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The takedown of Megaupload

2012-01-23T08:36:00.000-08:00

And more importantly, why a lot of people are thinking of it the wrong way. Unfortunately it seems that most people are making two mistakes. First, they seem to be connecting this takedown to the crazy uprising against SOPA. And as a result they are making this move of taking down Megaupload seem like something terribly wrong.

They are all wrong.

Taking down Megaupload was perfectly legal, but also coincidental with the massive uprising; I don’t believe it has everything to do with said opposition to SOPA. The important thing is that opposing the move to take Megaupload down doesn’t make any sense and it just shows how woefully ignorant most people are of the facts.

Firstly, this isn’t how SOPA is supposed to work. This is exactly how SOPA doesn’t need to work. If SOPA is passed then they don’t need to go on gung ho missions arresting some hick way out in the boondocks just to get a site shut down. They are free to remove the site from the directory of internet addresses inside the USA while granting protection to the ISPs, aka providing indemnification against any and all law cases.

Second, the evidence against the Megaupload CEO and his employees is absolutely solid. And this is by far the most important point. Emails captured shows communication between employees displaying their knowledge of the pirated content on their website and advocating the use of it as well. If that wasn’t bad enough, in their allocation of uploader reward points, inspection of accounts shows that they had knowledge that the uploaders were guilty of uploading a few movies, some porn videos and several key generators/cracks. Yet they still went ahead with the allocation of uploader points and thereby directly supported piracy within their file sharing network. Despite all their publicity stunts of them wanting to take down other file sharing sites saying that Megaupload is the only one that actually respects take down notices, the evidence shows that they were probably amongst the worst offenders themselves.

Third, the evidence being collected against Megaupload has been in the making for two years. That isn’t something that took place just yesterday in time for the uprising against SOPA. The people behind the takedown really waited it out for the right moment to sting and whether or not there were external powers at hand wanting to send a message to the people calling for the death of SOPA the fact remains that there is no direct connection to the taking down of Megaupload. The take down was simply an act of justice and one that is absolutely justifiable.

Finally, I see a lot of people also forgetting the core concept that piracy is not a good thing. Apparently because musicians and movie directors are living on piles of money, its ok to steal their works that they put a lot of time and effort into creating. Granted, the media industry is full of backward folk but that doesn’t give anyone the right to say that piracy is something that shouldn’t be looked at as a bad thing. Piracy is stealing and if you are ok with that then good day to you. Quit supporting the people who are against Megaupload. It hurts us who are trying to stop bills like SOPA going through. It doesn’t work that way. When people oppose things like the Megaupload takedown it just goes to show that the majority of people really don’t know what they are talking about and that’s the reason people in congress and the senate aren’t sure whether or not to take most of this opposition seriously. It seems like every time there’s some bill related to anti piracy, most people call it Armageddon and immediately ask for it to be taken off. It’s not like anyone suggests any viable solutions either. How do you take a bunch of people seriously when all they do is complain about every solution proposed to stop piracy. How do you take them seriously when they never seem to be satisfied and never seem to provide any good solution themselves? How do you take them seriously when they begin complaining even when a completely legitimate takedown such as that done with Megaupload is also opposed. When people fail to make sense and simply sound like a pack of brainless parrots in an echo chamber, the effectiveness of the real message that genuine people are trying to spread gets lost.

Here’s a little something to think about. How many people do you honestly think, who upvoted all those posts about SOPA and PIPA on 9Gag, actually took the time to study the bills and find out what really makes them such a disaster? My bet is very few. If there were really a bunch of people who were serious about this then the posts about Megaupload probably would not have really bubbled to the top. Bottom line. Take some time to think before just opposing everything that comes down the pipeline. I made that mistake and I can guarantee you. When it eventually hits, you really understand how foolish it all is.

Big media, SOPA, and the real solution.

2012-01-21T20:36:00.001-08:00

A while ago I recall reading a statement from the CEO of Steam and his opinions on game piracy. I believe the man is a true visionary and it is people like him that ought to be put in charge of drafting anti piracy legislations in congress. That or the media corps ought to take a few lessons from him in how to combat piracy because he is one of the few people who believe the way forward is offensive and not defensive.

This may seem like an odd statement given how offensive the media corps are these days. But the reality is that the media corps just appear to be on the offense with their legislative motions like SOPA and PIPA and goodness knows what will come next down that crap line. These acts are really just acts of defense where the media corps want to huddle up in their traditional business models and traditional media formats while lashing out at people each time they see some site pirating stuff come up on the horizon. This is just plain stupid and it’s the reason that the tech community and so many others are standing up against whatever the media corps do to shut down piracy. People want a way forward. Out with the traditional plastic discs. In with digital. But no. Media corps are scared because the new medium is just so much more transferrable and therefore easier to pirate. So they go on the defense and lash out against the digital medium and decide to hole themselves up with their good old fashioned DVD discs. And then they wonder why people rise up against them. It doesn’t even make sense anymore. To say that DVDs are a good form of protection against piracy because they are less transferable is stupid. I could in two hours rip a DVD and share it with my friends if I wanted to. But of course the laws of ripping will stand in my way right? Again. Defensive action. They try to stop the people from ripping DVDs by saying that they can sue them in court for it. The media corps think that putting some kind of code around that will make the DVD format locked out to others. But I’m sorry. That doesn’t work. People want to go digital. They don’t want to be looking at this mountain of discs when they can instead have one 5 TB external hard disk which contains everything. Even more important, with increasing internet speeds, people don’t want to even have the 5 TB hard disks anymore. They would prefer to just be able to stream everything.

But of course the media corps continue to ignore these signs and prefer to stay holed up in their little closed up worlds. As Steve Jobs quite rightly put it, “You guys have got your heads up your asses”. Now what did the CEO of Steam say that clearly showed that he had the right idea? On piracy, all he had to say is that it isn’t about just the game anymore. It’s about the service provided with the game. If a person finds that ordering a game DVD doubles or triples the cost due to shipping costs to his/her country and has a waiting time added to that, then piracy becomes a natural option to turn to. After all, the pirates are providing a better service than the game company themselves. But in the case of Steam, the CEO believes that the Steam platform provides a better service to gamers. Whether this is true or not is debatable but whatever said and done, the man has the right idea. After all, now through Steam I have so much more enabled. I can no download the games like I would a torrent and I can get the game for free. All patches and future updates and expansions become just as easily and readily available. Online gaming with other people becomes easy, leaderboards with friends is automatic and even buying a game level by level becomes possible.

Imagine this with the media corps. What if they put all the effort they are putting into foolish bills like SOPA into making a media platform greater than any other. What if they made a platform where all movies could be streamed with ads or without ads depending on how you wanted to pay for it. Imagine a platform where people from anywhere in the world can no get a movie without having to worry about shipping costs and other unnecessary details like having to deal with storage of physical goods. And imagine a platform where users are automatically connected to fan pages and merchandise, and where buying a movie gets them inside access to behind the scenes and other constantly updated media such as director’s and artist’s notes. When it comes to advertising, people can even start offering advertisements to make the program seem more local. Now when I watch the tv series/movies for free via this new platform I won’t have ads from geico but instead ads from my own country which makes more sense.

This is the kind of stuff people should be thinking about. Not how to stop people from downloading the movies off torrent sites. Media corps need to instead answer the question, “why do people even want to pirate something???” There really aren’t that many thieves in the world. People just want access to something with ease and if the media corps aren’t going to provide that access then they might as well turn towards someone who does. And in this case that someone is, the pirates.

A good example of how media corps can be so stupid comes from CBS and the big bang theory. Today I went online just to check what episodes they have, and it turns out that they have one episode from season 3, 12 and 13. I mean really? And there’s no way I can even pay to watch those online. So what have I got to do? Either buy it from Amazon, or take a trip down to a DVD store and buy a bunch of physical discs I neither want, nor need. Even if I really don’t want to pirate, I all of a sudden don’t care. The pirates provide me with a better service so why should I go to CBS? Defiance sets in. And I give the finger to CBS and go ahead and switch on the torrents to get my episodes from season 1. Good move CBS. Really well played.

‘Nuff said. Get your act together media corps. You’ve shown the world just how much influence and power you have. The world is seeing an unprecedented growth in people wanting to develop stuff to make media more readily available around the world. Use your money and power to grab those developers and set them free to develop a platform like no other. One that enables the world, to become one.

I feel like a dork

2012-01-18T01:42:00.001-08:00

Biggest mistake ever. The other day I was doing a Facebook engineering puzzle using C++, and the puzzle description warned about performance and how important it would be to go through a large amount of data real fast. Before I go any further into that, let’s talk about Project MADA. The now defunct ho ha of mine.

When I was doing the project back into university, I had to look up bi grams within a large amount of text. Essentially I had to keep running tab of all possible combinations of two letters {aa,ab,ac,ad….zw,zx,zy,zz}. That’s 2^26 combinations.

My solution to this problem turned out to be, a list, where I would store each bi gram along with its corresponding count as a tuple. Thus, for each bi gram I read into the system, I would go through the list to see if I had a mach. If yes, I would increment the count by 1 and if not, I’d add the new bi gram along with a corresponding count of 1.

Back to the Facebook problem, which is liar liar. There’s a forum of users and you have a list of people who have come frward to name the others as liars or truthful. From this knowledge, you have to derive who is truly truthful and who is just a big fat liar. The logic for this is a no brainer. The implementation however requires keeping a track of number of accusations corresponding to a name. Now I could have used by bi gram method, but for some reason, just because I was doing a Facebook puzzle, all that was in my head was efficiency. And my first thought was, hash table (Map in C++) where the key would be the person’s name.

