Back in January, Microsoft announced a new project called Tag at CES.  In Microsoft’s words, Tag is:

Microsoft Tag is a marketing solution that enables consumers to access and share useful and fun content in a simple way. It also helps marketers engage with consumers in meaningful and creative ways, and to measure effectiveness.

They also call it colorful, and capable of transforming traditional marketing media.  I started toying with it a little bit then, but not much until recently when they announced a new API.

So how does it work? And how is it going to change our lives?  Well the idea, as far as I can see, is its targeted at mobile audiences.  A small application runs on your phone/pda/etc, and using the camera snaps a picture of the Tag.  This is then sent to Microsoft and decoded.  This will then take you to whatever resource the creator configured the tag for.  As of now, there are several types of resources to create:

• URL
• Free Text
• vCard
• Dialer

They are all pretty self-explanatory. When the camera picks up a tag, it triggers the application to launch various events.  For example, when tested on my Moto Q9h, a vCard tag added the vCard to my address book, whilst a URL opened Internet Explorer.  A date range can be applied, as well as a title.

Now the question is, is it life changing?  How about the latest movie poster you just saw, with a tiny icon in the corner, taking you to the preview movie, and how about from that same page, finding out local times?  Well at least part of it is in play now, on an upcoming moving 5:13.

Not just handy for movies either.  Proctor & Gamble picked it up in Turkey for a contest for Head & Shoulders™. BestBuy also pulled out the stops on their “Live Tour” truck, shown in the Tag showcase.

How about business cards?  There is quite often a fair bit of information you can provide on a business card, name, address, title, phone, fax, email, and that’s just the basics.  Now include a small image, and your clients can scan the card into their phone.  Want to change the details but can’t get time to get new cards before that major conference you just got sent to? That’s fine, you can update the vCard associated with the Tag.

Want to know how small you can go?  The tiny image to the left actually works on my phone.  It’s sized at 33 pixels square.  That’s something else I’ve noticed about Tag compared to the traditional barcodes, blurry doesn’t matter, and detection of a Tag is incredibly fast.  This is all being done using HCCB (Even more cool, black and white works too).

Being a Microsoft product, some people are probably wondering if it’s limited to Windows, and Windows Mobile devices.  Not at all.  Microsoft seem to think this is a great technology, and a brilliant idea for future marketing and media.  So they released an iPhone reader too.

So will I use it?  Probably play with it for a bit, see what I can get out of it, see if it is viable for anything at work.  I’ve already created a couple to play with, the one above, and the one to the right.

The potential is there, now to see if anybody exploits the technology, and pushes it to the limits. Next time you’re looking at a movie poster, see if it got Tagged.

Keep following the project for more news, I suspect it might actually get quite popular.  The folks even have a Twitter profile setup, as well as a blog.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Tag

As a follow up to the previous Tinkering with Temperature post, here is more on what I did, and how.

I made some alterations to my original schematic, as I was originally going with a serial to RJ45 conversion.  I figured I’d save myself some headaches, and use one of the Cisco console cables I had laying around.  This had a slightly different pinout on the RJ45 end, compared to the serial cable I was going to make.  Pinouts for the cable can be found all over the internet, including Cisco’s own site, but I used this as a reference.

Now I had my new schematic, I put it onto a board.  As with my schematic, KiCad helped out here too.  It mocked out the basic components, I just had to rearrange them, and then draw tracks.  I did read somewhere that there is an auto-route feature, but I couldn’t find/figure it out, not that mine was complicated, and I couldn’t figure out a few lines.  So I ultimately ended up with the image to the right.

Once drawn out, a simple case of printing on special paper, or you can do it the cheaper way of using magazine pages.  I went with the later.  When printed,  it’s just a case of taping the paper to the board, and applying heat.

When applying heat, you must remember to turn off the steam options, otherwise it won’t work properly.  This can take some time, depending on the toner, paper thickness, and the iron involved.  Once you’re satisfied with enough transfer, time to get the paper wet.  This will dissolve the paper, but leave the toner on the board.

