Lately, I have become quite a frequent user of various transportation services, such as buses, trains and planes.

The basic idea is simple, and there are very few variables: you want to go from somewhere, to somewhere else, at a certain moment.

The idea is that you throw in these initial parameters into the system, and then you spend some time viewing the pricing and possibly some characteristics about the trip itself, such as duration or transfers.

Somehow, after using several transportation services websites, I feel like I have spent most of my time learning how to actually use each different website, rather than evaluating the actual consequences of each possible transfer choice.

90 % of the websites involved the usage of a “wizard”, which reminded me more of some sort of obscure machine rather than something that has magical powers.

Recently, I poured my frustration with these “wizards” out on my significant other (who usually does a great job with putting up with my rants, hehe).

The question I had was: is it not possible to have a 3 click booking procedure ?

I mean, once again: where, when and how much….it shouldn’t take more right ?

You could even market it as “<insert any transportation services website here>’s famous 3-click booking !”…

And, funny enough, I recently stumbled upon this great paper: Magic Ink, INFORMATION SOFTWARE AND THE GRAPHICAL INTERFACE, by Bret Victor.

The paper is from 2006, but I believe it can still be fully applied to the majority of today’s user graphical interfaces offered on the net.

I have to say it is the most concise, straight to the point and clear paper I have ever read (and probably will ever read) on user graphical interfaces design.

It definitely is a must-read for anybody involved on any kind of information system with graphical user interfaces.

(The article can be found here, and, if you liked the paper, the rest of Bret’s content will probably be interesting for you also)

Here are some quotes which made me continuously nod in agreement while reading the paper, and having in mind all these wizard-infected and administrative-debris-contaminated websites:

• The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers
• A good graphic designer understands how to arrange information on the page so the reader can ask and answer questions, make comparisons, and draw conclusions.
• A person uses information software to construct and manipulate a model that is internal to the mind—a mental representation of information, and mentally prodding this model to reveal the optimal choice.
• I want to see how all of this information interrelates, make connections, and ultimately make a decision about what to do when.
• People are encouraged to consider software a machine—when a button is pressed, invisible gears grind and whir, and some internal or external state is changed. Manipulation of machines is the domain of industrial design.
• Navigation implies state. Software that can be navigated is software in which the user can get lost. The more navigation, the more corners to get stuck in. The more manipulable state, the more ways to wander into a “bad mode.” State is the primary reason people fear computers—stateful things can be broken.*
• …modern software is dominated by mechanical metaphors…with the user spending more time pulling down menus than studying and learning information…

It seams clear, with less interactions, less navigation, less states, it’s…better.

Bret reasons that, many of the informations that are obtained via interactions with the user, can be obtained without a need of annoying the user, and introducing more and more buttons and navigation.

(they can be obtained for example from the context, environment, history…)

Bret goes on to provide a concrete example, and, coincidence, it is an example of a potential user interface for a flight inquiry system:

So why is it that something like that is so difficult to find in the wild ?

There is another great quote that I also agree with:

• Software doesn’t have to be this way, but the solution will require a significant re-thinking of both the design process and the engineering platforms.

and:

• Good design makes people happy, but feature count makes people pay.

He continues on with:

• Today, software consumers demand technological features because software marketing presents features. Consumers ignore design because marketing ignores design. The cycle is vicious, but perhaps vulnerable too—some brilliant new software with engineering, design, and marketing all in sync may raise the bar for everyone.

Well, I also recently discovered Google Flights, which definitely looks like something towards the direction of something…nicer:

Is there hope ? Bret seems to think so:

However, in my case, when I need some quick content extraction, nothing works better than p & p media: pen & paper.

The pen part is quite easy to solve, but sometimes I struggle on transforming the electronic media to paper.

More specifically, sometimes I discover some great blog, with quite a big amount of posts, that doesn’t offer any easy printing solution.

The obvious idea would be to take the blog’s RSS feed (which is offered almost always) and use any RSS reader to selectively print the desired posts.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any RSS reader with this kind of functionality (although I have to admit that at some point I became lazy and frustrated due to my poor googling skills).

