BDOT - Blake, Director of Technology

Mobile Best Practices

2011-02-16T13:21:00.000-05:00

Guest blog on Mobile Best Practices

http://www.ektron.com/david_fung_blog/Mobile-Web-Best-Practices/

Advertising and 3D

2011-02-01T11:36:00.006-05:00

Audiences in the '50's

I had the good fortune to attend an Advertising week session with James Stewart, founder, producer and director from Gemini Films Co. This is a write up of that session and some background research.

James Stewart, Ad Week

3D movies and images have existed since the 1950’s but until the advent of digital projection these movies were plagued with poor user acceptance.

Once simple reason is found on the projectionist’s floor. 3D media is dependent on two images being displayed simultaneously – if an edit is made to one reel but not another than the timing is off and can easily cause nausea.

creating 3D images in Photoshop

It costs upwards of 200K to outfit a theatre for 3D viewing but new players in the market are offering 35mm Film projectors a 20-25K conversion kit- but that does not include the cost of the glasses.

Content Success

IMAX Digital films are one of the primary reasons for the resurgence in renovating theatres to accomodate 3D content delivery but Avatar still holds the lead at 2.4 billion in global sales.

Other than the Avatar blockbuster, one of the more successful genre of 3D films in the past couple of years have been concert movies. Hanna Montana: Best of Both Worlds and Jonas Brothers took in 3 5million and 19 million receptively.

65% of the profit for Alice in Wonderland and How to Train Your Dragon came from 3D screens. According to the International 3D Society, 33% of 2010's box office take was from 3D media.

All directors will be forced to move to 3D - or else leave millions on the table. Even Scorsese, one of the last hollywood holdouts is making the leap with his upcoming Hugo Cabret.

Sky TV in the UK has outfitted many of the pubs in London with 3D TV to push the adoption.

ESPN has a full time channel and the BBC has announced that they will be broadcasting the 2012 Olympic games in 3D.

YouTube has a 3D channel

Advertising Campaigns - Print

It seems that every advertiser is jumping on the 3D print bandwagon. Even advertisers with no 3D content. A recent car advertisement told viewers to come to their showroom to experience the new model in 3D.

Wonderbra Campaign

Wonderbra put up a 6ft billboard outside Waterloo station and handed out 3D glasses to people passing by.

Crest Whitestrips released their "Kiss Me in 3D" print campaign.

Advertising Campaigns - TV and Theatre

As expected, the biggest advertiser for 3D content so far are the equipment manufacturers themselves. Sony, Toshiba, Hitachi and LG have all launched campaigns in theatres to promote their 3D technology.

Other campaigns include the 2009 Superbowl which feature 3D advertisements from Dreamworks (Monster vs Aliens) and Pepsi's SoBe Lizard.

Costs

According to Stewart, the cost for producing a commercial in 3D approaches approximately 10-25% more than the equivalent 2D commercial.

Creating CG in 3D only increased the costs by 10%. The costs for converting from 2D to 3D run from about 5k-100k per minute of footage. In Toronto, the choices of editing suite availability is limited to Deluxe.

Impact

There are only a few studies that have been completed looking at the effectiveness of 3D over 2D but the results are impressive.

One study was completed by ESPN during the 3D delivery of world cup soccer series. Cued recall and purchase intent for an ad increased - 68% for the 2D ad and 83% for the 3D ad. Ad liking increased from 67% to 84%.

A DLP study looked at 1000 students in Chicago who viewed content in 3D saw their test scores rise by 29-35%.

How 3D works

Visual fields converging

Modern 3D systems try to replicate the functions of human vision. Our vision is referred to as stereoscopic or binocular vision – evolutionally, this gives us an advantage determining depth and distance of objects. Our eyes, working as a team gives us two slightly different views of the same image. You can test these different images by holding your finger at arms length and viewing it with both eyes open and then closing first one eye and then the other. One of the images will be slightly offset from the other. This is refereed to as eye dominance. The brain, receiving both of these images at the same time, automatically combines them by matching up the similarities and adding the small differences in viewpoint.

Our eyes will converge at a close object and will diverge (to parallel) at images further away. Children have a much smaller ocular distance, which is why equipment manufactures have issued warnings on their use in the young reporting that it may cause nausea or imped the development of regular vision.

This is exactly how modern 3D systems work. There are two lenses that converge and diverge mechanically to five the illusion that objects are moving towards or away from the viewer.

Anaglyph images

Moon Landing

This is the more familiar of the systems to North American audiences- everyone recognizes the traditional red and blue lenses - and has been used since the 1950’s. Two images are captured by the camera and displayed as two colour layers superimposed on e each other. The brain itself performs the colour correction. Unlike the eighties, technology has evolved to use polarized glass to selectively screen out the colour channel rather than the traditional red and blue gels.

