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• TiffanyScreens 3.0, a major leap forward
  TiffanyScreens is a presentation tool that continuously captures the content of the presenter's screen and sends it to multiple other computers at the same time. Best of all, any computer can seamlessly become the presenting computer, no matter if connected wirelessly or through an Ethernet cable.
  Obviously, TiffanyScreens works best when all clients reside on the same local network, but like we know just too well, not all team members we wish to include in a screen sharing session can always be in the same room, on the same local network, or use a VPN-client. For all those teams and peer groups, there is good news: TiffanyScreens 3.0 is a major leap forward, making a subset of TiffanyScreens' functionality available over the Internet.
  

  
  
• Protect your online privacy when on the road by using your Home Router as a Secure Socket Proxy
  If you use your Laptop computer at the local coffee shop, in a hotel while traveling, or at any location where you expect your online privacy at risk, you may want to consider some extra steps to protect your electronic mail and Web browsing behavior from those nosy prying eyes.
  
  Using your computer in the above-mentioned places allows at least everyone with administrator-access to the local router to see what sites you visited. In case you aren't reading your email through an SSL connection, it's also not too hard to capture what you read and write; and no, it doesn't matter if you use are using a Web browser or an email client application to access you email account.
  
  However, if you have a hackable router at home and it is also accessible through a publicly routable IP address, you are in luck and with only a little time and effort, you can use your home-router as a secure proxy when you are on the road. The idea is to have your Laptop connect securely to your router at home; meaning, whenever your Laptop needs to request information from a resource on the Internet (DNS-Domain Name Service, HTTP-Websites, IMAP/POP3 Email, etc.) it encrypts the request and sends it to your router at home. The router decrypts the request, sends it on to the intended destination, and awaits the response. Eventually, the router will return the response to your Laptop, it is again encrypted, this time by the home-router, and decrypted on arrival at your Laptop. For those nosy prying eyes, all this will look like a long https connection, with undecipherable content. Sounds good? OK then let's make it happen.
  

  
  
• TiffanyScreens 2.6.3, faster and more secure.
  TiffanyScreens, your favorite Presentation Sharing tool for Peer Groups has been updated. TiffanyScreens is a the multi platform application that seamlessly captures your computer's screen-content and sends it to multiple other computers at the same time. TiffanyScreens is great for sharing PowerPoint or KeyNote presentations. It is a truly cross-platform tool to share presentations (or any screen content) with your peer group, without requiring a projector.
  The TiffanyScreens 2.6.3 update removes multiple security vulnerabilities that were caused by 3rd party libraries provides by Sun Microsystems, Inc. This latest update also include performance improvements that are especially noticeable on the Windows platform.
  

  
  
• Data collection on the Web made amazingly easy.
  Collecting even simple responses on your Web site still requires some programming skills, like

  • An HTML form needs to be generated [HTML and CSS]
  • user input has to be validated, best on client and server side [JavaScript and JSP or PHP]
  • and eventually the collected data needs to be aggregated, sliced and diced. [SQL]

  I recently discovered formassembly, a service offered by Veer West LLC, based in Indiana, which claims to help with all the required tasks. Let's walk through them ...

  Form Design

  

  To test the Web application, Tom and I created a simple feedback form for his PodCast: The Tech Weekly PodCast
  
  An easy to use but still powerful all web based form builder makes form generation easy and fun. First, one has to write the text that makes up a question and subsequently select an answer-type, like text, options, radio-buttons, checkboxes, even file upload is among the choices. Secondly, one can setup triggers, conditional questions, calculations, and advanced presentation styles.
  At any time, a preview of the form can be displayed, which makes the design and setup process less of a guessing game.

