Matt Croydon::Postneo

Busy making things: @mc, notes, tinycast, github, links, photos.

  • Perfectly Spherical Holographic Cow

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    While I was in middle school, I spent a fair amount of time on CapAccess (the local Freenet. Yes I had to get my parents to sign the application form that I printed on the Okidata) and ViBES, The Virtual Interactive Blair Environment System. I was going to Sligo at the time and was nowhere near as cool as the Redland middle schoolers. I went by the name Prometheus. I had an office with some useless stuff in it that you had to teleport to. I wandered the virtual halls of Blair and vaguely remember something about a Perfectly Spherical Holographic Cow. I could be hallucinating though.

    How did I get here? Oh right. Go North.

    The whole ViBES mention is a tangent on a tangent on a tangent. It all started when I refreshed the Hack the Planet tab in Firefox (on my Debian box). I finally clicked on the PDF about peer to peer event notification which I had been meaning to do since yesterday. After glancing it a name near the top stuck out: Dan Sandler. Where the heck have I heard that name before? Reference the first paragraph of this post in which I rememberd ViBES and two of the god-like admins: Dan Sandler and Danny Gould.

    I was curious what Dan had been up to since I vaguely knew him (virtually) in middle school. All is well aparently. He’s working on his PhD in Computer Science at Rice and working on the FeedTree project [pdf] that got me started with all of this googling in the first place. He’s also got a weblog which I’ve subscribed to via RSS. I wasn’t sure that he was the same guy I knew years ago, but this reference to ViBES confirmed it for me.

    It was nice to stumble across old names and remember the good old times when we used to surf via gopher. It’s great to know that some of the kids I hung out with online when I was a kid are doing well. It also makes me realize that I’m still working on my BS in Computer Science while others from my childhood are working on their Masters and PhDs. I really need to slack less and code more.

    My apologies for the trip down virtual memory lane. Don’t even get me started on green CRTs and 1200BPS modems, I could go on for days.

  • Is The Series 60 Brand Becoming too Diluted?

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    The other week I was glued to the monitor during the first day of 3GSM. Lots and lots of stuff was going on. One of the highlights for me was the announcement of the Nokia 6680, 6681, and 6682. They are compact, state of the art Series 60 devices. There’s full-on UMTS for the parts of the world that do that sort of thing, and EDGE for us in the mobile backwater better known as the United States. Even better, the release date for the US variety should be sometime during 2H 2005.

    After the initial excitement I dove in to the tech specs a little bit. I then realized that Series 60 can mean quite a range of things. At the low end you’ve got the 7650 and my 3650 which I’ve never been able to clear out enough memory to actually run Opera. (I’ve managed to misplace my 3650 somewhere too and probably haven’t seen it in a few weeks.) On the other end of the spectrum we’ve got devies like the 6630 and now the 6680, with newer versions of Series 60 and with additional Feature Packs. Somewhere in the middle there are devices like the taco and 6600/6620.

    Yes, there’s a lowest common denominator in there somewhere that you can refer to when you say that something is Series 60. After that you have to think to yourself What version does that run? and Is that Feature Pack 2 or Feature Pack 3?

    At the same time I think that most of this confusion is inevitable. Series 60 has grown up quite a bit in the last few years, from the 7650 slider with no external memory capability to the latest devices with lots of on-board memory sporting the latest in low voltage RS-MMC cards.

    What really worries me is the confusion that will come when the Series 90 technology is rolled in to Series 60. Then Series 60 might mean anything from the classic 7650 to the latest bleeding edge stylus input or QWERTY device in addition to whatever the latest single-handed unit may be.

    What can be done about this brand dilution? Off the top of my head I can’ think of anything. Nokia could try sub-branding the different variants: Series 60 Classic for the old stuff, Series 60 One-Handed for the main stuff, Series 60 Stylus for pen-based stuff and Series 60 Keyboard for the QWERTY stuff. Of course that would probably just cause more confusion than If it looks like Series 60, walks like Series 60, and talks like Series 60, call it Series 60.

    *Sigh*

  • Hula!

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    I was excited to hear Nat and Miguel talking about The Hula Project yesterday as I was catching up on my feeds.

    Hula is an email and calendaring server. I think they’re taking the right approach: instead of trying to do everything for everybody they’re going to focus on email and calendar. They’re going to try to make the best darned email and calendar server out there. They’re also looking to make of Javascript and DHTML to create a rich web UI.

