The Trinity Development Group has a map of planned development of the Corbett Centre. According to the map it appears that the electronics big box store Best Buy is planning to set up in Fredericton. Other stores that appear to be slated for the Corbett Centre include home fashion store Bouclair and a new Tim Hortons. The long rumoured Tim Hortons store would fill in the gap (according to some Tim’s addicts) created by the closing of the Regent Mall location last year.
The Trinity site claims that these new stores will open in the spring of 2010 while Costco’s planned warehouse store is marked as a highly unlikely Fall 2009. Perhaps these are construction start dates as opposed to store opening dates.
New Competition in Town?
A new Best Buy store would likely be the second store in Atlantic Canada after a recently opened store in Dartmouth, NS. A new Best Buy which sells laptops, big screen televisions, digital cameras and other electronics and opening would not only bring some needed competition to the current electronics giant in town Future Shop but it would also be a win for Fredericton in the ongoing battle with Moncton and Saint John to attract retailers to their cities. Is Fredericton gaining an upper hand in attracting retailers to its city?
Are there any other retailers that you’d like to see open up in Fredericton?
The RX-51 review has tons of pictures of the device and some of the screenshots of the user interface. Since this is the first internet tablet from Nokia to use the Fremantle or Maemo 5 software, many people are curious how much change will be ushered in with the new operating system and device. The UI definitely looks more polished and a lot slicker than the older Diablo release (4.2) but it is hard to determine the user experience without having the software in your hands. The hardware looks very similar to the older N810 with a slide out keyboard and 800 x 480 resolution screen but there have been some improvements such as the included 5 megapixel camera.
Will it compare to the iPhone?
As I mentioned in a previous post about the Nokia N900 and Fremantle, the N900 / RX-51 is also the first of the N series internet tablets to include phone capabilities. Previous versions only had wi-fi connectivity and as such were not direct competitors with Apple’s iPhone or RIM’s Blackberrry devices. It will be interesting to see if this new Nokia mobile offering will provide some competition from the other smartphone players.
Canada on the other seems to be trying to lock government files and data away and often require a ransom to be paid to get access to it. A large proportion of data generated by government agencies require payment to access. For example, Statistics Canada create maps of postal code to census boundaries but charges $10000 to download it? Why should I have to pay to get information that Statistics Canada collected using my taxpayer dollars? Why should I have to file an access to information request (and pay $5) to get information about government dealings? Shouldn’t the default status of information created by the government be free and widely available? Do only the rich have the right to information? Not only would opening up database, documents and other available data increase transparency, it would also remove economic barriers for companies and individuals that could benefit from the amazing amount of data that could be made available to the public.
Vancouver opens its data
The city of Vancouver has adopted a similar strategy of opening up its data and information as the Obama administration in the United States. Additionally, Vancouver is also in the process of examining open source software and how it could be use at the municipal level. Their strategy has already generated some interesting ideas such a garbage reminder service.
Will Canada be left behind?
Hopefully we will see other Canadian cities, provinces and the federal governments be forward looking and follow Vancouver’s example. There is an enormous untapped potential for using data that is generated and currently locked away in vaults, behind firewall or simply in proprietary formats that require expensive software to use. Who knew that opening up GIS signals and data to free civilian use would result in such a large number of indispensable and powerful inventions that build on GIS. Just as democracy opened up the political and decision making process to all citizens, opening up information to all empowers all citizens and not just the elite royalty that can afford it.
Hopefully Canada will be able to realize its potential.
I love this YouTube video. Very powerful and well done. It has been online since 2007 but the video gives a great view of why the computers and the web are so powerful. You also can’t help but wonder how much more untapped potential there is to be found.
Fredericton, New Brunswick based PQA – Professional Quality Assurance has announced its intention to grow its workforce from the current 91 to almost 400 over the next three years. The province of New Brunswick has announced an assistance program for PQA which will see an average of $7544 per full time permanent employee that PQA hires over the next three years. This assistance is for training and equipment for these new hires.
Who are PQA?
Founded in 1997, PQA is a software quality assurance vendor which provides services such as software testing, QA consultants, content quality assurance and e-learning or training development services. They currently have three offices with their headquarters in Fredericton and satellite offices in Moncton, New Brunswick and Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. With this latest expansion there are hints that PQA will open additional offices in other New Brunswick locations, likely in Saint John but possibly in smaller and economically hard hit cities in northern NB such as Miramichi or Cambellton.
Software Testing is a dirty job
As many software developers know, software testing is very difficult as you become accustomed to the warts and consciously or sub-consciously avoid trouble areas or scenarios in your application when testing. In addition, software testing, developing training materials and documentation are often pushed back to the end of the development cycle are are often the first tasks to get short changed when the pressure to ship starts to build. By farming out these tasks to a third party, your developers are free to concentrate on developing quality and compelling software.
A fresh, experienced and independent point of view
Just as a third party audit of financial records is a good idea (and often necessary), a third party software quality assurance can give your code a professional and independent critique before it ships to customers. An outsiders’ fresh view of your software may reveal omissions in your documentation or bring to light implicit or explicit assumptions that were made in the software design and development cycle. Identifying and addressing these issues prior to shipping can save a lot of money in fixing software as well as in support costs. Even more valuable than saving on support costs, by fixing problems you can ship a higher quality product and enhance the customer experience. Creating a quality experience for your customer can raise your reputation and brand. Remember: “Every Touch Counts“.