While querying the net for RSS to PDF, I stumbled upon fivefilters.org.

This great webapp offers the possibility to translate any RSS feed to PDF.

However, it only processes the latest published posts, as supplied by the RSS feed.

Usually, only the latest 10 – 20 posts are offered.

After confirming that my targeted blog was a WordPress blog, I remembered that WordPress has quite nice pretty permalinks and feed options: simply provide a month in the url and the feed will return the posts of that month.

So the solution to my problem was quite simple, just invoke fivefilters.org with a different RSS url each time: once for each month.

So here is a little shell script I made that does precisely this (curl and pdftk are required for usage).

It takes the target blog url, and a start month.

It then invokes fivefilters.org once for each month, receives all the generated pdfs, and merges them in one PDF file.

The scripts only works with WordPress blogs, but I guess most other blog software offer similar RSS url queries, so the script could probably be adapted.

Now, if I could just find some time to read all this great content…

So, when browsing the daily visit statistics for this blog from time to time, I expect anything from 10 to 60.

However, a couple of days ago, I was quite surprised to see only 2 visits.

Surely enough, a quick visit to the homepage showed a blank page.

After recalling how to run a local copy of a WordPress blog, these ugly messages popped up in the php log:

Deprecated: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in /home/dvromeu/www/www/wp/wp-settings.php on line 520

Deprecated: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in /home/dvromeu/www/www/wp/wp-settings.php on line 535

Deprecated: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in /home/dvromeu/www/www/wp/wp-settings.php on line 542

Deprecated: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in /home/dvromeu/www/www/wp/wp-settings.php on line 578

Deprecated: Function set_magic_quotes_runtime() is deprecated in /home/dvromeu/www/www/wp/wp-settings.php on line 18

A quick visit to google took me (of course) to stackoverflow, where the hints indicated a change of PHP version on my hosting services.

Indeed, there had been a migration from 5.2 to 5.3 (announced I have to say…just not monitored by this blog’s sysadmin…hehe) and my 2009 wordpress 2.7 installation was not happy about it.

Some local testing and migrating was enough, and now the blog is up again…

Monitor, monitor, monitor ! upgrade, upgrade, upgrade !

This event just reminded me on how important it is to have good sysadmin’s in the team, even thought they are often misunderstood and their importance underestimated !!

So don’t wait for the next sysadmin day, and give your sysadmin a hug tomorrow !

1. Download the complete wordpress directory
2. Export wordpress database
3. Place the directory in your htdocs folder
4. Import the exported database
5. Edit the ‘siteurl ‘ entry in the wordpress options database table and make sure it is correct i. e. http://localhost:8888/www/wp
6. Edit the ‘home’ entry in the wordpress options database table and make sure it is correct i. e. http://localhost:8888/www
7. If your local server does not support ssl, make sure ‘define(‘FORCE_SSL_ADMIN’, true);’ is not present in your wp-config.php file

In my case the goal is to connect to a wireless network from a workstation that only has a PCIe NIC.

The simplest solution is probably to use a USB wifi dongle on the workstation, but it can be quite complicated to find working wireless network drivers for linux systems such as ubuntu 64 bits, which I currently use.

In my case, after having no luck on linux drivers for the Belkin Play Wireless N+N300 Dual Band USB Adapter, I remembered I still had an old Conceptronic C54APM Access Point lying around somewhere in the closet.

In the past, I used it to offer a wireless network from a non-wireless cable modem router and, fortunately enough, after some googling on the possible operation modes, it seems it offered what I needed:

My use of the “AP Bridge – WDS” mode goes something like this:

The workstation is wired to the C54APM, which is linked via WDS to the FRITZ!Box. The workstation is then able to receive and route data through the FRITZ!Box and to the WWW.

Here are the steps to setup the network:

1. (Optional) Change FRITZ!Box admin console language


Access the FRITZ!Box admin console by launching a browser and going to “http://192.168.178.1″ and then:

• “Einstellungen”



• “Erweiterte Einstellungen”



• “System”



• “Sprache”







(After the language change, the FRITZ!Box will take a couple of minutes for rebooting)

2. Obtain the MAC address of the FRITZ!Box


Login again to the FRITZ!Box and go to “Settings” –> “Advanced Settings” –> “WLAN”. You should end up on the “Radio Network” page. Here you should note the “MAC address of this FRITZ!Box” value.



