This whole number reuse thing has gone too far

Published by Matt Croydon May 4th, 2008 in Mobile. 0 Comments

This madness needs to stop!

Espoo, Finland - Nokia today unveiled a trio of mobile devices that balance stunning and sophisticated looks with the latest in mobile functionality. All three devices, the Nokia 6600 fold, the Nokia 6600 slide and the Nokia 3600 slide present a smooth, minimalist design and an appealing array of easy-to-use features. The devices range in price from 175 EUR to 275 EUR before taxes and subsidies and are expected to start shipping during the third quarter of 2008.

I know that Nokia have a finite set of product names when we’re talking about 4 digit numbers. Aside from the Nseries and Eseries and a handful of other products, Nokia are pretty keen on assigning 4 digit numbers as product names. While often confusing, at least it avoids product names like RAZR or ENv. I don’t quite get the naming of the 6600 fold and the 6600 slide though. Either someone in Espoo has the attention span of a goldfish or they expect that S60 consumers do.

Us S60 owners are a pretty loyal and knowledgeable bunch. We do our research and know our history. I may be wrong, but I’d venture that a good number of S60 users could name a dozen or more S60 models from the 7650 to the N-Gage to the N95. Surely a good chunk of us would rattle off the 6600 in the process. We might also remember the 3600 as the awkward American cousin of the 3650.

You know, that business phone from 2003 that brought significant hardware and software upgrades to the table compared to the 7650 and the 3650. I sure remember it as if it were yesterday.

Every once in awhile someone raises a stink about Nokia reusing a product number. Usually it’s a product number from the 80’s or 90’s and the word “Classic” is attached to the new phone. I’m OK with that. I just think that it’s a little early to be reusing a product code from 2003 in a market segment of geeks and power users.

Python for S60: back in the saddle

Published by Matt Croydon March 28th, 2008 in Python and Mobile. 2 Comments

I had the opportunity to meet Jürgen Scheible and Ville Tuulos, authors of the Mobile Python book at PyCon a few weeks ago. They graciously gave me a copy of their book, which is an absolutely fantastic guide to writing S60 apps in Python. It seems like every time I look away from Python for S60 it gets better, and this time was no exception. Everything is just a little more polished, a few more APIs are supported (yay sensor API!), and the community and learning materials available have grown tremendously.

While I didn’t get a chance to hang out too long during the sprints, I did pull together some code for a concept I’ve wanted to do for a long time: a limpet webcam that I can stick on something and watch it ride around the city. Specifically I thought it would be cool to attach one to a city bus and upload pictures while tracing its movements.

So here’s my quick 19 line prototype that simply takes a picture using the camera API and uploads the saved photo using ftplib copied over from the Python 2.2.2 standard library. It’s called webcam.py. I haven’t run it since PyCon, so the most recent photo is from the PyS60 intro session.

Working with PyS60 again was absolutely refreshing. I write Python code (using Django) at work but writing code for a mobile device again got the creative juices flowing. I’m trying to do more with less in my spare time, but I definitely need to make more time for PyS60 in my life.

PyCon 2008

Published by Matt Croydon March 13th, 2008 in Python. 0 Comments

I’m headed out the door to PyCon 2008. Yay!

Covering Kansas Democratic Caucus Results

Published by Matt Croydon February 5th, 2008 in Projects, Django and Journalism. 1 Comment

I think we’re about ready for caucus results to start coming in.

We’re covering the Caucus results at LJWorld.com and on Twitter.

Turnout is extremely heavy. So much so that they had to split one of the caucus sites in two because the venue was full.

Later…

How did we do it?

We gained access to the media results page from the Kansas Democratic Party on Friday afternoon. On Sunday night I started writing a scraper/importer using BeautifulSoup and rouging out the Django models to represent the caucus data. I spent Monday refining the models, helper functions, and front-end hooks that our designers would need to visualize the data. Monday night and in to Tuesday morning was spent finishing off the importer script, exploring Google Charts, and making sure that Ben and Christian had everything they needed.

