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Yesterday i discovered termtter (thanks to a twit from antirez). From the author’s description:
Termtter is a twitter client software working on terminal emulators, which is very easy to extend functions
Here is a view of its interface:
Updating your status is as simple as writing u my new status at the program prompt and installing it is just a matter of doing a
sudo gem install termtter
at the terminal.
Termtter will ask you for your twitter username and password the first time it’s run, and it will write them to the ~/.termtter/config file. It would be a lot better if it used OAuth but being opensource it should be easy to add (albeit being a bit of a challenge being a terminal, client application).
The config file is also the place where you can setup and enable various plugins and extensions, e.g. :
You can post the 100th fibonacci number to twitter by (1) uncomment the line “plugin ‘fib’” and reboot termtter and (2) type “fib 100″ on the termtter. http://twitter.com/ujm/status/1330652098 from the readme
I think that “very easy to extend” is an understatement from a rubyist point of view. Writing a plugin is just a matter of creating a ruby file in the ~/.termtter/plugins directory. A plugin can contain new command definitions, status view filters and hooks to take actions on different events (e.g. before or after posting an update). There are a lot of examples in there and here is one i wrote:
It adds a retwit command (with shortcut RT) which just retwits the given update (takes a single argument, the twit ID to be retwitted).
As you can see it’s really easy to personalize Termtter to fit one’s own usage of Twitter and to experiment with it.
As developers we fight with the desire to build useful new services and applications which can attract many users while at the same time reducing the friction that makes it difficult for our average user to try and keep using our creations.
I started observing how people usually hate learning and using too many different tools (except possibly for us geeks), this happens because we have limited resources and look for the maximum utility (this happens most at the cross of the business and consumer markets).
Uncertainty also plays a role in forming our decisions as users, where the perceived value of a new application is decreased by the lack of knowledge about how well it can fit the problems that we need to solve.
This has a few consequences: resistance in adopting new tools since it takes a too big effort to learn and preference for generic tools since they are perceived as more flexible and adaptable to our needs.
To overcome this we may reduce the visible part of the application to a level where the user stops noticing while making sure the user can easily reach the value we add. In the end it will all be about finding a way to give increasing returns for the same effort.
One way to follow this path is leveraging the tools that people are already using, integrating into or with them thus giving new ways to use those “old” and generic applications to do new things. Our invisible application will integrate within the flow of information that the user is receiving, it will remove modality from the interactions and augment the context around the documents and data that the users already handle to enrich the interaction with the same old services. Also, an important role will be played by allowing deep adaptation of the interface, whether automatically or via manual customization by the user (for the italian readers, look also at this presentation by Luca Mascaro).
Just when I was losing to the idea of configuring my macbook for dual boot (or even getting a new machine) to be able to use Windows XP with more ease.
I am using Parallels to be able to do testing of the apps I’m writing on IE (one site I’m working on has more than 1/3rd of users still IE6…) and to be able to recompile and package an old J2EE application using a proprietary framework and builder that works only on Windows :-(
Until upgrading to Parallels 4.0 (which I did yesterday), generating the EAR for said application was taking more than 25 minutes, now it’s just down to less than 5 minutes! The big improvement seem to be in the (shared) filesystem access but also everything else seems snappier and the VM feels lighter on the system.
Overall a highly recommended upgrade to anyone using the product.
One of the selling points of EC2 is that it enables elastic provisioning of computing infrastructure; this allows following novel usage patterns where a server is used only for the time required to do some work.
The key to reach this flexibility is the API that gives developers the ability to startup a server, configure it, use it and shut it down. There are libraries for many programming languages but I like the way the boto python library makes it really simple do these things (and a lot more).
Here I’ll show how to use boto to start a server instance then how to send a file to the instance and execute a command on the remote server, and finally I’ll show how to terminate the instance.
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Yesterday’s OpenID User Experience Summit (hosted by Facebook) has got together a lot of people interested in building a better user experience for OpenID.