Two days later I was thinking of my FYP, and I just realized how stupid I must have sounded coming up with my method to insert stuff into a list and keep track of it when the hash table was there along for me to use. Instead I had an implementation which was utterly inefficient, (nested for loop, traversing through list each time to find element. Talk about a worst case) and what’s worse, I feel like a dork because I stood in front of my lecturers proudly showing off my implementation as it was the best thing since peanut butter and jelly. I can’t even believe the hash table didn’t occur to me.

I can’t help but wonder, if they thought I was a bit of a dud for not using a hash table. Sigh.

On a side note, it truly is amazing just how differently I thought simply because the thought of Facebook efficiency was in my head the whole time.

Apps. Confusion as much as with the pc

2011-12-13T10:18:00.001-08:00

Scripting News: Why apps are not the future

There's an article raging over the internet, written by Dave Winer where he makes the argument that apps are not the future. His reasoning being that linking is something that is lacking from apps making them silos or buildings rather than an something as open as the web.

Firstly I have a bit of an issue with the definition of linking. But in the case of traversing and sharing information from silo to silo thus bridging the gap between them, I think we are getting there. Android in particular has done this excellently. A good example would be how I bogged this article. I simply long pressed the url on my browser (also an app mind you) and pressed share on the menu and shared it to Blogger. As far as linking goes where linking is passing information from one app to another I really do think we are getting there. But maybe Dave's argument goes deeper. And maybe only a medium which is controlled by open standards will win against individual mobile OS's. But I have a problem with this idea as well.

Mobile OS's need to open up their APIs first

How do you access the rich features of the smartphone if the operating system doesn't provide a unified open way of accessing them? Take a look at android and iOS and try and find out how you would take a photo through a web interface on the phone. You'd be better off encapsulating the mobile website within an app and then accessing the camera from there.

Offline persistence is a big win for apps

The beauty of mobile apps is that I can switch my 3g on for a few seconds, let my apps run an update course and then switch the 3g off leaving me with a new set of rich data to browse offline. This is not really possible with a website since on a mobile device, memory is limited and cached pages need to be refreshed when you make the tab it's encapsulated in visible again. Your best solution would be always on 3g.

But always on 3g is battery intense

Terribly so. Which leads to a far more complex issue than just apps vs the open web. To have websites work on mobile devices over apps you are going to be cranking out the 3g juice and frankly speaking, battery life isn't that good yet. While I hope that gets sorted soon I wouldn't hold my breath if I was you.

The work around to this would be to do what apps do. Offline data storage. Write directly to the phone memory and have your own pockets of data ready. So when I open Facebook.com it's not going to the internet to load those resources like the header bar and icons etc. Those will be ready along with my last update of the news feed which I can browse. But if the website can do all of that,

What is an app really?

Here comes the biggest issue. Linking is basically a functionality. It's not a property that can belong only to the web. It's something that's been implemented only by the web though. Similarly all those other things such as offline persistence of data also come under functionality. So assuming a website implements all of that, isn't the website then an app too?

This is the same problem I have with people using the buzz phrase, 'post pc era'. What utter rubbish. There is no post pc era. The form factor has changed but the personal computer remains. The day our body becomes the machine where data is stored and can be deleted simply within our brains and our eyes become the camera and electro magnetic implants become our gps, that'll be the post pc era. As long as there's a device we use external from our physical selves to do our everyday work stuff, the pc will remain. Just not in the same form factor as 10 years ago.

And just like that, apps will evolve conceptually before being implemented. Battery life will increase, 4g coverage will become more comprehensive so my battery isn't drained. Javascript execution via the mobile device will become faster making use of the inevitable graphic cores for smoother rendering thus removing the concept of installing an app. But the app, will remain. Changing and evolving in terms of form factor but never dying. I'm sorry Dave. But apps are, the future.

Changing a Primary key value via SQL

2011-12-09T02:04:00.001-08:00

I had to run into a rather annoying problem today where due to an error somewhere else in the database I was faced with two tables containing the same Primary Key (AL/1112/0001) which was causing a conflict in my data insertion. The only way to solve it business logic wise was to ensure that one table would programmatically receive the AX prefix and the other AL. While these values are stored in a separate table and changing them was a simple UPDATE statement, changing all the records in a similar way within the tables that would receive the AX prefix in the future was an issue. Changing a primary key value in the following manner:

happens to yield this abominable error due to the constraints and checks enforced

Bah! This may have been just a test DB but reinserting all those values whether through an INSERT/DELETE statement or through the program was going to take time. A quick bit of searching on the MSDN site to see what could be done to alter a table and I got this out.

The first thing you want to do is make all those ‘CHECK’ CONSTRAINTS be switched off. Here’s the code to do that.

I know that the standard code would be ALTER TABLE fcadadet WITH NOCHECK CONSTRAINT ALL but this gives an error with MSSQL. The MSDN documentation specifies it to be put in this way. (Is this wrong?)

Run your update statement. This time it should work fine.

Once done, don’t forget to put your constraints back on using the code below.

Feel free to try another UPDATE. This time you’ll be met with the error from above again confirming that your constraints are all back in place.

Do note however that this is quite likely a very very bad practice and I used it only because it was a test database and the situation was one of those ‘it doesn’t matter who does what’ things. Using this statement on live data while a system is running is probably a bad idea. Those constraints are there for a reason.

Technorati Tags: SQL,MSSQL,Code,Developer tutorials,Journal

Hacking, Defined

2011-12-08T22:16:00.001-08:00

There’s sadly a lot of confusion amongst a lot of people as to what a hackathon and hacktivist community is. It’s not so much about the definition of what should someone be doing to call it a hackathon but more about the fact that the media’s sensationalization has simply degraded this term to create a mental picture of some greasy hair kid seated in the darkness banging out commands into a shell command prompt in an attempt to gain access to the NSA’s database. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing.

I finally stumbled upon something that could put a definition to the word ‘Hacking’ and here it is. Short, and sweet.

“Hacking

Hacking is the process of writing code for, or contributing code to, a piece of software.
There is some controversy surrounding the meaning of this term. It began as a benign term meaning "to exercise proficiency" or "to alter or improve," but the popular media have since construed it to mean "to break into a computer system, usually with malicious intent."”
- From the WordPress Glossary page

The piece goes on to direct one’s attention towards Wikipedia for further disambiguation but honestly, for a term this misconstrued I really wouldn’t recommend that. Just take this definition above and keep it at that.

At hackathons we gather to hack upon a common purpose. And that purpose in our SL Hackathon is to hack on our ideas over a short period of time, usually a weekend. Be it individual or group.

What’s the point?

https://gist.github.com/6443

tl;dr?

Hack = "to exercise proficiency" or "to alter or improve,"

Hackathon = to hack with a common goal in mind

SL Hackathon = The common goal to hack on is an idea where at the end of a weekend/Hackathon’s duration you have a tangible product.

Edits – Some awesome links (content is verbose) provided by @nazly and @laktek in response to this post.

http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/ – This is like the mother of all guides to becoming a hacker

http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html – Paul Graham’s essay. “The Word “Hacker”

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html – Another one of Paul’s essays. Related and very much worth a read.

Technorati Tags: Hack,Hacking,Hacking defined,Hackathon,SL Hackathon

Visual C++ 2010: Scope Of License

2011-12-08T17:07:00.001-08:00

Early in the morning today while installing the MySQL client components I had to install Visual C++ 2010 runtime as a prerequisite to continue. No problem, set it to download via the installer itself (very convenient that) and once the install screen showed up I thought I’d give the EULA a bit of a go. Just for the heck of it. The scope of license section was actually quite interesting simply because of what I found to be one oddity.

“2. Scope of License. The software is licensed, not sold. This agreement only gives you some rights to use the software. Microsoft reserves all other rights. Unless applicable law gives you more rights despite this limitation, you may use the software only as expressly permitted in this agreement. In doing so, you must comply with any technical limitations in the software that only allow you to use it in certain ways. You may not

· disclose the results of any benchmark tests of the software to any third party without Microsoft’s prior written approval;”

Eh? I may not disclose the results of any benchmark tests without Microsoft’s approval? But why not??? I understand that Microsoft reserves all rights except my right to use the software but why can’t I perform a benchmark test without Big Brother’s approval?

Anyone know the answer to this one?

Edit – Some interesting posts related to this topic

Benchmarking is illegal says Microsoft

Microsoft Restricting Free Speech

Dangerous Terms: A Guide To EULAs

Technorati Tags: EULA,Microsoft,MySQL,Legal Agreement,Visual C++

Discoveries on a day of programming from home

2011-12-08T16:52:00.001-08:00

Thanks to me being sick due to food poisoning I had to stay home today instead of going for work. Feeling irritated since I had such a little left to complete I thought I would complete the code at home and then take it back to the office and integrate it with the rest of the code base, test, correct and make a final commit before going home. During one of the longer builds I was toying with the idea of how nice it would be if we had a remote SVN to which I could commit from work. Sadly such a feature does not exist. But how would you go about such a thing? VPN was the first thing that came to my mind. Ba! Too complex. Wouldn’t it be nice to set up the thing as a remotely accessible server by opening up a port, say:

"Company IP address:14035”

with some username and password and let us access it. I really don’t know if that can be done but it was still an idea worth toying with.

