Ambient technology towards pervasive media

PHP WebSocket Server Framework

2011-08-25T17:19:00.001-07:00

Finding a bit of gap in the market I decided to implement a PHP based WebSocket server with application framework in PHP. I did find other PHP implementations of Websockets but for the most part these were very simple implementations (often single classes to be modified) rather than a full framework that could be evolved with the standard (which is a moving target) and offer a simple application framework to enable Application protocols to be implemented in isolation from the relative turmoil underneath.

There are of course some excellent Websocket server implementations out there including the excellent PyWebSockets along with a number of very good Node.js offerings including Socket.IO. So the other reason for doing something in PHP was to get some experience below the WebSockets covers .

And to therefore I offer you the PHP-WebSockets-Server which is current hosted under GIT. I plan (as time allows) to evolve this along with the standard and if I can figure out how create an apache MOD for tighter integration. The server currently supports both draft 75 and 76 of the standard along with the newer HyBi protocol. As such it can deal with what most HTML5 clients (and Node.js clients) can through at it, although it has not yet have a rigorous amount of testing under its belt. There are also a few things missing from the shelf the main ones being support for extensions and chunked data. I hope to get to these in early Sept depending on work demands.

I don’t want to repeat what is written in the (Readme) documentation on GIT here but to give a brief outline of how it is architected there are three major levels.

Server Framework

The server framework really deals with how to run the server and to that end there are a couple of methods depending on what platform this is being run on. Basically it can be run from the command line on either Linux or Windows and there is a Daemon script for running as such on Linux.

Library Layer

The main implementation is supported in a PHP library which includes a main server class, interfaces and implementations to deal with the Websocket protocol versions (specifically handshake and data framing) as well as some utility classes.

Application Layer

The server is extended through the creation of Application protocols. All Application protocols must implement the WSApp interface which and is isolated from the protocol mechanics which may change over time. Application Protocols can be specified at the client using the Protocol argument of the WebSocket constructor for example in javascript the following

socket = new WebSocket(host, "Foo");

Would request the Foo application protocol.

The organization above allows for graceful evolution of the WebSockets standard whilst supporting various client interpretations without requiring changes to the application protocol.

As I mentioned above I will try to evolve this over time as I can and as major changes to the standard evolve. I intend to use it for my own prototyping needs and therefore will have some motivation to update.

Cross Platform Mobile Applications using HTML5–Part 1

2011-08-18T10:40:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I set myself a task of developing a mobile application using HTML5 that could be deployed onto as many popular mobile platforms as possible with the minimum amount of modification. This post describes that task and conclusions drawn from doing it.
Firstly I should describe what I mean by mobile application since HTML5 is typically used via a browser and a URL. In this case I mean a local application that can be bundled and deployed a from an App Store/Marketplace etc. and looks and feels the same as a local application. Recently there has been a lot of interest in using HTML5 to develop mobile applications in this way so I wanted to test the water.

Lots of options

A quick google search on the subject will find a lot of different technologies and frameworks that claim to provide just what you need to attempt what I was attempting. I set myself some basic design principles and set about verifying as many platforms as I could find. I am sure there are ones which I missed but what follows is the cast that I played with, all of them do what they say they can but there are tradeoffs and to be honest your choice will depend on the tradeoffs you want to make. So set yourself some guidelines. Mine where quite simple. Firstly I wanted to be able to have a lot of flexibility and as such wanted good access to HTML5/CSS and javascript and not be forced to live in one or the other. Whatever I chose had to support mobile device features such as touch, rotation, different viewport dimensions and access to device sensors. I also didn’t want to learn a complex new object model in order to develop my app so reuse of existing approaches was good thing. And finally I didn’t want to pay licensing.
I tested a number of multi-platform technologies such as Jo, Sencha, Titanium, and JQTouch as well a one (Enyo) that wasn’t billed as multi-platform, see my previous post for details. Firstly they all worked to a certain extent but for one reason (e.g lack of touch support) or another (e.g complex javascript framework) I ruled them out. I finally landed on JQuery Mobile. Although in beta and not as polished as something like Sencha touch it was the best option in that is satisfied all my criteria for a framework. As a framework it embraces HTML5 and CSS (rather than encapsulating it) while providing a powerful javascript framework that provides a lot of nice features for a mobile developer. Finally as it’s names suggests it is built-on and uses jQuery which means that a lot of current web developers will be able to easily take advantage of its features without skipping a beat.

Going Cross Platform

The application framework provides the basis for creating the look and feel of an HTML5 mobile application but they don’t help with creating cross platform applications such as I was interested in. They are fine for web based applications accessed via a browser but not a native app deployed and launched like a native app. Luckily the bit that is missing can be satisfied by a great piece of technology called Phone Gap. Phone Gap not only provides an API to access many of common sensors built into mobile platforms (e.g location, accelerometers etc.) it also provides the application shell support which enables you to repurpose your HTML5 look and feel into different mobile environments without (for the most part) changing a line of code. There might be other technologies that do the same but to be honest I stopped looking once I played with Phone Gap they have a fairly complete package which is well documented and integrated with the XCode, Eclipse and Titanium Aptana IDE which became the environments I used the most during this task.

