Do as I say, not as I do. Trev's Blog

I received this video from a friend, and thought it was really good. Its Jason Fried, founder of 37Signals, talking about being a software curator. Check it out.

I've spoke before about Sun's Statup Essentials program, an offering to help startups get their business off the ground with enterprise-class hardware and software at discounted prices. They act as a strategic partner, providing training and advice, discounted hosting and storage solutions, and connections to a huge network of investors.

Now they've taken it a step further and added a program called VC Connect, which actually matches your business profile up with select investors for the purpose of acquiring funding. This is a golden opportunity for startups, as many do not even know where to begin and are unprepared when it comes to raising capital. Whether you're looking for seed funding or a big time 3rd-round investment, access to Sun's network of venture capitalists and angel investors is sure to be valuable. It's about who you know, not what you know.

Also check out Y Combinator, which does the same sort of thing on a smaller scale.

What makes a "software engineer" different from a regular "engineer"? Why were mechanical engineers in the Engineering College while I was at the College of Arts and Sciences? So there's the obvious differences: I do not have to obey the laws of physics in my work, and people usually will not die if I make a mistake (eluding to bridge builders and airplanes here). However, I would argue there is a distinct element of creative ability and clever design that goes into building good software -- so much so that I would dare call it an art. Not completely an art, but more of an art than a science. Yeah, I said it. Software engineering cannot be completely mastered by reading, listening, or even learning. The difference between the good and the great has its roots in your genetic makeup.  

Whether we're designing folding chairs or eBay itself, good design is an integrated, cognitive process. Ok I admit it, I've been reading books by Don Norman. There's a bunch of principles, you've heard of them: affordances, conceptual models, mappings, visibility, feedback, and others. These are some of the characteristic of a good design, but how can you truly create something that embodies these principles and is natural for a human being to use? In "The Design of Everyday Things", Norman says that it's about physics, and psychology. There is a natural way that people expect the world to behave. If you drop an egg, it will crack; if you drink too much.. well that's a little less deterministic, but you get the idea.

A good conceptual model is key to a good design. The classic example of a poor conceptual model is the temperature control in a refrigerator. There's only two things to do: adjust the temperature of the freezer compartment and adjust the temperature of the fresh food compartment. And there are two controls, one labeled "freezer" and one labeled "fresh food". Should be easy, right? Well, suppose your fresh food is just right, but you need to make your freezer colder. Give it a try.

The problem of course is that there are two conceptual models: yours and the designers, and that is a big problem. A deeper look into the mechanics of the fridge would show that instead of independent cooling units, there is in fact one thermostat and one supply of cold air, which merely gets split between the two compartments with a valve. That would've been nice to know, don't you think?

It goes deeper, too. All the way into the structure of your memory.

"Say aloud the numbers 1, 7, 4, 2, 8. Next, without looking back, repeat them. Try again if you must, perhaps closing your eyes. Have someone read a random sentence to you. What were the words? The memory of the just present is available immediately, clear and complete, without mental effort. What did you eat for dinner three days ago? Now the feeling is different. It takes time to recover the answer, which is neither as clear nor as complete a remembrance as that of the just present, and the recovery is likely to require considerable mental effort. Retrieval of the past differs from retrieval of the just present. More effort is required, less clarity results. Indeed, the 'past' need not be so long ago. Without looking back, what were those digits? For some people, this retrieval now takes time and effort."

Check this out:

Now, what makes this an art for software designers is that we don't have the luxury of physical elements with which to create a design; it's all visual. What's more, the view of the inertial "world", that is, what people expect to happen naturally, is always changing and in fact evolving at an increasing rate with computers. So while the traditional rules of good design still apply, they are just one shade of the ever-changing chameleon that is software design.

After my post on OpenSocial, I had no choice but to do some research and sign up with an OpenID provider. Ok, you don't actually need to do any research to get a good OpenID, but I can't make even the simple decisions without due diligence. So my choice was MyVidoop, and here's why: browser integration, multi-tier security, and ease of use.

I'm an early adopter; I don't currently use any sites that support OpenID  (although most of them are working on it), but what's drawing about MyVidoop is that it handles existing passwords as well. Here's something to think about: I've never trusted the browser to manage passwords for me. Call me old-fashioned, but I've seen way too many spyware horror stories and hacked browsers (and it doesn't help that I'm a Windows user). But at the same time, I've got this exploding array of passwords to keep track of. So how does MyVidoop solve the problem?