These type of glasses are cheap to mass produce and some prominent makers of regular polarized sunglasses will be embedding this technology in upcoming models.

This technology has some drawbacks – images are somewhat degraded and fine detail is lost.

Active Shutter

3D TV with AS

The alternate system to the Anaglyph method is called Active Shutter display. Going back to the example of above of holding out your finger and first closing one eye and then closing the other, active shutter displays mimic this behavior albeit at a much higher rate of 60 frames per second mechanically. This is the technology that is finding it’s way into the new breed of 3D televisions. With each frame duplicated and the glasses mechanically closing a shutter at 60 frames a second, the minimum refresh rates of the television have to be at 120 mhz.

3D TV and Monitors

With almost 6.5 million 3D TV sets sold in the first year, it is easy to figure out where this is going. Equipment manufacturers are not making the investment in 2D sets anymore. Most 3D televisions have the capability to disaply 2D content as well – and in most cases the 3D TV doing 2D content is displayed better than the 2D sets still on the market.

Autostereoscopic 3D TV

Toshiba is offering a 65inch 3D television that does not require the use of special glasses - similar to Philips lenticolor prototype. There are two competing methods for glasses-less viewing. The less popular method uses cylindrical plastic lenses pasted on a transparent sheet which is in turn stuck to the surface of the LCD screen. The second method, called parallax barrier, shows the most promise for consumers and is being actively pursued by Sharp and LG. This method, instead of using lenses, has a liquid crystal surface with slots that correspond to the columns of pixels. These columns correspond to the alternating images which shutter based on a small electrical charge.

Other 3D devices LG has announced that in 2011 they will be releasing a 3D phone based on Nvidia's new dual core Tegra 3D chipset. A rumoured tablet will follow. Rumours are circulating that the iPhone 5 will be 3D enabled. Fuji, among others have launched a line of 3D digital cameras aimed at the consumer market

NAT Pinning Security Concerns

2011-01-05T12:31:00.000-05:00

There is an old attack method that was first published in 2001 that now is gaining more notoriety with the adoption of HTML 5. The method was dubbed "The HTML Form Protocol Attack" or Cross Protocol Scripting. Some of the vulnerabilities described in the paper have been addressed by the browser makers themselves but others are still open.

The premise of the vulnerability is that a browser can be tricked into communicating on a non standard port (i.e SMTP, POP, NNTP) from a hidden form on a web page. This can be used by spammers for instance by setting up a page with a hidden form that submits a request to a mail server and turns your client into a spam bot.

JQuery for Mobile Web Development

2010-12-07T15:31:00.000-05:00

In 2009, Neilson estimates that 21% of Canadian mobile subscribers use their phones to surf online and check their email. There are 3.9 Million unique mobile internet users in Canada

Juniper estimates that worldwide users of mobile web services will increase from 577 million in 2008 to more than 1.7 billion in 2013.

Clearly, mobile web development is going to become more prevalent and a part of integrated campaigns.

Developing for the multiple handsets with their myriad of standards can be a frustrating experience -- and explaining the intricate nature of those differences to a designer who has to design an interface or an account manager who has to explain to the client can be a lesson in futility.

That is why I love when someone comes up with a clear, tested standard - with visuals and handy charts. It makes the job of Sherpa tech translator much easier.

JQuery, one of my favorite libraries has done such a job. JQuery mobile is a subset of the popular library that does an incredible job of standardizing interface elements across all the supported mobile browsers.

JQuery mobile even comes with a handy chart for Account Managers to show very clearly what browsers are supported.

They have rated browsers as the following

A High Quality. A browser that’s capable of, at minimum, utilizing media queries (a requirement for jQuery Mobile). These browsers will be actively tested against but may not receive the full capabilities of jQuery Mobile.

B Medium Quality. A capable browser that doesn’t have enough market share to warrant day-to-day testing. Bug fixes will still be applied to help these browsers.

C Low Quality. A browser that is not capable of utilizing media queries. They won’t be provided any jQuery Mobile scripting or CSS (falling back to plain HTML and simple CSS).

Office 2011 Preview

2010-11-24T10:29:00.000-05:00

Can anyone tell me where the option to Publish to Blog has gone? This was one of my favorite time saving features and it's gone!!!

Question about Mac and Microsoft

2010-11-24T10:24:00.000-05:00

One of the most prevalent questions I get regarding MACs on Snow Leopard and older versions of Microsoft Office is once they have loaded the software their systems slow down. Looking at the System Processes we see the following-

You can see from the screenshot that there is a process called Database Daemon that is taking up 278 MB of virtual memory.

