My blog has been pretty quiet recently because I’ve been busy getting up to speed at the new job.  We’ve re-branded ourselves and our product as Pulse Energy.  We had a launch party at the offices of Busby Perkins + Will, one of the foremost architecture firms in the world when it comes to designing green and LEED certified buildings.  The Mayor of Vancouver came, we served Enertini’s complete with dry ice garnish.  It was a good time.

One of the project’s we’ve been working on is monitoring energy savings during Earth Hour for some of the bigger buildings around Vancouver.  So tonight, for an hour, many buildings will be shutting off HVAC systems, lights and more.  For those not in the Pacific time zone you can check it out on our site in real-time (but if you’re in the Pacific Daylight zone please wait until after 9:30 when Earth Hour is over — we can all live without email, tweets, FaceBook and YouTube for an hour!).

We have some very interesting technical work at Pulse.  Our software is making a real difference in helping companies with large building portfolios improve their bottom line and reduce the impact on the environment. We’re looking for smart people in the Vancouver area to join us as developers, QA engineers, information architects, business analysts and more.  Check out our current postings. We’re always looking for good people.

At the November Vancouver Enterprise Forum Steve Jones presented a 100 second lightning talk on Small Energy Group.  We talked afterwards, exchanged emails that evening and I stopped by the office to meet a few members of the team later that week.  I came in for a more formal round of interviews a week later and was thoroughly impressed with everyone I met.  I was invited for skating, cocktails and small plates at the company holiday gathering at Grouse Mountain overlooking Vancouver on a crisp, clear winter evening.  I walked away thoroughly enjoying the time I spent with everyone.

Small Energy Group’s software provides insight into how energy is used so more intelligent decisions can be made about consumption and conservation. Sure it is green and good for the Earth and future generations.  But it also boils down to good business sense by controlling costs and improving the bottom line.

This is a new domain for me so I’m sure my understanding is a bit naive and my ability to explain the space leaves a bit to be desired but the simple analogy I used to explain to friends and family while I was home in Chicago is a security system.  Universities, corporations and homeowners install sensors on windows, doors and in hallways to monitor activity in one or more buildings.  When something goes awry any number of things can happen from having someone call to check-in or automatically dispatching the police and fire departments.

Now imagine a system with sensors on heaters, A/C units and water valves.  Not only can we monitor for excessive water flow in the case where a pipe breaks or above normal heating oil consumption when someone leaves windows or an outside vent open but we can learn how energy is consumed in a building over time and help people adjust expectations and behavior to be more efficient or take into account the impact of weather.

During the ‘08 elections there was a lot of rhetoric about developing ways to take advantage of alternative energy sources and reduce dependence on oil.  This is admirable and something I’m glad to see pursued with significant R&D dollars.  But as Tim O’Reilly blogged we don’t need to wait 10 or 15 years for research to start paying off.  We can change our behavior today.  But we can only change by first understanding how we act today.

In my mind the mission of Small Energy Group falls into the “Work on stuff that matters” category Tim mentions.  Add smart and fun people to the mix and the decision to join the team was an easy one to make.  The company’s tag line is “When small pieces come together in a coordinated way, big things happen.”  2008 ended for me with many small pieces falling in to place.  Now I’m looking forward to big things on all fronts in 2009.

Happy New Year!

Since I met Martin Logan, a colleague at Orbitz, and listened to what he had built with Erlang and how passionate he was about the language I’ve kept my ears open for Erlang news and stories.  I even dabbled with writing a bit of Erlang and working through Programming Erlang from The Pragmatic Programmers. But I always thought the name Erlang was a contraction of Ericsson Language giving credit to its heritage of being developed internally at Ericsson.

But tonight I learned it is not.  Or at least not entirely.

Since reading Release It! at the Orbitz Book Club I’ve followed Michael Nygard’s blog for the very practical advice he gives on operationalizing systems.  I spent a portion of my afternoon working through some capacity planning numbers to prepare for a site launch.  Thinking Michael might have some interesting insights I opened up his blog in NetNewsWire and was happy to see a new post to read before digging in to the archives.  But how appropriate when I saw the subject was using Erlang models for capacity planning.

It is a great article and something I’ll hopefully be able to put in to practice.  Scaling and capacity planning is somewhat of a black art.  If anyone thinks they have a clear approach to removing the mystery there are lots of people who would enjoy seeing Size It! on The Pragmatic Programmers list of titles.

