Archive for the ‘Software’ Category
PHP on IIS
I’ve been playing around with IIS recently. The Windows/IIS community is not nearly as well served by Open Source as the competition, which is unfortunate given that IIS is a really popular platform for intranets and other enterprise applications. It’s not really fair to ask your IT department to support Apache + MySQL as well [...]
Getting lucky with free mobile WiFi
Like lots of people in tech, I have a Blackberry with WiFi. Regardless of how good Rogers has been with their 3G network, WiFi is faster to browse with, and free-er. With that in mind, I’ve added my home and work WiFi networks to my connections (Manage Connections -> Set Up WiFi Network), and just [...]
TorCHI Presentation: Sprint Zero and Agile Design
My co-workers Khan and Brian and myself went to the University of Toronto for a presentation at TorCHI. It was by Lynn Miller, a Senior Manager at AutoDesk (Maya, 3DSMax, AutoCAD, etc.)
The presentation was about Sprint Zero: the lead-up work that is required before a team embarks on an Agile project, or any [...]
The birth of the Microsoft Office “Ribbon”
New ideas for user interface components don’t come by very often. For example, the pointer, icons, and toolbars have been around since the late 1970’s courtesy of the work done at Xerox PARC. It’s safe to say that the computing environment in the late 70’s was quite a bit different than it is today, so [...]
My new Dell Mini 10v: The First Day
Since I haven’t bought a laptop in over 3 years, I decided to follow the trend and pick up one of the ultra-portable notebooks / netbooks. After reading some reviews, I picked up this Dell Mini 10v. It arrived today, only seven days after I placed the order via a Dell Chat.
Rather than offering [...]
Techno-update: Feedly, Twt.fm, and Super-Cache
Newsfeeds were all the rage a few years ago when the news agencies and blog platforms started syndicating content this way. For the most part any blog, newspaper, TV station, or anyone who needs to syndicate a stream of information (articles, posts, comments, scores, etc.) has done so using RSS or Atom. This is great, [...]
Bridging the digital divide between rich and poor using cellphones.
Today is the 20th birthday of the World Wide Web, and in celebration there was this telecast on French TV from CERN about the future of the web. Stéphane Boyera’s five minute talk stood out as being particularly interesting to me.
There is a digital divide in the world, as there are 5 billion people that [...]
Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner on the chaos and rewards of open source
On March 4th TorCHI hosted Mike Beltzner (blog) who is the Director of Development at Mozilla, though he prefers to call himself the “phenomenologist.” His talk focused on how Mozilla has harnessed the power of the open source community to build Firefox: managing the chaos of open source and have good ideas rise to the [...]