Really Great… Parking??
Every now and again you run into great technology – it doesn’t happen often, but you recognize it when you see it. For example:
OK, that last one seems a bit out of place, but bear with me for a minute here…
When the Ottawa airport was expanded in 2001, they built a parking structure that uses the Skidata parking control system. You can tell these things are different when you drive up – the bright orange, cute, and fantastically designed device is right there – with a nice big button for obtaining a ticket.
And, the same device is there when you leave – just hand back your ticket, then it takes your credit card, then it issues a receipt – ALL USING THE SAME SLOT! Nice!
The Ottawa Airport is expanding the system – adding machines where you can pay using cash or credit cards.
So, why do we like this device?
- The design is simple, cute and obvious.
- It’s easy to use. One big button to get a ticket.
- On exit, one slot to feed in your ticket, then feed in a credit card, then get a receipt.
- They’ve got really nice industrial design. The ticket unit, and the barrier device follow the same design. We know they’re connected.
- It works even in winter. In Ottawa, the devices even have a little winter jacket to augment their built-in heaters.
- The device is part of a system that includes wireless payment, and wireless connectivity between devices.
- It evolved from ski lift ticket systems in Europe – so it’s cool!
It’s one of those devices you look forward to using!
Well Done SkiData! US Dealer: TCSIntl
Here’s some brochures: skidata-parkingcolumnunlimited-450.pdf, skidata-apt-450-folder.pdf. Here’s an article in Forbes.
Patent App picked up – again!
I mentioned a few days ago that my patent application had been picked up by ZDNet and Alec Saunders. I’m excited to report that today, it was on Engadget! It’s interesting to be mentioned on a blog I read daily!
References:
And HERE on this blog.
Intelligent Directory in trials now!
Our latest application, Intelligent Directory, is in customer trials now – and should be released to the public in June!
To quote the marketing material:
The Mitel 5300 Intelligent Directory application provides a simple, intuitive on-screen searchable directory of both corporate and personal contacts right on your phone display. The 5300 Intelligent Directory application is available on Mitel 5330/5340 sets.
The 5300 Intelligent Directory Application and Presence Upgrade automatically pull information from three different sources:
- Microsoft Active Directory Server for corporate phone numbers
- Microsoft Exchange Server Contacts for personal contact phone numbers
- Microsoft Live Communication Server for presence information in the case of Presence Upgrade.
The 5300 Intelligent Directory application lists names and phone numbers, and allows users to search on the phone for names and numbers, using the very familiar keypad search that users are accustomed to on their cellphones and handheld devices.
Key features:
- Extremely intuitive and easy to use – phone numbers are where you need them, on your phone.
- Instant phone number updates. When a new person is added to the centralized Microsoft Active, their phone numbers are automatically available to all 5300 Intelligent Directory users.
- Less administration, less expense, more accuracy. No more need to separately maintain corporate phone books for internal use.
- Up to 5 phone numbers can be displayed per person (corporate, cell, home, etc.).
- One-touch dialing – numbers selected are instantly dialed.
- Automatically displays a dynamic list of recent calls on default home screen.
- Add your favorite numbers to your home screen.
- Uses Microsoft dialing rules to automatically insert dialing prefixes when numbers are dialed.
- Supports Hot-Desking. 5300 Intelligent Directory requires users to enter their password to access personal contacts in Microsoft Exchange.
With Presence Upgrade, LCS Presence status is displayed beside the contact name, indicating whether he or she is available. With just a glance at the phone, users can determine whether and when to make that important call.
The application is structured as a .Net application that runs on Microsoft’s IIS Web Server, and uses a web service to connect to Active Directory, Exchange, and LCS. The architecture is shown below:
The application will be available soon – check HERE for updates.
And, if you just can’t wait, try it out on our HTML application demo page HERE!
Patent App Picked Up!
I was surprised this week to discover that a patent application we had submitted a year ago was “in the news” on a few blogs.
We first got wind of it through Alec Saunder’s excellent VoIP blog – HE was surprised to see a reference to the Ottawa Senators in a patent application – just our little nod to the team!
And Alec found the patent app through Russel Shaw’s IP Telephony blog over at ZD Net. Russel apparently scans all new patent applications, looking for interesting VoIP applications, and ours made the grade.
Our patent application covers some of the applications that InGenius’ TelML technology makes possible on IP Phone sets with larger screens. Stuff like News, Weather, Sports, and advertizing on you kitchen phone. Very cool stuff – that we’re implementing now for a number of customers.
