Technology
Entries related to technology.
Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 11/01/2009 - 09:24#NaNoWriMo, Google Voice, StatusNet, Karmic Koala, Matlab in Joomla, Portfolio Analytics, Ad:Tech, Citizen Journalism conference, Trip to Virginia and to Cape Cod, proceedings in the Cablevision request, CEP, Doninger Case, making cider. The list seems to go on and on.
I often start each months’ blog posts with the old childhood saying, “Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit” meant to bring good luck for the month. Yet there is also an old saying, chase two rabbits, catch none. I feel more like a young kid in with ADHD in a field full of rabbits randomly running this way and that, sort of like Brownian motion.
I’ll keep this post short as short as I can, so I can start chapter one of Liza’s Party, my NaNoWriMo project. If you are interested in sharing ideas, or reading and commenting on my rough draft, please contact me directly.
When I’m not writing fiction, I’ll be busy writing and testing code, for both fun and profit. My Google Wave Federated Server is up. I’m working on setting up a second so I can actually test federation. If you have a federated server, let me know and we can collaborate. If you want to get text console access to a Google Wave server that is not connected yet to the main Google Wave servers, let me know. I’ve done some interesting hacking to make that possible. It isn’t as nice as the full Google experience, but it is a way to play with the technology.
Then, when I get a chance, I’ll continue my StatusNet migration. My previous installation was so old, that I’m planning on dumping what I had and starting from scratch. I’m partway through the installation, and I really want to connect it up to my XMPP server so that I can explore StatusNet to Google Wave integration options. Again, if you’re interested in this, ping me, but it may be a little while before I can really explore this.
In order to upgrade my laptop for testing with Google Wave, I’ve kicked off the upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10, also known as Karmic Koala. I left it running last night and it said it would take several hours to download all the updates. Now, it is sitting with the message fetching file 1295 of 1295 on the screen. It has been like that for a while, and not moved to the Installing the upgrades phase. I’ll keep glancing at that, and then eventually test some of my Google Wave Federation from that machine.
Of course all of this needs to happen in the background as I work on two paying projects involving Matlab. One is in the final phases of testing and hopefully will be completed soon. The other involves implementing a routine written with the Matlab Runtime Executable into a Joomla website. Most of the pieces are in place, and now I need to try putting them together to see how they work, and then fine tuning the result.
Then, there are the conferences. Ad:Tech is coming up this month, as is a conference on Citizen Journalism. It looks like the conference on Drama Therapy is likely to fall by the wayside. For other travels, there will be a trip to Virginia for a weekend at my daughters’ college, and a trip to Cape Cod for an extended family Thanksgiving celebration.
In legal and rules making activity, there is the Cablevision case, where their replies are due in about a week. There is the Citizens’ Election Program case, where replies are still being written, and there is the Doninger Case where I believe the replies are all written and we’re just waiting for oral arguments. This may involve another trip to blog from the Second Circuit in New York City before I know it.
Beyond all of this there are ongoing projects like the cider making, Fiona’s Radio Show, and who knows what else. Time to end this blog post, without spending time for editing and getting on with #NaNoWriMo 2009 – Word Count 0. Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit, indeed.
Google Wave Federation on Ubuntu – Openfire XMPP, StatusNet, Asterisk and Beyond
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 10/31/2009 - 10:48Last night, I spent more time exploring Google Wave, and find there are so many more areas that I need to explore. I am especially interested in Google Wave Federation.
On the GoogleCode blog, they talk about “the Google Wave Federation Protocol, the underlying network protocol for sharing waves between wave providers.” They go on to explain, “Yes, that's between wave providers: anyone can build a wave server and interoperate, much like anyone can run their own SMTP server.”
With this in mind, I set up my own wave server. To do this, I followed the steps in the Google Wave Federation Prototype Server Installation Wiki Page.
At first glance, it looked nice and straight forward for Debian and Ubuntu users. Make sure you have Java 6 installed, grab the Openfire package, install it, configure it, and add the Wave software. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a bit more complicated.
If you are running on an older version of Ubuntu, you cannot simply install sun-java6-jdk. The package isn’t found. You can install openjdk-6-jdk, but then the Debian package can’t find sun-java6-jdk and it won’t install.