After a few hours of sleep, most of the morning was spent testing everything out on our staging server, fixing bugs, and improving performance. By early afternon Ben was wrapping up KTKA and Christian was still tweaking his design in Photoshop. Somewhere between 1 and 2 p.m. he started coding it up and pretty soon we had our results page running on test data on the staging server.

While the designers were finishing up I turned my focus to the planned Twitter feed. Thanks to some handy wrappers from James, I wrote a quick script that generated a short message based on the caucus results we had, compared it to the last version of the message, and sent a post to Twitter if the message had changed.

Once results started coming in, we activated our coverage. After fixing one quick bug, I’ve been spending most of the evening watching importers feed data in to our databases and watching the twitter script send out updates. Because we’ve been scraping the Kansas Democratic Party media results all night and showing them immediately, we’ve been picking up caucuses seconds after they’ve been reported and have been ahead of everything else I’ve looked at.

Because we just recently finished moving our various Kansas Weekly papers to Ellington and a unified set of templates, it was quite trivial to include detailed election results on the websites for The Lansing Current, Baldwin City Signal, Basehor Sentinel, The Chieftain, The De Soto Explorer, The Eudora News, Shawnee Dispatch, and The Tonganoxie Mirror

While there are definitely things we could have done better as a news organization (there always are), I’m quite pleased at what we’ve done tonight. Our servers hummed along quite nicely all night, we got information to our audience as quickly as possible, and generally things went quite smoothly. Many thanks to everyone involved.

We’re hiring!

Published by Matt Croydon January 22nd, 2008 in Python, Django and Journalism. 3 Comments

Wow, the Django job market is heating up. I posted a job opening for both junior and senior-level Django developers on djangogigs just a few days ago, and it has already fallen off the front page.

So I’ll mention it again: We’re hiring! We’re growing and we have several positions open at both the junior and senior level. We’d love to talk to you if you’ve been working with Django since back in the day when everything was a tuple. We’d love to talk to you if you’re smart and talented but don’t have a lot of (or any) Django experience.

Definitely check out the listing at djangogigs for more, or feel free to drop me a line if you’d like to know more.

Google apps for your newsroom

Published by Matt Croydon January 7th, 2008 in Projects and Journalism. 7 Comments

Google spreadsheetsI like to think that I’m pretty good at recognizing trends. One thing that I’ve been seeing a lot recently in my interactions with the newsroom is that we’re no longer exchanging Excel spreadsheets, Word files, and other binary blobs via email. Instead we’re sending invites to spreadsheets and documents on Google docs, links to data visualization sites like Swivel and ManyEyes, and links to maps created with Google MyMaps.

Using these lightweight webapps has definitely increased productivity on several fronts. While as much as we would love every FOIA request and data source to come in a digital format, we constantly see data projects start with a big old stack of paper. Google spreadsheets has allowed us to parallelize and coordinate data entry in a way that just wasn’t possible before. We can create multiple spreadsheets and have multiple web producers enter data in their copious spare time. I did some initial late night data entry for the KU flight project (Jacob and Christian rocked the data visualization house on that one), but we were able to take advantage of web producers to enter the vast majority of the data.

Sometimes the data entry is manageable enough (or the timeline is tight enough) that the reporter or programer can handle it on their own. In this case, it allows us to quickly turn quick spreadsheet-style data entry in to CSV, our data lingua franca for data exchange. Once we have the data in CSV form we can visualize it with Swivel or play with it in ManyEyes. If all we’re looking for is a tabular listing of the data, we’ve written some tools that make that easy and look good too. On larger projects, CSV is often the first step to importing the data and mapping it to Django objects for further visualization.

Awesome webapps that increase productivity aren’t limited to things that resemble spreadsheets from a distance. A few weeks back we had a reporter use Google’s awesome MyMaps interface to create a map of places to enjoy and avoid while traveling from Lawrence, KS to Miami, FL for the orange bowl. We pasted the KML link in to our Ellington map admin and instantly had an interactive map on our site. A little custom template work completed the project quite quickly.

