So I just made my first ever Squidoo lens for my Wammy’s House blog.  It serves no real purpose other than to point Google searches towards my blog.  For example, I’m guessing that a lot of people who search ‘Wammys House’ will soon be pointed towards here.  This is both good and bad.  It’s bad because most likely the people who are searching for stuff about Wammy’s House are likely searching for stuff related to the anime series.  It’s good because it’s more readers for the stuff I’m writing!  I’ve tried to add in a bunch of tags too though on my interests (BRM, BPM, Second Life, Android etc etc) in effort to get some hits from those searches too, but most likely they won’t yield many readers since they are fairly generic tags. Continue reading Getting the word out

I was told some time back by a colleage that they went to a corporate sponsored managerial class and learned to peel a banana from the bottom side up, instead of ripping it at the top and peeling down. I asked her why they were teaching them about peeling bananas. She said:

“Because monkeys peel bananas this way and it’s more efficient. They’ve done it for thousands of years!”

So, choosing to use her words of wisdom today I peeled my banana from the bottom up. FAIL. Not only did the method involve a second step of removing the black dot from the bottom of the banana manually (which is done as part of the existing one-step peel solution) but I also squashed the bottom of my banana trying to break open the peel since there was no ’shaft’ to the banana to leverage. All in all a working one-step process was turned into a two-step failed process.

I guess over time humans evolved PAST monkeys and learned a superior technique to peel the banana. <rant>Though I’m sure some corporate heavy manager-drone course would prefer programming us all to act like monkeys</endrant>. My counter lesson-learned (albiet ultimately similar to the original message) is that just because an existing process has been in place for a long long time, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the most efficient process and we should always strive to try new ways to improve these things.

Recently I’ve been exploring the area of business rules for an upcoming provincial government project. For this project we’ll be dealing with student loan processing, which as you can imagine has 1001 (or more) rules for how much money a student can get from the government to go to post secondary school.

Right off the bat our team made the decision to use a rules engine to store all of the business rules in.  This is kind of a no-brainer, since nobody wants to scour through a million lines of program code to find out the interest rate on a particular type of student loan (for example).

Aside from simply implementing these rules in a rules engine though for our project, there is a number of things we could do to add a tonne more value to the same information.  With pictures for example, instead of just taking a picture on your camera and storing it in a folder on your computer you can now upload it to Flickr, annotate it with notes, have friends comment, add tags for organization, geo-tag for geographical reference etc etc.  I think we can do the same thing for business rules just like we do for pictures on Flickr, and I’d like to speculate a bit about this in my blog.

Continue reading Business rules for an open government

Ok so my loving girlfriend recently did an amazingly awesome thing and bought me an HTC Dream (more commonly known as the T-Mobile G1) for my birthday.  As a geek these kinds of things make your skin stand up on end, as well as bring about manic depression as you bunk work early during the week of it’s potential delivery, hoping to be at home when the item arrives.  Depression kicks in naturally as the item is more than likely late, leaving you devastated and without your new toy in hand.  Yup, while we geeks do grow up and become evil geniuses with the capacity to rule the world, when it comes to new toys we pretty much turn into mindless kids.

So, after a few bouts of depression and three missed deliveries, my new mobile was finally in my hands.  I had a guilty sense of delight watching that little green android glow on the screen as the device booted for the first time.  Actually, I still get that same warm feeling, not that I’d openly admit it to anybody.

Wait, why not an iPhone?  It has more applications, a smaller footprint, a higher resolution screen and supports 3G in Canada already!

Well, to sum it up:  I want to develop applications, and with Android being open source and Linux based I figured it would be the preferable development environment.  From a business perspective, if I ever wanted to sell said hypothetical application Android would be a better platform than Mac to sell on since it will inevitably reach a vastly larger audience than iPhone ever will.  (Do you see DR Congo getting iPhones anytime soon??).  Smells like 1984 all over again, except this time Google will take a turn kicking Apples butt for being ignorant.

Anyway, I actually bought my device on eBay from the US so I can’t buy paid applications right now.  Hopefully Rogers new addition of the G1 / G2 will change this though!  I was going to buy a US sim card to trick my device into thinking it was a US based device but perhaps I won’t have to anymore.

Note: I just want to mention here saying that this post was substantially longer as of yesterday, but with this news this morning, my whole blog post was pretty much nullified!  I was writing a beautifully informative article on getting my G1 working in Canada, but since the darn thing is coming here via Rogers next month anyway it doesn’t really matter!

Found this when reading reviews on the Firefox Tab Sidebar plugin.  Aligns well with what I’d love to see in a web browser.  Instatiatable web launchers (think OS X dock launchers) and built to maximize real estate.  Can’t wait!  I think Mozilla is aiming to get Firefox here in the nearish future??

I know this isn’t a professional blog, but it’s somewhat professional! First of all, this is just a quick post to show a bit of the Diwali show I went to last night at the University of Victoria. AWESOME show, and I’d love to go see more of this dancing. This video is just a snapshot of some of the action.

Second point, I’m posting this blog entry directly from flickr using service integration I’ve never seen before. Very cool (if it works) and a nice and easy way to make quick blog posts of your photos and videos.

There was an option under the sharing feature called ‘Blog It’ and it must have been put there from some flickr extension I installed on my wordpress blog perhaps? We’ll see if this works anyway! If it does, SO cool!

Ok, I’m no political guru, and I find it annoying to follow politics period.  Social media though is making this a lot easier.  I’m not sure if the parties were always setup in the key tools like Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook etc but they are for this election coming up and it makes it very easy to follow their updates.

Public Timeline Tweets Canada Election 2008

I whipped this pipe up this evening to track all of the tweets happened related to the election coming up this year.  I’m going to spend some time tonight trying to aggregate more election data in an easy to understand way.  There is loads of RSS links from the parties websites, and it would be nice to be able to follow some key items like election promises, commercials and other media.

Let me know what you think!

Here’s a video I made using a wicked cool SaaS animation studio called Fuzzwich.  Animations were all created using the minivid tool they provide, and then stitched together with iMovie on my Mac.  Music was borrowed from the Katamari Damacy OST (just so that attribution is properly given).

RMS Idol from llawliet on Vimeo.

On a side note, I CANNOT wait for this to be released in public beta!!!  It’s going to change the way we do presentations in business and how we create epidemically popular TV shows and movies!