Marcel Neuhausler's World

Skype Technologies today released a beta version of Skype 0.8 for Mac OS X, an internet-based teleph...
[MacNN | The Macintosh News Network]

Posted by mneuhaus at 11:34 AM | Permalink

"LiveMessage Blogger Edition is a free service that enables bloggers to drive traffic to their blog sites by alerting interested users of new messages. The system uses real-time networks which find a subscriber on the network and deliver a headline via a desktop alert, a cell phone message or a PDA message. E-mail alerts are also available, but the company has no plans for snailmail alerts."

Posted by mneuhaus at 05:20 PM | Permalink

Open Source Paradigm Shift by Tim O'Reilly -- This article is based on a talk that I first gave at Warburg-Pincus' annual technology conference in May of 2003. Since then, I have delivered versions of the talk more than twenty times, at locations ranging from the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the UK Unix User's Group, Microsoft Research in the UK, IBM Hursley, British Telecom, Red Hat's internal "all-hands" meeting, and BEA's eWorld conference. I finally wrote it down as an article for an upcoming book on open source,"Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software," edited by J. Feller, B. Fitzgerald, S. Hissam, and K. R. Lakhani and to be published by MIT Press in 2005.

Posted by mneuhaus at 02:57 PM | Permalink

How-to using a GPS watch, XML, and satellite photos.
"After running, I take the XML data, export it, convert it and use it in an application which places the path I ran over Satellite photos of the area."

Posted by mneuhaus at 10:11 AM | Permalink

I meant to post this a week ago, but remember when I reviewed the 7610 and couldn't play with the chat and presence apps because I didn't have a OMA Wireless Village server to connect to? Well, Rafe helpfully pointed me at YamiGo.com a free chat and presence service which you can use with your IMPS enabled phone such as a Nokia 3220, 5140, 7610, 6230 and 6820, SonyEricsson T630, K700i, and Z1010, and Motorola's v500 and v600. Very cool! Check out the site, even if you don't have these phones as it's very innovative - an open web-based chat service! Rock!

YamiGo sent out a newsletter last week with a ton of information about their service. Though I have to say that I only was able to connect once, and since then I've gotten an error, they seem to be heading in the right direction as they've completely opened up the back end of the service. There's a web page where you can check presence (think about that - this isn't just chat presence, but *mobile* presence) and an API you can download which allows you do things like send messages and create chat bots:

As an example we developed a Google search service that uses the input from the user to perform a Google search and return the content as the reply meessage. Eg: the user can send a message to "wv:google" or "wv:google@yamigo.com" The message body will be used as is and passed to Google search engine.

I mean, come on, that's cool as hell. I don't care if I'm having problems right now connecting because they'll get that worked out and then this will be a rocking service. Who needs SMS when I can wire up some kick-ass mobile alert system based on their API? The system also interops with XMPP (Jabber) and the other IM systems as well which isn't new if you've used Agile Messenger, but if you're not on a Series 60 phone, that adds some serious power to your mobile.

I don't know if there's any real sort of business model around this service, but I swear if I had enough hours in the day this is something I'd have love to have done myself just to see what you can do with it. It's just neat. Open standard mobile clients, open server, etc. throw it out there and see what happens. I still go back to my iMobs thoughts from last year: there is a real need out there for a ".mac" style web service for mobile phones that provides email, chat, sync, storage, help desk, etc. Imagine combining YamiGo with MightyPhone and SnapFish mobile and you start to get what I'm talking about: a server-side companion to your mobile phone.

It's amazing that YamiGo has been out there for months now, and I've never heard of them! I wonder what other cool-ass services are just hanging out there waiting to be discovered?

-Russ
[Russell Beattie]

Posted by mneuhaus at 10:04 AM | Permalink

The Jakarta Commons team is pleased to announce the release of version 1.1 of the Jakarta Commons Launcher component. Commons-Launcher eliminates the need for a batch or shell script to launch a Java class. Launcher 1.1 is the first official Jakarta Commons release of launcher after it was migrated from the tomcat project almost 2 years ago. (see release notes for more info) The latest binary release is always available on the Jakarta Binary Downloads page, its source is available...
[Apache News Blog Online]

Posted by mneuhaus at 10:03 AM | Permalink

The IBM Reflexive User Interface Builder (RIB), a new technology available from alphaWorks, is an application and toolkit for building and rendering Java AWT/Swing and Eclipse SWT GUIs. RIB specifies a flexible and easy-to-use XML markup language for describing Java GUIs and provides an engine for creating them. You can use RIB to test and evaluate basic GUI layout and functionality, or to create and render GUIs for an application.
[IBM developerWorks Java technology zone]