  Publishing

  Formassembly offers several different ways to put the form on the Web:

  • Formassembly hosts the form on their server.
    Our test form for instance is available on their servers here: http://app.formassembly.com/forms/view/5850
  • The HTML for the form can be downloaded and integrated into a web page.
    This link for instance can be used to download the HTML code that makes up the form: http://app.formassembly.com/forms/export/html/5850
  • Server-side script can be used to retrieve the form via a REST URI.
    This link can be used to retrieve the form markup via an REST call: http://app.formassembly.com/rest/forms/view/5850
  • Server-side script can be used to retrieve the form via an XML URI.
    This link can be used to retrieve the form markup via an XML API call: http://app.formassembly.com/xml/forms/view/5850

  Getting to the form markup via REST allows merging the form's HTML code into a regular web page on the hosting server, which is significantly different and better than letting the consuming browser perform the merge, which happens for instance with Google and Amazon ads.
  In case the form needs some modification later, Formassembly amazingly offers simple but effective revision management.

  
  
• TiffanyScreens 2.6, with new features and compatible with Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard. Available Now.
  
  Version 2.6 of TiffanyScreens, the Presentation Sharing tool for Peer Groups, is available. The new release support OS X v10.5 Leopard and introduces new features, like user-adjustable frame-rates during presentation broadcasting and improved full-screen switching when watching presentations.
  TiffanyScreens 2.6 is available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux and more information about TiffanyScreens can be found on the project's main Web site: http://www.tiffanyscreens.com.
  
  
  TiffanyScreens is a the multi platform application that seamlessly captures your computer's screen-content and sends it to multiple other computers at the same time. TiffanyScreens is great for sharing PowerPoint or KeyNote presentations.
  TiffanyScreens is the first truly cross-platform tool to share presentations (or any screen content) with your peer group, without requiring a projector.
  
  

  
  
• TiffanyScreens 2.6 beta available for Mac users.
  Version 2.6 of TiffanyScreens, the Presentation Sharing tool for Peer Groups, will also be made available soon. The 2.6 release will support OS X v10.5 Leopard and introduce new features like user-adjustable frame-rates during presentation broadcasting and improved full-screen switching when watching presentations. Users on the Mac can download the current TiffanyScreens Release Candidate, which already supports new OS X 10.5 features like Spaces.
  
  More information about TiffanyScreens can be found on the project's main Web site: http://www.tiffanyscreens.com; the download page provides access to the current Release Candidate (Mac only).
  

  
  
• TiffanyScreens 2.6, with new features and compatible with Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard announced.
  
  With Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard launching tonight, a new release of my Presentation Sharing tool for Peer Groups: TiffanyScreens, will also be made available soon. Tests with pre-release software from Apple went well and there are only one or two issues that need to be addressed before releasing TiffanyScreens 2.6.
  Not only will TiffanyScreens 2.6 be optimized OS X v 10.5, it also contains some new features, e.g. user-adjustable frame-rates during presentation broadcasting.
  
  Much later than expected, but within the 1st half 2008, Microsoft has announced a preliminary date for the availability of Windows XP Service Pack 3. Without going into too much detail ... again, test went very well so far.
  
  
  TiffanyScreensis a the multi platform application that seamlessly captures your computer's screen-content and sends it to multiple other computers at the same time. TiffanyScreens is great for sharing PowerPoint or KeyNote presentations.
  TiffanyScreens is the first truly cross-platform tool to share presentations (or any screen content) with your peer group, without requiring a projector. To say it with Bren's words "A whole new way of doing presentations -- without the projector. Looks really cool."
  

  
  
• Small Improvements on WolfPaulus.com
  The appearance of this Web site in style and formatting was updated a couple weeks back and I kept adding new content regularly. The Journal section for instance had a new content area added recently, focusing on Mac Tips and more Arduino related content was integrated into the Embedded Systems area of the site. However, the site hadn't been seen a lot of improvements, when it came to functionality.
  Finally, I have taken the time to add a submit to digg.com link into my homegrown PHP-based blogging system and also added a cool photo-viewer, pulling my own photos from flickr.
  
