High Impact Noise

So I spent the last couple of hours moving AlarmTube from a Rails application to one that is host by Google App Engine (GAE).

I did this for two reasons:

1) To play with Google App Engine

2) Can’t tell you. Hopefully will announce next week.

GAE makes a lot less choices for you then RoR, thus taking a little longer to set up your application infrastructure. I am sure it won’t be long before someone puts together a web framework that makes GAE simpler to setup. Simply creating some scaffolding would help a lot. Now AlarmTube does not need to scale, but if it did I here GAE would be kick ass. GAE is also free so it really lowers the barrier to enter the web world.

Those are my thoughts on Google App Engine, it will be interesting to see how the big guys in the web world respond to this complete development environment (cloud) that Google has set up. Amazon has the closest thing to what Google has setup, they just need to integrate their disparate services.

Well I haven’t given this project much love lately. I took a little time out this weekend and stabilized it (a little) and added the much needed feature of specifying the database url and port.

It is still missing lots of features, (all files and views are still readonly) but i would rather release it then sit on it.

You can download it at CouchFS download page.

For those who don’t know…

CouchFS is a MacFUSE file system that allows you access to CouchDB databases and files. Using CouchFS will allow you to mount your CouchDB system and edit/browse CouchDB files like any typical file on your OS X file system.

The Internet has developed under a “philosophy of free”. Watching Chris Anderson Talk at Nokia has only reaffirmed my belief that to succeed on a large scale in this digital era, Free is the key.

The internet and traditional phone companies are headed for a clash. Ribbit may be the first company to lead the charge in changing the telephony landscape, making it accessible to any developer. Their API offering is extremely interesting, allowing any developer to use their telephony backbone, see their demo for some nifty stuff.

But as All Thing D Article writer John Paczkowski points out

”.. how’s the company going to make money? Ribbit says it plans to charge for services like calls to traditional landlines, voice-mail transcriptions and billing…. Being able to use text-to-speech transcription services and archive voice calls are many of the features that consumers have shown interest in over the years. However, whether or not they’re willing to pay for these features is going to be the big question.”

I know that I am barely willing to pay for my phone calls, especially knowing the cost of a phone call is diving toward zero. Archiving my voice calls would be great, but if Google got in this game I know that they would do it for ZERO. So I am wondering, where is the advertising opportunity in this venture.

Instead of doing something somewhat necessary in my life. I was so intrigued by Fuse in general and MacFuse in particular, I rolled up CouchDB into a MacFuse filesystem.

Friday I saw Amit Singh’s Google Tech Talk on MacFuse and it was really fascinating. He not only showed off MacFuse but went into the history of filesystems.

The MacFuse code comes with a couple example applications, but they are written in Objective-C, so instead of looking for a language that I understand I decided to learn Objective-C. Long story short MacFuse makes it really easy to make your own filesystem.

CouchFS is still very raw (mainly because my understanding of Objective-C is minimal) so I don’t have an app ready to distribute. But the source is available on CouchFS google code page. Patches/Help are encouraged. Hopefully I will have an app ready next week.

After a thanksgiving weekend of traveling in which I had connecting flights both to Florida and back to Boston. I wish I had known about a website called flightwait.com earlier. This site is a google maps mashup, that shows you where the flight delays are.

It might have eased my flying mind, though I bet it probably would have made me more anxious.

It is the old philosophical question, is ignorance really bliss? Such speculation leads nicely into me to my next to blog post, would you pay to have your genome decoded?

I have been marginally playing around with CouchDB, currently waiting for a time for my schedule to free up. But I wanted to just put my two cents in on what I see is a very promising technology.

• A document database server, accessible via a RESTful JSON API.
• Ad-hoc and schema-free with a flat address space.
• Distributed, featuring robust, incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and management.
• Query-able and index-able, featuring a table oriented reporting engine that uses Javascript as a query language.

• Documents are formated in JSON and accessed through HTTP
• You don’t have to define what your documents will look like ahead of time
• 1 computer to …??? (>1) computers the database replicates itself without getting messed up
• Extract the data you want by basically searching through all the documents

Obviously to use CouchDB in any project you probably want to understand their jargon, but my English will hopefully get you interested in their jargon. What makes CouchDB so cool is just how simple it is. CouchDB is just using HTTP to pass around json objects. And getting data out is just using javascript to extract data through HTTP in the form of … JSON objects. A database like only the web could do.