Posted by mneuhaus at 10:55 AM | Permalink

As share spreads, we’ve been getting more specific questions about how it works: for example, what do we mean when we say that share is a “private and secure environment” to share files, or what kind of chat infrastructure or protocols we are using. These are important topics since we want share to be useful in both personal and work environments. So I wanted to take some time to explain the basics without getting lost in technical details (maybe there isn’t much chance of that, but I’ll try).
Private? Secure? Really?
“Private and secure” are terms that are widely over- and mis-used in a variety of contexts and that can concievably be spun pretty much whichever way you want. The most obvious way to spin their meaning is by attaching conditions to them. Take this imaginary excerpt from the imaginary press release of an imaginary product:

“BoondogleGadget™ is fully secure.
**Support note: BoondogleGadget™ is fully secure only if you disable half the services and enable the security functionality that we ship built-in, but forgot to turn on for the release.”

Ok, maybe this is not so “imaginary,” as it would describe a good number of applications and environments, and I’m sure one or two come to mind more easily than others.
That last bit might appear to be a digression, but it’s not. Why? Because security cannot be optional.
In share, if you can see a contact as online, then it means that a) you have them in your contact list and have approved their contact, and b) that a secure (read: encrypted, one-to-one) connection has been established between you and your contact, in many cases a direct connection (a relayed connection is possible, I’ll get to this in a moment).
All the information (and I mean all the information) transferred through share goes through that encrypted, authenticated channel. Connections made to our servers for authentication or data retrieval purposes (such as obtaining your contact list) are made over HTTPS. As far as connections between you and your contacts, encryption is negotiated on a user-to-user basis: someone talking to you would have no way of reading what you are telling someone else, even if they could intercept the connection (which is possible, although extremely difficult to do). Finally, your personal share network is by default private. You have to go into your preferences in your share account and explicitly share your contact list with others, and even then they could only see who you know, but they wouldn’t have a way of knowing what you are exchanging with them (actually the “share your network with your friends” feature isn’t enabled yet, but it will be soon).
Let’s say, though, that you were half asleep and let someone you don’t know into your network. They are online, and connected to you. Eventually you’ll realize this, and remove them from your contact list. But in the meantime? In the meantime, nothing will happen, because share only gives access to data that you have explicitly shared with a contact. (Now, if you’re consciously sharing your personal files with strangers, that’s another matter entirely, there isn’t much we can do about that).
Encryption is not optional, it can’t be turned off, it can’t be disabled from the application or any of the preferences. One-to-one channels can’t be turned off. You can’t see the folders or files that haven’t been explicitly shared with you by others, and viceversa.
This isn’t to say that it is impossible to break into the system: not only that’s a negative that can’t be proven; I’d be foolish to say that’s the case even if I hoped that was true. But the nature of the application (small groups in closed circles, no broadcast capabilities, secure one-to-one channels) means that at a minimum it is extremely difficult to do so. And even if you do get in, somehow, somewhere, what could you see?
The answer is: not much, since they would be constrained by the way information propagates in share, and, more specifically on how connections are handled.
The connection sequence
When it connects, share attempts to open connections using a fallback sequence, attempting first to establish direct communication, then relayed. This means that if you are behind a closed firewall and want to share with, say, your coworkers, you can, as long as HTTPS connections out are allowed. If the network is completely disconnected from the Internet or does not allow HTTPS access, you will not be able to connect (we are looking at ways to improve this of course, but that’s the situation at the moment).
The default port for share is TCP 7001 (this can be changed in the Preferences). If you are at home, and, say, map port 7001 from your firewall to your machine, every person that connects to you will do so directly. If no direct connection can be established, a relay will be used (if possible–this isn’t guaranteed either, after all, your access to the Internet might be highly restricted). As mentioned above, communications are encrypted, and, since the encryption is user-to-user, the relay can’t “see” what’s being transferred, it simply passes packets along. The information is only accessible on the sender and receiver end.
Direct connections are also crucial for speed on local networks. See it for yourself: load up share on two machines (you’ll need two identities for now, eventually you won’t, but that’s a topic for another day) on the same intranet, and transfer a few big files (try setting the “maximum simultanous uploads” and “max uploads per user” to a relatively high number—say, 10). On intranet connections, we have seen aggregate transfer rates that routinely max out an Ethernet LAN.
You own your data
“But you have servers right?” Would be the logical question to follow the above. And it’s a fair question. What do we store? How do we deal with what we store?
To a large degree, we have a server-side infrastructure to make the service easy to use and reliable: to backup your contact list and some of your preferences, to provide enough to the clients so that they have the best chance of communicating directly, and so on.
But, specifically, what do we store? We store your email address and name, and preferences, and whether you are online or not (not the specific status, such as “Busy"—that is communicated directly between you and your contacts), as well as your contact list. No information is public, and once we enable the “sociable” (read: social software) features, not only they will all be optional, but the settings will default to maximum privacy. You will have to turn things on explicitly to share information with others.
What we do not store is any information whatsoever related to data transfers, communications, chats, and so on. In fact, we really have no way of knowing any of that, since connections are (one more time, all together now) one-to-one, encrypted, and typically direct between participants.
As to the data we do store (or even know about) we have a pretty strict privacy policy.
In short: We do believe “that you own your data” and share has been designed so that it stays that way. We have done our best to make share as secure as we can, and we’ll continue looking for ways to improve it.
This ended up being a bit longer than I intended originally, but hopefully it wasn’t completely boring. Anyway, that’s it for now.
And as always, comments, questions, and suggestions will be appreciated!
[the cactus log!]

