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November 3rd, 2006
10:25 pm - Announcing FROSBO.org! Free online classifieds for the world.
FROSBO.org is live. The concept is that of a free classifieds site, like craigslist.org, but with much more detail captured and displayed for each type of listing, and with a nifty photo slideshow. I'm starting out with Real Estate -- first Vacation Rentals and regular rentals, later Home Exchange, homes for sale, and more. Later i plan to move on to other areas, possibly including Autos, Pets, Employment, Services and so on. I've built things such that I can add new listing types very simply -- just a few new records in the database, 3 HTML template files, and voila! Just goes to show the power of generalization/abstraction.
The tricky part is ensuring that the data being captured in the database is the right data for that type of listing. It has to please both the advertisers and readers. To that end, I have been working with the members of the Yahoo Vacation Rentals group. They have offered lots of helpful advice, and I've tried to implement it as best I can. Still lots to do though! Key bit of advice for web developers though: Send your important users a survey questionnaire soon after they've used the site. And offer some sort of reward for filling it out. They point out things that we never think of as developers.
The site is also an experiment for me. It is already fully translated into spanish, and is ready to be translated into other languages. Plus, I have all the countries and many/most of the important cities in the world. So I really hope to make this a truely international and multi-cultural site. The tricky part is making it appear to be local and global at the same time.
Perhaps another time I will post about the difficulties I had obtaining quality geographic data ( eg country, region, and city names ). I could rant for hours....
The site gave me a chance to play with spatial data in postgres. I have GPS coordinates for each (most) cities in the database. Using the built-in geometric types and functions in postgresql, I was able to efficiently run queries such as "show me all the listings within 50 KM of Monterey, California". Cool stuff.
I think the challenge for the site will be building up a sufficient population of advertisers and getting the word out. Being free helps here. Once there is a sufficient body of listings, the viewers will come ( I hope ). I need to work on search... should be an opportunity to investigate free-form text search in postgres, a topic I've been dancing around for a few years now.
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June 2nd, 2006
01:15 pm - Casa Arena - Condo in Jaco, Costa Rica for rent
So as some readers may know, I recently bought a fixer-upper condo in Jaco Beach, Costa Rica and have been remodeling it since January. It's been a lot of work, but I think the result is worth it. I like the location a lot because it is 100 meters from the beach and is also on the main drag in Jaco. So it's walking distance to pretty much everything. I like Jaco because it has a genuine beach town feel to it. There are of course lots of bars and restaurants, but there are also big grocery stores ( Mas x Menos and MaxiBodega ), hardware stores, banks, english book store, etc, etc. And everything is nearby. It's also right on the highway, and about 2 hours from San Jose.
I'm calling the place "Casa Arena". Actually, I bought a pre-existing company to own the house, and it came with that name, which I liked well enough. I'm planning to rent the place out, and I've setup a website with lots of information and pictures, and such.
It's been a bit of a nightmare trying to find a decent property management company and then to get the place advertised online. I had a particularly ugly encounter with vrbo.com. I may write about that another day with all the gory details. For now, I've come to the conclusion that all online vacation rental sites suck. They way overcharge and then they drastically limit what you can put in the ad ( eg, no links ). Online classified sites also suck, with the notable exception of craigslist -- which is really great. I'm pondering creating a 100% free vacation rental site to undercut all these rapacious bastards, such as vrbo, vacationrentals.com, etc.
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May 2nd, 2006
05:41 pm - Where's the Open Source Grand Challenge Entry?
So I've been thinking about automated cars since about 1998. I think they ultimately have the potential to substantially improve our quality of life and to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. But I've never done anything about it beyond read a few web pages and follow the Darpa Grand Challenge events. The problem just seems too big for a single person, and I wouldn't really even know where to begin.
I've realized that I would *LOVE* to see an open source entry into next year's Darpa Urban Challenge.
Right now, I see a bunch of teams working on this problem in order to win the prize, and they are all working on software to solve the same problem. They are all inventing similar "wheels"... almost literally. What if one team could build on a pattern recognition library created by another team in the same fashion that Gnome builds on GTK? It seems to me that an open source team/project could help to lift all boats, and ultimately enable us to realize the dream of truly automated cars sooner.
The true value in each of these projects is the logic: the software. Clever software algorithms enabled the Stanford team to win the challenge last year with less than a year of total development effort. What's more, the software can be built, simulated, and heavily tested without having an actual vehicle. So it should be possible for lots of people to work on such a project in a distributed fashion.
