Enjoy!

Google Wave Dev Preview

I can happily announce (or brag :-P) that I’ve just received my Google Wave invitation today and already created my account. I’m really excited of exploring and developing on Google’s Wave, especially with the ideas I already have in mind. Yet, I just clicked around a bit, due to the lack of free time, but as soon as I can I will take a deeper look at the API and try out some stuff I might even publish here. So stay tuned to see read (and maybe see) the latest progress of my Wavealicious ideas/implementations.

Btw, you can contact me on Wave via devilx@wavesandbox.com.

First of all, the App Store is great. From its theory to its practice, everything is implemented just the way it has to be. Sure, sometimes it’s a little slow and not that responsible as one would expect, but altogether the browsing experience is really great. Why? Because it has to be. Nobody likes to spend money somewhere he doesn’t enjoy browsing for things – regardless whether we’re talking about the #real-life or in virtual. It’s just fun to look through the Apps, find new ones, share them with your friends and of course buy them. And it’s so easy as well. One click, that’s all! Isn’t that just great?

Oh well, yeah, it would be – if. If Apple would have kept the essential concept of their App Store the way they actually planned and intended it to. I mean, let’s think back, to the time before the Apple App Store was launched (what’s only little over a year ago) – what was the general appearance of existing application stores (of e.g. Nokia or for the Windows Mobile Platform)? Exactly. Ugly, slow, confusing, a lot of useless tra…ehrrr… stuff. And then came Apple – BAM! Brand new App Store for mobile applications. Everything was clean, everything was very well working and simple for the end-user to access. Then ago, the App Store provided a few essential and yet well known applications by third-parties. Great apps, with great functionality that even looked amazingly cool.

But then, after a while, it seems like the whole BAM just BAM-MED even more. And more. And more. Of course, Apple was lucky about this fact – more Apps for sale, more cut-offs for themselves. Why not? And do you know what’s the best? Big numbers. What? Yeah! Just as I said it. Big numbers. From the moment on, from which Apple started literally raping the potential of the App store within every Keynote they presented people could see all those big numbers. Thousands of of Apps. Millions of downloads. Et cetera.

But did this really improve the Store? I’m looking around at this very same moment within the App Store and have to say: No. It didn’t. All it improved was Apple’s pockets and the big numbers on their Keynote presentations. I stumble through the App Store and see hundreds and hundreds of Apps, one more useless than the other – Bikini Babes, Gym Babes, Simple To-Do and of course a huge amount of games. Yeah, games. I’m not saying, that games are “useless” in that way. Sometimes, when waiting for the Bus or for your Girl getting changed you appreciate those little time-consumptions. But come on? I mean, spending more than $2 for a game that won’t last any longer than one hour to be played, thanks to Apple’s gorgeous batteries? Who should play those games? Shall I constantly keep my iPhone attached to the power-cord, so I can play two hours of Need For Speed? Isn’t the whole game stuff, that Apple’s trying to sell as “PSP/NintendoDS Killer” just plain dumb and totally impracticable? I’m not saying, that games on mobile phones are no fun in general, but are you re-charging your iPhone every three hours, just to be able to play some games? I mean, I still don’t understand what market Apple really tries to reach with that. My impression is, that people indeed spend money on games like NFS or Sims 3, but only to be able to show-off at parties or other occasions. I don’t believe anybody really playing (and by playing I mean the very same behavior you hear from 15-years old, Norwegian guys with a World of Warcraft account!) the games on the iPhone. At least not till their end. Also I believe, that 70% of the people buying games use in iPod Touch instead, in addition to their iPhone.

Eh, however. Back to the topic. So, the Apple App Store started providing more and more sh… apps, over the past year. Some, useless ones and also some totally useless ones. Of course, in between of all those crap, you’ll sometimes find a pearl, like for example Shazam, Daylite Touch, Things, LittleSnapper, Colloquy, eBay, Ego, Wallet, Squirrel, Shopper, Deliveries, Weightbot, iStat, Beats, Last.fm, RadAlert and many many more. Apps that really have a use and pay-back for the price you spent on them. Unfortunately, those apps aren’t the majority anymore – and it seems to become worse by each day passing by. So what to do?

Of course Apple could stop selling all those other crappy apps. Just reject when developers submit them – and instead include apps that would be worth including. *cough*GoogleVoice*cough* But to be honest, by that, Apple would shoot into their own feet. Why stop selling crappy apps, when there are enough users to buy them? Why rejecting the cut-off, even if it’s just some pennies per app?

