PEIBlogs.com: the definitive Prince Edward Island blogroll since 2004.: Technical - Computer

I've created an experimental system to allow access to schedule information by telephone: just dial (902) 367-3694 to try this out.

On September 2, 2008, Charlottetown Transit launched additional services, including increased frequency on the main University Avenue run. The Interactive Charlottetown Transit Map has been updated to include these new runs.

Under the hood, the application has been migrated to use jQuery.

After a year without an update, I've finally taken a stab at translating the new route system into the Interactive Transit Map.

The map is currently only showing the University Avenue Express route.

The map has been enhanced so that every scheduled time at each stop is a clickable link to the stops on that "run." This should make planning an actual trip much easier.

There are more details in this ruk.ca blog post.

I've finally had a moment to update the application completely to reflect the schedule changes that took effect on June 12, 2006.

While I'd actually updated the stops, routes and schedule for routes 1 to 4 last month, there were some loose ends related to route 5 that needed to be cleaned up.

The end effect is that:

• Only routes 1 through 4 are included on the map.
• Route 5, which is an "Around Town Loop" that runs "at certain times of the day for added customer service" is not included on the map, because it's schedule and routing is so variable. You can get a a complete schedule as a PDF file if you're interested in that route.
• Because all routes now run Monday through Saturday, I've removed the note about this in the pop-up schedule windows.
• Route 6 disappeared from the schedule as part of the June 12, 2006 updates and isn't a part of the system any longer.

The hiving off of a route "1a" from route 1 is a little bit of a kludge on my part -- there is no official route "1a" on the schedule, it's simply part of route 1. But the run out to Sears and Winsloe is tacked on to route 1 as a side-note on the printed schedule, and is different enough to warrant standalone representation on the map.

One important thing to note about route 1a is that it appears that you can get to Sears, but that you can never get back. This is simply an artifact of the schedule: the bus only stops at Sears on the way out to Winsloe, not on the way back. But to get back from Sears, you get simply get on the next outbound bus, go out to Winsloe, and ride back into town.

The source code and route data in the SVN repository have been updated to reflect these changes.

read more

On Monday, March 13, 2006 service will begin on a new route, the #5 "Around Town Loop."

This route is a reconfiguration of the old "senior's bus" route, and is now available to everyone.

The route is shown in black on the route map.

Also being introduced on Monday is a hybrid route, #6 "Up Town, Across Toen, Downtown." I haven't yet added this route to the Interactive Transit Map, but hope to soon (it's a little more complicated because it's actually 5 different runs added at "certain times of the day for added customer service."

It is always interesting (frustrating) following the upgrade/stick/switch turmoil that goes along with any consideration of moving from a stable devil you know tool versus the shiny new thing. Often the implicit upgrade cycle you would hope to happen is hindered by a slow release cycle on the tool of choice or lack of compelling features. These items have been beaten to death by others but I thought some personal insights from similar struggles I have seen may as well be added.

In any upgrade it is generally the "little things" that surface to haunt you so anyone that has been through a prior upgrade always entertains the idea that there are many of those gremlins just waiting for a chance to laugh at you publicly after you have deployed to your clients.

I participate in two significant products, one based on Delphi 6 and another still on Delphi 5. In both cases the volume of code, testing capacity, and potential re-platforming as are always cited as significant barriers to attacking the upgrade cycle. Due to 3rd party dependencies the latter project has an extremely high bar for upgrading. In both cases the problem is firmly rooted in not carrying out a natural and continuous upgrade cycle with robust testing. Until you have the "must have" in the new version you can't really afford to make the move. The business case simply does not exist and diminishes the further you get from the tip release of you development tool.

Rather than suggest you should not upgrade I think a pragmatic approach that I have found moderately successful is worth highlighting. For much of the server components of one of the products the code has been maintained in each new release of the Borland/CodeGear toolset but always back-compiled and tested using Delphi 6. So, all along the code was maintained in Delphi 7, BDS 2005, BDS 2006, and finally in RAD Studio 2007. That is great, after getting over the the initial hate for some of the IDE changes (SDI) you start to rely heavily on the new features like live templates, refactoring, code metrics, and models. Still nothing new is needed for the product that goes out the door though so upgrade sell is weak based on a "feature case."

