Archive for category Cloud computing
Catching the Wave
Posted by RyanG in Cloud computing, Reviews, Software on November 6, 2009
I am something of a Google Zealot, I was using the search engine back before many people knew what it was and haven’t strayed since. I’ve been using GMail for the better part of two years, and it handles ALL of my incoming mail, I even forward all of the emails from my self hosted domains to it. I use Google Docs for everything, including writing and storing invoices for my consulting work and any of my other “office” needs. And I use Google Voice daily for business phone calls. We used Google Maps to find and track rental homes, and it helped us find the place we’re living in now. Google Analytics keeps a finger on the pulse of the (itty bitty) traffic on this site. Google Reader is my RSS reader of choice, which I use almost strictly through a gadget on my iGoogle homepage along with tgadget for Twitter. I sync my iPhone with Google Calendar, and wouldn’t know what I’m doing any particular day without it. You get the idea. 
So you can imagine that when I heard about Google Wave, I instantly signed up to receive an early invite. And as you can probably also imagine, I was super disappointed when the first set of invites went out to the public, and I didn’t get mine! I watched as many of the people I follow on Twitter announced that they’d received their invite, and were happily getting started with Google Wave. Of course, many of them were reporting serious usability issues and disappointments but I was never-the-less anxious to get my peek at it. After a few short weeks I managed to trade a Google Voice invite for a Google Wave invite.
Now getting the wave invite was… Interesting.. Evidently when a user is granted some discretionary invitations they aren’t sent out immediately when used. Instead a user “nominates” a person to receive a Google Wave account. Apparently there is some waiting involved, and I suspect some manual human intervention on the part of Google in order to actually send the concrete invitation. After waiting four days (two of which were the weekend) I actually received the email that my invitation had arrived!
My initial interaction with Wave was reasonably short. I watched a couple of the introduction videos, make a few setting changes to my profile, added a couple of people who I knew were on Wave, and logged out. My first real Wave was from an acquaintance of mine from Twitter who had also recently gotten Wave. We both admitted that we were excited to have the new tool, but really had very little idea of what it was really intended for!
After having a couple interactions with a few others later that day, I started to get a feel for the interface and the power of the tool. See, I’m currently working on a software project which is reasonably large in scope. The nature of the company I work for means that we didn’t have the time, money, or expertise to hire a big enough development team to accomplish the software solution we’re trying to build. So, we’re managing with myself as the lead architect, a business analyst who knows what this thing is supposed to do, and a project manager on our side. Then we’re having all of the development work done by an offshore team.
Very quickly it struck me that Wave lends itself VERY well to this sort of thing, and in fact I think real-time collaboration for creative/design purposes is exactly what this tool is designed for. In many of the sessions of collaboration that we’ve had over the phone, having a parallel wave would be invaluable! Imagine an integration with Google Docs, I can create a wordpressing doc, a presentation, or a spreadsheet and simply attach it to the wave. Or I can take a screenshot and toss it in there where it is appropriate. Everyone has visibility to the results. This thing is DESIGNED for agile, if you ask me.
That said, this is still a very early version. In all of the “buzz” about Wave it was claimed that it will contact you in any way that is appropriate. If you’re at your computer, and logged into Wave, you’d get the real-time view. Not logged in? That’s okay we’ll nag you by email. Not at a computer? Easy you’ll get an SMS message. None of that functionality seems to be there yet though, as there is no place to supply my email address (you’re supplied with an @googlewave.com address which you can’t access), or my phone number (should already know my Google Voice number). And there is the matter of stability. It certainly has some kinks to be worked out.
So, now that I’ve caught the Wave, I’m looking forward to really starting to use it to my advantage and riding along to see how the tool evolves. Isn’t it fun being an early adopter?
My Twitter Client Search – Ended
Posted by RyanG in Cloud computing, Linux, twitter on June 10, 2009
Okay, so as you may already know I’m a big fan of any software solution that does what I need in a portable and platform agnostic way, particularly if it does it “in the cloud“.
What you may not know, is that I’m addicted to Twitter and I’ve been going through desktop based Twitter clients faster than my Cadillac beer bongs fuel! My affair with desktop clients started with TweetDeck, since it’s used by a lot of my friends on Twitter and it seemed to be a front runner. The problem is that it’s in beta, and it’s a bit buggy still. Worse yet, it doesn’t run on my linux box. In fact, no decent Twitter client does work on my linux box. I’ve also tried Twhirl, and DestroyTwitter. Both of which lack all the features TweetDeck has, and none of which work “quite right” on my linux box.