Now is a good time to inspect the board, and make sure that any missing traces are covered.  Usually you can get away with a sharpie, but you can get special etch-resistant pens.  I went over all the lines again just to make extra sure.

At this point, we could etch the board, but it’s still a little large, so I trimmed off the larger side, and left the shortest excess attached.  This gave me a good point to hold, as well as a good indication of how well it was going.

Now it’s etching time.  Following the instructions carefully, I did this outside in a well ventilated area, with poor light.  Okay maybe I cannot follow all instructions well, but I did wear gloves, and did this away from anything metal.

After about 15 minutes of agitation, and careful inspection, the board was etched.  Note that part of the board wasn’t etched in the picture, but that was part that was in the excess area.  Another quick trim to remove that excess piece, so it’d fit nicely into the housing.

I borrowed Jeremy’s drill, and a bit from Rick. I quickly drilled the parts, and got to work soldering.  One thing to note is that when soldering, and constructing, follow your diagrams closely.  I originally soldered one of the diodes in backwards, so it wasn’t working until I desoldered it, and put it back in correctly.

I’d carefully designed the size of the PCB to be oversized, I could have clearly chopped an extra inch or so off, because it was to fit inside an old Linksys workgroup switch box.  This ended up being about 4×6.  The RJ45 connectors were a little low profile for the case, but it doesn’t matter too much, as it’s going to be hiding in the server room away from careful inspection of most people.

The final product looks like this.  Sits nicely inside the chassis, and looks pretty good.  It was a 5 port workgroup switch, with port 5 being disabled if you had an “uplink” cable in place.  In my case, port 6 is going to be the serial port.

Now for Monday, build some cables, once I’ve figured out all the lengths I need.  I did do a quick breadboard test with a RJ45 connector, and 2 wires crimped down to a breadboard to ensure it was working, and got good readings (compared with my fluke tester). 

I’ll power additional pictures once I have all the cables in place, and tucked into the racks.

Technorati Tags: 1-wire, Electronics, instructable, make, temperature

The first interesting stat is for my tiny little mail server, I received 27,668 emails. Of that 27,242 of them were dropped at the door. 20k of which were RBLs. Of the handful that were left behind, half of them were marked as spam by Amavis and SpamAssassin.

Here are the full details…

 --------------------- Postfix Begin ------------------------ 

        4   SASL authentication failed 
 
   48.003M  Bytes accepted                        50,334,433
   77.976M  Bytes sent via SMTP                   81,763,280
    8.110M  Bytes delivered                        8,503,744
 ========   ================================================
 
      426   Accepted                                   1.54%
    27242   Rejected                                  98.46%
 --------   ------------------------------------------------
    27668   Total                                    100.00%
 ========   ================================================
 
      504   5xx Reject relay denied                    1.85%
       42   5xx Reject HELO/EHLO                       0.15%
     4239   5xx Reject unknown user                   15.56%
     1914   5xx Reject recipient address               7.03%
    20543   5xx Reject RBL                            75.41%
 --------   ------------------------------------------------
    27242   Total 5xx Rejects                        100.00%
 ========   ================================================
 
     1097   4xx Reject recipient address             100.00%
 --------   ------------------------------------------------
     1097   Total 4xx Rejects                        100.00%
 ========   ================================================
 
    22593   Connections made      
    12936   Connections lost (inbound) 
    22592   Disconnections        
      422   Removed from queue    
      115   Delivered             
      333   Sent via SMTP         
        4   Resent                
     7536   Policyd-weight        
 
        2   Connection failure (outbound) 
      184   Timeout (inbound)     
       28   Illegal address syntax in SMTP command 
        4   Numeric hostname      
       14   SMTP dialog error     
       28   Excessive errors in SMTP dialog 
     3484   Hostname verification errors 
        4   Hostname validation errors 
        7   SASL authenticated messages 
 
 
 
 ---------------------- Postfix End ------------------------- 

This reminds me of a need to setup more monitoring and statistics. For example, per domain logs for the domain owners to review (and me to find out who uses my system the most).

