A vowel? Yep! I'll show you spectrograms of various words to illustrate how "R" is just as much a vowel as "E" and "I". Of course there's also the vowels "Y" and "W", but those are a little more obvious. You'll leave with a basic understanding of phonetics as well as a soft spot in your heart for the vowel "R".

Background

The goal of this project is to allow anyone to send a short text message to someone only knowing their domain name. The receiver should be able to get the message in whatever way they want (SMS, Email, Twitter DM, etc) without the sender knowing what medium the message will be sent through.

(For a bit of background on why abstracting the delivery mechanism is useful, see the communication protocols of Tantek and myself.)

Also see conversations from the #indiewebcamp IRC channel on July 30 and July 31, 2011.

Goals

• Knowing nothing besides a person's URL, be able to send them a short text message.
• Easy to implement, both on the software side as well as the infrastructure side.
  • This most likely means a protocol on top of HTTP, since if you have a web page you already support HTTP.
  • We don't want to require massive amounts of setup and configuration (Jabber, SMTP) since that is not always possible on hardware that powers IndieWeb sites.
• The recipient, not the sender, should decide how the message is ultimately delivered.
  • i.e. I may want to get IMs if I'm at my computer, but SMSs if I'm out and about. The sender shouldn't have to figure out which way I like to receive messages.

Protocol Summary

Given Alice and her site, alice.com, and Bob and his site, bob.com.

• Alice writes a message
• alice.com sends to bob.com
• bob.com asks alice.com "did you send this message?" and presents a small factoring problem to solve
• alice.com says "yes" and provides the answer to the facorization, and bob.com sends the message to Bob

Detailed Flow

• Alice logs in to her website at alice.com
• Alice composes a message addressed to bob.com and hits "submit"
• Alice's server generates a unique ID for this message and stores it locally
• Alice's server makes a post request to bob.com containing:
  • POST http://bob.com/ from=alice.com&text=hello&message_id=1234
• Bob's server (bob.com) receives the request purporting to be from alice.com and needs to verify the message was actually initiated by alice.com
• Bob's server takes the message ID and sends it back to alice.com, along with a factorization problem
  • POST http://alice.com/ message_id=1234&challenge=FactorInteger[2434500]
  • Alice's server looks up the message_id to see if it sent that message, and if so, answers the factorization
  • The answer will be in the Mathematica format for FactorInteger, which will look like
    "{{2,2},{3,2},{5,3},{541,1}}"
• Bob's server compares Alice's server's answer to its known answer and if it matches, accepts the message
• Bob's server can then send the message to Bob
• Bob can be reasonably sure that Alice originated the message

Protocol

Receiving

• When receiving a message, accept POST requests to "/" on your domain with the following form fields:
  • from, text, message_id
• To confirm the message is really from the declared sender, make a post request to http://{from}/ with the post body message_id=####&challenge=FactorInteger[###] given the message ID you were sent, and an arbitrary integer.
  • You can vary the integer based on how much you trust the originating IP address, so you could present new IPs with more difficult factorization problems than trusted IPs. A trivial choice which can be solved instantly is 1.
• The response from the remote server will be the answer to the factorization using syntax, ({{1,1}}), or denied, at which point you can decide where to send the message.

Sending

• To send a message to a remote server, make a POST request to http://example.com/ with the following form fields:
  • from, text, message_id

$ curl -d from=http://example.com -d text=hello -d message_id=1234 http://aaronparecki.com/

• The remote server will query your server (specified in "from") and pass it a challenge and the message_id you provide, so you will need to respond to that request and the challenge.
• You should respond with the answer to the challenge in Mathematica syntax ({{1,1}}) if you confirm you sent the message, or denied based on whether you recognize the message_id specified.

Implementations

• PHP: github.com/aaronpk/IndieWeb-Messaging

When implementing this service on top of an existing framework like Wordpress or Mediawiki, you can add an Apache RewriteRule to intercept the POST request before the framework gets a hold of it.

Insert this before any other RewriteRule declarations. This matches a POST request to "/" and routes it to a file called message/receive.php

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^POST
RewriteRule ^$ /message/receive.php [QSA,L]

This prevents this script from interfering with any existing code you might have on your site, as long as no existing code expects to handle post requests to http://example.com/.

Benefits

• The protocol confirms that the sender did in fact originate the message
• Extremely simple to implement, since no signatures or cryptography is needed
• Can be secured by using SSL
• Can discourage or prevent spam by making the spammers solve factorization problems in order to deliver messages. In theory, it's not worth the spammers time to solve the problem and they will just move on.

Drawbacks

• Does not encrypt or verify the message contents
• Potentially subject to a DoS attack

List of Current Implementations

• aaronparecki.com
• brennannovak.com

Comments

To leave a comment on this page, write a post on your own website and send me a message using this protocol! I will update this page with a link to your site.

If you can memorize the table below, you are well on your way to doing a lot of what looks like complex math problems in your head!

OpenSearch is a collection of simple formats for the sharing of search results. One of the formats allows your browser to add your site to its list of search engines, which Firefox displays in the top right corner, and Chrome uses in the address bar. Adding a small link and XML document allows your site to be added to a browser.

Many CMSs such as MediaWiki already support this natively so you might already have it on your site. To check in Chrome, in your search bar, enter your domain name followed by a space and see if it looks like the below screenshot.