So let’s see, what could be Plan B? Uh yeah. Plan B. Sounds always good. How about.. err.. an “Exclusive App Store”? An App Store exclusively for high-rated and (therefor) pricy apps. Yeah, that sounds good, doesn’t it? But wait… who decides what’s “exclusive”? The developers? The users? Or maybe the price? I don’t know how you think, but I’d probably go with the third option. As long as the price is high enough, I don’t believe Apple caring about the actual application’s quality – not esthetically nor functionally. So, what sense would an exclusive App Store have then? Well, I guess no more than just gather more and more money.

I’m really happy that at least there are Blogs and Sites on the web, which take the enormous job of searching through the App Store, filtering the whole crap away and bringing you the best and most beautiful applications available for your iPhone. Without them, I guess I’d have a hard time to fine *anything* that would fit my needs within the actual App Store – and maybe just switch to Android.

So far.

For my tests, I was using a vanilla Ubuntu 9.04 with latest package versions/updates installed. The installation of the PPA was pretty simple, thanks to the DEB provided on the Ubuntu One site, although I could not install the Ubuntu One GNOME-Client using the one-click feature implemented on the official Install-site. This probably could be the first thing a regular user could trap on.

So, after installing the packages manually by using a terminal and aptitude, the client appeared in Ubuntu’s “Internet”-submenu of the panel-main-menu. When a user installs Ubuntu One on a new computer and clicks the client’s icon within the menu to start the service, he will get a browser-window containing an Ubuntu One authorization-page. There, the user needs to click the “Authorize this Computer” button, so the computer will be able to sync with the Ubuntu One cloud. I took a quick look behind the scenes and as far as I’ve seen, Ubuntu One uses regular OAuth to authenticate computers to the cloud. The OAuth-token therefor will be saved within the “Passwords & Keys” thingy, that’s found somewhere in the main-menu.

However, the sync service itself creates a “Ubuntu One” folder within your home-directory, which syncs up into the cloud. Within this folder, there’s also a sym-linked-folder for Public content. The client-daemon doesn’t seem to be using some mechanism like iNotify to sync the folder contents up to the cloud, or if it does, it’s simply broken. At least on my test-machine, the client synchronized periodically – and by periodically I mean cycles with noticeable pauses in between. On one way that’s good, because not every tiny-whiny change that will be made to the folder’s contents will be pushed up to the cloud, what would literally kill your bandwidth, but on the other hand, the actual duration from one sync to another is just too big to be used with multiple devices simultaneously (e.g. an Android implementation or even another client-computer).

Talking about the simultaneousness, I don’t think that Ubuntu One is (yet) planned to be used on multiple computers simultaneous. On my test-setup I’ve created a sub-folder named “Home”, where I moved some dot-starting-folders from within my actual $HOME to and soft-linked them back to their actual location. My setup then looked something like:


devilx@vm-ubuntu:~$ ls -la | grep ^lrw*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 devilx devilx 38 2009-09-12 20:32 .evolution -> /home/devilx/Ubuntu One/Home/evolution
lrwxrwxrwx 1 devilx devilx 36 2009-09-12 20:31 .mozilla -> /home/devilx/Ubuntu One/Home/mozilla
lrwxrwxrwx 1 devilx devilx 35 2009-09-12 20:33 .purple -> /home/devilx/Ubuntu One/Home/purple
devilx@vm-ubuntu:~$


By this, I’ve pushed the preferences and information of my Firefox, my Evolution and my Pidgin into the cloud. A quick test showed me, that none of those three applications complained about their new “home” being a symlink to some directory within the cloud – and neither about any insufficient permissions that could have happened, if the cloud was set-up crappy (+1P for Ubuntu One). Still, this setup seems not that perfect for me, at the moment.

The synchronization of a modified .mozilla and especially of a modified .evolution folder seems to take for years. While I’m writing this text, the client-daemon is still synchronizing the files (it started nearly at the same time I’ve started writing this entry) and says “Updating 6 of 270 files…” – this could become a looooong night. Though, I don’t want to complain about Ubuntu One’s performance, since yet, it’s still in Beta (even if I don’t know, if Beta isn’t just an upcoming trend every company has to stick with -> e.g. Google).