It all boils down to apps that facilitate collaboration, increase productivity, and foster data flow. Sometimes the best app for the job sits on the desktop (or laptop). Increasingly, I’ve found that those apps live online—accessable anywhere, anytime.

2008 Digital Edge Award Finalists

Published by Matt Croydon December 20th, 2007 in Django and Journalism. 0 Comments

The 2008 DIgital Edge Award finalists were just announced, and I’m excited to see several World Company sites and projects on there as well as a couple of sites running Ellington and even the absolutely awesome Django-powered PolitiFact.com.

At work we don’t do what we do for awards. We do it to serve our readers, tell a story, get information out there, and do it as best we can. At the same time even being nominated as finalists is quite an honor, and evokes warm fuzzy feelings in this programmer.

Here are the various World Company projects and sites that were nominated (in the less than 75,000 circulation category):

Not too shabby for a little media company in Kansas. I’m particularly excited about the LJWorld.com nominations since it hasn’t been too long since we re-designed and re-launched the site with a lot of new functionality. Scanning the finalists I also see a couple of other sites running Ellington as well as several special projects by those sites.

As someone who writes software for news organizations for a living I’m definitely going to take some time this morning to take a look at the other finalists. I’m particularly excited to check out projects from names that I’m not familiar with.

Web Browser for S60: If only I remembered the shortcut key

Published by Matt Croydon November 22nd, 2007 in Mobile. 0 Comments

I was reading a post on the (unofficial) Nokia Blog detailing the shortcut keys for the S60 Web Browser. I was instantly reminded of my own frustration and how often I had looked at that page of the user manual.

Web Browser for S60 is easily the most powerful app that ships with new S60 devices. It renders real websites well and quickly using my favorite rendering engine. It packs more features, options, and actions on one screen than any other app that I can think of.

It comes at a price though. Aside from the two softkeys there aren’t any keys on the device marked specifically for browser actions once you’re in the app. Even better, I usually use the browser in full screen mode to maximize screen real estate, so those two softkeys are now gone.

It’s still an amazing app, I just distinctly recall the constant remembering and forgetting and looking up of shortcut keys as a big pain point in my enjoyment of the S60 browser. It’s something that I’d love to see addressed, but I’m not sure of an easy way to do so without resorting to touch interfaces or keys (physical or virtual) that change labels given different contexts.

Mobile browser shortcuts are a lot easier on a device like the N800 or N810 that can dedicate keys to it full time. Or you can go the no-keys approach that seems to be working well for the iPhone.

I know that those smart Finns will figure it out.

Kansas covered by OpenStreetMap!

Published by Matt Croydon November 17th, 2007 in Web Services and Open Source. 1 Comment

I was checking up on the TIGER/Line import to OpenStreetMaps earlier today and I was pleased to see that Kansas is already partially processed! I had emailed Dave the other day and he had queued Kansas up, but I was pleasantly suprised to see it partially processed already. Douglas County is already completely imported and Tiles@Home is currently rendering it up. Parts of Lawrence have already been rendered and cam be seen using the osmarender layer. Here’s 23rd and Iowa:

Lawrence in OpenStreetMap!

Andrew Turner had turned me on to OpenStreetMap over beers at Free State and at GIS Day @ KU even though I’ve been reading about it for some time now. So far it seems like an amazing community and I’ve been enjoying digging in to the API and XML format and various open source tools like osmarender, JSOM, and OpenLayers.

After getting psyched up at GIS Day I’ve been playing with some other geo tools, but more on that later.

Maemo blows me away again

Published by Matt Croydon October 17th, 2007 in Open Source, Linux and Mobile. 1 Comment

Nokia N810 Internet Tablet

My wife and I just bought a house and I’ve realized that there isn’t any room in the budget for major gadget purposes, so I’ve been trying not to get too excited about things coming down the road. It’s not suprising that I’ve been following the recently announced Nokia N810 Internet Tablet in a much more detached manner than usual.

