Andre’s Blog

August 31st, 2006

• Evolution on Win32

  Evolution is an open source email, calendar and contact management client very similar to Outlook. It looks more feature rich than Thunderbird, well at least it has calendaring and get appts from outlook/exchange!

  (tags: exchange microsoft opensource email pim calendar outlook)

• Yahoo! Hack Day Is Coming

  Yahoo’s infamous hackathon now invites outsiders, very interesting. Bill Scott was telling me about this at WebVisions. Nitobi Hack Day coming soon also.

  (tags: developer yahoo camp hack)

• Developer Night in Canada (DNIC)

  Developer Night in Canada (DNIC) is a community Website for highlighting rock star developers and techno-wonks in Canada. Gotta contact these about podcasting together and giving some play on our podcast.

  (tags: podcast canada developers blog community microsoft)

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August 30th, 2006

• Yotophoto | Find free photos… fast!

  Yotophoto is the first internet search engine for finding free-to-use photographs and images.
  Now indexing well over a quarter million Creative Commons, Public Domain, GNU FDL, and various other ‘copyleft’ images.

  I saw a demo and met Mark at BarC

  (tags: images creativecommons cc search free use internet marketing opensource drupal design)

• 10 Tips for Successful Web Design RFPs

  This is good advice, not that I’m really doing that much web design these days it’s still interesting.
  “But if you’ve ever gone outside of your organization to get a Web site done, you know how tough it can be. With the huge range of Web development orga

  (tags: webdesign rfp firm webdev)

• Five Reasons You’ll Use Google Office (And Five Reasons You Won’t)

  Interesting article why or why not for Google Office. I signed up this morning, it looks pretty sweet. Easy to setup. Here’s a reason for not using it that hadn’t crossed my mind yet: Sarbanes-Oxley or other industry regs prevent you from even consider

  (tags: google googleapps googlehosted domain email calendar gtalk im)

• Creating Passionate Users: Why marketing should make the user manuals!

  Discusses the benefits of creating great user documentation and learning material over flashy marketing material and ads. Great article by Kathy Sierra. We’re definitely going to be incorporating this into the documentation and collateral efforst we hav

  (tags: design docs marketing pr programming tips usability ux)

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August 30th, 2006

Andre, Dave and Alexei shoot the breeze about the new Nitobi website, BarCamp Vancouver, online apps like Google Apps.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

August 29th, 2006

• Gmail Shortcuts (printable cheatsheet)

  ev has put together a great one pager on keyboard shortcuts for gmail.

  (tags: google technology tools gmail keyboard navigation usablity)

• Ajax Datagrid for ASP.NET, Classic ASP, PHP, and J2EE Java - Nitobi Grid V3

  Nitobi Ajax Grid

  (tags: ajax grid nitobi)

• WordPress and Del.icio.us

  How to integrate your worpress blog with Delicious. To do a daily posting of your favorites. Delicious doesn’t have good help on this so I found this article quite handy

  (tags: delicious tag tagging wordpress blog integration)

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August 29th, 2006

I thinkby most accounts BarCamp Vancouver was great success! About 120 attendees, dozens of great sessions, a pre-bbq, great location, great coffee, decent wifi, a photo walk, dj and turn tables, break-even, great organizers and 2 kegs of free beer.

Big thanks to all the organizers, Bill and WorkSpace!

I managed to catch a bunch of different sessions, Jason Billingsley of ElasticPath had an interesting talk on SEO and the longtail. I took some kind of random notes here:

• Many want to be number for one”digital camera”
• but there’s a lot of money to be made for “sony 5mp digital slr”
• it’s very hard to become number for digital camera
• if you put together a 4 keyphrase you’re further along the buying process
• dig throough your logs to come up with the long tail list
• keyword generation tool Jason will post this on his blog
• they compete against IBM, MS, Oracle, but they are very slow to move on keywords so they got lucky
• EP has baked alot of this baked into their platform
• CSS vs Tables…CSS is better because:

• spiders get to content quicker
• your keywords are higher in the page
• this creates better content to code ratio

More in Jason’s blog post.