I’ll try to clone this Ubuntu-installation and run them both with Ubuntu One being active – first, one after another (to see, if the applications could be synced without them complaining about parameters, that are incorrect for the secondary host they get synced to -> e.g. hostname information) and then I’ll try to run them simultaneously and hope for the best. If it should work out (what I don’t expect, just from what I’ve seen in similar projects), it would be really cool, because then, most applications could be synced this way without much hassle. I’d be really surprised, if this should be working, because then, the cloud seems to implement some kind of “merge” service, which allows you to upload data from two (or more) clients and seamlessly merge it up in the cloud together to one, consistent state.

Eh, I will see. Altogether, Ubuntu One is yet already working pretty cool, though I’m not quite sure, what a regular user should do with it, if he’s already aware of service like Dropbox or Amazon’s S3 – because at the moment, Ubuntu One unfortunately isn’t any better than those services. It just integrates more seamless into the GNOME-desktop. Hm… oh well.

The last time I check out the project, there was no such daemon for Unix(-like) platforms but Mac OS X itself. I decided to take a quick look at the independend istatd Project on Google Code and give it a shot. I fetched the sources, built them on a Debian Lenny and ran the daemon with a slighly modified configuration – and it worked!

I found it pretty cool. Actually, I found it so cool that it was the reason for me to buy the actual iPhone App. I have no Mac OS X Servers I’d like to monitor, but I could think of plenty of Linux machines which I’d like to keep an eye on – not as an replacement for Nagios, just as a solution for quick-live-monitoring.

However, I decided to build a Debian package, to make it easier to deploy the istatd on a couple of machines. I attached the Debian package to this post, so you can just download and install it on your Lenny machines. Warning: It’s not a clean and tidy built, lintian conform packge! I just hacked it together to have something that “just works”. And that’s what it actually should. Besides, be warned that the daemon takes quite long to shut-down, due to the fact that I’ve just used the regular /etc/init.d/skeleton to create an own /etc/init.d/istatd script, without going into deep workflow-checks. Here, the script takes something around half a minute to kill the istatd.

Anyway, now I’m going to take a look at the sources and see, if I could probably commit some enhancements to the projects. The last time I was doing C++ is *quite* a time ago, but it shouldn’t be too hard from what I’ve seen so far. On the project’s site it says that there’s no support for fans and temperature measuring, yet. I will check whether it’s possible to use lmsensors for getting those information and maybe hack it in – or even rewrite the daemon in C, what would be the best to do anyway.

Oh well, however. Enjoy the package.

Download: istatd_0.5.4-1_i386.deb

The red block let's you choose.

I’ve been now using Prologue for quite a very long time – I guess longer than I’ve ever used one WordPress theme before – and I’m highly pleased of it. However, even that Prologue has a built-in iPhone/iPod Touch browser-detection which cuts away the sidebar and only keeps the important news-stream in focus, I haven’t been very satisfied by that. The font is still pretty small, nearly unreadable, the links are therefor pretty hard to hit, et cetera.

However, yesterday then Andi showed me some pretty nice little framework he just found, what actually doesn’t have anything to do with WordPress itself, but made me think of a very cool idea. The iWebKit-Framework is a small set of CSS and image files that concentrates on building a website in a way so that it looks just like an iPhone or iPod Touch Application. The whole thing’s appearance is pretty sexy, you can take a look at the downloads and get the framework plus some example HTML files for testing.

My optimized front-page.

So, I took a closer look on the iWebKit stuff and did some (again better, a lot of!) PHP WordPress theme hacking. I think I spent the whole night building that thing – but I also think that it was worth it, heh. And I guess, I’ve created a revolutionary and new WordPress theme aimed for the usage on iPhones and iPod Touches – the only problem I had left was: How to I get WordPress to use this theme only on the tiny Safari, but on nothing else? After some more PHP hacking, which included modifying my Prologue theme but not the actual WordPress (what’s the really cool thing within the whole story), I’ve found a way.

When you browse my WordPress now using your iPhone, you should be getting a red message right on top of the site, which tells you that it has detected the tiny Safari and suggests you to use the iPhone optimized theme. If you confirm by clicking the first link, the whole site’s design should get to look just like on the pictures I’ve inserted here.

My contact information - optimized.