This is a Microsoft process that runs in the background to power the notification system. The issue is that this is a PowerPC process (hence the need for the Rosetta framework) running in 32bit mode.

The problem is further compounded by the fact that if you are using not using Entourage this process will spawn regardless.

This process is generally not needed.

Spotlight will index any cache files the Entourage daemon has created even if the daemon is not launched.

To solve this issue (and to shorten the startup time of your MAC) you can go to System Preferences > Accounts and select the Login Items and ensure the checkbox for Database Daemon is unchecked. You can remove it entirely from this list.

You can also go into the Entourage menu and select the “Turn off Office Notifications” option.

Alternatively, you can create a script that will stop orphaned processes

Microsoft processes tell application "Microsoft Database daemon" to quit

Save this as a compiled script and then open the Applescript utility and Select the “Show in Script Menu in menu bar” and voila you will have access on your desktop to stop this process anytime your MAC starts to get slow.

HTML5 Roundup

2010-10-13T11:58:00.001-04:00

There are a ton of resources that show you the possibilities that start to exist with HTML 5. Here are some of the best I've found

Games

Galactic Plunder

Defender

First Person Shooter (proof of concept)

Mario Cart

Contrasaurus

BioLab

Video

Video effect

Interactive Film (ArcadeFire)

Apps

Collaborative Drawing

Medical Monitoring Breakthrough

2010-10-07T08:56:00.001-04:00

MIT is poised to make a big difference in medical monitoring coming up with a method to use low quality webcams to measure pulse rate, respiration and blood oxygen levels. Previously only available through the use of invasive commercial pulse

oximetry or electrocardiogram sensors, this breakthrough method uses variations in transmitted or reflected light sources from image capture to measure cardiovascular pulse waves without a dedicated source of light (red or infrared light sources). Attempts in the past have been stymied by motion artifacts or signal noise that drown out the relevant frequencies to be measure physiologically.

The MIT breakthrough uses an open source image processing library called Open Computer Vision released through the BSD licensing (so can freely be used by non-commercial and commercial sources). This library provides the basis to stabilize captured images and to capture and account for image movement and artifacts. The captured images are separated into red, green and blue channels and then Fourier analysis is used (breaking a large function into simpler sums of trigonometric functions). These function points are assumed to be linear (pulse rates jump but the differentiation between plotted points are somewhat the same) and are measured on a Bland Altman plot (the primary application of the Bland-Altman plot is to compare two clinical measurements that each provide some errors in their measure) to come up with a mean measurement.

The experiments were done using a simple MacBook webcam and was extended to include the measurement of multiple faces in the same field of vision of the camera.

Here is a link to the full MIT study

The Psychology of Change Management

2010-07-12T15:54:00.001-04:00

Managing process change within an organization is often more stressful than the change itself. Psychologists in the fields of child and adult development have made several important discoveries that are helping companies to facilitate the changes. Success depends on persuading hundreds or thousands of groups to change the way they work.

In broad strokes, there are three types of changes that will typically happen within an organization;

Strategic planning: An organization changes its overall strategy for success
Organizational transformation: The addition or removal of a major section or practice (which encompasses restructuring operations, new technologies, mergers, major collaborations)
Natural lifecycle evolution: For example, changing from a highly reactive, entrepreneurial organization to more stable and planned development

"People are afraid of the unknown. You fear an enemy mostly because of what you don't know. You are afraid of what they might do, not what they are doing."

Sylvia Earle

Typically, there is strong resistance to change. People are afraid of the unknown – it's hardwired into our brains to resist.

The Evolutional psychology view

Evolutional psychology teaches us that the computer is a physical system; it functions as a computer with circuits that have evolved to generate behavior that is appropriate to the environmental circumstances. Memetic Selection, postulated by Richard Dawkins in 1976 supposes that we have over time evolved memes (e.g. ideas, rituals, tunes, cultural fads) that are self replicating in large populations to solve the problem of how to transfer information across distance and time. Change would in effect be in conflict with this primal, evolutionary trait.

Behavioral psychology

B.F. Skinner is widely regarded as the father of modern behavioral psychology and is best known for his experiments with rats reinforcing them to run a maze circuit by putting a reward at the center of the maze (positive reinforcement) and punishing rats with an electric shock if they made a wrong turn (negative reinforcement). Similarly, in an organizational setting, unless positive reinforcements (reporting structures, reviewing and setting goals, financial and non-financial reward systems) are consistent with the desired behavior, employees will be less likely to adopt the new behavior consistently. Like Skinner's rats, the effects of positive and negative reinforcement are negated over time. A similar phenomenon often prevents organizations from sustaining the change if reinforcements are not evolved and reestablished from time to time.

