A few months ago, MLBR (our DBA) decided to try something different. Rather than sit all day, he modified his desk to be about 14 inches taller, added a cushy mat, and started standing all day. There has been a bit of news over the last year about how bad sitting all day is, so that’s motivated a few more desk conversions – we now have 7 altogether.

For me, I found that standing for 4 hours took some adjustment, but having my chair completely removed from my desk area helped. (That, and some friendly skepticism from Idowu, a nearby coworker.) By day 3 I was able to stand for 8 hours, though I find that sitting down for lunch is nice relief. If I need to read something printed that’s more than a page long, I find myself gravitating toward some nice couches in the front of the office.

Overall, I’ve found that I feel better and more energetic through the day. When I’m done with work, there’s also a bit of relief and it feels good to be naturally tired. I program for most of the day, so I was using my brain far more than anything else, which lead to amusing things at the end of the day…

If you’re interested in trying it out yourself, here are a couple tips:

• We obviously aren’t medical experts, so be sure to talk to your doctor.
• You’ll notice that we just used some cheap cinder blocks (be aware that they are deceptively heavy) to stack our desks up higher – these seem to work well and make it easy to convert the desks back if we want to. (There are also desks out there that adjust automatically.) You may want to use a small stack of business cards or something like that if your floor isn’t quite level.
• Your monitor(s) will likely need to be raised a bit too
• Our desks seem to be most comfortable at elbow height
• Get a mat for your feet and slip your shoes off while you stand

We’d be interested in hearing if you’re trying out standing desks and if you have any suggestions. Feel free to leave a comment below.

• Automatic Watering system
  Watches the moisture level in soil and flips a relay to turn on a pump
• PocketPanda
  An Android app that shows live video from the San Diego zoo and allows you to send snapshots of those precious panda moments to family and friends
• Stickers Everywhere
  The 3-Jenn team redecorated a significant portion of the office
• Jenkins (nee Hudson) Build Light
  A USB-connected light shows the status of the latest build
• MongoDB Scaling
  Testing out how MongoDB does with large datasets…and how it works in general
• Kinect Vision
  Trying out Kinect’s depth vision with Linux
• Statty
  An idea in progress to make interactive stats displays on the wall

We put together a 3-minute video to show off some of the stuff…

Ever see a special someone and want to let them know you thought they are cute? Our newly formed mobile development team has just launched an app to help out – Flurt.



From the app store: 


“Flurt is a location aware social app that allows you to anonymously send and receive flirts.”



Since launching the app in Winnipeg last week, Flurt has had over two thousand downloads and garnered attention from the Winnipeg Free Press, City TV, 92 Citi FM and Hot 103. Listen to the not so flirtatious (but excellent) interview Jeff did with Ace Burpee.



Flurt-interview-hot-103



Have a smart phone & want to try Flurt? Its currently available for iPhone and Android. Click your way on over to http://www.flurt.me and try it out!

I want to thank everybody for the feedback we received. It is highly valued and will help us line up future events that will meet your needs and wants. We already have topics lined up for the next couple of meetups before the summer holidays kick in. This month’s will be:

Maintain Sanity on Large Projects: OOP in PHP 5.3

When: Monday, May 30^th 6:00PM

Where: Tipping Canoe, 101-141 Bannatyne Ave. Winnipeg

Description: An overview of OOP in PHP, including new features in 5.3:

• - why OOP in PHP
• - namespaces
• - inheritance and overrides
• - plus, some functional programming features

Presenter: Orion Ifland has been a senior developer at Tipping Canoe since 2009. Orion has led teams in developing web-based consumer applications built on the LAMP stack and brings a passion for test-driven development and continuous integration. He has also been instrumental in integrating many of the precepts of Scrum into his teams. Orion holds a Bachelor’s Degree of Computer Science from Trinity Western University.

We’re planning on bringing in the pizza a few minutes earlier so folks can socialize a bit before the presentation starts. As always we will try to keep the presentation under an hour so people can get home at a reasonable time, but there’s always extra chat time after the event and later on at the Kings Head for those so inclined.

I am working at getting a permanent home up on teh interwebs for Winnipeg PHP, but in the meantime you can always check into our Google Group or our Facebook Group look it up: Winnipeg PHP.