Out of curiosity however I just typed in our company IP address into the web browser bar and was greeted with the standard Router username and password dialog box. Feeling lucky I typed in admin, admin. No result. admin, admin123; nothing. admin, pass; still nothing. admin,password; welcome to the… “WHAT???????”

Turned out that not only was our router accepting external connections but the router’s username and password were still at default level. Note. I decided to wait a day to publish this since I gave a call to the office and asked the person in charge to fix it. Turns out that when the connection was being redone by SLT they had to do a hard reset on the router and hadn’t configured this bit again. Negligent but not as severe.

Strangely enough “Jerry” over on the IRC SLHacktivists had mentioned this before stating that it was unbelievable just how many routers one could find by typing in random IP addresses and even more unbelievable how many of those routers had been left on with the default username and password. Please don’t use this information for malicious purposes. If you do find someone’s router open and if it is an SLT ADSL configured one, you should be able to get the person’s phone number straight out from the username. Give that person a call and tell them to call SLT to reconfigure the router to prevent this kind of activity. I find it to be irresponsible on SLT’s part that they configure routers for clients and then leave it with these default settings on like this. Most people don’t know any better and therefore the onus of customer security falls upon SLT and any other company that installs these connections.

Wake up the community and spread some awareness people. Oh and check your own routers too.

N.B – Doing this at your own workplace could lead you to being thrown out and/or bringing up bad will between you and the server dude should the router have been left open. My suggestion is to do something in which you have definite evidence to say that nothing has been tampered with and that you did this only in the interest of investigating corporate security.

Technorati Tags: Security,Routers

Musings of a Weekend Hacker

2011-12-05T21:33:00.001-08:00

Each of my blogs have been going through a serious repurposing over the last month and a half as I’ve tried to up my game somewhat in the blogging department. By upping the game I don’t mean to be some pro blogger who the world reads and then talks about but instead someone who is fairly consistent. By consistent I don’t mean how often I post. I’ve decided to put that aside since trying to do that unnaturally means it doesn’t get done. But by consistent I mean what I talk about. One thing I’ve always wanted to do is share whatever knowledge I gain with the rest of the world. Even if the rest of the world doesn’t read this blog it’s still a medium with which I can share everything right?

If you’ve read the last two or three posts of this blog you would notice that I’ve been trying to spur myself into becoming a weekend hacker. And it’s working. Along with dubstep and the pomodoro technique I am going through an unprecedented productivity burst. Over the last two weekends I have been able to release my first Open Source application, begin learning HTML and have given up my addiction to Twitter and RSS feeds. When you are programming those things matter less and less. I had to give up podcasts too up to a certain extent, something I’m a little sore about since the information I get from those is fairly valuable but some sacrifices have to be made I guess.

Digress digress digress.

Long story short, since I’m not reading tech news anymore I don’t really have anymore stories to write about all that often. But since I’m learning new programming stuff everyday I figured that whoever is trying to learn a new technology probably has to go through the same steps I do. So welcome to the journal of my tech life. Will it be daily? I don’t know. Will it be worth reading? For some yes. For others no. I don’t see the Hitler’s ghost taking much of an interest in this. What will it be?

Tech journal. Itsy bits of tech news. My open source projects. My ideas on building Sri Lanka’s Silicon Valley. Code snippets. Gotchas that screwed me over at work. And plain stupid things like how I managed to miss an assignment to a BigDecimal variable while using the add method on that variable itself. Why? Because it’ll keep me sane. :)

SL hacktivists: Your guide to joining the IRC

2011-11-26T20:35:00.001-08:00

Yesterday on IRC about three of us were having a chat on the number of people in the IRC. Or rather, the lack of it. Fact is, most people haven’t really used IRC at all since it can be just a very cumbersome and tiring process. Especially if you happen to use Windows seeing that the most popular client out there isn’t free. Neither is the second most popular client. It doesn’t help that most of the tutorials out there have been written for those two either. Given that, I though it would be best to write a tutorial for joining the channel on IRC using one standard process. No choice of clients, no frills, no nothing. Just one standard process which once you are comfortable with you’ll be free to move on to try other things. Be warned however, IRC can be addictive once you get into it. Let’s get into it then.

Edit – Screenshots have been provided for the whole process. Scroll down if the text doesn’t interest you.

Step 1: Downloading and setting up the client.

This is the worst step usually. Wikipedia’s comparison of IRC clients is worthless. It’s a mess of colours and columns which makes one wonder if they are in the process of inventing some form of chinese tic tac toe. To make things standard, let’s all get on the same boat with Trillian. (For windows. For mac users I have an instruction all the way at the bottom so it doesn’t confuse anyone up here in wondering which one to take)

1.1 Go to http://trillian.im/

1.2 Click on the download button (I’m loving the simplicity. Are you?)

1.3 Standard install process. No frills. Refuse the bloatware that comes with it.

1.4 Go through the basic sign up process. Note that this account you sign up for is like an account with any other website. The account is with trillian and not with the IRC so go ahead and set it up like you would a normal accout. Username and password. Yey. You are done with that

Step 2: Setting up the IRC connection

You should now have a skinny column on the left of your screen. Welcome to trillian. Time to IRC.

2.1 Click on the trillian menu bar. And click manage accounts.

2.1.1 Ideally you should be in the screen Basics->Accounts. If you aren’t, then go there.

2.2 Click Add New Account. You should see a nice tall column of various types of accounts to click on. Click IRC (doh!)

2.3 Ok this is usually the tough part right? It’s simple.

2.3.1 In account name, just type what you want to call it. SL hacktivists account maybe. It’s just a name for your reference.

2.3.2 In nickname, choose what you want to be called*. This is the equivalent of a twitter handle. We’ll see you as ‘crazym4dd0g’ when you log in (or whatever you choose to call yourself. I’m kiriappeee).

2.3.3 Just type in irc.foonetic.net here. IF you are wondering what that is. That’s the server where our slhacktivists and slhackathon channels are. That’s all you need to know.

2.4 Click connect. And once done. Close the window.

Step 3: Joining the channel

Notice now that your skinny column has a new tiny blue logo on the top right of it? Click it.

3.1 Click join a channel

3.2 In the window that opens, type slhacktivists and press Join.

Welcome to the IRC.

There’s the slhackathon channel you also want to join. Do the same process above (3,3.1,3.2) again and type slhackathon this time into the channel name.

Do bear in mind that we are building the community at this point. It may seem a little empty but that’s ok. Come on in and just leave yourself logged in. Even if you are idling don’t leave. Conversations will pop up from time to time and things will eventually get started.

* Note that if you choose to use an existing username you will probably be automatically given a username of the format [existingusername]_ . So if you chose kiriappeee you’d be giving kiriappeee_ <- notice the ‘_’ :D

For mac users you can use the plugin chatzilla with firefox. I think. Either way, if you get something that has no graphical user interface like trillian, then type this into the chat line when you join.

/Nick <your username> (like kiriappeee)

/server irc.foonetic.net

/join slhacktivists

/join slhackathon

Hope to see you guys in there soon. Please share this tutorial. We understand that IRC is a geeky thing but there really is nothing better to get people into one place where they can chat and wait. Let the hacktivism, begin.

IRC via Trillian

VIEW SLIDE SHOW

DOWNLOAD ALL

Edit – Big thanks to ‘AJ’ who provided screenies for how to join the IRC if you are using a MAC. Choice of IRC client here is Adium.

IRC via Adium

VIEW SLIDE SHOW

DOWNLOAD ALL

I’ll put up tutorials for all other clients as well soon. If you’ve got screenshots for Linux and iOS I would really appreciate that.

The SL Hacktivist movement

2011-11-25T06:36:00.001-08:00

It’s about time this got started. So, this morning’s post on hacking received a generally decent amount of positive feedback if the retweets and faved tweets were anything to go by. Also a quick review of my blog’s traffic shows somewhere upwards of 80 page views. That’s just for the individual post so I figure there must be around another 20 page views coming through the standard blog home view. Not bad. 100. I think we would be off to a super brilliant start if anywhere of a quarter and upwards of those views were converted into people participating from tomorrow. I’m really not expecting too many people, mainly due to the spontaneous nature of this suggestion which also equates to way short notice. But I think its important that we start. Even if its just me tomorrow I will forge ahead because I think starting is the most important thing. How could it not be? It’s the one thing we keep putting off after all. And it’s time to change that.

If you read the post on my mild disappointment at refresh Colombo there were several interesting comments regarding my observations on us not having a community of individuals who actually create stuff. One set of comments that interested me most were the ones left by laktek in which he said this.

“It's very hard to cultivate this attitude on Sri Lankans. They are more comfortable with cursing the system and envying others for lack of opportunities rather than creating it by themselves. Well, of course there are few exceptions (like you :)).
Also, another cynical piece of advice - just ignore these so-called tech events in Sri Lanka. I know the people organizing these events are passionate and have pure motives. But if you analyze the audience carefully, it's a just a bunch of rich kids who wants to show off their new gadgets and some smugs desperately trying to find some way to get noticed, upon realizing they have just wasted the best in their lives.
If you want to get some real shit done these events are just poison. It's easy to dream up all sorts of crazy ideas. But it will take lot of stamina and courage in you to turn them in to realities (and even more perseverance to get people to pay you!)
(Disclaimer: this is just my personal opinion based on my experiences, so take it as a grain of salt)”

He wrote another post on his Google+ as well. Scathing. But sadly true in many ways.