    I have to say that I’d love to have something like this. A month or two ago I spent a few weeks off and on banging on OPEN-XCHANGE. I tried several times to get the prereqs right so that I could build slapd from source and then build OPEN-XCHANGE in order to be able to configure all of the stuff that needed to be configured. At first I got stuck near the top of the Debian install instructions. Then I got stuck in the middle, and by the time I had written a shell script to do most of the dirty work, I got stuck at adding the LDAP user. I also looked at installing OpenGroupware but a lackluster attempt at figuring out what to do with nightly build .debs I gave up.

    I’m going to repurpose a box and put Debian unstable on it (testing has an older version of automake) to play with Hula, as it seems like it has the easiest build/install process so far:

    ./configure
    make
    su make install

    Granted there is some configuration to do after that, but from what I’ve heard in #hula on freenode the process is quite easy.

    That’s not to say that I’ve stopped looking at alternatives to iCal-over-webdav or Exchange or an exchange workalike for my calendaring and general togetherness. I’d love to see a livecd with openexchange already running on it. For now I think I’ll build Hula and see what the buzz is about. I’m confident that it’s going to progress and improve quickly.

  • Nokia 6680, 6681, and 6682: Covering the Bases

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    Nice. I don’t think that these are supposed to be live yet, but Symbian has links to details on the Nokia 6680 and Nokia 6681. The 6680 has it all: Tri-band, WCDMA, EDGE, etc. The 6681 is a gem. It’s pretty much a 6680 with UMTS stripped out. This is big news for us in the relative mobile backwater called The United States of America.

    Nokia have definitely played their cards right. They have a bleedng-edge Series 60 device that can debut almost simultaneously around the world. The Euros can get their true 3G handset while at the same time we can get the same tech in our hands using EDGE. This is A Good Thing, since we don’t have to wait for the technology to trickle down or wait for lethargic carriers to update their infrastructure before a phone is deemed approrpiate for our market.

    Nokia is also able to please the entire US market by releasing the 6681 and 6682. The 6681 will be good for T-Mobile (tho they lack EDGE so will probably not pick it up) that use the 900 frequency. Cingular will (hopefully) eat up the 6882 which runs on 850. Both units are tri-band so they’ll also do 1800 and 1900.

    Here’s the timeline:

    • Nokia 6680: March 2005
    • Nokia 6681: April 2005
    • Nokia 6682: Q2 2005

    Now that’s a way to launch a phone! It looks like the US version will be a bit behind the others, but should be much less behind than usual. Go Nokia!

    More information:

    Update: The 6680 is small, but the 6681/6682 is even smaller, as in the smallest Series 60 device to date.

  • 3GSM Roundup

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  • Just Browsing: Books that Caught my Eye

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    As a break from classwork last night my wife and I headed to the local Borders to do a little book browsing. I didn’t pick anything up, but several titles caught my eye. Here are the books that I would have picked up if money were no issue and there were a few extra hours in each day:

    • Novell Certified Linux Engineer (Novell CLE) Study Guide: I almost went for a cert with the previous SUSE cert system. I also remembered that I’m a Java Certifieid Programmer and would do more Java certs if I had the time. I really wish that there were a J2ME cert book out there that I could study in my downtime.
    • Secure Architectures with OpenBSD: This looked like a meaty book with lots of information on hardening the already paranoid OpenBSD as well as ways to use it without making stupid mistakes.
    • Managing Security with Snort and IDS: There aren’t enough yellow O’Reilly books. Snort has intrigued me for some time and I’d love to read up on it someday.
    • Advanced Unix Programming: I’ve never been a really low-level guy, but I’ve had a newfound respect for plumbing since I’ve been shoving 0’s and 1’s around this semester. This looks like a great reference for low-ish level programming in a Unix (or Unix-like) environment.
    • Knoppix Hacks: I swear, if you leave two Hacks books alone for 20 minutes they’ll mate and have offspring. There really are a lot of things you can do with Knoppix.
    • Essential Mathematics for Games and Interactive Applications : A Programmer’s Guide: This one was showcased a little bit and gets down to the nitty gritty of stuff that you need to do in order to know your stuff. I’m always amazed at how much you need to know about whatever subject you’re coding for.
    • XML Hacks: What did I tell you? There’s another. A bunch of tricks with XML from cool but useless to wow.
    • Python Programming Patterns: I don’t think I’ve seen enterprise-grade patterns using Python before. This looks like a good book for those looking for an excuse to use Python in the workplace.
    • Moleskine by Kikkerland: Some great small notebooks and stuff. They could be great for jotting down notes before they can make their way to my wiki.

