Our CEO sent out an e-mail that included this great post on the value of using GoBinder. It’s a blog post by one of our users who really likes the virtual printer, and the annotation and search capabilities.
Good to see feedback from someone really using the product!
No TagsI’m now using WindowMaker as my window manager, and starting to install
some other applications. A browser would be nice … so I used
Darwinports to install Mozilla, but it was still running this morning
trying to build the thing.
I then remembered that I could maybe go and grab an RPM from here. I’m downloading the Mozilla RPM now and will give it a try later today.
No TagsThings are starting to heat up here at Agilix Labs as the GoBinder SDK
is now reaching good Alpha stages. I just installed the first cut
of the GoBinder SDK (build 931) on my Virtual PC Windows XP machine …
and it’s up and running!
The core functionality is there and working, and we even have the first
sample “File System Sync Provider” in place to test with. I’m now
beginning the process of writing my own plug-ins … as a test of the
new platform, and my own skills! 
It’s cool to see things coming along nicely, and we’ll soon have some
developer forums in place for the SDK. I’m also going to be
looking for some developers who want to join an “early release” program
and beta test our SDK. We’re looking for .NET developers who want
to create some cool plug-ins for our product launch later this
year. If you are interested, send me an e-mail: scott.lemon
[at] agilix.com
Some friends of mine have created a very cool new start-up called
Firepoll. It’s like combining Instant Messaging with Surveys
… and you get paid for it! Well … if you have the right
identity.
What they created is a small IM-like service that you install on your
machine. You then register with their server, and they ask you a
lot of identity/profile information. All of this is stored at
their server. Companies interested in doing market research can
then visit the Firepoll web site and subscribe to do “Instant
Surveys”. Through a web page they select all of the attributes of
the target market that they are interested in surveying, and in
real-time they can see how many of “those” people are currently
on-line. They can then design their survey through their browser,
and select which “rewards” they are offering for completed surveys.
Lastly, they indicate how many survey results they want and when they
post the survey it is sent - instantly - to all of the on-line
community members who match the profile that was defined. As soon
as enough people have replied, the survey is closed.
As a user of Firepoll, I have it running on my machine all of the
time. When a survey is created, where I match the demographic
profile requested, I get a small pop-up message on my machine.
When I click the message my browser is launched directly to the survey,
and the first question is “Which reward do you want?” I can get
things like MP3 music, $1 to my PayPal account, discount coupons,
etc. I then proceed to answer the survey questions, and then post
my results. I get an e-mail with my reward notification in
minutes. The entire process is a clean and simple experience.
To me, this is a facinating solution for a number of reasons …
combining many facets of the Internet into one powerful solution that
really leverages the power of distributed networks. On top of
that, I can leverage my identity - or the one that I define and create
- to actually generate money.
It’s a cool product … I’d love to hear feedback from others on what they think of it!
No TagsOk … so the TabletPCBuzz post about getting Apple software to run on
a Tablet were false … the author has no real evidence to prove
it. Bummer.
On the other hand I *did* get OpenDarwin running on Virtual PC 2004 …
that is the same kernel and libraries that forms the base for
OS-X. I even got a better window manager working this
morning. So at least *some* Apple software is runnable on a
Tablet PC!
During the night last night, Darwinports completed the download and installation of WindowMaker and all of it’s dependancies … my first experience at something other than twm on OpenDarwin.
I had to do a quick update to my .xinitrc file in my home directory, changing it to:
#!/bin/sh
exec wmaker
… and then run ’startx’ … and it all came up working! Very cool … now I’m going to see about grabbing KDE!
No TagsI was surprised to stumble on this today … a OpenDarwin v7.2.1 RPM Repository
… and there are a lot of packages here! I’m going to start to
grab some of these and see how well things work … yet another
direction for getting more software for OpenDarwin!
I was looking for an alternate window manager for OpenDarwin.
I’ve been using twm and it is just too minimal for me. I started
to see if I could get Gnome from Darwinports, but the installation
failed when trying to install Perl 5.8 … which I already have.