The process

So with my choice of application environment sorted now it came down to the task of choosing my app to build. I had decided that the actual app didn’t matter since it was the journey rather than the destination which was important. Once I had achieved what I set out to do, repeating it for other applications would be easier. So I actually found a JQuery Mobile Tutorial on how to build a feed reader. This tutorial demonstrates how to write a web service which has a UI generated by php files into HTML/CSS/JS pages which are loaded by the browser. All the page generation is done on the server and as such this tutorial created a web application in the traditional browser based model, however it is a good tutorial and it allowed me to both learn JQuery Mobile and provide a basis for my local application experiment.
I re-created the application to work without a service component using JQuery Mobile to generate the UI based on user events. The whole experience was packed into a single HTML file (thanks to the multi-page concept in JQM) and a single javascript file to drive the application logic. I then used PhoneGap to to provide the shell for applications which could used on devices. My first test case was to provide the feed reader app for both Android and IPhone, and I later expanded to WebOS. Using Phone Gap it would be a simple matter to create an application for all the platforms PhoneGap supports as long as that platform supports HTML5.

The image above shows the same app running as a local app on three different platforms. On the right it is running in the Android emulator, bottom left it is running on the IPad emulator under XCode and finally in the background it is running in Chrome on the desktop (more on this later). This is the same HTML/CSS/JS code running on all platforms. The code is simply slotted into the App shell created by Phone Gap.

Conclusions

So I can claim success right? well, not exactly because although it is possible to do what I set out to do there are a few things that need to be improved before I feel this kind of thing is ready for prime time.
First in line is a decent development environment. I used a combination of Titanium Aptana and the Chrome browser. Aptana managed the source code while testing and debugging was done in Chrome (which is why I show it above). At the moment both are needed. This wasn’t ideal but it was possible however, not as seamless as you might like. Getting tighter integration between the development process and debugging process would make life a lot easier all around.
One area that really caught me out is catching errors in generated code (e.g. HTML5 or CSS). Inserting code into the DOM is almost inevitable doing this kind of activity and it can be (was for me) the source of a lot of the problems. Although Aptana does basic syntax checking and code completion you need to use validators (W3C HTML5 Validator and JSLint in my case) to make sure you have clean code. Unfortunately the validators work off static code if there is an error in any of the dynamic code (a closing H2 tag in my case) there is no way to pick it up other than using the DOM browser (in chrome) and wading though looking for errors. This is very time consuming. So a validator that works off generated code would be great.
The second problem I had to deal with is that although the same code can run on all platforms and Phone Gap can be used to hide a lot platform differences there are still accommodations that need to be taken into account. One of the big ones that I had to deal with was the lack of a back-button on IOS, requiring me to generate a soft button when the app was running on IOS. This isn’t hard as phone gap provides an API to discover the platform but it is something to be aware of and requires testing
Having said the above, I am encouraged that this is actually possible it really opens up the whole mobile a little more and although there are going to be certain apps where pure native code is required there are an awful lot that can be coded in the same way as I have done. One comment I always get asked with respect to using HTML5 is performance, all I can say in this case is that when I deployed the feed reader app onto my device (a G2) it performed very well. The app loaded fast (much faster than the network version) and was responsive to user actions. There was a delay when retrieving feeds and feed entries but those were network delays and could be prevented by using caching and prefetch. As it is Jquery Mobile already manages a lot of that kind of thing.
The advantage of creating a local HTML5 app versus a traditional service based application is that other areas of HTML5 can be exploited perhaps the most important one from a mobile perspective is dealing with offline operation. Having the application local also cuts down on network access allowing for minimal amounts of information to be passed between a service and an app. These are areas I plan to deal with in subsequent posts.
For those interested you can get the source code from http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1874766/jqmFeeder.zip so you can play in your own pen . As to what is next, now I am interested in how having HTML5 on the client can and should effect the design of mobile applications I am eager look at both offline operation and the use of websockets to potentially reduce the battery impact of traditional polling apps. More on this later

Cross platform development with Enyo

2011-07-01T17:13:00.001-07:00

I have been looking to use HTML5 for cross platform development on mobile devices and have probably tried just about every framework going and they all suffered from different problems from not handling screen resolutions to not supporting touch to not being mature enough. Today I managed to get access to the Enyo framework which is part of the WebOS 3.0 SDK.

I wont go into the details of the framework just now, but I went through the tutorial to create a simple feed reader app. I used Aptana to develop the application and debugged it using the Chrome browser. Once I had the App developed I used the Palm command line tools to throw the app onto the WebOs Emulator. You can see both browser and emulator running the same app below.