    It was great to get out and graze at the bookstore a bit. It has been awhile since I’ve done so. Of course I have a similar number of tech books already on the shelf that I haven’t had a chance to read, but I always want more.

    What books have you looked at lately? I was bummed not to find Mono: A Developer’s Notebook on the shelf, but considering that there were several there last time, I think that’s a good sign.

  • VLC Media Player (Formerly Videolan) Rocks!

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    Codecs and Linux distros don’t mix. A few years ago, Red Hat stuff stopped playing mp3s. I love my debian Sarge desktop, but Totem just doesn’t support enough codecs out of the box. It’ll handle the basics fine and keeps in line with the minimalistic clean-lines Gnome philosophy. It just won’t handle everything that I throw at it.

    Enter VLC.

    Man, this thing does it all. It can stream just about everything, and it handles a lot of the Windows-based formats that other players throw ugly codec errors on. It may not be as pretty as Totem, but it sure as heck gets the job done.

    Installation was cake on my Debian box. I followed these instructions but opted to install most of the related optional and suggested packages. I also went the sid route as opposed to the woody route. VLC was downloaded and installed in just a few minutes, tho I didn’t get a chance to try it out right away. Sure enough I threw some .wmv and .avi files at it and it handled them perfectly. I don’t have speakers on this box so I can’t vouch for sound decoding, but the video looked just fine.

    I’d highly recommend VLC in addition to whatever media player you’re using now under Linux. There is also a Win32 and Mac OSX version. Take a look at it, I think you’ll like it.

  • Lock Down Your Aerials: The 2005 Brit Awards

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    The Brits were taped yesterday and are airing tonight on ITV. Since Comcast doesn’t carry ITV (only the watered down BBC America), I was elated to find that BBC News took notes on the winners. I was glad to see that Mike Skinner (aka The Streets) picked up the British male solo artist award. I loved his debut Original Pirate Material. His newest, A Grand Don’t Come for Free is best listened to from cover to cover, as it all fits together in a well-told story. Both albums have enjoyed heavy rotation in my car CD player as well as at home on the computers. They’re really top notch work.

    Other hilights from the awards are that Franz Ferdinand didn’t dominate quite as much as was expected. I think there’s a bit more hype for them then they deserve. Other big winners include Keane and Joss Stone. The Scissor Sisters sadly dominated the international category. I’ve heard most of their album and I guess I just don’t get it.

    Congrats to the winners, including my underdog favourite The Streets.

  • Google Maps From Point A to Point B

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    I’d like to say this up front: Google Maps is the most beutiful webapp that I have ever seen. It’s thick-client goodness in a plain old browser. It’s gorgeous, it’s clean, it’s interactive, and it’s driven by Google. It also has a killer feature: parmalinkage.

    Getting back on topic, has anyone actually trued to use it? For directions I mean. They seem to be about on par with Mapquest, which isn’t a compliment. I was really bummed when I clicked on the Print button. I was expecting a nice clean overview map with a minimap for each turn. I was dissapointed to find a rather huge map with some text directions thrown in at the bottom.

    Hey guys and gals, what gives? I love that I can click on each turn number and get a zoomed-in map of the turn. They’ve got this retro nostalgic feel to them. I love them. They don’t really do me a lot of good when I’m on the road though, unless I’m balancing a laptop on the dashboard. For the sake of drivers around me, I’ll refrain from that

    I know, I know, it’s a Beta. Unfortunately Google has led me to expect perfection out of their Beta services. I do hope that they give me some options on printing in the future. As much as Mapquest sucks I really like the turn by turn graphics (for when I miss the turn and get lost).

    I could probably deal with the printable directions as they are if they didn’t feel like an afterthought. Mapquest does a pretty good job with their little icons (right, left, interstate, route number, etc). I also like no-nonsense approach that Yahoo Maps takes. They mark their turns with clear L and R icons.

    Thanks Google, for another awesome tool, even if it’s not perfect yet.

  • Open Message Queueing: The Next Big Web Services Thing?

