Jeff Pelton — Blog

Watching BitCoin Prices

Thu, 15 Feb 2018 04:22:00 GMT

I'd like to summarize and open source a small project I've strung together from a few open source projects for bitcoin arbitrage trading, log, and chart streaming to the browser.

Given the inspiration from an anonymous friend, I stumbled upon an open source BitCoin Arbitrage trading system on github called blackbird.

One thing lead to another and I couldn't help myself but to take the opportunity to make use of, and test out, auto-devops to Kubernetes via GitLab, which makes it's really easy to deploy new projects just by defining their Dockerfile.

As a developer it's also really handy to have dependencies and versions isolated by using Docker which means I don't need to find a server that can run the language and dependencies required by blackbird, which I might not have.

In this case I wanted to use as much existing tools as possible to get the most bang for the buck, without doing anything from scratch, but staring on the shoulders of giants. And I've yet to execute on the bitcoin trading, but it's been a good excuse to check things out.

Blackbird

I found this C++ application on github that has a bunch of discussion, and contributors. It runs great, and I can use the terminal to view the logs it generates right in GitLab.

In the log file it writes the prices it gets from each of the exchanges every few seconds, an also the current opportunity and strategy details.

It's setup to send an email when a trade occurs (which won't happen in demo-mode), but the problem is that I'd like to interface with this via a browser (obviously). So thinking in the nodejs microservices nature, I searched for a log stream server..

Frontail

By just running, frontail ./output/*, I could get all the blackbird logs right in my browser - great!

Now that's fun and all, but I'd really enjoy being able to visualize these number, so I searched for a chart stream..

Chart Stream

This nice little single page app comes with a server that consumes the prices log file that blackbird outputs, and streams it to the browser - nice!

It's using C3, D3 and EventStream data. Cool stuff.

It took a little configuration to get the options I wanted, to not overload the chart with infinite data, and add time stamps. Plus it had to be black.

Node Http Proxy

I could avoid this in the future, but I wanted to see if I could just get this running on a single docker image to keep databases out of this. Obviously for production, as more of a micro architecture, the web server could run on it's own, reading the data from a database blackbird writes to.

Thus we want to be able to run both http servers, through the same host, using a path like "/logs/" to route to the log server.

Having had great success and experience with node proxy in the past, I decided to go ahead and set it up to do the job. There was a bit of a hickup getting the log app to work configured with a non root path, but it works.

Development

This has been a great chance to test the tech tools and process. Here's a few improvements to the chart that I wanted to make after getting things up and running:

- Invert the colors
- Shift the max x points, so the data doesn't overflow memory.
- Fix the date stamp for the x axis

Watch Me Teach a Newbie to Code

Thu, 12 Feb 2015 03:57:00 GMT

I've been using Google Hangouts On-Air to experiment with a lot of things since it's launch.

It's allowed me to interview startup founders from around the world for my podcast.

I've chatted with energetic entrepreneurs all over the globe, via the helpouts platform, who are looking for technology advice to get their projects started and save them critical time.

When I first saw notch screencasting coding minecraft several years ago, I had already seen the power of Khan Academy and was exploring ways we can leverage amazing new technology like video streaming or social networking to drastically improve stale categories such as education.

Going back to the mother of all demo's (perhaps the first screencast), I've always thought that we could be utilizing basic communication tools better. For instance, from time to time I'll screencast / record my desktop for hours, either privately or with a team member working on a project.

There is something to say however, about the result of openness when at the scale of the internet.

If someone as educated as Salman Kahn, son to a single immigrant mother, who received a B.S. in three fields, M.S. in two from MIT, and an MBA from HBS - or someone as highly skilled in a highly paid profession such as notch (now a $101 millionaire) - can open up and just give it all away... why can't I?

Thinking about why these powerful technologies aren't always leveraged for our benefit. For instance, most people had the exact same tools and opportunity as Sal and Notch, but would never think to open it up and give it away.

I'm still thinking about the dynamic. It's hard for me to understand the impact of someone making an educational video on anything from algebra to game physics engines, being watched by millions or even more people.