I started to look at AfterStep, and then saw mention of WindowMaker in
an article that claimed a complete successful installation using
Darwinports. So I started the installation hours ago and it is
slowly bringing down the various dependancies, building, and installing
them. I’m going to give this a try … and then I found a few
alternate directions.
One thing that I hadn’t thought of is that the KDE environment is
’stronger’ in this market with the Apple use of KDE components.
I’ll see what I can do with KDE, after I complete my experiment with
WindowMaker.
I spent time today working on OpenDarwin again. Now that I have
a working network driver, it’s a lot more fun! I can now start to
download and install a wide range of Open Source to make it a more
complete and usable system.
One thing that I’ve been doing is spending some of the time documenting the work that I am doing to the OpenDarwin Wiki. They are running a copy of the MediaWiki
and I have to admit that I am very impressed with the
functionality. I’m just learning the interface and capabilities,
but it appears to be a very rich wiki with a lot of
functionality. I ended up writing this page today on Installing OpenDarwin x86 on Virtual PC 2004. I still have a lot to add, but it’s a good start.
I’m going to see if I can complete my CD ROM image tonight that will
contain the network driver and some other tools. I’m still
working through some details. I’ll keep documenting.
I’m not sure why, but this morning the DNS or network had died on my
OpenDarwin installation. In addition, the clock had “stopped”
… or was going *extremely* slow. I ended up having to
reboot. At first I was thinking it was a Darwinports issue …
or a repository issue … since I was getting errors trying to fetch
the most basic packages. When I went to grab a copy of Fink
curl failed to resolve the DNS name. That’s about when I rebooted.
When I got logged in then I could begin the download of Fink, and I
went back to Darwinports and began the process of installing Gnome
again … not sure if it’s going to work … but it’s installing!
When you first boot OpenDarwin 7.2.1 (x86) I found that on Virtual PC,
I have to hit enter to get to the boot prompt, and then manually
specify the boot device. The format of this command is:
Now the specific device might vary on your installation so you’ll have
to possible put different values for the channel and device (e.g.
disk#s#). The ‘-v’ is the switch for verbose mode.
After completing an installation, you can go and edit the preferences
file:
Look for the ‘Kernel Flags’ key tag and enter the same string that you used above (e.g.
rd=disk0s1) within the string tags following it. This will set your default boot device.
As of this morning, I was able to get Darwinports installed on my
Darwin installation on Virtual PC 2004. I followed the
instructions on the Darwinports web site. The cvs checkout
worked, the configure worked, and the install worked. For some
reason the ‘port’ command didn’t get installed into my path … I’ll do
that manually and then give it a try … and see if I can grab a better
window manager!
I was looking forward to this mornings breakfast … it’s always a good
set of conversations. I got to share my success in getting
OpenDarwin working in Virtual PC 2004 … I also started a new OpenDarwin Experiences blog where I’ll write about my experiences.
We started off talking about Yahoo! and Google for a bit … comparing
their financials and discussing Google AdWords and search technologies
in general. It was surprising to see that Yahoo! still exceeds
Google in revenues. I wouldn’t have guessed that.
Someone brought up the subject of Google Maps,
and the various hacks that are out there. It’s amazing to see
just how far people are taking this amazing new medium. I brought
up the USAPhotoMaps product that my friend Joe Skehan showed me.
The topic of Microsoft’s new XML file formats came up, and that took us
off into a conversation about whether the open/proprietary formats
really matter. I don’t feel that they make much difference
anymore, and I used C# and Visual Studio as an example … even though
the C# language is now supported cross-platform by the Mono project,
the Mono development environment does not come close to the level of
functionality provided to a developer in Visual Studio.
Phil brought up ActiveGrid
which is a “LAMP stack based system for building web
applications. It looks like a pretty impressive solution for
developing SOA applications. This (for whatever reason) caused me
to think about my recent experiments with Greasemonkey and what I
think is the next generation of real innovation in browsers. I
really believe that client side post-processing of web pages is going
to grow and become more and more commercialized.