And, as if to add insult to injury the company I work for has recently been acquired by a MUCH bigger company which is imposing a lot of new restrictions to the use of our desktop computers. Meaning I’ll likely not be able to install a Twitter desktop app on my computer in about a month.
Enter TwitterGadget, pictured above. It’s an iGoogle gadget so it runs in my browser, on windows or linux, without installing! And it’s quite featureful too! It has built in URL shortening which is one of the features I miss most from other desktop apps. The one feature I hope to be included soon is TweetShrink integration, but I’ll live without it.
Hopefully I won’t have to change Twitter clients for a while now!
UNYK Address Book
Posted by RyanG in Cloud computing, Rants, Reviews on December 22, 2008
I just received an email today from one of my contacts on LinkedIn. It was an invitation to join this new UNYK Address Book application which is apparently in beta.
I think I’ve made it clear that I’m a big fan of anything which centralizes my information and allows me to access it through a web browser from anywhere, so I checked it out.
Overall, it looks quite promising. It will harvest your existing contacts from several different locations (Yahoo!, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft Outlook, MSN, etc.) and consolidate them. When you sign up you provide your personal and professional contact information, and this in turn keeps your contact record up to date for anyone who has you in their address book. Their premise is that everyone will eventually use them to manage their contact information, and therefore your address book will always be “automatically” up to date, because all of your contacts will have updated their information with UNYK.
My first, and perhaps biggest problem with the service is that they don’t provide an https:// option. So as I’m entering all of this personal and professional data, as well as supplying my login credentials for these other services it’s all going across the wire in plain text!
My second problem is that I’m already using GooSync to store my contacts, and then synchronize them with my HTC phone, which is my life line as far as contact information is concerned.
There is also some considerable controversy regarding the fact that it will effectively “spam” the contacts that you do import inviting them to join UNYK as well. This is no doubt how the email was sent to me. I’m less concerned about this than the previous two points however.
So in order for me to fully embrace this new UNYK solution, it’ll have to get a “secure” presence, and either integrate (which they seem to already do quite well with several other services) with GooSync, or provide the same functionality (syncing with my HTC).
Seems like a cool idea, but it’s not quite mature enough for me to dive in head first. I’ll keep an eye out though!
EDIT:
Since I was more than a little bit surprised that there was no secure access to login and supply my credential for other services, I did a little further digging. UNYK insists in their privacy policy that they encrypt any “sensitive data” that goes across the wire. Here it is directly from their site.
How Secure Are Your Web Servers? [ ^ ]
The security of your personal information is important to us. When you enter sensitive information (such as credit card number) on our registration or order forms, we encrypt that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL).
To learn more about SSL, follow this link http://www.verisign.com/products-services/security-services/ssl/index.html.We follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the personal information submitted to us, both during transmission and once we receive it. No method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100% secure, however. Therefore, while we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.
If you have any questions about security on our Web site, you can contact us.
So, since it looked like they used a lot of Web 2.0 technologies I thought possibly they were doing some javascript magic to encrypt the stuff going across the wire, I did a little test with Wireshark to see what got sent. I bit the bullet and imported my gmail contacts, and this was the result, with the password obscured by me, of course.
POST /Scripts/dotNET/ContactFinderProxy/Services.asmx/ImportWebContacts HTTP/1.1
Host: www.unyk.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.8.1.17) Gecko/20081021 Firefox/2.0.0.17
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8
Referer: http://www.unyk.com/Diffusion/main.asp?nub=5EDC7952-7D0D-445F-B49A-0E068F4CA09E
Content-Length: 76
Cookie: BIGipServerwebUnyk=185207306.12310.0000; s_cc=true; s_campaign=en-US-0064; s_cp_persist=en-US-0064; s_sq=%5B%5BB%5D%5D; s_vi=[CS]v1|49503BB000004A0E-A02085E000051AD[CE]; InfosCompleted=3; nub=5EDC7952%2D7D0D%2D445F%2DB49A%2D0E068F4CA09E; __qca=1224815862-86415704-76514833; __qcb=1181521546; UNYK=LoginPassword=&LoginUsername=&RememberOption=0
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache
provider=Gmail&username=qwikrex%40gmail.com&password=*********&useOctazen=true
Clearly not secure. I do have to admit however that I seem to have been wrong about the mobile sync, they do provide this, though I’ll have no idea how well it works until they fix the security problem.