Everything works quite well and I decided to try my luck at running the same app on my Android G2 phone. In Eclipse I created a PhoneGap application and replaced the web asset directory with the same app structure as for WebOS version. Before I could run the app I needed to copy the Enyo runtime onto Android. This is not a small framework but was easily installed on the SDcard via USB. Then the only modification I needed to make was in the Index.html at the point where it pulls in the Enyo framework. In my case it went from:

Then I used Eclipse to install and run the app and voila

It ran great, the performance wasn’t as snappy as I would have liked it but certainly very useable. The App scales very well from the large screen to the small. So far this looks like the most promising cross-platform HTML5 solution I have used so far. Now I have the process down I am interested in how far I can push this framework. Hope to post more on this. I am also interested if Enyo would run on iPhone/iPad. As I don’t have the development environment for that I would be interested to hear if anyone else has tried it.

Sorry for the short post, but it is friday evening and I need a beer

Edit 7/5/2011

After a bit more hacking around in the Enyo API I have found a couple of areas which don’t work in a cross platform manner. This perhaps is not surprising since Enyo was never released as being cross platform in any way. The areas that would affect any application where the desire was to run on more than just Palm devices relate to the specific environment and user interface of those devices. I have found three such areas so far:

Services: Enyo provides access to a number of pre-defined services on the Device some of these work (e.g WebService) across platforms but the PalmService is specific to the device and does not exist on other platforms.
AppMenu: This one is a little trickier since it affects the UI portion of the Application. Although most platforms have the concept of an Application menu the AppMenu component does not travel well off the device. There is a mechanism to deploy it in a desktop browser (by pressing CNTL `) but I certainly could not find the equivalent on Android to make it appear and it certainly is not bound to the existing menu button on my G2.
Handling Back: This can easily be done by providing an application specific back button but a number of devices have an existing back button. Frameworks like Jo and JQM recognize this and provide support based on the platform capabilities. Enyo ignores the back button on Android device which makes it hard to use in multi-view applications where the learned action is to press the back button.

Is the world ready for an Fphone

2010-08-26T12:52:00.001-07:00

Last week Facebook launched it’s newest feature (in the US only at the moment) called “Places”. Clearly a shot across the bow of the growing upstart foursquare which has been gaining steady growth of users and has so far failed to secure a trademark on the notion of “Checking in”.

Facebook Places is an interesting but logical shift as the social network makes it’s first move towards the physical world. It is also the first step which really brings facebook into the mobile space and effectively opens up there application platform to Geo-social, Geo-spatial and location based services. The revamped API now exposes the “social graph” of it’s users to applications and devices that are authorized to use it. The well defined schema provides an interesting infrastructure to design a well integrated mobile experience.

Facebook is reported to have a community of around 500 million users and as such certainly represents a very key social fabric on the web. Given all of this I wonder if will start to see the notion of a facebook themed mobile device that provides the best mobile experience for interacting with that platform. Today facebook has been relegated to being an app which doesn’t make it a totally seamless experience to set status, post pictures and now expose your location on a mobile device. As a service Facebook exposes a really nice set of integrated social interaction tools which support subtly different ways to connect with friends and family.

I am not so sure I would to see an Fphone being developed in the same guise as the Gphone from Google but it might be an interesting as a future feature phone concept. What do others think?

Geocommunities - It’s a Social thing

2010-08-06T16:03:00.001-07:00

Social has been the big thing over the last few years, Social media and Social networks springing up all over the place and bringing people and their together. Staying connected, hanging with your tribe, digital snacking are old and new behaviors that these networks have created and foster. Facebook is the dominant one, at least in North America and boast a large and growing user based. Delivering a mobile device without a good facebook and twitter client will invoke the wrath of the reviewers and the bloggers. New services appear that try to exploit a new facet of online social behavior but have one single driver, the community they are able to attract and from this one revenue source, advertising..

Perhaps it might be time to take a fresh look at the whole social network/media space, my personal take on this area offers a more holistic view which is segmented along the dimensions of time and space. These are dimensions which create both the basis and opportunity for humans to socialize and where digital media can enhance the social interaction. Using this model it is easy to see where existing social tools focus and where the whitespace is. The following diagram maps out the social model..

The dimensions shown above bisect the temporal and spatial boundaries of social interaction.

Same Time/ Different Place: This is clearly an area where technology has had significant impact. The ability to make the spatial divide disappear has been the main focus of telepresence, and conferencing technologies. The first technology was of course the telephone but we now see Halo rooms and mobile Apps that deliver an real-time AV experience for remote groups along with chat and IM programs all of which assume a same-time interaction model.
Different Time/Different Place: This has been the domain of messaging and mail oriented technologies. The immediacy of the interaction is not important but the information in the interaction is of great importance. In recent time the web has service to democratize information across the time and space divides and things like this blog also fall into this kind of social interaction.
Same Time/Same Place: Some people may think that this was just what existed before we had technology. But I feel this is actually an area where there is space to innovate. This innovations comes from the use of social media and also social commerce (more on this later)
Different Time/Same Place: This one might be harder to imagine but most physical bulletin boards fall into this category, even graffiti speaks to this dimension. More recently with things like geo-tagging and location based services there have been grass roots efforts to enable the place to play a role in social interactions independent of time.

