Jadon

ARM9 , OMAP And BeagleBoard in India

(author unknown) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:53:38 -0700

Shared by Jadon
Well, the BeagleBoard is available directly in India now (see http://beagleboard.org/buy) and has a Cortex-A8 CPU, which executes roughly twice as many instructions as an ARM9 per cycle because it is dual-issue superscalar.

Currently i am working on a ARM9 based platform and found out that in India its really hard to get by ARM9 which is above 500 Mhz and costs < Rs 10k. ARM7 TDMI is whats easily available and after having some fun with it , it was found to be highly underpowered.

So if anyone looking for a ARM9 Based Platform in India get a Beagle Board ... Its what i call Awesome for the price and performance. To get it you can go through either Indian vendors who overcharge and fleece as usual or Get it from Sparkfun(Awesome Service) where i got it from. Digikey also sells it but charges a hell of a lot of shipping. So if you are looking around source from US and dont waste time like i did looking locally and getting frustrated.

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=9444

149 USD + 9 USD USPS = 160 USD ( approx Rs 7500 as of the time of posting ). The cables , SD card etc all can be bought for < Rs 500 locally.

While Indian vendors like Cranes etc are charging like Rs 13000. Why dont we have shops like spark fun in India .

Right on Trent

(author unknown) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 07:33:49 -0700

Shared by Jake
Amen

Trent Reznor from the Nine Inch Nails has some great advice for young, unknown artists trying to make it.

via Trent:

Forget thinking you are going to make any real money from record sales. Make your record cheaply (but great) and GIVE IT AWAY. As an artist you want as many people as possible to hear your work. Word of mouth is the only true marketing that matters.

To clarify:

Parter with a TopSpin or similar or build your own website, but what you NEED to do is this - give your music away as high-quality DRM-free MP3s. Collect people’s email info in exchange (which means having the infrastructure to do so) and start building your database of potential customers. Then, offer a variety of premium packages for sale and make them limited editions / scarce goods. Base the price and amount available on what you think you can sell. Make the packages special - make them by hand, sign them, make them unique, make them something YOU would want to have as a fan. Make a premium download available that includes high-resolution versions (for sale at a reasonable price) and include the download as something immediately available with any physical purchase. Sell T-shirts. Sell buttons, posters… whatever.

Don’t have a TopSpin as a partner? Use Amazon for your transactions and fulfillment. [www.amazon.com]

Use TuneCore to get your music everywhere. [www.tunecore.com]

Have a realistic idea of what you can expect to make from these and budget your recording appropriately.

The point is this: music IS free whether you want to believe that or not. Every piece of music you can think of is available free right now a click away. This is a fact - it sucks as the musician BUT THAT’S THE WAY IT IS (for now). So… have the public get what they want FROM YOU instead of a torrent site and garner good will in the process (plus build your database).

The Beastie Boys’ site offers everything you could possibly want in the formats you would want it in - available right from them, right now. The prices they are charging are more than you should be charging - they are established and you are not. Think this through.

The database you are amassing should not be abused, but used to inform people that are interested in what you do when you have something going on - like a few shows, or a tour, or a new record, or a webcast, etc.

Have your MySpace page, but get a site outside MySpace - it’s dying and reads as cheap / generic. Remove all Flash from your website. Remove all stupid intros and load-times. MAKE IT SIMPLE TO NAVIGATE AND EASY TO FIND AND HEAR MUSIC (but don’t autoplay). Constantly update your site with content - pictures, blogs, whatever. Give people a reason to return to your site all the time. Put up a bulletin board and start a community. Engage your fans (with caution!) Make cheap videos. Film yourself talking. Play shows. Make interesting things. Get a Twitter account. Be interesting. Be real. Submit your music to blogs that may be interested. NEVER CHASE TRENDS. Utilize the multitude of tools available to you for very little cost of any - Flickr / YouTube / Vimeo / SoundCloud / Twitter etc.

If you don’t know anything about new media or how people communicate these days, none of this will work. The role of an independent musician these days requires a mastery of first hand use of these tools. If you don’t get it - find someone who does to do this for you. If you are waiting around for the phone to ring or that A & R guy to show up at your gig - good luck, you’re going to be waiting a while.

Fantastic advice. That’s exactly right.

The only thing I would add is that I wish Trent would get a blog instead of posting in the NIN forums. And naturally, I would recommend using Tumblr just like Ra Ra Riot recently did :)

My son in an Iron Man Suit!

Enrique — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 13:58:32 -0800

My son loved his Iron Man Suit for Halloween! I added some cool tech! Here’s a video:

Repulsor Air – Blows air with CO2 air pump on hip and hose back to his hand.
Repulsor Missile – Using CO2 air pump can also launch a paper missile.
Repulsor Sensor/Light - A magnetic switch sensor lights his repulsor hand light and fades out and in his glowing eyes. Arduino handles this effect.
Repulsor Sound Effect(s) – Originally not working. Worked around problem by using right-mouse, middle-mouse button and configured Elightenment17 to playback sound effects using Mplayer script. Mouse buttons activated by Arduino Digital output triggered by sensors.
Arc Reactor – A LED night light from Costco embedded in his chest.
BeagleBoard: Powerful Computer – With BeagleBoard already running in JARVUS box on my son’s back need to add other features. Possibilities: Web cam, mobile router with hotspot and a head-mounted display, VoIP, streaming video of Iron Man view.
Arduino: Super Input/Output Board - Handles repulsor effects but can add other sensors to enable even cooler special effects!!

Also, entered suit in Instructables Halloween Contest [here].

We need lots of good luck!

-Enrique

PS: The backside has a JARVUS box with this block diagram.

Originally, unable to activate sound because of missing software link between linux and Arduino serial port. Worked around the problem by using a PS2 mouse embedded into JARVUS. When Arduino has the repulsor sensor activated, Arduino automatically closes the middle-mouse button. The middle-mouse button is then heard by the BeagleBoard Enlightenment17 mouse binding and plays back the repulsor sound.

Iron Man Suit with Tech Block Diagram of JARVUS.

How I Spent My Sunday Night

Christopher Friedt — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 19:47:00 -0700

Wow - Jules has been asleep for a couple of hours now, and I thought I'd write about how I spent my time this sunday night.

Both Erin & I needed to catch up on a little work. My targets were:

* OE (OpenEmbedded) environment for the BeagleBoard
* OE environment for OpenMoko/FreeRunner
* Qemu for the OpenMoko/FreeRunner
* Qemu for my thesis

I'm really only interested in talking about the last point right now though, since that's the only one that's news to me.

My thesis has been very bleeding edge and very 'theoretical' directly from the start - the goal is to design and build a PCI co-processor for accelerated application of geometric algebra. The last attempt ran into a memory bandwidth bottleneck due to the use of shared system SDRAM over the PCI bus (even with DMA the problem cannot be solved). Unfortunately, the last attempt used an externally developed PCI card, and so they couldn't expand on the hardware itself. My solution to the problem was to throw more hardware at it - by designing a card with a sufficient amount of on-board SDRAM and SRAM, I hypothesize that PCI-imposed memory bandwidth limitations can be eliminated.

The board would contain an FPGA with a sufficient number of logic cells / blocks for one or many instances of the GA processor. There would be a high density of SDRAM to facilitate extra storage requirements for image processing, as well as sufficient amounts of SRAM to facilitate the needs of each processor and to act as a first-stage cache to the slower SDRAM.

My current vision of the board is something like the following:

(Insert diagram here - fpga, sdram, sram, optional DSP @ xxx MHz )

It's somewhat similar to the DSP Card by Darrell Harmon, and I plan on using free tools to do the schematic & circuit as well.

Now, there are several problems with PCI:

I only have a vague understanding of the protocol, data format, and timings of the PCI bus
I don't want to spend literally thousands of dollars on a prototype board, or even hundreds on literature describing the PCI bus
I don't want to waste time and money designing, ordering, reflowing, and testing PCI boards from scratch, including PCB layouts, etc. I want to do 1 PCB layout and have it work!!! (a very optimistic goal)
Even if I design a PCI board from scratch and it was electrically flawless, it's worthless if the interface software isn't on the other side (i.e. driver, low-level libraries, application)

Conceptually, I regarded electrical verification and validation as two entirely separate problems. if I could emulate the behaviour correctly, and if the description for that behaviour closely matched that of a physical piece of hardware, then the difficulty of implementing the hardware would be drastically reduced, and even if the hardware failed, I would still have a simulation!