I have already decided I am going to use CouchDB in my next Rails project. If it fails to work out properly I will at least be able to give back to CouchDB community about what the pain points were.

P.S. I will be posting on how to build CouchDB on OS X later on without macports. Its pretty easy but everyone likes a little tutorial.

Recently a friend of mine fell victim to a phishing scam. Phishing is a huge problem plaguing the internet costing millions of dollars. Gartner claims, between May 2004 and May 2005, roughly 1.2 million U.S. computer users suffered phishing losses valued at $929 million.

Spotting these emails and fake websites are tough to do unless you know what to look for. They often look exactly like the Paypal or Bank of America website. They use little tricks that make the url look like they are coming from your bank such as http://www.yourbank.com.example.com/. It is a big problem.

OpenDNS is a nifty service that not only helps you browse the internet more safely, and guess what it makes the internet faster as well.

It works by teaming up with phistank a user generated phishing site database to prevent you from going to these malicious sites. The best thing is that there is no software to install, no hardware to buy, just point your DNS settings to their servers.

For information on how it works go to here and for information on how to set it up go to here

After reading about Kiva on 37 Signals Blog I had to go check it out. Kiva is a really fabulous idea that allows you and me to finance small businesses in developing countries. This is not a hand out, it is a loan (without interest, actually the interest gets paid to the field partner) and Kiva has had a really good record of repayment. The delinquency rate of a Kiva loan is 2.37% and the default rate is 0.25%, compared to the current delinquency rate of sub prime mortgages, Kiva loans are positively risk-free.

Here is how it works

And I am proud to say I made my first micro loan. I lent $25 to DRAME MAMADOU , I wish him luck in expanding his activities and diversify his product range. I encourage everyone to check it out.

Vince Kuraitis has some very interesting speculation, that Google may be moving into the Personal Health Record Management Biz. I believe this would be a radical move for Google and a big bonus to the US Health Care System.

Centralization of people’s health information is a must. This is not the 1900’s where I may only see one or two doctors in my whole life. I have probably seen 50 doctors in my lifetime and I am only 25 years old. Who knows what it says in my chart in rando hospital in CT where I was treated for Torticollis (Stiff neck but it hurt like hell). My health information is scattered throughout the US, in hospitals, doctors offices, etc. It would take a monumental effort on my part to track down the scattered bits of information to form a full personal health record, but connecting all these dots would make me feel more comfortable with the information out there, and would produce a better medical histories which would lead to better diagnosis…

But after writing the blog post, many people commented on Vince’s speculation, often asking why should I trust Google with this information. Vince “nicely responds to this question, but I would go on to say most people already trust google with important information, maybe not the all sacred Personal Health Information, but important information nonetheless.

Actually I am more scared of someone hacking Google and obtaining my search history, (Yes they keep that info) (man I have had some weird searches), than I am of someone finding out my blood pressure. I understand that people’s health information is incredibly important to them, that is why I would rather have it centralized so I know who is accessing it, and what it says. So i hope the rumor is true.

I just acquired two Orb Audio Mod 1 speakers and they kick ass! Whats even more refreshing is their business model. They focus on simple high quality products. The really only sell 2 products a round speaker the size of a CD and a sub woofer. But the round speakers are very modular so that they can be combined into different combinations.

They do not sell their products through distributors, instead they choose to only sell through their website. Distributors markups are often on the order of 3 times what the manufacture would sell the same product for. Orb Audio would rather supply costumers with high quality products without the excessive markup, selling through the internet allows them to avoid the middleman (you gotta hate the middleman).

The speakers they sell are great looking, most speakers are Ugly!, but these babies are small and well designed. I am certainly no audiophile but to me the sound kicks ass, you will be amazed at how big the sound is.

I recently switched over the mailer on a project to use the gmail to send the apps emails. It is pretty well documented how get rails setup with gmail, (here and here), though you wish actionmailer could handle gmail out of the box. This could make a nice little plugin, if I get the will.

