OurTraction

It started with a simple (but great) idea and a single tweet from Ian Gifford:

And in no time at all it grew into a competition between 5 Ontario cities to have a Canadian media icon visit one of our cities.

A number of folks that we have a lot of love for were involved in the initial hours and we wanted to lend them whatever help we could offer. Now we can’t come right out and bribe the man so instead we made an offer to allocate a big chunk of our CSR time to a charity of Jian’s choosing.

We were very pleasantly surprised when Jian took notice later that day.

Now there’s a great Facebook page and a number of other businesses have come to the table (Jody Bailey has provided a great summary here along with all the Twitter traffic).

I’m sure a few folks will be saying “There IS a string attached to your offer, Jian has to come to London. That’s a string.” Well let’s remove that now. This offer is an act of goodwill and whether or not Jian comes to London this offer will remain on the table.

Jian, we would love you to visit our city. We’re not perfect but the place is teeming with great people who want to make things better. So, on behalf of all those people, please feel free to donate this offering to any charity you choose. A new website probably won’t change anyone’s world but we know there are a lot of incredibly worthy organizations out there and we want to give them the very best of what we do best.

Today, we had two new additions to the rtraction team for Take Our Kids to Work Day: Jenysee from Saunders S.S. and Haley from Central (LCSS). We sat down and I interviewed them about their day at the office. This is what they had to say:

Jenysee arrived to the office at the crack of dawn (7:30 a.m.) and set to work immediately… math homework, that is. Once the rest of the office piled in (around 9 a.m.), she met Haley and they began their first day of work at rtraction.

With no time to waste, they headed out with Elvin to do some technical support work at North Park Community Church, which they dubbed the “massive” church. They weren’t kidding either. Haley took some pictures and it is quite possibly the biggest church I’ve seen.

Haley and Jenysee took a tour of the church, Elvin taught them all about the wiring, and how the computers were all connected to one server. They also learned about the backup drive, and how it’s important to always have a backup in case of a disaster.

Thankfully, the girls had to return to the office before they were put to more work – the cleaning staff at the church nearly had them polishing book shelves!

When they got back, they enjoyed some delicious pizza (but they didn’t save me any). They each spent their lunch hours with their parents. Jenysee got to go shopping with Elvin, and Haley got to input invoices with Kate — (she thanks Kate for this enriching experience).

After lunch, it was back to work (or continuing to work in Haley’s case). The young ladies met with Denise and learned all about graphic design. They got to see her work her Photoshop skills, making foreheads less shiny, fading background images, adding mustaches (ok, not the last one):

Surprisingly, they weren’t scared off and both agreed that the designer’s jobs are the coolest.

They both agreed to a one-hour contract position. After a gruelling hour they quit, and continued their search for the perfect job.

Moving on to the developer’s end of the office they sat down with Gavin.
They were confused, as I would be, too– There were a lot of colours and things appeared on screens like magic. Gavin figured Greg could make their job seem like more fun so they sat down with him for a little bit. Jenysee and Haley thought it was pretty interesting how the designer’s can make a design by dragging stuff around but the developer’s make that same design by “attaching links and making codes” for every little thing. They agreed that it would be cool to learn how to do it because “you would feel so smart.”

Finally, it was on to me! We wrote this blog post, took some pictures, and chatted about party planning and their day.

Overall the ladies said their day went better than expected – but then again, they thought they would be making us coffee all day.  Their favourite part was learning about design work since they both enjoy drawing (drawing credit: Jenysee):

As for how they thought rtraction compared to most offices, they said that rtraction seems less like a stereotypical office and more like a group of friends talking and working together. Jenysee put it best when she asked me, “No one here really wears shoes, do they?” I remember that being my first impression as well.

Jenysee and Haley, consider yourselves part of the rtraction team. I hear we’re hiring anyways.

As part of rtraction’s ongoing commitment to the community, one of the organization’s we’re proud to support is the Junior Achievement London & District. For the past two years they have been kind enough to donate space for an ad in the Junior Achievement London Business Hall of Fame Induction Gala Dinner program.

In 2010 half of our ad space in the program was dedicated to promoting the cool things going on in London.

