The Spoon website and service provides the ability to access and deliver applications instantly with no downloads, installs, or hassles. [On a side note, this seems a little odd because you do have to install a the Spoon plug-in for everything to work.]

Spoon specializes in app virtualization and delivery technology, a family of sophisticated techniques that decouple apps from the underlying operating system and enable extremely rapid delivery and launch.

In support of its ongoing product development efforts, Spoon conducts fundamental research in the areas of virtualization, operating systems, formal semantics, programming languages, complexity theory, and cryptography.

All that being said, simply, you can run any app you want from your browser as long as they have it available to run. They have games and productivity apps. Just pick what you want to do.

Everything worked as expected. I installed the Spoon plug-in, then was able to run the apps available for testing. I can see how this type of functionality would really come in handy.

Post from: EveryJoe

Spoon – Delivering Apps On the Web

It appears that users are experiencing a little bit of an issue with the camera that’s part of the Android phone. The Android’s 5-megapixel camera’s auto-focus feature isn’t always working. You’d think it might be some kind of issue with a faulty lens or the auto-focus mechanism. It turns out it’s all in the programming though.

The issue is due to a rounding issue with the auto-focus programming routine. The auto-focus function uses a time stamp (not sure how that works or why?) that’s set on a 24.5 day clock. So, every 24.5 days the camera can’t focus. That shouldn’t be a problem though right? I mean really? What happens within 24.5 days that won’t happen again?

The good news is, there’s a patch coming soon to fix the issue. Now, will someone please explain to me why an auto-focus programming routine is based on a timestamp?

Post from: EveryJoe

Google Android Camera Focusing Issue

Those travelers that have the opportunity to take advantage of a free wi-fi connection will also be able to donate money to the Climate Savers Computing efforts to move toward a clean, sustainable economy through energy-efficient computing.

“We encourage all air travelers to use the free Wi-Fi access to learn more about Climate Savers Computing, and to download one of our free PC Power Management tools,” said Lorie Wigle, president of Climate Savers Computing, an international nonprofit committed to reducing IT-related energy consumption. “You’ll immediately reduce the carbon footprint of your computer, and if you make a donation, you will help us bring power management to more people, reducing their carbon footprint too.”

You can get more information about the free Wi-Fi for the holidays and what airports are participating by visiting www.freeholidaywifi.com

If you’re out on the road from now through January 15, 2010, look for the gift of free wi-fi from Google and make a donation to Climate Savers Computing.

Post from: EveryJoe

Free Wi-Fi from Google This Holiday Season

I didn’t have that much luck as the applications weren’t really as helpful as I had anticipated or really needed. It’s been awhile since I’ve come across something that’s made me feel completely ignorant, but regular expressions seems to be the winner lately.

The two apps I found are completely free and give you quite a bit of assistance and guidance for writing your “regular expression”, but I’m still looking for something a bit more natural English. Shoot, something that would let me even write some stuff that looked like SQL or VB would be a step up.

Here are the two apps I found though:

• Regulazy – this tool is very simple and is shown on the right in the image above. It’s more bare-bones, but still looks like it could get the job done if you know what you’re doing with the basics of regular expressions.
• Expresso – this was the first tool recommended to me and it’s fairly user-interface friendly. There seemed to be much more functionality available to the user, but it still didn’t give me the plain English encoding capability I was really looking for in the app.
• The Regex Coach – I found this after I’d already found the other two options, but didn’t download it and install it up to this point. It may have what you’re looking for so let me know if you give it a try and can compare it to the other two.

Post from: EveryJoe

Free Apps for Writing Regular Expressions

I’ve never heard of this being an issue with servers, so it was a bit of a surprise for me. I’ve been using and recommending using email aliases and forwarders for years. I’ve never read anything else about using them causing spam or causing the email servers to be listed as spammers either.

Has anyone else heard of this?

This would be a huge impact to a variety of users I would expect. No longer could you make use of simple aliases like questions@yourdomain.com to be auto-forwarded to a group of users easily.

Instead the email address would have to be setup with its own account password and login instructions. Then one user would have to manage that account and manually forward to a team of users or figure out some other form of distribution for the emails received.

If you’ve heard of this or have proof that there really is a risk of email hosting servers being tagged as spammers due to alias usage, please let me know.

Post from: EveryJoe

Email Alias / Forwarders A No-No?

One of the things that immediately makes me start wondering about whether a wi-fi network at an establishment is legit, is whether or not the name of the wi-fi network being broadcast matches or at least is similar to the business name.

For example, I was at a coffee shop the other day and a list of about 12 wi-fi networks within range popped up as available. Within the entire list there was nothing listed that even remotely identified with the business.

The strongest network listed was labeled "linksys", real creative. A personal security step for me is that I don’t connect to a wi-fi network unless I’m sure of the one I’m connecting. In this case, I got up and asked the manager what they had named their network, sadly he didn’t know but he thought "linksys" sounded right.

Dear business owners if you’re offering free wi-fi at your establishment, know a little and train your employees to know a little bit about how things work, at least what the network is named and how to reset the router would be great! And please, name your network something that your patrons can easily identify.