I have some interesting ideas for my servers, just got to get around to doing them…

Sometimes my blog is all over the place.  Mostly work related, and other times it springs back to stuff about me, or stuff I’m working on outside of work.   This is a cross-over project I’ve been working on (and something I’ve wanted to play with for a while).  A temperature sensor…

Right, doesn’t seem to exciting does it?  Maybe not for some, but I have an unusual interest in information and data.

We recently had an A/C failure in the office, which triggered our A/C unit to alarm, and out control unit for the A/C to alarm, and for some odd reason, not start the secondary A/C.  Looking at the logs, it appears the time from outage to Jeremy forcing the backup A/C online was about 2 hours.  Not too bad, but we’d have picked up on it a little earlier if we’d had a remote environment sensor, something I keep trying to get but keep getting denied on.

So I set out to look at cheap alternatives.  First stop was Instructables.  This is where I stumbled across a couple of different ideas, but the one that popped out of my head was this little project.  This is a very simple example of using the Dallas 1-Wire system, a resistor, and a couple of diodes.

The really cool thing about this example is the author demonstrates the expansion of the system from a single sensor to multiple sensors by simply adding more DS1820 sensors to a CAT5e cable.

So with some scheming, I grabbed a couple of DS18B20 sensors from hacktronics, and the rest of  the components from Mouser Electronics, increased the count a little to allow for mistakes, and a home model, and set out to build a simple temperature sensor.

The little image above shows 3 of the DS18B20’s connected to an Arduino (hidden off shot).  It clearly looks more than the “1 Wire” that the name hints at it using.  However, what’s happening here is the power is being fed in on the same line that the data requests come in (pin 2) on, and pin 1 and 3 are grounded.

I built on the idea from the original project, and decided to figure out a nicer package for it.  I figured this would actually be quite perfect for an RJ45 case, a collection of network cables (allowing me to vary the length to the sensors), and a single central point of collection.  This sparked an idea in my brain, a hub for data collection. Then it struck me, repurposing the chassis of an old Linksys workgroup switch.  This is a 6 RJ45 port switch, with only 5 operating at once, but it was perfect.  A quick schema modification, and the use of an old Cisco serial cable (the ones that go from serial port to RJ45 connector) and a few more inexpensive parts from Mouser, and you can build a mini-temperature hub.

I’ve built schematics, now all I have to do is get some board, etch it, and solder the parts to it, and I’ll be all set.  I’ve tested the theory out on breadboard, and it works great.  With the use of the hub, I can put the DS18B20 sensors on the end of short cables and use standard network cables to place them as far away as 100m.

I’ll post updates, and more pictures as I finish the product, but it’s turning into a fun little project for me, yes yes, I know, I’m a nerd.

Technorati Tags: 1-wire, instructables, make, temperature

I’m currently working on rebuilding a server on a project, and went to hit the tab key to auto-complete, when I was presented a delightful error…

$ vim RE-sh: <( compgen -d — ‘RE’ ): No such file or directory
-sh: <( eval compgen -f -X ‘*.@(o|so|so.!(conf)|a|rpm|gif|GIF|jp?(e)g|JP?(E)G|mp3|MP3|mp?(e)g|MPG|avi|AVI|asf|ASF|ogg|OGG|class|CLASS)’ — $(quote_readline $cur) ): No such file or directory

This is actually a reported bug in Debian [#502804] and is caused by using /bin/sh as a shell, rather than /bin/bash due to some POSIX compliant code.  A simple change to the shell until they release the fix..

usermod –s /bin/bash jangliss

And we’re all set again.

Technorati Tags: Bash, Debain

One of my more popular posts, oddly, is about CapitalOne and Fraud, which is going on nearly 2 years old now.  There are a number of comments on the thread, but I noticed something that just started bugging me.  When replying, I had no way of creating a nicely formatted reply (threading).

So I went in search of plugins, and discovered that Wordpress 2.7.1 actually supports it natively, you just have to update your themes.  I found a great reference here which detailed how to do it, but it seemed to not work, so I went in search of more details.  I found that the old comment handling used to be performed using an array, and you’d have to setup the formatting yourself.  They now provide a nifty function wplistcomments that outputs the entire array of comments for you, including all the settings for the reply information.

