Category Archives: Technology

| Montreal, Technology

Ile Sans Fil in the park

Both Union Montreal and Vision Montreal have an element on their platforms that some technologically-inclined Montrealers might find interesting: free (or cheap) wireless Internet access in public parks and other public areas.

The idea isn’t new. The city first approached the volunteer group Ile Sans Fil more than two years ago to talk about setting up such a system. Ile Sans Fil provides free wireless Internet through more than 150 access points in the city, most through places like coffee shops who pay ISF a small fee.

The city has even conducted studies and hearings on the subject, and a presentation given in November 2007 resulted in only one comment, in support of the project. In a report, filed at the beginning of 2008 (PDF), the city’s commission on economic development recommended setting up a network with Ile Sans Fil.

For various reasons internal to the city’s operation, this issue has been sitting on a shelf since then. ISF even appealed to the public in August 2008, (perhaps prematurely), though specifying that the group wasn’t in danger if the deal fell through. ISF were expecting a call for tenders earlier this year on a free wifi project, which it would then bid on and be a clear favourite for, but it never came.

Both Tremblay and Harel should be somewhat embarrassed to have this on their platforms. Tremblay because the city hasn’t acted on this yet despite the preliminary work being done, and Harel because it was an idea of the Tremblay administration that her party has now stolen.

| Montreal, Technology

Google Street View coverage maps

I won’t bother reporting that Google Street View launched in Montreal and other Canadian cities today, since everyone else is already doing that.

But I’ll add this map so you can see what areas are covered (sorry Châteauguay, Vaudreuil-Dorion and St. Bruno, it seems you’ve been left out):

Google Street View coverage map for Montreal

Google Street View coverage map for Montreal

To check it out, we’ll start you off in true Gazette style, at the corner of Peel and Ste. Catherine. Now go and find all those embarrassing or quirky photos hidden in the city.

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| Media, Technology, Video

Relive the PodCamp Montreal experience

Former TQS tech reporter Jean-Michel Vanasse kicks off the PodCamp Montreal conference with a talk on new media

Former TQS tech reporter Jean-Michel Vanasse kicks off the PodCamp Montreal conference with a talk on new media

On Sept. 19-20 I attended the PodCamp Montreal conference, and a smattering of the 40 seminars given there. Fortunately, bring a technology conference a lot of it was recorded, twittered, photographed (some by me) or otherwise saved. So for those who missed it, I’ve collected some resources below. Some are videos from the UStream feeds that were setup in two of the four rooms. A few are my own videos taken through the iSight camera on my laptop. And others are blog posts or posted slides from the presentations.

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| Montreal, Opinion, Web design

Dear “Friends of Louise Harel”

Friends of Louise Harel

Friends of Louise Harel

Good for you with the website rallying anglos to the defence of Louise Harel. Providing a new voice in the election campaign is always welcome. And you’re getting the francophone media to use anglo headlines, which is always a plus.

Here’s the thing: Maybe people would believe you more about the surge of Montrealers from ethnic communities who have come out in support of her if the pictures on your website weren’t stock photos from a U.K.-based stock photo service.

These aren’t Montrealers, nor are they friends of Louise Harel, so why are there pictures of them on your website? Does Harel not have enough real friends that you’ve had to import pictures of fake ones?

UPDATE (Oct. 5): And I see you’re also plagiarizing blog posts. (Original, FOLH version)

| Opinion, Technology

The stupid mathematics of ringtones

Astral Media has come up with a new way to print money by preying on clueless teenagers satisfy the growing needs of the population when it comes to pimping their cellphones, and has opened a “mobile boutique” called 61215.ca, a number guaranteed to be incorrectly remembered within seconds of seeing it. For “only” $6 a month, you can make three “downloads” of either ringtones (those 30-second song snippets people replace the sound of a ringing phone with to sound cool) or wallpapers (images of scantily-clad women that you’ll rarely see because you never stare at your cellphone except to do something that will cover them up).

For you non-math wizards out there, three downloads at $6 a month works out to $2 per download. That’s $2 per 30-second song excerpt or tiny stock photo. If you want to buy them individually, it’s $3.50 per ringtone and $2 per image.

Websites that do nothing but rewrite or republish news releases did not even think to question whether charging $3.50 for a song excerpt was a bit expensive.

So allow me.

If I go to the Dell Music Store, I can buy 10 songs for $7.99, or $0.80 per song. The iTunes Music Store sells most its songs for $0.99, and the most popular ones for $1.29. This is for a song I can download, play on my computer, download to my portable media player and otherwise do what I want with (for my own personal use), including transfer to my cellphone and use it as a ringtone. Astral, on the other hand, wants to charge 270% of this amount for an excerpt of a song that I’ll only be able to use on one device.

Does that not sound stupid to anyone else?

And then there’s the wallpapers. Images are much easier to produce than music, and they’re much easier to get hold of. Why should I have to pay $2 for a picture of Garfield when I can get Garfield wallpaper for free from the cartoon’s website?