We came up with the idea after hearing a common theme among Londoners that “there’s nothing to do in London.” We know, of course, that there are many cool things to do in London. We figured that people were just having a hard time discovering them, so we came up with a website to launch in connection with the Junior Achievement ad. The website is dedicated to promoting events and groups around London. Users can browse, get more information and add their own initiatives. Visit www.londonforthewin.ca to check it out. This year we decided to dedicate the 2011 Junior Achievement ad space towards a cause very close to us: 1000 Acts of Kindness.

This year’s print ad rounds out the suite of projects we’ve donated to 1000 Acts 2011. Our overall goal  has been to make it easier for participants to get ideas for acts of kindness they can perform, and record and share them afterward. The ad itself explains the concept of dedicating half the space to another organization, and speaks just a bit about what rtraction has to offer, too. The remainder of the ad is a 1000 Acts QR code. When users scan the QR code with a smartphone or tablet, they discover a suggested Random Act of Kindness. When they rotate the device around, the app will prompt them with a new act of kindness. The app is a fun way for people to discover acts of kindness they may not have thought of before, and to share them via social networking sites. To try it out now, scan the ad to the left or visit 1000acts.ca on your iPhone or Android smartphone.

For more information on the 1000 Acts of Kindness Campaign and to get started today visit 1000acts.ca or visit 1000 Acts on Facebook and Twitter.

rtraction is proud to be supporting LUSO’s 1000 Acts of Kindness again this year. We’ve been involved in the Challenge since it began in 2009 and we’re excited to continue supporting this important initiative well into the future.

LUSO’s 1000 Acts of Kindness is an important event for London. Every October, LUSO encourages citizens to eliminate hate and bias from our community by performing acts of kindness. In 2009 and 2010 there were over 100,000 acts performed around London and then recorded on the website. Getting involved is simple: just visit the website and register, go out and perform acts of kindness, submit those acts on the site, and then share them with the world!

Since 2009, we’ve been involved in the challenge in several ways including donating the website, developing a social media strategy and performing acts of kindness as a team.

This year, we are particularly excited to be doing the following: redesigning the website, making a spiffy PSA and creating a unique ad to be launched at the Junior Achievement London Business Hall of Fame Induction Gala Dinner.

Here’s a sneak peak at the new website design that will be launched in a couple of weeks!

Creating the PSA has been a really fun experience for all of us and something we’ve never done before. The whole team got involved to recreate several of the acts of kindness we’ve performed since 2009. You can see the final product below and be sure to look out for it on Rogers throughout the month of October.

I have a challenge for you too! Can you find the character who doesn’t belong in the video? Leave your best guess in the comments below.

The whole team would like to send a big thank you to the following people for helping make this video possible:

• Scott (thecrow65) for letting us use the awesome Star Wars coffee logos he designed.
• Kevin Van Lierop for the lighting equipment
• Our in-house crew: Noah’s voiceover, Jeremy’s mad post skills, and Shawn’s direction.

Here are some additional pictures taken from the shoot:

The “Studio”	The Props

Stay tuned to hear about the unique ad we’re doing for the Junior Achievement Dinner, I’ll be writing about it in the next few weeks.

NOTE from the “management”: The author of this blog, Shannon, was instrumental in making this a successful endeavour. Thank you Shannon for all your creativity and hard work in bringing this idea to life – David, Josh and Shawn

I’m the current co-op student here and this 4 month placement will have me close out my 2nd year of the Computer Programmer Analyst program at Fanshawe College.

I have been presented with an amazing opportunity to prove myself, and to learn a great deal of practical skill at the same time. My assigned project is to re-create PolicyTool from the ground up and add a number of features to it. That in itself is a pretty slick project to have been handed as a co-op student, but there’s more to it.

The 2nd part of this opportunity is the task of researching various programming languages and choosing one that would not only be the best fit for this PolicyTool project, but also benefit all the devs here.

Here’s where the proverbial fork in the road comes in. We have a multitude of choices: PHP, Javascript, a CMS like Drupal, Ruby on Rails, Grails, something newer like Node.js and more – not to mention various combinations of these. The only one of those languages that I am familiar with at this point is Javascript.

A core choice needs to be made at this point: Take an easier route and choose something in the realm of PHP, Drupal or Javascript, where help would be readily available from the other devs here when guidance is required; or, take the path less travelled and learn something that most of the other devs here are unfamiliar with, which would create a new resource for future projects.

This is a scary choice for a co-op. There is a tricky balance between knowing there is still so much to learn to become a competent developer while wanting to prove that you’re a worthwhile investment to the company you’re working for, as well as hopefully solidify your position to return for another co-op and/or get hired on when you graduate. In this case, it seemed the the choice was to take the path less travelled.