Try an integrated browser plugin (supports FF3) that allows me to store credentials remotely. Actually, it gives you the option to go either way, per password: store it locally in an encrypted file, OR store it with your profile on their secure servers. Why am I okay with this? Because MyVidoop protects my information with several layers of security. Step 1 is browser authentication. The very first thing they check is the IP address and browser signature that is making the request to their system. If it's not one that I have verified using one of several alternative methods (email, text message, voicemail), forget about it, you're not getting in. Step 2 is what they call an "image shield." It's a random assortment of images with corresponding letters, three of which make up my unique password token for that session. It's category-based, so you might set it up to be something like Trees, Cars, and Animals. It's a clever and rather powerful authentication mechanism that relies on the classic usability principle of recognition rather than recall. 

If you have the plugin, it's a seamless experience. Just log in when you start your browser, and from then on it will auto-populate both username and password fields for any site it knows about. And if it doesn't know about it, it'll ask you if you'd like it to.

The final selling point for me was reading their development blog, which shows how their implementation is secure enough to counter a man-in-the-middle phishing attack that is engineered to exploit OpenID providers. It's a pretty cool walkthrough and you can even mount your own attack to see how it works.

Continuing from my Web 2.0 rave on OpenSocial, I'd like to introduce Sun partner Joyent, which provides a host of on-demand computing and storage services to small businesses and startups. They have put together a highly-optimized and scalable cloud, built on OpenSolaris and the Rails framework.  Space on the cluster is sold to web developers via Joyent Accelerators:

"Accelerators are built on OpenSolaris, multi-core (8+), RAM-rich servers (32GB+ each) and vast amounts of NAS storage. Accelerators are deployed in the best routing and switching fabric (Force 10) and the best load-balancers (F5 Networks) available (and always will be)."

They've also leveraged hundreds of DTrace probes to further optimize their environment.  Amazingly, they're offering free Accelerators for OpenSocial and Facebook applications. This is a great way for social/media applications to get started; they can enjoy the powerful Joyent stack from the beginning, and if they happen to grow to thousands of hits per second, they can simply sign on for a contract and crank up the capacity as needed.

And these guys know Rails; in fact, several Joyent employees are or were members of the Rails Core Team. Not suprisingly, their other core product, Connector, is one of the most extensive uses of the Rails framework yet. Connector is an open-source, web-based collaboration suite providing things like email, contacts, calendars, bookmarks, scheduling, tagging, RSS, and search functionality.  The software itself is free, but you'll need a web host and some storage to make it useful.  Ah, what a perfect example of complimenting products.. run it on the Joyent cloud!  Technologies like this are what makes the next generation workplace (one where I can do my work from anywhere) possible.

Joyent also runs OpenID servers to provide its applications and developers a common authentication service.  I'll keep it short (if you don't already know what OpenID is, you need to get with the times), but basically it provides a true single sign-on ability for web applications.  This is huge, since we already have way too many credentials floating around, and the number of web apps is multiplying every day.  A good description of how it works can be found here.

I've posted before about the Flight Planner application that my team has been developing the past few months.  I thought I'd share a few screen shots.  We gave Silverlight a try, and this is what we got.  It actually doesn't look too bad.  The first shot is of our custom airport locator dialogue, which lets you run custom queries for specific airports.  The second shot is of the results screen, showing a (simplified) flight plan.  It indicates distances, times, waypoints, and most importantly, current weather at each of the airports.  Still a work in progress, but take a look and see what you think.

 

 

For our User Interface Design class we've been working on a flight planner application to allow recreational pilots and aviators to quickly and easily create a flight plan.  The web technology of choice? Right now it's the Google Web Toolkit.  The rich web interface tools GWT has available are powerful and easy to use.  After all, it's just programming in Java... with some added CSS of course.  We've discovered an extensive add-on library to GWT called GWT-EXT.  This toolkit has the power to turn your browser into a truly rich, desktop-like environment.  There is a full demo showcase, with sample source code and all.   

Window managers, dynamic history support, custom tabbed panels, layout managers... this is really sweet stuff.  Our project is still in the prototyping stages, but within a few weeks a concrete interface should be available for your viewing pleasure.

 

 

 

A couple months ago I wrote a little tool that converts an Excel file to HTML and then uploads it to a remote host via FTPS (that's right, FTP over SSL).  There are a few good Java libraries out there for FTP, but I spent hours and hours finding one that supported TSL/SSL and was free.  And worked.  There are several out there that claim to have this ability, but I've tried most of them, and most of them don't work right out of the box, or at all. 