Back to the future, I've been tinkering here and there. A while back I figured a popular search would be for the dark art of page scraping using a tool like phantomjs, so I hit recording just to test it out. I've done quick show & tell demo's after completing work on a project like my rss reader, with an audience of zero, just for posterity. When the much anticipated framework held it's public launch, I watched the famo.us launch live streaming my reactions.

Then I noticed a sub reddit, Watch People Code, and their dog food project www.watchpeoplecode.com, which inspired me to spend a few hours Sunday working on my open source web radio jukebox project live.

In an effort to step up my efforts this year, I'll be setting up office hours to not only take your technology questions, but also to learn to program.

That's right, I'll teach you to code, for free. The only condition is that the session will be recorded and published on youtube for everyone's benefit. A good pupil will be motivated to learn, and not afraid to ask questions that others out there are surely also thinking.

If you're someone interested in learning web technologies, or you know someone with access to a microphone and internet connection who is, contact me at edu@jeffpelton.com .

Hello 2015

Wed, 14 Jan 2015 21:19:00 GMT

It's that time of year again for the commemorative New Year's blog post.

My goal this year, like always, is to write more. That means pushing myself to publish even when I don't think it's ready. I'm going to try publishing more drafted thoughts, instead of always holding out for the profound.

Right after this I'm going to publish a draft I started while setting up GitLab on AWS.

I'm also going to start trying to use voice annotations to give me a jumpstart on the writing process. It seems like in 2015 we should have pretty good voice to text.

I still really like writing things out and being able to rearrange, and distill down my thoughts. I just realized that long form writing and essays are better suited in living (editable) pages rather than blog posts that are primarily seen when published.

I'll try to share more smaller bite-size content like photos to keep up the consistency. Let's start right now without any fanfare some of the photos of gardening I've been taking on this winter.

I've got a couple planters and strawberry patch growing in the backyard, but I've also recently joined the Ocean Beach Community Garden, working a good sized plot there.

I think I let the arugula (on the right side of the picture below) grow a bit too much.

So I harvested a bunch today, and it's very spicy.

Here's a cute Monarch Caterpillar that I found crawling around my celery.

He's lucky that he didn't get fed to the chickens.

Yet another fun home project I'm giving a try is growing sprouts.

And with all of these greens, I'll probably start juicing. I don't know if the internet can handle another blog post on that, but stay tuned to see what happens!

A hurdle when blogging is first deciding what to write about. I have multiple blogs for various topics and projects but I'll try to be more spontaneous with what I post here and I'll try linking to the others too.

Follow along this year as I work towards my many goals:

- Develop a web consulting agency, Alternating Bits

- Document and release 1.0 of House.JS

- Develop Call2Train, a mobile app for trainers to manage scheduling and billing

- Grow my garden and Cultivate OB

- Blog 5 days a week.

I should probably exercise or something too.

My challenge is always to balance ambition and focus. There is so much I'd like to accomplish; it's hard to decide what to work on first.

It can be overwhelming but when you're doing what you love in a lovely place, it's easy to put in the work. It's a pleasure to be able to work on this, so my ultimate goal for this years is to be doing the same thing next year too.

AWS EC2 Docker Hosting a GitLab Container

Sun, 28 Dec 2014 02:54:00 GMT

I want to setup an instance of GitLab to host my git repositories on my Amazon Cloud (AWS), to be available securely over the internet and backed up.

There's a few options:

Install it along side another existing EC2 instance running mail, web, etc..
Install it on it's own fresh instance using the provided deb package.
Install it on an instance using Docker.
Install it on an Elastic Beanstalk application using Docker.

After contemplating the pros and cons of each, I decided to give the last option a try. Mainly that GitLab requires Ruby, Redis, Postgre, Nginx and even tries to install Postfix. I was hoping to set it up along side my email server, but the package install would destroy my existing config, and I'd have existing mysql database, and apache web server not setup to work out of the box with GitLab. So for best results I think it makes sense not to try jamming them together and use the power of virtual machines.

For the benefit of documenting my experience; I spent quite a bit of time trying out the Elastic Beanstalk hoping that it would magically scale and monitor my docker environment, but after trying to wrap my head around the tool, I don't think it was going to be useful at my current scale. Also, it took me a while, and I was surprised to also find AWS's EC2 Container Service in preview, which might be just what I'd like.