Last year’s acquisition of Sun by Oracle sent shockwaves through the MySQL community and many were left wondering what that meant for the future of MySQL. It’s true that Oracle wanted Java and Solaris under their umbrella, but MySQL just happened to come along for the rider. That being said there seemed to be few grumblings about Oracle’s commitment to the development of MySQL. The early reports on the development release of MySQL 5.6 appear favourable thus far. What is important to note is that the announcement for this release was made at Collaborate ‘11 – the conference for the Oracle community which was held at the same time but on the opposite coast.

The area that most of our fellow professionals seemed to be taking Oracle to task on was support. This was most notable in the number of alternatives to Oracle support that were being presented: Percona, SkySQL and of course Monty Program founded by Michael “Monty” Widenius – the original creator of MySQL. Oracle is in the business to make money, and there are plenty of people who believe they can step in to compete against Oracle’s pricetag on support for MySQL. Heck, there are plenty of people who believe they can compete against Oracle’s development of MySQL. I lost count of how many sessions were presented for competing alternatives or even mixed flavorings – “Developing With MySQL Beside <insert product here>”.

Fragmentation was the buzzword-du-jour. This is natural in a marketplace still adjusting to last year’s Oracle-Sun news. There are reasons that large enterprises consider specialized database solutions – they have specialized needs. RDBMS is not the only solution for every database scheme. NoSQL as a concept was being bandied about long before last year’s conference and the newer document-based data storage options available today are a reflection of that reality. Although MySQL is not the only option, I don’t think anything has changed from it still being the best option for most open source developers. Besides – LAMP is still easier to say than LADP. (Drizzle should have called themselves Mizzle. MariaDB and MongoDB at least still obey the stack!)

As a developer I took home a lot of knowledge about indexing. That is not to say that I wrote bad SQL before. But I will certainly write better SQL now. Visualizing data as it is stored and retrieved is very different from visualizing data results. I already knew why I needed an index for some data, and I even knew how to use an index for faster retrieval. What I hadn’t properly understood, however, was how to reorder a where clause in a query to better leverage a multiple-field index and the importance of equality operators in doing so. Seeing indexes as ordered lookup tables where each index can be scanned for data in a contiguous fashion rather than piece-meal was epiphonic for me. One entire table scan on an improperly thought out index can render the other indices useless. If you understand why defragging your hard drive makes your laptop run faster, or why having a chronological file folder of mixed receipts doesn’t really help you all that much if you need to find a gas bill from 1996, 1999 or 2007 – then you can appreciate how leveraging multiple indexes properly can make your database more efficient. A covering index comes at a cost of course – slower insertion and updating. It is easier to throw a gas receipt into the “2004″ file folder than it is to create and label a “G” folder, put it in the “2004″ folder and then add “G” to the list of letters on the “2004″ folder. Sure makes it easier to find that receipt when you need it though.

I was quite pleased to see that memcached and Sphinx were still actively being developed. It was also rewarding to find out that Tipping Canoe is actually pretty cutting edge in the ways that we use these technologies in our environment. Something new for us, though, was Adminer: a drop in replacement for phpMyAdmin. Instead of fixing the things he didn’t like about phpMyAdmin Jakub Vrana built his own admin tool. His presentation gave us plenty to talk about and our DBA is currently investigating Adminer’s possibilities.

MySQL’s future remains bright. The product is being developed as Oracle promised it would be. Just because Oracle has little interest in involvement with the community does not mean that the community itself does not exist. It is there and it is still immensely active and will be for the foreseeable future. As long as there are people working on the codebase, people supporting the product and people deploying the releases in their various solutions then there will be a community. What O’Reilly chooses to call next year’s conference will be interesting, but irrelevant. What is relevant is MySQL itself – it is here to stay.

Winnipeg PHP is not a Business Group. It is not a Student Group. It is not even strictly a Users Group. It is just a group of: web developers, designers, hobbyists, students, hackers, IT professionals, entrepreneurs and pretty much anybody who has ever used, touched or merely seen PHP. So whether you develop enterprise level software, design websites or just dabble in html scripts, we hope this group will offer a little something for all of you.

This being the first meeting feel free to drop in anytime after 4:00 if that’s when you are finished work. We want to accommodate you as best as possible until we can find out what works for most people.