  The search functionality of the site is provided by www.google.com/search and since recommended and demo-ed by Bob, I also use their Google Analytics service to monitor the usage of my Websites, which required only adding a couple lines of Java Script code into the pages' footer-template.
  Adding the "Submit story to digg.com" functionality was done in pretty much the same way how search works, but instead of an HTTP GET through an HTML form submission, digg simply uses an HTML link. More details can be found at http://digg.com/tools/integrate#3
  
  Integration with flickr was even easier. I used PSTAM's instructions to put his cool flash-based flickrslidr photo viewer on the site, looping through photos I had already posted on flickr.
  Nothing earthshaking, I know. Still, even small improvements like these make the site more useful, at least for myself.
  --
  Wolf
  
  
  

  
  
• TiffanyScreens is all about innovation and 2.5.1 is available now.
  
  TiffanyScreens is a the multi platform application that seamlessly captures your computer's screen-content and sends it to multiple other computers at the same time. TiffanyScreens is great for sharing PowerPoint or KeyNote presentations.
  
  TiffanyScreens is all about innovation; it's the first truly cross-platform tool to share presentations (or any screen content) with your peer group, without requiring a projector, and I have just released TiffanyScreens 2.5.1. In this latest release, all graphical user interface libraries got updated and TiffanyScreens' over-all performance has been improved once again.
  
  To say it with Bren's words "A whole new way of doing presentations -- without the projector. Looks really cool."
  

  
  
• Ad Hoc TiffanyScreens
  You may already have heard about or even used TiffanyScreens, the multi platform application that seamlessly captures your computer's screen-content and sends it to multiple other computers at the same time. TiffanyScreens is great for sharing PowerPoint or KeyNote presentations, or in fact for sharing any screen content at interactive group meetings.
  
  Jeffrey Peacock of the Orange County Embedded Java Users' Group for instance, organizes and chairs weekly meetings, to discuss topics, news, and current projects. The group meets at the local Panera Bread in Irvine, California and uses TiffanyScreens to collaborate. Besides the tasty sandwiches, the group enjoys the free wireless Internet access, which certainly is one reason why the group chose that particular venue.
  
  On the other hand, collaborating, sharing presentations with TiffanyScreens doesn't require Internet Access nor routers, hubs or switches. A wireless network between two or more computers can easily be created using ad hoc networking. Obviously, each participant needs a computer, equipped with a wireless network card and while it doesn't really matter which specific WiFi protocol each one uses, the ad hoc network will be performing best, if everyone uses 802.11g.
  
  On my PowerBook for instance, I start a Computer-to-Computer wireless network, using the Create Network.. Airport menu item. The network's name defaults to my computer's name (wpBook) and the channel defaults to 11.
  Everyone else in reach can now connect to my machine but only Macs or Windows computer's with Apple's Bonjour service installed would be able to use TiffanyScreens' convenient autodetect feature, which detects all machines running TiffanyScreens without the need to configure a proxy.
  
  However, with a little extra work, the PowerBook can be configured to not only span a wireless network but also act as a DHCP and Name Server, for the temporary wireless network we want to build.
  
  In System Preferences, click on the Sharing icon and then on the Services tab. Choose Built-in-Ethernet in the Share your connection from drop-down, and check the Airport box, before hitting the 'Start' button. This method provides assigned but private addresses to all computers on the ad hoc network.
  TiffanyScreens' auto-detect as any other of its features will work on Windows and the Mac. Ad hoc networking isn't right for every situation but it's really cool for those group meeting at your local Micro Brewery.
  