3. Set and Obtain the FRITZ!Box Radio Channel


Now, proceed to the “Radio Channel”, and set the mode to “Adjust radio channel settings”. Then set the radio channel and note the channel used. Select the “apply” button at the bottom of the page so the changes are applied.



4. Connect the C54APM to the Wired Workstation


Plugin the C54APM and reset it by pressing the reset button on the back on the device for around 10 seconds (the led on the left should briefly switch off once the reset signal has been received). Then, connect the workstation to the C54APM with a standard CAT 5 ethernet cable (not crossover) and set the workstation ip settings to a static IP “10.0.0.10″ and netmask “255.0.0.0″.

5. Set the IP settings for the C54APM


Launch a browser and go to the http://10.0.0.1 address, which will bring up the administration console for the C54APM. The user and password is admin/admin. Navigate to “System Utilty” and in the section “Management IP”, the ip settings should be set to the same network as the FRITZ!Box. In my case, I set the IP to “192.168.178.2″, the “Subnet Mask” to “255.255.255.0″ and the “Gateway Address” to “192.168.178.1″ (The ip address of the FRITZ!Box). The “DHCP Server” should be set to “Disabled”.


Apply and save the changes.


6. Set the WDS Mode for the C54APM


Return to the admin console on the C54APM and go to “Basic Setting”. Here the mode should be set to “AP Bridge-WDS”. The “Band” and the “Channel Number” should be set to the same band and channel used by the FRITZ!Box (noted in step 3). In the field “MAC Address 1″, the MAC address of the FRITZ!Box should be inputted (obtained in step 2).

Apply and save the changes. If security settings are to be used, the “Set Security” options should be accessed.


7. Obtain the MAC address of the C54APM


In the home page of the C54APM admin console, the “BSSID” value in the “Wireless Configuration” section should be noted.



8. Set the WDS mode on the FRITZ!Box


Log in to the FRITZ!Box admin console and go to “Settings” –> “Advanced Settings” –> “WDS”. The checkbox “WDS Enabled” should be checked and the “Operating Mode” should be set to “Base station”.



9. Add the C54APM as a WDS Repeater


Scroll down the same page and select the “Add WLAN Device”:

Enter the C54APM MAC address noted in step 7 and apply the changes:

If everything went ok, the C54APM should now appear as a WDS repeater:

(Additional security settings on this page)


10. Set the workstation IP settings


Finally, set the IP settings on the workstation. The IP should be something like a static IP like “192.168.178.50″ and the netmask “255.255.255.0″. The gateway should be set to “192.168.178.1″ (the FRITZ!Box).

Quote from Michael Nygard – The Future of Software Development”:

"Speaking of languages, many of the problems we face today cannot be solved inside a single language or application.
The behavior of a web site today cannot be adequately explained or reasoned about just by examining the application code.
Instead, a site picks up attributes of behavior from a multitude of sources: application code, web server configuration,
edge caching servers, data grid servers, offline or asynchronous processing, machine learning elements, active network
devices (such as application firewalls), and data stores. "Programming" as we would describe it today--coding application
behavior in a request handler--defines a diminishing portion of the behavior. We lack tools or languages to express and
reason about these distributed, extended, fragmented systems. Consequently, it is difficult to predict the functionality,
performance, capacity, scalability, and availability of these systems."

I couldn’t agree more with this…

The amount of expertise and know-how that can be needed to implement, understand and maintain what can appear to be “a simple website” is usually underestimated.

It really is amazing what can be lying under the hood of a “web page”, and the amount of knowledge needed to fully control and understand the consequences and the outcome that will be triggered by the execution of your code:

Distributed transactions, dynamic deep domains, load balanced clustered black box environments, 3rd party constraining libraries, stateless http legacy protocols, evil deadlock-friendly isolation levels , resource bottlenecks, legacy client browsers, classloader hell…

When a problem arises, usually in the form of an unexpected behavior, the hunt starts for any information that can help understand exactly what is going on.

