I’m very excited to announce that AvidTap is in HyperDrive accelerator’s 3rd cohort with a demo day set for Oct 18 and another one in Toronto. See the Communitech press release. The Path to HyperDrive When Kaz, Geoff and I started the company HyperDrive was the first accelerator that we looked into. However, we weren’t accepted back then when we …

I recently switched my parents’ phone to use voip, and have been pleased with it so far. I went with Anveo for porting over the phone number and for phone service. To connect regular phones to phone jack I bought a OBi202 for around $100. My parents used to pay $23/month for phone service. Now I believe they can pay …

UPDATE: Changed name to syncray, which is also cool! My backup strategy involved just using external HD to put encrypted backup. However, it’s been bugging me that I didn’t have an offsite backup for some things that aren’t on my SkyDrive. That’s why I wrote syncray over the past week whenever I had some time. syncray syncray csync (aka Cloud …

UPDATE: Added photos of AvidTap stickers as well Two months have rapidly went by since I last talked about AvidTap in more detail. A lot has happened since April. AvidTap Box Take our hardware for example, we’ve done several iterations for the AvidTap box. It went from a breadboard on my desk to a 3D-printed version, to a much more …

I’ve been a fan of Khan Academy since its earlier days. Two years ago after I watched Salman Khan’s TED video, I was inspired to leap into action. I went and fixed couple bugs in khan-exercises involving floating point precision on certain browsers on certain …

The Toronto library doesn’t allow you to put a hold on newer DVDs until several months later. When a new batch of DVDs becomes holdable on the 15th of every month they’ll show up on this list. This weekend I was reminded of the idea to write a program to automatically grab the list and check Rotten Tomatoes for ratings …

I have a love & hate relationship with hybrid web apps. I have some experience in building apps using Cordova/PhoneGap, and I covered some of the pros and cons in a previous post about Well.ca’s virtual store app. Despite the numerous deficiencies when building a mobile app using web technology, it turned out to be one of the right decisions …

At the beginning of April, I read this article on how to do email right as I took public transit to the office. I immediately put it into use for AvidTap’s welcome emails, and since then it’s proven to be extremely effective. This is the original email that my co-founder wrote: Hi there! Welcome to AvidTap! You have already found …

PhantomJS is just pure awesomeness. I gave a presentation on it at Well.ca and talked about how one can use it to facilitate website testing (with CasperJS). At the time we just encountered a bug with the website, so it was fitting. Having a headless WebKit can do so much for you other than just tesitng too! Taking Screenshots For …

This is a follow-up post from previous Getting Started With ClojureScript For Node.js tutorial. This time showing how to get a restify service up & running. Example source code on github. Setting up ClojureScript for running Node.js is the same as before. You can also see the README for details. Below is a demonstration of restify’s example echo server written …