Archon Systems Developer Blog

This weekend, my co-worker Sunny and I participated in the 2012 Enbridge CN Tower Climb for United Way. Sunny had already climbed the CN Tower this past April and according to him, he did it in a time of 17 minutes and 36 seconds.  My goal was to make it to the top under 20 minutes and possibly try to beat 17:36. Sunny has always been physically active. This past summer he rode his bike from Toronto to Niagra-falls in one day. My goal of trying to beat 17:36 would be a hard task. Nevertheless, I had two goals set. My strategy was to alternate between climbing double steps and single steps. Whenever I get tired, I would use single steps and the rest of the time I would use double steps. Before the climb, I tried to reduce as much weight as I can. This includes emptying my stomach and bladder as well as removing extra layers of clothes.

At the beginning of the climb, I went ahead of Sunny by few seconds. After few flights of stairs, I was already gasping for air. As I kept climbing I saw a lot of other climbers taking breaks. The more people I saw taking break, the more I wanted to stop and take a breather. However, I told myself that I need to make it under 20 mins and kept climbing without rest. At about the halfway mark, ~70th floor, Sunny went ahead of me. After few more floors, I lost track of him. Near the 100th floor point, I started to push myself and caught up with Sunny near the 135th floor. In the end, I achieved my two goals. I was able to finish under 20 minutes and beat Sunny’s previous time of 17:36. It took me 17 minutes and 26 seconds to climb the 144 floors of the CN Tower.  Sunny still beat me with a time of 17:11.

The time it took Sunny and I to climb the CN Tower

Stephen and I recently did an interview with Dx3 Digest regarding to starting a tech startup in Canada.

Here is the link to the interview.

Like most good software companies, we’re focused on building the best possible team.  This means we have high standards for hiring; numerous times we’ve spent thousands on job postings and advertisements, gone through dozens of interviews, and been unable to hire anybody suitable.

We do get a number of job applicants from outside of Canada, and to date, we’ve been turning these away, simply because we didn’t know what’s involved in hiring outside of Canada.  In particular, many of the best applicants have been American citizens.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) can make it easier in some cases to hire American professionals under a TN visa, but only if they fall under certain professional designations.  This does include engineers, but does not include software developers or senior marketing people, for example.  So if the candidate has an engineering degree, you’re lucky, things are relatively fast and easy.  This is a temporary work permit, typically 2 years, but it has unlimited renewability.  Your cost is in the ballpark of $2,000 in legal fees and $150 for a work permit.

Hiring people not eligible for TN visas is harder, but not overwhelmingly difficult.  The main requirement is that you convince the government that you weren’t able to hire a qualified Canadian by getting a Labour Market Opinion (LMO).  First, you post a job nationwide to Service Canada’s job bank for 14 days.  Then, if you can’t find a good Canadian candidate, you can apply to hire a foreigner.  This approval process takes 12 weeks, and you’ll likely need to meet with a government representative and convince them that you had a good hiring process and couldn’t find a suitable Canadian to hire.  The good news is that next time you do this, you can probably use an accelerated process that would only take two weeks for the government to approve.  Your cost is in the ballpark of $4,000 in legal fees and $150 for a work permit.

Overall, I’d say the TN visa is pretty easy for engineers (but not software developers with e.g. a Computer Science degree).  Otherwise, the biggest obstacle in the LMO approval process is a 3-4 month delay.  It means some extra planning ahead and commitment for you and for your potential employee.  The cost is manageable – even if you add on the cost of travel for an interview and a basic relocation package, it’s still probably less than you would pay a recruiter.

So, you are going away for a while and you want to setup a home surveillance system but don’t have the money to spend on the expensive cameras. Well, you can hack your own home monitoring system. All you need is a spare computer with Skype software installed and a webcam connected to the computer. Here is how you do it.

First of all, you will need to have 2 skype accounts. One account will be used for the location where you want to monitor. i.e. HomeCamera. The second account will be used to get the live feed off the camera. So, it can be your personal Skype account. i.e. prabak.

Connect the webcam to the computer and point it to the location you want to monitor. Remember, while you are away you will have to keep this computer running contiously with Skype in the background.

On the computer where the webcam is connected, log into Skype using the HomeCamera account and enable automatic call answering with video. Here is how you do it for Skype version 5.8 installed on Mac OS X. Similar settings exist for Skype on Windows and other platforms.

Open the prefererences in the top menu bar (Skype -> Preferences). Select the “Calls” tab. Under the “Incoming Calls” section, select the radio buton that has the option “Answer automatically“. Then, clcick on the “Configure …” button, and make sure “Answer automatically with video” is selected.

Skype -> Preferences -> Calls

Skype -> Preferences -> Calls -> Configure

Once the above step is done, add both accounts to each others contact list. This is very important: HomeCamera account should only have one contact which is your own account. Otherwise, anyone who is on HomeCamera contact list will be able to see the video feed of the webcam.

Thats it. you are now setup. If you call HomeCamera via Skype from anywhere in the world (including your smart phone) using prabak skype account, you will get an automatic live feed off the webcam..

Side Note: The reason that lead me to write this blog was the idea of having a web app perform home surveillance. In my next post, I hope to have a working rails app doing the above.

I don’t know how many times I have heard this phrase: “It’s always harder than it seems”. And you know what. It almost always true (at least in regards to development).

When we’re working on a new feature, it seems that no matter how much we think we understand the problem, or how easy we think the fix will be, there will always be something out there that makes the problem more complicated.

I biked from Toronto to Niagara just earlier this summer, and the bike trip kind of reminds me of what happens during the development cycle. At first, our plan was to leave Toronto at 6am sharp, and arrive sometime in Niagara before 6pm.12 hours should be pretty reasonable to bike around 180km assuming we go at around 20km/h, with some breaks in between. The gym closed at 8pm in Niagara falls, so we had to get there sometime before or else we won’t be able to take a quick shower before we headed out for dinner and what not.

But on the day of the actual ride, we had so many delays because people slept in, the weather got extremely hot so we took breaks more often, there were delicious fresh fruits on these farms that we felt like we had to stop at, fatigue, drawbridge went up to let a boat pass which wasted us 30 minutes… etc etc

In the end, we still made it to Niagara falls (we got there 5 minutes before the gym closed, phew), but it took us a lot longer than we thought. Kind of like implementing that easy feature?