That is until I saw Ari Jaaksi holding a prototype in his hand. Holy crap that thing is significantly smaller than the N800 and packs quite a punch. The slide-out keyboard is killer, GPS is a no-brainer these days and is included, the browser is Mozilla-based, the UI got a refresh… I could go on for days.

The other thing I really like about the new tablet is that the Maemo platform is moving to be even more open than it was before (which was about as open as the lawyers at Nokia would allow). The quite good but closed source Opera web browser has been replaced by one that is Mozilla-based. This is yet another major component that is now open instead of closed. The major closed-source components (if I’m remembering correctly) are now limited to the DSP, various binary drivers that Nokia licenses directly, and the handwriting recognition software. That’s definitely a smaller list than it was before, and I applaud Nokia’s efforts in opening up as much as possible. It’s also worth noting that the Ubuntu Mobile project is basing a lot of its work on the work that Nokia has done with Maemo (most notable Matchbox and the Hildon UI).

So yeah, I’m now paying much closer attention to this new device that I was doing my best to ignore. Job well done.

You had me until I saw the stylus

Published by Matt Croydon October 16th, 2007 in Mobile. 2 Comments

I got pretty excited when Rafe posted a video about S60 touch on allaboutsymbian. I’ve been using S60 since the 3650 days and continue to love it, despite its quirks and shortcomings. There have been rumours of touch capabilities for S60 for years now, long before the announcement and shipping of the iPhone. I’m also pretty sure that Nokia have been working on S60 touch capabilities for some time now (pre-iPhone) too.

Everything was going great: the video showed a nice N-Series-style phone with a big touchable screen doing things that you’d expect an N-Series phone with a big touchable screen to do. And then about two minutes in they lost me. That’s when they showed the S60 touch interface being used with a stylus.

Come on Symbian. It’s not the 90’s anymore. My Palm III rocked because of its stylus and glorious grey screen, but that was almost a decade ago. Now that the iPhone has launched, there’s a certain expectation level for new mobile UIs.

Touch is one of those expectations. Having to use a stylus is not.

It’s also interesting to see this latest battle in the one-handed vs. two-handed war play itself out. It has always struck me that there is a split between these two factions within Nokia (and by extension within Symbian) but the public rarely sees it. I tend to lean toward the one-handed side myself but do see the merits that some two-handed devices have to offer from time to tim. I have both a 9290 and an N800 but the bulk of my mobile purchases have been one-handed devices.

I also think that S60’s one-handedness is one of the reasons that S60-based devices have been so successful. Nokia sold approximately 1.5 million N95’s in Q2 2007. Compare those numbers with a flagship device like a high end two-handed UIQ phone and I’ll bet that the two-handed numbers are significantly lower. Once you start including the entire one-handed range of Symbian devices, you have a force to be reckoned with.

I’m hoping that showing the stylus was meant to demonstrate that Symbian can support a stylus, not that most or many devices will. I’m encouraged a bit since S60 has recently taken on QWERTY capabilities and it makes sense to tout its versatility from single-handed to touch to stylus to QWERTY.

We’re still at the press release stage not the technical documentation stage, so there’s a lot of room for change. Lots of things mentioned in the press release strike me as good things: tactile feedback, backwards compatibility, in-browser flash support and a continuation of S60’s various sensor mechanisms.

But Symbian, here’s a bit of advice for you: downplay that stylus! Nobody wants to see it and it totally kills the mood when you use it on an otherwise sleek and sexy device.

Goodbye Business 2.0

Published by Matt Croydon October 2nd, 2007 in Web Services. 1 Comment

Goodbye, friend.

I got my last issue of Business 2.0 in the mail today.

As predicted they’ve offered to send me one month of Fortune for every two months of my remaining subscription. I’ve been offered “equivalent” subscriptions for cancelled publications in the past, but never at a 1:2 ratio.

I might grab a copy of Fortune from the newstand to see if it’s worth it, but I feel like I get enough standard business news from Marketplace and various sources in my feed aggregator. Unless Fortune knocks my socks off I’ll be asking for a refund. It doesn’t help that I’m already unhappy with Fortune/CNN Money for killing my beloved publication.