Once the initial decision was made to learn something “new” I spoke with some of the devs here. We narrowed down the choices fairly quickly to only a few “new to us” programming languages.The options were Grails, Node.js, and Ruby on Rails.

Grails looks like it has a lot going for it. Though to me it resembled Frankenstein to an extent, heavy in Java, it also included GSP, Hibernate, Spring and Groovy syntax, all of which would take more time to learn. The community behind it doesn’t seem to be all that large, as its main support forum has a range of only 6 – 10 threads per sub forum. On there other hand, there’s a lot more support for it on stackoverflow, so that could make up for the lack of support on the main forum. Another downfall is the apparent lack of test driven development. The tutorials don’t seem to cover this topic, and many plugins and modules don’t seem to involve that either.

Node.js seems to be gaining popularity quickly, and it’s easy to see why. The asynchronous nature of it is intriguing. This would be great to learn, but being better suited towards more real-time applications, it isn’t the best candidate for PolicyTool. It’s also changing very quickly, so chances are once learned and implemented into a project, a few new versions would’ve come out which could require changes to a lot of code. I also had some trouble finding a web hosting provider that had node.js support and also met some of the other criteria for this project.

Ruby On Rails has a huge community behind it, lots of great learning material and tutorials, and is also supported by most every web hosting provider. One of the most attractive arguments for Ruby is the testing. It seems most of the tutorials are heavy on writing test suites, the plugins/gems written by devs include testing, and much of the core has a lot of testing and documentation included. There are even entire Ruby books completely centred around writing test suites. The testing and documentation seem to be the biggest benefits of learning RoR, not only for this project, or for me to grow as a developer, but also to pass on to other devs here to fortify their own projects. RoR is also used in many popular sites, a list of which you can view here.

Blazing a completely new trail does come with risks, and could easily backfire if things go awry. However, after much discussion with Greg Smith and Dave Millar on pros and cons of all three options, as well as encouragement from the team for me to stretch myself to learn something new from scratch, we decided on Ruby on Rails for this project. As the project progresses, short sessions will be hosted here at the office to share what I’ve learned along the way.

Reading the following article by Rodrigo Rosenfeld Rosas, as well as a good chunk of the comments following the article really helped solidify the decision to learn Ruby on Rails.

The decision to learn and develop on Ruby on Rails may not be the right answer, or the best answer, but some value comes out of the process of deciding which path to take when all paths are unknown. And that’s worth sharing.

Any feedback on similar experiences is welcome, as hearing other opinions and experiences can save a lot of grief.

My name is Shawn Adamsson and I’m a partner at a small digital media agency here in London.

Normally I wouldn’t mention where I work, but the green bin issue has a larger impact on this community beyond just London taking responsibility for its waste.

Our company, and other digital media companies like it, require progressive minded Gen Y and Millenials in order to be successul. These generations tend to look beyond their pocketbook and see the impact that they are having on the world. As a 42 year old Gen X, this is something that I have to keep in mind on a daily basis if rtraction wants to attract and retain the kind of talent that we need.

The decisions that have been made at City Hall over the last 10 months are being received with derision by the progressive, creative, and idealistic among these generations – those who want to make London, and the world, a better place. They see decisions being made to meet short term targets or for short term revenue that either halt progress in our city or seek to undo progressive directions set by previous Councils. The re-tabling of the water bottle ban, forced resignation of an LTC board member, continued focus on sprawling the city, neglect of public transit, dismissal of nominees to committees and dismissal of staff recommendation in the pursuit of more jobs, sure, but of the low-skill, low-paying variety. This is far from a comprehensive list.

The latest issue is, of course, the green bin pilot. Again, many members of these generations (and I’m with them on this) want to take responsibility for the waste they produce. They know that the system that we have in place today is not sustainable and they see other communities that have had better systems in place for years. They know that this has been on hold for years here as well. This isn’t cutting edge stuff, we’re playing catch-up.

We have lost 2 employees in the last 3 years to other communities with more progressive visions of the future. Other cities are moving forward and the perception is that London is standing still at best or taking steps backward at worst. Perception is enough to lose the people that we need.

Of the 5 industry sectors listed on the LEDCs website, 3 of them require the kind of technically savvy people that I’m talking about.

