Marcel Neuhausler's World

TiVo's Home Media Engine launched: "

As reported at CES earlier this month, TiVo's new developer-friendly package, dubbed Home Media Engine (HME), launches today. I got to chat with Howard Look, VP of TiVo Application Software and User Experience a couple days ago about it, and here are the main points about today's rollout:

• Developer Toolkit available at Sourceforge starting today: http://tivohme.sourceforge.net/
• Toolkit includes a sandbox TiVo emulator app you can run on your desktop to test applications against
• Developer backdoor password that enables HME (will require that you have the new TiVo 7.1 OS)
• You can now code simple games, audio applications, video applications, and utilities in Java that will run on your computer and communicate with any TiVo with the backdoor enabled on your network (you can share your code with others if they want to run the apps too)
• Developer contest announced, to award the best apps developed in the next few months
• Included sample apps include a simple game, a RSS reader, and a weather app

Not much that they didn't allude to at CES, but great to see it out just a couple weeks later. As I've said before, I believe embracing developers and letting them extend TiVo is one of the ways to keep TiVo ahead of the PVR pack. I see an explosion of cool apps coming really soon that will tie the web closer into every TiVo.

Keep in mind this is a developer release, and the first apps will probably be buggy and slow, but I'm sure the best apps will eventually migrate to everyone's TiVo. They're launching with the audio and photo app support (no video for now, but will come soon and may support transcoding any video to your tivo). The audio and photo demo apps I saw at CES were full blown custom interfaces, and I can't wait to see audio clients for Shoutcast streams, Live365, and the Internet Archive, and photo apps for Flickr and Ofoto someday soon.

This new package should open up a whole new world of cool apps for TiVos. Record labels could have showcases for their bands, photographers could show off their best work to friends, and someday soon, folks will be able to stream video on demand, over the net, to their TiVos. A few months from now, I'm sure there will be hundreds if not thousands of HME apps for your TiVo -- I predict some exciting times ahead for TiVo owners.

(Via PVRblog.)

Posted by mneuhaus at 02:54 PM | Permalink

RCP security work underway: "The Equinox team has created a Security work area in order to further discussion and development of Eclipse and the Eclipse RCP as a secure application platform. See the overview and related topics for more information. Of particular interest is a class-by-class analysis underway of the RCP core plug-ins."

(Via eclipsepowered.)

Posted by mneuhaus at 08:57 PM | Permalink

Open source sniping tool takes aim at eBay: "Have you ever bid in on eBay auction item and thought you were going to win, only to see it go at the very last second for a bid just slightly higher than yours? Congratulations, you've been sniped. Luckily, you can fight back by getting your own sniping tool, courtesy of the open source community, which provides JBidwatcher, one of the best ones gunning."

(Via NewsForge.)

Posted by mneuhaus at 02:49 PM | Permalink

24 January 2005 - Apache DS 0.8 (Incubated) Released: "The Apache Directory team is pleased to announce the release of Apache DS 0.8, a pure-Java LDAP server (Incubated).

Our primary vision is to build an enterprise directory server platform and its components where other Internet services snap in to store their data within the directory so they may be managed using LDAP. Those services include LDAP itself, DNS, DHCP, SLP, UDDI, NTP, and most importantly Kerberos, which can integrate with the services to provide full-featured network authentication service.

Features:

• Designed as an LDAP and X.500 experimentation platform.
• The server exposes all aspects of administration via a special system backend.
• Both the backend subsystem and the frontend are separable and independently embeddable.
• Provides a server side JNDI LDAP provider which directly interacts with the backend storage.
• Powered by Staged Event Driven Architecture (SEDA) which can handle large amounts of concurrency.

Coming soon:

• Remote management via JMX.
• Java-based triggers and stored procedures.

The Apache Directory team is looking for developers and users to work with the server and give feedback. Mailing list information is at: http://incubator.apache.org/directory/mailing-lists.html

Please note that the Directory Project is an effort undergoing incubation at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF.

Check ApacheDS at: http://incubator.apache.org/directory/

The Apache Software Foundation provides organizational, legal, and financial support for a broad range of open source software projects. The Foundation provides an established framework for intellectual property and financial contributions that simultaneously limits contributors potential legal exposure. Through a collaborative and meritocratic development process, Apache projects deliver enterprise-grade, freely available software products that attract large communities of users.

----

-- The Apache Directory Team

"

(Via Apache News Blog Online.)

Posted by mneuhaus at 11:38 AM | Permalink

Posted by mneuhaus at 11:24 AM | Permalink

Eclipse RCP knowledge links summary: "Due to my work with jLibrary, an Eclipse Rich Client Application based application, normally, each week, I get some emails asking me if I know some articles, books, URLs, related to Eclipse RCP development. I'm tired of rewriting everytime the same, so I'll condense here all the Eclipse knowledge links that I have.

