Here are some Edmonton-related things I found interesting this week:

• More than 1500 people attended Homeless Connect Edmonton last Sunday. The positive response means the event will be happening again in the future, hopefully with even more services.
• The city budget was released Monday, and calls for a 10.7% tax increase. Mayor Mandel said he’ll never support such a large tax hike.
• The City of Edmonton’s planning department has been recognized by the International Downtown Association with a Special Achievement Award in Planning for its Downtown North Edge Plan and the Urban Design Handbook. I think this happened a couple weeks ago, but just came across it yesterday.
• Syncrude has donated $1 million to NAIT, the majority of which will go to the NAIT Spartan Centre for Instrumentation Technology.
• The City has been running public information sessions on the draft Municipal Development Plan and the draft Transportation Master Plan. The initiative, collectively called Transforming Edmonton, also includes the City Vision for 2040, the 10-year strategic plan, and other things. Todd Babiak has a nice article on everything here.
• You probably heard that popular Italian Restaurant Il Portico was sold to Alberta Blue Cross to make room for a parking lot. Now city planners are proposing that standalone parking lots be prohibited in parts of downtown, which could save the restaurant.
• City Council approved the construction of a new Queen Elizabeth Pool. The new location is beside the Kinsmen, and the approved budget is $5.5 million, though it could end up costing much more.
• International design firm Kasian has been chosen to lead the $356 million rejuvenation project of the Federal Building.
• Edmonton Transit is running an eConsultation site until October 20th. This is an opportunity for you to provide feedback on public transportation.

Big news today in Canada’s wireless industry. Telus and Bell announced they are partnering to upgrade their wireless network to 3G nationwide, laying the groundwork for an eventual move to 4G. The move should put both companies on equal footing with Rogers, but playing catchup is expensive:

Although both companies declined to provide any clear insights to the cost of the upgrade, analysts expect it to be approximately between $750-million to $1-billion, split two ways between Bell and Telus. Mr. Entwistle said that initial capital expenditures for the new network are included in Telus’ original guidance of approximately $1.9-billion this year and is expected to be $750-million higher than historical levels in the following year.

I’m not sure how I missed it, but apparently rumors of this specific deal actually surfaced back in July. The first rumor, that Telus would switch to GSM, started back in January. The announcement today covers the launch of a network with High Speed Packet Access (HSPA/GSM). Bell and Telus hope to have the network ready just in time for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. After that the goal is to move to LTE (4G), which is in line with the plans of most other carriers around the world.

Clearly this is great news for Canadians. Having a single network standard will bring cost benefits, and faster time-to-market for hardware. I’m looking forward to it.

Here’s the Telus press release, and here’s the Bell press release. Both are incredibly similar, though neither one mentions the other! I guess we should use the term “partnership” lightly.

October and November are shaping up to be fantastic months for tech events here in Edmonton! Our next DemoCamp will take place on October 29th at 6:30pm, once again in ETLC on the University of Alberta campus. DemoCamp is always lots of fun - if you’ve never been to one I really encourage you to come check it out! You can read about our previous events (1, 2, 3) to get an idea of what they’re like.

Date: Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Time: 6:30pm (and drinks afterward)
Location: E1 017, ETLC, University of Alberta (map)
Cost: Free

Add your name to the wiki page to let everyone know you’re planning to attend (or if you’d like to demo). We’re also looking for help spreading the word:

We’d like to challenge everyone to tell a few people about DemoCamp and physically bring at least one new person to the event.

Additionally we’re looking for volunteers to help us target different groups of people in a more organized fashion. If you want to help us spread the word to schools, media, demoers or service providers, let us know.

Anything you can do to help would be great! We’ve got events on Facebook and Upcoming that you can send to people also. Be sure to tag things with democampyeg so that they are easier to find.

I also wanted to point out the interview that Peter Urban of Smibs did with Cam Linke. Smibs was “demo of the evening” at our first ever DemoCamp, and Cam is of course the driving force behind DemoCamp here in Edmonton. Check it out!

If you’re a Canadian developer using Microsoft technologies, you’ve undoubtedly heard about the upcoming Tech Days training conferences taking place in 7 different cities across the country. Tech Days is Microsoft Canada’s first attempt to move beyond the marketing tour-style events they usually do and into something more substantial. This is immediately obvious from the price - these are not free events. Some cities are one-day events, and cost $249.99 (or $129.99 before October 15th). Others are two-day events, and cost $499.99 (or $249.99 before October 15th).

What do you get for your money? Your choice of sessions from five tracks, plus a fairly impressive learning kit worth about $1000. Quite honestly the learning kit alone is almost worth the price of admission - you get a full copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional, a full copy of Expression Web 2, the complete TechEd 2008 DVD Set, and a 6-month subscription to TechNet Plus. Do the math…$249.99 isn’t bad at all.

What about the sessions? I’m going to be honest, my first impression is they aren’t much different than the marketing tour. Here are a few examples:

• Building Killer Line-of-Business Applications with WPF
• Goin’ Up to the Data in the Sky: ADO.NET Data Services for Web Developers
• Mastering Your Samurai Skills of Silverlight
• Beyond Relational SQL Server 2008: Managing Unstructured and Semi-Structured Data

Notice anything? WPF, ADO.NET Data Services, Silverlight, SQL Server 2008 - these are all the latest and greatest from Microsoft. I wonder how many developers are using these things right now. I know I’m not. How much will developers be able to take back to their jobs? Especially considering each session is just an hour and a half?