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    Slashdot links to an eWeek article detailing the plans of John Davies at JPMorgan Chase & Co to release an open source message queueing system. Amazon already has its Simple Queue Service. Codehaus has its ActiveMQ. There is a lot of room in the marketplace for queues of varying openness and closedness. I’d love to see several queueing systems thrive, especially if they end up being as open as it looks like they may be.

  • Open Source PBXes

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    The most interesting article (to me) in the Jan 31 edition of InfoWorld was one titled Open Source PBXes: Free Flexibility. I’ve been tracking a few open source PBX and softphone projects for awhile now. After reading the PBX article I thought I’d take another look.

    The InfoWorld article looks at Asterisk by Digium and SIPxchange by Pingtel. Asterisk is probably the most well known open source PBX package and can run quite well in its open source form. Pingtel has a much more corporate feel. Its core, sipX, is open source, but it appears that that to do anything useful you need commercial extensions from Pingtel. I can’t fault Pingtel for that either. A company has got to make a buck somehow, and some open source is better than no open source at all, I think. There appears to be a nice community growing up around sipX at SIPfoundry.org.

    If I had to choose one open source product over the other, I’d probably have to go with Asterisk, as it handles many protocols (SIP, H.323, MGCP, IAX, SCCP) while SIPxchange/sipX focuses exclusively on SIP. The commercial SIPxchange is probably going to be the easiest to administer with its graphical user interface for confiuration and management. On the other hand, if you have a linux guru on staff you should be able to pull off an Asterisk configuration without too much trouble.

    Most (if not all) PBX systems require some sort of hardware to interface with your external lines and internal network. These open source alternatives are no different, although the processing power requirements are very low. InfoWorld tested out these PBX systems on surplus Pentium desktop systems and they performed just fine. You’ll need some sort of hardware to hook in to your phone lines and phone system, but open source PBX software running on modest hardware can quite proably reduce the costs of your PBX.

    Update: I really should have dug a little deeper, as I forgot to mention GNU Bayonne, which has probably been around longer than most. Erik also pointed me to Voicetronix, which looks like a good place for hardware as well as open source PBX software.

  • Freshmeat\’s Revamped RSS Feeds Rock!

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    Freshmeat offeres several XML feeds of new project releases as well as an RDF representation of its software map and all releases. Until recently the Freshmeat RSS feed that I was subscribed to was a no-nonsense short list of projects with new releases. To view information about a particular release, I just CTRL-clicked on the project name to get more information in a new FireFox tab.

    That has obviously changed recently. I’m pretty sure that the barebones feed has gone away, and I’ve now been redirected to fm-releases-global.xml. Here’s a quick list of available feeds:

    The release feeds are RSS 2.0 generated by PyRSS2Gen and are just beutiful. The new feeds provide most of the critical information that I would want to know about a new release: project name, branch, version, project description, changes for this version, and a screenshot if available. That totally rocks! Here’s an example from a release that hit my aggregator this morning:

    Title: gnormalize 0.12 (Default branch)

    Link: http://freshmeat.net/releases/186939/

    Description:

    Screenshotgnormalize is a graphical front end to normalize. It decodes the MP3/OGG files to wave, then normalizes the wave and re-encodes it to MP3/OGG. It can also convert audio format between MP3 and OGG, change the encoding and ID3 tag properties of final normalized files.

    Changes:
    This release can now convert audio format between MP3 and OGG.

    Thanks, freshmeat. You’ve totally made my morning!

  • Research and Development

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    I was joking with a friend about Fortran Server Pages and how silly that would be the other day. A quick google search didn’t reveal anything, although it did unearth some Fortran CGI from the FCC (with source code). While investigating further, I found myself arriving at the R&D sections of a few different companies. I thought I’d collect my findings for you:

    This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, but there are a lot of amazing research projects, downloadable software, and amazing papers on the other end of those links. If you have some free time, you should look around a few of them.

  • Playing With Y!Q

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    After hearing about Y!Q from ZDNet (via Slashdot) I decided to poke around a bit at the technology behind Y!Q. If you break Y!Q down to bare bones, this is what you end up with:

    On Yahoo’s site, the context input is a hidden field, but it’s much more fun to be able to poke at it interactively. The code that drives the popup resides at http://yq.search.yahoo.com/javascript/yq.js, which is well commented with lots of white space, unlike the javascript I’ve seen from Google which tends to be very dense (but quick to send over the line). yq.js is an interesting read, one that I’m still digesting.