You can see the new modifications at work here on this post, see the second comment down is indented to reflect a comment to Bill.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress

I’ve been on the SquirrelMail project for quite some time now, and an administrator on the project for several years.  One of the things that has always been an issue has donations.  As there are multiple people that contribute to the project at varying levels at different times, we’ve never figured out a good way to handle donations.  Other projects, such as MySQL, setup a foundation, and generate enough donations that they’re capable of supporting full time working developers.  Whilst it’d definitely be cool to do that, we’re not there project wise.  So recently Paul sent out a rather interesting option, and it hit the lists.

He gave the users the ability to donate to individual people on the project, as well as sign up for bounties.  The copy of the announcement can be found here.  The other option was bounties.  This has been used on several open source projects before, and the idea is that people “sponsor” a project, bug, or target.  There are already several listed, but we’re always looking for more ideas. So if you have some, submit an idea.

Technorati Tags: Bounty, Donate, SquirrelMail

One of the things I’ve been working on is migrating our equipment over to the corporate domain off of our domain.  For the most part, this has been relatively easy, and given me some changes to fix some things I’ve wanted to get to, but not had time to. One of the stumbling blocks was cutting the file server over to the new server.

I’ll admit I really didn’t plan that server migration too well, but I’ve played it on the side of fixing things as they come up.  One of the issues I’ve come across is trying to remember who had access to what originally.  As the file server can no longer talk to the old domain controller, it’s not able to resolve the security accounts.  This results in the permissions being filled with a bunch of security IDs, rather than names.

I’d originally come up with the idea of using Softerra’s LDAP Browser to search the old AD server for the security IDs.  This is where I had an issue.  The security IDs in the AD server are stored as binary objects, and LDAP Browser cannot search on it (at least not that I could find).

I did a little Googling around, and stumbled across a nifty utility called ADFind. It allows you to do LDAP queries against the domain controller, and has the added bonus of supporting binary encoding.  For example:

adfind –binenc –f “(objectsid={{SID:S-1-…}})”

This encodes the SID, and returns the record for the user or group.  This allowed us to go through the file server and fix permissions, and make sure those that should have access, did have access.

Technorati Tags: Active Directory, adfind, Permissions

For example, right now I’m wanting to tinker with an Arduino. Why? No idea, just think it’d be pretty cool to knock some cool stuff together, like this. Okay, so I probably won’t monitor that cat’s water bowl with it, but it is a pretty cool idea. And it’s not just limited to doing that either, the list is pretty much endless. That, and I want to tinker with electronics again.

Then I have another itch at the moment… Monitoring stuff. Not sure why, but I’m curious about power consumption, and what uses the most in my apartment. So yesterday I picked up a Kill-A-Watt meter. Plug stuff in, and it’ll tell you how much juice is being used. But it’s not just limited to watching it… I want to record it, and as such, stumbled across a little modification to the device using a couple of Xbee devices, and some interesting hacks to send the measurements onto your computer. It’s interesting to find the cable box, whilst asleep, still draws 40watts, not terrible, but for a device that’s supposed to be asleep?

I still have my previous idea for the kitchen device, which I’ve currently got suspended in my head, especially as there are already a device floating around that covers some of the functionality… That, and I’m watching the CrunchPad, which looks like it’ll drop it nicely for the project, just need to write a UI for the software.

I’m also working on a project for work at the moment, completely unrelated to what I usually do, but it slips in with my general attitude of “I can do it”. I’m building a call stats board for the helpdesk. Yes, I know you can buy them, but currently sitting at $4k for one of the cheapest we found, and company has decided to tighten its belt on spending, it’s not one of the things they’ll approve. So with a little wireshark help, I sniffed out the traffic from the phone system, and I know how to talk to it to get call stats… Now to just build a small C# application to listen, and output to an LED display.

Oh well… maybe I’ll actually do some of this stuff… one day