Category Archives: Computer Science

Domains Transferring from GoDaddy to NameCheap

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As a technologist and web developer that uses the internet for various uses, I’ve seen many cases where the DMCA has been used inappropriately – but, as an artist, I’m also aware that websites can and will steal and use my images and art. (I look for free art or news related pictures sometimes when posting blogs, but much prefer my own pictures to avoid the issues.)

GoDaddy.com is one of the writers of the SOPA bill in front of Congress that makes enlarges the consequences and government involvement in copyright issues. They reversed their primary blog post in full support as they lost customers, but they still sponsored the bill.

Historically, I used GoDaddy because it was an easy way to keep my domains in one place. The user interface – and my annoying username is a strange account number presented minor problems. I even used them as a DNS host as it was more central than afraid.org and allows *some* wildcard posting. The whole CEO hunting elephants didn’t bother me. The Danica Patrick and Hooters style models bothered me significantly – but honestly it did help me know that they are a big name in the business (I love car racing, so Danica Patrick is great, but truly using the sex sales method in tv commercials is a bit distracting and not befitting to women.)

Today, I finally made the jump. Is it because of SOPA? Some. Mostly I’ve been seeing competing prices at namecheap – and the managers and login process at GoDaddy have been annoying. Namecheap still has some user interface issues. Their branding is based purely on price, and they are part of a large corporate conglomerate – but their marketing did a great job on the SOPA polices.

The change was pretty simple, though, I wish that I had found a better designed import / export system for eep codes and DNS management. Ultimately EEP, SPF, and Domain Keys were the biggest pains as I had to go through each domain that had these (DKIM is going to be different anyway) and it was relatively cheap – cheaper than renewing at stock prices next year anyway.

It’s worth noting that I’m a small player, only had 8 domains.

RHOK ATL Dec 2011

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The hackathon this weekend was another great Random Hacks of Kindess event. This is my second RHOK event and I’d like to start by saying that the event is different than events like StartAtlanta and StartupCamper partly due to the different crowd that it attracts (significantly more developers than “business” people.)

PolioTracker

Poliotracker was the project that I “worked” on. By I, I mean mostly Jeff setting up a Ushahidi instance that would help us report cases of polio and map them out in a nice report.

The idea came from Cyrus Shahpar of the CDC as they currently experience issues with reporting and field agents with WHO who find cases and then sending medical teams and supplies to deal with outbreaks.

You can view it at http://poliotracker.crowdmap.com – if you have an Iphone, Ipad, or Android device, there is a Ushahidi app that gives a nice interface to report and see cases.

Because there won’t always be data available as agents travel the length of the world. Ushahidi also allows SMS (text messages) that describe a location to be sent to the service and processed through Frontline SMS (somebody the CDC / WHO can use as a supplier)

StreetSafe

Street Safe is an app that helps alerts (urban) explorers know when the area that they are in may not be safe. Jeff made sure to extend the resourcefulness by making it time sensitive as well – so if there is only crime in Home Park when it’s night, then it won’t warn you at 10am as you are walking to class. It’s a web smart phone client that sends a json encoded location string to a PHP server. The PHP server responds with crime reports relavent to that area.

The demo works, so that’s pretty awesome. They’re not actually using real data.

They have sort of addressed my qualms with reenforcing biases by proposing an alogorithm to actually determine if an area is safe. It also has a “hot/cold” functionality.

Clinical ER

The idea is to help deliver ER response in situations where medical services may not be necessarily nearby. There is no working prototype, but the process list / design is covered. The goal is to crowdsource medical emergency response while keeping it easy and free. The difficulties are protecting medical providers from liability issues.

The idea goes towards what many people would like to see WebMD become; where Doctors and Nurse practitioners are on call to diagnose and solve a problem remotely and then later provide some sort of medical solution.

 

Businga

MARTA in Atlanta just began offering real time bus information by sharing gps information from their busses – so this is a highly relavent topic. In Inidia and other countries commercial and municipal bus systems are apparently even less reliable than they are in the U.S. Rather  than leaving the onus on the bus companies themselves, this crowdsources the idea to cell phone users via both HTML5 and SMS (through Twilio) – the server seems php based.

The working demo is a webapp (mobile compatible – jquery ombile) where you can get status or set status of routes. When you get status, it tells you the last seen location of the bus route that you are looking for so that you can predict the time at the next stop.