If not, you’ll have to add a small link and XML file.

The HTML code to reference the XML file is this:

<link href="/opensearch.xml" rel="search" title="aaronpk" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml">

The XML file should look something like the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/" 
      xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
  <ShortName>aaron.pk</ShortName>
  <Description>Search aaron.pk</Description>
  <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
  <Url method="get" type="text/html" 
      template="http://aaron.pk/search?q={searchTerms}"/>
</OpenSearchDescription>

But what if you want to add this to one of your sites that doesn't have search capability? Turns out there is no restriction on the domains that you can use for the search URL. This means we can delegate the search to google!

Using Google's "site:example.com" feature, we can restrict the Google search to our domain.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/" 
      xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
  <ShortName>aaron.pk</ShortName>
  <Description>Search aaron.pk</Description>
  <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
  <Url method="get" type="text/html" 
      template="http://www.google.com/search?q={searchTerms}+site%3Aaaron.pk&amp;hl=en"/>
</OpenSearchDescription>

Then, if someone uses your site's search, they get taken to a Google search results page with results from your site!

2015 Update: I've heard reports that this no longer works and may brick the device. Proceed at your own risk and keep in mind that this article is now over 4 years old.

I recently acquired a 6 TB Seagate NAS drive which I am using for nightly backups of my servers, as well as snapshots of several Dropbox accounts.

While the web interface on the device isn’t too bad, I wanted a little more control over it, as well as the ability to monitor the device's health with some custom munin graphs.

Here's how to enable SSH without wiping the drive and installing custom firmware.

1. Set up a new user account on the device from the web interface, and create a password.
2. Shut down the device, remove both drives, and connect them to a local computer with SATA cables.
3. Boot your linux computer with the drives attached, it’s probably safest to boot from some sort of Live CD. I used Fedora.
4. When you get to a shell, execute the following commands to mount the drives.

$ mdadm -A /dev/md0 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1
mdadm: /dev/md0 has been started with 2 drives.
$ mkdir /mnt/md0
$ mount /dev/md0 /mnt/md0

5. Add the following line to the file /mnt/md0/etc/inetd.conf:

ssh stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/dropbear dropbear -i

You can do this in one shell command by executing this:

echo "ssh stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/dropbear dropbear -i" >> /mnt/md0/etc/inetd.conf

6. Edit /mnt/md0/etc/shadow with a text editor, and replace the hashed password for "root" with the hashed password of the user you created. The hashed password is the characters between the second two colons, and begins with $1$$.
7. Unmount the drives and shut down the array:

$ cd
$ umount /mnt/md0
$ mdadm -S /dev/md0
mdadm: stopped /dev/md0

8. Put the drives back in the NAS device and turn it back on!
9. After it boots, you'll be able to ssh in as root with the password you set from the web interface.

Excerpt

Have you ever wanted to automatically turn on your lights when you get home, or turn them back off when you leave? What about controlling your lights by SMS or IRC? This presentation will teach you how to automate your life with location-based hacks and SMS.

Description

Have you ever wanted to automatically turn on your lights when you get home, or turn them back off when you leave? What about controlling your lights by SMS or IRC? Aaron Parecki and Amber Case have been living in a smart home controlled by mobile devices and their locations for the last year. The house is filled with sensors and networks for collecting all sorts of information and automated processes. They’ll show you some of the expensive smart homes of the past, and how the same effects can be achieved with microcontrollers, 20-year-old technologies, and the mobile phone you currently have.

This presentation will cover a number of fun DIY elements of home automation using GPS, SMS, location sharing, geotriggers, Geonotes and other mashups that can be done using mobile location, IRC and SMS as control hubs. We’ll also cover advanced geolocation triggers and messaging based on the real-time location platform and API we built, and how it can be used to build apps that can notify people automatically when you land at an airport, or automatically text message your kids when you’re there to pick them up from school.

Resources

• opensourcebridge.org/sessions/685
• Home Automation with Geoloqi example
• Tropo Demos

IRC Hacks

• Loqi
• MediaWiki Recent Changes IRC Bot
• SMS to IRC Gateway
• x10 UDP Proxy Script

Hardware

• Electronic Door Latch

Presented at

• Open Source Bridge, June 22, 2011, Portland Oregon

Updated versions presented at

• OSCON, Portland, July 20, 2012
• O'Reilly Webcast, July 17, 2012
• WebVisions, Portland, May 18, 2012
• WebVisions, New York, January 19, 2012

WebVisions, New York

Open Source Bridge, Portland

Notes

OAuth 2 Implementations

Excerpt

If you've ever written any code to authenticate wtih Twitter, you may have been confused by all the signature methods and base strings. You'll be happy to know that OAuth 2 has vastly simplified the process, but at what cost?

Description

This talk will give an overview of the OAuth 2 spec, starting with the various options the standard gives to developers for building web apps and native apps. We'll look at what the end user sees, work our way to what developers using an OAuth 2 API deal with, and we’ll end up at what developers of OAuth-2-compliant APIs will need to know to successfully implement the standard.

Many large providers have recently deployed APIs using OAuth 2, including Facebook, Foursquare, Google, and more. But since OAuth 2 is technically still a "draft," many aspects of the spec change from month to month and it's sometimes hard to keep up. We'll cover the commonalities and differences between some of the major providers and draft versions. The security implications of some of the changes between versions 1 and 2 will be covered, along with recommendations for best practices. You'll also get a glimpse of the debates currently raging on the internal OAuth 2 mailing list.