As Michael states, “coding application behavior in a request handler–defines a diminishing portion of the behavior”.

Sometimes it is quite astonishing the number of things that must go right just so a simple http request can be processed in the way we want:

First of all, a cross-browser friendly piece of javascript needs to be correctly interpreted by any of many equal-but-totally-different browsers. If this already complex first step is ok, then, somehow, the request must be almost miraculously routed and guided through an almost infinite network of broken nodes and dead ends to a hopefully responsive socket. Supposing the request has actually been able to trigger the spawning of a thread on a valid member of a clustered environment, the clock starts ticking on all sorts of request, session and transaction timeouts that have to be beaten in order to correctly access, use and close all sorts of different resources, and produce a usable and expected response, that must of course be somehow guided back to the original startpoint.

Multiply this sequences of events by the hundreds, add transactionality, performance and security, and it is not difficult to imagine the madness that occurs in a shared memory multithreaded environment such as a JVM….

It is also not surprising that the number of elements that have to be perfectly synced and configured to work together in order for the global system to work, can be frightening…

From what I have seen so far, only specialization plus information gathering, through a vast array of tools, can help.

All sorts of sources must be gathered and delivered to the right experts for analysis: transaction logs and deadlock dumps for DBAs, thread dumps to java engineers, system logs for operations…

It is not always possible to implement simple solutions: sometimes complex system implementations are inevitable.

And when this is the case, interesting challenges always appear before being able to offer a “simple web site” that “just works”.

(hopefully for us, the T-800s no time soon)

I remember taking a robotics course back during my studies in the early 2000′s, and the autonomous specific-purpose line-following 4-wheeled Number 5 ancestor that resulted from putting together a PCB, a servo, some amateur welding, some sloppy microprogramming and a lot of enthusiasm, was quite far away from David.

Nevertheless, the strong willed sheldons of the world continue to close the gap between science fiction and reality, and every once in a while, some results popup which certainly raise my eyebrows.

I recently stumbled upon the Space & Robots lecture given at the singularity university by NASA astronaut Dan Barry.

The entire presentation does a great job on briefly discussing adaptiveness, robotics and A.I., but what caught my eye were the various examples of current-day efforts in robotics, and specially these two:

Kiva Systems

What is probably the most interesting fact about this legion of intelligent orange agents controlled by a central brain is that this is a real system being used in real production environments.

Three Engineers, Hundreds of Robots, One Warehouse on spectrum.ieee.org gives a little insight on how it works:

"The robots ... navigate the warehouse by pointing cameras at the floor that read two-dimensional bar-coded stickers laid out by hand 1
 meter from each other, in a grid. The robots relay the encoded information wirelessly to a computer cluster that functions both as a
 dispatcher and a traffic controller. It instructs, for instance, robot No. 1051 to bring rack No. 308 to worker No. 12--without colliding
 with robot No. 1433, which is crossing its path."

"Instead of relying on a single piece of software that centralizes all the decisions, they envisioned software agents that could run on the
 central computer, on the robots, and on PCs at the picking stations. The agents would exchange information but act independently, each
 trying to optimize its own tasks. They also adopted heuristic methods, like greedy algorithms that can make good--but not always the
 best--decisions to perform tasks such as assigning racks to stations."

“BigDog”

Just seeing this “beast” walking on ice is scary and thrilling at the same time.

As Dr. Barry, I too believe BigDog certainly does a better job than I do walking on ice…

Hoping that it could be useful for anybody else that frequently finds themselves in a “friend / relative / XXX” who is a “computer guy / gal “ kind of role, and who is expected to easily and quickly solve any computer related task, here goes one possible quick and simple solution for building the aforementioned portfolio site.