Until then, I ended up going with option C. Even after everything I'm not certain that docker is going to be the jesus package manager, but with so much commotion, it's worth looking at I guess.

I'm going to quickly / briefly fill in what I ended up doing. It might not all be there, but I can come back and update if needed.

It also turns out that most EC2 instances don't have any swap space by default, so that's a problem for all of us memory hogs. I followed this helpful tut to get me going like follows:


# check for free space on an instance storage device that wont incur i/o costs
$ sudo df -h

# give ourselves 1G of space
$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=1024
    
$ sudo mkswap /swapfile
$ sudo swapon /swapfile
$ sudo chown root:root /swapfile
$ sudo chmod 0600 /swapfile

# include a line in fstab so that it works on reboot
$ sudo vim /etc/fstab
/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0

# see your space
$ sudo free -k
$ sudo df -h

Back to my setup. There's EC2 instances out there from CoreOS that look pretty cool for clustering, but I think I want to go the other way, stepping up from small to larger instances docking as many containers as possible on a single instance. So to go the vanilla route, I decided to just boot up a t2.micro ec2 instance with amazon's linux image, per the docker instructions.

$ sudo yum update
$ sudo yum install -y docker ; sudo service docker start

http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/install/requirements.html

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/tree/master/docker

$ sudo yum install git
$ git clone https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce.git ; cd gitlab-ce

# Build the source into an image and setup data volume
$ sudo docker build --tag gitlab_image docker/
$ sudo docker run --name gitlab_data gitlab_image /bin/true

# Run the container with our data and ports, with auto restart enabled on restart
$ sudo docker run --restart=always --detach --name gitlab_app --publish 80:80 --publish 22:22 --publish 443:443 --volumes-from gitlab_data gitlab_image
$ sudo docker logs -f gitlab_app
$ sudo docker run -ti -e TERM=linux --rm --volumes-from gitlab_data ubuntu
root@abc:/# sudo apt-get install vim -y
root@abc:/# sudo vim /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb
external_url "https://git.yourdomain.com/";
# Prevent Postgres from trying to allocate 25% of total memory
postgresql['shared_buffers'] = '1MB'

# Configure GitLab to redirect PostgreSQL logs to the data volume
postgresql['log_directory'] = '/var/log/gitlab/postgresql'

# Some configuration of GitLab
# You can find more at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/blob/master/README.md#configura
tion
gitlab_rails['gitlab_email_from'] = 'noreply@yourdomainwefav.com'
gitlab_rails['gitlab_support_email'] = 'noreply@yourdomainwefav.com'
gitlab_rails['time_zone'] = 'America/Los_Angeles'

# SMTP settings
# You must use an external server, the Docker container does not install an SMTP server
gitlab_rails['smtp_enable'] = true
gitlab_rails['smtp_address'] = "mail.yourdomain.com"
gitlab_rails['smtp_port'] = 587
gitlab_rails['smtp_user_name'] = "noreply@yourdomain.com"
gitlab_rails['smtp_password'] = "password"
gitlab_rails['smtp_domain'] = "yourdomain.com"
gitlab_rails['smtp_authentication'] = "plain"
gitlab_rails['smtp_enable_starttls_auto'] = true

# Install SSL certs
# copy files into /etc/gitlab/ssl/ with files including your domain named in gitlab.rb

root@abc:/# sudo mkdir /etc/gitlab/ssl
root@abc:/# sudo vim /etc/gitlab/ssl/git.yourdomain.com.key
root@abc:/# sudo vim /etc/gitlab/ssl/git.yourdomain.com.crt

# Rebuild gitlab configs
$ sudo docker restart gitlab_app # just restart the container

# If you need to change run configuration
$ sudo docker rm -f gitlab_app # doesn't delete data volumes
$ sudo docker run --restart=always --detach --name gitlab_app --publish 80:80 --publish 22:22 --publish 443:443 --volumes-from gitlab_data gitlab_image

So now voila! A home for my code. I can host code repos, with issue tracking and snippets! If you need a hosted repo for a project, just let me know.

RAID 10 FTW

Thu, 26 Jun 2014 00:53:00 GMT

From time to time I have to put on my sysadmin hat to build, manage and repair systems. I'm not an expert, but I do my best to search for expert advice or RTFM. If you have any suggestions to my implementation let me know.