References

• windowsteamblog.com/windows_live
• googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/03/making-auth-easier-oauth-20-for-google.html
• www.facebook.com/unsupportedbrowser
• groups.google.com/group/foursquare-api/msg/5f5dfb179b27fa1a
• gowalla.com/api/docs/oauth
• www.facebook.com/unsupportedbrowser
• blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazureappfabric/
• www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/oauth/current/msg04391.html
• develop.github.com/p/oauth.html
• developers.geoloqi.com/api
• github.com/geoloqi/oauth2-php
• blog.benward.me/post/968515729
• www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/oauth
• www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/oauth/current/msg05907.html
• tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-oauth-v2-10#section-5
• tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-oauth-v2-bearer-04#section-2
• tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-oauth-v2-http-mac-00#section-3
• twitter.com/blaine/status/83539367100030976
• code.flickr.com/blog/2011/06/21/flickr-now-supports-oauth-1-0a/
• aaronparecki.com/An_Introduction_to_OAuth_2

Presented at Unplugged 2011

While location-based mobile apps are becoming increasingly popular, they are still relatively new. Special considerations need to be made for battery life and handling large data sets of geolocated data. The good news is there are many services and technologies you can use to assist you in building mobile location-based apps.

In this session, Aaron Parecki, co-founder of Geoloqi.com, shows you services you can leverage to do things like nearby business lookups, location-based triggers, nearest intersection queries, and more. Aaron also covers the location services available on the various mobile platforms as well as in HTML 5, and shares some insights on how to deal with battery life. The session concludes with some real-world use cases for real-time location such as turning on and off your lights in your house or notifying your boss if you'll be late to work.

Example Code

• github.com/aaronpk/Geolocation-Examples

Live demos

• Get the user's location
• Track the user's continuous location
• Find nearby businesses with SimpleGeo
• Get city, state, weather, and more information about a location

Example Geoloqi applications

• (Still in development)
• Home Automation with Geoloqi example
• https://github.com/aaronpk/Point-Runner
• https://github.com/aaronpk/MapAttack

Resources

• Android LocationProvider Documentation
• an iPhone CoreLocation tutorial
• Geolocation in HTML 5 and Javascript Tutorial

Today at Where 2.0, two data scientists announced a discovery that iPhones are recording GPS positions into a hidden file on the device. I'll save a summary for an update of this post, but go read the original article for now.

I downloaded the logs from Amber Case's iPhone, and have been looking through them to see what's there. Turns out it's a lot more than just the cell tower positions of the phone. There's also a list of all wifi access points the device has seen, as well as the best-guess position of each wifi access point!

There also seems to be a table in the database containing a record of all the requests that other programs have made for your location, which includes the app's bundle ID. Here's a snippet of the logs:

The Bundle IDs of the apps that requested location are clearly visible, and it also shows where the phone was when the app requested the location. This suggests to me that the purpose for these logs is not malicious on Apple's part at all.

I also observed that the timestamps of the logs in the CellLocation table were not very granular. There seemed to be batches of 30-50 significantly different locations at a time, with anywhere from 1 to 12 hours between timestamps. My guess after asking Amber about her syncing habits, is that the timestamps correspond to the date the phone was synced with the computer, not necessarily the date the timestamp was recorded. This is speculation at this point, and I will hopefully be able to come to a better conclusion after some more analysis of the data.

If it in in fact the timestamp of the sync, this would seem to further contradict the notion that Apple is covertly tracking your every move, since location data is far more useful when it contains a timestamp associated with it. This data says something more like “Here are all the cell towers the phone has seen since it was last synced.” I'm not sure exactly what purpose this would serve.

Some of the other database tables that piqued my interest included:

WifiLocation - a database of all wifi hotspots seen, their mac addresses and latitude/longitudes

Fences - my guess is this corresponds to Apple's CLRegion API, which allows iOS developers to define fences which trigger a method when the user crosses the boundary.

Harvest - All tables ending in Harvest correlate with the different location tracking types, Cell, CDMA, Wifi, etc. These tables track requests made to the various location providers.

So far it's been a lot of fun to look through this data, and I'm looking forward to continuing to play with the data. Many thanks to Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan for pointing out this log!

Aaron Parecki is the co-founder of Geoloqi.com, a private, real-time location sharing platform. Geoloqi allows you to securely track your location and you always have complete control over who can see your location. You can leave yourself a Geonote at a place which will be sent to you next time you're there. Geoloqi has an API which lets you download all of your location history, as well as build fun apps on top of the platform!

Nobody wants to be presented with a signup form when trying out a new web service. Even though in recent years many websites have trimmed down their signup forms to make them easier to complete, I think we can do better.

A typical signup form these days consists of asking for your email address and creating a password. Some will also request you create a username, or ask for your real name.

People will probably fill out your signup form on your website if it doesn't look too daunting, but mobile apps are a whole different story. With mobile apps, people expect to be able to use your app immediately after downloading it. Adding a signup form will do nothing but make people frustrated. It is important to think about whether you actually need their email address or phone number in order for them to at least start using your app.

Incrementally collect information from your users as it becomes necessary to provide a feature.