Technology has clearly influenced the nature of social interactions in certain areas of the map above. However I would say the most of the effort has been placed along top row where the spatial divide is dominant. The thing that has driven this has been the natural human desire to maintain connectedness even when being away from the people they wish to connect with. What’s interesting is that typically what is going on is sharing. Connections are maintained through sharing information with a community of interest. Posting something on facebook is only desirable if there is a large community of people (friends) to read and comment on it. This desire to share, to discuss, to recommend to provide advice and commentary would seem to be universal.

Perhaps what is missing from the lower row in the figure above where it is the time domain that changing rather than the place is the notion of community. Perhaps if there was a way to capture the community at a place irrespective of time that would enable similar social sharing and social media to occur as it does in the more traditional distance based online communities.

I am going to define the communities that address the social needs in the lower row of the figure above a Geocommunities. The community exists because of the place rather than a URL. We all belong to Geocommunities as we move around and spend time in other locations. Sometimes we are surrounded by people we know and sometimes by strangers or a mix. In either case the Geocommunity can act as a means of sharing, for example

Sharing of Media: Visiting a friends home and displaying images of your vacation while on their TV. Printing a recipe on there printer, or simply exchanging a URI they should see.
Sharing of behavior: Ever turned on a computer in a location and been confused about which network access point to connect to, or which printer to use, or where most people eat. This is community information that be shared (anonymously) and used to create a better experience

There are some applications that do some of the above but nothing on the scale of online social networks. The area is mosly untapped and it would seem that linking the communities that exist in the physical world with the ones the we belong to in the virtual world would extend the richness of applications and services and enable new social interactions and behaviors to develop.

It would seem to me that geocommunities and the support that would need to surround them would most logically come from a mobile solution company. Clearly in any place oriented solution the mobile device is a key component as it would be the instrument through which sharing is enabled and the lens through which spatial information would be discovered.

Context Matters

2010-07-23T10:30:00.001-07:00

The nature of pervasive computing implies mobile, always on and in general ambient. At a recent meet-up in Palo Alto hosted at the Ubiquitous Media Studio the conversation centered a lot on sensory enhancement and control and I have always thought in human terms pervasive computing would be very much like a sixth sense. Today computing is attentive and task driven the ideas behind pervasive computing drive more towards an ambient model providing enhancement and augmentation to the way live work and play will pull on many area and require new paradigms and create new behaviors. The goal to provide experiences that are in the moment and related to the situation and needs, rather than a human response to an event.

There is some glue that is required in order to pull this all together and I keep coming back to “context” being a keep enabler. The ability of a system to understand, react and even predict context will enable the automation and delivery of in the moment experiences. Today that most people believe the Context is merely about location and the use of GPS coordinates to fix a physical position into which relevant services can be delivered. It is true that GPS is a extremely good example of Context but I don’t feel it is enough and to move beyond simply location based solutions we have to examine a richer model of context.

I view context as a set of dimensions onto which solutions are mapped, ability to pull information from those dimensions that matter to its function. I have identified 3 core dimensions

Personal Context: This is perhaps best defined as “your stuff” it is what represents the human, which is composed identity or persona and the digital artifacts, data and services that are associated with that persona.
Physical Context: This is closely related to location but is more than this, since it includes the artifacts and services that are around you. This might be physical objects or unseen virtual elements rooted in the place you currently exist
Social Context: This is the current social group that is around you or are connected to. It is a real-time notion of community and could be made up of both friends and strangers.

Providing windows onto these dimensions will allow pervasive solution to draw information necessary create an experience which is relevant to the situation. There is another dimension which is time. Time affects the physical and social context more than the personal since the former are changing on a second by second basis. The constant changes in these dimensions may enable distinct patterns of activity to be determined and further exploited. The notion of digital diaries is not new and neither is the fact humans are creatures of habit, both of these can factor into supporting predictions of future situations which might increase to performance and efficiency of a system to react or prepare to a future tense.

The may be an aspiration goal and perhaps socially scary but would be a glue to supporting a computing model that is more attentive to us, rather than the other way around.

MeeGo First Impressions

2010-06-07T10:16:00.001-07:00

It isn't often I plug the efforts of the company i work for but in the case of MeeGo I feel justified. I have been continually swapping operating systems on my two netbooks and have run the gamut of Windows (too big and slow), Chromium (too basic) and Jolicloud. The latter had been my staple go to operating system as it offered a good mix of reliability, speed and breadth of applications. I had also tinkered with Moblin but found it to be too unstable and this was my worry when I found myself downloading the MeeGo image and and burning it onto a USB stick. To my surprise what I ended up with was a very nice netbook interface which is lightening fast on my EeePC 1000HA and comes with a nice basic set of applications and hopefully more on the way. Many of the trouble spots i found with Moblin such as the ability to hang onto a network connection were gone and the system boots fast, the GUI is responsive and as such this has become (even in such a early state) my primary netbook OS.

