Keebler/Blog » Software

MSN is so hip and super rad

Jonathan — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 14:18:42 +0000

Like, OMG! Katie likes using MSN soooooo much! She’s always have a good time with her friends on MSN! OMFG! MSN is super awesome, guys, common!

All the chunky jewelry in the world won’t make this 30yo actress appeal to tweens, but what do I know:

Hi I’m Katie. I’m all about staying in touch with my friends no matter what I’m doing or where they are. So I’m, pretty much, always online. We’re always chatting about what’s going on and getting all the latest gossip. There’s always something happening and the new Messenger has tonnes of new features that make chatting more fun. It’s awesome.

Instant Photo sharing lets me and my friends tell stories faster….Awesome! I love seeing what my friends are doing and showing them stuff that happened…but without all the typing. You gotta check it out!

.NET: Monitoring Windows processes from ASPX webpage

Jonathan — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 16:40:27 +0000

I was recently working on some ScribbleLive features that require asynchronous processes to be running in the background on Windows. Since I want to make sure they keep running, I wanted Pingdom to be able to monitor (and alert) on them.

I was happy to find that in .NET, a web application can access the processes running on the host server. I whipped up this little bit of C# (which will be on an ASPX page) to check for the processes, and report if they are “UP” or “DOWN”. Pingdom will then check for the word “DOWN” on a request to the page and let me know if it finds one.

Here are the using statements that you have to have for this code to run:

using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Collections.ObjectModel;

Then here’s the bulk of it:

Collection RunningProcesses = new Collection();
RunningProcesses.Add( "Program1" );
RunningProcesses.Add( "Program2" );

Response.ContentType = "text/plain";

foreach ( Process proc in Process.GetProcesses() )
{
    if ( RunningProcesses.Contains( proc.ProcessName ) )
    {
        Response.Write( proc.ProcessName + ": UP" + System.Environment.NewLine );
        RunningProcesses.Remove( proc.ProcessName );
    }
}

foreach ( string s in RunningProcesses )
{
    Response.Write( s + ": DOWN" + System.Environment.NewLine );
}

When I have a bit more time, I’m going to add a call to Process.Start(…) to restart and processes that have gone down. You know, at some point this code will probably make me unnecessary

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Creating cool clickable wireframes for crude cash

Jonathan — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 16:44:51 +0000

You don’t want to know how many hours I’ve spent messing around in Visio drawing wireframes. It always ends up being a painful process of creating templates for the header, making sure it gets on every page, exporting it to PDF so other people can see it, versioning…..ARGH! I’m getting frustrated just talking about it

Anyhow, I was doing some random googling yesterday and I came across ProtoShare. It looks like a kickass web-based piece of wireframing software with built-in commenting and clickable actions on your wireframes. You can just drag-drop elements around the page like in Visio, then connect actions to them.

I can’t wait to try it out on my next project. I hope nobody FRAMES me for using it. Har har

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Download podcasts right to your iPhone 2.2

Jonathan — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 00:37:27 +0000

The iPhone 2.2 update was mainly just a bug-fix release from what I can tell. But one feature it did bring was the ability to download podcasts right on your iPhone, which is awesome! I use MobileMe to keep my iPhone synced, so there really is no reason for me to ever connect my iPhone to my laptop except maybe to upload some music from time-to-time. I have to admit, I’ve pretty much stopped listening to podcasts since I got the iPhone because I can’t be bothered to dig up the wire to do the sync.

With the 2.2 update that came this week, you can now download the latest from your favorite podcasts right through iTunes.app on the phone. Just go to iTunes.app and search for the podcast you want. Unfortunately it isn’t smart enough to make it download the latest from the podcasts you already listen to. Anyhow, when you get there there’s now a “Download” button. One click will start the download, which will even continue if you close the iTunes.app. When the download is done, you’ll see the podcast in the (you guessed it) “Podcasts” area of the iPod.app.

This update is probably the death-knoll of Podcaster.fm, but for the rest of us, we can all breath a collective sigh of “FINALLY!!!!!!”

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Fixing Connect360 on the New Xbox Experience

Jonathan — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 03:10:01 +0000

When I fired up the New Xbox Experience tonight, the first thing I checked was whether Connect360 worked. I think I would probably use my Xbox for a coaster if I couldn’t play my DivX video on it via Connect360.