At home I built a system for the purpose of being a development workstation, with similar hardware specs as a production server. That means the box is running Ubuntu desktop on a drive with four additional drives for the raid array, my personal cloud.

Last week I had a drive failure that I replaced so I want to share my experience and recipes.

Let's start from the beginning. Setting up a RAID 10 array, also known as RAID 1+0: creates a striped set from a series of mirrored drives. This way data loss can only occur if a drive fails after already losing all drives in a mirror. Anticipating typical and saddening hard drive failure, it's simple enough to make a replacement allowing the array to heal itself. It's unlikely for simultaneous drives to all fail at once without a notification and the array shutting down.

In my case I'm using 4 drives (sda, sdb, sdc & sdd) separate from the operating file system. The plan is to create a single array (md0) from the drives and then logical volume and mount points. My use case is a mongodb data store, so I followed the guide to setup three volumes mounted at /cloud/data, /cloud/log and /cloud/journal.

Here are the basic steps for what I described above:

Start by entering sudo interactive mode since most of these commands require root privileges.

 $ sudo -i

Install mdadm if you don't have it already and scope out your /dev

 $ apt-get install mdadm
    
 $ mdadm
    
 $ ls -la /dev/

Create the array from 4 physical devices. Note this is different than using partitions like sda1 for instance, which is also possible, but I didn't, per the guide I was following.

 $ mdadm --verbose --create /dev/md0 --level=10 --chunk=256 --raid-devices=4 /dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd
    
 $ 'DEVICE /dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd' | sudo tee -a /etc/mdadm.conf
    
 $ mdadm --detail --scan | sudo tee -a /etc/mdadm.conf
    
 $ blockdev --setra 128 /dev/md0
    
 $ blockdev --setra 128 /dev/sda 
    
 $ blockdev --setra 128 /dev/sdb
    
 $ blockdev --setra 128 /dev/sdc
    
 $ blockdev --setra 128 /dev/sdd
    
 $ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/md0 bs=512 count=1

Setup logical volumes from the free space that we can then mount to the file system

 $ apt-get install pvcreate
    
 $ apt-get install lvm2
    
 $ pvcreate /dev/md0
    
 $ vgcreate vg0 /dev/md0

Setup our three logical volumes, 98% of the available space given to data, 1% to log and journal each, formatted as ext4 file systems.

 $ lvcreate -l 98%vg -n data vg0
    
 $ lvcreate -l 1%vg -n log vg0
    
 $ lvcreate -l 1%vg -n journal vg0
    
 $ mke2fs -t ext4 -F /dev/vg0/data
    
 $ mke2fs -t ext4 -F /dev/vg0/log
    
 $ mke2fs -t ext4 -F /dev/vg0/journal

Create our mount points

 $ mkdir /cloud
    
 $ mkdir /cloud/data
    
 $ mkdir /cloud/log
    
 $ mkdir /cloud/journal
    
Now we want to add entries to fstab to mount on startup
    
 $ echo '/dev/vg0/data /cloud/data ext4 defaults,auto,noatime,noexec 0 0' | tee -a /etc/fstab
    
 $ echo '/dev/vg0/log /cloud/log ext4 defaults,auto,noatime,noexec 0 0' | tee -a /etc/fstab
    
 $ echo '/dev/vg0/journal /cloud/journal ext4 defaults,auto,noatime,noexec 0 0' | tee -a /etc/fstab
    
 $ mount /cloud/data/
    
 $ mount /cloud/log/
    
 $ mount /cloud/journal

That should get you up and running. It's also a good idea to take a minute to check out your /etc/mdadm.conf configuration and make sure you're getting email notifications.

You can run the following to test mdadm is able to reach you.

$ sudo mdadm --monitor --scan --test --oneshot

Using logical volumes has the advantage of being able to resize easily regardless of physical devices. On my AWS cloud version of this setup it was fairly simple to create another raid array and add it to the logical volume.

The following helped me grow logical volumes hosting my database.

