Flux, Flex, and Other

A coworker of mine forwarded this along to me today, and it was really inspirational. I love it when technology, an idea that probably got laughed at, and a little effort can give a big middle finger to the forces of oppression…

Most people have heard that China maintains the Golden Shield, a state firewall run in order to censor unapproved websites from the Chinese people, and to survey who is trying to access them.

Picidae is trying to change all that, with a very interesting, and relatively simple idea.

• A person in China surfs to a website run off of a pici-server — a computer running Mac OS X, which is outside of the Golden Shield. The URL to the server could be found by talking to someone outside of China, by word of mouth, etc.
  • There’s a whole network of these, and the network can be grown by adding an inexpensive new computer anywhere in the world, so it would be nearly impossible and massively labor intensive to Shield them all
  • The individual servers do not know that any other servers exist, nor does the main organizer keep a list, so literally anyone, anywhere could be running one of these, and there’s no away to find it.
• That website has a simple text box and a button.
• The person enters the website they want to see, that may be censored.
• The page, locally on their computer, encrypts the URL so snooping eyes can’t see what they are requesting.
• The pici-server decrypts the data, surfs to the requested website, and generates a single image of it — one huge JPG. It also looks where links are, and maps those areas of the image to be clickable, linking back to the pici-server. It’s called an ImageMap, and has been around forever…
• The image and its maps are sent back to the person — nothing incriminating other than a JPG image that the firewall can’t read…
• The person reads the information off of the image, clicks an area of the ImageMap, and the cycle continues

Here’s a link to the main site.

Here’s how it works.

Here’s what the user in China will experience. I tried it on this blog and it looked identical - you’d never know unless you looked at the code behind the page…

Obviously content shown in Flash (Flex) or any other dynamic content (Javascript, AJAX, video, etc) will not work on this type of network, but hey, a big fat hole in censorship in a great thing.  It also looks really easy to set up your website to proxy to a server or to use your webspace as a server if you’re so inclined — you can even use your Mac to run the server over your cable or DSL connection!

Adobe Max just happened in Chicago this week. I couldn’t go and drink the Kool-Aid, but it was nice of some people to videotape the sneak peeks a the upcoming features of Flash.

I never was a Flash guy - I just couldn’t get my head around the timelines, keyframes, and setting up tweens and such. It was too scattered for me. Looks like some of the new features will help this. But…

Peter Elst posted videos to his blog showing most of the features in development. All of these are cool in some fashion or another, but the author- and runtime- inverse kinematics shown at the end of the Flash Next video is really cool, and is the foundation (that I was missing) of an idea I had a long time ago that should, if my estimates are correct, make me a multi-millionaire.

Sweet. Stay tuned for more at a much later date…

Oh, and the Seam Carving demo is still really cool. You just can’t beat stuff like that.

Here’s a pic of my cat, Higgins, doing what he does normally - sleeping in odd positions in odd places around the house.

Very not-interesting I know, but I was testing posting the photo from my cell phone thru Flickr. Will he handy while hurtling down the highway during the move to let you guys know what’s going on.

Just testing my ability to post to the blog via email. That way I
can send text messages from the truck during the trip…

Saw this website today. It’s a project called RepRap which is, if I read it correctly, essentially an inject printer that can print with materials, not just ink, and do so 3 dimensionally.

So you fire up its (free) software, design a plastic or metal item, and “print” yourself one.

Sounds interesting, but one of the main claims to fame is that it can almost create itself by printing new parts out to be assembled into another one of itself. The first (and now the second) can both print new parts, and the population of the machines grow exponentially)

Did these people not see The Matrix??? Or The Terminator?

Seems to me making machines that can make themselves is pretty much baby step one into the tub of warm pink goo and the Ethernet port in the back of your skull…

Still is pretty freaking cool tho…

I like to think I’m a guy in touch with technology.

I’m a programming, developing, web designing, apple using, Tivo-using, web surfing, VCR clock setting kind of a guy. New things come down the line, and I’m in like I’ve used them all my life.

Except this new service from my bank. We use USAA for our banking (Patty’s dad was in the Navy, so we can). They released a service called “Deposit@Home” that answered my only real gripe about our accounts there.

USAA has no brick and mortar banks, and no ATMs. They refund any ATM fees you incur, which is nice, but depositing checks has always been a little odd. You can mail them the checks and a deposit slip, but it takes a while for them to get there, and there’s something odd about endorsing checks and putting them in the good ol’ US Mail.

This new Deposit@Home thig is really slick, technology-wise. I log into my account on the USAA website, click a link, and it runs a little app that lets me use my scanner to scan in and crop images of the front and back of the check.

A second or two of “Please Wait” crunching and boom! Money’s in the account. PLEASE VOID AND SHRED YOUR CHECK.

Let me type that again.

PLEASE VOID AND SHRED YOUR CHECK

I understand how the system works. A check is no different than an image of a check — the little routing numbers in the weird font are there, and the endorsement signatures get compared if a problem arises. I see how it works, but that’s irrelevant when it comes to SHREDDING THE CHECK.

Have you ever put a check for $497.38 into a shredder? That little part of our brains that we share with newts and frogs chimes in and says “Um… no…”

I scanned in my checks. I saw the money in the account — no holds… no processing delays… but I still waited 3 days to shred the checks, and I went to my account every day while waiting just to make sure they didn’t say “Oops, just kidding”.

I guess its the thought of destroying money… or I’m getting too old for these newfangled whippersnapper technologies.

It’s still pretty freaking cool, tho.

I’m a mac user, and liked the idea of the Dashboard — a place for small utilities to be brought up at the touch of a button.

I’ve got weather radar maps, calendar entry viewers, calculators, and my NetFlix queue. Nothing I couldn’t live without having at the tips of my fingers.

I did download 3 widgets recently that have served me well, and are nice to have ready to run at a moment’s notice:

Application Update: searches your installed third party apps and lets you know when newer versions are available. Cool.

Amazon Album Art: iTunes tried its best to download all my album art, but missed a lot of them. Select a song in iTunes… bring up the dashboard, and puch a button. It copies in the song info, presents the album art it finds (including a panel of multiple candidates), and then gives you a button to push to Set As Album Art for the selected song (and it ripples to all other songs with the same album name).

Houston Transtar Traffic: Whoever designed the road system in Houston was drunk or had a bad sense of humor. This widget shows the realtime updated traffic map of Houston. Nice.

I’m diabetic — have been for 32 of my 33+ years. A lot of promising work has been done over my lifetime to get us, hopefully, closer to the cure that has always been “just 5 years away”

Still waiting, folks…

I wear a Medtronic-Minimed insulin pump that makes my life a lot easier, but man the things are clunky looking and non-user friendly in the days of iPod and cell phones that can launch rockets.

Shelby sent me this blog entry — a woman’s open letter to Steve Jobs (”his Steveness”) of Apple, asking for his design team (the ones behind the iPod) to get into the mix and help medical quipment companies better design their products for their users.

There’s a nice link in the comments section to Digg a TechCrunch article that got written about the letter, which it looks like people are doing. If you like, go Digg it too.

Here I am on the blog world. Geek out, baby.

Hope this makes your day, shelbert.