I did install sun-java6-jdk and Openfire 3.6.4 on one of my machines. However, I couldn’t get it to start. Then, when I finally got it to start, it wouldn’t recognize the administrative password. I went through several cycles of installing, uninstalling, tweaking, and couldn’t get things to work consistently. It was then that I discovered two important things:
First, when you start Openfire, depending on the machine you are using, it make take a minute or two before it will start responding to http requests. So, install Openfire. Wait a minute or two. Then, attempt to configure it. This led me to the second issue. After you configure it and set up the administrative userid and password, it appears that you need to restart the Openfire service. Once you’ve restarted it, and given it a minute or two to get up to speed, you can login to the administrative panel, and continue on with the configuration.
Openfire is an XMPP server. XMPP is a standard protocol that is used for chat programs like Google Talk. It is used by StatusNet for connecting with their micro blogging. StatusNet connects with Twitter, and the Openfire server has plugins that allow connections to other IM services like AOL and Yahoo. Openfire also has plugins to connect to Asterisk and SIP, so that you can use an Openfire session to connect to Voice over IP services. These are things I have yet to test.
My first test to make sure that Openfire was up and running was to run Pidgin, a chat service that runs nicely in Ubuntu. Not only did it connect nicely with my Openfire server, but I managed to connect over IPv6 for some of my testing.
Once I had Openfire running smoothly, the next step was to add the Wave component. In the instructions, they say to download the software using the ‘hg’ command. I did not have ‘hg’ as an available command. Hg is part of the mercurial package, so I did a
sudo apt-get install mercurial
To install Mercurial. Then, I retrieved the code and tried to build it. However, I had initially installed just the Java Runtime Environment, and I didn’t have ‘ant’ available as a command. I installed ant and the full Java Development Kit and the build worked. It took about a minute to build on my machine.
The next step was to build certificates. The Wiki page for Certificates provides a simple easy way to build your own certificates. However, it suggests getting a CA-issued certificate. They suggested going to http://xmpp.net/. However, as of yesterday, XMPP stopped operations. They have a link to https://www.startssl.com/. However, Google Chrome says that StartSSL’s certificate is not valid. On top of that, the StartSSL pages just aren’t working for me right now. So, I’m running with my own self-signed certificate.
The next place where I ran into an issue was installing my certificate. The run-config.sh file has a line
CERTIFICATE_FILENAME_LIST=${WAVE_SERVER_DOMAIN_NAME}.cert
If figured I’d just name my cert file to be my domain name. The problem is that the procedure for making cert files uses an extension of .crt instead of .cert So, my first attempt to run failed. Fortunately, I found that fairly easily and now have the server up and running.
The Openfire administration pages shows the component session running. The message from the wave server looks like it is initializing okay, but it isn’t discovering any other wave servers. It is getting a message that
INFO: Couldn't find wave on initech-corp.com
initech-corp.com does not appear to have wave
So, it looks like I’ve got a wave server up and running, but not connected to anything or doing anything. If anyone else is experimenting with Google Wave Federation, let me know. In addition, if anyone wants to do other things with my XMPP server, I’ve set it up so that you need to contact me to set up a userid, but I’ll set up userids for people that want to experiment.
Later, I’ll reinstall statusnet. I had set up a very early instance of laconi.ca, the precursor to statusnet, but I haven’t done anything with it in ages. Now that I have a nice XMPP server, I will want to do an new installation and see how it runs with Openfire and ultimately, Google Wave Federation. If I really get motivated and have some free time, I’ll work on getting Asterisk up and running again. Also, still on the list is looking at Shindig and Drupal for Google Gadgets, but that is even further down the list.
So, are you doing anything interesting with Google Wave Federation? Got any cool ideas?
Geek Day
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 10/30/2009 - 12:15Yesterday, I spent much of my day playing with new technology in the pipeline as well as some older technology that is new to me, and it looks like today may be a bit similar. With that, I want to share some views from the geek trenches.
Google Wave
I am now on Goggle Wave. You can find me as aldon dot hynes at googlewave dot com. It is still in early testing and I’m only slowly finding friends and waves there. However, it does have a lot of interesting potential. I like the ability to have a real time discussion and still have it end up like an email thread. I like the idea of having these discussions publicly, like on a mailing list. I like the idea of being able to insert comments in the middle of someone else’s comment. I like the idea of having gadgets, and I’m glad they now have tags.
I’m disappointed that a good permissioning system isn’t in place yet, and I’ve been frustrated at times when a wave can get really slow with a lot of people on it.
On the usage side, I’m very interested in how people are using it for community gathering, political discussions and potentially journalism. It will be interesting to track usage and how usage changes, and I sure hope there are some good academics looking at this from various academic frameworks.
