New project: Auto poster

Motivational posters pop up everywhere, either the serious ones, but really mostly at least on the internet the demotivational ones. People on all sorts of forums seem to have fun creating themselves. It's not hard - you find a powerpoint template, find an image, pick some colors, type in your funny text, create a screenshot and upload the result. Still quite a bit of work. Especially since you'll usually end up using image search to get the picture and if you want to do it right, base the color scheme on the image you use. Plus sharing by image is not as handy as sharing by url.

Auto poster does the entire thing online. You type a search string for your image, a word for the poster and your tagline and the program does the rest (i.e. fetch the image, calculate the color and project the entire thing in badly css'd html). Give it a go.

The advance of APIs: WordColor and Landgeist are back

A while ago I had a server crash and it was really painful to restore the Zope instance I had before. I decided to do away with Zope and go with django on App Engine instead. This meant however rewriting all projects. I never really got around to that and ended up with just a subset.

Today I decided to update some, more specifically WordColor and LandGeist. It is interesting to see how much APIs have improved and how these projects can now be done a lot better.

WordColor used to be a windows executable that would screen scrape image search to get images that matched a search, average the pixel colors returned and declare the average color (with some normalization of saturation) the color of your word. That was kinda bad. If image search changed its html, the program would stop working. And anybody who had installed the program would then have to find back where it came from. But doing this online was near impossible.

Now there is a search api that lets you do image searches right from the page. You still can't access the color values from javascript of course, but a quick ajax call back to the server solves that. App engine comes with a handy images module that has a function to get the histogram of an image so that's really quick and painless now.

Landgeist was in a similar fashion a client side program that would given a word, do searches for that word and all the names of all the countries and then calculate the google share of that country for that word.

But now there is a search api callable from javascript! And you can use the chart api to update a map while you watch. The fun thing is that all the work is now just done in the browser.

Living like an American

The Internet is this great place without borders. You can do anything from wherever you want. Check your email using your phone from the airport, post a facebook update from an cyber cafe over a dial up line somewhere in the south east asian jungles. Post a tweet update while watching the world cup right from the stadium.

Except for that you can't. The media companies (music, books, films etc) are starting to figure out that playing nice with the web is better than suffer the piracy. Excellent. But if you are outside of the US it doesn't quite work. You can't buy your latest movies and tv shows on iTunes. Amazon sells you some books outside of the US on the kindle, but not many. And no MP3s. Netflix lets you stream movies and tv shows but only if you are in the states, the only place where you get to see Hulu.com.

Over the last years or so I've collected some tricks around these restrictions. It leaves you of course still in a weird gray area. You pay for the content and you don't really lie, but still the content owners didn't intent for you to consume the content. Some might argue that you might as well use Bittorrent or Usenet to get to the goods for free. I think this way is a lot better.

So, what do you need? First you need to get an American ip address. You can try your luck with open proxies if you want to go free. Or you can set up your own using an ssh tunnel if you have something on the other end (a cheap vps will set you back around 5 dollars a month). Proxies can be detected though, a VPN is better. I am using StrongVpn.Com. They have plans from 55 dollars a month.

With a US ip address you can watch hulu.com, which might be worth your 55 dollars. Next up: iTunes. Now, iTunes has versions for most countries of course, but the US version is cheaper and has a wider selection (especially for movies) and earlier releases. To use the iTunes store in general you need a credit card that matches the country of the store. You can get a prepaid credit card but they're usually a terrible deal (charge you per month and per transaction), so I think that's best avoided.

iTunes gift certificates are the other way in. If you have an American friend you can buy a card online and ship it to your friend who'll then forward the code. If you don't you can pay people on ebay to do the same for around 15% over the face value. On your US ip address and using the gift card you can open your account and you can replenish your account the same way when needed.

An American Amazon address is useful to buy books on the kindle or if you want to buy any other digital goods on Amazon (MP3s, video on demand). Amazon also likes an American credit card, but will let you buy Amazon gift certificates with a non American credit card. However, they need your address to be in the US before they'll believe you are too (and for non kindle purchases, you need that US ip address). Add a credit card and enter a valid US address - they don't need to match. The other thing you need to make sure to set this address to be your one click delivery address.

Netflix obviously will only work for the streaming, since they deliver only to the US. The also have gift certificates, but you need a credit card even if you are on a gift certificate (to pay for any DVDs you don't return, presumably). When verifying the credit card, netflix only seems to check that the zip code you entered, matches your credit card. So you can enter any (US) address, as long as you enter the zip code of your actually credit card. Postal codes in Australia are 4 digits, not 5, but I got away with prepending a zero and the match went through just fine. If you're postal codes contain letters, you should be able to just leave them out and apply zeros as necessary.

It would be nice if we could just get rid of all this and have a true world market. I am pretty sure we'll get there at some point, but until then these tips might come in handy.

Manly Ferry App

When I switched from the iPhone to Android there were many things to like (the bigger screen, multi tasking, IM, over the air sync), but there were also things I missed. One of them was the excellent Trip View app. Trip View lets you indicate trips that you often make (within Sydney I believe) and then clicking that trip immediately gets you when the next connection on that trip is. Much easier to use from a phone than a full blown public transport planner and especially handy if you depend on a ferry for your daily commute like me.

There was no such thing for Android. Android however has a nice SDK, so I decided to roll my own. And make it simpler. Mostly because I am lazy of course, but when you think about it, most commuters have only one question when they reach for that app: when is the next ferry (train, bus). So that's what my app tells you. There are no routes to find, it always just tells you when the next ferry to or from Manly is.

To or from? Ah, yes, that's the clever bit. These modern phones know where they are, so my little app just checks the location. If you are closer to Manly, it tells you when the next ferry from Manly is, if you are closer to Sydney CBD, it tells you when the next ferry to Manly is.