I will extend the theme some more, maybe by building in JavaScript effects or other Eye-Candy, to make it fit even better into the iPhones Look & Feel. I was also thinking of some Cover-Flow’ish effect for my Gallery (which at the moment just links to my Picasa-Site, but thanks to the great API provided by Google it shouldn’t be too hard to implement that right into the page).

Maybe, after some more testing I’ll be able to provide it for download, including a whole documentation of how to make it work. Until then, I hope you enjoy browsing my Blog, especially over the iPhone or your iPod Touch. Please feel free to write me your impressions, feedback and also suggestions for improvement by commenting here or writing me an e-mail. So far …

Have fun!

Safari 4 Top Sites

Okay, so for now already two days I’ve been testing the public beta of Apple’s new Safari 4 and I need to say that I’m pretty impressed. While talking to colleagues and friends of mine, who seem to be having quite some problems with the browser-beta, I personally can’t confirm any of these.

The noticeable features regarding Safari 4 are the tabbing-feature, the browser history and of course the brand new and likable ability of displaying a graphical “list” of the most visited websites. However, let’s start with the “Top Sites”. By default, Safari opens this as homepage for each new window. I personally turned it off, since I don’t actually really need such a feature. But I think, Apple just tried to copy Google’s Chrome on that. Yet, the feature is – at least on my internet connection – really slow. In my first test, Safari did not manage it to load all previews in an acceptable amount of time, as you can see on the screenshot. This feature can be turned on by pressing the new button (the one with many tiny squares) contained in the Bookmarks-bar.

The browser-history became something of a mixture of the Top Sites preview-feature with a Cover-Flow combination. By that, the history can be browsed now using a graphical interface that display a preview of each site. And I think I don’t even want to know how much disk space and cpu-power this feature needs… but eh.

And of course the last any maybe most important, noticeable feature: The tabs. Actually, Apple moved the tab bar which was beneath the Bookmarks-bar before right into the window’s title. On the right to corner, there’s now a plus-icon for adding a new tab to the window. Moving tabs within or even across different windows is still as simple as it was before, just that now you know exactly which window contains what tabs, even if the window’s in background with only the title-bar visible.

Safari 4 breaking Adium Style

Of course, Apple also improved the browser’s Webkit backend with many different new features and speed enhancements. This was the first thing I’ve noticed, even without having Safari running. How? Well, somehow, after installing the new beta, restarting the system and opening Adium, my Message-window style was broken. It seems like the new engine does something different regarding the CSS stuff that was used by the theme. By that, the picture-reflection didn’t work out anymore the way they should.

Altogether I’m pretty happy with the upcoming version of Safari and despite all other, negative comments I’ve heard, I have to say that here it’s working pretty cool. Of course, I did not have any obscure plug-ins installed in Safari 3 (oh, wait, I had, Cooliris… where is it now, by the way?) nor do I run a MacOsX86 Hackintosh. Heh.

Who's watching you?

Some time ago, I got interested in these tiny little cams with direct Ethernet connection, that contain a lightweight webserver that streams the actual picture to the network the cam’s connected to. I was holding such a cam in the hands at work, some while ago, and recently I was wondering myself, how expensive these would actually be. Not that I would really want to purchase one, just for informing myself. So, I opened Google and entered the manufactures name followed by some other keywords. The first links Google showed me were the links to the actual products, but while flying over Google’s first page of results I found some link directed to an IP address and ending with an .shtml file. The structure of the URL looked similar like the one I’ve seen from the cams we have at work… call it boredom, but I followed the link and – I was surprised – I landed on such a cam’s video server which streamed me the picture of the traffic on some highway. I got the idea to enter the site’s title into Google and search for more links similar to this one. And what should I say… after around one hour of search I’ve already found seven sites containing the live-pictures of webcams which in my opinion seem not to be intended for public-viewing. Or at least, I don’t know why someone should want the internet to watch his bar’s guests or his co-workers to be visible on the world wide web.

I’m really astonished about some administrator’s sloppiness on such things. Especially, because it’s not them who are visible on the internet, but the people around them. On some webcams I really got the impression, that the administrators of these webcams thought, that it would be good for them to be able to access the webcams from anywhere, and to make this possible just use “security by obscurity”. The webcams where all only accessible directly by entering the server’s (or gateway’s, dunno) IP-address and had no security at all, for accessing the live-stream.