For the technology, I’m very interested in what can be done with gadgets, and I’m hoping to play with creating some gadgets. I’m interested in what can be done with gadgets and Shindig, and especially with the Drupal Shindig OpenSocial Integrator. Ultimately, I’m interested in how this will fit Open Handset, or Android.
Over on StatusNet there has been a discussion about Google Wave Federation and how Google Wave could interact with a system like StatusNet. This is another area I want to explore.
So, as an early adopter geek, I’m really enjoying Google Wave, and I’m hoping to explore it much more.
Sidewiki
On the Thursday #socialmaketing discussion, @ckieff asked people what they thought about Google Sidewiki. I hadn’t played with Sidewiki, but I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about it, so I figured it would be a good idea to kick it around a little. My first comment was about my surprise that you couldn’t use it with Google Chrome. Several people shared this comment, and then @googlesidewiki responded that Google Sidewiki has just come to Chrome. Actually, it only partially came and there is more work to do, but it is a step in the right direction.
Over on Firefox, I installed the Sidewiki addon. So far, it doesn’t seem to do a lot that I couldn’t already do with StumbleUpon and a host of other sites. In addition, for some reason, I often have problems with Google authenticating from Firefox. It seems like Google frequently gags on my Firefox cookies. Maybe when Sidebar gets connected up to a Google Gadget and from their into a Google Wave, it will be more interesting. If you’re doing anything interesting with Google Sidewiki, let me know.
FlashBlock
One of the things that I’ve found more and more annoying are Flash programs in browsers. They suck up CPU time, play annoying music, and generally don’t add much of value. So, I was please to find FlashBlock as a Firefox addon yesterday. I’ve added it and things seem to run much more quickly and nicely without Flash. Unfortunately, there isn’t anything similar for Chrome.
This does present interesting new issues for advertisers using Flash.
Twitter Lists
I’ve also started playing with Twitter Lists. I’ve set up a few different lists and I look forward to when they can be accessible via the API. It seems like group functionality is one of the next great frontiers and I’m especially interested in how the group information can get shared. For example, some of the information that I entered in my Twitter Lists has already been entered in FriendFeed, PeopleBrowser, Facebook, and probably half a dozen other areas. Perhaps group information is something that needs to be added to Portable Contacts and sites like DandyID
Joomla
As I believe I’ve mentioned earlier, I’m starting to play a little bit with Joomla. Don’t worry, I’m not abandoning Drupal. Meanwhile, I’m listening to a friend on Facebook talk about a Drupal versus Wordpress smackdown going on at her office. You need to use whichever tool meets the needs.
Ubuntu 9.10
Next on the list is upgrading some machines to Ubuntu 9.10 I'm hearing good stuff, but just don't have the time yet.
Anyway, I keep getting distracted by a shiny new tool, so I’d probably better post this entry and get back to everything else that has piled up.
Random Updates, #DPAC4, Balloon Boy, Swine Flu, the Coast Guard, Google Wave
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 10/28/2009 - 08:38In case anyone didn’t notice, yesterday, I attended DPAC 4. I sent out about 140 tweets from the conference. I received around 30 replies, many of them retweets of what I had sent out. A lot of the people were old friends from other conferences, but I ended up following about a dozen new people. I had a net growth of five new followers, but that is a little misleading since there is always churn as old fake followers get deleted and new fake followers crop up. I reality I picked up at least a dozen new real followers. More importantly, I had a lot of great discussions and gathered a bunch of interesting new ideas to write about over the coming month. These days, I’m interested in the number of tweets and the changes to followers and those I’m following as a metric on how good a conference is. It actually can be used to analyze how interesting each panel is, as well.
During my train ride into New York, I mostly slept. I’m hoping to build up my defenses and avoid what is going around. My daughter Fiona stayed home sick yesterday and is sick again today. She does not have a fever and I do not believe it is swine flu, or if it is, it is very mild. About 10% of the students at her school are out. The local middle school has about 29% absent, and at least three school districts in Connecticut, in Guilford, Middletown and Burlington have closed because of the swine flu. Meanwhile, I continue read more blogs about how this is just another fake media frenzy driven by evil operatives in the Obama White House. I just want to let people know that tin foil hats has not been proven effective in preventing the spread of swine flu.