Example: geoloqi.com

Download the app and press "use anonymously", you're taken to your map

You can leave yourself a Geonote, and we can deliver the message since we have your push token for the device

When you press "Share Location," you have multiple options:

Send via SMS or Email

The app opens the phone's system SMS composer, and your phone sends the SMS. We never need to know your phone number to do so.

Send via Twitter or Facebook

In order to post to your Twitter account, we need to connect your Geoloqi account to Twitter. At this point, we prompt you to log in to your Twitter account which then tells Geoloqi who you are. Similarly to Twitter, posting to Facebook requires you to grant Geoloqi permission to your Facebook account.

At this point, we have now named your previously anonymous user account in Geoloqi, tied to your Twitter or Facebook account. This is a relatively seamless way of "registering," since you knew exactly why you had to authenticate at that point.

Soft Create: GraphThis.me

Similar to the idea of "soft signup" is the idea of "soft create." Send an email to "weight@graphthis.me" where the subject line is your weight, and a graph will immediately be created for you. Replace "weight" with other values to create new graphs.

GraphThis doesn't require signing up beforehand in order to use the service, since you'll be inputting data from your email address anyway. If you want to expand your input options, such as being able to send a tweet or a DM, then you can connect your Twitter account.

GraphThis doesn't require that the tag "weight" be set up before starting to graph the values. It could have required you to set up the graph name before hand, but that would have increased the barrier to create new graphs.

Conclusion

Make it as easy as possible for people to start using your service. Think about whether you actually need more than a unique identifier for a user in order to get them started playing around. Collect new information from your users only as it becomes necessary to provide a new service to them.

Electronics

Point-and-Shoot Camera

This tiny Canon Powershot Elph 300 HS camera is fantastic for traveling. It is great in low light and can record HD video as well. Works best with an Eye-fi SD card!

See this camera compared to other Powershot models: Digital Camera Comparison

• $149.00 on Amazon.com

Eye-Fi Wireless SD Card

The Eye-Fi Wireless SD card can automatically upload your photos to a number of online services including Flickr! Any time you are near a wifi hotspot your photos will automatically sync. This is by far the easiest way to handle photos, it saves you from having to manually copy and edit files from the card. The "pro" model can also geo-tag photos!

• 4GB Standard Model ($29.99)
• 8GB Model with Geo-tagging ($89.09)

Backup Mobile Phone Battery

If you are a frequent traveler, or like to log a lot of GPS data, then you might find this external battery pack useful. Works with iPhone, Android and Blackberry, and probably every other phone. Comes with a set of adapters for other phones.

Mophie Juice Pack

The Mophie Juice Pack is a fantastic backup battery for the iPhone 4 and 4S. It's a case for your iPhone which has a battery in the back so it makes the whole phone a bit thicker. It will charge your phone back up plus a little bit more! It's a light-weight way to double your battery life instead of lugging around the larger Trent battery pack.

Services

Linode

Most of my websites are hosted on VPSs provided by Linode. Starting at $20/month you can get a server with 512mb RAM, which is most likely good enough to run most websites. It's also incredibly easy to add new servers as needed.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a great way to keep files in sync between multiple computers, or for collaborating with multiple people on a project. It seamlessly syncs files and integrates with your OS's filesystem so it doesn't feel like a separate program that's running.

Sticker Mule

Sticker Mule is a fantastic sticker printing company. My favorite are the die cut stickers, which they will cut to any shape. They are also quite affordable, and very quick.

Dreamhost

Dreamhost is an affordable web host which provides a lot of software available using their "one-click-install" method including Wordpress 3.0, Moodle, MediaWiki, OpenVBX, StatusNet and more. I also register domains through them, as they provide free whois privacy.

Books

Beginning iPad Application Development

Beginning iPad Application Development gives a decent overview of the differences between the iPhone and iPad platforms. However, my favorite part of this book is the appendix which gives a crash course in Objective C. This is where you should start reading, in my opinion, if you have had any programming experience in some other language before.

Programming Ruby 1.9

Programming Ruby 1.9 is the reference manual for Ruby. {{clear}}

Founders at Work

Stories of Startups' Early Days

Other

iPhone Stand

A nice stand for iPhone/iPods. Doesn't include a cable, you attach the cable to the stand to set it up.

Optoma Pico Projector

Not only does the Optoma PK320 Pico Pocket Projector have a model number that begins with PK, it's also the tiniest projector that is actually bright enough! It's obviously not going to be as bright as the larger ones, but it's actually bright enough to be seen in a room with some lamps on. In a dark room it's certainly bright enough too!

@tantek has been using his Falcon project to create short-form and long-form content on his site, and syndicate it out to Twitter. Falcon is a personal publishing (tweeting, blogging, realtime syndicating) web application created in the true spirit of the Indie Web.

When syndicating content to other sites, a good practice is to include a link back to the original content. This has the effect of letting people know that this copy is not the original, and lets them find the original if they want to cite or link to it.

Unfortunately, Twitter has no mechanism for including this "citation" link anywhere except in the text of the tweet itself. This means if you're syndicating content to Twitter and want to include a link back, the link will become part of the tweet. This ends up looking something like this:

Now I don't know about you, but when I see a link in an interesting tweet, I am inclined to click it. The problem with these links is that they often link back to tantek.com which has an exact copy of the tweet text and no additional content. I often find myself disappointed after clicking, because I was expecting to see more. Sometimes, @tantek's tweets are in fact cut short and do link to more content, such as in this example.