Obviously it lacks a few things, including a broad set of applications but I assume that things can only get better, here. I had to work (harder than necessary) to an MP3 decoder up and running but other than that this is a very promising start.

Ipad my first 24 hours

2010-05-02T07:24:00.001-07:00

My first 24 hours with my iPad 3G under the belt and so I figured i should probably provide my initial impressions. You mileage may differ....This was my initial experience.

The out of the box experience was disappointing, I opened the box peeled off all the protective skins and pressed the power button. The device sprang to life and commanded me to connect it to iTunes. I have to wonder why such a connected device needs to be tethered to breath it's first breath. i duly connected it and nothing happened. Nothing at all!. I concluded that perhaps iTunes needed an upgrade and this was so. About 30mins and two restarts later my new iPad was connected, filled out a few forms and we were synchronizing. Then i realized it was copying all my iPhone apps. Sure enough when I finally managed to untether it and start to play, I spent another hour removing all the apps that just did not belong on the iPad. Sorry apple, compared to the Kindle the out of box experience of the iPad was a bad one for me.

Playing around with the device I was impressed with the speed and responsiveness of the UI. Love that you can orient the device any way you want. Text entry is ok, the virtual keyboard is adequate but not sufficient to do real work and the typing position isn't ideal. Drawing is really finger painting, the control is minimal and the drawing apps I brought down had created controls (mainly sliders) that required ant sized fingers to select and move. I gave up. Perhaps adding a pen support might have been a good idea if this was an important design center for this device. I haven't tried the dictation or voice oriented applications which might help the input restrictions but there is something about talking to a screen that feels wrong. Talking to a phone is where I draw the line.

So basically this is a big iPod touch and this is the point, it really shines with applications that need that extra display surface to add punch. This means the experience of most consumption based apps that are available for both devices have been improved. Where the iPad really shines (and I think the design center) is book reading. Clearly this is the new commercial addition to the Itunes paid media family and this device was made for iBook. I was also surprised to find that the Kindle App worked very well too. Sans battery life this might be the Kindle killer. i can see the potential for better quality ebooks and ones that exploit more media and even context (see an earlier post).

Really wish it had a camera and better in the moment sharing facilities with the iPhone. Try sharing an image (given there is no camera on the iPad) the amazing Bump app doesn't work on the iPad the only shared service that works is iTunes which mean devices have to tethered to a specific itunes instance or possibly through iLife.In the end I found two essential apps if you the reader are stuck. iPad camera is very cool it connects the iPhone (iPad-touch) camera to the iPad as a remote device but falls short if you want to share images already capture on the iPhone. A second app was required to share captured images, the one I found was Pic-Z-Share.

So in summary, great consumption device, will banish my kindle to the drawer, and an average social device. Want to see a camera and possibly some kind of pen support or better drawing experience and more peer connectivity with other devices. And can we finally get away from the incessant tethering for these highly connected devices. The iPad is not an ambient device even though it is highly connected it is not the device I wont leave at home. it serves a thin vertical within my digital lifestyle, a convenient a capable media consumption device but I will be interested to see how future products and applications change this initial take

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Aster Ln,Cupertino,United States

Immersive Media

2010-01-11T14:29:00.000-08:00

In the last decade we saw the explosion of social media, in this decade I wonder if the time has come for Immersive media. At the recent CES (I wasn't there but read the press reports and blogs) it was clear that the Z axis was as important as X and Y given the amount of 3D technology being rolled out and it can't be long before depth cameras are commonplace on computing devices to give depth to gesture interfaces. Another popular subject at CES seemed to be the mass digitization of the written word into various e-book devices and services was quite apparent.

And it was the latter that started me thinking about Immersive media and what it might mean in the context of traditional media such as books. We have had Imax and wrap around cinemas for many years, and Virtual reality simulators all of which cost large amounts of money. In a little while I will have 3D content on the small screen in my home as long as I want to make a negative fashion statement and wear glasses. Digitizing books seems ok to me, making a them more portable and the sales experience more direct. But what if the experience could be more immersive?

In a digital book there is more opportunity for interaction, more opportunity for secondary media streams (e.g audio) that can make things more real and engaging. As can be seen in this CNET interview at CES with Ray Kurzweil

CNET: Ray Kurzweil on the future of reading

The Blio platform seems very interesting and will certain will have the potential for authors to make books more engaging and interactive. I can imagine two key opportunities emerging, augmenting existing art and new purpose authored content for such a platform.

So if platforms like Blio are almost here, what else might be done. Well what is the book could reach out into the environment/context of the reader and cause actions to occur. For example what if the cookery book can control aspects of the kitchen. With knowledge of inventory it could suggest recipes, and instead of asking you to pre-heat the over it could do it for you and maintain cooking time and optimum temperature. Such things might be the next enhancement for immersive media and further blur the physical and virtual worlds.