However, I think, I kinda found some new hobby for long nights. And you should think twice when you see a camera connected to the network somewhere – you might be visible to the whole internet. Oh, this reminds me of the local Subway, where three cameras are hanging in the corners, but no sign indicates that the place is getting filmed. Hm…

My future Livingroom

Last evening I was playing round with Google’s great 3D-modelling software called Google SketchUp and tried to do something, what’s actually not SketchUp’s purpose: I was trying to design a room. I was searching for quite a long time some home designing software that includes real furniture and the only one I’ve found till now was “The Sims 2″, though it’s pretty pricy since there’s also a need to buy the Ikea-Addon.

However, as I was saying, I tried out Google’s SektchUp and I have to say that I’m positively surprised by its features and the possibilities it provides – especially because it’s freeware! I did some scratches for practise and half an hour later I began to create my interior design. I spent around thee and a half hours for designing, but in the end I am very pleased with the result, especially regarding the fact of me being a SketchUp-rookie.

The Media Center

So, how does my future livingroom I’ve designed look like? Let’s start with the basic information: The room has approximatively 8.3 x 6.3 meters of floor space and a regular height. On the mocha-carpeted floor I have two smaller carpets (unknown brand, designed by hela19). On the lighter carpet a Sofa by Mark Goetz, a Noguchi glas table and the Nelson Coconut Chair is placed. In front of the Sofa, the Chicago Media Center by Blu Dot holds a Samsung Flatscreen-TV, an Apple TV and a DVD-collection. Since the DVD’s would be available on the Apple TV itself, the DVD boxes in the Media Center’s cubicles would be more prestige than use. On the glas table, a MacBook Air would be available as carryable media device.

Wall unit, Media Center, Storage Benches and Turntables.

On the left side of the room, a Smart Furniture Wall Unit would keep all books, magazines and other things in it. On the right side of the Media Center area a nice plant lightens up the room’s ambient and another seating accomodation with integrated shelves called “Cognita Storage Bench” by Herman Miller provides additional storage space.

Right after the benches, three (modificated) Linc L18 tables by Bernhardt Design provide the space for my DJ equipment. Into these tables, a part of my Vinyl collection could be placed.

The room’s entrance would be at the corner in which the SketchUp figure stands. Besides the entrance, a nice, black George Nelson Marshmallow Sofa would provide another additional seating accomodation, in a stylish way. Right next to the Sofa, another nice plant and a Herman Miller Airia Home

The "Office" Corner

Office fill out the other corner of the room. I replaced the original chair coming with that Home Office set by a Herman Miller Eames Softpad Executive chair. On the (modified – I stretched it to be longer and deeper) desk, an Apple iMac with wireless keyboard and Mighty Mouse is available for work, placed in a way to not get derranged or even distracted by the images showed by the TV, though it’s still possible to turn around and take a quick look at the show, even if someone sits on the sofa.

So, however, this would be my idea of how a perfect livingroom for myself could look like. The main problem would be to find an appartment which provides a 52.29 square-meters (living-)room, heh.

Some more pictures are available on my Picasa WebAlbum. Enjoy!

Anyway, after searching for hours on Google, the only possibility to do this seems to be the installation of ffmpegX, what’s so not “just works”. I’m still wondering, if there really is no other alternative which works and really does the job of converting a simple DivX into a MP4 (or into whatever other format).

Meh, maybe I’ll just use MacPorts to install ffmpeg.

… an instant messenger application designed for the GNOME desktop. It will allow you to connect to MSN, Jabber, GTalk and IRC (and Yahoo, AIM and ICQ in the future) through the use of addins. You can communicate with your family, friends and co-workers from around the world, using different networks!

And the best thing is, that it uses the Mono Toolkit and the MonoDevelop IDE for development! I tested out Galaxium a bit and must say that it’s a pretty good start. The User Interface isn’t that simple and intuitive but now it already supports the main features like multiple accounts, setting per-account profiles, file-transfers and even proxy support. Unfortunatelly it doesn’t let me select whether I’d like to use no proxy, the GNOME Proxy settings or a manually defined proxy, what makes it hard for me to use the application in everyday work – but I’ve already file a bug about this.
However, besides its functionallity Galaxium also looks cool since providing the feature to use Adium Message-Themes! I’ll track the project curiously and participate by filing bugs and maybe also patches. I’ve been waiting for a really long time for a Pidgin alternative, but unfortunatelly every project until now died of starvation.
However, we’ll see…