Another little thing I do is to try and avoid doing any financial transactions online over a free wi-fi network. I’m not too worried about hacking for the most part, but this is an area where I just feel that most of the time, I can wait till I’m back at home on my own secure network before doing this task online.

Image: richiec on flickr

Post from: EveryJoe

Thinking Security on Free Public Wi-Fi

Although you may think it’s gibberish, the text above is the regular expression I’m using for the solution to my earlier problem. Doesn’t look very "regular" does it? Aside from the fact it’s using characters I’m familiar with, the order and meaning behind them might as well be hieroglyphics to me. So, what is a "regular expression"?

The Wiktionary website defines it as follows:

A concise description of a regular formal language with notations for concatenation, alternation, and iteration (repetition) of subexpressions.

My task for my application was to exclude any .zip files from being able to be uploaded to the server. I couldn’t ever find a regular expression that excluded .zip files, but I did find the one above that basically allowed a list of other files.

Here’s the expression above again:

^.+\.(([jJ][pP][eE]?[gG])|([gG][iI][fF])|([pP][dD][fF])|([dD][oO][cC])|([dD][oO][cC][xX])|([bB][mM][pP])|([tT][xX][tT]))$

The "regular expression", or "regex" above basically looks for any .jpg, .jpeg, .gif, .pdf, .bmp, .doc, .docx, or .txt file and allows it to be uploaded. The upper and lower case version of the letter within brackets specifies that the file extension could be typed either way.

I’m still not real sure what all the other symbols are really specifying in there. I’ve got more to learn for sure.

Post from: EveryJoe

Regular Expressions are Anything But Regular

The problem with the white erase board is that the information is then only available on the white-erase board. I recently developed an application for a client where we eliminated a white-erase board being used for department status information and created a "banner" that everyone could access and see from their computers and a webpage.

The white-erase board also isn’t interactive. I can’t set reminders on the white erase board that would sync to my phone and computer.

With energy consumption, the panels themselves could have screens like the new Kindle. Low-power consumption where power is only used to change the display, not keep it visible.

The problem with relying on my cell phone is that again, it’s an island of information for me. I can’t share or assign "To Do" items to the other members of my family. My kids don’t have cell phones and I don’t plan on them having them for at least another few years at the earliest.

These information controls would absolutely sync to computers as another portal for that information.

As for music, I believe the AMX panels can absolutely work as a digital jukebox functionality. Not sure what range issues you’re talking about with the panels being connected via Ethernet or wireless connections. The panels themselves wouldn’t have the speakers in them, each room would have separate speaker, providing much higher audio quality and far higher than a cell phone playing music.

Post from: EveryJoe

Home Automation Follow-up Post

I was at a meeting last week in a corporate building that has just recently been finished. Outside of each conference and meeting room is a small touch panel display that was displaying a calendar for the day.

I did a quick search for the manufacturer and found more options that are available from AMX.

After seeing the calendars, and thinking about some current challenges in my own family, here’s some functionality I’d like to see, and these kinds of panels in each room could really make it a reality. There’s also some entertainment features to take advantage of as well.

• each kid’s room has a panel that I could list events on their calendar. Easily put things like sports practices, upcoming tests, doctor’s appointments, birthday parties, etc.
• each kid’s bedroom panel could display a list of “To Do” items. Similar to Outlook calendar tasks, these could be set to automatically occur and repeat as needed.
• each bedroom panel could serve as a message center for members of the household. The messages could consist of a view of their email Inbox, voice-mail messages, and even private messages among family members.
• in conjunction with a home media server, the ability to access and play music into any room independently of the other rooms, including the ability to play the same music throughout the entire house

All of this type of information management can probably already be done, but what I think is missing is the management of the information in the first place. I should be able to add and manage tasks for each person (and their associated panel) as needed from any Internet connection. Each device could be wired into a home network or connected wirelessly for existing construction homes.

I’d love to be able to send a message to greet my kids when they get home from school, remind them not to forget to take out the kitty litter and clean their rooms. It would also be nice to be reminded of their upcoming math test when I get home and know I’ll be spending some time with them on their homework.

Post from: EveryJoe

A Few Thoughts on Family Information Tech

The Trakkboard application is developed on the Adobe AIR platform and is a quick download and install from the Trakkboard website. The Trakkboard application provides the opportunity to combine data from different websites into a single report, allowing you to see patterns across a group of similar websites perhaps.

For example, you can group and manage your e-commerce website traffic together into reports and compare how each site is doing compared to each other. Seeing spikes or traffic patterns in one could provide details on how to optimize or improve traffic patterns on your other sites.

Extending the dashboard theme, you can build as many dashboards for data analysis as you would like at once. I’ve been a user of Woopra for awhile and I’ve really enjoyed their desktop application, I’m hoping Trakkboard will extend that same type of functionality to me with all of my Google Analytics information.

Post from: EveryJoe

Trakkboard Analyzes Your Google Analytics