Challenging the status quo

Cognative dissonance is the distressing mental state that arises when people find that their beliefs are inconsistent with their actions—agnostic priests would be an extreme example. Festinger observed in the subjects of his experimentation a deep-seated need to eliminate cognitive dissonance by changing either their actions or their beliefs.

The implication of this finding for an organization is that if its people believe in its overall purpose, they will be happy to change their individual behavior to serve that purpose—indeed, they will suffer from cognitive dissonance if they don't. But to feel comfortable about change and to carry it out with enthusiasm, people must understand the role of their actions in the unfolding drama of the company's fortunes and believe that it is worthwhile for them to play a part. It isn't enough to tell employees that they will have to do things differently.

There are four conditions for changing the midset

Employees see the point of change and agree with it
Surrounding structures (reward and recognition systems etc..) must not be in conflict with the proposed change
Must have the proper skills
See examples of people they respect modeling it actively.

Authentication Methods

2010-06-17T03:34:00.000-04:00

There are several industry standard methodologies to provide single sign capability. Due to the level of integration required, creating a customized solution would be cost prohibitive and would lack the credibility in terms of security and standardization that all of the following solutions have.

Open ID

OpenID is an open, decentralized standard for authenticating users which can be used for access control, allowing users to log on to different services with the same digital identity where these services trust the authentication body. OpenID replaces the common login process that uses a login-name and a password, by allowing a user to log in once and gain access to the resources of multiple software systems.

An OpenID is in the form of a unique URL, and is authenticated by the user's 'OpenID provider' (that is, the entity hosting their OpenID URL). The OpenID protocol does not rely on a central authority to authenticate a user's identity. Since neither the OpenID protocol nor Web sites requiring identification may mandate a specific type of authentication, non-standard forms of authentication can be used, such as smart cards, biometrics, or ordinary passwords.

OpenID authentication is now used and provided by several large websites. Providers include AOL, BBC, Google, IBM, Microsoft, MySpace, Orange, PayPal, VeriSign, LiveJournal, Yandex, Ustream and Yahoo!.

Logging in

The user visits a relying party web site (e.g. website.relying.com) which displays an OpenID login form somewhere on their page. Unlike a typical login form with fields for the user name and password, the OpenID login form has only one field—for the OpenID identifier, typically along with a small OpenID logo: Openid small logo.png. This form is connected to an implementation of an OpenID client library.

A user typically will have previously registered an OpenID identifier (e.g. alice.openid.provider.org) with an OpenID identity provider (e.g. openid.provider.org). The user types his OpenID identifier into the aforementioned OpenID login form.

The relying party web site typically transforms the OpenID identifier into a canonical URL form (e.g. http://alice.openid.provider.org/). With OpenID 1.0, the relying party then requests the web page located at that URL and reads an HTML link tag to discover the identity provider service URL (e.g. http://openid.provider.org/openid-auth.php). The relying party also discovers whether to use a delegated identity (see below). With OpenID 2.0, the client discovers the identity provider service URL by requesting the XRDS document (also called the Yadis document) with the content type application/xrds+xml that may be available at the target URL and is always available for a target XRI.

SlashID

Unlike OpenID, SlashID operates closer to a password and profile manager. SlashID keeps up with information such as the user's email address, website, and contact information, and sends that information to the requesting website when the user inputs their SlashID username and password.

Both systems require the website to support the feature before it can be used, and this is their main obstacle in achieving universal acceptance.

The Benefits and Downside of SlashID

The major benefit of SlashID over OpenID is its ability to keep track of more information, which makes it more adaptable to websites. A user can even have multiple profiles, so if they want to use one email on some websites, and a second email on other websites, this can be easily accomplished.

The biggest downside of SlashID is its current dependence on a single website. While OpenID allows almost anyone with their own website to set up an OpenID server, SlashID is run from a centralized source. There are plans to decentralize the authentication process, but this will be dependent upon SlashID gaining some acceptance across the web.

Implementation

Both of the above methodologies for granting authenticated access are similar. In both cases the third party sites must install and configure the authentication libraries. Security changes to the third party sites must include the implementation of the library on the front end.

Additionally, the company would have to control the token ID's that are permitted authentication.

SR&ED

2010-06-13T11:17:00.000-04:00

The Scientific Development and research fund is a tax initiative created by the Federal government to stimulate research and development by Canadian companies.