Goodbye b2. You will be missed.

Newton 2.0?

Published by Matt Croydon October 1st, 2007 in Apple and Mobile. 7 Comments

Every time I refresh my feed reader and see a new slick third-party app for the iPhone, I wonder to myself if a few years down the road we’re going to be talking about pre-1.1.1 iPhones like we talk about Newton’s today. Third party apps and unlocked iPhones are essentially a dead end street unless someone figures out how to work around it.

Of course 1.1.1 might have also started a cold war battle between Apple and hackers that sounds almost exactly like the moves that Sony pulled on the PSP. The latest move is very different than the Laissez-faire attitude Apple has taken toward hacking the Apple TV and the early iPhone. I never thought I’d see the day that Apple cribbed something from Sony’s playbook.

Perhaps it’s the difference between an indie/niche product and something mainstream like the iPhone. Perhaps it’s the added pressure of the carriers wanting super-locked down devices on their networks. (I doubt that though. Just grab a Symbian device and do with it as you please.) Perhaps it’s Apple realizing that it’s big enough that it can do as it pleases.

Then again, maybe they’re biding their time while they polish the official non-web-2.0 SDK. We can all dream, can’t we?

Pull up a chair and bring it close to the fire. Let me tell you about the golden age of the iPhone…

Google Maps GeoXml crash course

Published by Matt Croydon September 10th, 2007 in Web Services and Journalism. 5 Comments

Over the weekend I added KML/GeoRSS data loading via GGeoXml to some mapping software for work. I ran in to a couple of gotchas and a couple of things that I thought were really interesting, so I thought I’d share.

Getting started

GGeoXml and particularly clickable polylines are relatively new features, so we need to specify that we want to use beta features when we grab our google maps code:

<script src="http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=2.x&key=your_key_here" type="text/javascript"></script>

The key here is v=2.x which specifies that we want some 2.x or somewhat bleeding edge features. Now that we’ve got that loaded up, we’ll want to define a couple of variables:

var map;
var geoXml;

This set up two global variables that we’ll be using. While I’m not a big fan of polluting global namespaces, this will allow me to play with these variables via Firebug once the page has loaded. For non-sample production code you’ll want to properly namespace all of your work. Next we’ll grab some data using GGeoXml:

geoXml = new GGeoXml("http://example.com/path/to/data.kml");

This will grab data from the XML file. In my case it’s a list of things to do in and around Kansas City. Now that we have data in hand, let’s create a map and add this data as an overlay:

if (GBrowserIsCompatible()) {
  map = new GMap2(document.getElementById("map_canvas"));
  map.setCenter(new GLatLng(38.960543, -95.254383), 9);
  map.addControl(new GLargeMapControl());
  map.addControl(new GLargeMapControl());
  map.addOverlay(geoXml);
}

This should be pretty familiar if you’ve ever worked with the Google Maps API. We’re creating a new map using the div map_canvas in the document. Then we set the center of the map and add a few controls. Once we’re done with that, we’re going to add the geoXml that we loaded via KML to the map. Here’s the complete basic example:

KC Basics

Let Google do the hard stuff

You’ll notice that the basic map is centered manually and doesn’t really fill the whole viewport. GGeoXml has finished running, we can query it for useful information. For example, I can ask what its default center is from Firebug:

>>> geoXml.getDefaultCenter();
(39.076937, -94.601867) Uk=39.076937 La=-94.601867 x=-94.601867 y=39.076937

Knowing that I could then set the center of the map as follows:

map.setCenter(geoXml.getDefaultCenter());

While this handles setting the center correctly, it doesn’t help me figure out what zoom level to set. Luckily there is another method on GGeoXml objects: gotoDefaultViewport(map). I can then call the following and have Google do all the hard work of figuring out what center and zoom to use to make sure all of the KML/GeoRSS content fits within the viewport:

geoXml.gotoDefaultViewport(map);

This allows us to let Google create bounding boxes, find centers and zoom levels, which while interesting exercises aren’t fun to do on a daily basis. There’s one gotcha here though: you can’t get information about a GGeoXml instance until it’s done loading.