“Lakshan Perera - Oct 27, 2011 (edited) - Public
These are the people you will actually meet in a Sri Lankan tech event:
1. I work for [insert a big multinational organization] as the Chief Social Media Strategist and my job is to tweet the inside jokes of the office.
2. I work at a cubicle farm and I just masturbate to Endgadget & Gizmodo all day.
3. Dude, I have compiled & installed Linux distributions that don't even exist.
3. I'm a final year engineering student at [insert any prominent university in Sri Lanka] and I have a first class. I'm planning waste my next 5 years in this CO2, for the prospect of going to US and getting a PHD (I don't know what to do with it after that).
4. My parents could afford to send me to [insert one of the top 10 universities in the world] and there we had this thing called [insert a name of a popular web app]. I'm looking for someone do a clone of it for Sri Lanka. Guess I could make big bucks out of it.
5. I'm just here for food.
6. I don't trust my boyfriend, that's why I'm here.
7. All these tech stuff are greek to me, but our professor said he will ask questions from this conference in the final exam. So I even took notes of lightning talks.
[6, 7 are the only kind of female species you will find in these events]
People you will not find in these events:
"I'm the one who developed ____________"
or
"I'm working on _____ to solve ________"
That's why I don't attend to Sri Lankan tech events anymore.”

So I replied to his comment on my blog. A long rambling reply both agreeing with his observation about tech events as well as defending the whole concept of Refresh Colombo which I think has done a lot of good for the community. I’d never have started down this road if not for them. And if this takes off then it’ll at the end of the day have been because of that first Refresh Colombo meeting I attended. The reply I received to this sparked my interest.

“As I said, the second point was based on my own experience. There was a time I even used to gatecrash tech events searching for inspiration and guidance. The audience I've seen around all these events (including RefreshColombo) seems to remain the same (I don't mean it as in individuals, but as in personas they represent). That's why I remain skeptical, but there's a hope for change.
Anyway, rather than ending this conversation by just dissing the system, let me suggest something. It seems there are many folks with cool ideas out there, but they are not committed to spend time and effort on those.
So let's gather around all these inspired people for a Sri Lankan style Hackathon, fueled with Kottu and lime. They will have to hack on their idea for 48 hours. If they run the full race, they will have a tangible output on their hands after those 48 hours. Then, they could come up and present it confidently in the next editions of RefreshColombo.
More importantly, it would be a great start to evolve just an idea in to a fully blown product.”

I thought I could get this started. I pitched the idea to my dad and his reply was one of interest but which at the same time didn’t seem to be too convinced that this sort of activity could lead to better things. If you are wondering the same thing, “can something as small as this actually work out to something worth while?”, then I would suggest you go ahead and read this gist on github. Big thanks to laknath for posting this link. One of the most valuable things I’ve read in a while. The gist of it is basically that the people who created successful web apps and iOS apps didn’t just create it out of no where. At least not in the case of the majority. The way this happens is that there’s a lot of tiny apps and experiences and slightly larger apps and a lot of difficult work that actually happens before someone creates an experience that turns out to be a hit. The problem and the reason that people rarely get there is that they don’t take those first steps towards creating the small apps and suffering through the difficult experiences.

Which brings me to the last point I want to make on getting things started. It’s not just about the small experiences and the tiny apps. The fact is that if you don’t get started you won’t go anywhere. But the other side of that fact is that once you do get started you won’t know where you will go. A recent question thread on quora questioned the validity of the incessant amount of photosharing apps and other things that seem to be permeating the very atmosphere of silicon valley these days. In an extremely logical and eloquent fashion this claim is not only disputed but the value of these kinds of projects are also brought to the front. For me the most valuable lines were,

"Trade Pez dispensers online" -> a marketplace larger than many national economies (eBay)

"Tell your friends what you are doing" -> a global communications network (Twitter)

"Hook up at Harvard" -> a billion person network, disrupting governments (Facebook)

"Send money to your friends" -> disruptive payment network (Paypal)

Large, disruptive ideas start with teams who jump into the game, start with small, tangible problems, then grow and expand from there.
But that requires their getting into the game in the first place. They need a starting point of something that feels achievable and caters to their passions and aptitude.
And they need encouragement. They don't need criticism from various pundits and hanger-ons who deem them to be working on the wrong problem. Especially since many of the pundits don't work on them either.

Do you see that? Small seemingly worthless ideas that don’t have any capability of running at a profit or ever generating a worthwhile revenue have grown to be something not only worth billions of dollars but also something completely different from what they started out to be.

So let’s get started then shall we?

Here’s the deal. Since I can’t afford to put up a physical hackathon yet and since the logistics are a little beyond me without knowing the real interest of the community I thought, why not we start a cyber weekend hackathon and a general hacktivist community?

This is how it’s going to work.

For the hackathon, the serious hackathons will happen every 2nd and 4th weekend of the month. This is where we actually try and work on an idea and smash it into place in 48 hours. Maybe an old idea even but the point is we work like the hounds of hell are after us for those 48 hours. Saturday morning 6 AM I should be on the IRC (more on that in just a moment) and hopefully you guys will join as well. Come along. Introduce yourself. And if you know what you are going to be hacking on just tell the rest of the community. You don’t have to be specific. Just a general idea.

What you decide to do at the hackathon is for you to choose. The point is to get started.

At the end of the hackathon we need to show each other what we’ve done. I would like to see some sort of standard here that we upload the stuff on to github so that we can actually see tangible work from each other. A physical hackathon would actually have people being able to point to their laptop screens but since we don’t have that let’s just go with this. Open sourcing side projects is a good thing imo. If for some reason you don’t want to open source your work that’s fine. But leave something tangible to show what you did during the last 48 hours. Preferably something more than a screen shot. If it was an Android app, upload the apk. Desktop app, upload the exe. Web app. Host it on your machine and let us know how to remotely connect to it for a few hours. Or take a screen cast of it using screencastr.

On all the other weekends it would be nice to see the community still hanging around on the IRC but more as a way of working on stuff in a chilled out way. Ideally talking the product you are working on/worked on the previous week with you co havktivists would be the best thing to happen. Features might get added. Unwanted stuff will get dropped and at the end of it we might just see the growth of the hacktivist ecosystem.

The SL Hacktivist culture

Since we don’t really have an Hacktivist culture I think it would be a great idea to work right from the start on being supportive. Be critical of ideas. Question the person working on those ideas on the whys and whats. But don’t be destructive. If you feel something isn’t right, don’t just say it. Say it with a suggestion of what you think might be right. Essentially the best case scenario would be a community which continues to pump ideas into other people’s projects in order to spur further innvoation.

There will be zero tolerance towards those who want to put down other people’s work. If you don’t think it’s something anyone will use then please have an explanation ready to be given in a civilized way rather than simply putting it down as “what is this I don’t even…”. That’s the sort of thing comment trolls write. That will not be tolerated within this community.

The communication mechanism

I racked my brain trying to figure this one out and the realized the answer was simple. IRC. I will write a quick tutorial later on how to get IRC started up so you can join the conversation. Because if you don’t know how to use IRC I really don’t blame you.

Server will be

irc.foonetic.net (port 6667 if needed)

Channels are

#SLHackathon – Will be the default channel we land up in for the hackathon days. Also on non hackathon days if you want to discuss your hackathon projects going to that channel would be a good idea but I’m not sure how the non hackathon days would pan out. Most important and distinguishing factor of this channel, going off topic will not be tolerated here all that much. I came to realise some time ago that conversation can be the bane of all productivity in situations like this. So chit chat will not be allowed. If you want to have a friendly chat and get to know your fellow hacktivists,

#SLHacktivists – Will be the channel you want to go to. Discuss your random programming problems. Share stuff you find interesting and just chill and get to know the community there. There might occasionally be interesting topics based on what you guys want. So enjoy your time there. (Right now at the time of writing this it may be a little cricket like silent but don’t worry. People will come soon hopefully).

Also on Twitter we will use the tags #SLHacks and #SLHackathon to talk about it. I’m sure we’ll agree on a standard in the end but let’s leave it at that

Timing and management

Apart from the no chit chat there’s also the time management technique called pomodoro technique. I went through it and it sounds ideal for getting people into a high focus mode with a goal oriented approach. Check it out. (Another one of laktek’s suggestions).

The end

That is it. That’s all you need to know. The first hackathon starts tomorrow (26th Novemeber 2011) and finishes Sunday Midnight-ish (or goes on if you wish)

Let the hacking. Begin

A big big big thank you to laktek for the advice and the ideas provided. You and the rest of team at Curdbee (vesess) keep making us proud :).

Who wants to hack?

2011-11-24T18:13:00.001-08:00

Time to get stuff done. While I’m continuing work on Project MADA I’m sad to say that I don’t think I can give my full attention to it as I have decided to give that attention to the place I work at. It’s my dad’s company and I might eventually be the person who takes over it so therefore I need to give some time and focus to that business instead. I’ll probably do a full post about that on the Project MADA website sometime later but for now let’s just say it’s going into a stasis of some sort.

But I don’t want it to be like that. I want it all. I want to work on stuff for the company as well as Project MADA. The problem is that my attitude won’t let me do that. I admit. I youtube a lot. I get on HN plenty. And I figure I waste at least 2 hours a day on that kind of stuff. You know how much 2 hours is? Every 12 days you lose one whole day. In less than 2 weeks you have already given up one whole day for YouTube and HN. Just imagine that. Can you actually picture yourself watching YouTube and reading tech stories for 24 hours at a stretch? It’s poison. That’s what it is.