Winnipeg PHP Google Group:
http://groups.google.com/group/winnipeg-php?hl=en

Winnipeg PHP Facebook Group
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_199321530088445

JL enjoyed connecting with classmates and noted that 30% of the women present were from Tipping Canoe! Her favourite session: jQuery.

Dave cleaned up in the prize department, winning a book and a keyboard. He enjoyed learning about database-driven apps on WP7.

Kathrin’s favourite session was Stupid Mistakes Made by Smart People. (She noted also that SkullSpace had a significant presence at Code Camp.)

I liked the “C# Ninjitsu” session, learning some ways to write cleaner, more understandable C# code. Though I don’t write a lot of C# now, one of the concepts was “fluid” code, which translates pretty well to other languages. The idea here is that reading from left to right is more natural, so rather than calling functions like this

c(b(a(x)))

where it’s like peeling an onion to read the code, use method chaining like

x.a().b().c()

I see this style primarily in jQuery, though method chaining can also be done in PHP (e.g. phpQuery).

Mobile Web Dev

In the “Web Dev for Mobile Devices” session, we discussed mobile web development and worked our way through the many options (and challenges) of writing for mobile devices:

• Native apps vs web apps
• Generic web apps vs apps designed specifically for mobile browsers
• Generic mobile web apps vs those that detect the device type and attempt to feel “native”
• HTML5 vs Flash vs Silverlight…vs what browsers actually support
• H.264 vs WebM
• Natively coded, platform-specific apps vs native apps designed with HTML/CSS/JS (e.g. PhoneGap) and deployed to multiple platforms

Though there weren’t a lot of definite answers, I left with some good questions to think about:

• How might your website be used in an “on-the-go” situation?
• What are the most important things that a mobile user might want from your business?
• How mobile-friendly is your current site? How many mobile users are visiting already?
• If you’re getting into mobile development, do you have any company devices for testing or are they all personal devices?

I think it’s pretty clear that this is a new and growing field and the challenge to me was to spend more time on the mobile platform both as a user and as a developer.

]]> http://www.tippingcanoe.com/blog/canoers-at-code-camp/feed 0 http://www.tippingcanoe.com/blog/tedx-manitoba http://www.tippingcanoe.com/blog/tedx-manitoba#comments Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:50:55 +0000 dave http://www.tippingcanoe.com/?p=342 On Tuesday, February 25^th Winnipeg was witness to a rather unique event for this province called “TEDx Manitoba”. TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. For those unfamiliar TED they bill themselves as a small nonprofit devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading”. TED is actually an acronym for Technology, Entertainment, Design, but that scope has broadened since TED’s inception. The theme for this one day event was “Emergence” and the subtitle scrawled across the program was “Culture – Technology – Community” which, although only containing the T from TED, none-the-less fulfilled their mandate to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group.

Tipping Canoe was pleased to be one of the sponsors of this event and I myself was privileged to attend. I did not know what to expect when I showed up. Having streamed many a TED Talk in the past I had a general idea of what to expect from TED in general, but what would be the flavour of a local independently organized event like TEDx? The speakers were varied: ranging from a 15-year old teen girl to an award winning scifi author, from a Cistercian Monk to a trio of ex-gang members. Their messages were as diverse as their backgrounds and disciplines, but their focus seemed to be the same: they all had large ideas that they wanted to help inspire others act upon. Questions were posed, novel ideas were presented, preconceptions were challenged, and in the end I believe even the most jaded person had to have walked away just a bit more pensive and thoughtful than when they arrived.

One of my personal highlights of the day was seeing Terry MacLeod, CBC’s host of Information Radio and a man whose voice I am well accustomed to hearing every day in my car, interview three young men who at one time would have all proudly proclaimed themselves as gangsters. “Finding Life Beyond The Gang” presented three brave men on their stools under the glare of the theater lights describing to us a life that I simply would not have been able to comprehend if relayed dispassionately by another. They shared with us glimpses into their family troubles, their struggles with addiction, countless run-ins with the law and of course their involvement in gangs. Unable to relate my own personal history to anything like their own I was surprised at how easily Terry was able to help them convey to me in the audience what it felt like to be them. I saw the hopelessness of the lack of choices they perceived before them in the beginning of their descent. I understood their desire for the respect and acceptance of a gang while they immersed themselves into that street culture. And when in the end they chose to leave I recognized the courage it took to make that choice. Finally I felt the tug of empathy when they pled for acceptance into so-called normal society. Earlier I wrote that I could not to relate to these stories. But couple the mere words of their stories with the emotion behind them and the candor with which they answered Terry’s poking and prodding and there was something that I could relate to: a scary future with limited choices, a struggle for acceptance with a social group, a decision to make a life-altering change, and finally a seemingly endless stream of barriers and obstacles hindering one’s progress. Well these are certainly the sorts of stories that each and every person in the audience must have felt at one point or another in their lives. If not they probably will yet. Thank you Terry for that wonderful segment.