Downloads:

• RCP binary and SDK downloads

Websites:

• Eclipse RCP wiki
• EclipsePowered lead by Ed Burnette
• Eclipse RCP home page
• Main community site

Newsgroups and email lists

• RCP newsgroup
• SWT newsgroup

Books

• Eclipse in Action
• Official Eclipse 3.0 FAQs
• Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plugins
• Developer's guide to Eclipse 2nd Edition (updated to Eclipse 3.0)

Articles

• Eclipse RCP FAQ
• Ed. Burnette Tutorial, Part 1
• Ed. Burnette Tutorial, Part 2
• Ed. Burnette Tutorial, Part 3
• Jeff Gunther article on developerWorks, Part 1
• Jeff Gunther article on developerWorks, Part 2
• Pascal Rapicault and Andrew Eidsness artible about Branding
• Exporting an RCP application, by Pascal Rapicault
• Eclipse.org Articles ( Don't miss this ! )

Presentations

• Building rich clients with Eclipse Rich Client Platform, by Martin Perez
• Building rich clients with Eclipse Rich Client Platform, by Martin Perez (Spanish Version)
• Overview of the Generic Workbench, by Nick Edgar
• Eclipse RCP Runtime, by Nick McAffer
• Eclipse Rich Client Platform, by Ed. Burnette
• The Eclipse Rich Client Platform, by various JDT memberes
• The Eclipse Rich Client Platform, by Chris Laffra

Weblogs:

• My own weblog :-)
• Luis de la Rosa
• Vasanth Dharmaraj
• David Orme

Code samples

• Browser Example
• RCP Text Editor Example

(Via Martin Perez's Weblog.)

Posted by mneuhaus at 09:55 AM | Permalink

I decided to try BackJack to back these users up individually. BackJack is a Mac-only Internet backup service that has been around since 1998.

The BackJack client software is nice, with a simple interface containing buttons labeled Backups, Recover, Maintenance, Logs and Preferences. Files are automatically compressed & encrypted on the client machine using standard Unix GZip with a CAST 128-bit key algorithm and MD5 hash (same as Blowfish & PGP). The encryption key is based on the password you set up initially, making backups very secure - files cannot be restored without the password, and all data is encrypted during transfer. Automated schedules are easy to set up.

Backups can overwrite the previous one (snapshot) or be incremental (can keep the last x number of versions). No limit to the number of versions you can keep; if it goes over the monthly cap, you just get billed at the next higher level.

I ran a test restore of my 108 MB Entourage database, which BackJack had compressed to 38 MB. The recovery took 8 minutes and worked perfectly.

BackJack's backups are done to 2 geographically separate locations which have their own offsite backups.

Posted by mneuhaus at 05:36 PM | Permalink

Palo Alto wiki company JotSpot leaked news today that it had signed up Walt Disney as a paying customer, stealing it away from its Palo Alto competitor, Socialtext. Disney is JotSpot's first major customer. Though Socialtext's Ross Mayfield doesn't seem fazed.

See full story here.

More here on the (former) relationship between Socialtext and Disney.

Posted by mneuhaus at 02:49 PM | Permalink

Mac mini colocation... starting at $29.99, which seems like a great low-cost way to get your (virtual) hands on a Mac mini, is a service that lets you control a fully administered headless Mac mini through either VNC, Timbuktu, or Apple Remote Desktop. Not a bad way to get a Mac mini serving your needs with some dedicated bandwidth.

Posted by mneuhaus at 02:21 PM | Permalink

theyrule.net is amazing. It’s a graphical flash representation of the interconnections between board members of fortune 500 companies. Make sure to load some of the popular ‘maps’ for some fun. If you like it, help digg it to the surface so that everyone can see it.

Posted by mneuhaus at 02:25 PM | Permalink

"I bought my Apple Powerbook G4 in May 2002 after finding out it ran a *nix variant. The 'it just works' of Apple's Mac OS X was very tempting, but I didn't want to be without the open source applications I had come to know and love. To the rescue came the DarwinPorts project, which gives you the tools to install open source software onto your computer easily."
[NewsForge]

Posted by mneuhaus at 10:48 AM | Permalink

Version 10.0.2

The IBM Integration plug-in for Derby provides a seamless integration between Eclipse and Apache Derby. It enables the use of the Derby database JAR files as an installable component to Eclipse. Additionally the ij SQL scripting tool and the Apache Derby Network Server can be run from the Eclipse console.
[EclipsePlugins: new and updated plugins]

Posted by mneuhaus at 11:18 AM | Permalink

Flow 1.5 - Peer to peer collaborative content/knowledge manager.
[MacUpdate - Mac OS X]

Posted by mneuhaus at 01:34 PM | Permalink

One approach for a weekly plan.

Like most productivity hacks, this might seem superfluous at first, but I think there's a method in here somewhere.

Posted by mneuhaus at 01:07 PM | Permalink

Their personal approach with Delicious Monster has already made the product a resounding success. With a small but talented development team (we started with one and one-eighth programmers, says Wil), the company designed and implemented Delicious Library, an innovative visual card-catalog program for keeping track of all your books, movies, music CDs, and computer games. The company's web site started selling Delicious Library on November 8, 2004. One month later, it had amassed sales totaling nearly $250,000.
[Studio Log]

Posted by mneuhaus at 10:19 AM | Permalink

Okay I have been obsessing about BitTorrent a bit too much these days, but I guess it is a technology which puts me in the media. It is also an area rife with innovation. Sajeet Cherian, emailed about his new software program, Videora.

Posted by mneuhaus at 05:08 PM | Permalink

The Eclipse Foundation has created a new web page to showcase RCP Applications. Do you have a commercial or open source application based on the Rich Client Platform? It's easy to get yours listed to generate interest in the technology (not to mention get a little free publicity).
[eclipsepowered]

Posted by mneuhaus at 04:31 PM | Permalink

You can download Slide 2.1 from:
http://jakarta.apache.org/slide/download.html

Release notes are at:
http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/jakarta-slide/RELEASE-NOTES-2.1?rev=1.1.2.1

The Slide project page is:
http://jakarta.apache.org/slide

----

-- The Jakarta Slide Community

[Apache News Blog Online]

Posted by mneuhaus at 09:00 AM | Permalink