Having used Qemu for a long time, I already knew that many people have written excellent code which performs kernel-level emulation of PCI hardware. So I started writing some C which described the basic functionality of a PCI card, borrowing from other existing modules (rtl8139.c, ne2k.c). After a lot of time spent, I finally got Qemu to initialize my module, which I appropriately called the 'OmniCard'.

However, even if I got the PCI protocol down, I would still be stuck writing C code to 'pretend' to do what each component in the FPGA would do (I'm not really interested in designing a VHDL interpreter). Furthermore, since emulation on a single-pipeline chip is not parallelization, a software simulation wouldn't really cut it for actually accelerating the operations of geometric algebra. Thus, the original goals would not be accomplished, and creating a piece of hardware is absolutely necessary.

Then I read some art-ic-les about using SystemC with Qemu. SystemC is probably the closest thing that I'll be able to get to that's highly integrable for emulation and also very close to the hardware level. Therefore, making a hardware design out of SystemC code is entirely possible. There are already translators that convert SystemC to HDL. The way that SystemC works with Qemu in the above articles is through a built-in PCI bridge. It will take some investigation, but I think that SystemC could be my key to maximizing my design efficiency with full debugability.

Stay tuned for updates.

Linux device IDs faces

(author unknown) — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 21:37:36 -0700

10 Videos About Google

Alex Chitu — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 09:47:00 -0700

Even if Google has been founded 10 years as a company, there aren't too many great videos about Google's history. I compiled a list of 10 videos: interviews with Google's co-founders, press events, an interesting documentary and some highlights from Googleplex.

1. "Charlie Rose" (PBS, July 2001) - a conversation with Larry Page (Google's CEO at that time) and Sergey Brin.

2. "60 Minutes" (CBS, 2005) - transcript. "To this day, Google has still never run a TV commercial. Their popularity has spread literally by word of mouth around the world, as people everywhere search for everything under the sun."

3. "Sergey Brin and Larry Page: Inside the Google machine" (TED conferences, 2004)

4. "Google - Behind the Screen" (Ijsbrand van Veelen, 2006). The documentary asks interesting questions like "How can you convince people that Google isn't a Big Brother company?", "What happens if a search engine becomes dominant?", but the answers from Google's executives aren't always convincing.

5. "Sergey Brin Speaks with UC Berkeley Class" (2005) - 40 minutes about Wikipedia, search engines, China, desktop software and more.

6. "Google Factory Tour" (a press event from 2005) - 340 minutes

7. "Googling the Googlers' DNA: A Demonstration of the 23andMe Personal Genome" (2008). Anne Wojcicki reveals interesting details about Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt - skip to minute 27.

8. "Marissa Mayer at Stanford University" (2006) - Marissa Mayer's 9 Notions of Innovation

9. "The Science and Art of User Experience at Google" (2006) - Jen Fitzpatrick

10. "Working at Google" (2008) - interviews with Google employees and images from Googleplex.

Ubuntu should not copy the Mac

Dana Blankenhorn — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 06:20:47 -0700

Ubuntu is putting serious investment into improving the interface of its Linux.

Mark Shuttleworth wants Linux to become comparable to the Apple Macintosh, quoting the watchwords of Web 2.0:

Make your site visually appealing,
Do something different and do it very, very well,
Call users to action and give them an immediate, rewarding experience.

Good idea. But the Ubuntu Developer Summit is taking the wrong approach.

It is past time for open source to become truly innovative. The Macintosh interface is a nice point-and-click interface, but that’s all it is.

We need something completely different. How about a high quality voice interface, based on Perlbox? (The graphic above is from Perlbox.org.)

Perlbox already has a KDE interface, and three years of work behind it. It may not be all it can be. What could it be with a few million development dollars?

My friend Lamont Wood has been working with voice recognition technology and says some of it is now ready for prime time. By that he means it can be 95% accurate at 120 words per minute.

True, he was testing a proprietary product, but I am first contemplating an open source voice interface, not a voice-based word processor. The parts to do something ground-breaking appear to be here.

Besides, there are millions of visually-impaired folks, like my mom and my friend Jim Pettigrew, who have been totally left out of the computer revolution until now. Why not bring them in?

If Ubuntu is ready to be truly competitive, then that says to me it’s ready to innovate. And if voice isn’t your favored direction, what is?

DRM Helps Spore Make History as The Most Pirated Game Ever

Corvida — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 11:41:25 -0700

Hosting Large Public Datasets on Amazon S3

Tom White — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:00:00 -0700

Update: I just thought of a quick and dirty way of doing this: just store your content on an extra large EC2 instance (holds up to 1690GB) and make the image public. Anyone can access it using their EC2 account, you just get charged for hosting the image.

There's a great deal of interest in large, publicly available datasets (see, for example, this thread from theinfo.org), but for very large datasets it is still expensive to provide the bandwidth to distribute them. Imagine if you could get your hands on the data from a large web crawl, the kind of thing that the Internet Archive produces. I'm sure people would discover some interesting things from it.

Amazon S3 is an obvious choice for storing data for public consumption, but while the cost for storage may be reasonable, the cost for transfer can be crippling since the cost is not under the control of the data provider, being incurred for each transfer (which is initiated by the user).

For example, consider a 1TB dataset. With storage running at $0.15 per GB per month this works out at around $150 per month to host. With transfer costs costing $0.18 per GB, this dataset costs around $180 for each transfer out of Amazon! It's not surprising large datasets are not publicly hosted on S3.

However, transferring data between S3 and EC2 is free, so could we limit transfers from S3 so they are only possible to EC2? You (or anyone else) could run an analysis on EC2 (using Hadoop, say) and only pay for the EC2 time. Or you could transfer it out of EC2 at your own expense. S3 doesn't support this option directly, but it is possible to emulate it with a bit of code.

The idea (suggested by Doug Cutting) is to make objects private on S3 to restrict access generally, then run a proxy on EC2 that is authorized to access the objects. The proxy only accepts connections from within EC2: any client that is outside Amazon's cloud is firewalled out. This combination ensures only EC2 instances can access the S3 objects, thus removing any bandwidth costs.

Implementation

I've written such a proxy. It's a Java servlet that uses the JetS3t library to add the correct Amazon S3 Authorization HTTP header to gain access to the owner's objects on S3. If the proxy is running on the EC2 instance with hostname ec2-67-202-43-67.compute-1.amazonaws.com, for example, then a request for

http://ec2-67-202-43-67.compute-1.amazonaws.com/bucket/object

is proxied to the protected object at

http://s3.amazonaws.com/bucket/object

To ensure that only clients on EC2 can get access to the proxy I set up an EC2 security group (which limits access to port 80):

ec2-add-group ec2-private-subnet -d "Group for all Amazon EC2 instances."
ec2-authorize ec2-private-subnet -p 80 -s 10.0.0.0/8

Then by launching the proxy in this group, only machines on EC2 can connect. (Initially, I thought I had to add public IP addresses to the group -- which, incidentally, I found in this forum posting -- but this is not necessary as the public DNS name of an EC2 instance resolves to the private IP address within EC2.) The AWS credentials to gain access to the S3 objects are passed in the user data, along with the hostname of S3:

ec2-run-instances -k gsg-keypair -g ec2-private-subnet \
-d "<aws_access_key> <aws_secret_key> s3.amazonaws.com" ami-fffd1996

This AMI (ID ami-fffd1996) is publicly available, so anyone can use it by using the commands shown here. (The code is available here, under an Apache 2.0 license, but you don't need this if you only intend to run or use a proxy.)

Demo

Here's a resource on S3 that is protected: http://s3.amazonaws.com/tiling/private.txt. When you try to retrieve it you get an authorization error:

% curl http://s3.amazonaws.com/tiling/private.txt
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Error>
<Code>AccessDenied</Code>
<Message>Access Denied</Message>
<RequestId>57E370CDDD9FE044</RequestId>
<HostId>dA+9II1dYAjPE5aNsnRxhVoQ5qy3KCa6frkLg3SyTwzP3i2SQNCU534/v8NXXEnN</HostId>
</Error>

With a proxy running, I still can't retrieve the resource via the proxy from outside EC2. It just times out due to the firewall rule:

% curl http://ec2-67-202-56-11.compute-1.amazonaws.com/tiling/private.txt
curl: (7) couldn't connect to host

But it does works from an EC2 machine (any EC2 machine):

% curl http://ec2-67-202-56-11.compute-1.amazonaws.com/tiling/private.txt
secret

Conclusion

By running a proxy on EC2, at 10 cents per hour (small instance) - or $72 a month, you can allow folks using EC2 to access your data on S3 for free. While running the proxy is not free, it is a fixed cost that might be acceptable to some organizations, particularly those that have an interest in making data publicly available (but can't stomach large bandwidth costs).