Dave and I talked about Ajax, I showed a bunch of cool demos including dave’s infamous Google maps/Ajax Grid/Excel Mashup. And then dave went off discussing some Advanced topics in JavaScript such as aspect oriented programming and inheritance. If you want Dave’s slide deck (you’re either David Gratton or Brian Leroux) email me;-)

technorati tags:barcamp, barcampvan, barcampvancouver, workspace, ajax, seo, longtail, jasonbillingsley, elasticpath, marketing, workspace, barcampearth

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Posted in Technology, Software Development, AJAX, Web 2.0, Business | 4 Comments »

August 22nd, 2006

[Update] Please add/suggestion sessison here http://barcamp.org/BarcampTopics so people can start to collaborate.

Just a quick note from the BarCamp organizers to pass on some plans and news about the upcoming event. We’re all very psyched to be part of the first BarCamp Vancouver, and hope you are too.

*** If You Can’t Come, Please Remove Your Name From the List ***

There are currently about 12 people on the waitlist. If you can’t make it:

1. Visit http://barcamp.org/BarCampVancouverRegistry and take yourself off
the list.
2. Move the next person from the waitlist on to the list.
3. If they left an email address, send them a quick email letting them know
that they’re in.

A waitlisted person will be very appreciative.

*** BarCamp Costs and T-Shirts ***

Technically speaking, BarCamp Vancouver is free. However, we’ve got plenty of costs to cover (see our budget: http://barcamp.org/BarCampVancouverPlanning), so we’re requesting a donation of $20. Everybody who makes such a donation gets a groovy BarCamp Vancouver t-shirt (you can view a PDF of the design here: http://tinyurl.com/osh68).

We’ve only got 120 t-shirts, so if you’re picky about size, register promptly on Friday night.

*** Schedule ***

The schedule, such as it is, looks like this:

Friday Night, 6:00pm - Registration and Rooftop Barbeque at the Bryght
offices
Friday Night, Later - Camping out at WorkSpace
Saturday, 8:30am - Breakfast
Saturday, 9:00am - Scheduling the day’s sessions
Saturday, 10:00am - Sessions begin
Saturday, 6:00pm - Sessions end

A note on scheduling: We’ve done the math, and we’re pretty sure that all 120 of us won’t be able to present in 8 hours. So, if you’re not so keen on presenting, don’t feel obligated to do so. Try to pitch in in other ways: contribute to discussions, help clean up, ask an organizer if there’s an errand that needs running, and so forth. If you’re sort of keen on presenting, check the list to see if there’s somebody you can co-present with.
There may be some preliminary scheduling on Friday night, but if you’re keen to present, show up at 9:00am on Saturday morning and participate in the scheduling round-up.

*** Locations ***

The main venue for BarCamp has been generously donated by WorkSpace (http://www.abetterplacetowork.com/). That’s suite 400 - 21 Water Street in the heart of Vancouver’s Gastown. Here’s a map: http://tinyurl.com/qoha6.
The Friday night BBQ will be at Bryght’s offices, which are literally a half-block away at suite 400 - 1 Alexander St. You actually enter around the side of the building off Carall St. Here’s a map: http://tinyurl.com/mwsbm.

The Bryght offices are not wheelchair accessible (there’s a flight of stairs between the 3rd floor elevator and the 4th floor office). If you require special access, please contact us via the BarCamp Google Group and we’ll see about arranging access.

*** Food ***

Friday Night BBQ - We’ll be providing some weiners and such to roast, plus veggie options for the non-meat eaters. If you’re not keen on those options, you’re welcome to bring real or faux beast flesh of your choosing. Beer will be provided courtesy of AdHack.