In fact, we’re releasing our first TelML-based product in the next couple of weeks – it’s called Intelligent Directory, and it allows access to your corporate Active Directory, including presence, from the screen of your phone! Think of it as a super intelligent and useful phonebook, that ties into your Active Directory,your personal Outlook contacts, and LCS/OCS for presence info – with easy searching based on name or company. It’s a great application, only possible due to Mitel’s adoption of our TelML technology on their desktop screen phones.
Panic’s new app – Coda – simply beautiful!
Panic has released an unbelievably beautiful application called Coda. This app is a terrific one stop shop for web development. The app includes:
- A web site manager based on their “Transmit” ftp engine,
- A great HTML editor,
- A preview pane – very nicely done,
- A CSS editor,
- A terminal window,
- A built-in online reference to HTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP.
This is one of those apps that brings a smile to your face as you use it. Beautiful touches abound – from nice animations, to a very nice preview of each of the web sites that you manage, to shared editing based on the subetha engine, a really nice CSS editor, to the built-in books. Even their web site is beautiful!
This is an app that makes it worth switching to a Mac.
Digital Photo Frame Review
I recently picked up a Digital Picture frame at Futureshop. They have a couple of models, but we wanted one that would support CF cards as well as a ton of other formats.
The one we chose was the 10.4 inch Fidelity Electronics model DPF-1040F, that supports CF, MD, MS, SD, MMC, SM, and XD format media. The frame will display JPG images, and will also play back MP3 audio files. The box says that it plays MPEG1, MPEG2 and MPEG4 video – but we couldn’t make that work at all. It certainly wouldn’t play the video files recorded by my Canon point and shoot cameras – not straight from the camera, or after they had been saved as MPEG4 by Quicktime.
There’s a remote control included with the unit. It allows you to select files via an on-screen menu, select music, select videos, and choose playback options. It worked well.
The unit doesn’t come with any built-in storage – so remember to buy a CF card or whatever when you purchase it. Once the photos are saved on the card, the unit simply starts playing them when it’s powered on. For a nice touch, you can use the included remote to select “slideshow with music” and it automatically uses any MP3 files on the CF card for background music.
I ran into some issues trying to save a ton of images into the root of the CF card – so I ended up using a directory structure on the card. The picture frame handled this easily – it found the images and started playing them back immediately – and the on-screen file browser understands directories, and lets you browser through the tree.
The picture quality is pretty good – really surprising actually, considering that the display is only 640×480. The unit will handle images up to 12 megapixels – but I saved all images as 640×480 when I exported them from Aperture. The cross fades and other transition effects are really smooth.
This is a perfect gift for grandparents, or anyone who’s into photography.
Canada wireless plans worse than 3rd world!
Check out this horrifying post which compares wireless rates for data access. 500MB/Month costs $375 – $1600 per month in Canada compared to $41 – $102 in 6 other countries. We’re moving into a world where we need ubiquitous wireless access. I really expect to be able to flip open my laptop just about anywhere in Canada in the next few years and be able to log onto the Internet at a decent speed.
The carriers really have to get on board with this. They are killing us, and really reducing our choices. It’s a common discussion among my co-workers – who all have very sophisticated phones, but hesitate to turn on the data features due to the cost.
PLEASE, Mr. CRTC, do something about this!
Live from Embedded Systems Conference – San Jose
Spent the morning settling in and registering at the ESC. The conference looks like it’ll be pretty good this year – the exhibit hall is quite huge – I can’t wait to get in on Tuesday for a full tour.
I sat in on a couple of the courses today:
The Introduction to Real-Time Operating Systems talk by David Kalinsky was horrifyingly S L O W. David would talk on one slide for 20 or 30 minutes, slogging through some very simple concepts, giving warnings about features of some RTOS’s, but then not naming the culprits, and over and over again referencing things that will be in “future” slides rather than what he’s talking about right now.
The audience is a mix of noobs and experienced developers – so I can see how it’s difficult for David to keep everyone interested.
Conversely, John Edwards DSP Demystified talk was terrific! He’s a VERY interesting speaker, captivating on what could be a really dry topic. He knows to skip the details, and instead concentrate on the stuff engineers need to simply get things done. Really worth attending.
Happy customer at the DSP demystified presentation.