Finally, I found a library called ftp4che.  It's free, well-documented, and just works.  I'll give you a glimpse of my uploadFile() method:

   private boolean uploadFile() {
        txtStatus.append("Setting connection properties..." + newLine);

        String host = properties.getProperty("host");
        String port = properties.getProperty("port");
        String user = txtUserName.getText();
        String pass = new String(txtPassword.getPassword());
        String path = properties.getProperty("path");

        Properties pt = new Properties();
        pt.setProperty("connection.host", host);
        pt.setProperty("connection.port", port);
        pt.setProperty("user.login", user);
        pt.setProperty("user.password", pass);
        pt.setProperty("connection.type", "AUTH_SSL_FTP_CONNECTION");
        pt.setProperty("connection.timeout", "10000");
        pt.setProperty("connection.passive", "true");
        FTPConnection connection = null;
        try {

            FTPFile fromFile = new FTPFile(htmlFile);
            FTPFile toFile = new FTPFile(path, htmlFile.getName());

            txtStatus.append("Connecting to " + host + " on port " + port + "..." + newLine);

            connection = FTPConnectionFactory.getInstance(pt);

            connection.connect();
            connection.noOperation();
            txtStatus.append("Connected..." + newLine);

            try {
                txtStatus.append("Deleting old file..." + newLine);
                connection.deleteFile(toFile);
            } catch (FtpWorkflowException ex) {
                connection.noOperation();
            }

            txtStatus.append("Uploading new file..." + newLine);
            connection.uploadFile(fromFile, toFile);
            connection.disconnect();

            return true;

        } catch (Exception ex) {
            ex.printStackTrace();
            if (connection != null) {
                connection.disconnect();
            }
            txtStatus.append(ex.getMessage() + newLine);
            txtStatus.append("Cannot continue..." + newLine);
            return false;
        }
}   

Pretty straightforward, as you can see.  You just set up a Properties object with a set of key/value pairs defining the parameters for your connection, including the authentication type, and then just use an FTPConnectionFactory to create a connection.  After that, I try deleting the remote file if it already exists, and then upload the new one, with appropriate exception handling of course.  Simple and easy, the way it should be.

If you haven't already, you need to check out GotAPI.com.  It's a one-stop API source for all of the common web technologies, toolkits, programming languages, and frameworks.  This is a huge time saver, no matter what you develop.  If you work on any kind of integrated systems that use multiple API's or even databases, this is a dream come true.  You load up several different API's in a tab-panel, and then within each one you can custom search for functions and constructs.  It actually crawls the official API's and loads them into its interface.  Check it out.

Wow, I close my eyes for just a second and two months go by. Here at UNL we're already starting to think about final exams and classes for next semester. Some of the progress made by both Sun and the Campus Ambassadors this semester has been astonishing. First of all, I'd like to point out that the UNL Open Source User Group has been steadily growing and is excited about all the new features and enhancements in Netbeans 6.0. I've been doing a lot of word-of-mouth evangelism with peers and professors lately, and all have been very impressed. Personally, I think that the Ruby support in Netbeans is phenomenal; just another example of how this IDE is so powerful and yet so flexible. It's amazing how many different technologies the Netbeans IDE actually supports. And they're constantly adding more (a PHP plugin is on its way!).

It's also not a bad time to mention that Project Indiana is already turning heads. We're still a few months from the final release, but a developer preview is out and is said to be worlds better than previous versions of OpenSolaris. Traditionally as a non-Linux/Unix user, I'm excited that Sun is making the Solaris operating system easier to use and more developer-friendly. I'll keep you posted when I get it installed.

Today I realized that my iPod is old... and so are the 5000+ songs on it. By the way, I'm glad I didn't overpay by $200 on an iPhone only to get $100 back from Apple while the wiser point and laugh. Anyways I've often found the need for portable music, and more and more I'm thinking that sites like ProjectPlayist and Deezer are the way to go. You wouldn't think that music streaming sites are in the same market as MP3 players, but for the past year I've turned to the internet over the iPod almost every time. Obviously this isn't yet practical when you're out for a jog or at the gym, but the more accessible the internet becomes, the closer we're getting to that reality. Look at phones... they almost all have the ability to get music and video, right when you want it. But back to the point: entertainment has leaped into the on-demand age, and we're redefining "portable". Of course, your stereo setup now needs to include a computer, but hey, isn't that becoming the standard now anyway? Now I can log in from any computer anywhere and have all my playlists instantly at my fingertips, ready to go. It's the same with TV shows and movies. The pace of technology is almost sickening, and it reminds me of all the stuff I have that I don't use. But hey, as long as technology can satisfy my "I want it now" mindset, I'll be happy.