Why do the clouds in cloud computing have to be so large?

2009-11-06T08:49:00.000-08:00

The current view of cloud computing is one where processing and data storage is moved onto a set of services accessed over a network and served up to a number of small and/or lightweight clients.

The benefits of such a model are often touted in terms of potential cost reduction and ubiquity of access for users and small businesses. Cheaper, more mobile client hardware, less localized fixed infrastructure costs, simpler management and update, extensible resources, potential for global access etc.

There are also some significant issues with the traditional characterization of cloud computing including ubiquitous and consistent connectivity, potential performance issues, richness and controllability of the experience delivered, security, and balkanization of services and information.

So why do the clouds have to be so large? Any system architect will tell you that design is a constant tradeoff between simplicity through the centralization of resources, the cost tradeoffs in resource sharing, verses driving complexity to the edge to achieve performance and more localized and richer experience; and that management of data ultimately becomes an issue of trust rather than one of technology.

A differentiated viewpoint on cloud computing would allow, support and embrace the inclusion of smaller clouds operating at different levels in the system working in concert with larger clouds.

With appropriate infrastructure the the clouds themselves then become a composable fabric of computing, processing, storage and other services enabling the architectural tradeoffs required to support effective pervasive computing. For example a cloud formed by devices in a room create a basis for entertainment (locative context), the cloud formed by the chance meeting of two individuals provide the potential for collaboration and sharing even commerce (social context). This doesn’t invalidate the existing vision and notions of cloud computing it extends this notion maintaining a balance between iron in the sky and local resources. The devil is in the details requiring a new platform that allows the creation (dynamic) and integration of computing elements at the local and global level. It will require a new set of tools, born out of the current web based tools that allow solutions to be created (authored) and deployed across the cloud infrastructure.

Even with the current vision of cloud computing, it is unlikely that there will be one cloud. Major computing vendors are all rushing to the pump and creating their cloud vision and deploying infrastructure this will create a balkanized services landscape with the same integration barriers that exist today in service oriented infrastructures and large web based communities. Other factors such as information security will naturally drive towards a more fragmented cloud computing view. So I ask the question again why do the clouds in cloud computing have to be so big?

Dropbox

2009-10-21T09:33:00.001-07:00

A little while ago I started playing with Dropbox, the concept of such a thing has been something I have been waiting to see for quite a while. There are some other products out there that do a similar thing perhaps the most well known is livemesh from Microsoft. I drifted to Dropbox because of the extensive platform coverage which now includes the IPhone. My first dip into this technology was to simply move photo's around. I was travelling and took a camera and a netbook and wasn't about to try and load up gimp on the netbook but I wanted a place to offload the pictures I had taken. Netbox worked extremely well every image I uploaded form the camera was nicely waiting for me on my desktop when I got home for me to process. Seamless, simple and convenient if only all software was like this.

Since this initial foray into Dropbox I have been using it for other purposes. I helped a friend share images of his grand daughter with his father (great grand dad) using the folder sharing. I also started to need to put more sensitive information between machines so I started experimenting with integration of TrueCrypt and Dropbox.

The general idea is to create a Truecrypt volume on a file which is within dropbox. When mounted the filesystem can be treated like any other through the mount point. Once the volume is unmounted Dropbox will synchronize it. Not only that but it does this quite intelligently only transferring the delta rather than the whole drive.

Now playing around with the Wordpress, Dropbox and TrueCrypt to see if I can create a distributed private journal.

TV3.0 How watching TV is evolving

2009-10-10T13:55:00.001-07:00

For me growing up, TV was in black and white and the first major evolution that I can remember was color (or coming from the UK Colour) TV which added a new visual dimension. Things remained fairly much the same in terms of consuming broadcast content for the next 20 odd years until Tivo came along. Yes you could make the argument that VCR's pre-dated the Tivo but for me I consumed mostly movies on this medium. Tivo allowed me to time shift and it wasn't long before that impacted the way my family and I consumed broadcast TV. I was on the leading edge of the PVR wave and so most of my friends are fairly much caught up now but I am already onto my third evolution of TV and this is really providing a different shift entirely. Not only am I time shifting my viewing I am also shifting geography. For the last two months my wife and I have watched mostly british TV restricting our use of local services to the delivery of live sports and a couple of specific shows, everything else has been from the UK.

The UK content was delivered into the home via torrents and the community is so active that for the popular soaps and drama's we were able to watch them the same day they were aired in the UK. So ok so this is illegal consumption of content but I rationalize it more as a missed business opportunity for the networks and advertisers. I do restrict what I download to broadcast material and would happily pay for it if somebody wanted to deliver it to me as a service (see BBC iplayer) rather than running the whole operation myself as I do today. My setup requires a certain amount of manual selection of shows and the upkeep and maintenance would not be for the naive user. The setup involves an in-home media server which runs the torrent package and is used to download the shows and then distribute within the home. I have a separate 803.11n network to which are attached client devices that can browse and play the content hosted. These clients are running Boxee which is great little integrated client for audio and video that is attached to a community network so my friends can see what I am watching and vice versa. The Boxee clients are connected to HDTVs.