As I headed from the conference to the train station in the evening, I saw a heading proclaiming that the Coast Guard exercise on 9/11 this year was ill-advised but did not violate agency policies. I would suggest it was ill advised because, my friends wearing the tin hats to protect themselves against swine flu have a good reason to suspect that the media is driving frenzies and not providing news. The same media that brought you Balloon Boy is bound to bring sensationalized fictitious information about Coast Guard exercises. My tweet, “[Steven] Brill [of Journalism Online, LLC asks,] will you pay for someone to make sense out of all the raw content? Brill thinks so. I don't.” was frequently retweeted. The only surprise is that in this day of Balloon Boy, Mr. Brill thinks there are people that would actually pay for that sort of editorial efforts to make sense out of raw content.
On the way home, I spent more time getting to know the characters that I hope to appear in my National Novel Writing Month novel.
Today, Fiona is still at home, still sick. It will cut into my productivity at a time that I really can’t afford it. I have over 4000 unread emails in my inbox, and a couple computer consulting projects to make headway on, including some work in Joomla. No, I’m not abandoning Drupal, but there are times that I work with clients that use other content management systems.
I also finally received an invite to Google Wave. What looks most promising to me about it is the integration with Google Gadgets. I’ve looked at Google Gadgets before as part of my explorations into Shindig, so when I get some free time, I want to look at Drupal to Shindig to Google Gadgets to Google Wave connectivity. Then, when I finally get around to getting an Android, I can have some real fun. But now, time to start plowing through some of the tasks at hand.
The Battle for Digital Cable
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 10/26/2009 - 20:29Back in September, Cablevision petitioned the FCC to be able to encrypt basic cable in New York City. I submitted my comment to the FCC and have been reading other comments ever since.
A wide collection of views have been submitted and some common themes seem to appear. One of the biggest seems to be confusing related issues. One is confusing the move of the cable signal to digital, and with whether or not the digital signal should also be encrypted or scrambled. Another is confusing the number of households with set top boxes with the number of television receivers that are getting their signal from a set top box. While many subscribers may have a set top box for one or more of their televisions, they may not have it for all of their televisions. Understanding these and other issues will be important in how cable systems move to digital signals.
A comment submitted by Public Knowledge and the Media Access Project places the request in the proper framework.
While Cablevision is the first major cable system to apply for such a waiver, it certainly won’t be the last. To the contrary this petition marks only the beginning of a “cable digital conversion” that will reshape the industry.
They go on to say that “It is critical that the Commission move expeditiously to a general rulemaking”. Sure enough, RCN Telecom Services supports Cablevision’s request and “requests the Commission to extend such waiver to other cable and open video system operators”. Bend Cable Communications (“BendBroadband”) , a small family owned cable operator in Oregon also commented in support of the waiver.
BendBroadband comes the closest to presenting a viable argument for why cable operators should be allowed to encrypt digital basic cable signals. They talk about the need to install traps to protect against signal theft and the need for cable operators to be able to make service changes without a truck roll if they are going to be able to compete with satellite services. Yet under current rules, to request a waiver, a cable company must show that there is significant cable theft that cannot be thwarted other ways.
Arguing on the other side is Elgato, a leading vendor of products for watching of television on Macintosh Computers. Such a waiver would have a significant negative impact on customers that have bought their products in the past, as well as making their product less valuable for future potential customers. Broadening this argument is the Consumer Electronics Industry.
They present, in a particularly clear manner, that Cablevision has not met the requirements necessary for a waiver; showing neither a substantial problem of theft of basic tier services or some other “strong need”. They also illustrate the vast number of devices currently on the market that would be negatively affected by such a waiver. These arguments are also particularly well presented by the Association for Maximum Service Television (MSTV).
MSTV describes itself as “the leader in fostering over-the-air digital broadcast television” and “represents the television broadcast industry on technical issues before the Federal Communications Commission”.
So, we see a battle brewing between the cable companies, the consumer electronics manufacturers and the broadcast companies. It is also interesting to see ordinary citizens, and people involved in public, educational and government television channels weighing in on the issue.
Public Knowledge and the Media Access Project are right. This does only mark the beginning. They are right, the FCC should address the issue of the transition to digital cable. However, there has not been a compelling reason presented that the transition to digital cable should include allowing the encrypting or scrambling of basic tier cable channels. Indeed, the arguments by broadcasters and television manufacturers present a much more compelling reason why digital basic tier cable should not be encrypted or scrambled.
Cablevision’s comment reply date is November 6th. It will be interesting to see what they have to say, as well as what the FCC ends up doing. What is exciting to me is that as the large industry groups battle it out, more and more individuals are getting involved and that, I believe, is good for our country.
What are your thoughts on the requested waiver? Are there other rules being made or re-evaluated that you believe we should be paying attention to?