But it was all too coincidental that a Danish telephone engineer named A. K. Erlang developed capacity planning models for early phone networks and the switches produced by Ericsson which scale so well and have minimal downtime have largely attributed  the success to having been written in Erlang.  Of course Wikipedia gives some insight into this and even has a citation to back it up:

“Erlang is named after A. K. Erlang. It is sometimes thought that its name is an abbreviation of Ericsson Language, owing to its origin inside Ericsson. According to Bjarne Däcker, who headed the Computer Science Lab at the time, this duality is intentional.”

Coming from the topographically challenged Midwest, scenes like this put a huge smile on my face every time I see them.  

It was a perfect day for hiking but if I had a boat I’d have joined two kayakers I met.

Most of the day was spent hiking at the aptly, if uncreatively named, Lighthouse Park on Point Atkinson.  This will definitely be the place I’ll bring visitors.  It is easy to get to and the trails are nice and wide for people of all athletic abilities and the views can’t be beat.

There is a major street in Vancouver named Arbutus.  While many of the North-South streets are named after trees I didn’t realize Arbutus was a tree.  Common to the Pacific Northwest I’d never seen or touched one before.  It is ideal for burning because it burns long and hot.  Unfortunately I don’t have a fireplace but I’ll file it away until I do because they keep telling me how cold it is going to get.

After thoroughly exploring Lighthouse Park we continued on to Horseshoe Bay where many of the ferries leave and on to Whytecliff Park to take in the sunset which was a great way to end a beautiful day.

Grand Central

One twelve year long chapter of my life ended and an exciting new one began when I moved from Chicago to Vancouver earlier this fall.  I’ve updated addresses and the most visible remaining Chicago vestige is the 773 area code on my mobile.  My initial hope was to get a Vancouver 778 or 604 number from Grand Central and have it route to my US phone.  Everyone in the states could continue to call the 773 number I’ve had for years and hopefully potential employers in Canada would be seamlessly routed through none the wiser that I was still fairly transient in Canada.  No dice — GC only allows you to reserve a number in a US area code. 

AT&T’s roaming rates in Canada would’ve killed this option eventually anyways.  The first cellular carrier to wise up and NAFTA-fy their calling plans to make it reasonable to use a mobile phone in both the US and Canada has a sizable market along the 49th parallel.

As I settled in to Vancouver the need for a local 778 number became more pressing so I eventually purchased an iPhone 3G on Rogers.  Reading my AT&T agreement I realized I could forward my US phone to my GC and while GC may not have Vancouver prefixes there is nothing stopping you from routing a GC number to a Vancouver prefix.  Now those potential employers really are calling a phone with a 778 number while friends and family in the States still call the 773 number and pay local rates.  Additionally, I avoid near criminal roaming charges and most importantly I only need to carry one phone.  Seems like a perfect solution.

Almost…

There are two gaps I’m still looking to fill:

1. Forwarding SMS messages: I still need to check my US phone daily for any text messages which were sent to it.  While I know SMS forwarding is available in Europe I haven’t found anything available for AT&T customers.  Perhaps there is an iPhone app I haven’t discovered (or one waiting to be written).
2. Retrieving voice mail: Part of the GC value proposition is unified communication which means a single voice mailbox.  When I don’t pick up a call which has been routed through GC it doesn’t ring into my Rogers voice mail but to my GC voice mail.  GC sends me a text message letting me know someone left a message but I can’t get to it from an iPhone unless I call to retrieve it which of course would be an international call back to the States at a ridiculous rate.  The GC web interface requires Flash, which doesn’t exist on the iPhone.  GC recently released a mobile site but the MP3 of the message doesn’t play in the iPhone Quicktime player.  Arghh!  So close…

I realize I’m using GC as a glorified (and free) forwarding system instead of the “One Number, One Voicemail Box” solution it is meant to be but has anyone else found a solution to either of these problems?
Maybe if I can find a way to get the MP3 out of Grand Central and to Jott I can get a transcription.  Although a cursory look at the Jott API doesn’t look sending MP3s for transcription is a part of the API.  As a bonus I wouldn’t have to sit through those VMs certain people leave which are two and three minutes long.
Finally, perhaps there’s hope this functionality will be developed as part of GC as it looks like it hasn’t been forgotten inside of Google with the recent release of Vocito and Google has taken quite an interest in iPhone apps recently.

It's Okay!