Further, if automated cars ever *DO* become a reality, I want to be damn sure that the software has been fully audited by the brightest folks out there. The public will demand and expect quality and safety, and the best way I know of to ensure that is to have open-source software available for anyone to inspect and ferret out the bugs. To put it another way: Would you trust MS-Windows driving your car?
And come on you hackers -- you know it would be kick-ass cool to download the software, buy some sensors and servos for your old beater, and have the first robot car in your block/city/state/country.
And let's not forget the end goal. This is software that can make a _real_ difference in the world. Eventually, in a society with truly automated cars, more things become possible. Send the car to pickup your child from school. Disabled and elderly people can rediscover their mobility. Ride home from the bar totally wasted with no worries of DUI tickets or fatal accidents. Pack more cars onto the same roads with few or no traffic jams. Drive more fuel efficiently. Remove auto-accidents from the number one position on cause-of-death stats.
So how about it? Anyone interested in such a project? Or anyone from an existing team that is willing to open their source code as the seed? Imagine hundreds of hackers contributing to and testing your project instead of the few you currently have. Become the Linux super-star of automated cars. What do you say?
To be clear: it would be cool to have an Open Source project with an entry next year. But it's probably not realistic to build all the hardware, etc for a real entry. And that's not the goal. Rather, this project would focus on building software components that the individual teams can use, that hobbyists can use, and that maybe, just maybe, your mother can use.
Here's my pledge. If I hear from at least 5 persons with a relevant skill ( programming, robotics, pattern recognition, neural nets, device drivers, etc, etc ) who are motivated to work on such a project for a period of 1 year, then I will setup/organize the project, register a domain, and generally attempt to promote it and assist with design/development as best I can. Just leave your comments below if you'd be interested in joining such a project.
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November 5th, 2005
01:07 pm - Flight Training!! The skies will never be safe again.
So I'm planning on training for a pilot's license.
Why? Because I can I guess.
That, and I've always thought it would be neat to have a license, and eventually perhaps even my own plane. There's something about being up in the air that gives you a different perspective on things. When I was a boy, a friend of my mother's had a plane and took us up a few times. We flew over our ranch and even out to the ocean. He even let me take the controls for a little while. It was exhilarating. Plus, there is the element of freedom it brings. It's so cool to be able to just rent a plane, file a flight plan, and go where you want to. I'm really looking forward to seeing Costa Rica by air ( my few flights in a passenger plane don't really count ).
I discovered that there is a Costa Rican aviation discussion forum in English/Spanish. Also, there are a few flight schools at the Pavas airport, which is not that far from where I live. I spoke with an instructor at one of them, AeroTica and he says they are even working on getting FAA tests available here, so that I could be pre-qualified to fly in the U.S. as well. Nifty. Oh,and they give classes in Spanish, which could make things more challenging for me, but he is also available for private lessons in English, so that may be the best way for me to go. ( This is one area where I don't want to risk mis-understanding crucial points. )
I've tried to talk a couple friends into doing it also, but they don't seem too interested. Perhaps it's the hefty price tag, or maybe you've just gotta get bit by the flying bug first. Maybe they should watch "The Aviator" a time or two.
Anyway, the Costa Rican skies are about to get just a little more crowded. Wish me luck!
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October 28th, 2005
09:49 pm - More RSI Fun
So I'm still fighting carpal tunnel. I'm battling it on a few fronts:
1) Less work. My maximum workday is now about 4 hours. sounds rough eh? Well, it means I had to drop any further work on Videntity.org for the time being. But it means I have to find other ways to keep myself occupied. Fortunately the guys I work with are super-cool and understanding.
2) Physical therapy. 3 times a week for one hour. Lots of hot wax and electricity. The quality of treatment I've received at Hospital CIMA so far is really excellent.
3) Wrist braces to prevent improper movement. I got a nighttime model for the left hand and a daytime model for the right hand. I look like I'm well on my way to becoming a Borg.
4) Improving my workspace. So far, I have: moved my laptop to my desk ( no more couch/bed usage ), purchased an "executive" chair, elevated the laptop screen ( stacks of printer paper works great ), and purchased a basic ergonomic keyboard.
My next step will be to purchase a truly ergonomic keyboard and mouse and begin to eliminate the stressful forces on my wrists. I have my eye on some truly weird looking and expensive keyboards: SafeType, Kinesis Evolution, Kinesis Contoured and DateHand. My plan is to pick one or all of them up on Ebay as cheaply as possible. I'll report back if/when I find a winner.
Kamal has also suggested acupuncture as a more systemic cure than the physical therapy. Still, while that might be helpful, I'd still like to find a keyboard/mouse solution that are not harming me each time I use them.