 $ vgdisplay
    
 $ lvdisplay
    
 $ df -hk
    
 $ vgextend vg0 /dev/md1
    
 $ lvresize -L +391GB /dev/vg0/data
    
 $ lvresize -L +8GB /dev/vg0/journal
    
 $ lvdisplay /dev/vg0
    
 $ resize2fs -p /dev/mapper/vg0-journal

Then one day I was having trouble with my server, foolishly not looking at the email from mdadm to see the failure, I decided to reboot the problem away, only to find a drive failure preventing me from even booting up. I'm not sure why the failed drive was behaving so poorly in the bios boot, there might be a setting I recall reading about related to the reacting time during boot. However, once I took the bad drive out, and booted, I was able to begin diagnosing my failed RAID array. I did find an email in my inbox giving me details about the failure and array status.

This is an automatically generated mail message from mdadm running on localhost
A Fail event had been detected on md device /dev/md0.
It could be related to component device /dev/sdd.
Faithfully yours, etc.
P.S. The /proc/mdstat file currently contains the following:
Personalities : [raid10] [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]
md0 : active raid10 sdd[4] sdc[2] sda[0](F) sdb[1](F)
5860532736 blocks super 1.0 256K chunks 2 near-copies [4/2] [__UU]

With one of four drives missing from the array, it was in a failed state, unable to operate. I've since realized that I could add a spare which should keep it running after a single failure. Hence I ordered 2 replacement drives and a couple days later included a replacement for the failed drive (no spare yet until I free a drive slot).

I wasn't immediately able to get the array up and running for a couple of reasons. Using the ubuntu disk utility gave me a visual insight as to what was going on and ability to add a drive, except that it's using fdisk utils that don't support drives greater than something like 2TB, which includes me.

Also, after trying a bunch of the typical procedures documented online, I realized that I wanted to add an entire disk /dev/sdd, to the array as a replacement, and not a partition like /dev/sdd1 which many guides and utilities seem to impose.

Here's what ended up working for me:

Begin by stopping the failed array.

$ sudo mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --stop

Then assemble the array without the failed disk (sdd in this case) $ mdadm --assemble --run --force /dev/md0 /dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc
Now you can add the new replacement disk
$ mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --add /dev/sdd
Then you can sit back and watch the recovery status of your new drive $ watch -n 1 cat /proc/mdstat

Hopefully this helps anyone reading this, and will definitely serve as documentation for me when it's time to put the sysadmin hack back on!

The Power of Using Google Hangouts to Publish Directly to YouTube

Tue, 25 Mar 2014 18:00:00 GMT

Watch the video on YouTube

Gone are the days of recording video files for later processing. With the internet, it's easier to stream directly to YouTube and avoiding costly software and rendering time.

What's the quickest and easiest way to:

Record voice & video calls with multiple parties
Screencast demonstrations or internet research
Stream live presentations & seminars
Create a YouTube Channel or Podcast

The old process of recording the raw media to your computer, and then using extra software to edit and then render the video, before uploading it to YouTube isn't necessary with Google Hangouts On Air.

Whistle blower Edward Snowden uses and promoted Hangouts during his South by South West event, and even former Director of the CIA, General Patraeus is a user of Google products because it's fast, simple, easy, and powered by the cloud.

Some limitations:

Quality isn't the raw media capture. Although there are options for studio quality audio and even custom encoding that I haven't tried yet.
Hangout branding and video thumbnail layout is currently out of your control.
Raw without edits. Actually you can still edit the video using YouTube's video editor to trim, adjust and insert text to your video. You can also download the videos and edit them with software on your computer.

Of course it has these setbacks, but the time saved makes it a powerful tool for many uses that might not even have been worth the effort otherwise.

Great use cases:

Recording research. About to dig into a topic, searching google, and finding sources online? Think about recording your research session for posterity via video, opening up your process and results for discussion and use by others.
Learning a new language. A small group with audio chat can be anywhere in the world and practice speaking foreign language just like in a classroom.
Study groups and book clubs. Topical groups with regular meetings can easily record events for archival and allows members to attend online.
Mastermind groups. Getting advice from the right people is key. Removing the distance barrier and building a peer support and accountability group can be powerful.
Video podcast. Anyone can start a podcast show. Production isn't difficult anymore and anyone willing to publish can. The key is consistency and hangouts let you focus on your show content instead of the production.
Interview podcast. Pretty simple. Ask smart people with industry knowledge or those whom you admire, to be on your show. Ask them great questions to share their knowledge with the world.
Product demos. Anyone with a physical or software product can use hangouts to pitch and hands on demonstrate the product for it's release, updates, sales webinars, etc. published directly to youtube for easy promotion.
Customer feedback. Anyone with a product or service knows the power of getting customer feedback, and this is certainly an easy way to video chat with individuals, getting their emotional response, as well as details related to the product itself with the help of video or screensharing.