A few questions:

Is this useful?
Is there a better way of doing it?
Can we have this built into S3 (please, Amazon)?

Beagle at IBC

Jadon — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 08:58:00 -0700

Lot's of activity going on around Beagle, but I've been lax on generating blog posts. In addition to the activity going on in preparation for ESC Boston, such as getting Sugar running, giving free trainings in India, and getting a new intern to watch the IRC logs, we also have our very own Roger Monk and Koen Kooi at IBC today. Stop by (IPTV zone IP322) if you want to take a look at the Beagle in action or simply hop on IRC and chat with them today while they are at the booth and logged into IRC using the Beagle board using nickname "beagle|ibc".

Lego-like Linux modules ready to ship

(author unknown) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 22:00:00 -0700

Bug Labs will ship its tiny, open-source ARM11-powered BugBase and three add-on modules next week, and will soon switch to Poky Linux. Meanwhile, a recent review finds the hackable Linux-based platform to be intriguing fun for "bleeding edge developers," but too "flaky" for average consumers.

Maemo gains KOffice port

(author unknown) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 07:13:12 -0700

First $100 laptop runs Linux

(author unknown) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 07:13:03 -0700

Amazon deal confirmed - Windows XP not included

(Christoph Derndorfer) no_spam@olpcnews.com — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 01:37:42 -0700

Django 1.0 Ships

(author unknown) — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 02:00:00 -0700

DjangoProject announced the general availability of Django 1.0. Django 1.0 includes quite a few features that are new since the 0.96 release that many sites have been using. These include improved Unicode handling, an improved and refactored ORM, cross-site scripting protection, Jython compatability, and more.

The Invisible Browser

Ionut Alex Chitu — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:27:00 -0700

Google Chrome has been released and you can now finally try it. Developed in the past two years, the browser is barely noticeable after you open it. It loads faster than Internet Explorer and it has very few buttons and controls.

In fact, Chrome is an ironic name: Google wanted to create a browser that has a minimal chrome (that's how software developers name the menu and the toolbar of an application). The browser replicates the simplicity of Google's homepage that hides the complexity of the search engine.

Even if it's just a beta, Chrome already supports 43 languages and it automatically detects your language. To change the interface language, just click on the wrench button, click Options, select the "Minor tweaks" tab, click on "Change font and language settings", select the "Languages" tab and change Google Chrome language. That's a lot of clicking, but you won't change the UI language too often.

Google's browser merges the address bar and the search box in a single box that provides suggestions from the local history and from Google search. Google suggests queries and web pages that you are likely to visit, so in many cases you'll not even need to perform a search. Of course, you can change your search engine in the Options and Google provides two great alternatives: Yahoo and Live Search (OK, Live Search is not that great). But the great thing is that you don't need to choose a search engine: just browse the web search, visit your favorite sites and Google automatically detects search engines and saves them for you. Try this: go to amazon.com, search for the title of a book and then type amazon in Google's address box. You'll see an entry that allows you to search on amazon.com using Amazon's search engine. Click on the list item or press Tab to access the search engine.

Google automatically creates keywords for sites that have search engines: the automatically generated keyword for Amazon is amazon.com.

Let's say I want to download an application, like the fabulous Opera browser. Instead of being asked if I truly want to download the file, the location from my computer and other pesky details, Google Chrome just downloads it without opening any dialog. A small bar at the bottom of the window shows the progress and the greatest thing is that I can drag the file to any location directly from the browser. You should definitely try this if you install Chrome.

The browser has a modern JavaScript engine designed for improving the performance of complex applications like Gmail. But to make Gmail feel like a true applications, try this: click on the "New" button, select "Create application shortcuts" and a new chromeless window will open. You'll also create a desktop shortcut for Gmail. That's a feature of Google Gears, which is included in the browser.

In Wired's article about Chrome, the engineers that built the V8 JavaScript engine talk about its performance. "We just did some benchmark runs today, Bak says a couple of weeks before the launch. Indeed, V8 processes JavaScript 10 times faster than Firefox or Safari. And how does it compare in those same benchmarks to the market-share leader, Microsoft's IE 7? Fifty-six times faster."

Like Opera 9.5, Google Chrome fully indexes all the web pages you visit and you can find search results from your browsing history in the address bar. To bookmark a page, click on the star icon and you can choose a folder for your bookmark (that's right, folders in an application created by Google). The browsing history, the recently closed tabs and the most visited pages are used to automatically create a homepage. Try this when you install Chrome: create a new tab, resize the window and notice how the thumbnails adjust to the new size. And another tip: go to Options and select "On startup... restore the pages that were last open".

Developers shouldn't a miss menu created especially for them: Control > Developer. They'll find a JavaScript debugger for the new V8 engine, an element inspector that includes some great charts for monitoring the performance of a page and something truly innovative: a task manager for your tabs. Remember this shortcut: Shift+Esc to instantly open the task manager if one of the tabs slows down your browsing. As you probably know, in Chrome (almost) each tab runs in its own process, which can be killed without crashing the browser.

Those who want to find more about memory usage, including a comparison with other browsers that are currently opened, should click on "Stats for nerds" in the task manger or type about:memory in the address bar. Here's a comparison between Chrome 0.2, IE8 Beta 2, Opera 9.52 and Firefox 3.0.1 when only three web pages are loaded after a restart: google.com, yahoo.com and youtube.com.

Google Chrome borrowed many features from other browsers: Opera's speed dial used to show thumbnails of the most frequently visited pages, Safari's inline find feature, Internet Explorer's private browsing mode, Firefox's spell checker. Google hopes that other browsers will borrow features or even code from Chrome. Sergey Brin said that what Google truly wants is a diverse and vibrant ecosystem of browsers and Chrome is just another option.

Google's browser might never become popular, even if it's fast, stable and more secure than other browsers. The most important thing is that Google Chrome will certainly have an impact on the next versions of IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari. Even if you don't have a Gmail account and you use Yahoo Mail or Hotmail, you benefited indirectly from Gmail's breakthroughs. If Gmail is the invisible feature of Yahoo Mail and Hotmail, Google Chrome could be the signal that browsers need to become platforms for web applications.

Related links:
Download Chrome
Chrome help group - useful to report problems or ask questions
Answers to common Google Chrome objections - by Matt Cutts
The secret project to crush IE and remake the Web - Wired
More links

Via frees Chrome graphics driver source

(author unknown) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 08:00:00 -0700

Via has released an open source Linux "Xorg" driver for its integrated graphics chips. Announced in a blog by open source leader and new Via consultant Harald Welte, the "chrome" driver release follows up on Via's vow to start opening up its chipsets to the open source development community.

XO replacement parts available at ilovemyxo

(Christoph Derndorfer) no_spam@olpcnews.com — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 05:02:20 -0700

Picasa Web Albums Get Face Recognition

Frederic Lardinois — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:32:24 -0700

Comparing Web Platforms

Richard MacManus — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 17:45:36 -0700

Google kills Blogger Web Comments

Jadon — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 04:00:00 -0700

Often I find websites where people are just being stupid and need to be told so. In those cases, I don't think relying on the ignorant host of the site to provide a comment page to let me tell him how much of an idiot he is being will really work.

Then there are those cases where I'm wondering about what other people think who are interested in this same site that doesn't allow direct comments to be posted, or where I don't trust the host to not pull down negative comments.

So, what are my options?

Well, I used to make a lot of use of the Blogger Web Comments for Firefox. This was a pretty handy tool that would fetch comments using Google's Blog Search. Since I've recently upgraded to Firefox 3, I thought it was a good time to go look for an update to the plug-in and to see if I could get that functionality back.

Unfortunately, the plug-in is no longer available. This isn't the first time I ran into a brick wall with Blogger Web Comments for Firefox, but it seems they've decided to drop it, rather than fix it.

Hopefully others will still see the promise in this sort of functionality and provide something, but in the short term, I'll be stuck performing copy-paste operations and executing 3-5 clicks to get similar output manually from del.icio.us, Google blog search, and Technorati.

I'll be visiting those search options regularly to see if someone picks up on this feature.

Coining a phrase, the Contextual Web

Jadon — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 05:46:00 -0700

I was getting started writing up a "master paper" to serve as a guideline for submissions to several conferences this year, including Lug Radio Live USA. In this paper, I planned to coin a phrase, "The Contextual Web". I figured, if I plan to coin a phrase, I should at least ask Google if anyone has tried to do that before me.

