There are some unknown variables to me so far. I don’t know how much of the money reaches the designated receiver after all, how privacy and security is ensured, how money can be transferred to flattr and so on, yet, this idea opens up new horizons for people who want to invest time in software they don’t mean to sell, but still be able to live a life worth living.

I mentioned the video, it’s a well-made one, see below

( note: I’m using the logo without permission, hope the pirate-bay guys won’t mind that. )

After having mastered the fun part of the day, I had a really interesting skype call with a former colleague of mine who is now enrolled at UCL. We spoke about some projects we have been doing, and of course the upcoming ones. And I guess a sideproject of his, 1bucketapp.appspot.com, is really worth mentioning. I don’t know what to do with it, but maybe you can put it to use.

Another, at first sight, useless site is http://750words.com/, a project where everyone is encouraged to write 750 words every day. The texts are not published nor accessible to anyone else but you, so it’s a private diary for everyone who has a need for one. From my personal attempt to use it I can tell that 750 words is a lot.

The last interesting snippet of the day was a collection of tipps for keeping Java code clean and maintainable. Although the text dates back to 2001, it’s still of remarkabel relevance and definitely worth reading.

Why. In my current position, I am building a set of applications ( most of them rails based ) communicating with each other in a RESTful manner. This is, well, just continue reading my ActiveResource rant here. It’s not really nice to use the official ActiveResource thing. It’s a lot of hardcoding ( e.g. you have to set the remote service’ URL in the model, not in some kind of configuration file, which makes switching from development to testing and production a pain ) and other shortcomings. It’s a good idea, yet far from being perfect. And the two things that bothered me most were service discovery, meaning, the easy ability to resolve a service by its name than by its url, and authentication. Both of them are crucial for a system exceeding the hello world boundaries. That is, what I’m doing. So, utilizing all of Ruby’s beauty, a) a Rails plugin was developed and b) a standalone Server acting as a Central Authentication Service and Service Discovery instance. And from what I can tell, it’s beautiful ( not the codebase, at the moment, but the functionality ).

What is this thing able to do? Well, for the simple parts, it handles all your authentication needs. No more password juggling, just do it in one place, and nowhere else. OpenID compatibility is on the way, both as consumer and provider. It’s nice to have this kind of functionality by only installing a plugin and create a before_filter.

The next big thing is the service discovery. ActiveResource wasn’t used as an entry point for customizations, it was HyperactiveResource. I extended it to provide the ability to connect to the above mentioned central instance ( the address of this instance is defined in a configuration file, by the way ) to retrieve a services’ address. A simple thing, yet it makes life so much easier.

Is there a clue? Yes. Bundling the two features above, you are able to allow and disallow communication between two services at your will. Bidirectional, so assuming you do have an E-Mail-service and an AddressBook-service, you now can allow the E-Mail to access your AddressBook, without allowing the other direction. Authentication is handled completely transparent to the developer, and the rest of the usage is like HyperactiveResource. Just a charm.

And for me? Fun is back

But the other problem is in enterprise or business environments. Imagine some people with the need to have access to certain management systems ( e.g. for remote servers ) sharing one account. While it would be totally usable to simply write down a password and hide it in the office, this is quite time-consuming, each time someone compromises your secret place, you have to reset passwords and find a new place, communicate this new location etc.

So an online solution should be the way to go. Public-Key Infrastructures fulfill the requirement of security sufficiently, yet the usability sucks. A simple desktop application retrieving encrypted passwords and deciphering them locally would be enough. Change a password and publish this change is as simple as changing the password, everyone else would get his new password automatically if he is in the group with access to that password, so password changes are not a problem.

Avoiding showing the password onscreen is as simple. Just put it in the clipboard, and happiness would spread. But where is this simple approach?

I’m still a bit frustrated that there is nothing like a general file metadata format. While every OS nowadays has its own metadata-supplying filesystem, there doesn’t seem to be a way to exchange that information or reuse it. Neither to publish it online, in a useful manner. I was thinking about a format that enables one to store almost arbitrary information in for a file. Album art, MD5-hashes, Author information, keywords. Anything that helps to categorize a file. Thus, a download would start by clicking on the metadata file, a nice screen would popup showing the file type, the supplied information, giving you the ability to get a quick overview about a file.

This could help to prevent the download of malicious software etc.. And it would help to store files correctly without user interaction. As a teacher of mine noticed correctly, it’s impossible to store and organize files in a useful way using the old-school directory-filename scheme, plus the good old 3-char extension, e.g. avi or txt. Something more sophisticated is needed, and would add a bit more usability to this web.

This is once again just a rough idea, and I would love to hear your comments.

I’m convinced that there are enough people to start up a project dedicated to building a graphics suite, open, based on already existing tools. Have you heard of Scribus, a great publishing tool for Linux, free? Amazin software, and I dare to speculate that GIMPs codebase isn’t bad, it’s just some frontend stuff that is. By creating a cool team and spending some time on unifying the user interfaces among these, a great step towards permanent switching would be made.