My comments: It would be neat if bus riders could install this in the background so that their phones are always updating their status. Given many people (6+) moving in the same location on the bus route, you can track the bus. This would also be good using Open Cell location tracking – track just pure cell phone movement along the route and identifying clusters.

Spork

Trying to solve the problem of food recovery – good food getting thrown out, while Georgians go to be hungry. They have an objective document to (by 2013 to decrease the amount of waste food by 5%.

The app uses Django on the server end and uses Twilio for SMS. The team plans to work on this afterwards. And would like to solve the stated objectives by working with restaurants and groceries.

The beta launch in 6 months would involce SMS, an incentive program, email and voice, QA – and more.

The slogan is “Where a good meal goes a long way”

Thanks

I’d like to send a big thanks to the sponsors that include GTRI, ATDC, MailChimp, NerdWerx, and others as the food, drinks, and qwerky door prizes / schwag help encourage people to come.

 

Stephen Reid

Stop Hiding Your Unsubscribe

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[ This is a post somewhat related to work - and I apologize for that as I try to keep my work and personal blog separate ]

Dear Email Marketers,

Stop hiding your unsubscribe links in small, strange to find locations. You’re not helping yourself. If I like or respect you enough to actually open your email – when I want to unsubscribe and I can’t find it, I’m going to do 2 things.

Why is this text so small

Why is This Text So Small!?

  • Report you as spam on my Gmail Google Apps.
  • Consider reporting you for spam on https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov
This means for you – that if I don’t want your email – I go through the task of opening your email – and I can’t unsubscribe gracefully:
  • You will get blacklisted (spam complaints are not good for your reputation)
  • Your next email will hurt your list health when you get bounces back from me
  • You are subject to a $10,000 fine (from my one case, not counting anybody else like me)
It’s really not in your best interest to make that unsubscribe link as small as possible now is it? Try the following:
  • Put your unsubscribe link in the bottom center of the page.
  • Make it reasonably sized.
  • Put it in some fun context. (could be your last chance to save me as a prospect)
At work I have heard of way too many clients asking how to do this. Some even made / tried to make their unsubscribe links white to blend in with the page background. Stop doing it wrong! If people don’t want your email, you want to be the first to know (you can make your lead gen / marketing better in the future) not the last.

Instagr.am Critic (And the Like)

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I hate to be critical of running startups, because I\’ve never raise $500 of capital, much less $500k of capital like InstaGram, but, I\’m going to because somebody asked on Quora about Flickr failing to get into the mobile single post image game.

The IDEA of mobile picture sharing is to share with friends. This means to me, that a service that does solely images (like InstaGram) will never be as great as something like Facebook. And, as a twitter user, I use TwitPic, mostly because it is very well integrated into every twitter client and has a pretty easy to use comment system. My incentive to download a different app is severely limited when I have two that do what I need.

Capital Intensive; Where is the money? Hosting images is the next most costly thing to hosting video, and I suppose that with maximum ad revenue, you might be able to make money. But let\’s face it: If you have images online, who actually looks at the ads next to the picture where the attention focuses : Viewers have a specific scope. Ads in the app – which I\’m still not convinced actually make much money – might be the source.

Cohosting Atlanta BarCamp 4

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This Friday will be the 4th annual Atlanta BarCamp , hosted at the Atdc and hosted by myself and Sam @samsm.

I challenge anybody reading my blog to come with some new ideas to teach me more, and most of all show up. We have almost 60 registrations so far and expect many more Friday night.

Challenge one : setting a date was difficult, the things to avoid were home gt football games and big Atlanta events like taste of Atlanta.

2. Sponsorship seemed a little difficult to gather this year, and while the Atdc can help ponsor the location, air conditioning and other fees apply. Luckily, I\’m a perfect business case for.Microsoft as I started a company with their Azure incubation week after hearing about it from the sponsors last year. Then we got in contact with Core Commerce which has products some attendees might use for  payment processing. We\’re still looking for more sponsorship though to pay for more food and drink.

3. Letting go. If we don\’t have a final sponsor, I\’ve got to realize that this is an un conference with creative idea people. They won\’t kill me if something doesn\’t quite go right.

——-
I\’m going to attend bar camp too though. Which means I need to prepare some talks.

1. I really want to talk about my experience auto racing with the sports car club of America and how it provides a good way for everybody to learn how to handle during loss of traction. How could we institute it as privatized required education?