In 2006 over 2.6 billion dollars was given out to over 18,000 companies.

SR&ED has become more and more influential in the planning budgets of technical departments. I created the following primer to introduce the concepts of the SR&ED program as well as criteria for eligibility.

SR&ED

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Subversion

2010-06-01T11:28:00.000-04:00

It still baffles me when I find development groups not using a repository system in order to centralize and promote code across different environments.

I created this training primer in order to educate a development team on how to use Subversion and TortoiseSVN.

Subversion

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Project Management Success

2010-05-21T12:44:00.000-04:00

Through those formal studies it is measurably and consistently found that managers who are perceived by their personnel as (1) emphasizing work challenge and expertise, but (2) deemphasizing authority, penalty, and salary, foster a climate of good communications, high involvement, and strong support to the tasks at hand. Ultimately, this style results in high performance ratings by upper management.

The project leader must foster an environment where team members are professionally satisfied, are involved, and have mutual trust. The more effective the project leader is in stimulating the drivers and minimizing the barriers shown in Figure 12B-1, the more effective the manager can be in developing team membership and the higher the quality of information contributed by team members, including their willingness and candor in sharing ideas and approaches. By contrast, when a team member does not feel part of the team and does not trust others, information is not shared willingly or openly. One project leader emphasized the point: "There's nothing worse than being on a team where no one trusts anyone else. Such situations lead to gamesmanship and a lot of watching what you say because you don't want your own words to bounce back in your own face."

Furthermore, the greater the team spirit and trust and the quality of information exchange among team members, the more likely the team will be able to develop effective decision-making processes, make individual and group commitment, focus on problem solving, and develop self-forcing, self-correcting project controls. As summarized in Figure 12B-2, these are the characteristics of an effective and productive project team. A number of specific recommendations are listed below for project leaders and managers responsible for the integration of multidisciplinary tasks to help in their complex efforts of building high-performing project teams.

Recognize barriers. Project managers must understand the various barriers to team development and build a work environment conducive to the team's motivational needs. Specifically, management should try to watch out for the following barriers: (1) unclear objectives, (2) insufficient resources and unclear findings, (3) role conflict and power struggle, (4) uninvolved and unsupportive management, (5) poor job security, and (6) shifting goals and priorities.

Define clear project objectives. The project objectives and their importance to the organization should be clear to all personnel involved with the project. Senior management can help develop a "priority image" and communicate the basic project parameters and management guidelines.

Assure management commitment. A project manager must continually update and involve management to refuel its interests in and commitments to the new project. Breaking the project into smaller phases and being able to produce short-range results are important to this refueling process.

Build a favorable image.Building a favorable image for the project in terms of high priority, interesting work, importance to the organization, high visibility, and potential for professional rewards is crucial to the ability to attract and hold high-quality people. It is also a pervasive process that fosters a climate of active participation at all levels; it helps to unify the new project team and minimize dysfunctional conflict.

• Manage and lead. Leadership positions should be carefully defined and staffed at the beginning of a new program. Key project personnel selection is the joint responsibility of the project manager and functional management. The credibility of the project leader among team members with senior management and with the program sponsor is crucial to the leader's ability to manage multidisciplinary activities effectively across functional lines. One-on-one interviews are recommended for explaining the scope and project requirement, as well as the management philosophy, organizational structure, and rewards.

Plan and define your project.Effective planning early in the project life cycle has a favorable impact on the work environment and team effectiveness. This is especially so because project managers have to integrate various tasks across many functional lines. Proper planning, however, means more than just generating the required pieces of paper. It requires the participation of the entire project team, including support departments, subcontractors, and management. These planning activities—which can be performed in a special project phase such as requirements analysis, product feasibility assessment, or product/project definition—usually have a number of side benefits besides generating a comprehensive road map for the upcoming program.

Create involvement.One of the side benefits of proper planning is the involvement of personnel at all organizational levels. Project managers should drive such an involvement, at least with their key personnel, especially during the project definition phases. This involvement leads to a better understanding of the task requirements, stimulates interest, helps unify the team, and ultimately leads to commitment to the project plan regarding technical performance, timing, and budgets.

• Assure proper project staffing.All project assignments should be negotiated individually with each prospective team member. Each task leader should be responsible for staffing his or her own task team. Where dual-reporting relationships are involved, staffing should be conducted jointly by the two managers. The assignment interview should include a clear discussion of the specific tasks, outcome, timing, responsibilities, reporting relation, potential rewards, and importance of the project to the company. Task assignments should be made only if the candidate's ability is a reasonable match to the position requirements and the candidate shows a healthy degree of interest in the project.

