hacker class

Browser Based Apps for Google Tablet

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 06:51:00 +0000

Google seemed to try to toss a bit of cold water on Apple's iPad announcement with a me too announcement of a Google Tablet.

One thing that caught my attention though was:

Google is taking a different approach with Chrome OS. Instead of programs running straight on the computer's hardware and its underlying Linux operating system, Chrome OS applications run directly in the browser. What's similar to the iPad, though, is that both have somewhat of an applications head start compared with a computing platform that's starting from scratch: the iPad can run existing iPhone apps, and Chrome OS can run existing Web applications such as Google Docs

This reminds me of the Native Client project. It would be interesting to see Google take a web app approach to the tablet. Of course Apple launched the iPhone without an app store and initially pitched the idea that all apps could just be web apps. Of course today no one thinks of web apps as real iPhone apps. (Except maybe the Google Voice folks.)

Maybe the Google tablet could just leverage NaCl apps as a way to jump start a gPad device instead of the more complicated and heavy handed process that is involved in running an app store. After all, this is similar to the way the iPhone got started. Of course NaCl apps could do a lot more than the Javascript web apps of the iPhone 1.0 days.

New Axis Thermal Cameras

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:44:00 +0000

Today Axis announced new thermal imaging camera model Q1910. Apparently you can get one for only $3,138 from your favorite reseller. The videos are kind of creepy, I have to admit.

ioBridge Sensors

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 06:03:00 +0000

I've been playing around with the ioBridge IO-204. This is a fun little gadget that allows you to hook up and control various devices in your home or office. The cool thing about ioBridge is that they have a web site for controlling and accessing the device. You plug it in and it connects up to the ioBridge website. You can then log into the website and configure the device. Since the IO-204 connects to their site, you don't have to muck with firewall issues or do any port forwarding on your router.

Since the servers at ioBridge provide the interface to the device at your home, you can easily create widgets that you can embed in your blog or web page. Here's one that shows the temperature in my basement.

I must say that it took me way too long to get this graph to work. The site is still pretty confusing. I had to poke around on the forums before I was able to get everything configured properly. For instance, I kept trying to create the temperature sensor as a digital input. It sure looks digital to me. But in ioBridge terms, digital really means binary and analog means a range of digital values. Go figure.

Anyway, I think they have the right approach and it was relatively simple to setup. For months I've had a similar device from Mi Casa Verde called the Vera and I have yet to be able to get a graph of temperatures out of it. The Vera will do a lot more, but the web integration for the IO-204 is much simpler.

Wreath Thief Caught on sensr.net

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:43:00 +0000

We've been alpha testing sensr.net for a few months now. I got an email from one of our early users that his camera caught a thief in action. See the shots below.

Unfortunately they haven't caught the guy, yet. At least the neighbors have been warned and they know what the guy looks like so they can keep an eye out for him in the future.

Love is all you need

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:08:00 +0000

A touching video from Starbucks.

My favorites are the wacky folks from Japan and Denmark.

Click here to view on YouTube.

Tesla and Lotus

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:45:00 +0000

They are so cute together.

sensr.net live

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:27:00 +0000

About a year ago I started playing around with the idea of monitoring various things around the house. We travel a lot and I wanted to be able to check on the house while I was out of town. I started playing with network cameras and found that it was cool to have remote access to a camera back home, but setting it up and monitoring it was a pain. I tried Linux, PC, and Mac software but I didn't like the idea of having a dedicated computer inside my house to do the monitoring. My PhD is in distributed computing, so it's only fitting that my home to be monitored in the cloud.

I started building a website for monitoring my cameras and realized that this could be a useful service for others and might even be a nice business. In the course of the last year I've been lucky enough to hook up with some incredibly talented folks who have joined me in this effort. We're now ready to start opening up the site for others to try. It's not perfect and it's not for everyone, but sensr.net is at least ready for the hacker class to try.

How does it work?

Basically we'll provision an FTP account for each of your cameras and process all the images it sends to us. We keep images where we've detected motion and organize them by time and date. Want to know what time the plumber left? Check the front door camera, archived on sensr.net.

We'll also send you alerts (email or text) if you want. This works great on indoor cameras when you're away from home. Of course you may get notified about motion that you don't care about. Here's one alert I got a while back that would have been annoying had it come at 3 am.

Moth caught mid-flight.

Why the cloud?

Nobody runs their own email server anymore, why should you run a home server?