After hearing this feedback from a couple people, Tantek realized he needed a solution to indicate whether there is additional content available when following the link. He proposed this format:

So far this has been working great. Now, tweets with no additional content look like this:

while tweets with additional content include the "http://" prefix.

I think another great convention would be to use a colon to indicate additional content. It's a natural indicator of "more" and generally draws interest to the thing following the colon.

Would you be more likely to click this link aaron.pk/2DS or this link: aaron.pk/2DS?

Tantek has already used this convention, possibly without realizing it, as observed in this tweet:

So what do you think? Should this be the convention for syndicating content?

No content other than this text (ttk.me/t4B12)

There is some more content available here: ttk.me/t4B13

If you are interested in this topic, you might also be interested in attending IndieWebCamp in Portland, Oregon in June, 2011.

cyborganthropology.com is quickly becoming the default online resource for everything relating to Cyborg Anthropology. With over 800 articles and growing daily, it's possible to find nearly anything you can think of.

We recently registered the domain "anth.ro" to use as a URL shortener to articles on cyborganthropology.com. I suggested creating a business card such as this, which would allow Amber to write in arbitrary text following the URL after having a conversation with someone and giving them the card.

Since she would obviously be offline while handing out cards, there would be no way to know for sure if a certain URL existed. The goal is to be able to write down any topic on the card and have the recipient be taken to the corresponding content when they get back to their computer.

Site search

If you didn't already know, you can add site:cyborganthropology.com to the end of any search in Google to restrict your search to a specific website. Try it here: google.com/search?q=Second+self+site:cyborganthropology.com. This is a great start, because this lets us search the wiki for anything using Google’s excellent search algorithms and spelling correction.

I'm Feeling Lucky

Since we've restricted the search to this site, we can be reasonably confident that the first match is the one we intended. If we were to press Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button, we'd probably get a good result. A quick Google search revealed that I can craft a URL which will automatically redirect to the first result, just like what happens when you press the button!

Adding btnI=I'm+Feeling+Lucky to the query string will automatically redirect the visitor.

Now our full search URL looks like this. Clicking this link will redirect you to the first page on the wiki matching "Second self".

www.google.com/search?q=Second+self+site:cyborganthropology.com&btnI=I'm+Feeling+Lucky

Short Domain

Now let's put that together with the short domain, anth.ro. We can easily set up a small script to redirect "http://anth.ro/second+self" to the full google search query. However, we'd ideally like to get some better Google analytics on how many times this URL shortener was used, so we'll need to add some tracking parameters to the URL. Since we lose control of the visitor if we send them straight to Google, instead, we can query Google ourselves first to get the destination URL.

Here is a short PHP script which will do the following:

• Query Google with the "I'm feeling lucky" option to find the best match on our site
• Add our additional tracking parameters
• Redirect the browser to the page on the wiki with the tracking code

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I\'m+Feeling+Lucky&q=' . urlencode($_GET['code']) . '+site%3Acyborganthropology.com');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, FALSE);    // Don't follow redirects, we want the first Location header
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, TRUE);             // Return the headers in the output curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla");     // Set the user agent to Mozilla so Google doesn't block the query
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, TRUE);             // Don't include the response body in the output
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);     // Return the response in a variable instead of printing it out
$response = curl_exec($ch);
 
// If there was a Location header found, use it, otherwise, Google couldn't find a match
if(preg_match('/Location: (.+)/', $response, $match)) {
  $url = parse_url(trim($match[1]));
 
  if($url && is_array($url)) {
    $query = array();
    // If the search result included query string parameters, parse those out
    if(array_key_exists('query', $url)) {
      parse_str($url['query'], $query);
    }
    // Add the search term as the "q" parameter. This is so Google Analytics will treat this as a "site search" query
    // and include it in the search analytics. You'll also need to add "q" to the "include site search" section in Google Analytics
    $query['q'] = $_GET['code'];
    // Add "anth.ro" as the utm_source
    $query['utm_source'] = 'anth.ro';
    // Add "ShortURL" as the medium. These end up appearing in the "Traffic Sources" list as "anth.ro / ShortURL"
    $query['utm_medium'] = 'ShortURL';
    $q = http_build_query($query);
 
    // Redirect the user to the page specified by google with our additional parameters included
    $location = 'http://cyborganthropology.com' . $url['path'] . '?' . $q;
    header('HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily');
    header('Location: ' . $location);
    die();
  }
}
 
// If there were no results returned from Google's I'm feeling lucky button, redirect to a Google search page
// This most likely happens on a typo
header('HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily');
header('Location: http://www.google.com/search?q=' . urlencode($_GET['code']) . '+site%3Acyborganthropology.com');

Search

With this in place, you can now use the anth.ro domain as a search interface to the wiki! You can type in anything after anth.ro and you'll either be taken to a page on the wiki or to a page of search results! We didn’t have to write any search code, we just let Google take care of that since that's what they do best!

I recently spent some time at Souk, a co-working space in Portland. It’s a great space with lots of room and lots of light, which is important when you’re going to spend hours on end somewhere. Over the course of a couple days, it became apparent that there are several tools that can help facilitate the coming and going of people in spaces like these.

