2Paths Team Blog

We try to get out of the office every month or so for a bit of R&R - kayaking, climbing, boarding. Geoff put this video together:

nice production work Geoff!

Check out the art from the “2007 World Latte Art Champion, Jack Hanna”

Link

We can aspire to greatness

We’ve been working with Darren Gibbons (Openroad) and Cameron MacDonald (HSBC) to kick off vanjug again. The first meeting we’ve planned out will be a lightening session:

* Nick Grabovac’s discussion on Tequila, a revolutionary new Java framework from 2Paths
* Mik Lernout on real world experiences using EJB 3 and Java Server Faces
* HSBC’s Web form Application Builder (WAB) a custom web component that can be used for rapidly building application forms

Should be a good kick off!

Coffee, as for all development shops, is a religious institution. Early morning around the expresso machine can get a little dicey especially for those of us working a little close to Vancouver’s downtown eastside. We’re battle hardened. Tough. We like a double shot with a little latte art.

We haven’t got it this hard though:

Never in my biology days did I see something as hardcore as that.

After the subtle washing and drying of my previous phone, a Motorola SLVR, it was time to pony up for the next generation. For me at least. Welcome an unlocked N95 from MobilePlanet. UK plugs but I can live with that.

Summary of the first 12 hours:

-wifi connection to our WPA2 Personal network, no probs
-isync plugin from nokia worked seamlessly - contacts + appts all set and loaded
-default email app able to connect over SSL to gmail
-gmail mobile mail app installed, works ok
-Shozu up and running (choosing the N93 to signup), sending pictures to flickr, huzzah!
-battery life hasn’t destroyed it yet

Haven’t bothered with the GPS yet, and therefore no geotagging of photos.

The bad? A few reboots already. Seems to be when connecting to the wifi connection, ah and once using maps. A lockup using the camera with a shoot repeatedly for 10 seconds test.

The other bad? Well I already knew this before buying but there will be no data plan for the phone yet It’s just prohibitively expensive, and therefore dangerous to even have a plan. You’d end up racking up charges inadvertently.

Update 20070522 - No more lock ups. A few random reboots and one “an unexpected error has occured please reboot the phone” (or something to that effect). Otherwise - I’m taking a ton more photo’s of my early mornings with the kids and sharing them with the rest of the family that morning. Reminds me of my last nokia moment in Morocco….but that’ll be another story.

So as mentioned in our weekly meeting, I’ve been watching a number of food blogs and starting to try a few. Here are two that were quite tasty yet easy:

labaniyya - chicken in yogurt sauce - this was a simple but nice flavour, on wild rice.

and

chorizo, lentils and chickpea soup - super tasty, filling.

No thought leadership there Trevor, but I think this is even better

Jira desktop client

Instead of spamming our company emailing list I’ve been tagging links in del.icio.us using the for tag to share links for:2paths. I added this into our default theme so they’ll show up on this blog in the sidebar. And of course you can subscribe to the rss feed.

Once del.icio.us fixes the private rss page for:2paths you’ll be able to subscribe to it in your rss aggregators.

[UPDATE 20070310] It was fixed, you can subscribe to it here: for:2paths

We do have a bit of love for coffee in the company. A commercial expresso machine was one of the first things we purchased for the office. Each person that works here usually starts of slowly, builds up to 4-8 shots per day, then goes through alternating cycles of cold turkey and moments of weakness.

To smooth those peaks out we spent some time with Nigel Tunnacliffe from Current Coffee who took the whole office through the finer points of pulling a good shot. He’s going to keep working with us on it, bringing in fresh roasted beans every week, teaching us latte art and keeping our caffeine addiction humming along.

Yes, he’s our pusher and we’ll keep going back to him.

It’s time Michal - a program that monitors what you do and reports it back to you. No more time tracking

Slife