Third party QA can identify software bugs, performance and scalability problems, user experience issues, user interface inconsistencies and documentation issues. Although some of these problems can be identified and addressed in house, a more thorough assessment by a third party quality assurance vendor can make your product that much more stable and bulletproof as well as give your product that extra usability edge over the competition.
Created in 2006 as a way of bringing people with common interests together, Mugshot was designed by RedHat as an open source site. The intentions was to allow interaction between users using not only its own site but by plugging into other networking sites such as Facebook and del.icio.us. Mugshot included the ability to chat between users, share links, facebook updates and read RSS feeds.
Mugshot did have some innovative features such as a desktop client which allowed quick and easy access to network updates and to quickly post items or share links with your friends or interest groups.
Where did it go?
Despite some initial promise, in April of this year, the website went offline with a “Mugshot is currently not running.” message and as of earlier this May, the URLs for http://www.mugshot.org get redirected to http://www.redhat.com.
I have been unable to find any official confirmation that Mugshot has been killed and will not come back but it does not look promising.
Why did it fail?
Unfortunately Mugshot never seemed to get much traction outside of a small group of Linux (mainly RedHat) enthusiasts. Whether it was a lack of marketing or a neglect of website and network can be debated but after its initial launch period, RedHat almost seemed to ignore Mugshot perhaps hoping that organic growth could occur with open source community updating and introducing new features. Competition from Friendfeed, Twitter and Facebook may have also helped put Mugshot on the chopping block.
Another part of the reasoning behind RedHat’s apparent neglect and eventual abandonment of Mugshot is that the social network concept never seemed to fit well into its strategy to be an enterprise Linux vendor. Right from the introduction of Mugshot, there appeared to be confusion regarding why RedHat was pursuing this product.
Mugshot champions gone?
It also appears that a few of the Mugshot champions from within RedHat such as Christopher Blizzard who has moved on to the Mozilla Foundation and Havoc Pennington who is currently at litl.
In a March blog post, Havoc even mentions the validity of the concept despite the lack of success with Mugshot:
It’s gratifying that the new default home screen of Facebook looks a lot like Mugshot.org, a site some of us came up with at Red Hat. We coded Mugshot’s personal-lifestream-thingy before Facebook’s news feed came out and before FriendFeed came out. Not saying either site copied us, but it’s still nice to know at least our idea was good (even though there were lots of reasons we weren’t the ones to get anywhere with it).
What’s next for Mugshot?
As of today, the source code for Mugshot is still available at http://svn.mugshot.org/ and it appears that a fork of the Mugshot code will live on in project magnetism at: http://code.google.com/p/magnetism/. There is no indication of that a free shared Mugshot type service (like RedHat was offering) will be made available.Â
The release of Fedora 11 was recently pushed back by a week and then another week to June 9th due to some blocker bugs still being open. The new release date however is still just around the corner so I’ve decided to look at what is coming in Fedora 11.
Firefox 3.5 (currently at beta 4) which introduces HTML5 <video> and <audio> tags an a Private Browsing Mode (aka Porn Browsing Mode)
ext4 is now the default filesystem when installing a new Fedora 11 install
Improved fingerprint reader experience with a improved detection and a GUI configuration tool (authconfig)
gcc 4.4
faster boot up times with the goal being a 20 second startup
upgraded rpm to 4.7 for performance improvements
OpenChange introduce for native Microsoft Exchange integration
Xserver 1.6 which brings with it improved performance, stability and RANDR 1.3 support
improved graphical drivers including
kernel modeseting in Intel drivers for graphical bootup sequence
new default NVidia drivers (nouveau) which supports more cards, has performance improvements over the current nv drivers and supports RANDR 1.2
improved ATI/AMD Radeon drivers allowing r100/r200 based cards to work with modesetting and DRI2
Try it out
I decided to install a Fedora 11 Preview copy in a VMWare Workstation virtual machine to see first hand what changes were in store. After booting off of the Live CD and clicking on Install to Hard Drive, the install process went very smoothly. Installation seems faster than previous versions as well though I did select more packages on my previous Fedora 10 install.
Here is a screenshot of F11 in action:
Not content to have the dominant position in the data center virtualization market with its VMware Infrastructure products including the widely used ESX, VMWare strikes out on another platform : mobile devices.
Virtualizing mobile devices
VMware MVP(Mobile Virtualization Platform) is a product which allow mobile operating systems to be virtualized. A small piece of code (about 20k) is run on a mobile device which effectively virtualizes the resources of the device allowing other operating systems to run on the virtualized hardware.
As Ars Technica describes, VMWare demoed a Nokia N800 running Google’s Android as well as Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS. Although there is some obvious overhead and performance penalties to virtualizing hardware on a mobile device (as on a server or desktop), freeing your mobile device to run the OS of your choice could prove quite valuable.
Currently VMware supports Windows CE 5.0 and 6.0, Linux 2.6.x (which would include Maemo and Android), Symbian 9.x, eCos, µITRON NORTi and µC/OS-II. It does not appear to be available for sale yet but you can contact VMware to get more information on MVP.
The future?
Although it is fairly new and probably rough around the edges, perhaps VMware MVP will get rolled into VMware Workstation 7.0 which would allow developers to easily access multiple mobile platforms for ease of development and testing.
Now if they could only emulate the iPhone and Blackberry using MVP. Then you would truly be able to use the hardware and software combination that suits YOU best.
