Opgenorth.NET

(Or, things to do when you have a sick kid)

One of the new data catalogues that the City of Edmonton has put up is the 2010 Election Results.  This Thanksgiving Long Weekend I was kind of “grounded” at home when my son came down with a nasty inner ear infection.  I was hanging out with him, and thought I could use the time to see how hard it would be and how quickly I could put together an Android application that would poll these results and show leading candidate in each contest for a given ward.  Turns out it was not that hard at all.  Development time was less than one day, and then I had the application running on my phone for a couple of days.

If you search the Android market place for YEG Vote, and you’re running Android 1.6 or higher you should able to find the application and install it (assuming, of course, you care about the election results).  The application itself is pretty bare bones.  It will get the results every five minutes, and then show the leading candidate.

I think my next trick will be to duplicate the application in C# and MonoDroid just to get a feel for the differences and such.  I’d wager that it will take even less time in MonoDroid for me, given that I’m much more fluent in C# than I am in Java.  I’d have done this in MonoDroid to being with, but MonoDroid is currently in a limited preview and one of the conditions of being in the preview program is that you can’t distribute applications written in MonoDroid yet. I would have tried a Windows Phone 7 port, but it just doesn’t make much sense, given that the number of people in Alberta with actually WP7 devices is probably less than 10.  Maybe next election.

If you have any suggestions or ideas, feel free to let me know. If I can scrounge up some time this weekend before the election I’ll see if I can implement them.

And, it goes without saying, regardless of what you think about this application, if you live in Alberta, make sure you get out and vote this Monday (October 18th, 2010).

If you happen to be a .NET type, knowledgeable/interested in MVC and Agile, QuestionMark is looking for .NET developers (F/T only, no contractors) here in Edmonton, Alberta.  Below is the job description.  If you’re interested, send your resume to Kaitlyn Lardin at QuestionMark (kaitlyn AT questionmark DOT com):

Senior Software Developer

Background

Questionmark is a company with a 20 year history recognised global presence in e-learning and assessment automation with software covering all aspects of this field, from authoring to delivery and reporting. Our software is used by over 3 million people in 15 different countries throughout the world. Questionmark is a fast-growing company, with a dedicated, passionate, and global workforce. We have offices in London, UK, Norwalk, CT and Tubize, Belgium. We care about the satisfaction of our employees and we reward them for meeting or exceeding expectations. The company promotes a relaxed, fun and highly productive approach to work. We have recently moved location to a vibrant office in the heart of downtown surrounded by software development companies.

Role of the Senior Developer

We are looking for a talented senior developer to join our development team in designing and creating the next generation of on-line assessment delivery software. This role will work closely with a Product Owner and other team members in a SCRUM environment, and be responsible for delivering potentially shippable functionality each Sprint. It also includes the mentoring of other team members through peer review. Our development team works in a Continuous Integration environment with automated builds and testing.

Essential skills:

· At least 5 years commercial experience development experience.

· You will be highly skilled in software development using our core technologies of C#, ASP.NET, XML, JavaScript, SQL Server and/or Oracle.

· Experience of jQuery very desirable

· Experience of working with .NET 2.0 or later

· Expertise in object oriented programming and relational databases

· Expertise in T-SQL and/or PL/SQL

· Good written and verbal communication. You must be able to write specifications

· Experience working in a SCRUM environment is desirable

Attributes of the Senior Software Developer:

The successful candidate will be highly skilled in software development using our core technologies, as above. You will be a self starting, self motivated individual who is enthusiastic and passionate about developing innovative software solutions.

Candidates must be eligible to work within Canada and relocate to Edmonton.

The package:

We offer excellent salary and benefits that include flexible working hours, starting 14 days annual leave, company bonus scheme, generous health coverage, and subsidized gym membership.

Last night I pushed a new build of YEG Buildings out to the Android Market. The two changes with this one:

• Rather than showing the latitude/longitude of were you are, the application will try to translate that into a more human-friendly address.  Note that the address might not be 100% accurate.  It depends on how much accuracy the GPS has.
• The application no longer uses Google Maps and a KML feed when show where all the historical buildings in Edmonton are.  The map of Edmonton is now rendered locally, and all

Just for fun, I also submitted YEG Buildings as part of the Apps4Edmonton contest.  So, feel free to check out the contest page – there are a lot of neat applications there.  Also feel free to vote mine up. 