When I got into My Xbox>Video Library I was happy to see all my videos and music from my Mac were still there. Unfortunately, when I clicked on a video I got a message:

A media update is required to play this content. Status code: 51-C00DF236

After freaking out for a bit, I realized that the “Optional Media Update” from a few months ago wasn’t properly installed about the NXE installation. All I did was click the grayed-out “Download Now” option on that screen, select the update, and click “Download again”. After that, everything was working again.

Fwew!

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Google results now showing post counts and content insight

Jonathan — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 05:20:29 +0000

I’m not the first to notice this, but it looks like Google is playing with attaching some content insight into it’s search results. Search results for ScribbleLive liveblogs now have a little gray line of text under the title that says something like, “48 posts – Last post: 12 Aug.” They must be looking for repeating dates in the content, checking for a repeating HTML structure, and extracting the information. Very neat, indeed, Google I’m sure Matt would point-out that this is another benefit of using XHTML standards (or close to them).

It kinda reminds me of a website I built in university called @Pad. It pulled the latest course news off websites by looking for dates in the format “##/##/#### ##:##”. It then grabbed whatever was the to the right of it. I might do the same for ScribbleLive one day to scrape in liveblogs from regular websites. Ya know, if I have a day to kill

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Windows Server finally available on Amazon EC2

Jonathan — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 03:35:41 +0000

I’ve been waiting for this for so long! You can now run Windows servers on Amazon EC2. I’ve been playing with a few ways of getting Windows Server 2003 to run on EC2, but it’s always been a massive hack. I never found a distribution running Windows virtually that got anywhere near the performance I would get out of a beige box.

But with native support for Windows Server 2003 boxes from Amazon, now we’re talking. The cost per hour is a few cents more than the Linux distributions (to cover licensing fees I guess) but definitely doable. And with the new ElasticFox firefox extension, there’s no more mucking around on the command line to create and deploy instances.

Let this screenshot be a hint of the things to come

UPDATE: I just got the official mailing from Amazon talking about the launch of Windows servers. It also had a cool little look at their 2009 feature roll-out:

Load balancing – Enables AWS customers to balance incoming requests and distribute traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances.

Auto-scaling – Automatically grows and shrinks usage of Amazon EC2 compute capacity based on application requirements.

Cloud monitoring – Enables AWS customers to monitor operational metrics of Amazon EC2, providing visibility into usage of the AWS cloud.

Management Console – Provides a simple, point-and-click web interface that lets customers manage and access their AWS cloud resources.

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XBMC iPhone Remote battles for control of my living-room

Jonathan — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 21:09:41 +0000

I have to admit, my XBMC (Unofficial Xbox Media Center) hasn’t been getting much use since I got an Xbox 360 and installed Connect360 on my Mac. Besides only having one HDMI port on my TV, the Xbox 360 is just so much slicker to use. After playing a game, I can just pop-over to the Media section, see all the videos on my Mac, and start playing them. But I definitely miss some of the features of the XBMC. It was so easy to watch YouTube videos, check the weather, watch DivX natively, etc.

Enter: The XBMC iPhone Remote. Similar to the Apple TV/iTunes remote, this iPhone app lets you control your XBMC over wifi. Check out the interface in these screenshots for finding media. Slick, really slick.

At the end of the day, the Xbox 360 probably has a permanent home in my living room. But this app just might have given my XBMC a new home on my second TV

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Make SkypeOut calls from your iPhone

Jonathan — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 05:41:57 +0000

It’s already a given that I’ll sell my soul for the first iPhone application to allow me to make SkypeOut calls from my iPhone. I make a lot of long distance calls and I have to run home to a landline because cellphone long-distance plans in Canada are so insanely expensive (if you wonder why I have a landline in the first places, it’s a long story involving my building’s buzzer).

Well, the day has come fring now has an iPhone app that includes Skype integration. It’s definitely Beta, so only try it if you have a strong geek stomach, but it works!

Some quick tips if you’re making SkypeOut calls like me. Make sure to prepend “001″ to all the numbers you call e.g. 001-416-555-1234. Also, there’s no way to make touch-tone sounds during a call, so you can’t use any touch-tone phone service (damn, no ordering pizzas). But give these guys a few more weeks and I’m sure they’ll get it.

Anyhow, another amazing app for the iPhone. Huzzah!