Are we there yet?

When we call GGeoXml, we can optionally provide a callback function that will be called as soon as GGeoXml is done doing its thing and we can access it. First let’s create a function that centers and zooms so that the data is contained nicely within the viewport:

var geoCallback = function()
{
  geoXml.gotoDefaultViewport(map);
}

Next we have to modify our call to GGeoXml to include the callback:

geoXml = new GGeoXml("http://example.com/path/to/data.kml", geoCallback);

Here’s the final code that includes the callback:

KC Final

I hope that illustrates how much can be done with very little code. Definitely take advantage of the rich map annotating capabilities that Google’s My Maps offers and don’t be shy about including them in maps on your own site.

Accidental APIs: NFL edition

Published by Matt Croydon September 9th, 2007 in Web Services. 4 Comments

NFL flash app powered by JSON

These days whenever I find an interesting interactive/updating flash app I tend to fire up Firebug and see where the data is coming from. Quite often there’s an XML data feed somewhere that the flash app is being fed with. For example, you can get an XML feed of parking space availability or a list of airlines with gate information at Kansas City International Airport. As with many XML feeds designed for consumption with Flash, these feeds aren’t always well-formed but the data is there for the taking.

I went on a similar quest after checking in on my Redskins at NFL.com. I was pleasantly suprised to find JSON driving the live game update instead of XML. There are three JSON feeds exposed on the live game update page.

The first is the game-specific updates. This feed includes a score breakdown by quarter, who has possesion, time left, and the last few recent plays, along with a few other things that weren’t obvious at first glance.

The second drives the league-wide scoreboard at the top of the page. This includes game date/time, the teams involved, what quarter they’re in, who has the ball, and what the score is. From time to time this feed will also include extra information such as a recent score change.

The third feed includes information about weekly leaders in the NFL. This includes the top five passing, rushing, receiving, and scoring players this week. That sounds like great information to have programmatic access to if you’re in to fantasy football.

It makes me happy to see big companies use XML and JSON feeds for their flash apps rather than a proprietary alternative. It’s also fun to see things like Prototype and Sciptaculous on a site like NFL.com. These feeds are rarely documented, but for the large part are self-documenting. Some of the subtitles in teh NFL feeds can most likely be determined by watching the feed and the flash display over time.

Google Maps adds clickability to GPolyline and GPolygon

Published by Matt Croydon September 8th, 2007 in Web Services, Projects and Journalism. 3 Comments

Google Maps: clickable poly!

I’ve been waiting for this announcement Ever since Google introduced GGeoXml to its mapping API:

In our latest release (2.88) of the API, we’ve added “click” events to GPolyline and GPolygon, much to the enthusiasm of developers in the forum.

I knew it was just a matter of time since their internal apps have been supporting clickable GPolylines and GPolygons for some time now. Read the whole post for some fascinating information on how click detection works.

What this boils down to (for me anyway) is that you can display information generated with Google’s MyMaps interface on your own site with the same fidelity as the original via KML and GGeoXml. Up until now you could load KML from MyMaps via GGeoXml but the GPolylines and GPololygons only displayed and were not clickable. This removes a huge roadblock and should allow for even more interesting mapping applications.

Crosswalk usability

Published by Matt Croydon September 4th, 2007 in Web Services. 4 Comments

Crosswalk

Today the City of Lawrence announced the operational status of a new crosswalk on 11th between New York and New Jersey. I’m a big fan of pedestrian safety, especially when it benefits kids on the way to school, but I was a little confused about the description of the new crosswalk and related signaling:

The unique design consists of three lights (two reds and one yellow) configured like an inverted triangle. The signal remains dark until activated by a pedestrian pushing a button. The signal then flashes yellow for approximately six seconds followed by a steady yellow for approximately four seconds and followed by a double, steady red during the time pedestrians are receiving a “walk” signal. Once the pedestrian display changes to “Don’t Walk,” the motorist’s signal changes to alternating flashing red. During the flashing red, motorists may proceed through the crosswalk after stopping if the pedestrian has completed crossing.

