more information once it is available…

Around 140 people attended 18 different sessions that focused on technology and inclusiveness. Topics ranged from designing learning spaces to web technology to mobile devices. Derek Featherstone opened up the day with a great keynote (last minute sub for Joe Clark who had to cancel on account of illness) which I think left everyone with loads to think about for the day. There were students, staff, and faculty in attendance as well as a good number of off campus visitors.

I presented with Antonia Palmer (formerly of LT3 soon to be in Distance Education) on adopting new web technologies with an accessible mind. Our presentation notes are available in the usual place for my presentations.

All the presentations were recorded so both audio and video will be available but it will probably be a couple weeks before they are all online. I will post more when they are ready.

Some Django based projects are starting to come to life in some higher education web spaces. Carthage College has a blog about their experiences learning and deploying a Django-powered content management system and Greenfield Community College has let it be known they have started the RISE Project for a course catelog system.

The nice thing about the RISE project is that it will be on sourceforge although there doesn’t appear to be much at the moment. This project is probably something that is desperately needed as course calendars are argueably the most tricky yet most relied upon parts of a edu’s web space.

Shall keep an eye on this project for sure… hopefully more information will appear in the coming weeks.

In about two weeks the area web folks will have the oppertunity to see Joe Clark along with a whole host of other great presenters (Derek Featherstone – UW Alumni – for one) at the Power of IDEAS conference here at UW. For on-campus people it is a free event but please register. For off-campus there is a very small $50 charge that will get you a great lunch and access to all the presentations during the day. From the site:

On August 15th, discover The Power of IDEAS at the University of Waterloo, a conference that explores how Innovative Design and Delivery Engenders Access and Academic Success.

New technologies and alternative strategies can enhance teaching and learning. This conference will provide an environment for:

• exchanging ideas in key areas of research,
• teaching methodologies,
• learning strategies and
• applications of technology.

Sessions include topics based on sound pedagogy, factors that affect performance outcomes for persons with disabilities, meta-cognitive learning styles, and technology applications that promote learning outcomes for all. Vendor exhibits will provide opportunities for viewing adaptive hardware and software designed to invigorate the senses and enhance learning, teaching, and research.

CNET has a nice warningarticle on how IE 7 will be pushed to users via Windows Update. It was reported on Slashdot where you can find the typical insightful conversation about it (a little bit of scarcasm, yes). What this essentially means is that you should probably start to think about getting those hacks out of your CSS and learn a bit about conditional comments. You also might want to read up on the known issues with CSS and IE 7 on the CSS discuss wiki. I would assume the CSS tweaks are pretty much done but if you want to hold out until the end it is still worth your time to identify potential problems and workarounds.

For UW sites there doesn’t appear to many CSS issues beyond printing. Not sure if anyone will be effected by other changes but it is worth you getting your hands on IE 7 to find out. Hopefully I can look at that in August although I would prefer to see a near final beta to be sure it is worth my time.

Update: I left out a buzz post discussing the end of IE 6—which points out that the automatic update is a good thing although it likely won’t mean the death of IE 6.

Just in case any of those UW web folks are working on blogging this summer… Mitch has created a plug-in for WordPress that allows it to autheticate users against our Kiwi application which means you can autheticate users with UWdir and not need to manage a whole set of passwords somewhere else.

Does that mean I am switching to WordPress? No. It means we have yet another cool use for Kiwi that is helping it prove itself as a really cool potential service. If you are working with WordPress on campus and want to know more about it, send me an email. We will document it soon.

Gone fishing

Originally uploaded by jrodgers.

The Daily Bulletin’s RSS feed should settle down as we stop messing with some automatiion of posting and the UW search app should be on to version 3 in a week or so. I will post from time to time but I thought it’s worth posting something about how it is summer time ;)

Oh and there will be a drop in web clinic on July 26nd. Come by the flex lab and we can chat CLF, CSS, Microformats, or whatever tickles your web fancy:

• Date: Wednesday, July 26th
• Time: 9am-noon (anytime)
• Where: Dana Porter Library 329 (LT3’s FLEX Lab)
• RSVP: by Monday, July 24th via this registration form

Have a good summer!

In my sleep deprived state an idea has been brewing for weeks. It’s not new but it is trendy… does anyone around here think a BarCamp in Waterloo would be well attended? I have been asking around about a venue on campus and trying to feel out folks I know, but what about those I don’t that lurk around this blog. What do you folks think? Topics could cover (because I know people are working on them around here):

• Developing web apps with students for the community
• WordPress, Textpattern, Drupal? I just want a blog… what are you using and why?
• Various projects by students like say Nirbi (created by a student who is working for me this term).

Loads more come to mind. There must be things going in the larger Wate