    I’ve got to say that the overall effect is quite interesting, and lots of fun to play with. I’ve got a local copy of the above code if you’d like to play along at home.

    More information:

  • Sony PSP Launch Details

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    Slashdot just pointed to a Yahoo News article with pricing and launch details for Sony’s PSP.

    The value pack retails for 24,800 Yen, so we’re not getting screwed too bad. I’m still hoping that there will be a barebones version on store shelves for $199, as the 19,800 Yen price point would suggest.

    Mobile gaming geeks (at least the ones that don’t already own a PSP) should set their calendars for March 24, the PSP’s official launch date in the US.

  • Wonderfalls on DVD

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    The day has arrived. Wonderfalls, the genius series malined by Fox Tevelision’s inability to discern good from crap, has been released on DVD today. Hopefully you preordered yours but if you didn’t you should be able to run out to your local Best Buy and pick it up for less than $30.

    I can’t say enough about this series. It’s just amazing in a quirky weird can’t quite explain it kind of way. I have most of the series on VCD (the shows that were broadcast plus most of the others in various stages of polish) but can’t wait to add it to my collection. Seriously though, this is probably one of the best telivision series that ever got whacked before its time. I’m so glad that fan response has been so high and that the whole season is making its way to DVD.

  • PyCon DC 2005 or Bust

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    PyCon DC 2005

    Over the weekend I signed up for PyCon DC 2005, and I’m looking forward to it already. The earlybird deadline has already passed, but PyCon is still probably one of the best values out there as far as geek conferences go. I’m in the DC area so if anyone is going to be in town and would like to get together, let me know and we’ll figure something out. PyCon week also happens to fall during my spring break, which couldn’t have worked out better.

    See you there!

  • Taco and Podcast Use Case: Killing Time Before Class

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    The one thing that has always bugged me about podcasting is that I never seem to have the time for it. There’s a lot of great content out there, but the vast majority of my typical day is spent either at home or at work, with a short 20 minute commute in between. I usually end up listening to WAMU, my local NPR station. If I sleep in just enough I can catch the Marketplace morning report.

    A 20 minute ride each way just doesn’t seem like enough time for listening to a podcast. The other thing that SUCKS is having to download an mp3, burn it to an audio CD, and then pop it in to my CD changer. That’s just too much work, and depending on the lengh of the podcast you’re lucky to fit one or two podcasts on a CD. That burns me up because you can usually hear how low the bitrate is, but raw audio is still raw audio.

    All of that changed on Monday when classes started again. Now not only do I have another 30-40 minutes commute to school from work and home from school, but I’ve got time to kill before class. Because of timing and the fact that I still needed o pick up a book that the campus bookstore didn’t have in stock last week, I arrived on campus well before class. After snagging my book and grabbing a bite to eat I still had a good hour or so to kill.

    Luckily it was 6pm and time for Markplace. I found a seat and whipped out my Taco, tuned the radio to WAMU, and picked up the Asphalt: Urban GT race I had started the day before. It’s situations like this that make me glad that I picked up an original taco used. There are only a handful of mobile phones that also have radio tuners and MP3 players, and I’m very glad that I have one of them.

    Over time my time before class will have to be much more productive, but for now I’ve found a viable use case for podcasting and my taco. Even if I just have the 10 minute walk to and from my car and 20-30 minutes before class, I should still be able to get through a podcast. I will probably have to save up for a larger MMC (my 256meg one is just full) or an iPod shuffle if I want to keep this up, but for now I’ll just try to throw a podcast on a spare 32 meg MMC. Of course I should really tie this together with the universal feed parser, some transcoding, and some scripted bluetooth sending. All in due time.

  • Snakes for the N-Gage Released

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    Snakes for the N-Gage is almost go for launch.

  • Yet Another Reason to Attend PyCon DC 2005

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    Here is one more reason to attend PyCon 2005:

    #16. Python for Series 60

    Erik Smartt / Nokia

    UPDATE 2005-01-04:

    A presentation where the Product Manager and one of the engineers do a joint presentation to quickly introduce and demonstrate the port, then cover the technical issues of porting and developing extensions

    In addition to the planned presentation, it would be great to get together a Series 60 Python BoF session or some time in the open space for further meets, greets, and hacking. What do you think? Let us know in the wiki.