The operation of this crosswalk appears straightforward from the pedestrian point of view. Press button; wait for walk signal; walk across. Things are a bit more vague for motorists. Here are several questions I can think of with answers inferred from the press release and tri-fold pamphlet, along with some common sense:

What do I do if someone is crossing in the crosswalk?
Stop and wait for the person to finish crossing.
What do I do if the bottom yellow light is flashing?
This means that a pedestrian has just activated the signal. It’s probably best to slow to a stop and allow the person to cross.
What do I do if the bottom yellow light is solid?
A pedestrian activated the signal a few seconds ago and is waiting to cross. It’s probably best to slow to a stop and allow the person to cross.
What do I do if the top two lights are red?
The two red lights are equivalent to a stop sign or red light and you are required to stop at or before the line to let the pedestrian cross
What do I do if the two red lights are alternating flashing red?
If there is a pedestrian in the crosswalk you must either stop or continue to stop. If the pedestrian has cleared the crosswalk you may proceed.

While I think that a crosswalk with lights to indicate it is in use is a great thing, some simplification could be done here. With all of the various light states above, the following always applies:

What do I do if someone is crossing in the crosswalk?
Stop and wait for the person to finish crossing.

Perhaps it would be best to reduce the crosswalk to a binary state: either someone has pushed the button and the crosswalk is lit, or it is not in use and therefore not lit. This would reduce the four light states in to one single state and greatly simplifies what a driver needs to keep track of. If you would like to give the driver warning, use a solid red preceded by a solid yellow for a few seconds. This would closer emulate the traffic signal that drivers are used to obeying. I have seen other crosswalks that flash yellow and transition to solid yellow. Either of these solutions seem simpler and more effective than the High Intensity Activated crossWalK described above.

Those annoying AT&T “free reminder” SMSes

Published by Matt Croydon August 28th, 2007 in Web Services and Mobile. 0 Comments

ATT SMSI’ve recieved an AT&T “free reminder” SMS twice now in two days. I know I’m not paying for it, but these messages amount to SMS spam to me. It may not be a big deal to most people, but for me most of the time I recieve an SMS it means a server is down and needs my attention. There’s a certain stress level associated with my incoming SMS sound, so it really irks me when I check the message and it’s spam from my carrier.

The first one I ignored, but I called up customer support as soon as the second one came in. I let them know that these messages, while I know that I’m not paying for them, amount to spam in my inbox and that I never received any such messages while I was a Cingular customer and that these messages made me very unhappy. I was as polite about it as I could be, because the person on the other end of the phone deals with a lot of angry customers during the day.

She asked me if there was a long code as the sender of the message, and after checking my phone I confirmed that yes indeed it was (in this case it was 1 111 301 000). After looking that up in her knowledge base she let me know that the easiest way to unsubscribe from these messages is to reply to the message with the word “stop” or “unsubscribe”. There were a few others, but these are the two that I remember.

My phone UI (S60 2nd edition) didn’t allow me to directly reply to this message, but I composed a new text message to “1 111 301 000″ with the word “stop” as the message body. We’ll see if this works. If it does I’ll be happy. If it doesn’t, I’ll be quite unhappy.

There is an Erlang community, it’s just smaller than you’re used to

Published by Matt Croydon August 26th, 2007 in Open Source and Erlang. 3 Comments

I thought I’d pick a nit with something that Ted Leung mentioned in his response to Sam Ruby’s response to Russ’ original post about Java needing an overhaul.

Particularly this comment about the Erlang community:

This is actually 2 problems. There’s the issue with the libraries, and there’s the issue with the community that did/didn’t produce the libraries. We don’t just need a technology, we need a community. Hmm, Erlang lab, anyone?

I’d like to assert that there is a vibrant Erlang community, it’s just smaller than you’re used to, and might be a little harder to find than most.