2. Cloud. Anybody with a web app has some issues with scalabilty and the ideal cloud structure is to use only what you need.

3. Believing ideas are worth $1 to $15 and your time to try. How to start that simple idea or business. Not saying i\’ll make you any money, but at least the idea is out there.

I also plan on taking my sleeping bag so that I can hang out with all of the attendees Friday night.

On Firefox 3.6 Today

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Recently, I\’ve been experimenting with a lot of the new HTML 5 specifications with web forms, javascript, and video. In addition, new browsers have a lot of new features… like with -moz-border-radius or -webkit-border-radius that makes having rounded divs so much easier.

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I tried google chrome for about a week. It uses the new HTML 5 \”placeholder\” text for forms that help discretely, but usefully label a form field. BUT extensions were the problem, namely, the twitter extensions weren\’t pretty or easy to use. Beyond that, the extensions for gmail were pretty ugly as well. I probably did check my google voice pretty often though. In terms of a browser though, it was fine, stable, fast, and I could tell that it used less ram than firefox but both would kill my netbook\’s ram.

What\’s new in Firefox 3.6? 3.6 has themes for your browser, immediately making it more like Chrome. The extensions for it are still great (I use echofan for tweets) It seems to have several more HTML5 type features, and seems possibly more stable and seems to be able to run more tabs just as easily.

Security concerns should be driving you to choose a new browser if you use Internet Explorer after the whole IE attacking Google in China. Separating your browser from your operating system is probably a great idea.

Extensions in Firefox can do more than they can do in any other browser, prettier too. I recently used iMacros to repetitively change DNS setting for about 60 domains on a web system that would have taken several hours without the system. I\’m trying a few optimizers too, Fasterfox can help speed up rendering (but please use the nice to the internet features), there is also a sql lite optimizer that keeps firefox running well.

That\’s it for now. Try the new firefox at http://getfirefox.com

Microsoft Incubation Week Review

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As I mentioned, I was really busy last week with the Windows Azure Incubation week held at Microsoft in Alpharetta.  The event was a week long event from Monday until Friday.

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The first major surprise that we learned was that the Microsoft people wanted us to use ASP.net coding and not use the offshore development team (Thank You Dmytro@  Soft Serve) for primary development.

The project that I worked on was Chris Stuckey\’s FandomU, a social networking site focusing on conventions, fans, and vendors to extend the connections you make at the actual event.  Hopefully FandomU will be able to launch with the MomoCon Japanese Anime convention in March 2009.

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The week was quite the experience. Microsoft brought in a handful of advisors and consultants to teach us about the Azure platform and (particularly for us) to use Asp.net technologies.  Jeremy Likness from Wintellect taught me the basic asp.net connections between the ASP and C#.

Here is the front page of our part of our prototype site, in the 4 days that we had to develop, we developed a few key features, registration, the beginnings to shopping, and the introduction to an idea of things like sharing images and videos on the cloud.

In addition to knowledge, Microsoft provided a great overall experience. We had nice co-working space with brand new \”beta\” style windows 7 computers at the MTC.  We had 3 meals provided 5 days of the week, and not just fast food pizza, but some pretty classy changes including Indian and Thai food.

Thursday, Microsoft spokesman Larry Gregory came and introduced us to all of the great features that Microsoft offers to entrepreneurs and startups. They have a lot of features that I\’m sure will be great. We also did an interview regarding our progress that will be posted on Channel 9 – spoiler: I somewhat

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embarrassingly spit Microsoft Marketing for the PHP community.

Speakers came in throughout the week, and on Friday, these speakers, and other startup voices in Atlanta sat as a judging panel for all of the startups. This was really valuable, as we all got a chance to practice our pitching abilities.

Because we sucked up more than a little to Larry Gregory by mentioning that we could expand from a conference like Momo Con to others like Dragon Con, or his interests like Farscape and Motorcyles, he presented us with our \”incubation\” week diploma.

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My group thought that the week would be more about coaching and less about technology, along with better planning for working with the offshore team as opposed  to us needing to be incredibly familiar with Microsoft products. It was slightly awkward to find that only 3 of 7 companies there had only just reached an idea and planning it out.

I\’ll post later about some of the teams that I met.

Laptop Alive

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I am so filled with joy! This post is being made from my old IBM t23 laptop (my favorite laptop) after it died earlier this February. I also have the privilege now to brag that my laptop works because I soldered it together.