An even simpler answer existed in the pesky dialog box asking me to restart Safari had I only read the fine print.  Rogue Amoeba clearly anticipated my need and shipped the solution with Airfoil: Instant Hijack.  It can be installed from the dialog box or the Install Extras… menu option within Airfoil.  After a system restart I was good to go.

Instant Hijack is certainly simpler than Fluid but I wanted to make sure I gave credit to the Rogue Amoeba gang for putting out a solid product which had the answer built right in.  However, the Fluid approach certainly wasn’t difficult and I’m glad I know about it now.

Some readers who aren’t Airfoil users may recall hearing about Instant Hijack before.  When Apple released Security Update 2008-002 some people had issues with ssh no longer working which was tied back to Instant Hijack.  Of course the Rogue Amoeba guys had an immediate fix.  You can read more about exactly what happened on their blog.

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

From The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Centuryby Thomas L. Friedman.

“Suddenly ordinary people could get the benefit of computing without being programmers.”

We’ve made some strides on this front but until family members can stop relying on the techies in their lives for technical support I think there is a long way to go.

At least until I settled down to work and was looking for a little background noise.  I’ve always had a stereo or my Griffin radio Shark near by so I can listen to WXRT.  

Unlike so many of the radio stations out there which recycle the same 20 songs, WXRT plays a wide variety of songs.  The station also puts out a great CD each year called ONXRT: Live from the Archives.  The disc is always full of great live performances artists record for the station or at local shows and all of the proceeds go to worthy charities.  Picking up this year’s Volume 11 (which ironically looks like a deep dish pizza) was one of top errands to run on my recent trip back to Chicago.

When I left Chicago one of the first things I checked was if XRT had dumped the old AOL, Windows-only stream and luckily they had.  So for a while I listened on the tinny speakers of my MacBook Pro but eventually felt the need to feel the bass without having the length of the aux cable to my stereo limiting where I could sit and work in the apartment.  Enter one of my favorite indie Mac dev shops, Rogue Amoeba and their product Airfoil.

Airfoil lets you send any audio stream to an Airport Express so you can fully enjoy your wireless freedom. Almost…

The frustrating thing was the WXRT player is essentially a Safari window.  For Airfoil to work it often needs the application whose audio you’re hijacking and re-routing to the Airport Express to be restarted.  Restarting almost any application but Safari or NetNewsWire is feasible for me.  But like others, I use my browser tabs to keep track of a lot I have going on.  So I’d tend to listen to the same old Wilco and Smashing Pumpkins from iTunes rather than opting to restart Safari.

That is until I discovered Fluid and made my own site specific browser.  It was silly easy to create WXRT.app using Fluid and now I can listen to WXRT without disturbing all those browser tabs.  Until Google Chrome is released for OS X I can get some of the benefits by using Fluid.

WXRT.app (and quite possibly the first time I've found the Finder CoverFlow mode useful)

I’ve been saying I’d do it for a while but this post marks the start of my post-Chicago blog. Unlike Rideabout this will not be specific to my travels or a particular trip.  Although since I’m traveling now it might not seem that way initially.

Started my morning in Chicago on a beautiful sunny Fall day. While photographing “The Bat” in front of the Chicago offices of Social Security Department I was reminded of a disturbing trend of late when a security guard came out and warned me I could take pictures of the sculpture but was not allowed to point my camera at the building. I had this happen earlier this summer at another location and have seen it happen many times in and around the building of the Orbitz offices — none of which are federal buildings. But does it matter if they’re federal or not? It is no secret Social Security as it stands today is hosed. Were they afraid I’d uncover something?  It was quite obvious I was there as a photographer and not on a recon mission. I don’t think I look threatening or like I should be forced to wear an orange jump suit ala Ted Kaczynski. Maybe I’m wrong…

Anyone determined to get a picture of the Social Security or any other building downtown could do it without much trouble. It bothers me as a photographer in search of new pictures but it bothers me more in how this kind of attitude has begun to permeate American society. Not to mention I probably couldn’t count on my fingers and toes how many surveillance cameras captured me as I captured the bat from every angle which (mostly) didn’t include the Social Security Administration building.

I’ve always enjoyed looking at the city from this location.  For some reason it is quintessential Chicago to me –  I think it’s the El on Lake Street crossing over the river.  Of course the location where I’m standing is also where the Great Chicago Flood of ‘92 started. And with that, my first trip back to Chicago as a non-resident was over as I was off to ORD to make my way to Central America for the rest of October. First stop, Costa Rica.