Photo Sharing Services
Posted by RyanG in Cloud computing, Photography, Reviews on September 25, 2008
Since I became a dad, and bought a dSLR I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to store and share my pictures of my son, and other interesting stuff I shoot. As far as securely storing it locally, I have a sizable RAID setup that handles redundantly storing my pictures on two drives, but it’s the sharing part that I’ve had some trouble with.
Initially, I was using my own web host and the rather nice PHP based SPGM photo gallery software. The problem though, is that it’s fairly tedious to resize and upload the images (I wrote a whole blog post about it here), and I have “only” 20GB of storage and 500GB monthly throughput. When shooting at 10 megapixels I could fill that space up quickly. Beyond that I knew that some of the web based sharing sites out there had some really cool features for sharing and organizing your photos.
So, the search begins. I had some (I thought) fairly simple requirements. I was hoping to have these requirements met by a free solution, but I was willing to pay a nominal subscription fee if I got everything I was after. Here’s the run-down of what was important to me.
- Ability to upload original sized images. Some services have a limit to the size of each image
- Unlimited storage/uploads
- Sophisticated organization features. This means unlimited “albums” and the ability to have an “album” hierarchy and probably some other stuff that the service would surprise me with
- Ability to use my images on my website, blog, forum posts, etc.
- Ability to have a gallery on my site which displays all of the public images from the photo sharing site
That’s a fairly short list, and seems as though it should be fairly easy to match but surprisingly it isn’t.
So let’s break down the services I tried and how they stack up. First, let me say that I did not try every service out there, I ruled some out just based on their feature set, some due to their obscurity etc. Listed here are just the ones that I either discovered myself, or were directly suggested to me. If you want to do your own search and want to see all of the services available, here are a couple links that I found useful during my search.
Picasa
This was a fairly natural choice for me since I’m a pretty heavy user of Google services. I use Gmail, Google Reader, Google Analytics, Google Calendar, Blogger (switched from blogger to wordpress), Google Docs, and YouTube. Additionally, Picasa has a great desktop tool for uploading photos that acts as a great photo management tool on your local system as well.
Unfortunately, Picasa only allows you to organize your photos into albums with no hierarchy. Also, while you can upload a photo in it’s original size, the number of photos you can store is limited by your storage space. You’re given 1GB of space for free, and you can buy additional space on a yearly basis. But again, shooting at 10 megapixels means I’m going to need a whole lot of storage space, and I suspect that even their 400GB plan for $500 a year would become insufficient sooner or later.
To be honest, Facebook is actually what warmed me up to the idea of using a photo sharing service on the web. So while it’s technically not a photo sharing service I thought I’d talk about what I did and didn’t like about the photo storage and sharing options it had.
First, I loved how easy it was to upload pictures and tag the subjects in the photo. Facebook also had no limit to the number of photos I could upload. Of course, those photos were downsized to a much more reasonable 604×404px, and their album hierarchy was also flat. And perhaps the most annoying thing was that I couldn’t share my pictures on my own web site and the galleries I made public I had to link directly. For instance I can send you to my public album of artistic shots but I can’t send you to a page that shows all of my public albums on Facebook. If you had a Facebook account, and were added as one of my friends you could see them all, but that’s cumbersome.
Snapfish
Frankly, I didn’t get very far in evaluating this service. There wasn’t much public information about the services offered, and it had a requirement of buying some product from them at some specified interval in order to keep your account active. As such, I never even signed up or tried it.
And the winner is….
Flickr
As it turns out, this had all of the features I wanted, plus some ones I didn’t realize I wanted until I used them.
First, the negatives. With a free account your only allowed to upload 100MB of files each month, and you’re limited to 3 “sets” (Flickr’s version of an album). Also, you can’t technically have a multi-level hierarchy of sets but there are ways to overcome that (more on this later). Of course, those limitations are removed as soon as you buy a “Pro” account which is a paltry $25 per year. Needless to say I went with that.
Now the good stuff! While you can only have a flat hierarchy of sets, you can create “collections” which contain sets or other collections. These can be nested up to 5 deep. This more than handles my organization needs. For instance, I’d like to categorize all of my pictures of my son, then break it down into particular types of events, then the specific event. Something like “Baby Pictures -> Firsts -> Crawling, Walking, Solid Food, Etc.”.
And if that organization is not enough, you can also tag a photo with keywords that are search able by the community, and act as a sort of metadata for organization.
Built right in is the ability to use your photo in a variety of sizes on your blog, forums, website, or whatever you like. Even more exciting is that there are plenty of options for sharing your pictures on other sites, as well as a public landing page for you. They even offer an open API which I’m sure I’ll find useful eventually!
So there it is. After a fair amount of time spent searching I found the solution that works best for me. Hopefully my comparison can help you if you’re searching for a photo sharing service.
Livin’ on the web
Posted by RyanG in Cloud computing on September 9, 2008
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been transitioning a lot of my normal computing activities to the internet. What I mean by this, is where I used to use some software based solution for something that had to be installed on every computer I used, or had to be used on only a single computer I’m now using a web based solution.
For instance. I used to manage my email through Mozilla Thunderbird on my home computer. This worked fairly well for me and allowed me to filter spam etc. But in all reality, I really want to be able to access my email anywhere, anytime, with any computer. I’ve now redirected most of my email addresses by either forwarding, or using gmail’s POP3 functionality, and it’s much nicer to manage my email this way, not to mention the ability to search archived stuff way cool!
I’ve also had an ongoing problem of managing my contacts and calendar on my windows mobile based cell phone. You see, the “standard” way to keep this thing synchronized is to use some variety of Microsoft Outlook, and their anti intuitive and very painful ActiveSync. The problem of course is, only one computer can be the “master” which you synchronize with, and if you try to sync with another you run the very real risk of deleting appointments or contacts on either your phone or the computer. Enter goosync. Leveraging my aforementioned move to gmail, I can now synchronize my phone (over the wireless internet connection I’m paying for) with my google calendar and contacts. Sweet!
How about social networking? Well I’ve had a MySpace profile for some time, though I rarely visit it and I’m seriously considering getting rid of it. However, I’ve recently discovered (and become addicted) to Facebook. I find that their particular implementation of social networking seems to allow you to use this for “professional” purposes and mostly dodge the less desirable social networking behavior that turned me off from MySpace in the first place. As a software developer I’m also very attracted to the open API architecture and the multitude of very well written applications, in fact I’m just waiting for the inspiration to hit me so that I can write my own.
Another consequence of joining Facebook is that I (re) discovered Pandora Radio. I had given Pandora a test drive when it was first released, and only the “QuickMix” was available. I was fairly disappointed after only a few minutes of using it and quickly dismissed it as just another over hyped new “Web 2.0″ app. When I noticed that there was a Facebook application for it though, and noticed that what my friends were listening to showed up as status updates I was intrigued, and gave it another try. This time I was able to create my own station, seeded by artists and songs that I liked. Having only supplied one artist seed I found myself LOVING every last song that was played on a station. I now listen to it exclusively where I used to listen to the “chillout” station over at Digitally Imported using Winamp. Still another step away from desktop apps!
One disappointment I have with Facebook however, is that while it does allow you to upload unlimited pictures, and share the albums publicly, it does not have any screen showing all of your public albums. For instance, I can share and link you to this album containing some artistic shots, but I have several other public albums that you’d never know about, unless I directly linked those as well.
In order to remedy that I’m evaluating using some other online photo management service like Picasa then linking it back to my Facebook account. It’s a real shame though since I think that Facebook offers an ease of use that so far I haven’t seen in the alternatives.
My last discovery in the world of Cloud Computing has been a password management system. You see, I have more logins than I could possibly keep track of, in fact I’m CERTAIN that I have logins to forums and other sites that I don’t even remember exist. As a result, I have the same problem of remembering passwords that many computer users experience, and I’m not great about picking unique passwords! To resolve that I went looking for some good online password management. Now, I’ve conducted this search before, and come up wanting for security or functionality in the solutions I’ve found. Not so this time!
Allow me to introduce Passpack. What I like about this is that it uses a lot of AJAX, and consequently the information I enter is encrypted in my browser before it even hits the wire! Very cool. It also has the ability to generate strong passwords then automatically enter them for me at the login prompt for the website! I could go on about the features for a while but I’ll save that for another blog entry when/if I feel so inclined. If your interested, or conducting your own search for an online password manager I recommend Passpack, go ahead and follow the link over there and check it out.
-
You are currently browsing the archives for the Cloud computing category.
LinkedIn Profile