I like my ibm laptop so much because it is my first functional laptop that I picked out specifically. It\’s only a 1.13ghz pentium 3 but it performs like a champ.

At one point I got a cousin mad because I suggested that a dell or walmart pc would work for him but not for me. It wasn\’t cpu performance it was preferences — like the great wifi antennas in the screen and the little tiny led to light up the keyboard. That and it was not heavy and had a pretty good battery life.

I like my laptop a lot!

Anyway, so I found out about the probable lose coil after searching on ebay for a new motherboard. I wish I would have found out about this the last time that my motherboard died! Here is a link to the full description: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=21979

My Gmail was Hacked

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This semster I am in three computer science classes: Information Security, Intro to Database Systems, and Computing and Society. Information security is by far the most interesting (and geeky.)

So even though I\’m in this interesting information security class, I had a weak as heck password on my gmail that allowed it to be brute forced. It was only 7 alpha characters :( . Anyway, so I got two emails at my GaTech account that were saying \”check out this new electronics site\” from Stephen. At first I was really afraid — that I had somehow installed a virus in Linux (it\’s only barely possible.) Then I worried that in putting my music or pictures on the web I symlinked the wrong folder — but I couldn\’t find any contacts in those files (oops I had torrents on my www for a while that Google cached.) Finally I a sent mail in gmail account so it seems fairly localized.

To brag about my information security class some more; I\’m apparently the only one who has seen real life hacks! Heres a surprising piece of info, I\’m a Management Major and have more sharable experience (and make fine geek jokes) as well as the rest of the Computer Science majors. That and nobody else has Linux like installed and customized (much less are they building the kernels.) Anyway, so to the point, our presentation assignment was to share hacks, one swiss guy shared some experience writing windows password grabbers — I shared on website files being uploaded and locked out — and everybody else has shared about newspaper incidents (when the project suggested using your own experience). So anyway, I got some CS credit.

I also wrote the longest programs (with functions) that I have ever written in python and C this week. They sort of work, but to go from not knowing either to writing several hundred lines is pretty amazing in my book. Granted I\’m not programming modules in linux yet, but I understand how to manipulate files, iterate, intake arguments, out, and time. Pretty intense for somebody who has only touched PHP and MySQL in four years.

Last night I went on a date to screen on the green (for ET) we couldn\’t really see the movie, but she was really fun. She kind of says anything that comes to her head whether or not I consider it publicly acceptable. I learned a lot about her personal life — and that\’s fun; I guess I need to work on sharing my life? No, I think I share my life enough (though I do have a private blog post here for alone).

My Brother Tried Linux

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The Reason

So this last weekend, my brother was visiting from Washington State, and inconveniently enough his windows laptop started gettinga blue screen of death as it booted up. Apparently, windows update had automatically installed an update that did not work for his computer and he needed a Windows cd with a recovery console which he obviously didn\’t have access to.

My brother is also a bit of a by the books person and demands that his computer be up to date with everything, windows update,. anti virus, a strong firewall, and anything else — which makes this even more satisfying — that when you try hard it can break things.

My Solution

So we are at my parents\’ house and they don\’t have a Windows XP disk either. I recommend that maybe Dan try booting from USB to Ubuntu — unfortunately, his Dell custom bios in a 2ghz P4 did not have an option to boot from bios! How!

Anyway, so he downloaded and burned the cd, which loaded amazingly fast on his 2gb of ram and to which he happily saw that everything worked, even his hardline ethernet that he had somehow turned off in overally strict firewall configuration, and his wireless cards which appear to be the driver that got updated.

He also thought that it was amazing to have a live cd, the wireless setup so easy, and everything to just work and be somewhat intuitive, especially with firefox in beta.

But Freedom Require Flexibility

Soon he was considering installing Ubuntu in another partition, but wanted to know if he could run his Norton system utilities in wine! This was very frustrating, and hard to explain, but he basically wanted to use only what he was used to, and basically said that he was going to switch back to Windows immediately only because he wanted to use the things that he was familiar with. Anyway, I came back to the city and grabbed a Windows CD to which he quickly cowered back to — to run his Norton checks, de-fragmentation, and service pack 3 updates.

Flexibility in Perspective

The world has only been using Windows XP since 2003, and 32bit Windows for 13 years. Despite the newer graphical user interfaces of Kde/Gnome/OSX that have shown themselves to be be more intuitive and easy for the unadapted people fixed in their ways are still afraid of change, despite the idea that that change might be better.