Those are just some broad examples with, 1, 2 or a group of people, on audio, video or screensharing hangouts, that can stream live & publish to youtube, or can be private.

Here's a bunch of real world use cases that I was able to find people using hangouts for today.

Examples of Hangouts:

The White House has used hangouts to share seasons greetings, publish a series using called We the Geeks, and Obama took a virtual road trip, answering questions from individuals from around the country.

Political opinion shows are just starting to use the platform like Thom Hartmann 's Program and channels like Russia Today.

Nike is using Hangouts to celebrate a 27th anniversary and the company that's helping them promote it does celebrity shop along's that seems like digital shopping with friends.

Tom Merritt's long running daily tech news show is now broadcast and published with hangouts and other industries can easily broadcast online discussions like Adam Simmons hosting GIS discussions on his show Project Geo.

NASA does hangouts, like the one above that included an astronaut participant from space aboard the ISS, and audience participation.

Back down here closer to earth, Liverpool FC players and fans are hanging out, people are picking their NCAA brackets together, talking to authors, and talking football.

The uses are endless, and your imagination can go wild once you're familiar with the simple tools that extend the power like screen sharing.

Online entrepreneurs are using hangouts to collaborate with others in their field. Chad from Gittip did a great job getting together the founders of four crowdfunding platforms, for a candid open call furthering everyone's knowledge and understanding of the field.

Dane Maxwell is using hangouts to collaborate with his group of entrepreneurs and small business owners from around the world all helping each other to success in their common goal.

Health and Nutrition fans are posting discussions on green juicing, Yoga 101, and fat-burning.

I've tried to provide a wide spectrum of examples, but you're only limited by your own search or desire to host your own hangout.

Google has also setup a marketplace of free and premium hangouts with experts and professionals, called Helpouts.

This communication tool is incredibly powerful and we haven't even looked into application development that could enable the customization and increase the longevity of the platform.

Tutorial How To Broadcast on YouTube with Google Hangouts On Air

Tue, 25 Mar 2014 09:00:00 GMT

Watch the video on YouTube

I recently covered the power of google hangouts, but didn't get into all of the mechanics on how. Actually I did a quick tutorial almost a year ago, but a lot has changed since then, so I'll try my best at capturing today's latest tech from Google Plus Hangouts.

Briefly let's explain what Google Hangouts is. Since about a year ago, they started merging existing messaging platforms like your GMail chat, into the group focused Google+ Hangouts. The plans are to do the same with Google Voice, and I imagine everything else into the Google Plus platform, such as YouTube comments already has been merged.

What this means is Google users have a Skype like group chat communication tool, with audio and video, up to 10 people, for free. It works in my web browser and as an app on my iPhone over 3G. The many points of integration to each site like G+, YouTube, GMail, and Google Voice can be confusing, but we'll try to demystify some of the common mistakes.

Step by Step

We'll take it one piece at a time, from preparation to editing your published video.

Plan the event
Join the Hangout
Start the Broadcast
End the show
Edit your YouTube video

Planning for Success

If you're going to setup a hangout for an event, you probably want to promote it ahead of time to drive traffic to the live broadcast. While you can create an event from the YouTube My Live Events page, I'd suggest creating it from the "Start a Hangout On Air" button on Google Plus which will create an event page for you on the social network, especially useful if you don't have your own blog or website to send people.

The window to create a new Hangout On Air allows you select "Later" and a calendar date & time you expect to start the event, as well as a duration. If you have specific individuals that you want notified of the event, you can include them from your contacts. It's worth noting that if you want your hangout recorded and published to YouTube, be certain that you're using Hangout On Air to start the call.

After clicking the "Share" button to create your event, you will be taken to the event detail page. If you don't have a blog or website, this is a good page to direct your followers to. From here you can create a trailer for the event, turn on the Q&A tool, invite, and interact with your audience.