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October 14th, 2005
12:49 am - Social Networking Unlimited
With the carpal seemingly under control, today I finished up some documentation and released a new Videntity.org feature that I call Social Networking Unlimited. I'm pretty excited about the idea.
Basically, the new feature allows any Videntity.org user to add a relationship with anyone else on the web. All you need to enter is a link to a page representing the person, be it a blog, homepage, Friendster profile page, etc. The other person does not need to be a Videntity.org user, now or ever. But if that person should want to reciprocate the relationship, then they can login to Videntity.org via OpenID to do so.
For URLs on remote sites, the login will most likely require an OpenID delegate. I think I need to do a better job of explaining about delegates and how/when to use them. I'm also thinking of adding an auto delegate creation tool, where the user just enters the URL to their page and it generates the necessary HTML automagically.
Well, hopefully I get some more feedback about the feature. The couples emails I've received so far have been positive. This implementation may not be the eventual winner, but I'm sure that someone will do this "right" soon enough and it will be very popular.
Tomorrow I'm back to chair hunting after an unsuccessful attempt today, and then back to work on Karmus in a serious fashion. I've been a bit AWOL of late finishing up this Videntity relationship feature.
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October 12th, 2005
06:57 pm - Struck down by carpal
A couple days ago my left arm started tingling and feeling numb. It kept getting worse the past couple of days. And then it started feeling quite "wrong" whenever I would go to type. Not painful exactly, but like I was doing something bad to myself and I'd better stop if I know what's best for me. So yesterday I couldn't hardly type at all. Just pecking with my right hand. Today I went to the physical theray center at Hospital Cima.
The service was quite nice actually. My therapist was waiting for me at the front desk when I arrived and there was no waiting. After preliminaries, she dipped my hand in water with an electrode and started zapping me. Then there was some more zapping later, where I could actually see my thumb moving of its own accord in rhythm with the machine. weird. There was also some nice hot towel wraps. Then she wrapped my hand up tight so I can't hardly bend the wrist and let me go. Each hour-long session costs 13,000 colones, roughly $30.
It was rather different from my therapy experience 9 years ago. Then they subjected me to hot wax treatment, ice packs ( towels ), and some very soothing arm massages. No luck with the massages this time around though. Those were paid for by company insurance so I don't know how much they cost, but I imagine quite a lot.
I also tried to improve my work environment. I put the laptop on my desk. ( No more typing on the sofa or in bed. ). And I bought one of those squishy ergo mouse thingies. I looked for a nice "executive" chair and a squishy ergo keyboard thingy, but no luck so far. soon.
Anyway, as you can see I've typed all this, and so far so good. wish me luck.
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October 8th, 2005
10:59 am - I got my ass kicked today
I played in a tennis tournament today at the club, but lost the first round in straight sets: 1-6, 4-6.
My opponent was very steady. He came out hitting very hard during the warm-ups, but then just kept the ball in play during the match. His serve was not that strong, no better than mine.
I believe I could have have beaten him if I was in any sort of shape. Instead, I was fighting the entire time just to catch my breath, felt weak, and was sweating like a pig. Horrible. I'm sure staying up all night battling server disk failure 2 nights ago didn't help. But whenever I found some energy and relaxed a bit I could direct the play pretty well and was dictating the points.
The good news is that this is a double elimination tournament. So I have a chance to redeem myself and will be playing again next Sunday, 6pm. ( reminder to self. ) Maybe my girlfriend will come to watch? Hmm, I'd better get in shape quick!!!
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10:47 am - New look for the journal
I finally found the journal customization tools. I wasn't that impressed with the themes. Actually, a couple looked nice in the preview page, but then they weren't actually available as an option. Maybe not available for the free accounts? whatever.
Anyway, I customized the hell out of the colors on this one to make it resemble my preferred terminal colors. ( An explanation for confused windows users is here. ) I also managed to make the font display monospace, which gives it an extra xterm sorta feel. nice. Well, I like it anyway, and it is my journal. I think I hear the sound of thousands of UI designers gagging all around the globe. Oh well.
It is also kinda makes me think of War Games, which was a fun movie. :)
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October 7th, 2005
04:54 am - Disaster!
Well, I was right, the disk was bad.
Apparently where I went wrong was in reporting this fact to ValueWeb. I explained the problem and asked them to install an additional fan or do something else to keep the drive cooler. I submitted this request via their online request tool.
A few hours later, I notice the server is down,and I figure they've shut it down to install the fan. When it come back up, I can no longer login. I get a sinking feeling in my stomach.