• Define team structure. Management must define the basic team structure and operating concepts early during the project formation phase. The project plan, task matrix, project charter, and policy are the principal tools. It is the responsibility of the project manager to communicate the organizational design and to assure that all parties understand the overall and interdisciplinary project objectives. Clear and frequent communication with senior management and the new project sponsor is critically important. Status review meetings can be used for feedback.

• Conduct team-building sessions.The project manager should conduct team-building sessions throughout the project life cycle. An especially intense effort might be needed during the team formation stage. The team should be brought together periodically in a relaxed atmosphere to discuss such questions as: (1) How are we operating as a team? (2) What is our strength? (3) Where can we improve? (4) What steps are needed to initiate the desired change? (5) What problems and issues are we likely to face in the future? (6) Which of these can be avoided by taking appropriate action now? (7) How can we "danger-proof" the team?

Develop your team continuously.Project leaders should watch for problems with changes in performance, and such problems should be dealt with quickly. Internal or external organization development specialists can help diagnose team problems and assist the team in dealing with the identified problems. These specialists also can bring fresh ideas and perspectives to difficult and sometimes emotionally complex situations.

• Develop team commitment.Project managers should determine whether team members lack commitment early in the life of the project and attempt to change possible negative views toward the project. Since insecurity often is a major reason for lacking commitment, managers should try to determine why insecurity exists, and then work on reducing the team members' fears. Conflict with other team members may be another reason for lack of commitment. If there are project professionals whose interests lie elsewhere, the project leader should examine ways to satisfy part of those members' interests by bringing personal and project goals into perspective.

Assure senior management support.It is critically important for senior management to provide the proper environment for the project team to function effectively. The project leader needs to tell management at the outset of the program what resources are needed. The project manager's relationship with senior management and ability to develop senior management support are critically affected by his or her credibility and visibility and the priority image of the project.

Focus on problem avoidance.Project leaders should focus their efforts on problem avoidance. That is, the project leader, through experience, should recognize potential problems and conflicts before their onset and deal with them before they become big and their resolutions consume a large amount of time and effort.

Show your personal drive and desire.Finally, project managers can influence the climate of their work environment by their own actions. Concern for project team members and ability to create personal enthusiasm for the project itself can foster a climate high in motivation, work involvement, open communication, and resulting project performance.

Managing conflict

2010-05-10T11:40:00.000-04:00

SharePoint

2010-04-13T11:48:00.000-04:00

I created the following primer to introduce the concepts of the Sharepoint to a business audience.

SharePoint Primer

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Loyalty?

2009-04-28T04:00:00.000-04:00

Networked markets can change suppliers overnight. Networked knowledge workers can change employers over lunch. Your own "downsizing initiatives" taught us to ask the question: "Loyalty? What's that?"

As a manager through this boom and bust who was around for the previous boom and bust, I’ve had to lay off (the polite term for fire) dozens of employees. There are many strategies to learn how to deal with this – the one I find most effective is depersonalizing the terms used. Employee becomes a resource – firing becomes “let go” or downsized.

Some of these are no-brainers, the employee that sits in the corner not doing anything or is in a position that they cannot succeed at whose only reaction to being let go is relief. Some of these are the social lifeblood of the company – long term employees whose only fault that they are not current is that they’ve been too busy for some many years just “getting it done”. It’s this last group that is always the hardest to make it through the exit interview (more feel good lexicon).
Is it a wonder that “sorry – it’s just business” sounds so hollow and has resulted in a workforce that largely has no allegiance except to themselves. A great majority of companies like to expound on the reality that they are all just a large, extended family -- if you accept the incongruity that like the Inuit, our company puts our family out on ice flows when the going gets tough.

In today’s marketplace, our employees are all networked together. Is it a wonder that with all those publically available profiles, employee poaching is not going on or that employees are targeting employers that they want to work with? Like the early BBS’s of the early internet – if the information is available more lasting connections can be made but with that comes the danger of empowering our employees to make better decisions.

The quickest job decision I ever made was over MSN. An old contact reached out, read what I was doing since I worked with them and offered me a job on the spot.

While anecdotal studies point to people spending more time at jobs that last only a short time – research from Burgess and Rees show a different landscape with only a small change in average job duration values taken from the 70’s and 90’s. In fact, the trend that was most apparent was in weakening markets (’79-’83), average job length seems to increase.

So is loyalty to our employers gone? No – it’s just changed. Gone are the days of a single job and a single employer for life. Enter the new reality which places employee and employer on a level playing field with both looking for that elusive loyalty.

