http://masalalabs.ca Sun, 03 Jan 2010 03:39:44 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Hurrah, 2010 is upon us! One new years resolution I have set for myself is to blog more about what I'm working on. I've learned over the last year that the audience of people who care about your projects in development is vanishingly small. Thus, the need for secrecy in ... http://masalalabs.ca/2010/01/projects-for-2010/ Near a client's office in beautiful old Montreal. Originally uploaded by William Lachance So I haven't been blogging much lately. Story of my life, I'll try to be a bit more active in the new year. I'm now back living in Montréal, which has been great. Very sad to leave Halifax and all ... http://masalalabs.ca/2009/12/changes/ Started to use a new piece of hardware at the Navarra office today, which resulted in the following gem being added to the GNOME notification area. Would anyone care to guess what the following icon is supposed to represent? [caption id="attachment_54" align="alignleft" width="277" caption="Image of crazy status icon in notification area"][/caption] http://masalalabs.ca/2009/08/icon-metaphor-fail/ I think it's fair to say that Halifax's first iPhone hackathon for charity was a big success. The idea was pretty simple: get a group of people (developers, marketers, artists) together over a weekend and try to produce as many iPhone apps as possible over the course of a weekend. ... http://masalalabs.ca/2009/07/iphone-hackathon-4-charity-halifax-edition/ People frequently ask me how I manage to collect and input the data that is used by hbus.ca, given Metro Transit's intransigence. The "bike and GPS" angle is well known by now, but what about the rest of the process? How do I get the data into a format that ... http://masalalabs.ca/2009/04/creating-a-google-transit-feed-for-fun-and-profit/ [caption id="attachment_18" align="alignleft" width="410" caption="hbus in action"][/caption]So I opened up my baby, hbus.ca, to the public last week (though traffic only really started to pick up yesterday, after a positive article in the daily news). This site, a trip planner for the Halifax Regional Municipality, was the cumulation of about ... http://masalalabs.ca/2009/03/hbusca-and-thoughts-about-crowdsourcing/ Cat watching himself Originally uploaded by William Lachance Been meaning to update this more, but I've been rather busy. Quite a bit of excitement going on, though I haven't been making time to blog about it (I've been more into the twitter thing lately). More soon. http://masalalabs.ca/2009/03/breaking-news-cat-watches-himself-in-tv/ I've been experimenting a little bit with maps urls on the iphone. If you've read Apple's web developer guidelines, you'll know that URLs of this form will automatically redirect to the maps application: Halifax, Nova Scotia <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?geocode=&q=Halifax,Nova Scotia">Halifax, Nova Scotia</a> This is fine if you just want to highlight one particular location ... http://masalalabs.ca/2009/02/maps-urls-on-mobile-safari/