So I want to become a hacker. That’s it. Simple right? And I’m going to blow past this attitude of mine by simply ‘doing it’. I know I can. I did a lot of serious sports and my mind is still conditioned towards doing stuff like that. I just need something to get started on. So I figured why not take a tiny step. That was how I did it in sports too. When I was running and I felt myself hitting the wall I would reach deep into my subconscious and give over control of myself to get me to take that one step. 5 minutes later I’d find myself back in stride. But I digress.

This weekend, and every month on the 2nd and 4th weekend I propose that we get together to have a cyber hackathon. We all work on a project for those weekends and by the end of it we have a project we can show off. Something. Some tangible end result. So here’s how it’s going to work.

We get together as a group. If you want to collab with someone else be my guest. I probably won’t because I discovered how useless I am at it recently. There’s just a few people I can collab with mostly because they know who I am and can actually keep me on track when working in a group. So, here it is.

We all get set this weekend. Jump on to skype. Add me on kiriappeee. And please add the message saying weekend hackathon. I’ll set up a private Google group/FB group later.
We get set pretty early morning. No slacking. It’s one weekend. By 6 AM we are on.
For 45 minutes we discuss what we are going to do. More than discuss we just tell what we are going to do. If there’s feedback to be provided we’ll do it then
Get down to hacking. No katha. No sina. Hack hack hack. If you need help drop it down on the skype board but otherwise please don’t use the Skype session to talk incessantly.
Break in the evening. 30 minute discussion on what got done.
Back to hack
Knock the work off at 10 30 PM. You want to continue. Be my guest but honestly I think that’s not really needed.
Same on Sunday. Hack till about 11 45.
Commit to github.

Now all this was just off the top of my head. If we are going to be hacking then we need to be thinking in the spirit of hackers. Get a general idea first and then correct details as you go along.

What kind of projects should you bring to the table.

Just an idea of what you want to do. Maybe you want to create a project management web app but you have no idea what web programming is. That’s ok. Spend the night before deciding what language you want to use as scripting (Python or Ruby probably) and then come and start hacking from your first HTML page to your first python script. Bring it on. And learn as you go.

At the end of the hackathon we commit whatever we did, even if it is test code, to github. Why? Because we all get to have a good idea of what we’ve done and it’ll give a sense of community success. If you don’t want to open source your project, well, come along and join anyway but just be sure to make something tangible that others can see at the end of the day. Else the purpose will be lost. This is a cyber hackathon after all.

Now I hammered this post out in about 15 minutes. I’m rushing to work. Leave your comments and we’ll figure out how this is going to work in the future. For now, Hacking starts tomorrow.

So what?

2011-11-16T20:58:00.001-08:00

A note to those who attended my presentation at apiit where I delivered my talk on how go generate and sell a (tech) business idea. I don't feel I explained the so what section as well as I should and therefore I thought I'd go through it in writing for your benefit. What I will do is first explain exactly what the so what factor means. And then I'll address each project's so what factor individually.

What's up with so what?

Everything in my talk that I gave was geared entirely towards pitching your ideas in such a way that people will be interested in it. Within the first 1.5 minutes. Or even 30 seconds. That's right. Everything I spoke yesterday was for just your first 1.5 minutes. It does of course lay out your framework for a larger presentation but the fact remains. Your opening 1.5 minutes will depend a lot on getting across the points I mentioned yesterday.

The so what is for everything else. If someone gives you the so what question you should be happy. Why? Because it means that people are interested in knowing more about what you have to say. It may come across as "oh no. This person doesn't care" but trust me. If they really didn't care they'd just nod their head and wait for you to speak before deflecting it and changing the topic.

What's so important about the so what is that people want to know more. People want to know:

What's your edge?
What makes you unique?
How do you fight the inevitable clones?
What is your domain expertise in this area?
How large is this market?
How do you plan on marketing?

Think of the so what factor as the Q&A session. That's where the best stuff comes out so you better be ready for it. Well if you've understood what the so what factor is all about then I shall proceed to breaking it down for each project.

Online A/L paper system. So what?

You are making a system that is dependent on an existing IT presence including internet access; the knowledge of using computers and the internet effectively is another requirement. This may seem viable at an anecdotal level (i.e. your personal observations may see this kind of IT presence available) but you need to bring more than personal observations to the table. In fact this project, if it is really being targeted at outstation students then how much of an IT presence needs to be established needs to be taken into consideration. Don't be afraid to dream big. Maybe this will need a massive investment and quite possibly a timeline of 3 years at least to truly come to fruition and that's acceptable. If you said 5 years it might still be acceptable. As long as you don't fall into a trap of convincing yourself that personal observations is enough to say that you can disregard the need for an IT infrastructure to be put in place. (I'm not saying that your personal observations are wrong, but I am saying that they aren't enough).

On a side note, I might make the recommendation that instead of instantly targeting the outstation areas you might want to consider implementing the system within the developed areas first. While your end goal is of course to enable everyone you have to accept that a root problem to solve first would be to get your system accepted in the first place. Step by step you can get there. Starting in a developed area will help you to ramp up your traction, get enough activity, feedback and ultimately help you deliver a more complete system to the outstation areas. Bear in mind that there have been others before you who have tried this idea but failed, in my opinion, partly because of a lackluster implementation and partly because of timing. In your case I think the timing to implement such a solution within developed areas is ideal so you might want to start there. Just a suggestion but I would appreciate if you take some time to think about it very seriously before deciding what to make of it.

Online classifieds for Tuition teachers. So what?

This actually has quite a few gotchas to it. It's interesting what you are trying to solve and your idea that more and more of this target market is approachable via an online medium is correct but it's questionable whether you've realized the root cause of the issue. The problem may not be the fact that advertisements have limited visibility but they are in fact competing for attention and trying to get themselves heard above the noise. It's a huge market and getting discovered isn't easy. You touched on something about social media bla bla. But don't get lost in the buzz. What exactly are you planning with social media? Point is, don't just build a directory of advertisements. Build a review system. Build a recommendation system. Be the blooming Google for Sri Lankan tuition classes. Build the 'page rank' for tuition teachers. Build an online platform for tuition teachers to communicate with existing or potential students. (Please for the sake of whatever that is sacred to you, don't build a damn traditional elakiri style forum. My eyes bleed every time I have to participate in one of those).

So let me drop this down one more time. For me, I feel your root cause of the problem you are trying to solve is, there are a lot of tuition classes out there and there's a lot of noise that people have to shout over to get themselves heard. Your online advertising system will work, but I don't believe its possible that it will continue to be effective in the long run. Can you instead give students a way to sort classes based on price, times, days, size etc.. and then help further filter classes out by using recommendations given by existing students. And then look into making money by giving tuition teacher a premium platform for communicating with students. Give them a platform to chat, a platform to communicate and give out homework to existing students and maybe even give samples to potential students. Build them a CMS even if you can. If you want to give them a live stream functionality by all means, do so. Dream big. Please. This has a lot more potential than to be simply an advertising platform. Remember. So what? Are you answering that question effectively.

Methane units for electricity. So what?

Sound idea. Sound solution. In theory at least. Your so what moment is going to come when people question you on what your domain expertise is in this area. You put the methane into containers. Now what? How do you connect this to homes and actually convert it to electricity? Is there a massive R&D component to this? If so what's the proof that you are capable of solving this? Once you've solved it does it mean you've discovered a way of making cheaper electricity with methane? Are you building the units that convert the methane to electricity or are you renting them out after having brought them down using a large seed investment? I believe the term used is methane digester?

Essentially where is that coming from and how do you implement it in such a way that it becomes available for everyone eventually without you having to wait till people eventually cough up the money to buy one? Or do you make it yourself for much cheaper so people can now afford it as a long term investment?

Online market place for organic foods. So what?

Maybe it's because of the lack of detail, but I see a large room for a lot of "so what?"s here. How do you plan on getting the organic food together to sell? What kind of distribution are you looking at? What do you mean by export? What's your edge since people in this business can also get an online store up and running fast. How do you plan on growing out? There's several questions here that leave me wondering if you've found a problem and understood it's root cause or maybe the simplest path to solving it. I could very well be wrong here so please do get in touch with me so we can have a chat about it. As for the questions that I asked, skip to the bottom if you want to know my opinion on too many questions. (But first read the other so what's. It may help with enhancing your thinking process as well)

Online classifieds for well... Everything. So what?

The biggest so what? I see here is that I don't see a competitive edge that an existing player like 'hit ads' can't dominate over. Nearly everything hit ads and the other classifieds receive is in digital format anyway. Converting that to an online form is not a big deal from their point of view. If they do that before you then you are essentially screwed over. I really can't begin to answer this question for you guys except to remind you of something Mark Zuckerberg said in a recent interview with Charlie Rose. When he was queried on whether Facebook would go into making games he was utterly and absolutely adamant that they would never touch it. When asked why, he replied that making great games is tough. And what Facebook does everyday is also tough if they want to a great job of it. And most importantly, Mark went on to say that in the end, companies focused on one thing and one thing only will always win against the bigger guys who try to do everything at once. My point here is that instead of being an online advertiser for everything and anything, figure out what your unique focus is going to be. Even if it's everything and anything you advertise for, figure out what your unique selling point is that you will focus on so entirely that by the end of it you'll be a damn squint.