But there are definitely reasons to upgrade. Recently, we were doing capacity testing and were a bit disappointed with our numbers and needed a quick hit. Without a single change to compiler options, code base, etc. we performed the same capacity testing with the application suite complied under RAD Studio 2007. We immediately saw a consistent 25-30% capacity volume increase. The majority of this is easily related directly to the the new memory manager (FastMM) and better inlining of key functions. Most of these items we could get if we were willing to alter the system to include or use 3rd party tools but the whole point was OOTB improvement. Since it was server-side code VCL changes really were not a factor.

We did not need the increased capacity immediately so we simply tucked it away in the "good to know" column. Had we needed it I am sure an upgrade on the server components would have happened right then (not a strong enough business case). We are now taking steps to assess a full upgrade on the client and server components and work out a process that will not leave us hung on an older version as we are now. What is the biggest hang up? Proper coverage for the testing. You can never have enough and dealing with tool related problems is never a good sell. An upgrade advisor tool that can run on a project would certainly be nice to have.

Over time though there has been a persistent set of issues that never quite seem to be addressed when you are trying to push a particular upgrade. Don't get me wrong, I am fully in the "upgrade often and stay upgraded" column but this list contains the items that most often leave me hesitant:

1. Install Experience - What you get after you finish the install is great... but getting there is appalling and there is no amount of counter argument that can ever suggest it is acceptable. Most persons that have installed any recent BDS/RAD Studio have most likely installed other products that are equally complex. I can get through OS + Service Packs often faster than I can do the same for RAD Studio. Suggestions that this is an MSI (Windows Installer) problem only serve to alienate those who actually know that it isn't MSI, rather it is how it is being used. MSI may not be fun but it is often a necessary evil.
2. Software Assurance vs Upgrade Cost - Upgrade costs always factor. The problem is they shouldn't, CodeGear has a fabulous subscription service called Software Assurance. While information about Software Assurance is more readily available these days it is still difficult to get your head around it and why it makes so much sense. Make subscriptions the only sales model and show clearly how your frequent release cycle makes this a cost benefit. There are blogs and even calculators out there that demonstrate this but "direct from CodeGear" means something.
3. Difficultly in showing the big benefits - The integration of dUnit, nUnit, MS Build (hmmm, wanted NAnt myself), FastMM, for each looping, code metrics, refactoring, generics, live templates... the list goes on and anyone following along with the upgrades is inherently aware of them and enjoying them but each of these is small by itself and information on them is more often found in blogs or secondary sources. These factors all play into quality and effort reduction improvements in our own projects in terms of quality, defect rates, and performance. The leading question is how do you turn that into a strong business case. The sales pitch "have less defects, more developer time, and a faster more robust product" may exist on the CodeGear site but I haven't seen it.
4. Documentation - Having used Delphi for so long I can't really appreciate the documentation woes that exist but on the occasions I find myself hunting for something in the help I realize just how difficult it can be for an OOTB experience. The help has been improving in first-use and correctness with each release but in some ways is still not on par with Delphi 7 and earlier releases (the language guide is still hard for me to locate to this day). The "little things" kill you here. Try finding the list of VERxxx compiler defines... (tell me if you find it).
5. Features only beneficial on new projects - ECO... everything I have seen and played with suggests this is a great addition to Delphi but the fact remains it is similar to re-platforming when it comes to making use of it. Give me MAC's, 64-bit, Unicode and even CF. These are core improvements I can use on products that have hundreds of man-years invested.

In the end the Delphi product is targeted at developers but the install process is so burdensome that it is difficult for a business application developer to potentially have to spend time on assessing and using the tool when the install experience takes up valuable time and leaves the wrong taste in the mouth and leaves little for a concrete experience in the software.

After all the non-positive comments above I still have to say that the upgrades are well worth the effort but that is more from the fact that I know the benefits are in there from constant exposure to them as opposed to looking at any given

information on the CodeGear site and going "Wow". So, if you have been hedging on upgrading I strongly encourage you to get past the OOTB experience and get used to the product. The benefits are there and your productivity will actually increase. You may even like the SDI interface after some time ;-).

Chris Bensen: Upgrading Delphi
Why aren't you upgrading Delphi- Reasons and myths

It was quite some time ago that I discussed an IFilter implementation using Delphi code. Here is the code for that blog post.

Source download link (v2.1)

Some of the development I have been doing lately has had me searching through the OpenSSL online documentation quite frequently. While most times the OpenSSL site pops up first in the google results it is not always the case. Google allows you to constrain the search to a particular site by adding a site:site-name expression to the search. This is great but more typing than I care to do repeatedly. My solution was to add an OpenSearch to the IE7 search.