From COSN: Blogging in schools
Two companies are here with tools to facilitate blogging in schools. Of course, this is pretty tricky to do right. In a world where authorities are blocking access in a CYA fashion, it’s nice to see these tools here to allow kids to blog and email in a safe and controlled way.
ePals has a nice looking system, and a good team here at the show. ePals is cool because it allows kids to interact in a safe environment – but interact with other schools around the world. They are approaching this as a world-wide linking thing rather than the simple and lame approach of just blocking access to blogs. Their UI is nice and clean, friendly, easy and even includes a translation feature – this is a REALLY cool idea. It’s nice to think of kids being able to communicate with other school kids in Spain, say. They are doing the same with email, and appear to be leaders in this field.
The other company here doing similar stuff is Gaggle.net. They have a blogging component, but seem to be focused on email. They offer the same translation options, but include some anti-pornography stuff, and monitoring.
In San Francisco – at COSN
I’m down in San Fran for COSN – a networking show for school teachers, and adminstrators. Mitel has a booth here, showing a cool school telephony app we put together, and a broadcast app that the Mitel Custom Apps group put together that uses IP speakers to broadcast throughout a school.
Feedback is along the lines of:
- “COOL” you can take attendance using a phone.
- OR, uhm, WHY would I want to take attendance using a phone?
Really, the coolest stuff we’ve done is the broadcast alert using the phones themselves. You can go to a web page on a PC, select a broadcast alert message, click “Send” and the alert shows up on every phone in the school – complete with blinking lights, a message on screen, including an evacuation route map, and an audio announcement that plays an alert sound, and says what to do. What’s cool, is that this uses the built-in voicemail system in the 3300 for the announcement – so no extra hardware required. Very cool.
One company with some cool stuff here is Promethean – they have a very nice looking educational application, with lots of interactive stuff, and these really cool little remotes that let the class interact, vote, and contribute to what’s going on. Their UI looks REALLY good – very clean and easy to use, yet powerful.
My brother is flying down tomorrow – we’ll be touring the town, including dinner at Chez Panisse, one of the best restaurants in the US! I’ll let you know how that goes…
Here are some pictures from San Francisco.
Blackberry all Fruity! DST Failure affects Blackberry ability to SEND MAIL.
So, we still can’t send emails from our Blackberries. We tried for two days to fix this ourselves, and finally called RIM. Remember that this was a RIM Blackberry Enterprise Server installation that has been functioning flawlessly since it’s original (and harrowing) install.
Monday, after waiting for TWO HOURS, a support technician answered, and we were redirected to a knowledge-base article, then pretty much hung up upon.
And that didn’t fix anything.
Tuesday evening we called back, waited on hold for hours, then had a pleasant 2 hour call with a RIM tech support guy in Singapore, who went over our entire Blackberry Enterprise Server installation with us, then decided that the problem was actually a Microsoft failure, and directed us to a Microsoft knowledge-base article.
And that didn’t fix anything.
But, we’re a bit further. Apparently anyone with a Blackberry, who ALSO has admin priviledges can no longer SEND mail from their Blackberries.
What I can’t understand is that we’re having this huge issue, a local hospital is having this issue, but I don’t see it being reported anywhere in the blogosphere!
Update: WE’RE BACK!!!! Our blackberries can send mail again! We updated to the latest service pack (the brand-new SP2) on our servers, then updated some DLL’s (CDO files), re-ran the DST patch, ran the set-send-as script as mentioned in Matt Roberts’ comment. Note, we had run this script before, but it hadn’t worked. It all sounds pretty simple in retrospect, but it was quite the pain while in progress…
DST Upgrade – not quite smooth
So, it wasn’t quite post-apocolyptic as failures go, but we’ve certainly had a rash of issues that may or may not be related to the DST change this weekend.
- We can’t send mail from our Blackberries. This is apparently a known issue with the Blackberry Enterprise Server, and we have tried dozens of “fixes” all weekend. Still can’t send mail.
- A hospital just down the road is having the same issue with its Blackberries. Nobody can send mail! What the heck does THIS have to do with a tiny DST fix? What is RIM doing about this?
- A ton of my appointments in Outlook are off by an hour. It appears that any appointments created by someone else are off by an hour. Ones I’ve created myself are OK.
- The time in our Terrastation is off – it’s an hour ahead of what it should be! Like, it skipped ahead by TWO hours in celebration of DST. So, this is screwing up our builds.
- A hard disk in our Terrastation has died. Luckily, it’s limping along OK in a failure mode till we swap in a new disk.
- My ReplayTV box has died between Saturday and Sunday. It just displays “Please Wait” on screen. This REALLY sucks since this is an old ReplayTV that includes the “automatically skip commercials” option that can’t be purchased any more. And, it’s the ONLY reliable PVR in our house since the Rogers Scientific Atlanta 8300HD sucks so much.