  --
  Wolf
  

  
  
• By Developers For Developers No Fluff only Code
  It's Code Camp time again in Southern California and lots of Coders, Programers, Engineers, etc will meet at the Cal State Fullerton Campus this coming Saturday and Sunday, January 27 and 28.
  Code Camp is a community driven event for developers of all platforms, programming languages and disciplines - well that's the idea at least. Looking at session table, one cannot shake the feeling that .net seems a little over represented but there are also a couple platform independent, embedded, and Java specific talks scheduled as well.
  My sessions: Arduino Fever - PHYSICAL COMPUTING and Declarative Programming, emphasizing UI Generation at Runtime have been scheduled to take place on Saturday, right after Code Camp Welcome.
  See you Saturday morning at the CSFU Campus in UH248 ...
  
  

  Arduino Fever - PHYSICAL COMPUTING

  CSFU Campus, UH248, Sat. 01/27/2007, 9:00 - 10:15 AM

  The Arduino project was created to provide access to the essence of digital technologies and has contributed a remarkable set of open-source tools, ideal to conduct courses in electronics prototyping. Today, more than 20 universities are using Arduino in their programs and engineering classes, several open source communities have welcomed Arduino as their platform for interfacing the physical world, and the Arduino project has expanded into secondary education in schools allover Europe. This session provides a hands-on introduction to Arduino platform. We will focus on sensors and actuators and take a look at how a computer converts inputs (in the form of sound, light, motion, and other forms) into changing electronic signals that it can interpret. No previous knowledge in electronics is required. However, participants should bring an open mind for a challenging time with a hand full of bytes.
  
  

  Declarative Programming, emphasizing UI Generation at Runtime

  CSFU Campus, UH248, Sat. 01/27/2007, 10:30 - 11:45 AM

  Graphical User Interfaces are described in XML documents that are parsed at runtime and rendered into UI-Widgets. While open-source projects like Thinlet and Swixml focus mainly on the GUI, they are also good examples for how declarative programming can be done in Java. Find out more at http://www.swixml.org Read what your peer are saying about declarative programming and swixml at http://www.swixml.org/opinion.html

  
  
• TiffanyScreens shows your screen to your peer group, without a projector
  Thanks to fact that it had been prominently featured on Apple's Third-party Downloads site, the TiffanyScreens Presentation Broadcasting / Screen-Sharing tool has been downloaded about 40,000 times over the last few months. The feedback was mostly very positive, some of which can be found here, and came surprisingly over-proportionally from users located in Australia and New Zealand.
  Since the first beta release of the software was made available in May 2006, TiffanyScreens has been constantly updated and features like watching in full-screen mode, working over restricted VPNs, or password protecting a screen casts have been added.
  
  Work on the most recent update, to what is now dubbed TiffanyScreens 2.5, focused mainly on performance. Updated libraries and a new, optimized runtime library resulted in a performance increase that is most noticeable on the Windows version. A frequently requested feature, adding the presenter's mouse-pointer to the screen-cast, was also finally implemented and honestly wasn't as trivial as it sounds, considering that low level screen-capture routines don't include a mouse pointer or even the pointer-location.
  
  If you haven't looked at TiffanyScreens lately, check it out, it's available for Windows and Mac OS X. Share your next presentation with your peergroup on their Laptop's screens.

  
  
• SD Code Camp Pt.2 - How the Internet works ..
  My other talk at the San Diego Code Camp, which is taking place this weekend in the UCSD Extension facilities, is going to be a little shady, a little underground. This will be one the the last sessions on Saturday, so it's OK to wear your diggnation shirt and bring beer - brown bag style of course.
  It's all about "How the Internet works" and while you will hear about MAC and IP addresses, TCP, packets, ports, TTL, NAT and all that, it will be fun - I promise!
  We will talk about how applications like iTunes announce shared playlists and why sharing only works on LANs but not over the Internet - and of course you will see how you can "work around" this .. limitation. And bring your Wifi 802.11 enabled Laptop, if you like.
  