The great thing is that this works in both IE and FireFox through the simple inclusion of a <link/> HTML element. If you check your search drop down you should see that OpenSSL Search Provider is availabe for using to search.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
  <ShortName>OpenSSL</ShortName>
  <Description>OpenSSL constrained search using Google</Description>
  <Tags>OpenSSL SSL TLS</Tags>
  <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
  <Url
      type="text/html"
      template="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&amp;q=site%3Awww.openssl.org+{searchTerms}"
      />
  <Query role="example" searchTerms="SSL_new"/>
</OpenSearchDescription>

This <link> should really be in the <head> section of the HTML document but luckily both browsers will pick it up even when it is embedded in the body.

<link
    title="OpenSSL Search Provider"
    href="http://www.run-time-systems.com/blog/openssl-search-provider.xml"
    type="application/opensearchdescription+xml"
    rel="search"
    />

Well it looks like Borland will continue the pattern of introducing version control sub-systems that I like and then removing them from the line up after two or three years. It appears the Standard Edition of StarTeam does not meet with the Borland ALM direction so anyone using it can either move up to the Enterprise licensing or somewhere else. The notice indicates that version control is a commodity so I would expect they believe that anyone who thought that the standard SKU was satisfactory will transition to sub-version or some other free tool.

This is twice now that Borland has provided a version control solution with the Delphi license and then go on to drop support. Both times I was quite happy with the solutions and happily moved to them. TeamSource was a great small shop tool and I really liked the model and integration. I didn't mind switching to StarTeam either and had become rather attached to the great linking support and build tagging.

The problem with this announcement is that the it leaves StarTeam in an all or nothing (planned it would seem) position and if you already have the rest of the change request/ticketing/project management bits taken care of outside of the Borland suite of tools. So, the upgrade scheme isn't really going to fly with me :-(.

The documents that are linked below make no references to the status of StarTeam within the DevCo/DTG but I am sure something will pop up shortly.

Further reading:

Borland Support Newsletter October 2006
Borland StarTeam Standard Edition CR-only Sunset FAQ
Borland StarTeam Edition Sunset Customer Notification

This is just a quick post to confirm the install and use of the beta Windows Live Writer.

If this works it is pretty simple to install and get working.

Our work with Mozilla led us to do some experiments on what can be done with the new HTML5 functionality in Firefox 3.5. With <canvas> and the new HTML5 <video> element, we created a demo that pulls color information out of a live playing video and uses it to style a border around the video. The result is not unlike the tackiest of back-lit LCD tvs.

View the Demo

We’ve been using free and open-source software at silverorange for years now. In the last year, though, we’ve begun releasing more of our internal web-development software stack under an open-source license.

While our Swat web application toolkit (it’s not a framework) has been open since it’s inception, it has been missing some of the key infrastructure required for a healthy open-source project. The code was available, that was about it.

Now, with the new code.silverorange.com website (based on Trac - a past nominee for silverorange employee of the year), we finally have the rest of the public project infrastructure in place.

Most importantly among these changes, we finally have a public bug-tracking system! This took longer than expected because we had Swat bug-tracking tied in with our internal (private client) project tracking. The two are finally separated, and everything that should be open is now out in the open.

We’re are also now in a position to grant SVN commit access to external contributors when appropriate.

The silverorange code site isn’t limited to Swat either. We have a whole set of packages we use for developing client sites, including a back-end website administration package, an e-commerce package, a photo-gallery package, and a (fledgling) weblog package. Each of these projects now has a section of it’s own on the code.silverorange.com site, and they share a mailing list and Jabber chat room with Swat.

For those who have been patient enough to follow and participate in our open-source projects so far, we’re appreciative. We hope to be much more open to external collaboration and contributions with this new infrastructure.

Each year at silverorange, we look back over the last twelve months and bestow honour to one deserving of the title of employee of the year. However, at silverorange, employees, family, and human beings are ineligible.

This leaves the coveted position opened mostly to inanimate objects. In the past three years, the Employee of the Year title has fallen on the following deserving candidates:

Employee of the Year - 2004: Jabber Chat Room

After getting our own Jabber instant messaging server, which allows us to manage our own secure instant messaging infrastructure just like we do with email. One of the benefits of such a service is way secure chat rooms can be easily created. Since then, an enormous amount of our company dialog has taken place in our “Office” Jabber chat room. It has been particularly helpful in keeping our few remote partners in touch with the mother-ship.

