I’ve been thinking a lot about software tools these days. As E15 continues to mature, and we start to consider it for installations, our OS X reliance has to be re-considered because of cost. The general trend in many open source projects, of course, is to be cross platform. At this point, I’m not particularly convinced that being strictly cross platform is the best approach. However, I’m definitely keeping it in mind as future E15 features get implemented and existing functionality upgraded. The determination of which features can remain cross platform and which ones should be platform specific is still in progress.

I’m currently working on a system that requires some simple realtime blob tracking from a webcam. The tracking results will be sent to E15 instances and iPhones. The easiest way to do simple blob tracking with the appropriate amount of programmatic flexibility is to use OpenCV, which doesn’t yet have a particularly stable home on OS X. As mentioned in my blog, my task was to find out how to use the most appropriate OS X technologies (in this case, CoreVideo) to grab the video, and then pass those pixels straight on into OpenCV. It turns out that a number of people have been trying to figure out how to do this, apparently without success. After getting the application to work, I was surprised to find that the performance was 7x faster than the cross platform approach using OpenFrameworks, a collection of utilities for making C++ programming more accessible to artists. In a sense, I see this as one example of what I call the cross platform tax, which exists because cross platform approaches tend to leverage only the most common set of functionality, which cuts down on implementation complexity and development time. The result is that the platform-specific and more cutting edge performance benefits offered by new OS features are lost. When I think about these kinds of tradeoffs, VVVV (Windows-only) comes to mind as a demonstration of the benefits of platform reliance.

This is where all the work gets done; thankfully we don’t have cable.

Well, according to my “List for a Successful Business,” it is essential for a business to have a Fax Machine. It’s kind of crazy how many people still use faxes. But I guess you need to sign things all the time, and getting a fax machine is much easier than trying to understand how digital signatures work.

We now have a fax machine, well, a multipurpose machine; the Canon MF4270. As expected with most consumer electronics devices, it sucks.

First, you can blame the 10lbs of the shipping weight to the inclusion of printed manuals that are completely unnecessary. Thanks Canon, that Portuguese manual really helped me out. Seriously…talk about a company that doesn’t want paper to go away any time soon. You think a company like Canon, who has been making this stuff forever would have these devices simple and easy to set up without requiring you to read hundreds of pages. To its credit, it does work well, as long as the machine is used on it’s own (as a copier and fax machine.)

I think Canon employs monkeys to write their drivers. First off, none of their features (like scanning) are supported on the Mac. Only network printing and faxing are supported. That is fine, but even then, good luck setting that up. The driver installation is a disaster. They use an old VISE installer that forces you to quit every application before installation can start. Also, don’t expect wireless printing to work with a Linksys WRT54G. For some reason, they don’t like each other. It’s pretty obvious they don’t bother with user testing.

I called Canon support a few times. The one tech I talked to admitted he never used a Mac before, but still insisted on me to “right click and select properties…” even though I kept telling him I’m not using Windows. He was like Sarah Palin, just sticking to his talking points written specifically for a Windows machine, and ignoring every question I ask.

Anyway, I write this to say, how horrible consumer electronics still is. Why do companies do such a bad job of writing software that bridges between devices and the computer? Is it intentional? Maybe it’s time we make the Laws of Simplicity required reading.

As Moto sets up shop in Chinatown, I’ve been setting up shop in Austria to do some contracting at the world famous Ars Electronica Futurelab. The Futurelab is known for its ability to produce cutting-edge large-scale multimedia installations around the world. There’s really no better place to see how these types of things get done. Upon my arrival, I was immediately reminded of something my dad tells me I said when I arrived at MIT: “Wow. These people aren’t fucking around here.”

The Moto part of BuzaMoto is now open in Toronto’s Chinatown. I don’t have the money or time right now to furnish the space, but there will be pictures of the inside space once it’s nice and presentable. The Buza part of BuzaMoto will be stationed on the other side of the Atlantic to set up shop so we’re better positioned for global dominance of the design and technology world!

I’m currently down at the Rhode Island School of Design giving a talk about E15 as part John Caserta’s Fusion Arts Workshop. I gave my presentation yesterday, and the students engaged in an E15-inspired activity about re-thinking the current web interface. Notes and references can be found on the buzamoto wiki.

Hey, like a real company, BuzaMoto now has real business cards! Check it out!

So one step closer to becoming a real professional. Also, we installed a wiki today. It’s a stock dokuwiki, but Kyle is in charge of making it look cool, giving it the BuzaMoto touch it needs. If it looks like shit, blame him.

I threw together a little demonstration of using the multi-touch capabilities of the iPhone to navigate and interact with a collection of images from YouTube in the 3D E15 context. If you’re so inclined, I’ve written a slightly more technical description of these efforts in my personal blog.

If not, I’ll get straight to the point and give you the video. Enjoy!

Keep the logos coming!

Today was a good day. Not only did I win Solitaire on my iPod on a train down to Providence, I fixed a mailserver issue that I’ve been struggling with for a few weeks.

I’m slowly switching over to Slicehost for all my web hosting requirements, and setting up the server (I’m running Ubuntu Hardy) so that I can get rid of all the other hosting I use (I already got rid of crappy Dreamhost). I’ve been using Pair for the last ten years and have been really happy with them, but I’m a server junkie. VPS is just too tasty. Anyway, most server stuff is pretty straight forward to set up. Pickled Onion articles and a bunch of howtoforge docs will get you started from a fresh disk image in no time. One thing that tripped me up was setting up the mail server. I wanted the standard PostfixAdmin controlled virtual user setup using MySQL to manage the users. Following this and this got everything working, except SMTP would not authenticate properly when storing passwords encrypted in the database.

Everything worked, Courier IMAP and SMTP Auth using TLS…but only if the users passwords were stored cleartext in the database. Even if connecting securely, storing passwords cleartext is a bad idea. The problem comes from Ubuntu SASL libraries not supporting password_format. I didn’t want to run the patch, since…well, I don’t really know how patching while using aptitude works (you probably have to run it every time you update), and I didn’t want to start compiling some things from source, while mostly relying on a package manager. I’ve inherited servers where some things are compiled from source and other things are managed on multiple package managers, and it is a BAD IDEA.

So, the solution. I followed the Ubuntu article and set up my database much like their example, but instead of using auxprop for pwcheck_method, I use saslauthd with PAM.

First, make sure you install libpam-mysql:

sudo aptitude install libpam-mysql


Then, in /etc/postfix/sasl/smtpd.conf:

pwcheck_method: saslauthd
mech_list: plain login


You might also want to add log_level: 7 while you are debugging. Next, create /etc/pam.d/smtp with the following:

auth required pam_mysql.so user=the_user passwd=the_password host=127.0.0.1 db=postfix table=mailbox usercolumn=username passwdcolumn=password crypt=1
account sufficient pam_mysql.so user=the_user passwd=the_password host=127.0.0.1 db=postfix table=mailbox usercolumn=username passwdcolumn=password crypt=1


Then make sure you use $CONF['encrypt'] = ’system’ for PostfixAdmin. You should observe /var/log/mail.log and /var/log/auth.log for any errors. When I first tried out PAM, I didn’t realize that I had not installed libpam-mysql, so only today when I went back and set the log_level did I actually realize I needed to install it.

Now I feel a little better not having cleartext passwords around…

ps. I am really bad at Solitaire, so it was a good day.