I didn’t want the email flowing through tkofol@gmail.com, so I decided to setup a google apps for you domain account. This would allow me to use something like do-not-reply@landscapesurvey.com and it would let me try out google apps.

Setting google apps for your domain was pretty easy, you just need to know how to mess around with your DNS settings or be willing to learn. I was willing to learn.

What you get is a really cool suite of webapps that if I had a small biz would be perfect. One its free, two it gives something like 100 people email accounts that end in your domain. It also has google’s word processing and excel type apps. It’s pretty solid though the online word processing and excel, still need to mature a little bit. But it is worth it just for the email accounts!

Imagine a world in which you typed www.google.com and got sent to www.msn.com. Or where the www.highimpactnoise.com sent you www.bestbuy.com (I don’t know why this would happen, maybe Best Buy found that readers of this blog are good customers).

This could and will happen if Telecommunication companies have their way, and create a biased web. Redirecting traffic based on the highest bidder, not who owns the web address. This could be an all too real possibility.

Write your state representative and tell them to keep the net neutral.

Search Network Neutrality to find out more about this important issue.

I just got my new Meraki Mini today, plugged it in, and started setting up my own wireless mesh network. My network is pretty boring right now, as it is just this one node, but I wanted to take Meraki out for a testdrive.

For those who don’t know anything about Meraki, the company started out of an MIT research project Roofnet. They are trying to change the economics of internet access providing cheap wireless equipment (mini costs $49) capable of creating large mesh networks. They have some pretty heavy backing from Google and Sequoia Capital.

Your wireless network is controlled through Meraki’s control panel. You can see usage statistic, uptime, and it even has a cool Google Maps mashup of where the mini is. Unlike most control panels this one is centralized on the internet so you can manage multiple minis, though they also give you a web control panel straight on the device.

Another thing that I am looking forward to checking out, is that they allow you to charge people if they want to use your network. No more people grabbing my free internet, they can now pay me like 50 cents. I can see the pennies pilling up.

As more and more medical devices try to become networked entities this creates an added burden on hospital IT administrators. Unfortunately hospital admin’s WS* and in particular SOAP based protocols are gaining traction and becoming the defacto standard. WS Death Star as DHH aptly nicknamed is a complicated standard that has plenty inherent security problems

Paul Prescod states the problem perfectly in this post

SOAP is designed to slip through firewalls as HTTP. There is no doubt that this is a design goal. Microsoft advertises it as such. Don Box (one of SOAP’s inventors) is quite open about this: “if you look at the state of the average organization, they use proxy servers and they use firewalls to prevent normal TCP traffic from making it from one machine to another. Instead, they set up this infrastructure to allow HTTP to work. So part of the problem was replacing the transport, which is the way DCOM does framing, with an ACDP-based transport. That was the first part of the SOAP effort.”

Firewalls exist to monitor activity. To create a standard that makes this harder is ridiculous.

Why ruin a good thing? SOAP adds layers and layers of unnecessary complexity, so much so that most SOAP toolkits have trouble communicating. HTTP is a proven commodity, used billions of time a day, embrace it.

Medical Device manufactures look to a RESTful solution. Don’t be deceived, poorly thought out complexity does not increase security.

For those of you who don’t know about OpenID, it solves the single sign-on problem, one login to be used all across the internet. It is about time, I don’t know how much longer I was going to be able to support all my online username and password combos.

I have been using it for my highrise, technorati and Jyte accounts. I only wish it was supported by more sites that I frequent everyday. I have put it on my todo list to implement in Landscape.

A really neat thing about it is you can use your own website as your URI, instead of something like tkofol.myopenid.com I can use highimpactnoise.com, doesn’t that just sound a lot sweeter.

All you need to do is put the following lines in the head section web page you are trying to use as you URI.

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<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://myname.myopenid.com/" />
<meta http-equiv="X-XRDS-Location" content="http://myname.myopenid.com/xrds" />

OpenID seems here to stay as it continues to gain support from the industry. The reign of thousands of usernames and passwords clouding your memory is gone. Rejoice!