Tech-Blog: Category In-Touch

ASP Possibility: Virtual Deposit Box

mop — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 15:48:00 -0500

An online repository for dated and confirmed storage of electronic documents and other media.

A typical use-case scenario involves a home owner taking digital photos of their household contents: jewelry, stereo equipment, art work, etc. The digital photos, and possibly scanned copies of invoices for the same items are then submitted, via the Internet (email, FTP, browser up-load), to the Virtual Deposit Box service.

The market space seems to be somewhat crowded already...

IP.com "enables customers to protect all internal e records such that they can prove the original date and content of any document in the future"
Surety "is the leading provider of tamperproof data integrity solutions that generate irrefutable evidence of exactly what electronic records were created and precisely when" (market leader?)
Read Notify allows customers to timestamp and notarize email contents
GenuineDoc allows customers to digitally sign online content

See my initial write-up. I do not expect to take this any further.

Brainstorm Session 4

mop — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 11:19:00 -0500

Results of our final brainstorming session using Paul’s random association technique.

Our random topics were as follows:

Follow the Money: recreational properties
Huge Problem: distance
Future Technologies: data integration
Current Skill set: performance and optimization

The results of our storming are online.

Ideas of Interest

Caretaker Matchmaker Service

A job board for cottage caretakers.

Integrated Travel Reservation System

Facilitate linking from one reservation system to other recommended sites, e.g. if selected bed and breakfast is not available on a given date, facilitate the transfer of customer to another B&B.

Customized Travel Reservation System

A CJB-like reservation service for small destination properties, e.g. B&B.

Brainstorm Session 3

mop — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 14:06:00 -0500

Results of another brainstorming session using Paul’s random association technique.

Our random topics were as follows:

Follow the Money: overseas family vacations
Huge Problem: poverty
Future Technologies: rich web interfaces
Current Skill set: customer service

The results of our storming are online.

Ideas of Interest

Travellers Matchmaker Service

A matchmaking service for travellers and those folks who are willing to billet.

Travel Games / In-Air MPORPG

Assuming in-air Internet access becomes somewhat ubiquitous, a collection of games suitable for air travellers, especially games that involve multiple players in the same plane.

Travel Notification Service

SMS or other notification service for travellers and their agents, e.g. notify of flight delays especially when travel involves tricky connections.

Brainstorm Session 2

mop — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 14:05:00 -0500

The second brainstorming session with Julia, Sepehr, and myself, using Paul’s random association technique was more fruitful.

Our random topics were as follows:

Follow the Money: high taxes
Huge Problem: time management
Future Technologies: digital photography
Current Skill set: virtual communities

The results of our storming are online.

Ideas of Interest

Automated Tax Payment

Online service that facilitates the annual tax filing and payment process, thus allowing users to avoid the high-stress filing period(s).

Insurance Photo Repository

Online service that allows users to store photographs and other digitized images (document scans?) in a dated and irrevocable manner. The service would provide dated third party verification of ownership.

CellShots.com

Online organizer for digital photos taken via cell phone. Similar to flickr.com and others, but with an interface suitable for cell phone photeurs.

Brainstorm Session 1

mop — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 11:12:00 -0500

Julia, Sepehr and I spend some time brainstorming business ideas, using Paul’s random juxtaposition method. This was our first session using said method, so the results were a little uneven.

Our random topics were as follows:

Follow the Money: debt (mainly housing costs), debt reduction, debt servicing
Huge Problem: global warming, climate change
Future Technologies: portable energy sources, batteries, fuel cells
Current Skill set: XML & variants

The results of our storming are online.

Ideas of Interest

Mortgage Comparator

Online service for quick comparisons between similar mortgage products. Probably in combination with user submitted advice and experiences.

Account Aggregator

Online service that allows aggregate view and management of disparate financial services. Provides a 10,000 ft view of debt.

XGWRL

Online clearing house and/or publication avenue for Global Warming Reports (using XML Global Warming Reporting Language) as published by participants in the Kyoto accord or similar.