- Any shows that were scheduled to record on the Rogers Scientfic Atlanta 8300 HD on Sunday did not record properly – but, shows scheduled for later in the week are OK somehow.
- We are not a large company, but our IT guy was working on upgrading our workstations, and pushing upgrades out to our Blackberries for the week prior to this weekend. So that’s a cost to us as well.
So, we’ve had a number of issues – and we’re a small shop. Multiply this by millions of companies around the world and the true cost of this DST thing become apparent – it’s billions of dollars!
And, what do you wanna bet that on the day that the DST *usually* changes, there will be a ton more issues as PC’s that weren’t upgraded decide to update to “DST.”
Fun times!
Update: We run a bunch of stuff on vitual servers, mostily for testing. We noticed that our virtual servers had actually jumped forward by TWO hours over the weekend. Looks like the DST change occured once on the host machine, then once again on each of the virtual servers! Locked us all out of LCS on those machines! SO, beware if you are using virtual servers!!!
Branham 300 Event
Stopped by the Branham 300 event last Thursday, straight off the plane from Orlando and VoiceCon. Wayne Gudbranson gave a nice welcoming speech, followed by a few words from Mayor Larry O’Brian. Larry gave a few callouts to his buddies in the crowd, then went into handshake mode, circulating among the crowd of be-suited executives.
Here’s a story with coverage focusing on Ottawa.
Here’s some photos of the event.
More from Voicecon Spring 2007
Today started early, with a VIP preview at the Mitel booth. CEO Don Smith gave a short talk, then we started doing demos of our new technology – and literally haven’t stopped all day! This is a long show - it closes at 7pm each day and started at 10:30am for us this morning.
Here’s today’s pictures on Flickr.
I did a bit more digging on SIP enabled appliances today – Tom Hoover at Valcom who was quite involved in the engineering of their SIP based paging server. It’s a nice system where you can attach entrance-way speaker boxes with a call button. The button press initiates a SIP session – allowing the user to talk to a person, or a VM system, and the system can send a command back to energize a relay contact in the box for door lock control. Their system also allows full SIP based paging, with message storage, and the ability to handle live, recorded or scheduled messages, and up to 65,000 speakers (!!!). Nicely done.
Sun is showing a cool thin client PC BUILT INTO THE BASE OF A PHONE! Talk about saving space. The system even allows for call center users to log in and out by simply shoving a card into a slot on the front of the unit, like a waitress at some automated restaurants. Very cool.
WAY TOO MANY people are walking around with Bluetooth headsets. They will soon realize how silly they look.
And, there’s a courtyard outside near the show which I’ve dubbed Cellphone Alley – at any time of day there are 10-20 people walking around doing the “phone walk” where you talk, and wander about, shuffling your feet or kicking at some pebbles. Pretty funny.
Check the pictures for some Alligator shots. For those who don’t believe the hotel has live alligators in the atrium. The alligators and the turtles live happily together on a rock, waiting for their pm feeding.
VoiceCon – Day One
Day One at VoiceCon was pretty exciting – we spent the morning getting our booth ready – last minute tune-ups on the demos and applications we’re showing. I get the sense that Mitel is demonstrating a ton of really new innovative stuff compared to what I saw at other booths – lots of same-old same-old…
Pictures from today are here on Flickr.
Some highlights from the show today:
- Asterisk/Digium showing a hardware appliance running Asterisk Business Editon, with 8 analog ports, 4 lan ports, and in a really sexy package about the size of two paperback books. You configure the hardware through a browser, plug it into your lan, plug in some phone lines or analog phones and go! You’re online. It appeared to have a CF card slot – probably for voicemail storage. Very nicely done. This company will go far.
- is||coord from Switzerland was showing their SIP softphone – with a nice API. I’ll be talking to them in more detail in the next couple of months. Odd name.
- Saw a couple of companies with SIP speakers – for public address systems in schools, etc. Cool market I had heard about, but hadn’t realized how big this is. I guess if you’re a speaker company, this is the only way to innovate – but it’s a really useful item – since it eliminates having to run more cables around. I guess we’ll run everything off of an ethernet cable before too long.
- Avaya is giving away Segways, and I am SO entering this contest. They are giving away huge-ass off road Segways. Very cool.
- Microsoft has some really nice stuff happening with Office Communicator and the latest Exchange server. You can truely build a PBX with voicemail with MS products now. Scary for the old-guard. Of course they have really nice integration between applications – assuming you are running the latest version of EVERYTHING. So, start saving your upgrade pennies. Microsoft is working with Mitel – their integrated solution appears to be the most advanced of the big phone companies.