(Thanks fuzzz)

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HOWTO: Liveblogging in Wordpress using ScribbleLive

ShiftEdit — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:00:08 +0000

With lots of websites starting to use the crossposting feature on ScribbleLive that we unveiled back in August, I thought it would be a good idea to put together a quick demo video. In this screencast, I go over all the steps to get your liveblog crossposting to your Wordpress site without using an iframe or other embed code.

Please feel free to drop in other questions in the comments, and I’d be happy to write you back. Happy liveblogging!

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TypeRacer typing racing

Jonathan — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:31:32 +0000

Was Typing class in school so much fun that you want to go back and relive it? Do you have an unhealthy obsession with keyboards? Do you like competing at everyday, normal tasks? If any of these apply, now you can compete online against random people at typing thanks to TypeRacer. It’s typerific!

Cloudo cloud-computing cloud

Jonathan — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:23:43 +0000

In the never-ending stream of people launching web operating systems while everyone waits for Google O/S and Windows Cloud, comes Cloudo. As well as having one of the funnier names, it seems (it’s on private alpha at the moment) to boast some neat features. You can make the GUI look like Windows, OSX, or Linux from a drop-down (sweet!) and they make it easy to share files with your friends. Being a European company, of course they made a mobile “skin” for their operating system too.

I signed up for the Developer Alpha, so hopefully I get in to have a look sometime soon. From their docs, it looks like it’s running on Javascript so I’m curious how one goes about creating an app (without being able to p0wn the whole O/S). But slick Alpha site at least

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Start Your (own) Tube

Jonathan — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:14:58 +0000

In my aimless Internet-wanderings today, I ran across Start Your Tube. Want to start your own YouTube for your dancing sheep videos? That’s now an option…and with revenue sharing to boot w00t.

Or you can just set-up your own video site in 10 steps on Debian, but it’s really your option. Wow, broadband video is commonplace now

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Enhancing Bittorrent Downloads of Licensed Content

Jonathan — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 23:02:38 +0000

As I try to slide into my Christmas vacation, I was thinking about how TV networks should be distributing their TV shows online. It’s a given that play-on-demand, web-browser-based video players are the standard right now, but the number of people still downloading content using Bittorrent really show that the needs of the viewers aren’t be serviced. Which raises the question: why can’t TV networks distribute their shows, DRM-free, on Bittorrent?

From what I understand, it comes down to two central problems:

Rights: TV companies sell the rights to air and to distribute online on a country-by-country basis. For example, they can’t allow an affiliate in England to stream complete seasons of “The O.C.” to Americans
Monetization: Bandwidth costs money. Viewing shows online takes eyeballs away from TV which costs them advertising revenue. They need to make money when people watch their shows online, or it just costs them money.

As a result of each of these problems, the majority of TV networks seem to take the approach that Bittorrent can be brought-down by enhancing strategies/technologies that do take into account rights/monetization concerns. For example, web-browser based streaming of their shows can be geo-fenced (locked down by IP-blocks by country) and surrounded by advertising. DRM-ed downloads can be locked down by country and littered with video advertisements. But with Bittorrent still dominating web traffic, it seems foolhardy to write-off the technology.

Which brings me to the (obvious) conclusion that the TV networks should work with Bittorrent instead of fighting it, by coming up strategies that do allow them to manage rights and make money. There has to be a way, and with the same amount of resources they spend fighting the trend, I’m sure they could flush out some ideas.

The central problem with Bittorrent downloads is their slowness. But direct downloads from the TV network websites cost too much bandwidth. So I suggest a mash-up: the TV networks could seed Bittorrent traffic to videos to which they own a license, but only to people in their country who are using Bittorrent on a page with advertisements. For example, say CTV owns the online rights to “South Park” in Canada. They create something like BitLet that allows visitors to download any episode of “South Park” already floating around in cyber-space but only if they are Canadian and doing so via that webpage. CTV could rely on the anonymous “pirate” encoders to do the encoding, while they reap the benefits. The visitors get faster download speeds and CTV gets to serve ads while the download is going (and metrics on the number of Canadian downloads of that show). Win-win! They could even take it a step further by stitching in ads to the finished download. As long as it was tastefully done, they could append an ad to the beginning of the video to further monetize the whole process.