CloudKnock is an application built using Tropo to facilitate letting people in to co-working spaces. When you need to get in, you can text “knock knock” to the application’s phone number. The application will then forward your message on to anyone who has checked in to the space. Since it uses Tropo it works not only by SMS but also by AIM, MSN, Yahoo IM, or Jabber! This means your “knock knock” SMS can be seamlessly forwarded on to people sitting at their desks using Gmail chat or AIM. While this app won’t actually open the door for you, that also means there is no physical hardware to install making it feasible to start using it today! Download the source code on Github, and sign up with Tropo to get started.

Have you ever wondered where someone in your group ran off to at lunch? Wouldn’t it be great if you could find out where they are without having to call them or text them and wait for their reply? Using Tropo, you can just send a quick IM to a bot which can find out where they are if they’re using Geoloqi.

Every person who you want to track should download the Geoloqi app for iPhone or Android.

From your map page, create a new shared link which never expires.

Copy the token at the end of the URL that is created, and paste it into the users array in the script.

Copy the sample code into a new Tropo scripting application, and add the Geoloqi shared link tokens for everyone in your group you want to track. You can give people nicknames so they can be identified by multiple names.

Then, you can send a message (via SMS or IM) like “Where is Aaron?” and you’ll get a quick reply with your friend’s location if they’re tracking themselves using Geoloqi!

Loqi is an IRC bot that lurks in several channels on irc.freenode.net. He is mostly a utility bot, but occasionally enjoys a bit of playful conversation.

About

Loqi is built around the MediaWiki Recent Changes bot. This is a small Perl script that uses POE::Component::IRC to speak the IRC protocol.

What Loqi Does

Loqi started out as a way to alert us of recent changes in MediaWiki instances. When a UDP packet is received from a MediaWiki instance, a message is printed in the corresponding channel. This mechanism has allowed Loqi to be extended to many other purposes. I can easily send messages to Loqi from other scripts and other servers by simply sending a UDP packet. This has allowed me to use Loqi for debugging and logging of websites, as an easy way to get notifications of unusual activity in the system without checking log files.

How Loqi Works

• The MediaWiki Perl script is the core of Loqi. This is the IRC client and UDP server which listens for incoming packets and routes them to IRC.
• When a message is received in the IRC channel, the Perl script launches a PHP script using open() and pipes the IRC line to stdin of the PHP script.
• PHP takes over reading the input from stdin. The first thing the script does is spawn a new process, thereby freeing up the Perl script that launched it. This allows the PHP script to take an indefinite amount of time to handle the message without hanging the main bot.
• With this mechanism in place, Loqi can be programmed to respond to various trigger words by writing new handlers in PHP. The response can come in a long time later, whether it's seconds or minutes, which helps make Loqi feel less like a bot and more like a real person.

What Loqi is Not

Loqi is not a chatbot like ALICE or Eliza. He will respond to various trigger words, but don't expect to have a full conversation with him. As a consequence, his responses seem less scripted, and you may not even notice he is a bot at first, such as in this exchange from #pdxwebdev:

donpdonp: i might have to just pony up the dough
tyler: I WANT A PONY
* Loqi gives tyler-iphone A PONY
tyler: yay!
* Loqi giggles
tyler: i never know if its the loqi AI or aaron
* Loqi grins profusely
caseorganic: haha - it's all loqi ai
Loqi: awesome

Commands

• !calc 12 ounces to cups - Loqi can do most any unit conversions and calculations that you can type.
• !date 1301943765 - Loqi can convert between unix timestamps and readable dates. Try giving him other date formats too.
• !dns 173.230.151.31 - Loqi can do forward and reverse DNS lookups
• !weather or !weather 97214 - Loqi can get a 2-day weather forecast for a given zipcode
• !temperature or !temperature 97214 - Loqi can get the current temperature for a given zipcode
• !digits 503-346-RIDE - Convert text to the numeric equivalent on a phone keypad

Channels

You can find Loqi in these channels on irc.freenode.net.

• #geoloqi
• #indiewebcamp
• #microformats
• #pdxwebdev

Some fun conversations Loqi has been a part of are documented on his Tumblr account: loqisaur.tumblr.com

We've been using Apple's Wireless distribution method for sending out beta invites of Geoloqi. It's a much easier process for our beta testers than syncing with iTunes to install the app! They just click on a link from their phones, and they can download the app immediately!

How, you ask? Apple has made this possible since iOS 4.0, but not many developers have noticed it's available. TestFlight has make a great wrapper on top of this functionality, but it's possible to do it without using TestFlight too! How to set up Ad Hoc distribution

First, build and archive your application from XCode. Make sure you've selected the Developer provisioning profile when building your app. This must pass code-signing verification or people will get an error when trying to install.

Open Organizer if it's not already open. Select your archived application, then click "Share." The next step is slightly misleading. Choose "Distribute for Enterprise" here, even if you don't have an enterprise account! Make sure you select the same provisioning profile you signed the app with!

This is the critical step. At this point, XCode is bundling the provisioning profile into the IPA archive so that your users only have to download '''one file!''' No need to have them install the provisioning profile separately, since it will be included in the app archive!

Next you'll need to fill out the form that appears. XCode uses this info to create a .plist file. If you're comfortable editing the .plist file directly, you can do that instead.

At this point, XCode prompts you to save the files to a folder. You'll end up with two files, a .plist and an .ipa file. Now comes the easy part!