Through this setup I think I have had a glimsp at the next version of TV whereby community (rather than networks) influence what we watch and it will be delivered on a global scale from production houses connected to a peer sharing network with appropriate funding from advertizing and PPV. Waiting to see who does this first....

Fettling Friday: Digging into Opensocial (Part 1)

2009-10-09T10:21:00.001-07:00

Defining the social dimension of the social desktop has led perhaps unsurprisingly to needing to understand the scope and role of opensocial in this context. Opensocial was created by google with the help of myspace and was designed to allow social applications/networks to share their social data with each other. From a users point of view this means that the social applications that you use can have access to your tribe independent of the hosting network on that tribe. From a programming standpoint it is a set of API's that enable implementers to create opensocial containers (social networks like Myspace) and applications.

Specifically there are four API's

Javascript API for clients
Friends: People and relationship API
Activities: publishing and accessing user activity information (e.g live feed)
Persistence: simple key-value pair data for server-free statefull apps

The general application model is just like any other webapp in that there some interface that a user interacts with a client interface (standalone application, gadget etc.etc) and this in turn requests data from the social service to be rendered at the client. The data requests are asynchronous utilizing ajax like semantics but the data request protocol adds a layer which can stack multiple requests into a single HTTP request thus optimizing the network utilization. I suspect that this does push more complexity at either end of the interaction but will need to dive deeper to substantiate and quantify this suspicion. Which I will cover in the next post for fettling Friday..

Dimensions of the Social Desktop

2009-10-06T16:56:00.001-07:00

The traditional desktop is fairly simple in it's architecture there are basically two system constructs. Files and Applications. Applications work on file-types or are pure network/webapp in nature. This is essentially the same for smart mobile devices as well. The rendering model of the desktop uses concepts developed more than 30 years ago and collectively know as a WIMP.

The social desktop would need more dimensions in order to include the social interactions as a basic construct of the platform. The social desktop should also be contextual being able to bind to a physical context (where) and enable the creation and detection of social context (who) based on situation and history.

I can think of the following dimensions that would be needed

Content - This mirrors the traditional desktop notion of content (which is typically stored in files) but includes a more decentralized notion of storage model where local storage is merely a cache of a far larger online storage of content spread across a number of distinct services (chosen by the user). The desktop itself is merely and integration point for this content.

Community - This is a new dimension and goes to the core of the social desktop which is about maintaining links with my colleagues, friends and family (my tribes). Again the virtual representation these communities will be encapsulated in separate services which can be integrated at the desktop. Different user roles will naturally align with different communities. This dimension also deals with community data in its various form. This includes the sharing for information from the content dimension into a community but also the ranking/rating, bespoke authoring, communication, commentary and narration of community information.

Time - The time dimension deals with present, past and future events for the user. It also is the natural home for presence and status information which may in turn be reflected into the community dimension. Time is an important part of the social desktop not only as an organizational tool for dealing with schedule and role based activities but also to navigate and search across a time line.

Context - The social desktop assumes mobility and mobility leads to location which in turn bring in specific services and information (LBS) as well as enable the discovery and use of shared resources that are local. Context can binding specific system functions to local and learned services (e.g printing).

More thinking is required for the rendering model, the simply direction is to just replicate the existing desktop canvas but a more optimum layout and organization model might be better.....more later.

App Stores get us no closer to social desktops

2009-10-04T17:31:00.001-07:00

Just read a blog post by Pete Cashmore on mashable.com about Digg Launching a iPhone app. This struck me all good but then I though of the places I like to use Digg and any number of other social apps and a lot of the time I am wanting Digg something from within another application. For web content on the desktop this is typically done through a browser extension (yes I know they are a pain too but they do work). There is really no such mechanism to include such basic notions such as promoting something ala Digg built into the platform (preferably enabling configuration of personal options) and this is especially true on mobile devices such as the iPhone and other app-store driven platforms such as the current crop of networks. App-stores are great but they end up creating multiple points of light into my social network and in a number of cases I want some of their functionality to pervade all the apps rather than having switch and/or cut and paste.

So now I am thinking what would constitute the mobile social environment, how would it be different from the essentially desktop function model we have today and finally what would be the interfaces that would need to be created to enable functions like Digg to pervade the entire platform.

Something to tickle the grey cells...time to see who else is thinking about this.

