Upgrade your university's campus map

One of the recent projects we worked on was a campus map for the University of Ottawa (uOttawa). The great thing about this map, is that it is not the usual image or PDF map that seems to be the standard on a lot of universities' websites:

For example the McMaster University Campus and the University of Toronto Campus use images along side image maps and tables to present information.

There are some universities with more interactive maps such as MIT's beta campus map which utilizes the Google Maps platform. This is a good sign and hopefully means the days of maps delivered via PDF or images are numbered.

Google Maps includes a lot of information pertaining the location you search, for example if we search "University of Ottawa" on Google Maps we would get the following:


View Larger Map

This is great stuff that Google provides, but it won't fly with universities although it is already miles ahead of an image map, it does not deliver the required content one would hope to find on a campus map. There is also very little you can do to brand it, customize the look and control the data. For example a big problem with Google Maps, is the data can get old and an old map is useless when its missing the new Faculty of Engineering building at McMaster University.

Onto the good stuff, the Google Map is one right path, but we want more control over the data. What if we want to provide routing between buildings? You might say "wait a minute, Google Maps already does that", but what if we want to route through buildings, along overpasses or even between buildings? What if we want to allow the student to pick whether they want to see the shortest route or the warmest route? Where are the wheelchair accesses?

Now I leave you to the following demonstration: (Thanks to Tim Merrill for putting this demo together - and for the record the background music is perfect)

Neti Pot

This may be a strange post and certainly not a topic I usually rant about, but this thing is ingenious!

I came down with a bad flu, cough and the works last Thursday and been on a bunch of meds but this one really clears out the sinuses. Its a weird feeling, but it works. *Atchoo!*

The first McMaster website? possibly

I just came across the internet archive - WayBack Machine. Always wondered how the first websites for different companies and organizations looked like.

This is the first McMaster site for everybody I know who studied there, or is still there:


The first Google.com site. What is really interesting, is that Google remained mainly consistent and they maintained the simplistic approach from the start.

The first Yahoo! website. Again interesting, Yahoo! did not believe in simplistic designs from day one. In fact their site just got even more complicated over the past 13 years.

And finally, who remembers the first Etisalat website?

So much can change in 10 years, who knows what the world will be like in another 10.

Why is Yahoo bigger than Google in Japan?

Found this post on mashable.com about Yahoo being bigger than Google in Japan - when it comes to search. Why?

Stan Schroeder attributes this to things being different in Japan; for example the iPhone is struggling for market share there. Japan is way ahead of the rest in the world in technology, and it looks like that the iPhone is well behind in features compared to local phones. Japanese phones are built in with QR readers, fingerprint readers, watch TV, higher resolution cameras, conference call features and IC chips to charge for purchases, ex. transit tickets!

So why is Yahoo! bigger than Google there? I look at the Yahoo! and Google sites, and Google's simplistic approach is definitely more effective in my opinion. You visit google.com and you know what Google does - Search. On the other hand a visit to yahoo.com is overwhelming. This is true in the case of the Japanese version of both sites as well:
http://www.yahoo.co.jp/
http://www.google.co.jp/

So yes, things are different in Japan, but I am curious to know what is different that makes Yahoo! more popular than Google. Is this tied somehow to the local super-phones? and perhaps that is why on the Japanese Google site there are links to mail, youtube, news and maps at the top and under the search unlike the .com site where they are only present at the top.

Why Twitter sometimes collapses

I just noticed something odd in the twitter over capacity screenshot I took
the tweet birds are not flying in the same direction!

Ministry of Transportation Ontario Online Transaction - FAIL!

Although I have been in Canada since 2001, I started my drivers license graduated program in 2004 only - I should have done it earlier but that is not the point of this post.

The Ministry of Transportation in Ontario has an online transaction application to process your test booking - unfortunately this application seems to suffer from major problems. I recall this happened to me when I booked my G drive test. Say I was going North and hit a stop sign and was going to turn East, I did not wait for the car that was on the East side heading West to clear the intersection and apparently that was a "dangerous maneuver"

So the online drive test booking engine stalled on processing my booking request yesterday so I have no idea whether the transaction went through or not and now I have to wait until it shows up on my credit card online report.

Over the past decade we came to expect certain applications to work in a certain way - when we want to make a purchase online we expect the transaction to complete successfully or let you know what went wrong. Online transactions are supposed to be easy to use, increase throughput and be convenient by avoiding you to have to line up somewhere - but when it does not work this is a problem. I waited 70 minutes for the transaction and it still did not complete.

For online retailers, this failure results in lost business, there are many of them so you can easily switch to someone else and make the purchase there - unfortunately there is only one Ministry of Transportation but this does not mean that their online applications can be below average. MTO needs to look at people using their online apps to book tests or pay fines as customers as well. Yes you are going to pay anyway sooner or later since you have no other option, but money now is always better than money next month. If I was ordering pizza online and this happened odds are my pizza will be free.

Twitter Over capacity

wow..what are the odds, I was just trying to add a twitter feed to this blog and it was not pulling in any content.
What's worse is that there will be "too many tweets" about this as soon as things are back up.