You just need to create a web page with a link to the .plist file using the special itms-services:// protocol. This might look something like the code below.

<a href="itms-services://?action=download-manifest&url=http://loqi.me/app/Geoloqi.plist">
  Download Geoloqi
</a>

When someone clicks the link from their iPhone, they'll get a prompt that says "loqi.me would like to install Geoloqi." Clicking "Install" will then immediately download and install the provisioning profile and the app!

Note: This is not going to get you around the 100-device limit that Apple imposes. You'll still need to get your beta testers' UDIDs from them and upload them to the Provisioning Portal.

You can pretty up the download page like we have done to make it look like more than just a plaintext link. Here's some HTML and CSS to get you started making your own mobile installation page.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no" /> 
  <title>Install Geoloqi</title>
  <style type="text/css">
    body {
      background: url(bkg.png) repeat #c5ccd4;
      font-family: Helvetica, arial, sans-serif;
    }
    .congrats {
      font-size: 16pt;
      padding: 6px;
      text-align: center;
    }
    .step {
      background: white;
      border: 1px #ccc solid;
      border-radius: 14px;
      padding: 4px 10px;
      margin: 10px 0;
    }
    .instructions {
      font-size: 10pt;
    }
    .arrow {
      font-size: 15pt;
    }
    table {
      width: 100%;
    }
  </style>
</head>
<body>

<div class="congrats">Congrats! You've been invited to the beta of Geoloqi.</div>

<div class="step">
  <table><tr>
    <td class="instructions">Install the<br />Geoloqi app</td>
    <td width="24" class="arrow">&rarr;</td>
    <td width="57" class="imagelink">
      <a href="itms-services://?action=download-manifest&url=http://loqi.me/app/Geoloqi.plist">
        <img src="geoloqi-icon.png" height="57" width="57" />
      </a>
    </td>
  </tr></table>
</div>

</body>
</html>

Here is the background graphic I used on the installation web page. Feel free to use it on your own pages.

If you're like me, you've probably got a lot of bookmarks saved on Delicious. If you're not, you might know someone who does. With Delicious going offline, the question is where people are going to be taking their Delicious bookmarks? If you have a Delicious account (created after the Yahoo! acquisition), your only download option is a html download exporting to browser bookmarks. This doesn't give anyone much freedom in where you can take your data. To ease this frustration, caseorganic and I set out to solve this issue.

WordPress and Delicious XML

Here's a live Delicious clone running WordPress with data from Delicious XML.

Delicious XML Exporter is an export tool takes your Delicious bookmarks and exports them as XML, allowing you easily import them into other systems.

Importing Delicious XML data to WordPress

Install WordPress and the three plugins here. This is a custom post type for storing bookmarks, a Twenty Ten child theme for displaying the custom post types, and an import tool which will import Delicious bookmarks from the XML export.

Once you install the plugins and theme, use the Delicious XML utility to download an XML file of all your bookmarks from Delicious. It’s secure OAuth, so you never have to enter your password.

Then, in WordPress, click on "Import", and choose the "Delicious" option. Upload the XML file and press import. Your bookmarks and tags will be imported and functional!

Happy bookmarking!

Enjoy, and let me know if it works for you. If you find it helpful, let caseorganic and I know!

Many people keep asking me why I use Tropo instead of Twilio. It seems that Twilio does a great job of getting the word out about their service, so many people end up using them first. But there are a few reasons I'm using Tropo instead. Basically it comes down to features, scalability and support.

AIM, Yahoo IM, MSN, Jabber and Twitter!

In addition to sending SMSs and calling phone numbers, Tropo can send messages over other text channels such as AIM, Google Chat, MSN, Yahoo IM, Jabber and Twitter, and can also call Skype and SIP numbers.

In-Browser Phone

Tropo recently released Phono, a browser-based SIP client, so you can now do things like have a click-to-call button on your website which will use the computer's mic and speakers to make the call!

Browser-Based Chat Client

Phono also turns a browser into a Jabber client. Your browser gets an address you can use to send messages to via the Jabber protocol. This means you can quickly make a chat interface without having to build the server-side code dealing with sockets.

Custom Caller ID

Tropo lets you set the caller ID of outgoing calls to any arbitrary phone number, which can be used to more tightly integrate with existing phone systems. For example, I'm using caller ID tricks for a client to route calls directly to extensions in their office phone system.

Voice Recognition

Tropo can do great voice recognition to let callers speak instead of enter digits. For example, you can prompt a caller to say "sales" or "support" instead of just entering 1 or 2 on the keypad. This is especially great for when you need to ask the caller to choose from a large number of options such as states, or cities within a state.

Free for Development

Tropo doesn't charge anything for development applications until you put them onto the production network. This is really great for experimenting with a new idea without running down your development "credits."

Scalability

Twilio runs on Amazon EC2. Tropo runs in the private Voxeo network. "Co-tenancy is hard." says John from Netflix in a blog post titled 5 Lessons We?ve Learned Using AWS. Personally, voice data and SMSs are not something I want running in a shared environment where resources may be allocated away from a call while I'm on the phone.

Additionally, if you are building an application that needs to be secure, such as for a bank or a government agency, they probably won't allow the application to run on the Amazon cloud for security reasons. With Tropo, you can license Prophecy and run your own Tropo platform in a secure location.

