Before trying to tackle the usablity and packaging issues, I think it would be interesting to come up with a guide on how to do social networking with standard, open protocols, open source tools, etc., in a way that lets the participants own their network. With this first instalment of what I hope is a series, I want to lay out what social networking on the internet really is, at a conceptual and user scenario level. I’m going to ramble a bit, but this is a blog, not a textbook, so cut me some slack.

To get started, you need a way to find people and initiate a connection. This connection has privileges – people you’re connected to see your broadcast information, and information they send to you, either directly, or broadcast, gets special treatment. For now, let’s call this list of people a whitelist. Facebook treats these connections as reciprocal, but I’m not sure they have to be.
So there are two steps to getting started: finding people, and asking for permission/participation in communication.

Finding People
The history of the internet makes this difficult. E-mail addresses are the most important way to identify people, as they are unique. But we there’s no easy way to find someone’s e-mail address. Also, people’s e-mail addresses change over time. Worse still, the history of spam, malware, and scams has made people understandably hesitant to publish there e-mail address.
So we’re left with services/sites like Facebook and linked-in, Google profiles, as well as simple web searches to find people and a way to contact them.

White-Lists
For e-mail, white-lists can be implemented in the e-mail client via filters. Blogs such as WordPress can be configured so that comments require moderation. Once a comment has been approved, the sender of the comment is essentially whitelisted.

Once we have our network, in the form of people and their whitelists, we need to have some means of communication. I think there are three important types:

1) Direct
A direct, person-to-person communication. Examples are e-mail to a single person, or an IM message.

2) Multicast
A direct communication to a list of recipients. E-mail lists, and e-mails with multiple recipients are multicast communication.

3) Broadcast
In essence, this is publishing information on the web, often via a blog, or a posting on some other web site.

Note that one large issue with Facebook is that its users are lead to believe that their postings are Multicast (to their Friends), but in fact they’re essential Broadcast, via Facebooks’ Friend-of-Friend exposure, plus their willingness to provide APIs to partners, and the general complexity of their privacy model and its implications.

I won’t be buying one, as I don’t have $500 to blow on upgrading my IPod touch, or money for a cellular data plan. If I did, I’d rather spring for an Android mobile phone, or wait for an Android or Lunix-based tablet, mainly because the closed-source, walled-garden approach is not something I can continue to feel good about supporting, and is already lagging behind more open technology and business models (see IPhone cut and paste, lack of IPad camera(s), etc.).

So, great prototype, Apple.

v7 on Fedora Hosted

They knew the game had problems before they released it. It was offered for $40 via pre-order, as compared to the usually fixed-price of $60. That’s why I’m not surprised that the game has issues, but I went for the pre-order despite this.

They did a good job for a driving simulator. I can’t comment on how realistic it is, as I’ve never raced in real life, but I’m not sure that matters. But the AI and their private physics model kind of ruins the single-player for me, turning it into a hot lap exercise. I hear the multiplayer is a lot of fun, but I can’t really try it yet given that most players are way ahead of me in unlocking cars. I’ll stick with it at least that far just to see.

So far, it’s been worth my time just in the sense of a break from Forza, some new tracks and new cars. That said, I’d rather be playing a Forza expansion pack with the new tracks and the open-wheel cars.

There’s a bigger issue that really bugs me about racing games in particular. They don’t seem to be getting better, with the exception of graphics, and RacePro falls short even here. Perhaps its my background via my day-job, but I can’t help but think that it’s due to the proprietary nature of game development. Each game has to re-invent the wheel. And industry pressures mean that companies producing good results get new projects in other genres, for example DICE and Rallisport Challenge.

I have no experience with PC-based games, perhaps it’s different there. Maybe this will change with business models, where these games go the way of WOW, a dedicated subscription service, and these monolithic console sequel releases are a thing of the past.

So far, pytrainer just won’t work. It seems to rely on an old blacklisted driver gps_garmin. I have gotten
gpsbabel working, via a usb permissions rule change:

I added the file /etc/udev/rules.d/51-garmin.rules with the following contents:

SYSFS{idVendor}==”091e”, SYSFS{idProduct}==”0003″, MODE=”0666″

With that, I could run:

gpsbabel -t -r -w -i garmin -f usb: -o gpx -F outputfile.gpx

This is a nice XML file. But what can I read it into?

On the mac, it gets a little wierd. The Garmin Training Center wouldn’t detect the device at all.
I downloaded the latest version. It still had a lot of trouble detecting the device, asking me
to reboot the 305 several times. There seems to be a hint that some maps are included
in the application, but no luck downloading them. It’s odd that the “supported” platform doesn’t
even work as well as Fedora.

while True:
    # take a picture
    timestamp = datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S")
    filename = "/tmp/pic-%s.jpg" % timestamp
    print "Say Cheese!"
    os.system('isightcapture -w 960 -h 720 %s' % filename)

    # upload it
    try:
        file = open(filename, 'r')
        print "uploading..."
        connection = ftplib.FTP('ftp.atomicspatula.com', 'henry@atomicspatula.com', 'password')
        connection.storbinary('STOR pic.jpg', file)
        file.close()
        connection.quit()
        print "done"
    except exception:
        print exception
    time.sleep(60)

This code writes timestamped pictures into /tmp, and uses it to upate a single file on the server.

With a nice sequence of pictures, I wanted to use QuickTime to make a nice time-lapse movie. But QuickTime seems to require that the pictures all have the same name with a sequence number, such as pic00001.jpg, pic0002.jpg, etc. Why Apple couldn’t have just suck in all the pictures in the folder in alpha-numeric order is beyond me. So, I wrote another little script to rename them:

rootdir = "/Users/henry/time-lapse"
files = sorted(os.listdir(rootdir))
i = 1
for file in files:
    print file
    shutil.move(file, "pic%.6d.jpg" % i)
    i = i  + 1

Tomorrow, I’m going to run it all day at 1 picture per minute, and see what that looks like at 15 fps.

Stay tuned!

Her mom’s (my ex-wife) first question was, “Can’t it run Windows? That’s what she needs for school”. I explained that the system didn’t come with Windows, and that Fedora was free, and easy to keep up to date. Also, any documents could be saved in formats readable by Microsoft applications. It’s really a shame they don’t run Linux/OO at school.

Still, I have to admit some misgivings about this experiment. Is Linux ready for teenagers? I like to thing that subjecting my daughter to an environment where she has to figure things out will be good for her, as opposed to letting her run Windows, where she can go ask adults for help (often getting bad advice) at every turn.

We’ll see how this goes

IP will transition from the defining protocol of the Internet, to being merely a convenient implementation of services. Independent web sites like this one will be replaced by Facebook pages.

Am I being alarmist? What about the FCC in the US? What about the rest of the world? Can these large media corporations be stopped from turning the Internet into Cable 2.0?

I don’t see nearly enough consumer unhappiness or even awareness of this issue. So long as these services are “faster”, “higher speed”, people seem to be happy.

At best, the present public internet will fragment into layers, some AOL-like services, some private corporate, and perhaps some underground networks beyond control of media corporations.