Infinite disk space: You don't have to worry that the PC in your basement is going to run out of disk just before your house gets robbed.
Elastic compute infrastructure: We can build all kinds of interesting computer vision algorithms to process your images. Right now we're starting with simple motion detection, but once the pipeline is setup, we can add other kinds of processing. Face detection should be easy. Face recognition is doable. Tagging your images with text could be next. Having our infrastructure in the cloud allows us to be creative and try new kinds of processing without requiring you to install anything.
Nothing to manage: Our users don't have to worry about the care and feeding of a PC. We'll deal with all those hassles for them.
Disaster recovery: If your house is robbed, we'll still have pictures of the thieves, even if they steal the camera. If your house burns down, all the images we've stored for you will still be there.

Sure, there are drawbacks. If your network goes down, we can't monitor your cameras. In most cases broadband connections are very reliable these days. Especially if you compare them with something like Windows Vista. Eventually we may support multiple tiers, so you can have an agent inside the home for caching until your network comes back. Some network cameras will do that already.

Why FTP?

FTP may seem like an anachronism, but in this case I think it makes a lot of sense. The issue is the home firewall. These days everyone has a firewall, so our servers can't reach into your network and pull images from your cameras. With FTP your camera will push images to our servers. Users don't need to configure confusing port forwarding options on their firewall.

Why Facebook Connect?

Do your really want another user name and password to remember? I didn't think so. That's one reason we use Facebook Connect for authentication. Besides, this makes it easy for you to share access to your cameras with your friends. BTW, you don't have to share whole cameras. You can mark a camera as private, then only share interesting images by uploading them to Facebook in a single click.

Not on Facebook yet? (Really?) Well, you can still peruse the public cameras. If you want to add your own camera or see cameras that your friends have added, you'll have to sign up for a Facebook account. Facebook accounts are free you know.

Give it a try!

So if you have a network camera that supports FTP, head over to sensr.net and give it a try. If you want to use the camera built into your PC or a USB camera you can make that work too. See the sensr.net FAQ for details.

Big Island Damage

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:10:00 +0000

Well there wasn't enough wind yesterday but I went out anyway. Didn't
even get up. The kite ended up in the waves and suffered a big rip.

It seems that 9 times out of 10 I need a bigger kite. I guess it's
time to look into a 12 because this 10 isn't doing it for me.

Tesla Model S Infotainment Center

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:08:00 +0000

Cool video on the design of the Model S. Can't wait for this.

For the UI geeks, skip to minute 28 or so to get to the juicy bits.

Towards the end of the talk in the Q&A they mention the possibility of a Tesla App store. Basically the idea is to keep it flexible and customizable. Sweet!

Salted Chrome

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:40:00 +0000

According to CNet there is now a NaCL (Native Client) version of Chrome. Since the early days of the web, computer scientists have tried to come up with ways to programmaticly extended the browser. It started with slow Java Applets and led to scary ActiveX implementations. Today most developers stick with Javascript or Flash.

This latest effort from Google might actually have a chance at success. It seems to strike a nice balance between performance and security. Of course a huge obstacle will be adoption. Including NaCL in Chrome is a significant step forward, but Chrome is has a very small percentage of the browser market. Perhaps if the Chrome experiment goes well, Google can get Firefox to include NaCL. I still don't see Microsoft supporting NaCL in IE, so compared to Javascript and Flash, it's going to be a long uphill battle for widespread adoption. I suppose NaCL browser plugins/extensions for Firefox and IE might be one way to gain further adoption. Maybe they could deliver it as an iPhone App as a way to finally get Google Voice on the iPhone. :-)

I'll be interested to see how it goes. I'll give it a try when the Mac version comes out.

Augemented Reality on iPhone 3GS

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 19:47:00 +0000

Looks like another reason to upgrade! These AR apps are pretty cool.

New Hampshire Biking

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:38:00 +0000

Dr. Palmer and I went for a little mountain bike ride near his place. We ran across this odd summer estate. Seems to have been abandoned since the 80s.

Sashimi Dinner

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:56:00 +0000

At Cho Cho San NYC. Yum!

Fred Zeppelin @ Gold Lake

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 03:25:00 +0000

Last weekend we were camping at Gold Lake and a few campsites down there was this amazing band rocking out. The band is called Fred Zeppelin and they were really good. There is something magical about a hard rock band playing in the wilderness. Thanks to Fred Zeppelin for a great show.

Thanks to my cousin Mark for inviting me and posting the video!

Piston Powered Fusion

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:04:00 +0000

Sometimes I forget how much I don't know about science. Being an expert in one field sort of blinds us to the crazy and creative things going on in other fields. Case in point, the folks at General Fusion have come up with an idea for a new kind of fusion reactor. Read more about it in this Technology Review article.

I love this quote:

"One of the big risks to the project is nobody has compressed spheromaks to fusion-relevant conditions before," says Richardson.

I'm glad folks are still working on big idea startups. This is not a Y Combinator kind of idea. This is a $1 billion project. Cool!

