July, 2008


19
Jul 08

BarCampEdmonton Was a Success!

BarCampEdmonton was a great success this weekend. There were over 100 people in attendance and it was great to meet new people and learn about new projects and interests.

A picture of the schedule is here:

I went to

  • Financing an Idea
  • What Problem Does The Semantic Web Solve?
  • Angel Fund, U of A, Robert
  • Evolution of Nexopia
  • Why Twitter Will Rule The World
  • Emerging Mobile Platforms

I also led a session on Edmonton Wireless & WiFi Mesh Networks with Mack Male.

One of the most interesting conversations I had was with a fellow named Clark Murray. Clark and three other guys have created a great product called dub5 which stands for the 5 W’s in everyone’s life, the Who What Where When and Why. Essentially dub5 is a new take on scheduling and calendar management. Their major advantage over competitors like Outlook and Google Calendar is their text message integration. Personally I love this and I hope to be using it as soon as it’s ready.

Since all the video I took of my sessions ended up being like 300mb a piece and 20 minutes long I haven’t finished uploading them to Google Video yet. However, check out the quick demo I had the dub5 guys give me.


19
Jul 08

BarCampEdmonton1

BarCampEdmonton1 is in 9.5 hours. I’ve stayed up later than usual quickly putting together a splash page for the WiFi network I’m setting up. This will let me track all the traffic it receives over the course of the day.

I reflashed and updated 5 of my Open-Mesh routers this evening. I’m hoping that’s enough but I have at least 10 I can break out if I have to.

I’m hoping to do a session at BCE1 on mesh networks and the current state of technology surrounding them. I seriously haven’t planned anything yet so I’m going to gather my thoughts a bit before I hit the hay.


15
Jul 08

Alberta’s 50 Most Influential People

My good friend Timo Ewalds was mentioned as one of Alberta’s 50 Most Influential People by Alberta Venture this week.

Timo Ewalds
Nexopia Creator
MySpace? My wha’? Facebook? So over it. If you have a teenager, chances are they’ve drifted from other social networking sites to Nexopia.com. Since its launch six years ago, more than 1.2 million 14- to 20-year-olds have made the switch. Oh, and did we mention founder Ewalds started developing Nexopia.com while he was still in an Edmonton high school? Early this year the site received a multimillion- dollar injection from Hubert Burda Media, one of Germany’s largest media companies, which was, like, so cool.

I’ve known Timo since late 2003, a few months after he started Nexopia. A big congrats to your success, Timo!


1
Jul 08

My First ScribeFire Post

I just installed ScribeFire, a Firefox plugin that lets you blog directly from your browser. So far I am really impressed! I often find it hard to motivate myself to post an entry because it’s a process to go to my blog and open a new post. Then I have to remember to finish the entry and it probably gets lost in a tab somewhere. ScribeFire can split your browser window and you can post while you browse. This means no flipping through tabs!

One thing I just noticed, however, is that they don’t do a very good job of integrating with WordPress’s image uploading. It’s not easy to have thumbnails automatically created :(

ScribeFire.com has a list of additional features:

  • Categorize and tag your blog posts
  • Upload images
  • Set timestamps
  • Save works-in-progress as notes
  • Post an entry as a draft
  • Share your posts on social websites
  • Upload files via FTP

I’m going to use this for a while and see how I like it. Let me know if you’ve had good or bad experiences with it.


Edmonton Computer Repair