We need City Council to start looking at the big picture when making decisions. We know that your hands are tied in the things that you can do to pull business to London, but retention of these key sectors is within your control.

Twenty members of our team will be watching and I would prefer to tell them that we moved forward on Monday night. I don’t want to have to explain to them again the single reason that this was delayed again.

My company loves London and we hope to be here in 10 years to celebrate our 20th anniversary. We’re on Team London. Please leave us a city that we can continue to take pride in.

Sincerely,

Shawn Adamsson
Vice President of Operations

MagiSeal, a local company in London, is now hiring for a Director of Business Technology.

Job Description

If this sounds like something that would interest you, please see the description above and contact:

Brad Geddes
President and Chief Executive Officer
Magi Seal Group
552 Clarke Road, London, Ontario N5V 3K5
Tel: 519.452.0101 x1502
Fax: 519.455.4233
Cell: 519.200.6058
email hidden; JavaScript is required

After reading iHostage comment numberOfMonths: [3, 1] I realized that the jQuery UI Team had in fact provided a mechanism for showing multiple months vertically; the documentation just didn’t immediately convey that to me

Specifying numberOfMonths: [3,1] will show 3 months in 1 column (verically).

Thanks jQuery UI Team for such awesome controls and iHostage for letting me know about my oversight

The jQuery UI Datepicker is an awesome tool, but I discovered recently that it lacks a feature that I needed…showing multiple months vertically.

I decided to see if I could bend it to my will using CSS and some JavaScript. Using Firebug I was able to figure out what styles needed to be overridden and was able to get the result I was after. I give the jQuery and jQuery UI teams a lot of credit for writing VERY flexible libraries!

I created the datepicker on a div so it would display inline rather than requiring a click on an input control. Here’s my setup:

JavaScript

CSS

You may need to do some additional tweaking depending on how you’re using the Datepicker, but showing months vertically is definitely possible

The calendar icon tab is a custom div that I added to toggle showing the Datepicker control; it’s not related to the jQuery UI Datepicker

Sometimes when writing Stored Procedures we need to store the return value from a Dynamic SQL Statement in a variable for use later on in the Stored Proc. sp_executesql is the tool for the job.

Lets say for example that we need to store an ID value from a table whose value is dynamic.


DECLARE @tableName VARCHAR(30)
DECLARE @ID UNIQUEIDENTIFIER


/* the query executed by sp_executesql must be ntext/nchar/nvarchar */
DECLARE @query NVARCHAR(1000)

SET @tableName = 'MyTable'
SET @query = N'SELECT @IDout = TableId FROM ' + @tableName + ' WHERE SomeValue = 1'

EXEC @query, N'@IDout UNIQUEIDENTIFIER OUTPUT', @IDout = @ID OUTPUT

SELECT @ID

/* @ID now holds the return value from our dynamic statement and can be used throughout the rest of our proc */

On Wednesday, May 11, Chantelle and I spent the day at the Western Fair Agriplex representing rtraction at SLOME, an interactive career exploration event that exposes Southwestern Ontario’s youth to careers in science, technology, and skilled trades. The event is geared toward students in grades 7-12 from Elgin, Middlesex, Oxford counties and The City of London. This year’s event was host to over 2,800 students and over 250 exhibitors.

This is the second year that rtraction has participated in SLOME. This year, the students visiting our exhibit interacted with the simon-game we built for the LHSF. We had over 60 participants and a high score of 690!

Beyond the fun and games, we introduced the idea of a digital footprint to the students and collected some information about their online behaviour.

The concept of a digital footprint is that all of our actions online leave an impression, and that impression can be positive or negative, heavy or light. What was important to get across to the students was that, in this digital age, the actions they take on the web today will impact their opportunities in the future: employers, family, friends, and schools will all have access to their online personas. Not only did we aim to raise students’ awareness about their digital footprints, we also conveyed the importance of proactively taking steps to build a more positive image today.

To measure online behaviour, we asked the student participants to fill out a short survey on the iPad. Here are just a few of the interesting results:

• 46% of students who responded have a Facebook profile; 24% have a YouTube account
• 31% of students who responded spend three or more hours on the internet per day
• 86% of students who responded have 1 or 2 email accounts
• 24% of students who responded have been bullied on the internet
• 83% of students who responded have never posted their mailing address or phone number on the internet

You can download the complete survey results here:  SLOME Survey