It’s astonishing how the mobile industry has been able to get people to pay sky-high prices for things they can get for cheap or even free. I’m not quite sure why this is, but I suspect the fact that the cost is simply added to the monthly cellphone bill (a bill paid by parents in many cases) has something to do with it. Newspapers should take note of this ingenious way to con people out of money.

I only have one ringtone on my cellphone (I have frequent callers tied to letters played through Morse Code so I know who they are). I downloaded the song to my cellphone from my computer (after editing it) and it cost me exactly $0.

Perhaps I’m missing something. But the only thing more ridiculous than the money Astral expects us to shell out for this stuff is the fact that many people will do exactly that.

| Montreal, Technology

Montreal parties and copyright

The four major parties vying for control of Montreal city hall (yeah, let’s go ahead and include Louise O’Sullivan) all seemed to have embraced the new online trends. They all have Facebook and Twitter (though some use the latter more than others). The two top contenders also have YouTube channels and upload official candidate photos and campaign photos to Flickr.

But, I wondered, do they really have a firm grasp of social media? We’ll set aside the fact that none of the four websites is fully bilingual, and move on to the fine print: how do the four parties handle copyright?

Since these are campaign websites, one would expect they would want to encourage dissemination of their pictures, slogans and press releases as much as possible. But that’s not exactly the case.

  • Union Montreal is the only party to release its content (Union Montreal’s fine print is still French-only) under a Creative Commons license, though it is the most restrictive of such licenses. It does not allow commercial use of the content (which could conceivably mean not publishing candidate photos in commercial media), nor the creation of derivative works (which would prevent activists from creating mashups of those photos). Also, all the party’s photos uploaded to Flickr are still marked “all rights reserved”, which is the default copyright license.
  • Vision Montreal’s fine print (the only one available in English, ironically), is complete boilerplate legalese: “All content, including texts, articles, photos, images and illustrations, belongs to Vision Montréal or the appropriate authors. It is forbidden to modify, copy, distribute, broadcast, transmit, represent, reproduce, publish, concede under license, transfer or sell said content without prior authorization from Vision Montréal or its appropriate authors.”
  • Projet Montréal’s website has no fine print, no indication of a copyright notice, in either language.
  • Parti Montréal Ville-Marie (Louise O’Sullivan’s party) is vague about its copyright license, saying that use and reproduction of its content can be used only for journalistic and activist purposes.

If these parties want bloggers and others to promote them, especially online, they need to be a bit more permissive than that.

| Montreal, Opinion, Web design

Union Montreal’s new website

Union Montreal's "English" website

Union Montreal's "English" website

I got an email Friday morning, just as the municipal election campaign officially began, informing me that Union Montreal has redesigned its website.

So, of course, I checked it out with my usual critical eye. I was pleasantly surprised by what I found. The design was clean and simple, the page looked fine even with the style sheet turned off. They’ve got the usual Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and Flickr accounts. They’re even releasing their content under a Creative Commons license.

Great, I thought. So where’s the English version?

After a bit of searching, I could find some pages that had a link at the bottom that said “English”. That would bring me to an English version of those pages. But then I’d click somewhere and it would bring me back to the French website. Or it would be the English page and all the navigational text would be in French.

I asked the guy who emailed me, Marc Snyder, what’s up with all that. He said they’re working on it:

We’re progressing in the right direction: I think this is what a work-in-progress is all about ;-)

Building a website that’s bilingual isn’t easy. Most cool content management systems don’t think of building in support for bilingual websites. So many do so through third-party plugins. In this case, the website is WordPress based and they’re using the Qtranslate plugin.

But to launch a website so publicly without even basic information in English (at first, there wasn’t even an English bio for the mayor) seems a fairly major gaffe. Even now, most of its content isn’t accessible in English. Instead, you get a short apology with a link to the French version.

Remember, this is supposed to be the anglo party, embracing both languages of this diverse metropolis. Vision Montreal, with ex-PQer Louise Harel who speaks little English, and Projet Montréal, which doesn’t even translate its name into our language, both have better English versions of their websites.

Maybe next time someone from Union Montreal criticizes Louise Harel for alienating anglophones, she can point out the fact that people don’t need to look up what “Arrondissement de militantisme” is before they can donate to her party.

Oh wait, she can’t. Neither can Michel Richard Bergeron. Because both Vision Montreal’s donation form and Projet Montréal’s donation form have random untranslated bits of French on them.

I realize this is small-time politics and we’re not dealing with real big budgets here, but these are forms people fill out to give you money. If you’re so careless about translation, I can only imagine what kind of controls you have on the $100 I’d be putting in your campaign fund.

Colour me pas impressionné.

| Media, Technology

Much talent, few scouts

"Lifestreamer" Erin Blaskie gets lots of attention from techies, but little from media

"Lifestreamer" Erin Blaskie gets lots of attention from techies, but little from media

This weekend, I spent some time at a conference put together by members of the local web technology community. I learned quite a bit from its speakers, met a few people and learned about a few more.

Most of the presentations were on the technical side, targeted towards WordPress developers. Others, like that of Erin Blaskie above, had ideas that could be taken up by someone who’s never touched PHP code.