It turns out that someone has, they did it recently, and the synopsis looks eerily like the one I had written in some drafts. I'm not trying to claim that anyone stole my idea, or that I even had it significantly earlier than anyone else. To the contrary, I'm trying to claim that this idea is just that obvious. Here's a clip from the page I found when I did a Google search for "the contextual web":

The next generation of the web isn't going to be on your desktop, it may not even be on your mobile device. Context is going to be increasingly important and Nick will take you through the process of designing and architecting for context as well as regardless of the context.

Well, Nick Finck, you've got my attention. A few more searches with Nick's name in the search box return some additional gems:

There are four Elements of Context – the User, the Task, the Environment, and the Technology. Who is your user and what obstacles are they facing; what task are they trying to complete; what is the environment in which they are working; and what kind of computer or device are they using? Designing interactive experiences is not limited to the web on your computer or phone – consider gas pumps, fridges, or devices like Microsoft Surface.

This definitely puts my ego into perspective. Nick, I'm supporting the Beagle board just for you. :)

Adding a URL to 'gitweb'

Jadon — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 16:22:00 -0700

It is as simple as creating a 'cloneurl' file in the git repository directory, just like you can add a 'description' file.

This took about 7 minutes of exploring the CGI code of gitweb to find, which took another 2 minutes to find. I spend about 20 exploring the web based on some links I was given that were 'supposed' to explain this, because this was the big feature that was missing from my gitweb installation. Ugh!

Come on Linux folks, are you just trying to make easy things difficult?

Example: http://www.beagleboard.org/gitweb/?p=beagleboard.org.git as sourced by http://www.beagleboard.org/beagleboard.org.git.

Making the connection between Gears, GreaseMonkey, JXTA, and OpenID

Jadon — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 02:59:00 -0700

A while back, I wrote-up a "Collaborative GreaseMonkey" patent disclosure. It was a defensive measure to make sure no one else patented the idea and prevented the rest of us from using it. The disclosure never made it past our patent committee, and I think that is fine, since it is at least documented as prior art in some way. The code never got to the point where it was worth sharing, but I do plan to revive it at some point.

I'm seeing that more and more people are starting to get ideas that are more and more similar to what I had in mind. Today, I read about someone dreaming up thoughts on using Google Gears to perform OpenID and OAuth. I like the thought pattern.

Gears, GreaseMonkey, OpenID, and P2PSockets (JXTA) have the potential to re-invent the web and to establish a real web operating system. Gears enables the JavaScript written into web pages to become part of a real, persistent application with persistent data storage and threads. GreaseMonkey provides a solution to edit existing web applications with user-controled, local customizations and to create applications fully local, without needing to learn how to write a web server application. OpenID gives a single solution for authenticating yourself across those web applications. P2PSockets allows the applications and data you host locally to be discovered on the web without needing to own a web server.

The result is an application building environment that is an incremental step from simple HTML+JavaScript editing and allows everyone to invent their own web, rather than just rely on the web that the social networking sites control today.

The success of this web is, of course, controlled by the economy it creates. An a-la-carte business model, like the one provided by Amazon's web services, is a great way to ensure that the bandwidth and data storage necessary for the locally-hosted services to scale.

Thoughts?

Open source on TI devices

Jadon — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 02:32:00 -0800

I happen to like this article, TI targets Linux and open source with new OMAP chips, but I certainly have gotten the message "more patches, less powerpoints". We'll see over the next few months...

TI-Open-Source-Workshop-TIDEVCON08

Jadon — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 14:30:00 -0800

TI-Open-Source-Workshop-Jason-Kridner-TIDEVCON08
Originally uploaded by shutter_nut

I've mostly given up on trying to be relatively anonymous on this blog. I figure that people who know me already know how to find this site, but I'm starting to try to take on some relatively public responsibilities related to open source software and the newly "announced" BeagleBoard.

Actually, the BeagleBoard isn't officially "announced". The reason is that there really isn't a community or set of applications around it yet to make it something worth announcing. Instead, it is just an open project looking for some of the right folks to help make it happen.

I have a lot of confidence that the BeagleBoard will be a very real and active community project. Just let me know if and how you'd like to get involved.

For those who have read my blog posts in the past, rest assured that the BeagleBoard is quite intertwined with my vision for collaboration. My hope is that it will yield a nice starting point for building collaboration software that could be integrated into just about any form-factor and innovative human interface.

Where is the Jazelle-RCT open source solution?

Jadon — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 03:03:00 -0800

Ugh. There is too much noise around open source virtual machines, including almost 16,000 projects on SourceForge.

The PhoneME, Android, or other open source JavaVM projects must be looking to support ARM's Jazelle-RCT technology, right? I know there are some interesting commercial efforts, but if anyone is aware of an on-going open source project, I'd want to hear about it.

Heading to LugRadio Live

Jadon — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 01:07:00 -0800

You almost can't call it a business trip, but I will be filing an expense report...

Go to LugRadio Live USA 2008, 12-13 April, San Francisco! Watch this, then spread the word!

Could Pandora open up Linux games?

Jadon — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 10:21:00 -0800

They say the Open Pandora (P&|A) handheld gaming device compares in power to a Nintendo GameCube, and will offer full-speed Playstation and N64 emulation. How does the GameCube compare to other systems/CPUs?

Of course, what I think is really interesting about this device is it being a clam shell (to protect the screen), having real gaming controls, and being fully open for hacking. I expect a lot of nice software will come out of this device existing.

read more | digg story

Hello? Jabber was designed for cloud computing

Jadon — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 14:00:00 -0800

I just read Marshall Kirkpatrick's Read/Write Web post Could Instant Messaging (XMPP) Power the Future of Online Communication?. Despite his apparent bemusement with the "the rise of XMPP (called Jabber in IM) for powering communication services hosted in the cloud" this really shouldn't be much of a surprise. In one of my favorite books of all time, Peer-to-Peer, Jeremie Miller, inventor of Jabber, explained this to the world in 2001. Jabber was envisioned from its beginnings in 1998 to not just handle person-to-person conversations, but also person-to-application and application-to-application conversations.

I also recently read about using Jabber with my OLPC XO-1, which opened up a whole new world. All of a sudden, instead of just finding other XO's on my LAN, my screen was full of people to chat and collaborate with. Over Jabber, not just instant messages are shared from the XO, but every application can be shared and becomes a gathering place. You can take a look at how Jabber is used with the XO on the OLPC wiki.

Marshall goes on in his analysis to bring us back down to Earth regarding Jabber/XMPP relative to HTTP and he is right. HTTP rules today and I don't think there is any one killer reason to change that. If nothing else, however, Jabber/XMPP has a really nice specification on how to use HTTP more efficiently to get notifications without polling. Jabber/XMPP specifies this for the purpose of overcoming firewalls, but the result is that Jabber/XMPP can really be seen as simply some really cool stuff to do on top of HTTP.

Bug Labs device was cooler than I expected

Jadon — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 12:37:00 -0800

At CES this week, I managed to stop by the Bug Labs demo, which ended up winning an award for the best emerging technology. I've been hearing about this device for months from co-workers and I'd explored the website, but seeing the live demo was more impressive than I expected.

The little Lego-like embedded electronics development kit was quite flexible. As a challenge, in 8 minutes, they created a new application of a motion-triggered camera that would upload photos to a server. I was quite impressed.

They use Eclipse to create an easy-to-use development front-end and PhoneME to run Java applications on the device. The device is running both X11 with Athena Widgets (AWT) and Qt/Embedded. This isn't quite as nice as the GTK stuff running on the N810, but it shouldn't take them any time to get there. The demonstrator had no trouble throwing together a new program in Java and sending it down to the device over USB, despite being harassed by one of his co-workers about the missing award they had just won.

Apparently, someone decided to take their newly won prize. Hopefully, it was just on loan to one of the many television interviewers showering attention down on them.

Criticism of the OLPC XO-1 concept

Jadon — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 01:09:00 -0800

In John C. Dvorak's PC Magazine article "One Laptop per Child Doesn't Change the World", he writes:

Does anyone but me see the OLPC XO-1 as an insulting "let them eat cake" sort of message to the world's poor?

I like Dvorak and I often follow him on the TWiT podcast and CrankyGeeks on TiVo, but he polarizes issues in ways that sometimes aren't that useful, except for bringing attention to an issue. Hopefully the audience is paying enough attention to think for themselves, but that has proven repeatedly not to be the case.