Posted by mneuhaus at 10:00 AM | Permalink

I just ran across a site to create your own caricature on Pascale's blog. Very amusing... Took me a sec to figure out how it worked.

Yep, there's 15 minutes I'll never get back...

-Russ
[Russell Beattie]

Posted by mneuhaus at 09:43 AM | Permalink

MW reader Faron Davis wrote up a nice laundry list of "40 Things I Did with My Pocket PC in a Week".

The vast majority of people, including those who currently use PDAs, are not aware of many of the Pocket PC’s capabilities. I decided I would keep track of everything I did with mine for one week (excluding the typical Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks stuff).

His activities included watching tv, listening to music, stargazing, messaging, taking class notes, sharing family pictures, ...

[MobileWhack]

Posted by mneuhaus at 04:28 PM | Permalink

This document lists TCP and UDP ports used by Apple software products.

Posted by mneuhaus at 05:06 PM | Permalink

"InterComm™ is next-generation instant messaging software that makes communication more productive for team-based projects. InterComm offers a level of functionality beyond currently available IM products through its workgroup organization."

Posted by mneuhaus at 03:29 PM | Permalink

"The core benefits of all social tools are very similar, which means
we are going to see (and in fact are seeing) a lot of convergence.
It's good for your swarmth."
... an interesting article.

Posted by mneuhaus at 03:09 PM | Permalink

This is a beta of "News Maps" from NewsIsFree. An image, created by a Java applet, shows a "technology news map" of current event in the tech sphere. Here's how NewsIsFree describes the site:

NewsKnowledge and The Hive Group have joined forces to bring you News Maps, visual maps of the NewsIsFree headline database. News Maps allow you to quickly scan dozens of news articles and instantly understand what's being reported all over the world. Each square in the News Map is an article. You can obtain additional detail on each article by moving your mouse over it. You can read an article by clicking on it.

The Hive Group's Honeycomb algorithm organizes news headlines by source. Size and Color information indicate article age and popularity. You can easily filter and rearrange you results to view articles that meet certain criteria, or that contain certain text.

This kind of mapping isn't an entirely new idea. And the potential, for now, seems greater than the achievement.

But this is an intriguing approach to making the daily information flood a little less intimidating and a little more manageable. I'll be watching with interest.

(Cross-posted to We the Media.)
[Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Posted by mneuhaus at 01:26 PM | Permalink

I ran across a couple of lists of mobile social software applications and mobile urban games.
[MobileWhack]

Posted by mneuhaus at 11:23 AM | Permalink

LifeBlogger allows you to post your Nokia Lifeblog favorites to your blog.

Posted by mneuhaus at 09:36 AM | Permalink

I just ran across a pretty scary new Google hack today. It seems they have just recently added number span searching to their engine. Take a look at this example:

visa 4356000000000000..4356999999999999

As you can see, Google has searched the entire range against its DB. Within minutes I found some crazy sites like this one. Now please know that Google didn't create this tool to be used like this. It's actually quite handy when used correctly. Just an FYI for all of you. Know of any other Google hacks? Post them in my comments!

+krose
-- sign up for my newsletter to find out what I'm up to --

[kevin rose dot com]

Posted by mneuhaus at 09:31 AM | Permalink

Modul8 is a revolutionary MacOS X application designed for real time video mixing and compositing. It has been designed for VJs and live performers. Created by professional VJs and developped by real time imaging specialists, all coming from the video game industry, Modul8 offers a state of the art user-interface combined with very high performances.
[MacUpdate - Mac OS X]

Posted by mneuhaus at 02:30 PM | Permalink

Jackito, the first Fingertip-Touchscreen PDA .. interesting concept.

Posted by mneuhaus at 10:57 AM | Permalink