Browser Penetration

2009-03-24T15:28:00.000-04:00

Browser stats have been updated for February here. As a breakdown IE7 is losing ground to IE8 (.2 percent up and down) while Firefox continues to grab marketshare - mostly at the expense of Opera (trending downward).

When will the day come when we can stop supporting IE6? For the Norwegians it seems that now is the time as several large properties are actively telling users to upgrade.

Why does Nicotine bind in the brain but not muscle?

2009-03-24T15:27:00.001-04:00

Nicotine should kills us quicker than smoking a pack a day for 20 years. The fact is, it binds to receptors in the brain but not to those same receptors in muscle tissue which would cause immediate and lethal muscle contractions. Caltech has found that there is a small change in the acetylene receptor in our muscle tissue that doesn't allow this to happen.

Study gives more proof that intelligence is largely inherited

2009-03-18T16:21:00.001-04:00

In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience Feb. 18, UCLA neurology professor Paul Thompson and colleagues used a new type of brain-imaging scanner to show that intelligence is strongly influenced by the quality of the brain's axons, or wiring that sends signals throughout the brain. The faster the signaling, the faster the brain processes information. And since the integrity of the brain's wiring is influenced by genes, the genes we inherit play a far greater role in intelligence than was previously thought.

Genes appear to influence intelligence by determining how well nerve axons are encased in myelin — the fatty sheath of "insulation" that coats our axons and allows for fast signaling bursts in our brains. The thicker the myelin, the faster the nerve impulses.

Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol (HSTP)

2009-03-16T15:26:00.001-04:00

Giving a new dimension to the internet, the Indian research arm of the US-based IT giant IBM has developed a technology that will allow users to talk to the web and create voice sites using mobile phones.

SQA Methodologies

2009-03-16T12:12:00.001-04:00

In large, complex applications, such as operating systems, it is practically impossible to iron out every single bug before releasing it both from a difficulty point of view and due to time constraints. Different software applications require different approaches when it comes to testing, but some of the most common tasks in software QA include:

PPQA audits: Process and Product Quality Assurance is the activity of ensuring that the process and work product conform to the agreed upon process.
Validation testing: Validation testing is the act of entering data that the tester knows to be erroneous into an application. For instance, typing "Hello" into an edit box that is expecting to receive a numeric entry.
Data comparison: Comparing the output of an application with specific parameters to a previously created set of data with the same parameters that is known to be accurate.
Stress testing: A stress test is when the software is used as heavily as possible for a period of time to see whether it copes with high levels of load. Often used for server software that will have multiple users connected to it simultaneously. Also known as Destruction testing. Fault injection is especially useful for any software system with exposed interfaces, e.g., protocol implementations.
Conformance testing: Confirms that the software implementation complies with established standards.
Load testing: Establishes the maximum amount of traffic that a target can accept.
Usability testing: Confirms that the software solution is "user-friendly" enough.
Robustness testing: Software systems are presented with invalid or unexpected inputs to determine whether they have robust error-handling or input validation. Such systems pass the test(s) if they can tolerate a wide variety of invalid or unexpected inputs across the entire protocol interface specification.

The unexpected is a key to human learning

2009-03-16T12:04:00.001-04:00

The human brain's sensitivity to unexpected outcomes plays a fundamental role in the ability to adapt and learn new behaviors, according to a new study by a team of psychologists and neuroscientists from the University of Pennsylvania.

Using a computer-based card game and microelectrodes to observe neuronal activity of the brain, the Penn study, published this week in the journal Science, suggests that neurons in the human substantia nigra, or SN, play a central role in reward-based learning, modulating learning based on the discrepancy between the expected and the realized outcome.

New organic material may speed Internet access

2009-03-16T08:50:00.001-04:00

The next time an overnight snow begins to fall, take two bricks and place them side by side a few inches apart. In the morning, the bricks will be covered with snow and barely discernible. What you will see resembles a phenomenon that, when it occurs at the smallest of scales on an integrated optical circuit, could hasten the day when the Internet works at superfast speeds.

Second Mac Monitor

2009-03-13T17:06:00.000-04:00

Here's a guy who decided to add a second monitor to a MacBook and have it display through the Apple logo on the back. Pretty cool idea.

Cybernetics and Spare Parts: A Robotic Opera and Workshop in Ontario, Online

2009-03-13T13:23:00.001-04:00

3 commodore 64’s running Cynthcart and MSSIAH. Details here

jQuery Leopard desktop

2009-03-13T08:49:00.000-04:00

Here is a great tutorial of what can be done with jQuery. The author has recreated the Mac desktop complete with save states in jQuery.

RIA frameworks

2009-03-13T08:46:00.000-04:00

Here is a great post examining the most frequently used controls (there's 30 of them) available by framework.