In my view, if some service like "Mechanical Turk" pays living wages for these folks, then it was worth it. On average and over a lifetime, each of these students should be able to earn more than the cost/value of the computer.

Yes, the literacy rates and language barriers are an issue in making the computers useful at all. There would be, however, huge motivation to focus on literacy and additional languages, if some people are able to earn money with these machines.

So, Dvorak has given all of us XO enthusiasts a mission: enable students to make money using these machines by providing services like Mechanical Turk in the languages of the students and figure out how they can collect the resulting goods.

OK, I admit, this isn't a perfect idea. I've heard concerns that these laptops will be stolen if a market emerges for them and having them be a source of money would certainly make them valuable. This is also, to a degree, advocating some sort of child labor, which is a reality, despite the many objections we have in the developed world.

Better ideas?

Blogger Beta Ships OpenID

Jadon — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 00:34:00 -0800

Google has added new login options to Blogger, including OpenID. This is an important additional baby step towards a web with a single sign-on that allows you to have better control of your identity information.

read more | digg story

No server, no satisfaction

Jadon — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 02:17:00 -0700

There's just no satisfaction for the casual home user who wants to collaborate with friends. Even when dealing with a problem that has been solved many times over, it is really difficult without a server of your own and a fair amount of programming. The problem I'm talking about is planning events on a group calendar.

There is a group of somewhat over 25 people near where I live that frequently gets together to play outdoor roller hockey. We play in a parking lot in one of the area parks or offices. We have a mailing list on Yahoo, but most people are just copied on a repeatedly used e-mail thread. On that thread, the subject line is typically changed to match the proposed day and time. Every week, we all bombard each other with e-mails to make sure that enough of us are coming out to play. This has actually worked fairly well, but there have been some significant exceptions.

Sometimes we don't meet our threshold of 6 players and additional e-mails go out to entice people to sign-up to play. Calls are made. Threats are discussed. People who previously agreed to go attend might decline since they don't want to risk trying to play hockey with only 3 people. Chaos ensues.

One of they guys who used to come out regularly created a really simple sign-up page on a website. The site accepted a name, e-mail address, and phone number to sign-up for a given game. The name is listed beside the entry for that game. The e-mail was used to send out the "game-on" or "need-more-players" notification a few hours before the prospective game. Phone numbers were included to speed up the communication.

The application worked quite well and was simple-minded. Entering the same sign-up information twice would result in being removed from the list. The phone number and e-mail information had to match, providing a tiny amount of security from folks simply removing everyone from the list. No verification of the entry was done, but you can imagine a simple verification code being provided via SMS to the mobile phone number if we ever started to have problems with that. Life was good.

He stopped playing and his site stopped working. We were back to using e-mail. A few folks reminisced about the good 'ol days when we had our own web server. I own the domain name, so I decided to bring back the sign-up sheet. Where should I host it?

I don't really like the idea of pointing people to my home computer, so that's not my first choice. I don't really like the idea of paying for a full-featured (LAMP and/or Ruby enabled, ie. scripting and a database) hosting service just for this hobby. This is just calendar data! Why should I need a web server to do something that Yahoo and Google provide for free?

Our mailing list is on Yahoo, so I looked first at their group calendar. It was a disastrously complex to use and didn't provide any of the custom features we had with the much simpler web app. Similar problems were had with Google's calendar and Evite. The most fundamental issue with all of these calendaring solutions: they required account creation and login to utilize.

I tried to see if I could do something with static hosting, but it seems even Amazon's simple queuing service doesn't seem to work without having a dynamic host. At this point I gave up, but I'll get back to this application yet.

Accessibility is the killer mashup/webos application

Jadon — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 06:03:00 -0700

After watching Douglas Crockford (of Yahoo and JavaScript fame) plea for Google, Microsoft, and others to participate in a mashup summit and reading some of the feedback around the web, I realized the critical application use-case is still missing.

Someone in the Q&A brought up a good example of a mashup implemented today in an undesirable method due to security reasons: Facebook accessing your GMail/MSN/... contacts to request more members. Contact sharing between applications is an excellent use-case for mashups, but I don't see it as a driving application. Certainly it gets to the heart of Crockford's talk: security is an excellent application for the Google Gears WorkerPools. If you are like me, you'll still be left thinking about how everyday web consumers will be motivated to download Gears, instead of walking down the questionable path of simply giving applications like Facebook access to all of your potentially private information.

Mashups are the most interesting innovation in software development in decades. Unfortunately, the browser's security model did not anticipate this development, so mashups are not safe if there is any confidential information in the page. Since virtually every page has at least some confidential information in it, this is a big problem. Google Gears may lead to the solution.

Security is important and is critical to the growth of new mashup applications and I'll be happy if that alone brings us worker threads and off-line support, but I think the killer mashup is the one that makes all of this great data exposed through APIs and structured web pages and makes it accessible in new ways.

Mark, of diveintoaccessibility and diveintogreasemonkey fame, who I admire for his vision of accessibility wrote in his blog post "if wishes were iPhones":

I don’t understand this continuing obsession with buying things that you need to break before they do what you want.

And with this thought I am reminded that the killer mashup/webos application is the one that takes all of those immensely useful web services out there and makes them measurably usable. And by usable, I mean giving the user control.

N810 demo video from Nokia

Jadon — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 09:13:00 -0800

Nothing too special about the web page, but the video gives lots of good angles and pictures of accessories. Sure would be nice if they used that GPS and a database to help find some WiFi hotspots. Too bad it doesn't have WiMax or EV-DO.

read more | digg story

Mobile 2.0 Conference

Jadon — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 18:04:00 -0700

I'm thinking about trying to attend the Mobile 2.0 Conference on October 15th in San Francisco. Anyone have comments about this event? If there were a handful of people interested in chatting about how to enable creation of scalable web services generated from mobile/embedded devices, I'd make a point of going.

Still don't get the whole WebOS thing?

Jadon — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 01:39:00 -0700

I've gotten a bit smarter about explaining why there will be a sort of emerging web operating system to the people who inquire. For example, I've started calling it a "web services kit", instead of an operating system. Today's tech savvy minds can accept the idea of yet-another-SDK, whereas the idea of a web operating system is either tainted by the webtops or seen as inconceivable and unnecessary delusions to compete with Windows, Linux, or OSX.

What I haven't leveraged enough is the great summary of web service APIs provided by ProgrammableWeb. From their simple scorecard, you can get a quick overview of the categories of popular services and some of the key players. Ask yourself what sustainable advantage do any of these players have within their service space. Don't get fooled, it isn't an easy question. Keep in mind that standard service definitions are coming into existence for most of these services, such as XMPP for chatting and OpenID for identity. Take up the exercise to look across these service APIs, look for winners, and look for emerging standards.

Comfortable? Now, realize that it is only a matter of time before there are standards-based implementations of all of these services. Sure, it might take a while, but it'll happen.

If you are quick, you might be sighing and thinking to yourself, "what about the data?". I'm glad you asked, because that is really the point. These services are all about controlling access to data and looking for ways to monetize it. You might stumble over the idea that on-line office applications involve an incredibly complex pile-o-code, but then you'll remember that you already have 2-3 other viable choices of office applications to which you already had access. Over the long-term, it is all about the data.

Still don't feel like you're any closer to accepting the idea of a web operating system? That's okay, as long as you recognize the benefit of something that provides you with the capability to control and monetize access to data and some sort of well-understood integration layer back into your application. You'll come around when you start thinking about who you want to own your data.

BarCampHouston

Jadon — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 00:05:00 -0700

I'm heading up to BarCampHouston today. I don't know what to expect and I haven't had any free time whatsoever, so I won't put on much of a demo or presentation. I'll be happy to share any info on P2P collaboration and my Maemo SDK EC2 image, if anyone is interested. I'm also looking forward to simply discussing toolkits for building web services (web operating systems).

By the way, I've moved my EC2 script over to http://sdk-ami.garage.maemo.org.

Boot your N800 Maemo SDK today with Amazon's EC2

Jadon — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 18:01:00 -0700

I really appreciate that someone has created VMWare and QEMU images for running the Maemo SDK. Unfortunately, my machines, both Mac and PC, are typically too busy with other stuff to allow me to quickly fire-up a virtual machine image that will chew up all my computing resources. Instead, booting up a machine from Amazon for about $0.15/hour or so is affordable enough for my N800 development. No more downloading a 1.5+GB image; EC2 users can instead just share an image and a boot script and be up-and-running at a known-good starting point.