The subject of identity theft came up, with one of the folks telling us
about how someone had recreated a physical copy of his credit/debit
card and was using it … in Indiana! They indicated that the
“card was present” at the transactions … even though his wife and him
were here in Utah. We talked about whether RFID would solve any
of this, but I talked about how you could probably create an RFID
skimmer, just as easily as a ATM Skimmer.
We wrapped up talking a little about hacking - and getting hacked - and
the potential for Open Source Web Service intermediaries.
Well … I found out that OpenDarwin v7.2.1 did not include X11 with it … I found these instructions on Google:
GET X11:
ftp http://www.opendarwin.org/downloads/7.2.1/X11-x86.tar.bz2cd /
tar -jxpf {path_to}/X11-x86.tar.bz2
(note: this will only have twm, which is pretty lame. Darwinports will fix that for you.)
This ought to get me back to exactly where I was with OpenDarwin v7.0.1 … so then next I’ll be trying Darwinports.
No TagsI got X going easily in OpenDarwin v7.0.1 … it’s nice to have
multiple xterms … but boy is it far from a desktop! I’m now
trying to get the same going with OpenDarwin v7.2.1 … but it seems
that X is not included!?!?!
For OpenDarwin v7.0.1:
1. To get a GUI up, I created a .xinitrc in my home directory that contained:
2 .Add /usr/X11R6/bin to your path:
3. Edit the /etc/profile if you want to add to the path permanently. Add /usr/X11R6/bin to the existing path statement.
4. Type ’startx’ and you ought to be off and running.
If you click (and hold) you’ll get a menu so that you can open another XTerm, or exit the desktop.
No TagsA year or so ago I heard about the release of OpenDarwin v7.0.1 … the
Open Source project building on Apple’s Darwin project. Darwin
is the core operating system beneath the popular OS X operating system
distribution. At that same time I was starting to use Virtual PC
for all sorts of other operating systems and so I gave it a try.
Well … it almost worked. The OS installed, and after a little
configuration I even had X-Windows working, and a primitive window
manager. The network driver … did not work.
I’ve spent some time, learned some things, and got some things
working. With the recent Intel/Apple announcement, I figured that
I would get back into things …. just for the fun of it. I’m
going to blog the various lessons and experiments that I perform.
I created a new blog - OpenDarwin Experiences
… I’ll start to post some stuff tonight. As of today I got the
network driver working with OpenDarwin v7.0.1 … I want to know if I
can get it to work with v7.2.1. We’ll soon see!
Well … that sure didn’t take too long! Here it is that I’m just
blogged about the fact that I can’t imagine that it’s too long before
Apple has a Tablet PC … and wham! It’s done! (Ok … sort
of!) One of my co-workers came across this post today … one of
the Tablet PC hackers out there got OS-X working on a Toshiba Tablet
PC. This whole Intel migration might just occur pretty quickly!
No TagsInstalling Apple OS X operating system on a Tablet PC
Apple’s Developer Transition Kit offers information, sample code, software,
and hardware developers need to build Universal Binary applications to run on
Macs using Intel processors. As expected, people are also trying to install OS X
on Intel platform computers that they already own.Charles Alexander installed OS X on his Toshiba Portege M200 Tablet PC. The
system runs. The digitizer functions. He’s run into issues with screen rotation,
networking, USB, etc. He writes on TabletPCBuzz.com,
“But with apple’s inkwell (http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/inkwell/) this thing is
really showing potential.”I admit, I’m curious about this and would like to see this working. The
install process appears to be fairly complicated - certainly not an average
Apple or PC user experience for people. Nevertheless, a curiosity. [What is New]
On Sunday night, you wanted to go and hike the mountain behind our
house. You started to say that you wanted to hike to the shed …
the wireless Internet shed that I built up on the mountain. So I
talked your mom into going, and we all headed up the mountain.