I was also very much taken with the talks given by Kerry Stevenson on “How 3D Printing Will Change The Way You Think” and by Rev. Fr. Bernard McCoy on “Social Entrepreneurism For The 21st Century”. Kerry Stevenson described for us recent developments in 3D Printing that I had no idea were so close to appearing in our homes. I know the technology had advanced from Star Trek TNG tea-making to Discovery Channel features, but the idea that I could own one for less than the cost of a high end TV blew me away. Rev. McCoy also set my mind spinning with his ideas for aligning non-profits with for-profits and running non-profits as if they were for-profits. Not new concepts, but certainly new in the breadth and scope that he was suggesting. As the “worst-paid CEO in North America” Rev. McCoy has been finding his “work + prayer = peace” through running an office supply company. I myself admit that previous to this talk I had thought that monks only made beer and calligraphy (well not truly, but you know what I mean). I also have to say that Laser Monks is the best name for an office supply company I have ever heard.

I hope there will be more TEDx events in the future. I certainly enjoyed this one. Maybe someday we can have the larger event here. Everyone involved certainly seemed able and willing to dream big and I don’t doubt for a second that there is interest in Winnipeg.

 

]]> http://www.tippingcanoe.com/blog/tedx-manitoba/feed 0 http://www.tippingcanoe.com/blog/learning-svg http://www.tippingcanoe.com/blog/learning-svg#comments Thu, 02 Dec 2010 07:41:57 +0000 orion http://www.tippingcanoe.com/?p=323

In the Web Industry, things change at a pretty rapid pace. For example, it’s been less than 6 years since Google Maps launched and brought on a renewed interest in Javascript. And only in the last couple of years have all the major browsers upgraded their Javascript engines to run much, much faster than first-generation engines.

To keep up with those changes, we spend a significant amount of time on learning: watching videos, giving presentations within the office, keeping up on tech news sources, and going to conferences. We also get a chance to try out new ideas on our monthly Hack Days.



One of the “new” things I’ve been dabbling with over the last few years is SVG – it’s an XML-based vector graphics format that’s supported by Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer 9. (I say “new” because it’s been around for almost a decade.) I’ve enjoyed using Inkscape to make lots of little projects like graphics for presentations, icons for Selenium, and calendars for family Christmas presents. And the cool thing is that I can go in and edit those files by hand if I want to – it’s all XML-based. If you’re interested in learning Inkscape, there are several good tutorials.



For the November Hack Day, I wanted to combine SVG and Javascript to make a dynamic, scalable image-based application. It’s a geography game (since it seems that all the cool Javascript apps have to involve maps) and we were able to find plenty of maps and flags on Wikipedia to get things rolling. To keep things simple to start, we made an analog clock first and figured out how to use Javascript events and the XML DOM to animate it. While figuring out how to rotate the hands, we had to tinker with coordinate systems a little because Inkscape does some tricks to override the typical SVN/Screen layout: Inkscape uses the lower-left corner  as the origin (at least it looks that way) and SVG uses the upper-left corner. Getting the “layer” group’s coordinates fixed turned out to be the key there.



After working out a plan for how the game would work, we split things up into components. It turns out you can actually use a container HTML document and pop a bunch of individual SVG files into it and make them work together. One of the components led us to figure out how shapes actually work, since it seemed that most of our shapes were “paths” (polylines/curves/etc.)

Anyhow, we got the game functional by the end of the day- zooming the map, watching a timer count down, showing the flags, and detecting clicks on countries on the map. If there’s interest, we might stick up a public version of the game once it’s a little more polished. As a bonus, we were able to demo it working on an iPad, pinch-zooming and all!




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