Updating the Media Center Part 3 (Jinzora and Mediatomb)

2008-12-27T18:04:00.000-08:00

Jinzora is a web bases media streaming and management system which I have heard good things about so I thought I would give it a go. This service runs on PHP and this in turn needs a web server. Seems like a job for apache.

sudo apt-get install apache2

sudo apt-get install php5

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-auth-mysql php5-mysql (Note include mysql-server if you didn't install squeeze center)

sudo apt-get install php5-gd

PHP 5 gets installed with some wimpy settings, too wimpy for most real apps so needed to edit some settings.

sudo vi /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

Set the following

"max_execution_time" to 300

"memory_limit" to 128M

"post_max_size" to 32M

"file_uploads" to On

"upload_max_filesize" to 32M

Install Jinzora

Update the Media Center Part 2 (squeezecenter)

2008-12-27T16:48:00.000-08:00

Second part of updating the in home media center is bringing back the trusty Squeezecenter (was slimserver) so that all the squeezeboxes in the home would work as before. This involved the steps documented here. I went with the testing branch which at the time of writing was 7.3.1. Note this does install a number of other components on your system including MySql which will require you to set a root password.

Once installed the slimdevices recognized the new server and needed firmware upgrades. There was also a small matter of configuration!, Squeezecenter exports a web interface on port 9000. This is where the initial configuration is down which is essentially wizard driven.

One of the main uses of the Squeezebox's in the home is to listen to BBC radio. Luckily some creative chaps have written a plugin called Alien BBC. The main dependency of Alien BBC is mplayer which is easily resolved with.

sudo apt-get install mplayer

With the dependancies out of the way the plugin can be downloaded, refer to the archive listed in the instructions

wget <archive>
tar -xvzf <archive>
sudo mv Plugins/Alien /usr/share/squeezecenter/Plugins
sudo chown -R squeezecenter:nogroup /usr/share/squeezecenter/Plugins/Alien

finally restart squeezecenter

sudo /etc/init.d/squeezecenter restart

So now the functionality is back where it was when I started....onward and upward...

Update the Media Server

2008-12-27T15:42:00.000-08:00

After two years of service it is time to update the central media server in the home. The current server is running on an old red hat linux image hosted on a old hush pc platform. The hardware is still gusty enough but the OS is past it's prime and good for a upgrade. The main service provided by this box has been to run the in home audio system. This system utilizes the great slimdevices (recently aquired by Logitech) and server component called squeezecenter (was called slimserver) was the only key service running on the box I am updating. The audio system will remain on the new platform since it is the best I have found after trying many different brands over the years, and it has given us over two years of stellar service without much of a hitch other than the occasional upgrade and perhaps most important everyone in the home can actually use it.

So the current audio system stays, but things move on in the house and we have discovered the joys of internet TV and the various torrent feeds that are out there. For the most part we have survived for a couple of months with a patchwork of solutions which work but are not efficient in the delivery of video content to the main TV in the home. The first upgrade was the inclusion of a 802.11n network (not really into pulling wire) which sits along side of the two G class networks, one for computing and one for audio and media. The media G network and the new n Network converge at a hub which the media server will be connected to.

First part of the upgrade is the OS, Redhat is going and will be replaced with the ubuntu 8.10 this proved to be less simple than I expected. First I chose the Server edition because I didn't need a Gui. Everything went well with the install included surprise bonus features of installing LAMP and Samba, however on first boot the kernel failed due to my Via C3.1 processor not supporting the pae Cx8 (pae = Physical Address Extension) feature even though the install CD happily installed it!. According to the chaps in the forum at ubuntu I had to use a generic kernel and that could only be found in the Desktop version. For those people who are now screaming what about the Microsoft Home Server edition. Well apart from the cost (yes I am a tight wad) I had tried to install this on a couple of platforms recently and in both cases it failed to perform. After hours of set up and configuration I finally ended up with a re-badged Windows 2003 Server that either didn't support my display or network adaptor..Anyhoo, the Desktop install (including updates) took about 90 mins which isn't too bad. Now to the software.

Since i had to bail on the server edition I needed to install/configure a few things I would need later.

Firstly ssh access, I don't really need a GUI but I do need remote (secure) access for doing some administration. Since Ubuntu Desktop does not come with ssh enabled this needs to be added.

sudo apt-get install ssh

Since i didn't need a graphical interface I disabled the GUI (Gnome - gdm). Simply click System/Administration/Services. Then unlock the configuration scroll down and disable GDM. Ignore the warnings and restart.

Time to set up file sharing and that means installing Samba

sudo apt-get install samba smbfs

I organized my content under

/media/samba/images - Photos
/media/samba/music - Audio content
/media/samba/videos - Video content

This required a modification to the default samba configuration, first stop the samba server

sudo /etc/init.d/samba stop

Copy/Move the current config. Then use this file.as a basis for your new configuration, make the necessary modifications wherever you see the "YOUR_" prefix. The last section ([MyFiles]) is the actual content you want to share. Change the section name to be the label you want to share. For example I create three sections labeled [Images], [Music], [Videos]. Each identical except for the path information.

Finally make sure that all the paths you specified exist on the local machine with the correct permissions. Then start samba up again.

sudo /etc/init.d/samba start

I didn't want to use to systems passwords over samba so I used smbpasswd to set a network password.

sudo smppasswd -a system_user

First part done...time for a cup of tea...