- Most of the phones are still pretty lame (are you listening Cisco, Avaya, Nortel?) The screens are small, and they just don’t get the power of running decent applications on the phone. Nortel’s solution is to run a Citrix back end and have the phone be a dumb device that displays static images. Also, they said that users don’t want this functionality, and are worried about security. I imagine they’ll change their tune when they actually release something. I think what users actually want is powerful, useful applications – that are secure.
The Gaylord Palms is impressive. Their atrium is HUGE, and has Alligators. How cool is that!
Orlando bound – Unveiling some new apps at VoiceCon.
I’m heading down to Orlando tomorrow for the VoiceCon tradeshow – I’ll be in the Mitel booth unveiling a bunch of terrific new software we’re releasing this month. Here’s the deets:
- Integrated Office Navigator and Integrated Office Companion – these two desktop applications work hand in hand with the Mitel Navigator phone and the new Mitel 5330 and 5340 phones. They are fantastic desktop applications that behave exactly the way PC based phone apps should – they are as near to invisible as you want them to be, utterly friendly, fast, and provide a ton of really useful features. At the minimum, the apps are simply a tray icon – or you can expand it out to be a desk-band application running in the task bar. The apps tie into Microsoft Exchange, Outlook and Active Directory, to pull up your contacts with a couple of keystrokes of their name or company. They also tie into LCS or MSN Messenger for presence. If you want to call someone, type a couple of characters of their name, up it pops, click enter, and you’re dialing them! The apps have tons more features – pausing music when you’re on the phone, popping up contacts or MSN Desktop search on incoming calls, dialing highlighted numbers in *any* application, and on and on. VERY VERY cool applications.
- We’re also showcasing our new Intelligent Directory application, which runs ON THE 5330 or 5340 PHONE ITSELF! This amazing application allows you to access your Outlook contacts or your corporate Active Directory straight from the phone, with an extremely simple UI, full searching, customized speed dial list, automatic “most recently called” lists, etc. It’s a really fun application.
- We’re also demonstrating some financial applications in conjunction with the Mitel Turret phone, and some really cool Educational (K-12) applications for the 5330 and 5340 phones, built on the Mitel HTML Toolkit application platform. The EDU app includes tons of features like managing attendance, dialing students and their parents, and some really cool broadcast announcement applications and duress capability.
We’re at the show from Monday to Wednesday, and we’d be very happy to demonstrate our stuff if you happen to drop by the booth!
Check back for more highlights from the show.
MacBook Pro Wakeup Photos
After reading about a guy who programmed his Mac to take a photo and email it to himself every time his Mac came out of sleep, I decided this was a pretty cool hack, and set about doing it myself. I found a command line app called camcapture which takes a photo using the built-in camera, then I wrote a simple automator script to take the photo and email it out to my gmail account. The last piece of the puzzle was getting the automator script to run on startup. Turns out this is pretty easy as well – solved by a simple google search. Looking back over the photos, the overwhelming impression is how mad I appear in most of the photos! I guess it’s because I’m kinda pissed, waiting for the mac to start up, and for the wireless to come on line. There are a few images taken on planes, images on vacation, at our cottage, etc. It’s funny to see how bad the colour is in most of the images – and yet how good it is in some. Here’s the first 200 images!
Moinmoin is cool
At InGenius, our development processes and systems utterly depend on wiki’s. When a new project is started, the first thing we do is set up a wiki, then a build process, some shared dirs, etc. But the wiki is prime.
Up to now, we’ve been using an old standby, OpenWiki, which was one of the first ASP based wikis. OpenWiki has not really been in development for some time, and is beginning to show it’s age. We’ve tried a few other wikis (jotspot, pbwiki, flexWiki, etc) over the past few years, looking for a good replacement, but we keep going back to good old reliable OpenWiki, despite it’s failings.
We recently had a look at MoinMoin (German for a friendly hello), and it doesn’t look too bad. It’s Python based (which meshes nicely with our build environment and tools), and runs fine on IIS as well as Apache. A nice feature is that it supports a much better editor, file uploads, and doesn’t depend on a database. It’s easy to create multiple wikis, it has built-in security, and lots of nice macros like we’ve become used to with OpenWiki. We’re hoping that we can evolve our corporate recruiting engine to use a wiki based mechanism for recording interview notes, resumes, etc. as well as using it in our software development.
We haven’t switched yet, but we’re thinking about it!