Near the end of the conference, a guy from Canoe (Quebecor’s web portal) stood up and said the Péladeau emppire is looking for bloggers and websites to join its network. That announcement rubbed me a bit the wrong way as Quebecor is currently in a labour dispute with the Journal de Montréal and is relying on its other properties to provide it with content. Anyone who takes him up on his offer could find themselves unwittingly becoming backdoor scabs.

But at the same time, it made sense. Here was a room of dozens of smart web developers and web entrepreneurs, many of whom are working hard at creating online properties with a sustainable business model. Sure, most will fail miserably, but their willingness to take risks only makes them more valuable. The next major web phenomenon is going to be created by someone similar to the type found in this room.

And yet, besides a single face from Quebecor, and a reporter and photographer from The Gazette, there weren’t any representatives of the media present. No executives looking to poach some smart programmers and idea generators to build things for them that will make then money.

To survive this media revolution, companies have to be innovative, have to think outside the box, have to take risks and have to be prepared to fail. Participants at WordCamp and similar conferences are ideal people to do those things.

Mainstream traditional media are currently in a death spiral. They don’t have time or money to think about innovation in any serious way. And so they don’t. And that just makes the problem worse, while the people who could solve their crisis sit on the unemployment line or go out on their own.

| Technology

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WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg (left) with Q&A moderator Jeremy Clarke at WordCamp.

WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg (left) with Q&A moderator Jeremy Clarke at WordCamp.

WordCamp, the WordPress conference, continues today at 10 a.m. (which is in like 15 minutes so I better get going). You can read a writeup about it in today’s Gazette, or if you’re really interested, follow the WordCampMontreal-tagged Twitter updates and check out the photos in the Flickr pool.

Above is a photo of Matt Mullenweg, who’s one of many people behind WordPress (but certainly its most famous name). Everyone else in the room also took pictures (or video) of Matt. Or interviewed him.

One device at a time, please!

One device at a time, please!

Resources from the Intertubes

See also Cool WordPress things that speakers mentioned and WordCamp presentation slides.

In order of appearance:

Day 1

  • The perfect migration to WordPress: Why and How (Jerome Paradis and Kim Vallée): ?
  • Lifestreaming – the new future of blogging? (Erin Blaskie): slideshow, Qik video
  • WordPress MU – How to install and avoid common mistakes (CT Moore): Slideshow
  • Ecommerce on the cheap with WordPress (Alexandre Simard): Slideshow
  • Q&A with Matt Mullenweg: Qik video (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), State of the Word talk
  • WordPress security (Brad Williams): slideshow
  • oEmbed: An easier way to embed video (Stephane Jolicoeur & Audrey-Rose Savard): Qik video, blog post, slideshow
  • Cooking with BuddyPress (Andy Peatling): ?
  • Caching and optimization for WordPress (Jeremy Clarke): Slideshow
  • Communication 2.0: le project pontmercierbridge.ca (Philippe Martin): ?

Day 2

Other WordCamp recaps

More to come as I find it.

| Montreal, Public transit, Technology

STM offers bus schedules by text message

There’s been no press release yet, but the STM has quietly launched two new systems to get bus schedules on mobile devices, and recently unveiled it to employees, Fagstein has learned.

UPDATE (July 14): The STM launched both services today as a six-month pilot project.

Text LA-STM

The first is by text message. Send a message to 52786 (which works out to “LA-STM”) with the bus route number followed by the stop code and you’ll get one back with the next three departure times for that bus. So, for example, to find out the times for the next 80 bus northbound at the Place des Arts metro station (stop #52552), text “8052552”, and you’ll get a message like this:

Stop 52552 (07/03/09) Line 80: 21:52, 21:59, 22:06.

The first time you use the service, it will ask you whether you want it in English or French by texting “E” or “F”.

m.stm.info

m.stm.info

m.stm.info

The second method is through a new mobile website at m.stm.info. A simply-designed page asks you to input a stop code and route number (or just the route number so you can search for the code), and spits out the time of the next three arrivals. There are also bare-bones pages with fare information and metro closing times.

This isn’t the first time that someone thought to make it easier for mobile users to get bus times (outside of the AUTOBUS voice-menu system). There’s the STM Mobile iPhone application, busmob.com mobile-friendly site and this site which mashes up with Google Maps. There’s also, of course, Google Maps itself, which has had Montreal-area bus schedule information since October. The STM told The Gazette’s Roberto Rocha in August that it was planning something similar “in the fall”, but it seems they’ve been a bit behind schedule.

UPDATE (July 5): Some linklove from Rue Frontenac and a citation from Agence QMI. Amusingly, both invent new examples to use, QMI’s in the more francophone area of the Joliette metro. The QMI piece is also on Page 3 of 24 Heures of July 6:

24 Heures, July 6, 2009, Page 3

24 Heures, July 6, 2009, Page 3

UPDATE (July 14): More coverage from The Gazette, Metro, Technaute and Canoe (again) after the system was officially announced.