Of course, the first step was to get an EC2 (and S3) account. I waited almost a month for my EC2 account. At some point I'll figure some way to let other people just rent a machine from me to make it easy, but that'll require a bit of thought and management. For now, head on over to Amazon, request an account, and they'll get to you eventually. There isn't any monthly fee or hidden costs; you just pay for the time, bandwidth, and storage you use. As long as you copy your work off somewhere else, such as by using Subversion hosted by code.google.com, you can shutdown without having any recurring fees.

Once you have an EC2 and S3 account, you'll want to download the EC2 command-line tools and your access identifiers.

The next step was to choose the Linux image I wanted to use as my starting point. Personally, I'm a Gentoo fan because I think Linux has an excessive number of binary-compatible dependencies on the C library and Gentoo solves that by recompiling every new application, instead of needing to update your C library to match the binary-compatibility requirements of all your applications. Of course, that makes application installation slow and Maemo itself uses the Debian package model, so Debian or Ubuntu make the most sense. However, Amazon supplies some nice reference images on Fedora Core 4 that might simplify my life around issues like ssh login security when the root account password can't be secret. Nothing is easy, so I found an Ubuntu image that has reasonable documentation on how it was created such that someone could redo this all with a better supported AMI in the future.

At this point, the issues started to pile up and I decided my best hope was to document my steps in scripts so that I can reproduce them with a better starting image and make corrections that people point out to me. I decided to the Google Subversion server I mentioned earlier to host my script at http://code.google.com/p/maemo-sdk-image/.

I used a Mac to run my script, but I plan to eventually make it run on the N800 itself or on a Windows PC. Right now, the script uses bash, which isn't natively on either the N800 or Windows. Also, the Unix-style version of the EC2 command-line tools also utilizes bash. I think the solution for both is likely to install bash.

The access identifier information ended up placed in a subdirectory called 'secrets' under where I ran the script. These secrets end up getting copied temporarily to the EC2 images for the purpose of bundling them up. I exclude that directory from the bundle.

I say 'images', because I end up working with four different EC2 images in the script. The first one is the base Fedora Core image that Amazon makes public. The second one is a bare-bones Ubuntu Feisty image that can be boot on EC2. The third one is patched to be self-bundling. The fourth one actually contains the Maemo SDK. The third and fourth could easily be combined, but I am still inching along.

In theory, you can run all of the steps using 3 separate calls to the script:

./build_maemo_api build-feisty
./build_maemo_api patch-feisty
./build_maemo_api install-maemo

I think the first two should work reasonably well to create a self-bundling Ubuntu image, but I haven't run them exactly like that to test them out yet.

The third step certainly won't work. One issue is that the Nokia binaries require you to agree to a license, so you'll need to do that part manually. This also only gets you to version 3.1 of the SDK, so you'll need to update that as well. There are also several steps missing before the image is really usable, such as setting up the X server and VNC server to allow you to view the emulated N800 screen remotely.

Please feel free to post your comments here or on the wiki on how to improve the script. I won't hesitate to utilize your inputs on the script hosted on the Subversion server.

Working on an Amazon EC2 AMI for the Maemo SDK (scratchbox on Ubuntu)

Jadon — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 05:50:00 -0700

I'll get into why I want to create this Amazon EC2 AMI thing later, but I thought I'd get information out there on a problem I'm having. Tve did a nice write-up on RightScale on bundling-up an ubuntu EC2 instance. This is a really helpful write-up, but I get a shell script error and a hang when I try to bundle my Ubuntu image.

root@domU-...:~# ec2-bundle-vol -d /mnt -k ~root/pk-....pem -c ~root/cert-....pem -u ...
Copying / into the image file /mnt/image...
Excluding:
/sys
/var/lock
/dev/shm
/proc
/dev/pts
/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc
/var/run
/dev
/dev
/media
/mnt
/proc
/sys
/mnt/image
/mnt/img-mnt
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
1048576 bytes (1.0 MB) copied, 0.003492 seconds, 300 MB/s
mke2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006)
warning: 256 blocks unused.

Bundling image file...
sh: Syntax error: Bad substitution

The script keeps running. I don't know Ruby well, but the script seems to be stuck in a shell call to 'openssl'. This seems to occur in bundle.rb line 51. It looks like the 'tar' call on line 57 that is meant to feed the pipe being read by the running 'openssl' died, but I don't see where the "Bad substitution" might be.

Tve didn't have a place to make a comment on the blog entry. Time to debug...

Quick update on when I canceled the process (need to think if this confirms or denies what I was thinking):

sh: Syntax error: Bad substitution
sh: cannot open /tmp/bundleimage-pipe1: Interrupted system call
error executing tar -chS -C /mnt image | tee /tmp/bundleimage-pipe1 |gzip | openssl enc -e -aes-128-cbc -K ... -iv ... > /mnt/image.tar.gz.enc; for i in ${PIPESTATUS[@]}; do [ $i == 0 ] || exit $i; done, exit status code 2
ec2-bundle-vol failed

...need to take a break and get back to my real work.

Update #2: The problem turned out to be assumption in Amazon's Ruby script that 'bash' would be the shell executed by default. The answer was within a script found on the Amazon developer's forum. I've created my first image and I'll be hosting my script using Google's open source code repository when it is done at http://code.google.com/p/maemo-sdk-image/.

Google AJAX Feed API

Jadon — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 18:01:00 -0700

I read Udi Dahan's post on how Google's Ajax API Simplifies Safe Mashups. It didn't take 5 minutes to take Google's "Hello World" AJAX Feed API example and embed into a web page of my own. This is fun stuff allowing me to finally be able to manipulate feeds across sites without injecting any server-side code.

What should be noted is that this is relying on Google services and must follow their terms. It means that they monitor all the content this API brings into my page while other search engines cannot. (Crawlers do not typically execute the JavaScript, so that's why they wouldn't see the results of the API calls.)

Certainly I'm not the only one disturbed by this, right? Where is the counter-movement to give the every-blogger ownership of his own services in just as simple a manner? Is there a better answer than Amazon's web services? (For those that don't know, Amazon provides hosting solutions that are API-driven, highly customizable, scalable, and billed-by-use.)

Google's solution is so simply by comparison that I am struggling to remember why this even matters to me. Something in my gut just keeps telling me it is wrong to rely on services where I can't understand the business model.

Also distracting from this actually-quite-cool service from Google is the fact that Yahoo! Pipes already offered this feature and many more. Additionally, I believe that Yahoo! doesn't require you to register for an API key against your URL, though there is a need to register to create a pipe (feed) if you aren't using one someone else already created.

P.S. If you are listening, sorry I'm not keeping up and haven't even uploaded the rest of my notes on my P2P collaboration presentation. I have lot's of activity at work these days keeping my creative energy going without having to resort to my blog rantings. :-) But, this was such a quick post.

Technorati Tags: google, yahoo, ajax, amazon

Judgment vs. Jealousy: Jadon on Twitter

Jadon — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 19:07:00 -0700

After hearing so much talk about Twitter on the blogs, podcasts, and vlogs I read, hear, and watch, I decided I had to know what the fuss was about: http://twitter.com/Jadon. How do I manage to find time for this sort of waste?

A CIO that "gets" open source and collaboration tools

Jadon — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 14:03:00 -0700

I've been really busy lately and will get back to the P2P Collaboration tool post soon. I've really been enjoying my new job and have been spending a bit too much time at it. :)

I was trying to catch up on a bit of my reading and I ran across a fantastic 50 minute video on open source in the enterprise when reading Stu's blog that I had to stop and share it really quickly. It is really worth the time. Be patient. If your job is related to information technology, you must hear this and consider it.

CIO JP Rangaswami breaks down the economic justification for using open source in the enterprise and many of the reasons we need to tear down the walled gardens. There are some specifics he gives for banks, but most technology companies will have very similar issues working with other companies. Any company taking an early stand for open source collaboration tools can gain the benefits of better recruiting as he explains. He also explains how the various tools are consolidating to standards and a small number of fundamental operations.

When I listen, it is more and more justification for the coming WebOS.

Again, the link is http://www.infoq.com/presentations/jp-rangaswami-open-source.

Peer-to-peer Collaboration Tools

Jadon — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 16:01:00 -0800

I gave this presentation at an internal company conference last week. Large corporations suffer from different collaboration issues than the open source world, but we also have much in common. My hope is to show folks at my company some tricks that we can learn from the open source world. Open source development is almost certain to be globally distributed and using on-line tools for almost all of the communication.