I’ve been lurking, participating, and sharing what I’ve learned in #erlang on irc.freenode.net since the Erlang movie blew my mind. I started tinkering with Erlang and the PDF for Programming Erlang came out a few days later. I still consider myself an Erlang noob. I still ask questions with obvious answers, spend hours trying to do something that should have taken 5 minutes, and sometimes don’t do things in the most Erlangish manner.

But the Erlang community has been great to me. Whenever I ask a question in #erlang, I almost always get the answer I was looking for, whether it’s a pointer to a specific part of the Erlang docs, a snippet of code, an opinion on the best way to do something, or a link to a blog post that has the answer. I’ve been around long enough that I can offer the same to people who are just picking up Programming Erlang and are running in to the same things I was a month or two back.

If you don’t think there’s an Erlang community, please come by #erlang and spend some time. They’ve been one of the most helpful communities I’ve ever been a part of. Activity is currently skewed more towards the European timezones, but as the community grows and more people across the world pick up Erlang that’s changing.

There’s also a pretty huge community outside of IRC. I’ve been subscribed to erlang-questions, the most active Erlang mailing list for a month or two too. The solution to one of my problems with bit syntax was asked and answered before I even knew that’s what I wanted. I’ve also learned a lot of things about Erlang that I wouldn’t have otherwise from the mailing list.

The community doesn’t stop there. Head over to trapexit.org and check out the Wiki and the forums. When you’re done there, check out the packages available at CEAN (the smaller Erlang counterpart of CPAN). There are lots of libraries included here if that’s what you’re looking for. Anything in CEAN can be installed from within the Erlang shell.

If you’re looking for libraries, don’t forget to check out Erlang’s module documentation. It’s far from Python’s batteries included, but there’s more there than it gets credit for. Aside from a distributed database there are TCP and UDP socket libraries, an http client and server, an XML library and support for SNMP and SSH. You’ll find many more protocol implementations at CEAN while the building blocks reside in Erlang’s standard library. Other places to look for sample code or libraries is Jungerl, a loosely knit collection of useful (but sometimes aging) libraries and applications, or Google Code.

While many third party Erlang libraries feel like they’re at the 0.1 stage (and many are simply because their authors are new to Erlang), don’t forget about the polished apps and libraries. I’m specifically thinking of ejabberd, RabbitMQ, YAWS, and Wings3D to name a few. Also worth a specific mention is ErlyWeb and the several libraries that it is built on top of.

So yes: the Erlang community is quite small. Think Python 10-12 years ago or Ruby before the Rails. But don’t pretend that it doesn’t exist, because while tiny, it’s vibrant and extremely helpful.

On the internet, everyone can hear you scream

Published by Matt Croydon August 21st, 2007 in Web Services and Weblogs. 1 Comment

When I first read this story on techcrunch about Grand Central snubbing customers and changing their numbers with very little notice, it seemed like the kind of thing that was affecting thousands of users. Perhaps it was a problem on the same scale as the recent Skype outage. That’s a big deal right?

Wrong.

The problem affected exactly 434 users.

As explained by founder Craig Walker in the comments of the techcrunch post, the problem occurred when one of their partners stopped providing service in a particular part of the country. They were able to port the majority of customers to a new provider but were unable to do so for 434 people.

Unfortunately two of those 434 people had a blog. Then it got picked up by Techcrunch and all of a sudden it’s not a problem that affected 434 people, it’s a problem that affected the entire internet.

It’s unfortunate (for Grand Central and Google) that some of those 434 people were in Northern Virginia. The blog per capita there is off the charts. If those 434 people had been in rural Iowa, the internet would have never known.

That brings me to the other takeaway from this incident: When designing a product or service (especially for alpha geeks) you have one and only one chance to get it right. You’re never more than one power outage, one service outage, one information breach, bad decision, misstep, misquote, or mess up away from loosing your customers or potential customers forever.

Are people going to remember that this issue affected 434 people a few months down the road? Nope. The conversation will go something like this: “Grand Central? I dunno about them. I remember hearing that they changed phone numbers on a ton of people after promising them ‘one number for life.’”