Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Chumby works as SlimServer (SqueezeCenter) player

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

I was able to get my Chumby to work as a client for the SlimServer (SqueezeCenter) tonight. My Chumby was updated to client version 1.5.0 this evening. SlimServer client support has been built in to Chumby since at least client version 1.4.0. And before there was a menu interface on Chumby, there were ways that you could make the Chuby work as a SlimServer client with a USB memory device loaded with some software.

The Chumby interface is pretty straight forward. In the main Chumby panel, there is a “Music” button. You select this and are presented with a list of different music sources. If you select the “SlimServer” source, you get a menu that lets you enter the IP address of your SlimServer. After entering the IP address, you can press the “Play” button and then the “Done” button. Momentarily, you should see the Chumby show up as a client in your SlimServer web interface on your computer. You can control the playback of music on the Chumby from the SlimServer web interface via your computer. (You don’t control it from the Chumby. If you have an Asus Eee PC like me, the Eee PC make a really convenient “remote”. Though an iPhone or iPod touch would probably be even cooler; use the built in web browser and wifi as a client of the SlimServer, controlling the playback of the music on your Chumby. :-) ) When the music is playing, the Chumby continues to play whatever “channel” you currently have active. For instance, my main channel rotates between a digital clock and a five day weather forecast.

I have the SlimServer running on a Wal-Mart Everex PC. I decided to try SlimServer when I learned that the Chumby could be a SlimServer client. I was quite impressed with the SlimServer. It makes it easy to play my music collection throughout the house. Up until now, though, I have used a laptop as a SlimServer client. But the Chumby as a client amps up the geek factor. :-)

What Would Google Do? Sometimes it may be worth asking.

Tuesday, February 12th, 2008

I have seen a couple different posts pose the question, “What would Google do?” I am taking a different tact. I work for a large organization making web applications. The web applications are used by external clients, but there is a rather limited group of users. Limited as compared to an application that is designed for general use on the Internet.

So, sometimes there are challenges developing our applications. I try to use Google as inspiration for coming up with creative solutions to the challenges.

To start this column out, let’s begin with a common task: uploading data files. Assume that you have a feature that uploads a batch data file. How should the file be formatted? This is a situation where I might ask, “What would Google do?” There are a couple different data uploads that Google supports.

Google Base is a service that provides a data feed. Google Base provides a way to describe structured data that will be included in a Google search. Here is more information about the data feed.

Google Apps, Google’s hosted applications like email, word process, and spreadsheet, has a data feed for provisioning users. They call this a Provisioning API.

In upcoming posts, I plan to look deeper into both of these data uploads that Google supports to help answer the question, “What would Google do?”

Me on Christmas 2007 morning

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

Me opening my Asus Eee PC 4GHere is a picture of me opening my Asus Eee PC 4G.

I knew that I was getting it. Nancy wanted to get me a laptop for Christmas, since my last one died early in 2007. I had been reading about the Asus Eee PC. I showed Nancy that she could order it from Newegg.com. She did. It arrived in October. Newegg’s return policy for laptops allows 30 days from delivery, so she had me open it and make sure that it worked. Once I verified that it worked, I had to repackage it. Nancy then whisked it away and wrapped it up.

I have been using it for a bit over a week now. I like it a lot. I am a Linux geek, so the Linux OS on the laptop is perfect for me. It is amazing small and portable. I have pretty much gotten used to the small keyboard. The “shift” key on the far right is a bit farther out than I am used to, and I keep pushing the “up” arrow key instead. The small screen is very sharp. This makes the small screen quite usable. And with the solid-state flash drive, it boots quickly.

Amazon SimpleDB announced

Saturday, December 15th, 2007

Amazon announced on Thursday (12/13/2007) this week a new service: Amazon SimpleDB. SimpleDB is a new part of the Amazon Web Service (AWS) offerings. This hosted application provides, as its name suggests, a simple database. It isn’t a relational database. It instead stores attributes-value pairs. The data values are indexed. SimpleDB has a special query language that lets you efficiently query the attribute values. SimpleDB joins the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Like these other services, SimpleDB is priced on how much you use it: so much to put items into SimpleDB, so much to read items out of SimpleDB, so much for the time to execute a query, etc.

One of the recommended practices of SimpleDB is to store the metadata in SimpleDB and the large data in S3. For instance, you could upload your FLAC encoded music library to S3. Each audio file has metadata, like an artist, album, title, track, genre, year, etc. This metadata could be entered as items within SimpleDB. Each item would also include a URL to the actual FLAC audio file stored in S3. You could then run queries against SimpleDB to find different music that matches your criteria. For instance, find all items where the “artist” is “Nerf Herder“. This would return all items, which would include the URL to the audio file, from your music collection that were performed by Nerf Herder. You could then have you audio player on your laptop play the audio, retrieving it from S3. This would allow you to access your music from anywhere and have it stored in a highly reliable system in case your CD was scratched.

I think that this could be a really neat system. Though, it does remind me more and more of the “old” mainframe systems. (Okay. I am really not that old. At Pearson where I currently work, they still use a mainframe.) I have been interested in S3 for some time, like my littles3 implementation, so I will probably keep my eye out for interesting uses of SimpleDB. I also wonder what Google will do to have something like this. I have heard rumors about Google’s “GDrive” for over a year now.

Now if I can only find some reason to justify using SimpleDB once it is available. (It is in limited beta right now.) :-)

(Oh! My little example of “outsourcing” the storage of your music catalog from above could also be related to the book that I am currently reading, “The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich“.)

My Chumby Arrived!

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

My Chumby arrived. I just opened the box and am registering it now. More to come.