The online advertising for lecturers is a good example of a single focus. I could think of several things they could do more than just being an advertiser simply because their aim is to focus on just one vertical. It's not being narrow minded. It's about being focused. Your so what question just has to be, what's your focus.

A side note, before even jumping to the so what? I think it would be a good idea to revisit the problem you are trying to solve and ask yourself again, what really causes the problem?

Cinnamon based products. So what?

Honestly speaking, I don't really have a so what for this. The idea is so simple it's one of those, "why didn't anyone else come up with this before". In fact that might be a so what. It is a simple idea to think of so why hasn't anyone else done it? Is everyone just following the herd or did people who tried fail? If so why did they fail?

If I really split hairs to get a so what I'll come up with two more definite ones. The first is, what is your domain expertise in this area? With respect to that question, will you be finding people to make the products? Even if you do what's your network like in terms of knowing people who you can influence into making those crucial first sales. Ideally I think the team would be mostly sales oriented rather than having an extreme low level of the how-to's in this domain. You guys will be pounding the streets and flying the skies to get your product out everywhere.

The second so what is actually a problem which you will probably have to face soon after starting. What you are doing isn't going to take rocket science to actually implement and you are going to have the copy cats nipping at your heels like crazy very quickly. Normally I wouldn't ask this question but honestly, how are you planning to stay nimble enough to stay ahead of them. Even if you don't stay in front of the pack, you can still make enough money out of this idea to be a success but then again, is that what you would really want. Study your domain till you have cinnamon leaking out of your brain and come up with something that not even India has thought of up to today. It could be marketing ploys, product ranges, packaging, whatever. But ask yourselves what you are going to do to keep throwing the dust in the face of the copy cats.

SMS bus tracker. So what?

What I really like about this idea is its simplicity. It's SMS based, so no need of fancy GUIs. It's complex enough on the back end in terms of actually documenting bus routes and then creating algorithms to say which bus routes to actually take to discourage the first wave of copy cats. And it's expensive to implement (buying a port with Dialog is a lot of money if I'm not mistaken) which would stop people coming up without having secured capital. And we are going to be using SMS based apps for long enough to say that this idea is old fashioned. (In America this idea may have been better implemented with a small app for a smartphone but in the SL market, SMS makes far more sense).

Having said that, the so what for you will be personal. Let's say you've done the necessary documentation, you've developed the app. The app is implemented. People are using it, you are making money and everybody is happy. What then? Do you move on? What further work could you do on this app? Where do you go from here?

Leaving that aside, you need to prepare yourself better if people ask for specifics on how you plan to get this app working. Look into things like Etisalat app zone. You need to have some idea on how you will go about getting this done. Are you going to hire a developer? Will you develop by yourself? What's your development knowledge? How will you find the bus routes?

Why too many questions are stupid.

Let's face it. I've asked a lot of questions. Some you may have answered. Others? Probably not. Does that mean you should pack up? Nopes. Even if others come along and ask a lot of questions that you can't answer you still don't pack up. If anyone ever says you can't progress without knowing the answers to all the questions, slap them and say the questions will never stop so you are going to choose to keep moving forward anyways. Remember that if you are doing something brand new you'll never be able to answer all the questions but your intuition is going to tell you that it'll work. That said, always bear in mind that the question still remains valid even if you don't answer it. Good example for this is the question of how you beat the competitors and inevitable copy cats. You might not always know the answer to this question but its a good idea to keep it in mind so that going forward you aren't blindsided. That said, too many questions is still stupid.

Don't take this is Adnan is stupid either. The point I'm making here is try to answer as many questions as possible but if they don't all get answered, don't be hard on yourself and say "I'm going to be a failure". Persevere. Push forward. And good luck.

Leave comments here and start a discussion if you want. If there's something you feel you should mail me instead for whatever reason, adnan.issadeen@live.com is where I can be found.

Hacking Spool: Breaking the Regional Barriers

2011-11-13T08:29:00.000-08:00

Quick reminder before I go any further. Definition of hacking in my book is, using something for a purpose other than what it was intended for. This is not some crazy sql injection where I stole a gabazillion usernames and passwords that match password123 which I promptly dumped onto pastebin. This was simply an intuitive use that I pushed out of a product that really wasn’t built with that purpose in mind.

A Quick Introduction to Spool

For the uninitiated and those who did not actively watch the videos of the TC disrupt competition, Spool is, in the words of TC itself, Instapaper on steroids. For the even more uninitiated, Instapaper is a service which allows you to save web pages to read later where the pages you save and read are synced across various devices. Instapaper and Spool share a very similar purpose (as do a plethora of Instapaper clones out there) and even execute in a very similar manner with users being able to save web pages both across their mobile devices as well as via Google Chrome using an extension. While most of the clones of Instapaper do the same thing, Spool takes a more advanced approach in not only saving a web page and syncing it to your device but in also making the web more readable. It uses an AI engine in the backend that reads the document like a human would and gets the necessary text (major time saver when it works on paginated articles). But most important is that it takes videos on the web page you wanted to save and converts it to a format that plays smoothly on your mobile device. In fact, given the language used in the app where upon saving the web page it says “recording…” I have a feeling that this was meant to be The killer feature in Spool.

The unique way Spool records

At first I wondered how Spool does the recording. I was thinking maybe they act as a download accelerator of sorts and simply rip the video out of wherever it is saved. I was surprised however, when I saved a Techcrunch TV article and found that instead of just the video, I was actually watching a video of the TCTV video playing inside TC player. Let me rephrase. Instead of just the raw video, I was actually watching the player on the Techcrunch website, playing the video. This meant that I could see the 3 second ad before, the play and pause button, the little tabs on top displaying the various categories and it was literally how I would see the player on the screen when looking at it with my own two eyes. What the AI engine was doing was actually taking a screencast of the video after having pressed play too. To be honest, I was mind blown. This just seemed really really advanced and in fact quite a cool solution to me. And then I saw the hack in front of my eyes.

Hulu around the world.

I live in Sri Lanka. That is a fact. Hulu, is not available in Sri Lanka. That is also a fact. The only solutions to this are to either use a proxy server (unreliable and after using fiddler to monitor traffic I feel better off without them) OR to use a VPN (setting up is not for the layman. In fact I borrowed my friends VPN connection to use Hulu). That is also a fact. Spool like most good startups these days, especially one that clearly needs a bit of horsepower like what Spool must require, uses Amazon EC2 or Rackspace for their hosting needs. That is an assumption. What is not an assumption is that these servers are located within the United States. I hope that that is a fact. Therefore, surely, Spool’s cute little AI bot with its excellent peripheral vision must be able to access Hulu instead of me. A quick search on Hulu for Naruto’s latest EP (I received the message, “Sorry Hulu is not available in your country. We are racists”) showed up. No problem! I clicked the spool extension icon and a few seconds later I found it recording in my queued list. This step is a waiting one since whatever video you add has to actually play fully. So if you put a 20 minute video to play it actually records all 20 minutes and will therefore take 20 minutes to complete. (I didn’t repeat it for this article but you can try it yourself). And 20 minutes later, the episode downloads on to my device and tadaaa

Yes, Sasuke can haz your kittens for breakfast :D

This goes even further. Using a very intuitive feature that lets the user click on a link within a spooled article to save to spool directly I can then use the rest of the web page that got saved to actually navigate the entire Naruto directory on Hulu.

Taking it a step further

Well what’s the thing that’s blocked in countries that people really want to look at? Facebook. What? You thought it was porn? That’s the second on the list. Well this provides an obvious use case for porn anyway so let’s go with it. Yes I know you saw this coming. But I thought it was important since it happens in a rather strange way. I asked my friend what porn sites have been blocked in Sri Lanka and I settled for xvideos. Check this out.

Don’t hate on IIS7 for being on my localhost. But this is where xvideos.com directs. Notice the Spool extension primed and ready on top.

By George! Saved to your Spool… “IIS7”. Well that’s useful isn’t it.

Turns out it is useful. And you know what’s even more useful than the homepage? The links from it to other videos and other pages to browse. Yeps. If you do Spool those links you’ll find porn delivered straight to your phone.

Enjoy the ‘hack’. I’m not entirely sure this is what the Spool team would want since this probably puts a lot of strain on their servers to essentially be a download center for a bunch of people so do go easy on them.

I didn’t bother going into the data to try and retrieve the videos to watch on a larger screen since I couldn’t be bothered. If anyone else wants to give it a go let me know the results

If you like what you read do give me a follow on Twitter @area51research.

TouchFire: Finally a real keyboard for the iPad

2011-11-06T10:18:00.000-08:00

If there's one complaint that can be made about the iPad across a large number of users, that complaint would be that it just isn't built for content creation where a large part of that criticism comes from the fact that they keyboard just doesn't allow for it. The touch keyboard doesn't provide the necessary feed back for users to type continuously without looking at it. I've heard of an effort to make a screen which actually uses a small electric current to create a pull on the finger to give the person that actual feeling that they are touching a keyboard. And while that kind of screen may solve the problem across every kind of device here's a solution which is both elegant and a work of genius.

Like I said. Elegant and genius. It completely utilizes ever aspect unique to the iPad to create a solution that does not get in the way. With just 36 days to go they've already hit 467% of their Kickstarter requirements but more really doesn't hurt now does it? Head over to the Kickstarter link under the video to check it out.