Judas and Me

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 21:00:00 +0000

If you're going to be in NYC, this September or October check out the new play from Chad Beguelin and Matthew Sklar. It's part of the New York Musical Festival this Fall.

Here's the description:

It's tough keeping up with the Joneses when your neighbor's kid is the Messiah. Consumed by jealousy, Rheba Iscariot pushes her son Judas to be better than Jesus - and we all know how well that turns out. A new musical comedy by the Tony-nominated writing team of Chad Beguelin and Matthew Sklar, Judas & Me is a hilarious look at life with the ultimate biblical stage mom.

Should be a great show!

Hawley Lake Run

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 20:47:00 +0000

Jameson Canyon?

Mark and I were doing a run last weekend for Wampler Kids. It's a great cause.

Clamato and Bud Light

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 19:00:00 +0000

I did not buy this but I'm tempted!

My First Cat5

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0000

I'm putting a new camera at the front door and decided I needed to make my own ethernet cable. I got a crimper and a spool of cable from Radio Shack. I had to look up the order of the wires, and found this site and the video pretty useful. Thanks LAN Shack for the great tutorial.

I didn't know if the wires were supposed to be the same on each end or not. They should be in the same order on each end. The order is: orange stripe, orange, green stripe, blue, blue stripe, green, brown stripe, and brown.

The image above is the first image from the camera. It's not mounted yet and the wire is still strung across the doorway. I just wanted to do a quick test to see if my home made cable actually worked or not.

Armstrong and Truveo

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 23:26:00 +0000

Just saw this in the NY Times. It seems the new AOL CEO likes Truveo but was convinced that it's not a core business. Strange.

Eventually, the assembled employees voted on their top five ideas. Separately, Mr. Armstrong wrote his top five on a blackboard, turning it so the audience could see it only after the vote. The only difference: Mr. Armstrong wanted to include AOL’s Truveo video search company in the top priorities. But he deferred to the group and assigned Truveo instead to a new unit called AOL Ventures, where he is putting noncore businesses, like the Bebo social network, that might eventually be sold.

I wonder if anyone from Truveo was in the room...

3 Phone Wires

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:28:00 +0000

We're doing some remodeling and I need to move a phone jack. Turns
out this old house has three wires running to the phone jack. What's
up with that? I've always seen pairs but never an extra wire.
Interesting.

As you can see, the third wire isn't being used.

Makeshift Camera Cover

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 16:22:00 +0000

Just in case it rains.

I added a camera that keeps an eye out on one of our doors. I didn't have a lot of time but wanted to make sure the camera didn't get destroyed if it rained. Luckily the camera came with everything wrapped up in little plastic bags. I used a couple of those bags to drape behind and in front of the camera. There is enough room for airflow so it shouldn't get too hot. The lens isn't covered so it doesn't obscure the image.

Hopefully this will hold until I have a chance to find a better solution or the wife finds it.

The camera caught a snapshot of me attacking it. :-)

SMS Camera Alerts

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 16:06:00 +0000

As we pulled into the garage early on Friday morning my iPhone chirped the arrival of an SMS. I thought this was odd since it was I don't usually get text messages at 1am.

Silly me, I forgot that I had setup the camera to send me text messages when it detected motion. We've been out of town for most of the summer so I wanted to know if there was any action inside my garage. I was pleasantly surprised when it worked so well. In the photo above, you can see me telling above telling my wife what just happened.

I'm working on a website that will let you do this kind of thing, and a whole lot more. If you're interested in trying it out, go to sensr.net and request alpha access. We're slowly opening the doors to a few alpha users.

Cool Augmented Reality with Pacube

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 17:03:00 +0000

Find more videos like this on www.truveo.com.

I've been following Pachube for a while now. They put out this video recently showing how Pachube data could be combined with augmented reality.

Imagine folks walking down the street with those augmented reality glyphs printed on their clothing. If you had the right camera setup, you could check out the data feeds represented by their t-shirts. I see a computer art project in the making....

Rubicon Misadventure

noreply@blogger.com (Adam Beguelin) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:39:00 +0000

On our way out on the last day we got stuck behind this rig (above). I didn't have any pictures of it so I didn't include it in my original Rubicon post. The guy pictured above was stuck on Cadillac Hill. He only had 4wd high with no breaks. This is an example of how not to do the Rubicon. His engine (below) was held in with the yellow strap. The engine eventually shifted and the fan started hitting the radiator. Our guys helped jury rig it so it worked a bit. Notice the jack and the newer orange straps holding it together!

The guy was nice enough but he just wasn't nearly prepared enough for the trip. After a couple of hours we were able to get him to a wide spot in the trail so other folks could get by. On the Rubicon you can never be in a hurry.