It was funny as you started to yell at your mom - “Mom … let’s go!” -
and you scurried up the trail. I have to admit that I was
impressed … this was the first time that you were able to go all the
way up with out stopping! And when we got to the top, you wanted
to just keep going! It was a blast.
On Monday night, after I got home from work, your mom wanted to go hang
out with Joe, and so you and I went hiking up the mountain again.
This time we went up the main trail, and up to the “flat” area … and
then we just kept going. I was again amazing at your stamina and
excitement. We crawled through the trees, went off trail (which
you kept yelling “bush wackin’”) and you just wanted to keep
going. We ended up at the top of the trails … almost to the
point of going up the ridge above the gravel pit. It was a long
ways up.
On the way down, you fell twice … doing complete “chest plants” …
and you got up and shook it off. I can see that I am going to
enjoy taking you out and hiking more … we’ll have to plan a camping
trip before long … maybe even this summer!
As we continue to make progress on our next version of GoBinder at
Agilix Labs, I am continuing to look at all of the potential plug-ins that
might be attractive to students, and our customer base in
general. One area that I am anxious to explore is Peer to Peer
solutions. I am already looking at the Microsoft Peer to Peer SDK,
and have an initial project that we are going to complete. Once
we have our first P2P plug-in, I want to create the next. Phil,
as usual, has given me an idea of where to look next!
No TagsI’ve been interested in distributed back-up systems for some time.
For example, I’d love to see a P2P client given to BYU students that
allows them to commit a percentage of their disk to a distributed
back-up system in exchange for that much storage on the overall system.
Rather than the University having to commit capital to a back-up system
for students files, excess direct-attached disk and software would
solve the problem.I’ve also be enamored with erasure codes
for reliability. Using erasure codes would allow the distributed
back-up network to provide reliable storage in the face of a certain
percentage of nodes going down, leaving the network for some reason,
and so forth.A couple of students in my Middleware class this semester picked
this theme up and did some further exploration. There were a couple of
items that caught my eye.
- PStore
is a secure P2P storage solution from some researchers at MIT. Overall,
the feature set seems quite nice, but the code is not available and it
doesn’t incorporate erasure codes as fas as I know.- DIBS is a similar idea written in python that does use erasure codes. The UI is something only a geek could love.
Apart from being genuinely useful in a campus environment where
its difficult to provide effective back-up solutions for even critical
files, this is an excellent example of a P2P network beyond mere “file
sharing” which has grown to have negative connotations. I’d love to see
the headline “BYU Embraces P2P Technology.”
I just found an interesting post on my Tablet PC blog that gave me cause for this blog post:
Well, MAC IS BETTER THAN WINDOWS YOU PERSON!!
Hmmm … I’m not sure that I have anything against a Mac. In
fact, I don’t believe that it will be long before Apple also ships a
Tablet PC. People ought to understand that the Tablet PC is not
necessarily about the operating system … it’s about a collection of
capabilities and an ergonomic design!
What I have found is that the Tablet PC is really about a design which
allows for easy use of a computer as a “tablet”, coupled with software
capabilities that allow for stylus-based annotation and writing.
As I am watching the various vendors who are now introducing Tablet PC
systems - like IBM/Lenovo - I can only imagine that we are going to
watch more vendors jump onboard. When Dell jumps in … it’s a
proven market.
One of my questions to my friends at Novell is why there isn’t more
Linux effort to support the standard Tablet PC platforms … and maybe
there is. I just haven’t found too much yet. Along this
same line of thinking, I really do think that it is just a matter of
time before Apple jumps in with their own Tablet Mac … or something
like that. It’s not about the operating system folks …
Years ago (wow … almost 10 years ago!) I was experimenting with voice and video over IP using products like WebPhone, CU-SeeMe, and NetMeeting.
It was a blast … and all using 14.4kbps dial-up modems! This is
what really drove me to upgrade modems through the 28.8kbps, and then
to the 56kbps modems. All of these products seemed to fizzle
during the Tech Boom, and also went away during the Tech Crash.