If you want more updates on tech stuff do follow me on @area51research on Twitter. Also I just started a new tumblog to feature indie projects at http://www.theindiezone.tumblr.com so give that a look and help me pass the word about it. You can follow that Twitter account on @theindiezone

An interview with Addictive Mobility's CTO

2011-11-03T11:58:00.000-07:00

As an accompaniment to my post on Google's lack of innovation in the mobile ad space (which you really should read) I thought I'd include the videos of my interview with Addictive Mobility's CTO and co founder, Dilshan.

Unhandled Exceptions: Addictive Mobility Part 01 from adaderana on Vimeo.

Unhandled Exceptions: Addictive Mobility Part 02 from adaderana on Vimeo.

Unhandled Exceptions: Addictive Mobility Part 03 from adaderana on Vimeo.

Do bear in mind that as a Sri Lankan and in keeping to the theme of the show the interview revolved less around the company and more around Dilshan's journey as an entrepreneur and then a look into the magic that happens behind the scenes to make Addictive Mobility work the way it does.

Google's disappointing lack of mobile ad innovation

2011-11-03T11:57:00.000-07:00

About a month ago I was fortunate enough to be sponsored by the company I work at to visit the GITEX 2011 tech exhibition in Dubai. While there I took the time to find out what talks and panel discussions were on and available for pass holders to attend free. On the side of mobile, apps and content world there were quite a few interesting looking discussions and daily addresses (most of which turned out to be duds) of which the talk titled " Daily Address: Mobile Marketing; The New Frontier - Mohamad Mourad, Regional Manager, Google MEA" caught my eye. The talk and the panel debate regarding targeted ads turned out to be a major disappointment for me in the end and I still can't believe I ran into a lack of innovation of this nature.

What the Google guy spoke of

As a member of the audience rightly commented, Mourad's talk on how advantageous mobile advertising is to companies was basic at best. The talk seemed better structured for a set of individuals who were absolutely new to the world of mobile advertising and I wouldn't be surprised in fact if the man had just taken a presentation he had already delivered countless number of times before to various audiences and attempted to deliver the same thing to us. Leaving the issue of being basic aside what was more interesting were the points he decided to focus on.

The first point he went harping on was the opportunity for advertisers and developers alike to use mobile advertising as a means of getting exposure and generating income respectively. His chosen example of Angry Birds wasn't one I would have chosen as it is definitely an edge case and doesn't apply to everyone. More on why that's important later. The second point he chose to go on about was the various types of rich media ads that mobile advertising could support thus leading to (apparently) better engagement with consumers and "increased brand awareness". Oh the agony of having to sit through a cannon ball of buzz words. A lot of buzz words that don't seem to ever touch upon the real issue of mobile advertising.

My question is...

During the Q&A session immediately after the talk I asked Mourad what Google's plans might be to improve ad relevancy. Rich media and various methods of displaying ads were all good but no one would ever take ads seriously as long as their relevancy remained below the level of obsolete. His answer came as quite a surprise to me as he looked me in the eye and brushed my question off saying "We don't see this as an issue and Google has no plans of looking into this in the near future". Come again? Google, the company that makes the biggest bucks via its ad networks doesn't care for ad relevancy on the mobile platform? I wondered if he even really represented Google. Regardless, what he said did make me realise that even if he was wrong about the fact that Google isn't looking into this the fact would remain that Google has not shown any signs of looking into it up to today.

The strange thing is, even during the panel debate that followed Mourad's talk, everyone spoke of geo targeting and rich media ads. But when I asked them the same question, stating that contextual relevancy was more important before going for geo targeting they were all happy to agree with my observation but again downplayed the importance of relevancy. This was after I said that when I use a mind mapping tool I still get ads for horoscopes when I don't even believe in them. It was as if relevancy was just one of those issues opened up on a bug tracker destined to never be looked into with more than a passing interest.

But relevancy matters!

Remember what the Google guy said about benefits for Advertisers and for Developers? Exposure and revenue right? Unfortunately, hours and days of exposure through a few apps are never a guarantee for either one of those when relevancy is nil. For example, when I was using my mind mapping tool to create an interview question set for a daily deals panel discussion, there were a lot of key words in there that could have been used to serve me up interesting ads. Unfortunately Google still managed to get it wrong and deliver the famous horoscope advertisement which led me to switching off my data connection to ensure I wouldn't see the ads for a while. When this kind of advertising happens one has to question, is the advertiser getting their money's worth? If ads are served up in a manner that is this dumb then what exactly is the advertiser bidding for? If I advertise with Google am I really bidding against a horoscope website? Even if what I want to bid for has nothing related whatsoever to horoscopes? Does that also mean that Google is squandering valuable opportunity after opportunity to serve up a relevant ad?

Then there's the problem for the developer too. Developers who use an ad supported model depend on those advertisements for their revenue. Unfortunately since most companies seem to be focused on the delivery mechanism of the ads rather than the relevancy the resulting experience from the apps can be frustratingly ugly. And it isn't just the the terrible experience of big pictures showing up after every other screen or advertisements masquerading as notifications randomly during the day. The problem has a much more severe impact on the entire system when these advertisements have no relevance.

The effect of non/poorly targeted ads

Remember the old days of advertising via the internet? The flashy banners desperately attempting to get your attention as the 1000th visitor to the site? Things have come a long way since then where I actually welcome ads, giving them my attention occasionally to see if there's anything I like. My clicks on ads have increased with the increase of their relevancy but somewhere at the back of my head I'm always questioning whether or not these ads are safe. And that is the unfortunate effect of the internet having grown up with the virus/malware ridden ads plastered around websites. And if mobile ads continue the way they are going, people are very soon going to start regarding them as just spam. And when this happens, no amount of relevancy will ever sort the issues out completely. Unfortunately mobile ad networks don't seem to be taking this seriously.

Google's crime in not creating targeted ads

Google is by no means new to the targeting game. For me it feels like Google invented the targeted ad concept. (Note that I said feels like). Their experience in using text on the web along with all their other knowledge of the user gives an experience in ads which if you choose to look at today, is quite good. This kind of targeting isn't easy though and the technology behind it has been put through a constant process of refinement and evolution. Given that, it might be understandable for companies new to the mobile advertising game to choose to try and trump other ad networks simply by making their ads richer and more obvious and ultimately more annoying. Google however, is left with no excuse as to why they continue to ignore the concept of targeted ads. All they require is to create the means for an ad developer to pass relevant information from within an app to their servers (since apps cannot be crawled for information like a traditional web page). The heavy weight work of actually converting that data into a meaningful ad is already built and Google has to simply leverage it to create what will be a fulfilling experience not just for the user but also for the developer AND the customers who choose to advertise with them.

Meanwhile...

The world continues to turn and others have woken up to this gaping hole in Google's strategy in the mobile ad space. Companies like Addictive Mobility have taken up the challenge of providing app developers with a method to throw data from within the app into their SDK which then funnels the data into Addictive Mobility's servers before churning out ads relevant to the current context within the app. I was in fact lucky enough to snag an interview with the CTO and co founder of Addictive Mobility where I spoke about the technology behind their product and frankly speaking, it's mind blowing. Mind you, this may not be a company that you've heard much about but you should check their clients out and realise that they simply believe in more action and less talk.

The point I'm going to make here is, Google and most other mobile ad networks are sitting back on their laurels expecting the money to roll in while they let the system deteriorate. It's disappointing and as an aspiring developer I feel insulted that Google doesn't given enough attention towards solving the obvious problems that exist in their mobile ad network. The mobile ad network that they've made so easy to use with Android. The OS they are caretakers of. Pretty soon one of two things will happen. Either the users of apps will grow numb to the ads invading their phone screens as web users have become numb to the banner ads on the sides of the web pages, OR, companies like Addictive Mobility are going to catch up and deal a death blow to Google. By which time Google might be able to only play catch up while the journalists write... "too little.. too late".

If you enjoyed reading this and would like to keep up with more tech updates do consider following me on Twitter @area51research while continuing to sharing this article.

My full interview with Dilshan can be found here

Bling my iPad 2. For £5m

2011-11-02T12:16:00.001-07:00

I won't lie, I honestly think making luxury products out of things like mp3 players and computers is really one of those over the top things in life. I guess whatever floats the boat right? In the case of this iPad the likelihood of the boat being sunk seems to be greater. And I'll admit. As far as pulling out all the stops goes, the people behind this really didn't hold back. This iPad 2 features:

Two kilos of 24 carat gold and 12.5 carat diamonds.
A bezel made from ancient rock and the crushed remains of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. ~750g of Canadian Ammolite was mixed with 57g of fossilised T-Rex leg to create the bezel.
The rear Apple logo is made from 52 individually-set gemstones and the front includes an 8.5 carat diamond surrounded by a further 12 small flawless ones.

Now tell me. Where are you going to use this? I suppose if anyone ever tried to grab it, it could be converted to a lethal blunt object in a pinch. Read on for more

iPad 2 made from T-Rex fossils costs £5m • reghardware

If you want to be updated with the latest in tech and science consider following me on Twitter: @area51research

Quick update

2011-10-31T20:29:00.000-07:00

In case anyone is here looking for a new article, my grandma passed away two days ago and as a result I will be back to blogging only tomorrow :). In the mean time feel free to keep an eye out on my Twitter account @area51research since that'll be going live again.

Android Developer Tutorial is Deprecated?

2011-10-29T21:02:00.000-07:00

I've dabbled in Android development for some time having created a few homebrew apps for my personal usage including a small password en/decrypter. But I'm finally taking the plunge into pro development to expand my skill set. As I was going through the Notepad Tutorial on the Android SDK I noticed something strange in the final step for Notepad Exercise 1.

