“What would be the best date for that weekend cookout with my friends? When is everyone available for a class reunion? Which night would work best for that company outing?”

The usual pattern when organizing such events is a mass email to your friends, followed by a thread of 80 emails, where everyone throws in their preferences, witty remarks, corrections, retractions, etc. Then, after a bit of confused silence, you try to draw a conclusion from all this, and in frustration usually end up picking the date you preferred anyway, followed by further negotiations and griping

We thought this could be improved, so we have put together a web application to scratch our own itch. You can very quickly create a poll about the best date, send a link to your friends, and follow all responses. No registration, no fuss, no muss. Everyone can see the most likely date at a glance, and also drill into the details of when individuals are available.

Check it out at www.congregar.com!

More features are on the way, but we thought this is quite useful as it is. We appreciate your feedback too!

We’ve started to work for a new customer, Festo from Germany, on the control software for a special 3D printer created at the fabCom lab, based on the Fab@Home design originally created at the Cornell Computational Synthesis Lab.

We’re responsible for making the special, tripod-based printer calibrate and work properly, by applying the required 3D coordinate transformations, and making sure the printer is controlled smoothly and reliably by the software. At the end, we’ll be able to ‘print’ real objects nicely with this piece of equipment.

But now I’m back, ready to take on commercial-grade software engineering challenges that we tackle here at EU Edge. I was missing this field actually, working on pragmatic problems, making people’s lives happy.

The solution, as most of the time, is in between.

Faced with an issue, engineers, having a perfectionist stance, deem any ’solution’ a failure, unless it is a 100% solution. If the tap is leaking, the only solution is such that there are no droplets coming from it if it is closed. Whereas for managers, the goal is to keep the issue at bay, and know how to maintain a status quo. Using this approach, placing a glass under the tap, and making sure it is emptied regularly is solution in itself. After all: there’s no unknown leakage anymore, and everything is kept under control.

Of course, the best usually comes when these worlds are combined: let’s improve on the valve, so that dripping is very limited, but still place and empty the glass underneath, albeit emptying with much less frequency - something that would not be considered a solution by an engineer at all. But from a managerial perspective, the maintenance resources are decreased considerably, and thus this is a major improvement in itself.

Shigeo Shingo suggests that this is actually a very good way to eventually achieve a ‘perfect’ solution, as it is easier to tackle only parts of a problem than the whole. One can ’solve’ say 60-80% of the cases with a naive approach, and put it into effect right away, already harvesting the benefits. And then there’s time to go for the remaining 20-40% later.

To the frustration of perfectionist engineers, this latter improvement sometimes never happens, and then there’s a feeling that ‘everything is broken’, ‘nothing is done properly’. And from his perspective, this view is understandable. But then again, making 60-80% improvements on other parts of the process is most probably a time much better spent than attacking 20-40% yields for the sake of perfectionism.

Nevertheless, the source of the conflict is ever there, and one must be wise to mitigate it regularly.

Topics covered an excellent 101 for startups, with a surprisingly good signal-to-bullshit ratio:

• Brief presentations of some startups. I especially liked iGlue, coining buzz-worthy terms such as “information iron curtain”
• APIs and the role of opening data sources. Brief summary: APIs are good for your service. My note: data portability is better for users.
• The role of advertising: how to use it effectively as a startup. Lesson: if you have money to spend on ads, by all means do it. But do your homework and look for the grassroots, guerilla models first, do some basic SEO, and only then consider banners.
• Ad revenue in the business model. As expected, usually not a solid model in itself for small players.
• Investor expectations. It was interesting to hear government representatives talk about the ineffectiveness of government.
• How to get funded: from those who got funded. I was on this panel for some reason - I suspect as the token entrepreneur, who’s actually happy without external funding. Hey, there are so many ways of not obtaining angel or VC money - I was delighted someone actually wanted to hear more about that Luckily for the audience there were also some veteran entrepreneurs on the panel with a background in economy, who could provide very insightful comments.

Thanks to the organizers for such a great, down-to-earth conference (call that “underground” if you will). Looking forward to more!

In the evening we held our monthly Budapest New Technology Meetup. Despite some serious initial challenges with electricity and burning out a projector, we’ve managed to get the presentations under way. An interesting observation from the Meetup was that people presenting agile development methodologies tend not to be agile enough to fit into the five minute timebox. I guess it might be the classic case of “Those that know, do.”

Update: A video of the session intro is now available.

Very thrilled and excited to show our project at such a prestigious venue.

The project is interesting from an architectural standpoint, but is also very interesting technologically, as it involves cellular automaton models, Zigbee wireless mesh-networked sensor motes, Augmented Reality viewports among other things.

I also held a presentation on the Zigbee motes used in this project at the Budapest New Tech Meetup this January.

It was very exciting to speak with these guys and to absorb the knowledge and wisdom they hold. Craig’s repeated reference to the 14 principles of “The Toyota Way” really reminded me of Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of 5 Rings.

“I’m not worthy” is all I can mutter

(And thanks to Stefan for inviting me in the first place)

The Widget Jones Library is a lightweight, flexible, template driven widget build system. It is intended to simplify creating portable widgets. Write your code once, build it with WJL, then run it on several widget platforms like

• Apple Dashboard
• Windows Vista Sidebar
• iGoogle
• add your own…

The Widget Jones Library is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 1.1.

To learn more about the WJL, visit the Widget Jones Library project page.

Since this PDA and Google Android were not really designed for each other, don’t judge the capabilities of either from these videos