Saturday breakfast - There will be a ‘continental breakfast’ starting at 8:30am

Saturday lunch - We’re ordering pizza
Other snacks include cookies from Midnight Kitchen, iced tea and sodas from Jones Sodas, bottled water and whatever else we can scare up.

*** Sponsors ***

This event is so cheap because of our fantastic sponsors. They are:

Uniserve
Business Objects
Belkin
Nitobi
ElasticPath Software
Bryght
Raincity Studios
EQO Communications
WorkSpace
Capulet Communications
Midnight Kitchen
AdHack
Sxip
Jones Sodas
T-shirt.ca

That’s it. Any questions, hit up the Google group at http://groups.google.com/group/barcampvancouver. Otherwise, we’ll see you on Friday!

Technorati Tags: barcampvancouver,barcamp, barcampearth

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August 21st, 2006

Dave Johnson of Nitobi and Sharat Chander of Sun put together a Webinar on using Java Studio Creator and our Nitobi Ajax Grid. It’s pretty cool to see the drag and drop visual development that JSF and JCS allow. More info from Sun:

Attend this Webinar and learn how to utilize the Nitobi Grid V3 component in Java Studio Creator. With the Ajax-powered Nitobi Grid V3, developers can display and edit tabular data in various web browsers. The grid delivers responsive, interactive data editing in a spreadsheet like user-interface with minimal coding. Access this on-demand webinar now through September 1, 2006. https://sun.webex.com/sun/onstage/onstage/framesets/
viewrecording1.php?EventID=346934662The webinar will be followed by an “Ask the Expert” session, giving you the opportunity to get all your questions answered. Presenters and engineers from both eBusiness Applications Nitobi and Sun will be available to answer your questions.
Submit your question here: http://java.sun.com/developer/community/askxprt/

Can’t wait until JSC is part of NetBeans so that adoption really takes off. I think that it will really help our enterprise customers make the jump to Ajax and JSF, as we all know tooling in this space is lacking. I’m also really looking forward to doing more work with the team at Sun, they really have been great to work with so far.

The actual download will be available by the 28th as that’s when Sun is promoting the webcast.

Technorati Tags: jsf, ajax, nitobi, nitobigrid, javastudiocreator, jsc, netbeans, sun, java

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August 16th, 2006

There was a good piece on BarCamp in Canada over at itBusiness.ca that Grant Buckly wrote a couple weeks ago.  I especially like the title;-)

BarCamps aim to erase the line between presenters and audience. Some require that every attendee come prepared to give a presentation. Some events are less strict about this rule than others, but the ethic of all un-conference events is participation. �It�s not really just about attending, it�s about participating,� says Andre Charland, president of Nitobi.com in Vancouver and an organizer of BarCamp Vancouver, which is scheduled to take place in conjunction with BarCamp Earth in late August.

I was quoted in it a couple times. Neat to see canada having a strong emerging tech scene with all this Web 2.0 madness going on down south.  Get ready for BarCampVancouver next week!  120 signed up, it should be a great time!

Technorati Tags: barcamp, barcampearth, barcampvancouver, media, itbusiness, quote, andrecharland, grantbuckley

Posted in Technology, AJAX, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

August 16th, 2006

Andre Charland, Dave Johnson and Alexei White discuss Ajax Components,
Software Documentation and open source frameworks. There's also a
good discussion on where the real value comes from in a software
component.

MP3 File

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

August 11th, 2006

Dave’s talk on debugging Ajax has been accepted for AjaxWorld. Check it out.

AJAX Debugging and Quality Assurance
� Building high performance and robust AJAX applications is challenging at best, particularly without proper quality assurance and testing techniques. Dave will discuss how to set up a test framework, methodology, and build process that works reliably and automates much of the tedious manual effort associated with browser based development.

He will present this session at the AJAXWorld Conference & Expo, October 2-4, 2006, in Santa Clara, California.

Technorati Tags: ajax, testing, qa, programming, session, ajaxworld, performance, optimization, debugging

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