Screen capture of the redesigned Canal Ice Conditions mobile web app

We have created a mobile app to make it easier to access Rideau Canal Skateway Ice Condition information from the NCC website.

This winter’s weather in Ottawa has not be consistently cold, and the conditions on the canal can change often.  We were particularly frustrated when the NCC’s site does not have a good mobile view yet.  So, we have created it!  Be prepared before you head-out for some skating on the canal.

It has been a fun exercise on user interface design.

First, a Google map of the Skateway’s path is shown on the top.  It makes add a nice visual punch to show exactly where the canal is, all 7.8 KM of it, for you to skate on.

Then, the status and conditions are re-positioned for a more natural read.

Finally, a color-coding of the various segments in the path are added.  A list of color codes to indicate the range of conditions is just under it.

There is also the ability to expand or shrink map, to fill out the screen more when you want to zoom in.

Screen capture of the NCC Ice Conditions website

The “cache-control” headers are for IE6’s weird bugs associated with its “Open as…” mechanism.

The “content-disposition” header tells the browser that the file is available as a download.

The “content-type” header suggests to the browser how to open the file on the user’s computer. For an unknown file type, use “application/octet-stream”.

Hopefully the following PHP could help save you from some frustrations:

header('Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate');
header('Cache-Control: pre-check=0, post-check=0, max-age=0');
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"{$file_name}\"");
header("Content-type: {$content_type}");
readfile($file_name_with_path);

A basic list of content types is available at W3Schools: http://www.w3schools.com/media/media_mimeref.asp

1. Simplest and least technical: use a hosted online shop solution like Yahoo! Store or Shopify
2. Also a fairly simple method: if you already have a website, add a Buy Now button and “re-direct” the user to a payment processor, such as Paypal, for shopping cart and payments.
3. Moderately involved method: use a shopping-cart-enable software on your site, and “re-direct” the user to a payment processor at check-out.
4. Most complex method: allow the user to remain on your custom website for the entire shopping experience.  This require that your hosting server is SSL & at least PCI DSS level-4 compliant, then do the back-end processing through a Payment Gateway service via a custom web service (XML, SOAP, HTTP POST, etc.).  For large-volume Canadian merchants, the best deals are to go through a US service provider as described in a previous post.

For option 4, what if you don’t want to go through the US? There are some option for Canadians (e.g., Moneris), just not as many as in the US.

By the way, PayPal has announced today the general availability of Website Payments Pro for Canada; they have finally decided to step up and enable the payment gateway support for Canadian merchants.  Good for them, and they are back on list.

I have signed up to volunteer for Jen Hunter with her campaign for Ottawa Centre in the up-coming federal election.   I’m blogging about it to help the search engines find her site and spread the word; additionally, I hope to help with some other on-line efforts also.

For sure, the social media is becoming an important asset for the Green Party to market itself and for relevancy to younger voters.  Notably, their party leader Elizabeth May is now as part of the debate, probably in no small-part due to electronic advocacy.

Good luck Jen; you will be a great politician to help bring many positive changes.

The Flex Camp Ottawa event at Adobe last Thursday was an experience to remember: well-organized, great speakers and interesting information.

While I’m no Flex developer, I was interested to see those who are in the city.  Having the top two Flash firms (Fuel Industries & Teknision) in Ottawa as presenters tipped me over to check it out.

As a software developer, I looked into Flash/ActionScript programming many years ago and concluded that I would like to make web apps using other methods.

After this conference and seeing the calibre of programming from these designers, however, I’m more warmed-up to it.  As opposed to Flash, Flex seems to be more friendly to traditional programmers, comes with a pretty good SDK, and the sample apps developed by the presenters validates its maturity and usefulness.

Here’s a spanning view of the conference room where the camp was held:

The rest of the pictures from the event are up at Flickr now.

Craig Fitzpatrick of DevShop make a presentation today at Ramius as part of their Periscope – Look | Share | Learn events.

According to Craig’s analysis, there are 3 camps in the project management tool space:

- schedules-based
- collaboration-based, or
- document-centric.

DevShop’s tool is currently mainly schedules-based.

They’ve developed a framework to solve the various problems related to software project management, with the 5 main points being: times estimation error, distraction rate, schedules confidence, tasks/estimates rather than requirements/designs, and churn/context switching.  This is brilliant.

Why is it so important?  Among other things, it offers much more predictability than other models.

For example, “last week, as a developer, I was distracted (as usual) 1.5 days out of 5 to help my team mates”.  Normal project management tools would have marked me as bad developer (even though I am just being a good corporate citizen)… But, DevShop would have told you that information ahead of time and adjusted the schedules automatically. Nice, eh?

Also, the rest of the pictures from the event is on Flickr.

System info:

/etc/apache2$ cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.6.24-16-server (buildd@palmer) (gcc version 4.2.3 (Ubuntu 4.2.3-2ubuntu7)) #1 SMP Thu Apr 10 13:58:00 UTC 2008


Step 1: Enable mod_rewrite

/etc/apache2$ sudo a2enmod rewrite
Module rewrite installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload to enable.

Step 2: Enable .htaccess overrides in the directories:

/etc/apache2$ sudo vi sites-available/default

Change AllowOverride from “None” to “All”; it should look like this afterwards:

<Directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>

Step 3: Re-start apache

/etc/apache2$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload
* Reloading web server config apache2        [ OK ]

Apache2 configuration is something new to me.  So, this is one of my more interesting moments…

The presenters tonight were:

• SIMtone
• GPU Core – Graphics processor core implemented on Xilinx FPGA
• OurAirports
• picsphere
• Stockify
• Protecode

It was held at the hip Velvet Room, 62 1/2 York Street in the Market, and not at the Clock Tower Brew Pub as per usual in the recent past. Alec Saunders was the emcee for tonight’s event.

My favorite demo was the OurAirports app for the thoughtfulness of the features for its users (mainly amateur pilots).

Here are a couple of pictures from the event:

VCs operate by high risk & high reward. Generally for less than $1M in funding, look for Angels. For larger sums, look for VCs.

The best time to talk to him is right after the napkins stage. Plan for 6 months, no shorter than that, to close a VC deal. The 6 months include legals, due diligence, background checks, etc. This is another reason why you need to talk to them as soon as possible.

They want “exits”; they do not want “lifestyle” companies.

Ask the VC what stage do they fund at, and what they do/don’t do.

Most VCs would like to partner with other firms. They’ll get you in front of other people. Besides, it’s also important for you to have diversified capital.

If you want VC money, set 18 months of milestones, like product in beta, a thousand customers, etc. and so that there’s a likely scenario for the company to be worth, say, $10 million.

2 types of VCs:

1. term sheet first: they’ll give you a term sheet almost immediately, but bait & switch later; essentially rip the company from you.

2. check list first: it takes longer to get a term sheet, but they move fast once the term sheet is offered.

JLA Ventures is actively involved in companies that they invest in.

They generally don’t invest in companies heavy with professional services; they like “shrink wrap” product companies for scalability and IP.

Because it’s so cheap to start a business today, there’s a lot of “noise” for similar product offerings. Anybody can have great ideas, but only the successful ones will be able to execute scale, sustainability and promotion.

Patents: process patents like Amazon’s “one-click” do not interest them; true IP patents have value, though they are not the only thing they base on.

For the future, they believe the localization is going to be huge.

Kohn suggests that “… homework… should be designed to promote two things: high-quality learning and the desire to keep learning.”

Now, imagine if you take replace the word “homework” with “knowledge management”, or any other knowledge initiatives you’re responsible for. Any engagements designed with this in mind will definitely be more successful.