There are some sessions that aren’t so focused on the new stuff, and the IT Professional sessions seem even less marketing-like. There are also some sessions that are likely to have a much bigger impact even if they are focused on beta bits, such as the one on ASP.NET MVC. Still, I’m left wondering where the WCF sessions are, or even sessions on Workflow! What about something from Patterns & Practices? And if Microsoft really wanted to make it interesting, why not a session or two on some commonly used open source technologies like NHibernate or SubSonic or something?

David Crow wrote about this today too, and he says the website is a bit misleading. You should definitely read his post on the event. David points out that the primary innovation here is that 90% of the content is being delivered by non-Microsoft employees:

Once you scroll past the usual suspects, you’ll find a group of Microsoft friendly people from other companies. Consultancies. Big corporations. Smaller companies. Client side. It includes MVPs like Colin Bowern, Mark Arteaga, Laurent Duveau, and Barry Gervin. And others like Robert Burke and Ken Cox. Sure lots of these speakers are MVPs, it means that they are “exceptional technical community leaders”. They are experts. They write books. They blog. They consult. They build things in the real world.

He makes a good point - but simply having non-Microsoft speakers doesn’t guarantee quality, of course. It remains to be seen how effective this format is.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t comment on the cities in which Tech Days is happening. Developers in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Calgary, Halifax, and Vancouver don’t have to go anywhere. Everyone else needs to get to one of those cities to attend. I don’t know how Microsoft Canada came up with that list, but I’m once again disappointed to find that Edmonton is missing. We’ve got an amazing developer community here, one of the most successful user groups in the country, and yet we’re passed over for Calgary. That sucks. I know it’s expensive to get everywhere, but why not force the Calgarians to come up to Edmonton for once?

I encourage you to check out the Tech Days website for yourself. Read the session abstracts and figure out which ones would be useful. If you want to attend, you’ve got until October 15th to get the early bird price. Finally, check out John’s funny post on the Canadian Developer blog. You’ll laugh!

The Twitter community here in Edmonton continues to amaze me. New users sign up every day, and existing users do a good job of following one another. As a result, there are really interesting discussions taking place all the time. Quite a few people have adopted the #yeg hashtag too, making it even easier to find Edmonton-related items on Twitter.

A tweetup is an opportunity to strengthen those online relationships and perhaps forge new ones offline. Or if you’re new to Twitter, it’s a great way to come and find out what all the fuss is about. Some people will undoubtedly talk about tech at the event, but for the most part it’s a non-geeky get-together. Join us for some food, drinks, and good discussion. Here are the details on EdmontonTweetup3:

WHO: Twitterers and the Twitter-curious in Edmonton and area!
WHAT: An event to meet one another in person.
WHERE: Devlin’s Cocktail Lounge on Whyte Avenue (map)
WHEN: Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 6:00pm
WHY: Because you need to get off the computer once in a while!

I hope you can make it out! If you’re planning to attend, please add your name to the wiki page so that we have an idea of how many people to expect. Follow edmontontweetup and/or myself on Twitter for updates.

See you there!

Pingdom is a service that monitors your websites and/or servers and can let you know when something goes wrong. Despite your best efforts, something will go wrong, so it’s important to know right away when it does so that you can take action. That’s exactly what Pingdom helps you do.

I should have written this a long time ago - I’m a very happy Pingdom customer! I’ve used dozens of different monitoring tools and services over the years, and without a doubt, Pingdom is my favorite. I first got an account in August 2007, when I took advantage of a free offer for Mashable readers (if I remember correctly). I didn’t use it right away, but when I did, I was impressed. So much so that I bought Pingdom Basic account ($9.95/mo or $119.40/year).

The two Pingdom terms you need to know are checks and notifications. A check is basically a website, mail server, or DNS server (there are HTTP/HTTPS, Ping, TCP, UDP, DNS, and POP3/IMAP/SMTP checks). A notification is an email address or cell phone number (for SMS). Pingdom Basic gives you 5 checks, unlimited email notifications, and 20 SMS notifications. Additionally, you get included uptime reports.

The best thing about Pingdom is that it’s fast and reliable. I receive notifications generally within about a minute of something going down. That’s much faster than anything else I’ve tried. I feel confident relying on Pingdom to let me know if something is wrong with my servers.

Another thing I love about Pingdom is their blog, called Royal Pingdom. They occasionally post about Pingdom-related things, but more often than not they post about the industry in general. They obviously put some time and effort into it though, because their posts are original, in-depth, and very interesting. For instance, earlier this week they posted about 12 great iPhone applications for sysadmins and webmasters. It’s the kind of thing that keeps me subscribed.

If you’re looking for a website monitoring solution, I’d strongly recommend Pingdom.

As a tech geek I’m interested in a lot of things, but I have a particular interest in wireless technologies. I want to have the ability to connect to the Internet wherever I go, using whatever device I happen to have with me. Despite the progress we’ve made in recent years, that vision is still a long way from being realized. A couple of things I came across recently look promising though.

The first is an article in MIT’s Technology Review, discussing research to make wireless faster:

One way to achieve faster speeds is to harness the millimeter-wavelength frequency of the wireless spectrum, although this usually requires expensive and very complex equipment. Now, engineers at Battelle, a research and development firm based in Columbus, OH, have come up with a simpler way to send data through the air with millimeter-wave technology.

Apparently they’ve been able to achieve speeds of 10.6 gigabits-per-second in a point-to-point field test, with antennas 800 meters apart. In the lab, they’ve demonstrated 20 gigabit-per-second speeds. Those are fiber-like speeds! Of course this wouldn’t work for blanket-wireless (like a cell network), but it could have some really useful applications.

The second article discusses a new study by market researcher In-Stat: