Sorry for the deluge of FeedBurner-themed posts (what can I say? I work a lot), but this is cool.

Last night we launched a significant extension to our advertising platform that allows us to serve ads on web sites. The first-ever FeedBurner ad on a web site is currently being served at Burning Questions.

Apart from the obvious financial benefits to publishers, advertisers and us (more inventory, more ads, more money) this is cool for a couple of reasons:

1. Ads are inserted in same space as FeedFlare, so the tens of thousands of publishers already using FeedFlare can run our ads on their site with a single checkbox (more on that soon).

2. We’re feed-centric, so we can use that metadata to inform ad insertion. (Dick mentions some of the advantages in his post.)

3. The 300 x 250 Medium Rectangle is significantly cooler than the 468 x 60 banner :-)

That is all. I promise the next post will not be about FeedBurner.

I just added a new piece of FeedFlare to my feed (if you’re not subscribed, get to it!) called “Take My Survey.”

What? Why?

Like you may have guessed, clicking this link will take you to a survey (hosted by the lovely SurveyMonkey) containing some questions about you, my much-appreciated reader.

There are really no good reasons I’m doing this, other than “I could” and “it would be interesting to know a little bit about my readers.”

Usually, this kind of survey is used to gather information useful to potential advertisers — and that’s why Rick created it (see below). But I don’t have any advertisers (or any potential advertisers, that I know of) so this is just for fun.

The cool thing

Anyway, the cool thing about this FeedFlare add-on is that Rick Klau — our VP of Business Development; not an engineer — created it from scratch with (almost) no help. The FeedFlare platform allows anyone (yes, even Rick *wink*) to create something truly useful and valuable — something that isn’t just “neat” but actually informative from a business point of view.

And if that isn’t cool, I don’t know what is.

From dishwashers to food mixers to even the simple electric kettle, kitchens have long benefitted from labour-saving devices. Now Microsoft are upping the ante even further with their fully-automated cyber-kitchen. The fridge door boasts a central "family information" screen, barcode scanners automatically program correct cooking settings, and the whole room is packed with RFID chips (the radio technology currently being implemented in areas as diverse as pet identification and retail security), so should you pop a mixing bowl and flour on the work surface the kitchen will start offering recipe suggestions, projecting them onto the worktop (see picture). This all sounds fantastic, however how it will hold up in the real world is in doubt. Its going to be hard to read a bread recipe projected on a worktop if said worktop is covered in flour. And LCD screens may look ultra cool dotted around the kitchen at first, the sure as heck won't look so good by the time the touch screens are covered with sticky finger marks, or spattered with cooking oil from the nearby frying pan..

Via Peter

About a month ago, I posted about how I used Virtual PC to build an image of Windows Vista and referenced two great blogs for info on Virtual PC and Virtual Server. 

In that post, I had mentioned that Virtual Server was recently made a free product.  Well, now its sibling, Virtual PC, is also free!  That's right, free... as in beer.

Robotics has been one of those things that I find interesting but didn?t know a whole lot about. But ran across this great site on MSDN with a download for the Robotics CTP. It also has some great getting started materials and tutorials. Very cool stuff!

The Best Practice Analyzer ASP.NET (alpha release) is a tool that scans the configuration of an ASP.NET 2.0 application. The tool can scan against three mainline scenarios (hosted environment, production environment, or development environment) and identify problematic configuration settings in the machine.config or web.config files associated with your ASP.NET application. This is an alpha release intended to gain feedback on the tool and the configuration rules included with it.

Download Best Practice Analyzer for ASP.NET

VMware Player

Free virtual machine player from VMware The free VMware Player lets you run pre-built virtual machines on your desktop.You can run multiple operating systems side-by-side, easing the process of software development, testing, and evaluation.Virtual machines developed in VMware Workstation, ESX Server, or VMware Server can be run in VMware Player.To run the VMware Player, just run /usr/bin/vmplayer from within X.

Note: You will also need the VMware Player kernel modules to run vmplayer. These can be built from source from vmware-player-kernel-source, or you can install a pre-built vmware-player-kernel-modules package for your kernel.

Version: 1.0.1-4

I'm a pretty big fan of the new startup Riya, if you haven't seen it, it's a social networking web application that uses facial recognition software to create the social links. Basically you upload your photo's and the application detects the faces and you give each face a name, it's pretty cool, if not a little scary.

Anyway they recently announced that they were expanding the searching so that you could upload a picture of something and you would get back search results related to your picture. I think this is fantastic, I'm really surprised that Google with all their PHD's haven't come out with something similar.

I'm also annoyed that Microsoft haven't added anything innovative like this to the searching in vista, imagine being able to search your hard drive for something like 'joe' but then maybe something like 'joe outside' or 'TV', sure some of the inputs might not be textual but I'm sure that wouldn't be a major issue. We know that MS has some of this technology from it's research department, I remember watching a channel 9 interview, one of the researchers showed this DirectX application that had facial recognition and the ability to know if it was outside or inside, I guess this stuff ended up in the big black hole between research and production.

Well I hope Riya can continue to innovate and keep ahead of everyone else and please Riya think about creating an IFilter pulgin for the windows search system. I just keep thinking about how cool it would be to search my hard drive for specific items in a picture.

I've had the media center PC for over a year now and its changed the way we watch TV dramatically. But the other day I found something new. I always knew the media center could backup recorded TV to a DVD but I was surprised how the media center laid the DVD out. I fully expected the shows to run back to back with no DVD menu, but what I found was that the media center put a really cool media center themed menu into the DVD. I was really surprised and really happy that after all this time I can still be amazed at how cool the media center is.

Event-Based Programming without Inversion of Control. Philipp Haller and Martin Odersky.

Scala is different from other concurrent languages in that it contains no language support for concurrency beyond the standard thread model offered by the host environment. Instead of specialized language constructs we rely on Scala's general abstraction capabilities to define higher-level concurrency models. In such a way, we were able to define all essential operations of Erlang's actor-based process model in the Scala library.

However, since Scala is implemented on the Java VM, we inherited some of the deficiencies of the host environment when it comes to concurrency, namely low maximum number of threads and high context-switch overhead. In this paper we have shown how to turn this weakness into a strength. By defining a new event-based model for actors, we could increase dramatically their efficiency and scalability. At the same time, we kept to a large extent the programming model of thread-based actors, which would not have been possible if we had switched to a traditional event-based architecture, because the latter causes an inversion of control.

(There's not really a proper abstract. The above is from the conclusion.)

I enjoyed this paper. It's a quick read and a nice demonstration of some of Scala's cool features. It's also a good example of using exceptions as delimited control operators, and in fact the one substantial restriction is imposed by the lack of the more powerful operators. They use Scala's type system to reduce the burden of this restriction, however, since they're able to state that a particular statement never returns normally (and thus must not be followed by more statements).

Those interested in the language/library boundary will also find it interesting for this reason:

The techniques presented in this paper are a good showcase of the increased flexibility offered by library-based designs. It allowed us to quickly address problems with the previous thread-based actor model by developing a parallel class hierarchy for event-based actors. Today, the two approaches exist side by side. Thread-based actors are still useful since they allow returning from a receive operation. Event-based actors are more restrictive in the programming style they allow, but they are also more efficient.

They have some fairly impressive empirical scalability results as well.

So the season has ended; my team finished in third place. The final stats for the season are available online here. If you drill down into the stats, you’ll note I got no goals, no penalty minutes, and a single assist. Go me. ;) Still, I feel like I had a great first season and a lot of fun. The handful of pictures Jenny was able to get before the camera battery died are up in the gallery. I’m in black with a white helmet, #79. (I would have been #13, but someone else on the team already had it).

Being in the top 4 teams meant we got to enter the playoffs, which are a simple single-elimination tournament. Our first-round game was last night, against the 2nd-place team. Of our 4 regular defensemen, one was recovering from salmonella and the other had just gotten new skates (and isn’t really comfortable in them yet) since the steel runner in his old ones shattered during a game earlier in the season (seriously). The referees seemed to kind of have it in for our team; we took 7 penalties to I think 2 for the other team, although I honestly think there were an equal number of offenses on either side. We did score first, one goal in the first period, but the second period kind of fell apart on us and we gave up two power play goals.

Fortunately, one of the things this team is very good at is coming back from a deficit, and we really went to work in the third period. My defensive partner scored a beauty of a wrist shot off a faceoff during a 4-on-4, leaving us tied. We had several more great opportunities, including one where I cut off a clearing pass, passed to a forward at the side of the net, and ended up with the rebound and a wide open net. My shot was a little off balance and someone got in the way of it, and we ended up with about 8 players involved in a scrum in front of the net—most of us laying on the ice. The puck ended up right in front of me, and I saw our center about three feet away, standing up. I very carefully used my stick to push the puck towards him, but as soon as he touched it the ref whistled us for a hand pass (which was nonsense).

Time wound down and ran out; unlike the regular season, there are no ties in the playoffs, so we went to a 5-minute 4-on-4 sudden death overtime. We played for about 3-1/2 minutes, with some good chances on both sides, until a miscommunication ended up with us apparently having too many men on the ice. (I’m not completely sure there actually were too many men, but that’s what was called.) One of our centers, my defensive partner, and I ended up as the 3 in a 4-on-3. I was really excited to get tapped for the 4-on-3, since it indicated a lot of trust from my captain and teammates. Less than a minute later my partner got the puck in our zone. He had some time, so he held it, and the center started yelling for him to ice it all the way down. Instead, he very calmly passed it straight up the middle to the center, who fought off the lone defense in his way, broke in on the goalie, and beat him 5-hole. It was an amazing goal shorthanded in overtime, and the crowd (friends and family as well as the teams waiting to play the next game) started yelling. It was great. :)

So we’re into the championship game, which will be played next Monday. We’ve played our opponents three times: beaten them twice and tied once, so we feel like if we play well we have a great chance. Either way, I’ve had an amazing time this season and I’m really glad I got to play.

In other news, yesterday and today my company held the annual conference for our independent resellers, consultants, and other developers. This year it was held here in Austin. I was scheduled to judge an annual competition yesterday, but I had to bow out at the last minute because I needed to make it to my playoff game. Today I gave a 25-minute presentation on recent improvements to one of the tools we sell. It was very well received, although I have several notes on things I can do better next time I get the opportunity. It was very interesting to me to meet all these people who build an entire ecosystem of software based on our stuff, and hear their perspectives on how things are and should be. Being an insider was a new experience for me too; all these developers wanted to know what’s coming down the pipe, and how things work, and I have to keep in mind what I am and am not allowed to state publicly. It was very cool taking questions and being able to give good answers. Hopefully I’ll get to participate in the conference in years to come as well.

Sorry about the lack of updates. I got busy again. Or got lazy again—take your pick. ;)

I won’t recap the games individually, but our last 3 games have been a loss (a really bad loss; our captain got injured and one of our players got ejected for an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty), a tie (0-0; our first shutout), and a win (in which I played like crap; see below) respectively. Aside from the really bad loss (which wasn’t fun for reasons other than losing the game), the season so far has been lots of fun. I feel like I’m learning something every time I’m on the ice; I feel more confident every game, and I feel like every game I find some way to make a good contribution, even if it’s not scoring (and it’s not; I have 0 goals/0 assists on the season—but 0 penalty minutes, too ;). I actually kind of love blocking shots, partially because I find it incredibly frustrating when other people block my shots, and turning that around is very satisfying.

Anyway, I got really, really sick last weekend. I played hockey Sunday afternoon, felt great, had a great game (the tie, which we really should have won but for their substitute goalie playing like a pro), came home, had dinner, and then spent much of the night throwing up. Oh, and massively delirious. Apparently I was a real pain in the ass; I don’t remember much of it. Monday morning I felt slightly better but was weak as a half-drowned kitten and still shaky, so I stayed in bed all day. Wednesday, we played our next game, and I was very obviously still tired. I couldn’t seem to stand up on the ice at all; I fell down even more than usual (and usual is fairly often—my teammates call me the “Tasmanian Devil” for my signature spin-around-and-fall-down routine). Fortunately I don’t seem to have relapsed, and we have a 10-day layoff to the next game, so I have time to recover.

We just finished a major milestone at work. The project that’s been taking up the time of the majority of our developers for the last 3-1/2 years has finally come to a closure point, and from here on out we’re going to be starting to pull that code into our existing applications and actually shipping it to customers. This isn’t really new for me, because the stuff I’ve been working on has been the actual shipping applications, up until the last 3-4 months. Lately I’ve been getting things in place to significantly improve our infrastructure to make that migration easier; after Monday that will all be done (we’ll be using .Net 2.0, SQL Server 2005, and Team Foundation Server—all really cutting edge stuff) and I’ll be back working on actual code, which will be nice. I’m really a code monkey at heart. :-D

Some of the stuff I’ve been working on (and will be working on) is really cool; I’ll be helping present some of it at one of our annual conferences, aimed at our resellers and other people who customize our application. That’s very exciting for me; I often envy the situation of the various Microsoft developers who blog about their work and have very active, engaged communities, and this is kind of a similar situation for me. Although I’ve worked on applications for end-users at other jobs, this is the first time that I’m really starting to get directly connected to users/developers who aren’t actually on my team or working for my company, and that’s pretty cool.

Simply put, flash memory will enable a revolution in improving computer performance in daily utilization scenarios. Your computer will boot up faster. It will launch applications significantly faster. (Hey, it will shutdown faster as well.)

The problem

To see why we will have this dramatic performance improvement, let's remember how harddisks work: whenever you have a mixture of random I/O requests, the actuator moves across different tracks to read/write the corresponding data. Switching tracks is a slow operation. For an average SATA drive, this is around 9 milliseconds. This might not seem much, but a few milliseconds per seek means that you can have at most a few hundred random I/Os per second. And this feels like light-years compared with the performance of other components in the system like RAM access speeds or even CPU frequency. So, just to give you an example, a random I/O with 4 KB requests and average of 4 ms seek time per request would mean around 1000/4 * 4 KB = 1 MB per second disk transfer rate. Pretty small, don't you think? Especially when you compare it with sequential I/O, where you can get a much faster transfer rate (say, 60-70 MB/s on a regular harddisk, depending the rotational speed, data density, etc).  

One trick to alleviate this performance issue is to minimize seek time by reordering writes and/or serving reads from cached memory. Memory caches can greatly help in this regard, but here is a little problem: applications, the OS, and other components do not expect writes to be reordered. When you a write reordering is detected at the application level, then a data corruption can appear, especially when you reboot the machine in the middle of performingg a set of reordered writes.

For example the applicaiton is performing Write(block1) followed by Write(block2) in one thread, and Read(block1) followed by Read(block2) on a different thread. In the sequence above, the application expects block1 to be written always before writing block2. Having this guarantee simplifies for example applicaiton recovery semantics, assuming that the computer can crash between writing block1 and block2. But if we perform write reordering, and only write to the disk block2, then our application recovery logic cannot be done in any way. And so we get to corruption.

Still, storage controllers perform today all sorts of tricks like maintaining a write-through cache in volatile RAM, coupled with limited reordering. More advanced controllers, or SAN equipment use persistent caches (battery-backed volatile RAM) to perform write reordering, complementing advanced storage features like RAID configurations, etc.

The solution - why flash is good

By now it should be clear how flash can be used in this picture: you can use inexpensive flash as a persistent write-through cache for reads/writes. Also, the fact that this flash is persistent enables reordering I/O requests at an unprecedented level, therefore greatly reducing our nasty seek time bottleneck:

The new 2Gb OneNAND chip doubles the capacity of a OneNAND memory device (from 1Gb) and increases the chip's ?write' speed from 9.3MByte to 17MByte per second.

?We're seeing a rapidly widening market for our OneNAND memory because of its outstanding performance and capacity that has become even more noteworthy with the application of 60 nm technology,? said Don Barnetson, Director, Flash Marketing, Samsung Semiconductor. [...]

Because of its exceptionally high performance, OneNAND can serve as a catalyst in the development of new product markets. A much-discussed example of this application-creating role is in how OneNAND memory is now being specified as the buffer memory inside a hybrid hard disk.

Samsung successfully demonstrated a commercial Hybrid-HDD prototype for the first time at the MS Developer Conference (WinHEC: Windows Hardware Engineering conference) in Seattle last month.

[source: http://www.physorg.com/news70899414.html]

Flash-based I/O optimizations - already present in Vista 

One more thing worth mentioning: Vista already benefits from Flash-based optimization. The feature is called EMD (External Memory Device), and can boost the performance of your computer by simply adding a USB thumbdrive and designate it as an EMD device. Under the cover, it works in a similar way with the technique described above.

Jason Levitt has been teasing me in our discussions on cross-domain requests about Yahoo's upcoming authentication API.
The recurring problem: how to offer web APIs that can be mashed up but involve personal data?
You want to allow for a large number of third parties to integrate with your services, but don't want phishing sites to abuse them.

Let me do a quick re-cap of the problem space before analyzing the pieces of Yahoo's solution.

Communication techniques:

• cross-domain web APIs using script includes,
• accessing web APIs accross domains using a web proxy,
• using a client-based cross-domain solution (see FlashXMLHttpRequest),
• neutered XMLHttpRequest with cross-domain support (see Chris Holland's ContextAgnosticXMLHttpRequest and Douglas Crockford's JSONRequest),
• cross-document messaging across domains (see CrossDocumentMessageEvent from the WHATWG).

In all these cases, there is no good authorization story, that would allow for working with personal data stored in the service in a secured way.

Authorization techniques:

The problem is that API keys and crossdomain policy files are too restrictive because the service needs to decide which third-parties to let in.

On the other end, access control based on the user authentication cookies are very open to un-planned integration, but also create a huge phishing risk.
This is a classic example of the confused deputy problems that appear in principal-based security models.

As a result, most web APIs today don't involve any user data (search, maps, ...) or non sensitive user data.

Yahoo APIs:

Let me re-iterate that I don't think this protocol is about Identity, unlike Passport, TypeKey or CardSpace (aka. InfoCard), but rather simply authority and access. This characteristic is important: we want services to cooperate without being tighly coupled at the identity level. Drew Dean's slides frames the issue as allowing 'Pseudonymous delegation of partial rights', which means the names of a user in different services don't have to match and the authority that is granted is granular.

What's great about this model is that the authority carried by a capability can be as granular as the design and scenario require, and are only be given out to third-parties under certain conditions, which again are chosen to fit the desired requirements and user experience.

For example, the authority granted could vary in range in action and scope: a handle could give access to the user's entire data, or maybe only partial access to part of the user's data.
The design of the capabilities could also comprise additional dimensions, such as a time restriction. For example, a capability could be only valid for 24 hours.
One of the myths of capability systems is that capabilities cannot be revoked. It is actually possible and in Yahoo's design, any granted authority can be revoked by the user at any time.

One common policy for giving out capabilities is to get consent from the user. The screenshots of the F-Spot integration with Flickr (found on this thread) show the Yahoo consent UI.
Although I don't like the desktop/web integration in this scenario and I have some concerns about repeatedly prompting the user for consent, I believe that this approach has a lot of potential for cross-domain service integrations on the web.
Cross-domain support in browsers will be the main remaining link missing to unleash some really cool web apps. In the meanwhile, you can use FlashXMLHttpRequest or some other cross-domain workaround.

I look forward to reading the documentation when the protocol is released and trying out the resulting user experience in practical scenarios. Let me know if you find any other information.
Jason mentioned that the protocol is open and can be simply implemented, which means that it could be supported by other services and hopefully used in a wide variety of mashups.

I've been working with Jason Levitt (from Yahoo) recently to iron the wrinkles out of my Flash-based technique for making cross-domain requests. The main focus was to extend the reach of the technique to a larger audience, by adding support for Flash 7, which is more widely deployed than Flash 8.

Try the new FlashXMLHttpRequest demo.

Brad Neuberg's awesome work on DojoExternalInterface gave us a major boost. It emulates the most recent javascript to flash communication API (ExternalInterface, in Flash 8) accross platforms including Flash 7. The library hides differences with browsers and flash versions as much as possible, and works around various performance limitations.

Thanks again to Jason for his interest, feedback and support. I'm pretty excited to see what cool stuff he'll cook using this and the new web APIs from Yahoo.


If you only want to deploy this component, you can download the 'binary' package.
To modify the flash source files and re-build them, get the 'source' package.

As you can see in the demo/index.html file, after including dojo.js and FlashXMLHttpRequest.js, you'll need to initialize dojo and the flash object by calling InitFlash with the name of a function. That function will be invoked once the flash object is loaded and ready to make requests.
From there on, you can create FlashXMLHttpRequest instances and use the 'open', 'onload' and 'send' methods almost as you would with a regular XMLHttpRequest object. You can also call 'setRequestHeader', but only to set the content type request header.

More generally, FlashXMLHttpRequest still has some limitations, due to the native Flash capabilities.
First, access to other domains is restricted by use of a crossdomain.xml file.
Second, you can only make GET and POST requests. It will become possible to support other verbs, such as PUT, DELETE or HEAD, with the new APIs provided by Flash 8.5.

Let me know if FlashXMLHttpRequest is useful to you and if you encounter any bugs. Here's a more convenient permalink to this post: http://blog.monstuff.com/FlashXMLHttpRequest.

Paul Graham's earlier work pissed off a lotta product pushers. His latest clarifies, and thus I can enter this meme on the after schock.

Eric Sink duly noted, (to paraphrase liberally), that it's probably a bad idea to hire a zealout. Yes, I said zealout, he didn't. He said hire a profesional, and I think the moral of the story is, when remotely possible, to hire a hacker who is a professional. Hopefull those who read his article will read more than the last paragraph, and thus not conclude that hackers cannot be professionals.

Then what is a profesional hacker? (cue music) Passionate, but not militant. Expressive, but not zealous. Aggressive, yet adaptive. Smart, yet empathetic. Able to type-cast, yet dynamic. Can follow procedures, yet functional. Uses source control and bug trackers but makes it PERTy only when necessary. Results and collaboration. And finally: Proud, and not condescending.

Yes, I lean towards Eric's perspective yet have been influenced by more respectable (and just plain cool) hackers in my life to let potential short-sighted conclusions go unnoticed. Tact is a necesity and will go a long way. I've met as many tactless hacker consultants as I have smug 'GPL is leprosy!' bandwagoners (sometimes both!) and since they both negate each other out of existance I'm (profesionally!) content with a product-shop wife with a hacker mistress.* I admit to having read the Great Hackers through nolstalgic eyes and generally feel most product-shops miss the point in regards to leveraging the hacker identity. My guesstimate would be that they only go as far as ThinkGeek, or worse, Despair.com. Frankly I find the term hacker about as saturated and misused as engineer. Funny how both hackers and shop-grinders like to be recognized for what they contributed to the community. 1:46AM. I digress.

*Wish I could remember the Pythonista who said 'Java is my wife, Python is my mistress' in some comment thread...here it is. Values of Cool, indeed.

Perhaps I should add a link to the Slashdot comments, but I've found Slashdot's Read More... considerabley harmful.

For those wondering about the title, I enjoyed this book. Not that it exemplifies tact, and too bad G and J are only phonetically similar, but I'll stick with it. I wonder if Vonnegut is required reading for Comp. Sci. majors. It would likely get read, but would it help?

Python and X10 Home Automation, Part 1

I recently saw an ad from x10.com for a free (you pay shipping) X10 starter kit, including a 'Firecracker' computer interface.  That was a deal I couldn't pass up, so I ordered it through their web site, and 3 days later, the kit arrived.

The kit consists of the CM-17a 'Firecracker' serial computer interface, which transmits via radio, a transceiver module which receives the radio commands from the Firecracker and retransmits them via the X10 protocol over your house wiring, a lamp modules for controlling... lamps, and a PalmPilot-sized hand-held remote control that lets you manually do what the computer interface does.  Oh, and the transceiver module also double as an appliance module, allowing you to control appliances of up to 500 watts.

With the hand-held controller, you can control any X10 modules you have, either the ones that come with the kit, or any add-on modules you may want to buy.  You could go wild, like many do, and completely automate your home -- lights, appliances, garage door, pool heater, ferret feeder, whatever.

But with the computer interface, things get much more interesting.  You can, for example, download from x10.com a free application that duplicates the appearance and functionality of the hand-held controller on your computer screen.  Or, you can download, for $20, an application that fully utilizes your computer and the x10 interface to do full automation.  Want your hot-tub to turn on at a certain time every day?  No problem.  Want your lights to simulate an occupied house while you are on vacation?  Easy.

Naturally, hand an X10 computer interface to a Python programmer, and he'll immediately start writing code for it.  Or that was my intent, anyway.  The first thing I did was google around for any existing Python projects for X10. I found two, Pyxal and Pyx10.  Both projects seem to be unmaintaned.  Pyxal is pure Python, and does not support the recent X10 controllers, like the Firecracker.  Pyx10 uses a wrapper to turn the XAL library into a Python extention module.  It supports recent X10 controllers, including the Firecracker.

I downloaded and examined both.  Pyxal was right out, as it has no Firecracker support (why not add it yourself, you ask?  I'll get to that in a moment...).  Pyx10 and XAL looked good.  After compiling and installing XAL (a snap), I tried compiling Pyx10.  Nope.  The wrapper code for XAL would not compile.  From a quick exam, it looked like it was out-of-sync with XAL.

I could have continued hacking at it to get it to work, but further googling (the trademark police are gonna get me), I found Project WiSH, a project for turning X10 device drivers into... well, Linux device drivers.  Super!  Instead of having to do low-level device handling from my code, I can simply open a linux device driver and write commands to it, just like I was writing text to a file.  And WiSH was a snap to compile and install.  Just make sure you have your kernel source loaded on your machine.  (For the CM-17a 'Firecracker', be sure to download the 1.6.10 version of WiSH.  The later 2.0.1 version does not yet support it.  But both versions support the CM-11a, which is the other modern popular X10 computer interface controller.)

Now, I do my work under Linux, so this is just what the code doctor ordered.  Actually, it's even better than it sounds.  You see, there's this little bit of info about that Firecracker X10 controller...

If you look at one of the other X10 computer interfaces, say the CM-11a that comes with another of the home automation intro packages that x10.com sells, you will see that it is controlled via the computer in a manner rather like an external serial modem.  Connect it to your serial port, and send it strings of ASCII characters.  Not so with the CM-17a 'Firecracker'.  This little guy is a serial pass-thru 'dongle', very small.  From what I can tell from my Google research, you must directly control the radio transmitter in it via bit-tiddling the RTS and DTR lines of the serial port.  You must assemble a 5-byte command via bit masking, then bit-shift it out to the CM-17a by directly controlling the states of the RTS and DTR lines, doing the timing yourself.  There are no smarts.  Ouch.  No wonder this is the bargain-basement controller.

The CM-11a controller has another advantage, too.  It's smart, it has its own processor.  So you don't even need to leave your computer on to do real-time home automation.  Use the scheduling software to send it commands, like 'turn on my security light at local-time dusk, and turn it off at dawn', and the CM-11a will do it, all by itself.

But I don't have the CM-11a.  I have a CM-17a and a Linux box.  Add in the device drivers from Project WiSH, and from a Linux command line, I can execute 'echo 'on' >>/dev/x10/a1', and send the 'on' command to the X10 device at house code 'A', unit code '1'.  How cool is that?

OK, how can we combine equal portions of X10, Project WiSH, Linux, Python, and fun?  (OK, fun gets a bigger portion.)

Here's the deal.  I work for a major software house.  We do automated nightly compiles of our code on all of the platforms we support (Linux, various flavors of UNIX, Windoze).  The last thing you want is for some code change you made that day to 'break the build'.  The automated process sends out email giving that night's build status.  If you broke the build, it's supposed to be your first priority to fix it.

I keep forgetting to check my email.  I have many projects, they grab my attention, and it may be hours before I check my mail.  Yes, I have a little task bar thingie that tells me if I get new mail.  I don't look at it if I'm concentrating on a problem.

Python and X10 to the rescue!  (This is a fun solution looking for a problem.)  I now have a Python script that is run via cron every 10 minutes.  It uses the poplib and email modules to grab and parse my email, looking for the specific patterns that a 'you broke the build' message will contain.  If it finds such a message, it opens and writes an 'on' command to the proper X10 device driver, which then turns on the BIG RED ROTATING LIGHT.  I kid you not.

This is so much fun!

The new PodShow+ site, unleashing pretty darn soon, has a personal bio feature called 'The Legend of me'. I just filled mine out. Here's what I wrote:

I'm a programmer with an apetite for timeshifted media. That pretty much sums it up. In 2000, before I'd heard of RSS, I was using Voquette Media Manager to record Real streams of This American Life, which I'd lovingly burn to CD and listen to on long car trips. Later, in the days of 'audio blogging', I used the Radio Userland news aggregator to automatically pull MP3 files from enclosure-bearing RSS from Dave Winer, Chistopher Lydon and Doug Kaye. I'd then locate these on my hard drive and drag them, one at a time, into the media management software for my Neuros MP3 player. It worked, sort of, but was too much effort, and there was still too little content (especially after Chris took a break) for practical daily use. Adam Curry switched me back on in 2004 with a steady stream of daily content, developer feedback, feature ideas and a critical insight that made the medium: we needed automatic sync to the listening device. The early innovations in podcasting were nearly all Mac-only, which as a Windows user drove me nuts. Erik de Jonge's 'iSpider' project had a decent command-line Python/Applescript codebase, and were up for doing a cross-platform GUI product, which is where I wanted to go. Bringing in some modest COM knowledge that Pieter Overbeeke's 'i-podder' javascript helped me learn, I joined the iSpider team and Lemon was born. Nearly two years and one Ceast and Desist later, Lemon is now known as Juice and has accumulated over 2 million downloads. Along the way, Martijn Venrooy and I built the GigaDial 'podstation factory' (October 2004), and in Fall 2005 I joined PodShow and moved my family from Boston to San Francisco. At PodShow I do a mix of engineering (DGAP, Golden Tickets), developer relations (developer.podshow.com, DevCasts), technical reviews of potential partners and, when anyone will listen :-), talent scouting. I'm bullish on New Media and on the lookout for cool new stuff to build, to make listening and viewing better.

Pretty verbose --- it fills the alotted space on my profile page --- yet it barely scratches the surface.