TwitterPoppy.com

October 31st, 2009

For this year’s I wanted to do something special for Remembrance Day. I decided to make it easier for people to add a Poppy to their Twitter profile picture. With the help of Nick Brunt at hithere and Paul Doerwald I am proud to present to you TwitterPoppy.com . Use it to add a poppy to your Twitter picture and commemorate the sacrifices of members of the armed forces and of civilians in times of war by updating your Twitter picture with the new one.

Support our Vets,  wear a poppy on your Twitter Picture.

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Welcome

June 17th, 2009

Welcome to Yonen Labs’ blog.

We are excited to announce that our website is now up and running… It’s nothing fancy, but at least we now have an on-line presence that highlights who we are and what we do. We will certainly make a few revisions of our website along the way, so if you have any questions or comments please do not hesistate to contact us.

Thank you for taking the time to visit our site!

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The Unfuddle Challenge

May 9th, 2009

I’ve been using Unfuddle for a few months now, and it has been great. It’s the (almost) perfect all-in-one project management tool for me. Since Unfuddle provides Code repositories as well as bug tracking, it makes it a great tool for developers. A lot of people have been asking me what the advantage of Unfuddle is versus other tools available. Well here is a short list:
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Posted in Project Management | 3 Comments »

I’ve been Unfuddled

December 28th, 2008

I’ve been working with Basecamp at work for a few years now and it works very well. When I decided I should use something similar for some of my personal projects, it fit the bill. I also started using GitHub for my repositories, this was fine when it was in still in Beta and I had a private repository for free. After a few months of not committing code and painful deployments (no capistrano), I decided it was time to find an alternative to GitHub. I didn’t really feel like paying for a private repo.
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Why Blue-ray is not more popular.

October 3rd, 2008

In the age of the YouTube videos, Video and Audio quality is not as valued as it once was. People are now used to watching low quality (video quality and content quality) video online and downloaded movies that are of lesser quality than DVD. The fact that people don’t care about quality is not the only reason why Blue-ray is not doing so well, I believe that it comes down to convenience.

All the big shifts in distributed audio and video happened because of the arrival of a more convenient alternative. Lets start with audio, vinyl was replaced by cassette tapes, not because they had more features or better quality (which they didn’t have), but because you could easily carry them with you. Then onto the CD, sure the quality improved but they were even easier to carry around. Now that we’re in the MP3 age, it is now easier than ever to carry 30 albums with you wherever you go.

Video follows a very similar story, the reason we moved from VHS to DVDs is not because of features like not having to rewind it before you return it to the Rental store, if it were the case then why didn’t the Video Disk make it? Video Disks didn’t survive because they were HUGE!. DVDs, just like CDs are much smaller and easier to handle than tapes. Now here comes Blue-ray. To most people, Blue-ray can’t be any better than a DVD since it physically looks just like a DVD and that is the reason why Blue-ray is having a hard time. Sure 1080p looks amazing, but it’s just a feature and people don’t care that much about features, they want “easy”. Now, since audio went the digital MP3 route, it’s almost a given that video will be going that route to.

And I believe that is why Blue-ray will not make it. I still have my PS3 and I might go rent some Blue-ray movies once in a while, but I don’t think I’ll buy any Blue-ray movies, because I know that the future of video will be online downloads, just like music. Now if only we had good online video store options in Canada, but that’s a different story.

Posted in Blue-ray, Technology | 1 Comment »

My Thoughts on KDE4

February 13th, 2008

In the past few days, I’ve been playing around with KDE4. I’ve been following its progress since KDE4 Development started about a year ago. Before updating I read everywhere that the Developers were saying that this is not really KDE4, it’s just the first release and that 4.1 would really represent the vision of what KDE4 should be.

So I updated, and it made me realize something. KDE4 is to KDE3 as Vista is to XP. Vista has all the bells and whistles: new look, composite windowing stuff, gadgets… but it’s full of bugs. Now KDE4 is pretty much the same: new look, new compositing Kwin, plasmoids(“widgets”), and it’s fairly stable. The only annoying part about KDE4 is that it’s not as customizable as it should be(it soon will be, just not yet).

Now here’s a few differences between KDE4 and Vista. First of all, I didn’t have to pay to have a brand new buggy Desktop Environment. Second, KDE4 is pretty much KDE3 using QT4 instead of QT3 with added features, and that’s why it only took 1 year to port/develop, not the 9 years it took for Vista (I know it didn’t really take 9 years). And lastly, did I say I didn’t have to pay for this upgrade?

Now, what’s so special about KDE4, well, it’s very similar to KDE3, with some major differences. Plasmoids are KDE’s gadgets/widgets/gidgets. Basically, you can put them anywhere, on your Desktop or on the “Bar”. I don’t know what to call that bar, in Windows it would be the bar that has the Start menu, task bar, system tray and Time, in OS X, it’s the Apple Dock. Because in KDE this bar is a place to put plasmoids, you can have anything you want there. This means that the community will be able to change KDE into what the people really want. Windows and Apple decided for you what they think is for you, KDE will let the community decide what is best for the community: Wisdom of the crowd.

The release schedule for KDE4 pretty much includes a minor(4.0.2, 4.0.3) release every month until July, when 4.1 should be available. Now these minor changes don’t sound like much, but in the KDE world, they are basically the equivalent of Service Packs in Windows.
Oh, and one more thing, KDE can run in windows now, yup that’s right, all my favorite KDE apps work or will work in Window. So now, if I’m stuck working on a Windows machine, I’ll be able to use Kate, Amarok, Kopete, KTorrent, to name a few. This is cool.

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I Challenge you!

January 21st, 2008

What have YOU done to help the environment?

Today, I called Irving Oil to ask them if they had a carbon offsetting program in place, something similar to Air Canada’s or National’s plan where you pay a bit more but they then take that money and help fund Environmental projects. I figured they didn’t have anything of the sort because I couldn’t find it anywhere on their website.

So I called them, and asked the rep if they had any plan like this and he said, “Not that I know of, but let me ask my manager” and of course the manager had never heard of anything like that.

I think I was lucky to get a rep that was interested in this, he then talked to the PR person in charge of the Environmental stuff, and after almost 30mins on the phone he was able to get me the phone number for the person in charge of the Environmental projects at Irving. He said that she would give me a call back. Well, after about 45mins, I received a call from her and she said that she thought it was a good idea and they will consider it. So maybe I will be able to fund Environmental projects by adding a little extra fee to my Oil purchases. GREAT! That makes my life so much easier!!

Now I CHALLENGE YOU to do the same with your Oil company, or your Power Company and ask them if they have a similar plan, where you can contribute a certain amount every month to offset your carbon emissions. It might take 30 mins of your time, but that’s not much if it can save a few years of your life. Pass it along… challenge everyone you know, if you, them, and the people they know all do it, these companies will see the value and they will do something.

–

Jessy Ouellette

Posted in News | 2 Comments »

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