[Introduction]

It is rare that I get to speak about a topic for which I have such a great interest and I know will have such a great impact. The scale of the impact is on par with the emergence of e-mail as a technology. In fact, I don’t believe it will be very long before peer-to-peer-supported blog-like technology replaces e-mail as the primary communication mechanism over the Internet and corporate networks. Perhaps 3-5 years.

The title of my presentation is "overview of peer-to-peer collaboration technologies" and is sub-titled "managing communications with a global workforce". I chose this subtitle to emphasize that these technologies will help you address some of the many challenges of working in global teams. Communication is a fundamental problem of business that is complicated by globalization. I hope to show you here what is happening now to solve the communication requirements.

Purpose of this presentation
The purpose of this presentation is to illustrate that the emergence of peer-to-peer-based collaboration software is inevitable, show why [our company] should embrace peer-to-peer software architectures, and give an overview of some current peer-to-peer, metadata, and collaboration technologies. Some peer-to-peer collaboration architectures, such as Microsoft Office Groove 2007, will quickly and significantly alter the client-server architecture used for most existing content management systems, such as SharePoint, TWiki, and [our proprietary systems].

These peer-to-peer tools will allow the elimination of many IT dependencies. IT will obviously have significant roles to play, but those roles will change. With the emergence of these tools, team productivity can start almost immediately. Additional productivity and stability can then follow with more formalized IT involvement. For example, someone needs to create bridges between all the products and protocols. The various tools need to be combined into a single product with a consistent look and feel. The costs of deploying a collaboration solution can be optimized. Additional points of access and different accessibility features can be provided. My suggestion is that checkpoints requiring resource allocation, however, can be eliminated until there is a business benefit for IT involvement.

This isn't as much a choice I'm suggesting we make as it is the recognition that existing forces will drive acceptance of peer-to-peer related technology. On-the-go collaboration is a critical requirement of global business communication tools. Information locked into what can be called "walled gardens" or server silos cannot benefit all of the necessary people at the necessary times. This is certainly true in a global workforce of partnerships, third-parties, outsourcing, and ODMs. While business communications regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and other E-Discovery requirements, will make the process more complex; they make it no less inevitable. The required technologies will survive by natural selection.

Tasks, e-mails, notes, and calendar items are mostly the same: they are a bit of collateral communication along with some specific metadata to allow the tool to know how to advise the user. There should be a tight association between the collateral, or content, or microcontent, and the metadata. These digital communications must be preserved in context. New metadata types, such as test case and product requirement associations, must also be supported. Making special tools to handle these bits of metadata is a formula for disaster.

The madness of creating new centralized walled gardens of highly specialized data repositories must be replaced with a vision of building new interoperable data definitions, widely accessible visualization tools, and improvements to existing communications infrastructure.

In this presentation, I will cover:

how I got interested in this problem,
why we need collaboration tools,
why collaboration will go peer-to-peer,
what a peer-to-peer collaboration tool might look like,
why should [our company] continue to evaluate peer-to-peer collaboration technologies, and
how you can get involved.

How did I get interested in this problem?
[Our company] entered the portable media player market in 1999. This market largely grew out of the popular usage of peer-to-peer file sharing applications, such as the old Napster. These peer-to-peer file sharing applications provided a source for content that established distributors weren't yet willing to provide. Learning about the architecture of these systems convinced me that they were useful for far more productive arenas than the sharing of pirated music.

The most critical aspect of making both peer-to-peer file sharing networks and portable media players work for people is the management of metadata. Metadata is the information associated to the content, such as the artist, title, genre, format, or rating. With all of the possible content available for download and playback, user satisfaction is driven by the ability to find desirable content quickly and easily using metadata. Apple's combination of the iPod scroll-wheel and the iTunes Music Store, along with a bit of slick advertising, gave people answers to where to get to music they wanted quickly. It led them to great success, without necessarily relying on peer-to-peer file swapping. Still, file swapping networks are still the quickest and easiest way to get to some content and they remain in wide use.

Failed attempts to defeat the networks convinced me that the technology will continue to be widely adopted, despite organized attempts to the contrary. The file swapping networks that are still in existence survived because they use peer-to-peer architectures. In a peer-to-peer application, there isn't a central server that can be shutdown to disable the network. Peers directly share metadata with each other, providing a path for sharing content. To build a peer-to-peer network, you only need peers speaking the same protocols and a willingness to participate.

The thing to remember here is that intelligent managing of metadata is how content is found, no matter what the platform.

Another experience I had was when this team went global. My job quickly shifted from a focus on media player technology to a focus on information management. I spent my time worrying about version control, status reports, bug tracking, requirements management, and portfolio management. The communication was less-than-efficient and the results were less-than-desired. This had nothing to do with the talent of the team, but had much to do with the communication mechanisms and processes that were in place. An 11 hour time-zone difference is literally one world away.

I saw that my experience in peer-to-peer technologies and metadata management could be applied to solve my new information management problems. Just like getting to media content quickly and easily helps media consumers, the product developers need quick and easy access to information.

Why do we need collaboration tools?
Communication in a global team cannot be handled entirely face-to-face. No matter how many worldwide face-to-face meetings you hold, when you break up and get back to work, there is always something left unsaid. Having frequent teleconferences helps close communication gaps, but they impact the work-flow of team members and never provide the depth of conversation required to establish a cohesive team.

While there is no substitute for strong individual communication skills, collaboration tools provide a path for competing with otherwise more convenient information sources and distractions. On-line tools provide opportunities for collaboration between people where distance, time, cultural, language, experience, and ability barriers exist.

You can see this in the success of open source projects like FireFox, which is a web browser that competes with Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Contributions to open source projects come from people all over the world in many different situations. To make open source projects work, the participants make extensive use of on-line collaboration tools.

Also note, the communication in these tools isn't one-way. The messages being communicated aren't dictates from a single expert telling everyone how to solve the problems of the whole. Requirements and solutions come from every member of the team and beyond.

Why will collaboration go peer-to-peer?
First, what do I mean by peer-to-peer? Back in 2001, Daniel Bricklin gave a speech at the O'Reilly P2P Conference on "The Cornucopia of the Commons". That speech was later printed in a great O'Reilly book. He quotes a 1968 essay on "The Tragedy of the Commons" summarizing a commonly expressed problem:

Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit--in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

That isn't such a pleasant or welcome idea, but we can all see some degree of reality to that view.

Dan goes on to offer another view in the light of successful peer-to-peer architectures and their failings:

In the case of certain ingeniously planned services, we find a contrasting cornucopia of the commons: use brings overflowing abundance. Peer-to-peer architectures and technologies may have their benefits, but I think the historical lesson is clear: concentrate on what you can get from users, and use whatever protocol can maximize their voluntary contributions. That seems to be where the greatest promise lies for the new kinds of collaborative environments.

That is the thinking that launched the Web 2.0 explosion with businesses like Flickr, MySpace, and YouTube. Similarly, when I'm referring to peer-to-peer technologies, I'm talking about creating protocols that maximize the contributions from the edges. Those contributions generate a wealth of information and content highly valued by users.

The elimination of a required centralized server is one common technology applied in peer-to-peer architectures. The benefits that approach provides to IT may be a bit counter-intuitive. I've done a small amount of examination of four benefit areas to collaboration tools by elimination of a required centralized server: security, reliability, interactivity, and efficiency.

The elimination of a centralized server is sometimes required for security purposes. We occasionally enter contracts with other corporations that give very explicit rules about who can have certain data on their hard drives. A centralized server would violate that policy, whereas it may still be acceptable to share the data with specific peers. Ultimately, security is best provided if information managers control the access to data, rather than IT.

There is also the occasional need to utilize modern tools that aren't yet available on our internal servers. Some of those tools are available on external servers, but it isn't secure to place [our company's] private data on those servers. A tool that does not rely on a centralized server could be more easily deployed. This doesn't eliminate the need for security audits on the tool, but it does eliminate the overhead of evaluating the impact of that tool on other tools running on a common server.

Despite on-going improvements to server reliability, there doesn't ever seem to be an end to the reasons why a server must occasionally be shutdown or relocated. With an architecture that doesn't rely on a single centralized server, the reliability is certain to be increased. An application network that requires a high degree of reliability should still make use of high-reliability servers, but it makes sense to architect those networks to not rely on them exclusively when possible.

Efficiency benefits from eliminating requirements on a central server come from the ability to rapidly deploy a new peer-to-peer network. A business could deploy a new network right away to gain the benefits of collaboration without waiting for a high-reliability server to come on-line. Such a server could then later be deployed to increase the reliability of the network without creating downtime. Further, an information manager within the business can be directly responsible for adding and removing users, machines, and services on the network.