Unfortunately I haven't found a way to link to Android Apps, but AppBrain has so for now this will have to do: http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.douweosinga.nextmanlyferry

Data trouble

I saw super freakonomics was out and thought that would make a nice presence for my wife. I was on a trip in the US so bringing something back could maybe make up a little for the fact that I left just after we moved and left her with many boxes.

But then the boxes sprang back to mind. A lot of them are filled with books. Do we really want more books? I did buy her a kindle for her birthday to fight this sort of thing, didn't I? I should buy her that book on her kindle. And then also put it on my iphone to read it on the plane - seems like the sort of book you can read on a phone chapter by chapter.

So I open my laptop, connect to the tmobile hotspot. But that doesn't work of course without paying. Aha, but I my laptop has iPass. So I use that to log in. Go to Amazon, buy the book, which takes 2 seconds. Start the kindle app on the iphone, click update. Nothing. No Internet connection.

I go hunt on the appstore and find the free iPass app, download to my machine, connect my phone, sync my phone, start it up. Doesn't let me in. But there's a button for corporate logins, so maybe that's a hint. Back to my laptop, login to the VPN, login the intranet and find the information on iPass. Indeed there is a code. Back to the phone, enter the code. iPass app says: no valid internet connection!

Finally I switch on data roaming praying they won't charge me more than the cost of the book for the handful of bytes I need here, go back iPass, enter the code again, now register, switch dataroaming off again, connect the phone to tmobile, enter my iPass credentials and voila, I am online.

The kindle app now sucks down the book and I can read. There's gotta be an easier way than this to connect. Especially if you compare it to how easy Amazon makes it get the book to the phone if you have a connection. Maybe the should get into that? I suppose the new international kindle that has build in data roaming is actually going into that direction.

Didgeridoo's and Grass

We went for a trip to the Kakadu national park last week for the long weekend caused by labour day which is the first of October in Australia. It was quite interesting. Somewhat disturbingly it was the first time since arriving in this country I got to talk to Aboriginals.

We got to a place for lunch and it was really nice and warm and they also had a bar so I ordered a beer. There were a couple of Aboriginals sitting outside also enjoying some and we got to talking.

Europe? One of them said his grand father had travelled in Europe. He had met Paul McCartney and painted his jacket. He was an artist. He'd also been to the Netherlands yes. And Germany. Another guy turned out to be a mechanic and had been in that line of work for 62 years. He looked like he could be anywhere between 50 and 90.

They were living in a town a little down the road, about three hours drive. But the bar there would only open at 5:30, so they decided to come here to drink some. And not to get aggressive one of them added.

Now it was warm and sunny and my beer tasted pretty good. But you have to be pretty thirsty to drive three hours to be able to get a beer for lunch.

Aboriginals are not doing well on any measure in Australia. There twice as likely to be a victim of a crime and 11 times more likely to end up in prison. Life expectancy is 11 years less than other Australians. Alcoholism and the associated aggression and abuse are rife to the point where authorities limit how much, when and where you can buy alcohol (only light beer for take away was a rule somewhere else).

Making alcohol harder to get has let some people driven to petrol sniffing, which in turn let authorities to push for a low-aromatic petrol that doesn't work for sniffing. And so it goes.

Alcohol and poor people has been a problem as old as, well, alcohol or at least cheap alcohol. Work is curse of the drinking class, as Oscar Wilde would have it. They only way to really solve it is to solve the underlying poverty and other social ills. Pushing people away from beer to petrol sniffing and when that no longer is available to glue sniffing is hardly a road to sanity.

So here's my proposal: Marijuana. Medically much healthier than alcohol, petrol or glue and the associated high is nice and mellow. Tribal law is based on the dreaming so a little weed should fit in. And a string of aboriginal settlements with reggae and didgeridoo sounds would certainly be a great tourist attraction.

Kindle & Copyright

I bought my wife an early birth day present in form of the Kindle 2. A coworker had one and we like it and now I have a birth day present and a cool gadget. What's not to like?

The fact that Amazon doesn't do the kindle outside of the US, that's what's not to like. They'll sell you the machine (if you provide a US address to ship to), but then when you have the thing and you try to order a book they say that there are geographical restrictions and I should lease refer to the terms of use for this product to determine the geographical restrictions. Couldn't find any of the terms of use. They don't even let you download books that are out of copyright where it really is hard to see where those terms of use would come from.

Amazon has a nice setup to buy books and subscriptions and I was really looking forward to using it, but when that turned out to be impossible, I checked some of the other options. Different copyright laws in Australia for example mean that books are out of copyright here, while they're still paid for in the US (most interestingly 1984 fits this case).

Meanwhile your average bit torrent search engine will let you download the complete works of Bill Bryson in a few minutes for free. It is quite impressive what you can get that way - this weeks economist is downloadable illegally before it makes its way to my Australian home.

I send an email to Amazon support and they said that my one-click delivery address was set to the address of my parents in law. I didn't know I had a one-click delivery address, but indeed, after I changed that (and for good measure did the payments through an Amazon gift certificate and tunnelled my traffic through some server in the US) it started to work just fine.

But it makes you wonder. We now have the technology to give each person for a few hundred dollars a device that could hold 1500 books. I know, I know the Internet could give everybody access to all the worlds information all the time too and has been able to do that for a while, but it requires cables, upkeep, computers. With a kindle like device we really could bring the worlds information to everybody.

If it wasn't for copyright of course. A kindle full of books costs the same as an ipod full of songs. It really doesn't seem very likely that copyright is really our best way to get books into the hands of as many people as possibly while paying authors for what they do.