Building a portfolio website is certainly not the most complex of I.T. tasks nowadays, however, the constraints surrounding my business case did make it quite challenging:

• My knowledge on Web Design and Website construction has not advanced since the early 00′s (CSS effects, Flash and HTML5 remain quite a mystery to me)
• The total cost of construction / hosting….and anything else, must be 0
• No ugly side effects of free hosting (such as popups) are allowed
• The portfolio must allow easy album management: uploading, coding and any other technical aspects are to remain transparent for the end user

Transparent Album Management

The most challenging requirement for me was to find a solution that offers easy and trivial album management.

FTP Uploading, remote directory creation or html coding were definitely out of the question, as all these tasks require specific knowledge that could not be imposed on the end user.

Fortunately enough, I stumbled upon Jalbum.

Jalbum offers free hosting for photo albums and, more importantly, jalbum also offers a great java client application that allows the user to easily create and manage the photo albums of their site.

Clicking, dragging and dropping are the only three basic operations needed to successfully use jalbum.

The client is freely downloadable, and it is possible to have a nice ad-free, popup-free 30 mb (more or less 200 photos, which is enough for the business case) account for free.

Custom and “nice looking” Portfolio Website

The business case required a nice flashy home page, and a top menu to connect the different albums.

Flash Catalyst came to the rescue when my complete ignorance of flash became a blocking issue towards providing a simple animation for the front page.

Although a bit buggy (perhaps due to the fact that it was still in a beta phase when I tried it), if equipped with a nice layered PSD, it is extremely simple to create nice flashy animations.

(Ryan’s “Geting Started with Flash Catalyst” tutorial should get you towards the path of simple animations in only a couple of hours)

(As a side note, sadly enough, I had to find a Windows PC to use Flash Catalyst: the prerequisites state that “cannot install on a volume that uses a case-sensitive file system”, which unfortunately is the (bad?) choice I made when installing MAC OS…. Maybe something to be solved in the future?)

After fiddling around with Jalbum’s skins, I managed to modify azarai’s great Imago skin, inserting the different top menus, allowing for the desired effect of linking the albums together on one site.

Hosting

Jalbum’s hosting is not intended to allow for flexible and custom websites, but rather only for hosting of jalbum-friendly sites, which meant that it was not possible to host the front page together with the jalbum photo albums.

The last time I had searched for a nice free clean hosting solution, I believe the now extinct Geocities was the best choice, which can give an idea of my knowledge on the current state of free hosting possibilities.

After some googling, I ended up setting up a Google App Engine account.

This option offered more than needed, and after downloading the SDK, creating my project and a simple “../appengine-java-sdk/bin/appcfg.sh update war”, the portfolio was up and running in the cloud.

I have to say, that I consider the final result to be not bad for a 0-cost-sunday-morning-built portfolio…

Although cheaper and more limited (functionality wise) models can be found, the eTrex Venture HC is great value for money.

The 10.000 point logging capacity, excellent reception and 14 hour battery life, and the Garmin Mac-friendly software utilities, were enough to convince me.

With Road Trip for example, it is possible to export recorded data in GPX format.

One possible source for such information is, for example, a GPS data logger.

The path from GPX to Google Maps can be completed in 3 simple steps:

1. Export the recorded tracks to GPX

In my case, with the Venture HC, it is quite simple.

Connect the Venture HC to the Mac through the USB port, turn it on, fire up Road Trip and click on the “Receive” button. The recorded tracks should appear in the “Recently Read” folder. Simply copy the needed tracks into a created folder and then export the folder.

2. Convert the GPX file to KMZ

KMZ files are zipped versions of KML files, which is another XML based standard for representing GPS data.

In any case, the KMZ format is a format that Google Maps understands, so the GPX must be transformed to this format, with GPS Visualizer, for example.

3. Code the Map

Couldn’t be easier:

    if (GBrowserIsCompatible()) {
      var map = new GMap2(document.getElementById("map"));
      map.addControl(new GLargeMapControl());
      map.addControl(new GMapTypeControl());
      map.setCenter(new GLatLng(49.613824,6.127625), 12);
      var kml = new GGeoXml("http://dvrom.eu/bike/2.kmz");
      map.addOverlay(kml);
    }

And, the final result, for example, a bicycle route around luxembourg.

The hard part of all this is producing relevant input data….in some form of physical activity, of course…