  San Diego Code Camp is taking place this weekend in the UCSD Extension buildings.
  See you in Room 111, 4:15 PM - 5:30 PM: How the Internet works
  
  
  
  

  
  
• A Feature Complete Tiffany Screens
  Early Access Releases of TiffanyScreens have been published weekly for the last couple of weeks and the presentation and screen sharing application for peer groups is finally feature complete. The most important features recently added, include:
  

  • For network environments, where multicasting has been disabled, a directory proxy has been added into TiffanyScreens.
  • TiffanyScreens currently supports up to 30 concurrent users and up to 5 virtual conference rooms, a.k.a Venues.
  • Password protected conferencing and Full Screen watching mode have been added.
  • TiffanyScreens has been package with industry standard installer applications, allowing convenient installation (and de-installation) on Windows and Mac OS X.

  Among other sites, the Java Posse has mentioned TiffanyScreens and Softpedia has already tested Tiffany Screens and awarded it the SOFTPEDIA "100% CLEAN" AWARD.
  
  Tiffany Screens can be downloaded as Windows installable and Mac OS X disk image (dmg), directly from the Tiffany Screens download site: http://www.tiffanyscreens.com/download.html or from Softpedia:
  

  • Windows
  • Mac OS X

  
  
• TiffanyScreens presents your PowerPoints without a projector
  Imagine a scenario, where every participant brought a Laptop to a meeting and watched your presentation on that Laptop's display - participants would probably sit on a table facing each other, instead of the wall.
  No adjustments were necessary; images would be scaled automatically on arrival, to best match the receiver's display-capability. To support lively meetings, everyone participating could, with a single button click, turn his computer into the presenting device.
  
  Well, it's here!
  Meet TiffanyScreens, a presentation tool, able to capture the content of the presenter's screen and send it to multiple computer screens at the same time. Best of all, any computer can seamlessly become the presenting computer, no matter if connected wirelessly or through an Ethernet cable.
  An Early Access Release is available as Windows executable, Mac OS X disk image (dmg), and also deployable via Java Webstart.
  
  
  

  
  
• How to remotely access a Mac, even if it's behind a corporate firewall.
  Accessing your Mac remotely isn't really that difficult, if it weren't for your resident IT-Department. You could simply open System Preferences / Sharing, enable ARD (Apple Remote Desktop) and check the VNC viewer checkbox. By doing so, your Mac starts listing on port 5900 and you could access it via any VNC viewer, like Chicken of the VNC (for the Mac), or RealVnc, or TightVnc (on Windows).
  
  VNC is one of the very few - if not the only - cross platform solutions, allowing to access a Mac from a Windows box or vice versa. However, opening a server port is usually unacceptable and not tolerated by your IT folks - for a good reason, I might add.
  

  OSXvnc to the rescue

  Fortunately, there is the OSXvnc open source project, while providing only a subset of Apple's ARD, it has the nice feature, allowing the server to make the initial communication request.
  Usually, you open port 5900 on the machine you would like to remotely control. That machine starts to listen for request from a vncviewer, on the predefined port. In this case, like with almost all clients, the viewer initiates the communication.
  OSXvnc allows you to enter an IP address and by clicking the Add button, let the vnc server call the client (the vncviewer). Obviously, to make this work, the vncviewer would have been started in listening mode on the machine with the given IP.
  
  
  
  
  Now, there is a little problem that still needs to be resolved: OSXvnc needs user interaction (clicking the add button), to make it initiate the connection. A really short shell script installed as a daemon however helps us to work around this issue.
  

  
  
• Insanely great software
  For a couple of days now, I'm working on a post showing how to access a Mac remotely, even when it's behind a really tightly set up firewall. However, this will have to wait another day or two.
  Earlier today, Aymie sent me an invite to the next XGroup Meeting, a company internal geek meeting, which covers all things Linux and Mac OS X - since it's after work, there is usually also some beer to improve the turnout ...
  We used to have dosxx - LinuX OS X, two Xs get it? However, it's just not good beer, even if the label fits nicely. Anyway, for incomprehensible reasons, I won't be able to attend this month's meeting and was looking for a way to be there, at least virtually.
  Now, if everyone stays in the Windows world, there are good commercial solutions available, e.g. GotoMeeting or WebEx. However, this is the XGroup that is meeting.
  While some of the presentations may be supported by PowerPoint slides, this is definitely a cross-platform event.
  