If you are using or have used YEG Buildings, feel free to let me know your thoughts.  If you find a bug, let me know.  If you have a feature you’d like to see, I’d love to hear about it.

After a few months of neglect, I put a new version of my Edmonton Historical Buildings application up on the Android Market.  I’ve renamed it to just YEG Buildings, as I’d like to eventually include buildings that aren’t historical, but interesting in general for some reason.  The previous version had a nasty bug that would crash when you tried to view the location of a building on the map.  Was one of those curious things where it worked in the emulator but not on a real device.  I’ve tried it out on my HTC Dream running Cyanogen 6.0 RC3 (this is Android 2.2), and it seemed to work. 

I’ve also added a feature where you could see all the Historical Buildings from the City Of Edmonton’s Data Catalogue at once in Google Maps.  It’s a bit slow (mostly for reasons beyond my control at this point), but it basically works.

You can download it from the Android Market, or via this handy page at AndroidZoom.  You’ll need Android 1.6 or higher.

I just uploaded an update to HistoricalBuildings.  The list of historical buildings used to be sorted alphabetically, by name.  Now they are sorted by the distance from your current location (assuming the GPS can figure that out).

Well, for the brave, criminally insane, curious, or otherwise bored I have a alpha version of Historical Buildings – download the APK if you want to try it out.  This is just, at this time, the application just shows a simple list of historical buildings in Edmonton (according to the City of Edmonton’s Open Data Catalogue).  Click on a building, and it will show you on Google Maps where the building is in the city.  The code for this is, in my opinion (and to say the least) – rough.  But it is a start.  Definitely needs some improvement.  Or maybe I just need to change my thinking to more of a Android/Java mindset.  Anyway the usual caveats apply:  use at your own risk / batteries not include / do not eat / void where prohibited by law, etc, etc, etc

Anyway, if you use it let me know.  There are bound to be bugs, but hey it “Works for me!”.  Time to work on some other stuff for it.  I think the next neat thing is would be to show the closest building to you.  Either that, or handle some of the seedy code issues and infrastructure stuff that bugs me. 

Well, don’t let the name of the post fool you – the next EDMUG event is in November, not October,  November 4th, to be exact.  I’ll repeat the e-mail I got with the details:

Date: November 4th
Time: 5:30pm doors open, 6:00pm event starts
Location: Edmonton Room in the Stanley Milner Library
Event Title: Practical Automated Testing Dojo

As we may have eluded to in recent newsletters, we’re going to try some new style events for this year’s schedule.  In the past the lecture presentations that we’ve held have provided great content in an easily accessible format.  They also seem to have left attendees wanting for more practical and hands on exposure to the technology being discussed.  This event will be the first of those new formats that will allow you to get started with that practical experience while still receiving some guidance.

How the Dojo event will work:

At the start of the meeting (6pm in this case) we will provide a brief introduction talk on Automated Testing.  This will take up no more than 15-30 minutes and is not intended to be an in depth review of the practices involved.

After the introduction a number of volunteers who are well versed in Automated Testing will form breakout teams which attendees will be free to choose from.  Those teams will spend the majority of the remaining event time (1.5hrs plus) working through real world examples of how to write automated tests using different tools and different styles.  While there will be one person who can provide guidance, we are encouraging all attendees to spend time pair programming, watching and engaging in questions with the entire group.  Attendees should also feel free to move from one team to another as the content, styles and experiences may be different.

What, you ask, will the attendee be responsible for?  Well, our hope is that you will feel inclined to bring questions about Automated Testing and a desire to interact and learn with and from the rest of the community.  If you can, please bring your own laptop.  There will be some laptops available but they will be used in pair (or more) programming scenarios only. We will be providing a sample code base that needs many different kinds of tests added to it.  If you want the code at the time of the event, please bring a USB drive.  For those that don’t we will provide the code for download from the Edmug website after the event.

As this is our first event of this style, we are going to treat it as a learning experience and apply those lessons to the coming events.  As always, we encourage you to provide us with any feedback that you can at info@edmug.net

The Edmug Team

www.edmug.www

So, with that out of the way, it’s a pretty loosy-goosy format.  If you are going, is there anything in particular that you would like to see or do?  Some code you would like help with?  Need a laptop?  I will be there, and more than willing to help out with your questions and figured that it can’t hurt to find out in advance some specifics.  Feel free to respond to me either via comments here, or by e-mail (tom at opgenorth dot net).