Sometime during the last year I installed an early copy of Skype
and was impressed … it was pretty raw, IMHO, but it was on the right
track. Well … as of a couple of months ago I upgraded and have
been continuing to track the progress. Skype is now looking
really good … I am thoroughly impressed.
What really got me over the edge was using Skype with work. At
Agilix Labs we are dealing with Universities that are all over the planet,
and I found that many of the schools from Asia are requesting all
“conference calls” to be done using Skype. I had a call last week
that was over one hour and forty-five minutes long … with two people
in Singapore, one in California, and two of us in Utah. It was
clear, and free. I have now added Skype as a permanent service on
my desktop!
This is something that Ray Kurzweil can only love to see. This is
a facinating article that talks about a patent that Sony filed … but
the coolest thing is that it is all about neural stimulation from
outside of the skull. If you can cause neural stimulation, then
you can cause neural activity … which a human can now “experience” as
though it were a real experience. This is a huge step forward in
the next generation of augmented reality. Don’t try to stimulate
the senses … just go directly to the brain!
No TagsSony patent takes first step towards real-life Matrix.
Sony has patented a device that fires pulses of ultrasound at the head
to modify firing patterns in targeted parts of the brain, creating
“sensory experiences” ranging from moving images to tastes and sounds.It could allow for movies and compute… [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News]
I’m way behind on reading and posting, and now I’m playing
catch-up. I have been so busy with my new “full time” job, along
with working on three different start-ups. Oh yeah … and with a
family.
So this post caught my eye, just because Jim Kobielus would say
something so outrageous in my opinion. Anyone who has readm my
First Axiom or Second Axiom will immediately know that there is no
way that I could ever agree with this kind of statement:
Each person is the only legitimate owner of their
identity, all manifestations of that identity, and all associated
identity attributes.
What? Are you kidding? What a self-centered perspective of the world! Your identity is completely given
to you. It was created and attributed to you by someone else, or
some other organization. There is always someone else who knows
this information about you, since they are the one(s) who gave it to
you! Our identity is an aggregation of perspectives of us, given
to us by the communities that we belong to. We can een have
different and conflicting identity attributes at the same time …
because we can be members of different communities simultaneously and
each of them can offer differing perspectives.
I believe that one of the biggest hurdles that is impacting the
successful creation and deployment of Identity Management Solutions is
this complete misunderstanding of the origins of our identity. I
can understand the “feel good” nature of a comment like this, but as I
disassemble the statement it all collapses around one core point …
that a “person is the only legitimate owner of their identity.”
If my identity is given to me by some community, how I can I be the
owner of it? I am the recipient of it … I have a community
pointing their finger at me saying that it is true and accurate … I
even have to refer anyone asking for verification back to that
community to have it proven.
It might be true that I would like
to have as much control as possible, but there are other people who
already know this information. In fact, there is a whole load of
identity information that I give away simply by being available for
public observation. Any of the other attributes are all ones that
I get from elsewhere … I am told what my identity is by someone else
… and that person or community is the owner of that observation.
I’ll even go further … since I’ve been wanting to write about this:
No person has a reputation as
an absolute. All reputation is generated as an observation by
another. All reputation is relative to some other person or
community. A reputation is something that is said about you …
you don’t have it.
Anyhow … Jim … we disagree on this note. I get that you might
like this, or want it, as you feel that this would give you some level
of security … but you don’t own any of your identity.
No TagsWho owns the attributes?. Jim Kobielus has jumped fearlessly into the fray of trying to define the normative principles of identity,
by synthesizing the proposals of some others in this space. It’s a well
thought out piece, with some excellent ideas and only one major flaw.
Unfortunately, that flaw comes at the very top of the stack when Jim
states:Each person is the only legitimate owner of their
identity, all manifestations of that identity, and all associated
identity attributes.…
But read the rest of Kobielus’ note for some interesting ideas. [The Virtual Quill]
