Category Software

Using OTE's 11888 to provide fast CLID data for FreePBX/Asterisk

For those using FreePBX (a configuration/administrative interface that manages Asterisk) there is a CallerID Lookup module, published by the FreePBX team. The module allows you to interface with data sources using several methods, one of them being http. Like many companies, we maintain several systems that can be easily integrated with our VoIP PBX system, […]

Mango / Tears of Steel

Tears of Steel is the fourth film (and the first live-action short) by the blender foundation and a giant leap forward for the community and the software. It is a sci-fi film that showcases recent work on blender, including Compositing, the Cycles render engine and many of the features introduced in the blender 2.6x series, […]

Visualising geospatial data using SVG, Python and Javascript/d3

Geography is an immensely important tool in the modern business environment. Doing business globally was the first wave of the globalised economy, and the widespread use of internet-based services and e-commerce only accelerated and solidified the notion. The next wave came with mobility in the form of location-based services. Today everyone can create location-based tools […]

TextMate 2 is now available under GPL3!

Who would've thought a few years ago that this day would come! Given the success of TextMate 1.x and the unprecedented delay in releasing TextMate 2, I guess open sourcing it makes sense. But GPL3? Really?

On the Google IO Keynote

So Android announced Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), the next version of the operating system with much awaited performance improvements and some new (marginal) features, available to Galaxy Nexus users in mid-July and the remaining 99% of the Android ecosystem sometime between a year and never. Along with the new version of Android, Google announced several […]

A Bill Of Rights

I found this article on EFF to be a very concise summary of many of the issues I've written (and often talked about) in the past, pertaining to the freedom to use the devices you have paid for and own as you see fit, and the increasingly worrying trend of manufacturer lockdowns that largely define what you can and cannot do with them. While Apple with its popular iOS may be the most well-known (and most successful) ambassador of the lock-down platform, the trend has been on the radar well before Apple managed to escape the threat of extinction in the late 1990s; Microsoft, with Windows RT and the Secure Boot flag in UEFI only manages to actually implement all those technologies they initially developed, studied and proposed more than ten years ago with Palladium/TCPA. The cat is still out of the box, but technology ages quickly and the threat is quite real: a combination of a cloud abused by the Valley oligopoly, lack of the computing storage ubiquity and locked down devices would be a nightmare scenario that would strip the computer of its fundamental differentiating quality from appliances of yore: its malleability, the power derived from its programmability and its ability to solve countless problems, to achieve infinite different tasks and not perform a single function, as manufacturers would most likely want.

On Device Identifiers.

Mere hours after pressing ‘Publish’ on the previous mini-article concerning walled gardens, an article on TechCrunch, this morning, clarified the situation we have more or less been suspecting for a while now: that Apple, after deprecating UDIDs (one of the things they truly did well in iOS from the beginning), they will start rejecting apps […]

Independent companies

WSJ: Before Steve Jobs of Apple Inc. died, he approached you with a buyout offer. Why did you turn it away? Mr. Ferdowsi: The problem that we're trying to solve is a problem that only an independent company can solve. We want to let you use a Mac, or Windows PC, or iPad, or Android, without having to think about any of the technical details. It isn't a problem any of those larger companies is going to be as inclined to solve in the same way we are.
A very very pertinent point, seeing that we're experiencing a renaissance of massive, vertical closed systems, walled gardens and a childish desire to lock people into proprietary platforms that try to offer everything. Look at how Google, Facebook, Apple and now Microsoft are heavily promoting their respective 'authentication' platforms, playing the game of ignoring_the_competition. Facebook would certainly like you to use their APIs to authenticate your users, but they don't have to try much because they have the most powerful database right now. Microsoft heavily promotes their 'Microsoft Account' (previously known by half a dozen names) and will do even more in Windows 8, while Apple makes ever increasing use of their Apple ID, across their products and services. Google, in lieu of their recent privacy terms update, needs no introduction I think with Google+ and every other service tied to a single Google account. The fact that Dropbox fully supports practically every single system platform I can think of using is reason enough for me to prefer it from competing services (Ubuntu One, Microsoft Skydrive, iCloud etc) and a refreshingly sane choice they made contrasted heavily by that of the established market leaders who fear of inadvertently promoting their competition.

Break free, create your own walled garden.

It's ironic, how 'ease' becomes the noose that chokes innovation and development. AOL, Facebook, iTunes, they all offer closed, proprietary solutions to 'problems' that --- in more ways than one --- are not so hard to solve. Solutions that seem to 'work', that 'succeed' because the 'trend' is to embrace 'easy', as opposed to 'moderately challenging', because the 'smart money' is behind them and because of network effects. In the last few years, that is after the wave of 'Web 2.0' (ironically, yet another 'trend' exploited by 'experts' that abused it for profit) subsided, Facebook started making serious money. Its real success as an advertising platform is not only arguably minimal, but quite controversial. It took a long time for the advertising industry and the hordes of marketing monkeys to embrace Facebook's walled garden approach and doing what they do best, counting. Only this time it wasn't 'impressions' or 'clicks' or 'conversions' they were counting, but 'likes', another frivolous metric that doesn't really mean anything in the real world. Facebook apps, once touted as the next big thing and a threat for the web, were stillborn, largely because Facebook itself made significant steps to expand beyond the confines of its site, by creating interfaces, programmatic and user, for other platform-owners to embed in or integrate with their platforms. So we got a slew of 'social plugins', more 'APIs', etc. But there were some exceptions, like Zynga, a gaming company living inside Facebook. Now, Zynga just launched Zynga.com. And it's a big deal, because this is the first Facebook-dependent business of significant scale that expands beyond the confines of this walled garden du jour. The whole 'frenzy' with Facebook in the ad world is now in its third year. As with AOL's endeavours fifteen years ago, the Facebook frenzy may be past its prime; as a teenager of the early-to-mid 1990s, AOL 'keywords' seemed to me like a pointless exercise, yet another 'top-down', force-fed business model that people never cared about. Clearly people care about Facebook; they care about the platform that connects them to people they love: their friends and their relationships, news from their social circles, people they'd like to know better or simply keep in touch. They could hardly care less about Facebook pages, Facebook ads, the Facebook business. Sadly, marketers and advertisers, typically the last group to perceive change --- and perhaps the most dependent on 'convention' (make no mistake, Facebook is convention, as is Google), will take a bit longer to 'wake up'. That Zynga chose to move beyond Facebook is undoubtedly a wake up call and a sign of maturity in an industry that more than often adopts the strategy of others, instead of coming up with its own.

Codify for iPad

I've been a fan of Lua since the early 2000s when a friend introduced it to me, even though I never got around to finding the time to properly learn and use it in production stuff. We have discussed about using Lua as a scripting language to allow for downloadable bundles that would extend AthensBook/ThessBook functionality (or fix bugs, or provide dynamically determined personalised features etc., but that never happened until now, due to licensing restrictions by Apple) for ages. Codify is an unbelievably cool app that leverages lua to provide a simple programming environment for the iPad. Combined with the general appeal of the device, the lack of third party, scripting programming environments for it, the ease of programming and use of Codify and the excitement of using such great hardware, I feel that Codify might be the Logo/Basic equivalent for this generation of children between the ages of 5-10, a great introductory platform for programming and an amazing tool for everyone else. And at $7.99 I think it's a steal. You might want to use a bluetooth keyboard for it though; typing code on the on-screen keyboard seems like a horrible horrible nuisance.