At the end of the day, TV networks should start focussing on the reality of how people download TV on the internet. Just because they don’t like it, doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. They just need to figure out how to satisfy their own demands in emerging marketplaces. And to do that, they need to start thinking about them

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Mac OS X Leopard + Time Machine + Amazon S3 = unlimited backups

Jonathan — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 03:46:58 +0000

Time Machine is the new killer feature of Mac OS X Leopard that performs an automatic backup of your machine, and the race is on in to be the first to get it using Amazon S3 to save the backups. Amazon S3 is basically unlimited storage for $0.15/GB/month. When you combine that with Time Machine that can do almost continuous backups of system changes, a user could have a backup of their machine without ever having to connect to an external hard drive. For MacBook users, it’s the perfect solution; who wants to connect your notebook to an external hard drive every night?

My money’s on ElasticDrive or JungleDisk (already talked about back in January) to get it figured out first. Who needs football when you can gamble on software development?

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Skype on the Xbox 360

Jonathan — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 03:48:24 +0000

In the ever-growing list of ~~cool~~ Media Center third-party software, I ran across mcePhone (thank Apple for the camel-case) that let’s you make Skype calls right from Media Center or a Media Center Extender. Since the Xbox 360 can be a Media Center Extender, MCE+Xbox+mcePhone = VOIP on your Xbox. How do I dial Bill Gates on this thing?

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Windows Server 2003 Running on Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud

Jonathan — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 03:23:05 +0000

WARNING: This blog entry is super geeky. Proceed only if you know what an “elastic computing cloud” is

This article is a little older, but I was blown away when I saw it. The Enomaly Open Source Consulting group has been able to get Windows Server 2003 running on the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud. I hadn’t heard of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (”EC2″) until the other day, but it’s almost as amazing as their S3 storage offering.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables “compute” in the cloud. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction.

Supporting only *nix operating-systems initially, it was a challenge for EC2 to support Windows Server. However, Enomaly was able to run Windows Server via the processor emulator QEMU. They then packaged the image into an AIM (a EC2 computing image) running the Windows Server 2003 trial. From there, you can put your own Windows license onto the server, Remote Desktop in, and away you go!

Some nights, I’m just blown away by what some developers are able to achieve. Elastic computing clouds, attached to unlimited bandwidth, provides a massively scalable architecture on which to build complex web applications that scale effortlessly. Akamai’s content delivery network is about to look very antiquated

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Community translation

Jonathan — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 15:43:45 +0000

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m a big fan of the feature-set being developed by the people at Mojiti. I’ve started following their blog, and today they added another innovative feature: community translation. They’ve provided an interface for users to translate all the text on the site (1117 phrases) from English to one of 31 languages. Once all the translations are made for a particular language, they roll it out on the site.

For an international site like Mojiti (who doesn’t love watching guys being hit in the groan with footballs in any language ), this sounds like a great way to grow your traffic and attract a much broader audience. ASP.NET makes displaying multiple languages pretty straight forward with built-in globalization features using resource files.

Once again, nice job Mojiiti! I translated some French for you

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Annotating Webnation video with Mojiti

Jonathan — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 22:58:17 +0000

I’ve been waiting for a web-app like this one for a while Launched in September 2006, Mojiti is a tool for annotating video. In its most basic form, you can use it to add subtitles or captions, but it’s actually way cooler than that. It allows a community to contribute hypermedia (i.e. links, images, other videos, feeds, comments) within the context of the video.

For example, in a show/podcast like Webnation that displays a bunch of URLs, you can create hyperlinks inside the video for people to click on. The community can also contribute contextual data inside the video (e.g. what is happening in each segment), and produce an index. From that index, you can jump to that timecode inside the video.

Whereas Joost is IMHO turning out to just be traditional TV on the web, the Mojiti-model is truly leading the way towards “Interactive TV” (excuse the buzz-word). The moment I can watch a newscast, and click on anything they say/show/do to see more information, then we’ll be making progress

To try it out, I annotated the first few minutes of the ‘Webnation’ premiere. You can also check out their tutorial here or a cool demo here.

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Mark Zuckerberg leaves Facebook

Jonathan — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 20:24:45 +0000

I was scanning the image directory where Facebook keeps all the “gifts” they release, and there were a few that haven’t made it into production yet. One of them, was this icon of Mark Zuckerberg with the text “2004-2007″. Facebook started in 2004 so I can only assume that this might be on the servers in anticipation of Zuckerberg (Facebook’s founder) leaving the company in the very near future.

There have been rumours swirling about Zuckerberg selling Facebook for years, but this might be the first “credible” sign that the man we have grown to love (and have gotten used to seeing in our upper-left corner) is hanging up his poking finger.

But before you leave, Mark Zuckerberg, could you please confirm my friend request?

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