Still, what are you’re experiences with GIMP or do you know any other, comparable tools?

Could a similar system be also built for free blog-to-blog linking? I guess there are many blogs out there dealing with almost the same topics from time to time, and I think it’s a pity that there is no automated way ( i know of ) to link these blogs based on the post contents. While a hard restraint for such a service to work would be that it is free and easy to customise, many bloggers focusing on their readers would embrace such a system. Once again, free and without any commercial background.

Edit: I guess someone’s done some cool work here, the plugin is called Ping Crawl and links to related posts and also pings them. Nice! Edit, 2: Ping Crawl to be quite uncontrollable and since it actually just looks at your tags, it’s not working well. Though text analysis is certainly hard to do, it’s the only way, I’m afraid.

This is another one of my ideas, and I’d be really glad if I could only realise one of them. If you want to help me out, please please please contact me.

But it’s users using ( and sometimes even buying ) software. And maybe you are involved at building a software product. I bet you consult your friends or fellow colleagues from time to time seeking input for a form, text, feature whatsoever. People who are just like you are the worst giving you advise on how to do something. I do have friends who are still pretty happy using zsh and rocking the world using the shell. But that’s just not the majority. 

Everytime I’m thinking about something cool in terms of a new project, I talk to my strategic consultants. I meet them when I’m at my parents house at dinner. They consist of: My father, my mother and my brother. And it sounds odd again, but explaining something to people who are potentially end-users, you’ll get a clue about how useful your software idea is considered in an instant. And that’s the kind of feedback I’m looking for. I know that most of my fellow students are used to the most weird kinds of application, expecting valuable feedback from them considering anything computer-related is like asking a priest for his opinion about the existence of god. 

So my message at the end of the year is simple: Talk to users. Not only when it comes to usability testing ( which is also crucial ), but at just every step of your project. That’s where the focus should be. For me that means: having dinner regularly. Nice, hm?

Well, long story short, I had an idea ( once again ). I want to build a simple platform that supports especially the blogging people in selling stuff. Why blogging people? Because a modern system would best integrate there, i guess. 

I named it jumblesale, and I’m going to specify what it’s good for. The intended audience is people who occasionally find stuff they don’t have use for anymore and want to sell it, e.g. a TV-Set or an old iPod: Non-Commercial and for private use only. This is to ensure that the focus is not on competition but on selling. This is also emphasised by choosing NOT to allow auctions. I just don’t want to place my 3g-iPod on eBay for a starting bid of 1€. I want to sell it for 120€, and whoever wants to get it for that money, simply can. 

By building the system in a way that supports RESTful access, it can be easily used from outside systems and integrated into blogs, widgets and more useful places. 

I also decided that the eBay of rating sellers isn’t the best, at least not for a small marketplace. I always liked the idea of having a circle of trust, members that guarantee for each other. So each new member requires to have an invitation to sign-up, and a higher count of “friends” at jumblesale will increase ( hopefully ) the trust buyers have in a seller. There is no plan to combine it with other features of a social network, such as messaging and so on, but the friend feature is very useful in this context. Maybe conflicts may be easier resolved by a social pressure forcing a seller to act properly.

Right now I’m exchanging my thoughts on this topic with a friend of mine, Sven Pfleiderer, and we’ll maybe handle this as a project for our studies. You can read his blog here . 

Merry christmas once again!

Staying wake always makes me do weird stuff in the middle of the night. That is, reading all feeds I recently ignored, taking care of stuff that has to be taken care of ( that is university ) and scheduling my activities for the upcoming, lets say, 3 weeks. 

Blogging is definitely a part of it, as I’m not exactly happy with the posts here. I’m working on it, to be more sepcific: I’m planning to do an article series on a .. secret topic. You’ll see, but I still have to finish work on Sharer, my LAN-Filesharing utility. I’ll tell you something about it. 

Sharer is at the moment simply a damn simple binary protocol and a Application implementing it. The protocol structure is quiet simple. A connection between two clients is initiated by establishing a control-connection. Thats the one used to retrieve metadata like file information etc.. If a client wants to get a specific file, it requests a transfer connection. File is being sent over it. I’m still working on it, as it appears to be more work than I initially planned. 

This whole project is based on the idea that simple file sharing that is decentralised and restricted ( or at least primarily designed ) for use in local networks is pretty much a lame topic. Every major company is proud to have some own protocol there, them being not compatible bla bla bla. So i decided to waste some time on this proof of concept. To make it really useful and simple to use ( remember \\mycomputer or \\192.168.0.12 ? that is _not_ user friendly! ), Sharer uses the Bonjour for Java Bindings provided by Apple. The Usage is quite straightforward, and it works well. I haven’t checked out yet if these Bindings are also available for Linux, but I hope so. At least for Windows and Mac(!) they are. 

I think I’ll try to online check-in now. Window seat.