The code given in the Android Tutorial is

private void fillData() {
        // Get all of the notes from the database and create the item list
        Cursor c = mDbHelper.fetchAllNotes();
        startManagingCursor(c);

        String[] from = new String[] { NotesDbAdapter.KEY_TITLE };
        int[] to = new int[] { R.id.text1 };
        
        // Now create an array adapter and set it to display using our row
        SimpleCursorAdapter notes =
            new SimpleCursorAdapter(this, R.layout.notes_row, c, from, to);
        setListAdapter(notes);
    }

But when you check the documentation you find this.

public SimpleCursorAdapter (Context context, int layout, Cursor c, String[] from, int[] to)

This constructor is deprecated.
This option is discouraged, as it results in Cursor queries being performed on the application's UI thread and thus can cause poor responsiveness or even Application Not Responding errors. As an alternative, use LoaderManager with a CursorLoader.

The documentation for the LoaderManager isn't exactly the easiest thing to understand for someone who really is on their first day of Android (even if they have a decent enough a Java background) so maybe it would have been better to at least include a Notepadv4 exercise to cover this? Anyway I'm going to redo the Notepad exercise once I'm done up to v3 and I'll post the redone version using a LoaderManager.

edit - Upon checking again I realized the SDK version this applies to is actually one that is higher up than what I am using currently. Version 11 to be precise. Regardless of that they really need to update the tutorial. Maybe we'll see a tutorial fragmentation now.

Generating and Selling a Tech Business Idea

2011-10-28T09:12:00.000-07:00

This is the recording of the presentation I delivered at Refresh Colombo where I discussed how to generate and sell a tech business idea. For those of you who may be reading this from abroad some of the views may seem overly simple but bear in mind that the crowd at Refresh Colombo is a very diverse one. It isn't just a geek community but it also includes a lot of people who just have an interest in how technology is finding its way into every facet of life today. If you are looking into how to sell the idea my suggestion would be to skip to the second video but as I say right at the start, generating and selling are not two concepts that live apart from each other. They are interconnected and move together.

The essence of my talk revolves around these key concepts

Building the mindset to generate ideas

1) Discuss Discuss Discuss
As much as it may seem tempting to keep your ideas to yourself, it really doesn't serve much of a purpose. Why? Because by keeping the idea in belief that someone could somehow steal it and steal all of your future away you end up missing out on the amazing feedback you could have been receiving way before you even started working on it. Don't worry. Even Steve Jobs needed his engineering crew to take a good look at the GUI before whisking it away as their own.

2) Observe
Observe and study areas you are familliar with and then areas you are not. Watch how people solve problems in these spaces. Why should you do this? Have you ever watched a leaf slowly being dragged along by a smaller stream of water into a much faster flowing one? You want to do that to your mind. Drag it along bit by bit until you suddenly find yourself flowing with ideas. Observation is key to understanding problems. Observation is also key to the next point

3) Predict
Predicting ideas is a way to get yourself out of the rut. It's not too difficult to reach a stage where you can observe and then speak of what you observed based on whatever that has happened or is currently happening. But attuning yourself to a trend and then striving to look beyond the trends into the future is something much more difficult. The reward of this mental exercise? Confidence that you are capable of identifying and solving problems. Confidence that grows each time your predictions become validated.

Generating your idea

1) Solve problems. Quit making them
For the love of whatever might be precious to you please don't ever consider creating a problem. Henry Ford may have said "If I gave people what they wanted I'd have made a faster horse" but that doesn't mean he created a problem. Where there's an unsatisfied need there's a problem and in Ford's case the problem was that people wanted to go faster. They just didn't know what they wanted to satisfy that need.

2) Find the Simplest Path
Finding the simplest path doesn't necessarily mean the easiest solution. What this actually means is getting right to the core issue, the root of all evil causing the problem, and try and solve it from there. Why I call this the simplest path is that when you try and solve something from a high level perspective what you end up with is a system that will forever feel gold plated. That's simply because deep at the heart of the system there remains an unsolved root cause. That root cause will always be the simplest path to the solution since often times you'll find that solving just that root problem will solve the myriad of high level surface problems that one might attempt to solve instead.

3) Connect different industries to find the best idea
This is a fairly simple concept. It's what artificial intelligence is to the hundreds of systems out there. It's what social media is to solving neighborhood level pollution. But I include this simply because as obvious as it may seem from the outset, a lot of people tend to ignore this as they form their own little bubble of thinking. It's fine if you are inventing something but leveraging the inventions effectively to create innovation? You need to connect multiple "industries" together. All of this does have a slightly deeper implication. If you want to succeed at creating an idea people want you need to really know the vertical you are trying to connect the technology to. Which goes all the way back to how you create your mindset.

Selling the idea

1) Describe the problem.
Unless people can understand what you mean by "an automated social X system for Y that helps do Z" avoid stating a summary of the system. Even if you do that, immediately shift into talking about the problem you are setting out to solve. It's a lot more attention grabbing if you can do that first.

2) Describe the solution
What are you going to do about the problem? What's the solution. Don't describe the system. To put it really simply, if the problem was tracking the time and attendance of workers at a factory manually then the solution would be an automated way which would electronically track people using a method which is super easy and fast. The system would be biometrics or punch cards or whatever. Which brings me to the third point,

3) Describe the system
When describing the system, don't ever ever go into specifics of combo boxes and what not. Goodness. I've heard this too many times. Talk about the process that one would go through in using the system instead. If you were describing Foursquare, don't say "the person will see a screen where they can tap check in". Asking the listener to visualize on the spot will distract them from understanding the system process. Say instead that "the person can see the locations around him/her and can choose which place to 'check in' to". Small difference. Makes a much bigger impact

4) The bottom line... So what?
What's the value in this. Sure it's a problem but what's the value? How big a problem is this? Is it a one trick pony? Is this all there is to it? What does it evolve into? If you are going to have a revenue model at the start what is it? Am I really going to want to pay for it? Your best bet to prepare for this is to talk to a person who is mostly incapable of taking risks. They'll ask you questions that'll make you wish you hadn't even bothered coming up with the idea but that's ok. That's how it should be. You may not know all the answers when you forge ahead. But knowing as many of the questions as possible is a definite advantage.

Well I hope some of this helps. Reminder. I'm an idea guy. I don't steal people's ideas so if you feel like talking about your ideas drop me a mail at adnan.issadeen@live.com . If you want to follow my tech updates both from around the world or this blog you can follow me on Twitter @area51research

Stanford's AI Class: Unit 2 - Problem Solving (search)

2011-10-28T06:04:00.000-07:00

Well it's mostly the absolute foundation of search algorithms but I still think it would be useful anytime as a refresher course for a lot of people. Stanford university lecturers have an odd habit of jumping about 5 chapters ahead into a topic yet to be discussed so you need to have some major patience to hang in there at times. Not so much in this unit but in the latter units you feel it a bit. Anyway. Here's the playlist compiled from the 2011 Stanford AI course (ongoing) Unit 2.

To keep up with more tech updates you can follow me on Twitter @area51research

Apple Opens Up Lossless Audio Codec Under Apache License

2011-10-27T17:31:00.001-07:00

Apple Lossless Audio Codec

From the welcome page

"The Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) is an audio codec developed by Apple and supported on iPhone, iPad, most iPods, Mac and iTunes. ALAC is a data compression method which reduces the size of audio files with no loss of information. A decoded ALAC stream is bit-for-bit identical to the original uncompressed audio file.

The Apple Lossless Audio Codec project contains the sources for the ALAC encoder and decoder. Also included is an example command line utility, called alacconvert, to read and write audio data to/from Core Audio Format (CAF) and WAVE files. A description of a 'magic cookie' for use with files based on the ISO base media file format (e.g. MP4 and M4A) is included as well.

The Apple Lossless Audio Codec sources are available under the Apache license."

Collection of inspiring videos to get you 'started up'

2011-10-26T21:49:00.000-07:00

Need motivation on working on your startup? Been sitting around for weeks not able to ship that last feature out? Can't get started on shipping your first feature out???

There's an interesting thread over at Hackers News asking for some inspiring videos to get the thread starter motivated to work on his/her startup. Even Paul Graham took some time to leave a quick response to and others have left responses to some really good stuff I didn't know was out there on the internet.

I'll take the time to watch them and when I find interesting stuff I'll probably push it over to my techstopmuse tumblr and let you guys know. If you want to stay update follow me on @area51research for the latest in tech and science updates.

Oracle vs Google goes way past Halloween

2011-10-26T17:52:00.001-07:00

Looks like I'll have to put the pop corn away as the trial between Oracle and Google gets postponed to a date that would be next year. NEXT YEAR! And I was hoping for a treat this Halloween. To be honest, having seen the charges and the documents I can't say I am in favour of Google and have been watching this trial intently because just like the solar flare activity a lot of people seem to be pretending these damages caused to Android by the patent battles don't exist.

The main point of this particular announcement is that the plan for the trial has to be presented in the following three stages.

1) Trial of copyright issues

2) Trial of patents

3) All remaining issues including damages and willfulness will be tried.

For a much more detailed look at how it will work do take a look at @fosspatents blog. (Oracle-Google trial postponed beyond the end of the year - http://pulse.me/s/2A8cD)

And pop over to Twitter and consider giving me a follow @area51research