Employee of the Year - 2005: Subversion Version Control System

Up until this point, we had been a small enough team working on small enough projects that working on one shared code-based wasn’t too much of a problem. Even at this scale, there was still a need to occasionally yell out “Who’s editing index.php?!” Along with some other changes, bringing in a source code management system (we opted for Subversion) has significantly improved the stability of our general work flow. The history of each file is preserved, and perhaps most importantly, it is easy to watch what everyone else is doing on a project. The benefit of this peer-review (aka, fear of shame) is significant.

Employee of the Year - 2006: Third-Floor Workspace

The third floor of our beautiful turn-of-the-century Victorian building in downtown Charlottetown had seen little use until 2006. Early last year, though, we set up a large communal desk, rife with power and network adapters. This became the place we would gather when we were working together on a project. When you ran into an issue that needed another the help or insight of co-worker, they were only a glance away. An LCD projector also helps with group reviews of current project sites.

As a result, many of us now spend most of our working time here at this large group desk. We’ve joked that we could sell our building and move into one room with one desk. We know, though, that working together in a room like this only works because we know we can retreat to our private desks and offices at any point if we need some time without distraction.

2007

Earlier this month, we convened for our annual winter summit on the north shore of Prince Edward Island. Looking back over the year, we examined a few potential candidates for the 2007 Employee of the Year. Promising candidates included our BBQ, Trac, our crock pot (chili and beef stew on Wednesdays!), Firebug, our drink fridge, our Dell projector, our Wii (and Wii Sports), the toilet, and the improvised cardboard lids for our waste and compost bins. Considering two pieces of cardboard as the Employee of the Year might seem a bit odd, but it’s quite likely that they prevented a breakout of malaria in the office following a fruit-fly issue in the late summer.

After this superficial and possibly beer-fueled evaluation, we chose to name the 2007 Employee of the Year as follows:

The Drink Fridge

Having beer, tea, and juice has kept us hydrated, and helped us to speed up the process of passing the caffeine from our morning coffee through our systems. Firebug was a very close runner-up. Some even claim there was some vote tampering, however, given the one-raised-hand=one-vote system, it’s hard to imagine much room for fraud.

Better luck next year, crock pot.

Swat 1.2.35 is released and available for download. This release of Swat contains the usual bugfixes, code cleanups and feature improvements. Additionally, this release features several important IE6/7 JavaScript and CSS fixes relating to hasLayout. Many thanks to the contributors of On Having Layout.

Download the latest release of Swat. You can upgrade from an existing PEAR install using pear upgrade Swat.

JavaScript is a ubiquitous technology used on modern websites. With the rise of several prominent JavaScript libraries developers are realizing JavaScript is a legitimate language for complicated programs. With this understanding, larger and more complex JavaScript applications are developed.

To create and maintain large JavaScript applications, coding conventions and documentation are necessary. Unfortunately, coding conventions and documentation result in larger file sizes. Since JavaScript is often served over the web, developers should be concerned with file size. As a result, it is common practise to run JavaScript source files through a filter that strips comments and white-space.

http://confedtrailmap.com/trail-blog/category/mapping-the-confed-trail/

Visit the Site to learn more...

http://pei.vespershine.com

I added a Map to my Beaches of PEI page last night. There are many ways to add a map to your website. The Beaches of PEI map I developed yesterday is powered by Google Maps,Google map search is powered by Google AdSense, I developed the code using Google Code Playground.

Another site that has useful tools for creating map is mapchannels.com/ I played around with this or a while and was able to get a functioning map before being inspired to try creating one from scratch right from the source.

• If you want a map similar to this on your website there are plenty of resources online to do it yourself however if you prefer to hire somebody to set it up and teach you how to update it, contact me for a quote.
• If you are trying to create a map on your own using the tools mentioned and need some help, have any additional tips, or just want to leave a comment, feel free to comment to this post.

http://www.vespershine.com/web-design/translucent-border/

http://mashable.com/2009/05/20/twitter-personal-brand/

As recommended by http://twitter.com/danschawbel, on using http://twitterfeed.com to post blog entries to my profile on Twitter.

And this is my first post using this resource.

http://www.imeem.com

Imeem.com is a cool music site that lets you create and share a playlist of your favorite songs. It is also a great site for discovering new music and rediscovering songs you have not heard in a while. Check out this link to my "Some classics of rock" playlist, http://www.imeem.com/people/n6zpdJE/playlist/vgB8wJoX/some-classics-of-rock-music-playlist/
then sign up and create your own.

Share your own playlist on your website, blog or Facebook, its easy.