In-Touch Makedata

mop — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 23:01:00 -0400

Not sure where I’d like this type of documentation to exist, but it should be preserved for posterity. So... here’s some background on In-Touch’s object-relational framework: Makedata.

Makedata is a Java app that creates *.java files that encapsulate the RDBMS <--> Java mapping. Each object/table is defined in a simple text file () which Makedata transforms into three files:

table.sql: a SQL script that creates the table and indices
tableRawData.java: a java object representing the raw data (members plus accessor methods, very bean-like)
tableRawRowBuffer.java: a java object that knows how to read and write the raw data to/from the database

The generated classes are generally found in the ./target/generated-datafiles/ directory. The Ant task ’datac’ invokes makedata.

Each *RawData class is a sub-class of intouch.data.Data. Each *RawRowBuffer class is a sub-class of intouch.sql.RowBuffer. Generally we extend each of the generated classes and these sub-classes of *RawData and *RawRowBuffer become containers for business logic.

Another important class is intouch.data.View which defines a bit-field representing each fields in a data object. A view of the table/data is defined by turning bits on and off.

We also use these classes to represent table joins. There are two abstract classes intouch.data.ViewData and intouch.data.ViewDataRowBuffer which are extended to define joins. Again, for each object-rdbms map there are two classes, one for data and one for db read/write.

RimuHosting

mop — Sun, 27 Jun 2004 21:26:00 -0400

In-Touch now has a bit of virtual space at RimuHosting. The company is based in New Zealand, but our server is located in Dallas TX. Rimu is unique in that they provide Virtual Private Servers (VPL) using User Mode Linux and a variety of Linux distros, including Debian.

We’re currently on a $40USD/month plan that provides a VPS with 128MB of RAM, 4GB of disk space, and up to 60GB of traffic. I’m guessing the hardware is a dual Xeon running at 2.8GHz. So far rimu.intouch.ca is just used to host the In-Touch blogs, but I may also use it for other In-Touch and customer services. At the very least, I’d like to learn something about UML services.

Some stats from rimu.intouch.ca:

tsai:/home/mpierson# cat /proc/cpuinfo 
processor	: 0
vendor_id	: User Mode Linux
model name	: UML
mode		: skas
host		: Linux host32.rimuhosting.com 2.6.6 #3 SMP Thu Jun 10 01:10:47 UTC 2004 i686
bogomips	: 2510.02

tsai:/home/mpierson# free
total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        125532      95932      29600          0       7896      64668
-/+ buffers/cache:      23368     102164
Swap:        98296          0      98296

tsai:/home/mpierson# df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/ubd0              4128448    452448   3466288  12% /
tmpfs                    62764         0     62764   0% /dev/shm

The only gotcha I’ve encountered so far is the incompatibility between UML and the GNU-TLS libraries in Debian sid. I orderd the VPS with Debian woody and one of the Rimu admins had to rescue our VPS after a "apt-get dist-upgrade" to sid failed. A few dpkg-divert additions were required for /lib/tls/*, but now rimu is happily running sid.

pyBlosxom Install

mop — Sun, 27 Jun 2004 20:06:00 -0400

Well, here it is. pyBlosxom is now installed on blog.intouch.ca.

I started with the Debian version of pyBlosxom in the experimental archives, and created a mini install in each user’s home dir. This more-or-less follows the install suggestions in the pyBlosxom wiki. The flavour templates are roughly based on the html flavour that comes bundled in the Debian package.

Each user now has files in their home directory similar to:

www
 |
 - pyblosxom
   |
   - data
      content-type.html
      head.html
      story.html
      footer.html
   - etc
      config.py
   - plugins
      pycalendar.py
   - cgi-bin
      pyblosxom.cgi

Blog are placed in the data subdir with a ’.txt’ suffix. The file name is significant when constructing permanent linke to articles so best to make it descriptive. Articles can be written in plain text or in HTML (still with ’.txt’ suffix) -- I suggest HTML for readability. pyBlosxom auto-magically classifies articles according the the file system hierachy under the data directory.

My goal is to write at least one article per day on work related subjects, and to convince other In-Touch’ers to do the same.