Support

I've had nothing but great experiences with Tropo support. They are very responsive to tickets submitted, I usually get a response back in less than an hour.

There are also several Tropo staff available on their IRC channel (#tropo on freenode.net) at pretty much any time of the day. There are also several community members that hang out on the channel and can help with questions and issues.

More Information

Here are some links about projects built using Tropo.

• Mobile Assessment of Damage Hotline built during the Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon in December 2010.
• Loqi.me Wins Most Useful App and Best in Show at CivicApps Award Ceremony
• Apps built at the Geoloqi+Tropo hackathon

Say you want to register a couple different typos of your domain name, and redirect everyone seamlessly to the correct site. This can be done quite easily in Apache using ServerAlias and a simple RewriteRule. I just registered geoloqui.com after noticing a couple articles linking to it instead of geoloqi.com. But then I thought, wouldn’t it be useful if I could track these typos and see which ones are most common? Turns out it’s not difficult!

Here is a snippet of my virtual hosts definition for geoloqi.com:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName geoloqi.com
  ServerAlias *.geoloqi.com
  ServerAlias geoloqui.com
  ServerAlias *.geoloqui.com

  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^geoloqi.com
  RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://geoloqi.com/$1?utm_source=DomainRedirect&utm_medium=%{HTTP_HOST} [R=permanent,L]
  ...

This will make domain typos visible in Google Analytics under the "All Traffic Sources" section. You can clearly see the referrals from the typo'd domain name at the bottom of this list.

You could also use the filter box to search for "DomainRedirect" and see only the typos.

I'd be curious to know if anybody else has other suggestions for tracking this type of thing.

On the weekend of December 4th and 5th, people gathered in coworking spaces around the world for the Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon. In Seattle, two teams worked on Population Centers in Disaster, and Mobile Assessment of Damage for the Public.

Results

After a weekend of much hacking, good food, and good company, we came away with solid problem definitions, UI mockups, and prototypes of an iPhone app, Android app, a website backend, and a voice-powered phone menu.

Mobile Assessment of Damage for the Public

The goal of MadPub.org is to build an application that streamlines the process of reporting and assessing the amount of damage after the occurrence of a natural disaster in the United States. Beta testing will be for the State of Washington.

In the event of a disaster, each county has a 72 hour window to report a dollar estimate of damage to the state and federal government in order meet the threshold for a federal declaration. The current system for assessing and reporting damage has many inefficiencies, requiring government personnel from each county to manually fill out a form after talking on the phone with the person reporting the damage.

To solve this, we are building a system that allows businesses and individuals to report damage on a variety of platforms including: a phone tree with voice recognition managed with Tropo, a web form, and Android and iPhone apps.

Information Flow

Mobile Apps

Laurel (@laurelfan) and Chi-Bong Ho built working prototypes of iPhone and Android apps! The apps allows you to enter the required information to gather information about the damage, and you can take photos and send them in the report as well. Mark (@malept) prototyped an HTML5 form using jQuery Mobile.

Server

Mark (@malept) and Pat Tressel built a Sahana-backed web form for submitting data, which the mobile applications can also send data to. While that was getting ready, Kav (@kavla) threw together a quick Rails app so uploading from the apps could be tested.

Phone

Aaron (@aaronpk) worked on a phone interface for entering the data. This involved a Tropo app to handle the speech recognition.

Speech recognition is a difficult problem in general, but Tropo provides a great platform to make it a lot easier.

When someone calls the hotline, the Tropo application answers the call and offers to provide an overview of the information the caller will need to answer the questions. It then asks a series of questions needed to fill out the form.

Most questions can be answered with a simple "yes" or "no." More complicated questions require more computing power to understand. Even the top of the line speech recognition technologies have a long way to go to understand what people are saying on the phone. How many times have you, a person, asked someone on the phone whether they said "b" or "d"? Now imagine a computer trying to hear that without any context!

Luckily, Tropo provides a way to recognize speech patterns from a smaller set of vocabulary. Tropo has built-in speech recognition to understand numbers, currencies and dates, and you can even specify your own set of options. What this means is that it's far easier to get a computer to tell the difference between "sales" and "suppport" than it is to tell you what word a person said in no context. If you give the computer two options, it can more accurately match what the caller has said.

With this in mind, I set up a system for building survey applications with sets of options. For any questions that have completely free-form answers, such as "please describe the damages to the property," the system records the audio from the caller so that the operator can play back that part of the message later. In fact, every response to every question has the audio recorded automatically so that the individual responses can be played back at a later date.

Here is some sample code showing what it takes to create a survey in this framework.

You can see the different types of responses the Tropo can understand. I added the "[BOOLEAN]" and "[RECORD]" types to the framework which causes Tropo to listen for a "yes" or "no" response, and that will just accept a recording of whatever the caller speaks.

My goal in designing this Tropo application was to make it as easy as possible to set up survey questions and change them in the future. The application takes care of recording responses and tracking answers, and provides the callers' responses in the admin's web interface.

The data gathered from the call is presented to admins in a web view. Here is an example of a transcript of one of the calls. There are "listen" links which will play the audio for that response. Some questions don't have recordings because the answers were determined based on other answers. For example, entering a zip code determines the county and state.

If you'd like to check out the source code to this application, you can find it on Github. For more information on Tropo, check out the Tropo documentation.