Upon calling their tech support, I learn that:
a) yes, they did swap the drive out, even though I had not asked nor authorized them to do so.
b) that is standard policy and no authorization is required.
c) whoever did this has gone home already
d) they "cannot" install the old drive as a slave ( so I can copy the data ) because I only have a "basic" dedicated server account.
e) they could copy the old drive to another that I can then access somehow, but that will take approx 2-4 hours, at $150/hour.
f) the new drive has Fedora Core 1 on it. I was previously running FC4.
g) the guy I'm talking to has no authority to help me, even though he agrees they screwed up, and no one with any authority will be around until tomorrow.
So I'm up all night upgrading fedora, restoring backups and generally dealing with this mess. And probably most of tomorrow as well.
Oh, and the new drive reports it is operating at 42 Celsius also, and already has a peak temp of 55C.
Idiots.
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October 6th, 2005
06:57 pm - My server's hard disk is coughing up blood
My main server started coughing up these messages every 1/2 hour:
Oct 6 20:31:18 207-36-180-175 smartd[1692]: Device: /dev/hda, 3 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors
Oct 6 20:31:18 207-36-180-175 smartd[1692]: Device: /dev/hda, 3 Offline uncorrectable sectors
The number of sectors seems to vary a bit over time. It has been as high as 10 sectors in the past few days.
I'm worried I may be needing a new drive quite soon, which is annoying because a) It means significant downtime for the server, and b) its a pain in the ass to re-install everything, even when I have data backups, and c) the drive was just installed about 8 months ago after a previous failure.
I've done some googling about, and folks seem to agree that temperature can lead to pre-mature failures. The following command gives me temperature info for the drive:
/usr/sbin/smartctl -a /dev/hda | grep -i temp
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 042 065 000 Old_age Always - 42
This says that the current temperature is 42 Celcius ( 107.6 F ). The minimum ever recorded was 22 ( 71.6 F ). The maximum ever recorded was 65 ( 149F ).
The google wisdom seems to be that anything over 40C should be considered bad, and that every 5 degree increase in temperature can halve the life of a drive.
This page shows how to determine which file(s) are affected by bad blocks, but it didn't work for me. I always get an error from debugfs when trying to identify the inode.
The drive ( via smartctl ) reports that it is generally healthy:
/usr/sbin/smartctl -a /dev/hda | grep asses
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
I'm pretty sure it is lying to me though. badblocks has been running for a couple hours and has returned a shitload of bad blocks. Also my imap server started acting weird, and required a restart before clients could connect again. Possibly unrelated, but I doubt it.
I sent a support request to my hosting provider, ValueWeb, asking that they do something to lower the drive temperature. Hopefully they do it -- it benefits them as well if they don't have to be replacing the drive every 10 months.
So, basically, I think the disk is screwed. again. Crap. Time to start backing up all the fringe conf files and stuff I didn't really worry about before.
Solid state disk devices sure do seem like they'd be nice. Maybe these guys really have something? If so, sign me up.
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October 4th, 2005
08:57 pm - My sister's birthday!
Today is my sister's birthday. Also two more of my sisters have birthdays later in the month. Being habitually forgetful, and lazy, I decided to do something different.
Lately, I've been working on a new site, Karmus.com, with some people who shall remain nameless for now. Karmus is sort of a cross between a greeting card site, a bulletin board, evite, and Flickr. You could think of it as shared greeting cards with Paypal support for fundraising.
So I took 20 or so of my favorite photos of the three of them and uploaded them into an album, with photos and captions, and sent it out to all of them and some more family. I really hope they like it. I'd like to link to the card here, but it is private access only.
I also took the opportunity to send another card for my other sister who just got married and included pics I took at her wedding. Well, I had created it before, but had not actually gotten around to sending it until now. Mostly because I was waiting for other people to sign it and add pics, though a bunch of them were too lazy. grrrrr......
Now it is back to working on OpenID support in mediawiki. Except I'm all jacked up on caffeine from drinking too much coffee. oops!
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12:45 am - First MediaWiki OpenID Login
Good news! Tonight I decided to hack on MediaWiki a bit and see if I could add OpenID support. Well, it wasn't exactly simple, and there's still a LOT of cleanup to do, but I'm happy to report that today, October 3, 2005 was the first ever MediaWiki OpenID login. Just think, one day soon we could be using OpenID on Wikipedia. :-)
I would upload a screenshot if it wasn't so late and I so tired. Oh, and if I knew how to use LJ's interface at all.
As soon as I have something decently usable I plan to install it onto the Videntity.org Wiki and also upload the patches to MediaZilla.
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