  
  
• Specialized client apps for watching Video Podcasts and Internet Television
  iTunes is just fine for listening to, watching, and storing podcasts. However, specialized applications like iPodderX give you more control over what to do with a content feed. Since the availability of 5th generation iPods, video podcasting has gained in popularity and specialized client application have started appearing, DTV and FireAnt being just two of them.
  
  

  Participatory Culture Foundation's platform for internet television and video

  DTV is a new, GPL open-source platform for Internet television and video (svn co https://svn.participatoryculture.org/svn/dtv/). The intuitive and very mac-like interface lets users subscribe to channels, watch videos, and build a video library. The DTV client is still in beta and currently only available for the Mac OS X 10.3 or higher, however, a Windows version is worked on. DTV uses Quicktime 7 and therefore anything that plays in Quicktime (like MPEG, MP4, MOV, H264) will play in DTV.

  
  
• Does Eclipse's RCP mark the return of the fat client?
  Replacing the old client server architecture with the web application architecture made quite a few folks very happy. Besides hard- and software sales people who were given new arguments to sell new stuff, the IT guys were just lovin' it. Zero admin on the client side had finally become reality.
  Users of all the new and cool web desktops on the other hand slowly discovered some serious flaws. Many of those much-appreciated conveniences like right mouse-clicks, re-ordering columns, stretching column widths, fast scrolling, etc. or just keeping state, were gone.
  Ask yourself, why do most users prefer an e-mail client like Outlook or Thunderbird over mail.yahoo.com or hotmail.com. GoldMine over salesforce.com, Quicken over ..bank.com, the list goes on an on.
  
  It's not over before the fat client sings...
  Don't read into this that I would like to see us going back to the old fat client days. However, there is a pattern here. Deploying the web application architecture we have sacrificed usability for maintainability. Considering that mostly IT-departments make the decision what solution to buy/deploy and that they are the once benefiting the most, it's no surprise to see the growing number of web desktop driven solutions.
  The success of the web desktop however, brings another disadvantage to light, which is its uniqueness in design and lingo. Where is the menu? Top, bottom, left, or right? What was that called? Open, enter, perform, submit, commit? Long gone seem the days, where an application style guide was used that ensured that if you knew how to navigate one app, you'd know it for all, but hey wasn't that one of the reasons why Windows 3.0 was successful in the 1st place?
  Old fashion MS-DOS apps, while looking very differently, had some of the same problems we experience today with web desktops: the absences of a uniform nomenclature and look and feel.
  
  

  
  
• One-click RSS Subscriptions
  There are several specifications for a feed URI scheme floating around now.
  My favorite is published at 25hoursaday and looks like this:
  
  feed:http://example.com/rss.xml - Identifies the RSS feed at "http://example.com/rss.xml"
  
  feed:https://example.com/rss.xml - Identifies the RSS feed at "https://example.com/rss.xml"
  
  feed://example.com/rss.xml - Identifies the RSS feed at "http://example.com/rss.xml"
  
  Try it, if you are using Safari or a Feed Reader like NetNewsWire, this link should work for you already. feed://carlsbadcubes.com
  Time to update all the links on all these orange XML image buttons.
  

  
  
• XQuery, XmlPull, and XPath
  XQuery is getting a lot of attention lately and the CarlsbadCubes' Forum/Mailinglist became a gathering place for SAX and xmlpull parsing enthusiasts. I feel kind-of left behind since I'm still wondering who in his right mind likes to write XQuery statements and SAX parsing code?
  It's almost like last year's discussion .. you cannot be a real Java coder if you are using an IDE .. real men use vi.