QFocuser

2009-03-13T08:34:00.000-04:00

One of the missing components in the browser is the ability to use keyboard navigation (other than tabbing from element to element) without jury-rigging flash.

QFocuser adds this ability to your AJAX to "listen" for key events. Be prepared however to create a work around for Safari.

Capacinno - Atlas

2009-03-13T08:24:00.000-04:00

Cappuccino is a drag and drop editor for creating desktop applications created by 280North. It includes built in libraries and behaviors that enable options like autosaving and cut-and-paste.

New is Atlas which takes the fundamentals of Cappucinno and simplifies it even more adding WYSIWYG editing to the mix.

Capucinno and Atlas are MVC framework (Model-View-Controller) objects. This means that the UI is separated from the business logic allowing for easier modification of the data (Model) from the UI (View). The controller is the glue that manages the communication of data and business objects used to manipulate the data between the two states.

Boffswana and Flash

2009-03-11T08:14:00.000-04:00

There is a company in Australia that has combined your webcam with some interesting technology to allow for 3D images to appear on your screen triggered by a specific object in the flash.

The way it works is pretty simple in theory; the camera picks up on a shape that you've printed up and replaces it with an object.

The example below is a simplistic version of what you can do but the possibilities are endless.

Papervision - Augmented Reality (extended) from Boffswana on Vimeo.

ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act)

2009-03-10T10:16:00.000-04:00

One of the better legislative rules that have forced web developers to pay attention is the introduction of the ADA and the resultant guidelines that they force developers to use.

The primary function is to provide alternative means and to facilitate assistance technology like screen readers to access content and functionality on your site.

Generally, the guidelines state that you must
a. provide text equivalents for non text elements (i.e alt attributes and/or LONGDESC)
b. avoid dependence on colours (i.e. red lettering for error messages)
c. avoid actions that are not triggered by user input.

HTML should be used for structure and CSS for style.

Communication Seminar

2009-03-10T08:55:00.000-04:00

As a DOT, I get to spend a lot of time in seminars and presenting my ideas. My earlier background is in stage and voice prepared me for presenting in front of large groups but my issue has always been the more than 5 less than 50 crowd.

I recently had the opportunity to attend a working session with Mark Bowden, a brit that has advised people such as Tony Blair and Harper on presenting.

His theory revolves around the idea that our primitive mind has a large effect on our newer (by evolutionary standards) frontal cortex. Some of these effects are subliminal - such as the fight or flight response to a crowd, the idea being that primitively our mind sees groups as threat (cause they can eat you) and it is only by acknowledging our primitive mind that we can overcome.

Another of his ideas take many queues from early art (especially Michelangelo) on arm placement. There are three main areas belly button, chest level and above the shoulders that convey truth, passion and ecstasy. One of the prime examples in art is the deception of biblical crucifixion (disambiguation) . Scientists and anthropology experts have agreed that in order for crucifixion to be effective the arms have to above the head (this brings on asphyxiation) but the majority of artistic impressions place the arms perpendicular to the body in the passion position.

Great ideas and strategies for dealing with group presentations.

TED Talks

2009-03-09T08:40:00.000-04:00

I'm a great fan of the TED series of lectures and the latest posting is one of my favorites. Taking a look at the economy, Juan Enriquez talks of the bubble burst that is still yet to come and how the savior will not be Santa Claus giving billions of dollars to failing banking institutions but science.

BDOT - Blake, Director of Technology

Mobile Best Practices

Advertising and 3D

NAT Pinning Security Concerns

JQuery for Mobile Web Development

Office 2011 Preview

Question about Mac and Microsoft

HTML5 Roundup

Games

Video

Apps

Medical Monitoring Breakthrough

The Psychology of Change Management

Authentication Methods

Open ID

Logging in

SlashID

The Benefits and Downside of SlashID

Implementation

SR&ED

Subversion

Project Management Success

Managing conflict

Knowing When to Use Different Styles

Competitive/Confrontational Style

Avoiding Style

Accommodating Style

Collaborative Style

Compromising Style

SharePoint

Loyalty?

Browser Penetration

Why does Nicotine bind in the brain but not muscle?

Study gives more proof that intelligence is largely inherited

Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol (HSTP)

SQA Methodologies

The unexpected is a key to human learning

New organic material may speed Internet access

Second Mac Monitor

Cybernetics and Spare Parts: A Robotic Opera and Workshop in Ontario, Online

jQuery Leopard desktop

RIA frameworks

QFocuser

Capacinno - Atlas

Boffswana and Flash

ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act)

Communication Seminar

TED Talks