If the process succeeds we’ll be able to have a
I’ve been able to follow just a bit of the initial presentations on the UStream but Plaxo’s John McCrea has a detailed live blogging post, moreover all the presentations are online at slideshare (plus here are the UStream recorded sessions)
The first thing I find interesting are the results of the Plaxo/Google hybrid OpenID/OAuth experiment. The stunning 92% rate of click through success shows that the open protocols can be made more effective by implementing a better user experience. Moreover it shows that the users, if given a good enough experience, will not fear to follow a path that’s different from the antipattern they have been (mis)educated to use.
The Plaxo/Google process is awesome if you think about the amount of interaction that is taking place within those two clicks
- the user is signs up for a new service
- the service is veryfies his email address
- the user is grants (scoped) access to the service to a set of his own data
- the service accesses that data thus importing it and pre-populating the new account
It’s a win-win as this shows how something may be made at the same time
- safer and more useful for the user (who should not give away his password or let absolute access to his account) and
- more effective for the service providers (more reliable user data collection, possibly more user signups)
On the downside of this approach is that it will not be easy to scale this beyond the single provider. I hope it doesn’t ends up in a proliferation of single-provider buttons (for somthing that may be implemented with the same undelying technology).
This is a treat without cooperation among the interested parties but looking at the meeting and how the big-cos and many of the smaller players are talking to each other there is hope that it will happen for real.
So… news of the day (yesterday actually) is that Facebook is getting on board in the OpenID foundation (this is following the annoucement a while back about Paypal doing the same).
Commenters are beginning to recognize that OpenID is actually gaining more momentum than most would have tought and the adoption that many big online services are showing is helping to build a larger mindshare also among the less geeky users.
One critique that I hear a lot is that the way the bigger players are approaching OpenID, basically turning every one of their accounts into an OpenID for their users is not really helping the open web since it’s like every site giving out an email address everybody can send to but just accepting email from their own email addresses. This is true, but here lies also a great opportunity for the smaller players. If you are a startup you should be happy, as what’s happening may mean that you can have a lot more potential users with an easier path to try out your service (got a google account? no need to signup!).
Ideally one’s identity online should not be tied to a specific service, but more likely each user will have one main service which represents his own main “self” online. That will be the main service they use online, the one they are spending more time on. It may be a Google account or a Facebook one or a Myspace identity or their wordpress.com hosted blog, but we can be almost sure that it will not be your shiny new little service.
It’s a great thing that now most of these “main” identities have become portable (thanks to OpenID and Facebook Connect) that is usable elsewhere, just being able to tap into the great number of people that will already have one of the hub-provided identities
You should start right now to plan and execute to adopt OpenID as a consumer, adding also Facebook Connect in the mix as long as they are separate (hopefully they’ll be interoperable in the future).
I don’t want provide a new identity just to be able to tell who you are, thus I, for sure, will try to do this with the services I’m working on.
P.S. I specially like this quote from Chris Messina I read on the ReadWriteWeb:
user authentication is like a credit card. You don’t go to a restaurant because they accept credit cards, you go because they have good food. To take that analogy a step further, it is good that every restaurant lets you pay for your food with any of the major credit card vendors
Cloudification of IT services will be a growing trend in the coming months, one (big) step forward in this process is the announce today that Microfocus has released a virtualized mainframe environment which will let enterprises run CICS and IMS code in the cloud
The real breakthrough is that this will enable a whole sector within our industry to transition to a modern architecture. There are a lot of ISVs which have invested heavily and have a great knowhow in mainframe technologies and those were facing tough times with clients lending towards web services and cloud systems to renew their IT (this is specially true for many small italian software houses working on ERP systems).
With this offering those ISVs will be able to transition current clients to cloud systems and perhaps they will be able to re-engineer and modernize their software one piece at a time as hopefully the Microfocus service will enable new ways to integrate mainframe software and internet services.