Efficiency benefits also come from more general aspects of peer-to-peer architecture. By allowing users to organize their own data, they can access it more efficiently. In most cases, there isn't one ideal solution to data organization. A peer-to-peer architecture allows everyone to organize their own data and allow others to benefit from that organization.

By interactivity, I mean both the possibility of working with other tools and the way the tool works for its users. Interoperability and connectivity to other tools doesn't necessarily require the elimination of a central server, but tools that don't attempt to create a centralized repository for information are more likely to support the standards required for interoperability. By creating protocols for use in a peer-to-peer network, some of the requirements for interacting with other tools are necessarily met.

One particular interactivity benefit of eliminating requirements on a central server is the possibility of providing "on-the-go" or disconnected collaboration. You experience this today with Outlook when you are on a plane. You can read your e-mail that is cached locally, create your responses off-line, and synchronize your mail once you are connected to the network again.

E-mail must be the most common on-line tool for collaboration. It is simple, universal, "on-the-go", search-able, you know who is on both ends, you get notification, and for the most part it just works.

Being such an effective collaboration tool, e-mail has many peer-to-peer architecture characteristics. Foremost, it is distributed and resilient. It relies on DNS, the domain name service that is used to look-up the address of servers on the Internet. DNS is distributed and resilient, allowing for server failures at many points in the system. Further, SMTP, the protocol used to forward e-mail messages, can be run on just about any computer. You could almost decide to run SMTP on your own desktop machine, but you'd quickly find that getting the DNS record to point to your machine is a bit of a hassle when you don't leave your machine running all of the time. This doesn't matter that much, though, since [our company] provides you with a high-reliability server to collect your e-mail and clients that cache the e-mail for off-line use.

So, what is wrong with e-mail as a collaboration tool? First of all, the information is trapped into little personal "silos" that no one else on your team can search or access. Certainly you don't want to share all of the information provided to you by e-mail, but some of it you do. Some of it you just want other people to know you have, but not necessarily give it to them without your approval. You can forward e-mail to individuals or mailing lists. You can archive e-mail sent to mailing lists on a website. You can even create shared mailboxes, though those are a bit complex for many people to handle. In the end, you are left with a large number of small silos of data that can't be organized as part of a larger body of information.

E-mail is not secure. Sure, there are tools for encrypting e-mail, but they are practically only ever used on the most sensitive data. E-mail encryption tools are simply too difficult to use and you cannot yet create encrypted messages for the vast majority of your e-mail address book and expect the recipients to be able to perform the decryption.

Monitoring e-mail for sensitive data is virtually impossible. E-mail is sent from all levels of the organization all across the world, without any approval of information managers. When inappropriate e-mail is detected, there is no realistic mechanism for confirming retraction of that data from recipients. Outlook has a "recall" feature, but it often fails and cannot be confirmed outside of our organization. E-mail must be the most important and most dangerous of all the collaboration tools available today.

Perhaps the worst aspect of e-mail is the lack of efficiency. Information coming in e-mails cannot be easily categorized. Creation of e-mail filters often makes the situation worse by creating yet more silos of data. Fields that would allow for some categorization, such as priority, action required flags, and deadlines, are typically never used and are often misused. Misuse is sometimes the result of spam, which is a problem that cannot easily be avoided. By one study, 94% of e-mail last month was spam.

What about TWiki or SharePoint? These tools are often called "content management systems". They can be quite effective in improving communication within a global team, but they have their own issues. Perhaps the best summary comes from a success story taken from the TWiki website from a company that deployed TWiki to improve support to field engineers:

People in the field were used to using email for communicating with the factory. Email is a one to one communication, a mailing list a one to many. The problem with email is that useful information does not reach everybody, email is not easy to search and email gets lost over time. Collaborating the Wiki way solves these problems, however changing habits is a difficult issue that needed to be coached.

Initially we also had a chicken-and-egg problem, i.e. voices like "why should I use this collaboration tool, the content is so limited". The solution was to assign a support engineer who monitored the mailing lists and entered useful information into TWiki.

Successful deployment took over 6 month[s], [which was] longer [than] expected. But now everybody is used to browse, search, collaborate and document the Wiki way.

The result was that customer satisfaction with the field support improved. The effort was a real success.

This sort of dedicated information management may not be something we can easily commit in our environment. If deployment took 6 months, how are we supposed to keep up with frequent release cycles? How do we convince managers to commit resources to TWiki when current searches for me today often return my own weekly reports, rather than something of valuable interest? With so little attention, even the top-level structure of the TWiki sites today can't even keep up with our organizational structure. I believe in TWiki, but we can only overcome this "chicken-and-egg" problem in each team by strongly evangelizing its use during the painful learning stages.

SharePoint has similar problems, but is a bit of a different beast. SharePoint is particularly well-suited for collaborating on Microsoft Office documents. It uses a standard protocol called WebDAV that allows for folder views in Windows Explorer. Most importantly, [our company] supports a mechanism for accessing SharePoint sites to customers and partners from outside the firewall.

The biggest problem with SharePoint, beyond the problems it shares with TWiki, is its complexity. The user permissions tables are extremely convoluted. Editing the content of any one page requires extensive knowledge of the overall system, rather than simply clicking an "edit" button and changing some text. I’m not saying that TWiki markup is trivial, but it doesn’t require learning specialized tools or extensive training. The help system is built right into the tool. Also, the SharePoint version control system is somewhat less than reliable because it allows overwriting and elimination of old document revisions.

We are still learning about how best to use TWiki and SharePoint on our projects and the best standard practices are not obvious with either tool. Neither provides great search solutions for the data you need on their own, especially if the data is in mixed formats. Instead of providing a complete knowledge picture, the combined usage of e-mail, TWiki, and SharePoint creates islands of information that must each be explored separately.

[Description of an internal collaboration tool]

Efforts like this should continue, but it is best to break up the platform into interoperable components. Consider interaction with a tool such as Microsoft Live Clipboard. Live Clipboard is a mechanism for users to initiate sharing of data between websites without requiring development of web services scripts or other complicated programming. By supporting such a feature in all of our collaboration tools, the islands of information can be bridged.

The same guy at Microsoft who dreamed up Live Clipboard, Ray Ozzie, has also brought us one of the more compelling peer-to-peer collaboration tools already available, Microsoft Office Groove 2007. Recently we made use of Groove on one of our projects. The project spanned two partner companies and two contractors. Some folks on the team were able to start collaborating on the very first day by simply installing the tool. It took a few more days for others to overcome some minor installation headaches that were likely related to the tool being in beta. The product will be released with the 2007 version of Microsoft Office.

Groove works across firewalls, provides account management, secures communications, provides synchronization for off-line usage, includes instant messaging with some voice capability, and has some limited integration with Office applications and SharePoint. When I talk about the integration being limited, however, it needs some emphasis. All of your important e-mail, calendar, and contact information isn't easily shared in Groove with something as simple as a single click on a category. To get that information into Groove, a user must jump through many hoops. A major concern for the team was lack of support for maintaining old versions of documents. Groove did a great job of ensuring everyone had a copy of the latest version of a document, but SharePoint was required to maintain historical copies.

Groove also lacks a client for any platform besides Windows and the client can be a bit slow because it consumes a large amount of memory at times. There is no way to see the data in Groove by simply logging into a web page. You can synchronize a SharePoint with Groove, but it is a tool separate from the other tools in Groove which all seem to act as more islands unto themselves.

Ultimately, usage of Groove suffers for many of the same reasons as the web-based content management tools. Some folks wouldn't use it regularly, instead using familiar tools such as e-mail. It never became part of the team's everyday work flow, partially because other tools were required to author rich documents and manage code. The client tool was seen as painful to start-up or leave running. Ultimately, nothing was pushing users to actively communicate using Groove.

Certainly there are some dangers with this going unchecked, primarily related to it being difficult for IT to log file exchanges. Exchanges over SSL secured websites or, to a lesser degree, encrypted e-mails offer similar challenges. Ultimately, there are always ways for employees to circumvent security and, in some cases, the risk of not progressing business is worse than the risk of compromising security.

What might a peer-to-peer collaboration tool look like?
Groove offers a good starting point for describing the peer-to-peer collaboration tools of the future, but it is not alone in its class. What I'd like now is to describe for you some of the building blocks for creating a tool like Groove and some of the building blocks that could be used to make a better tool. I won't draw you a complete picture of the ideal peer-to-peer collaboration tool, but I hope to point you in that direction.

I'll finish typing this up when I get back from vacation next week. I need to scrub and upload the pictures...