Let people know that you're planning the event, allowing them to comment and ask questions ahead of time, and mark the date on their calendars for the live show. If you have a website, blog or other way of posting youtube videos, you can find the youtube.com video link provided under the Details section Links tab on the event page.

For some advanced settings you might need to dive into your YouTube page Live Events tab where you can see your upcoming hangouts and edit the video title and description and other options.

Joining the Hangout

Once you're ready to start your event, simply visit the event detail page and click the "Start" button with the camera icon. You can also find your Live Events via their tab on YouTube and join from there.

A new browser window or tab will open with the hangout. You'll be prompted to invite your guests to the hangout if you have any. You can also invite guests to join later by clicking on the invite button top center, or simply giving them the URL of the hangout you have open. This allows them to join as a participate in the hangout, while the YouTube link is for the audience to watch only.

You will see a progress meter bottom middle preparing for you to broadcast. Usually it takes only a minute to "prepare", which allows you to join your guests, test your microphone, webcam and screensharing if needed.

Broadcasting Live

Once you and your guests are ready to go live on YouTube, simply click the "Start broadcast" button at the bottom middle of the hangout window. Only the host of the event will be able to see and control this. You'll hear a couple of "dings" and the "OFF AIR" light should turn to "ON AIR".

At the bottom to the right of the ON AIR light, you'll also see a counter showing the number of current viewers you have on YouTube and a link for the URL of the YouTube video and event pages.

During the broadcast you can use applications from the left bar such as the "Q&A", "Cameraman", "Control Room", and "Hangout Toolbox" to enhance your experience. They're mostly self explanatory and you'll be best off trying them yourself. The apps are also likely to change, which should continue to make the tools better.

There's a chat room for the participants on the right side of the hangout, that isn't displayed on screen of the YouTube video, great for sharing links and notes offscreen.

If you have more than one participant, one individual will be displayed larger at the center of the screen with the rest as thumbnails along the bottom. Google will automatically display the participant speaking to be shown. You can also manually choose to select which participant's video is full screen by clicking on them. As the host, what you see will also be the layout that YouTube records.

Sign Off

When you want the recording to stop, click the red "Stop broadcast" button at the bottom middle of your hangout as the host. The "ON AIR" light will turn off and you can continue your hangout with your guests without being broadcast on YouTube or captured in the recording.

Once you've ended the broadcast, you won't be able to turn it one again using the same YouTube video ID. I'v had a browser crash, and reloading the page kept the show going, but I'd suggest being mindful with the host broadcast button. Obviously you can simply start a new hangout quickly, but it will have a new URL. Luckily there are several ways to put the pieces back together without video editing software.

Post Production

Now that you're masterpiece is in the can, you can relax and begin to think about polishing it up.

The first thing you'll want to do it check the video detail page, and perfect the title, and description to include any pertinent details or links that you promised in the video.

Then you should consider commenting on the video to start a conversation and send it to friends.

If you're video was really long, or raw footage that needs to be edited down, or given a few titles and captions, try out the YouTube video editor from the web which seems perfectly capable of cuts, captions, etc. useful for cutting or stitching together videos at least.

When that's not enough, download the MP4 from your YouTube Uploads page from the video dropdown while in list view. They hide it, I know.

If you have a little bit of time for some extra detail or information, using simple annotations on YouTube video's allow you to link to extra information or detail that you might have left out during the live recording.

You also can add your videos to a playlist that will make it easier for your viewers to watch one video after another.

If things went really wrong, or someone spilled the beans, you can also make the YouTube video private, or unlisted instead of public.

Bitcoin Battle

Sun, 02 Mar 2014 04:00:00 GMT

A lot has happened since I wrote my introduction to BitCoin, let's do a quick catchup on current events and so some quick analysis.

Trading at MtGox has stopped and they've filed for bankruptcy after losing 850,000 bitcoin.

With 12,425,000 bitcoin in circulation, that was ~ 6.84% of the "currency" lost in a single heist. And we thought it was bad when a man accidentally threw away his laptop containing 7,500 coins that he'd mined himself.

Assuming the laptop gets destroyed, we can assume those coins will never be in circulation again.

It's also worth noting that a large chunk of coins were seized by the FBI from the Silk Road and it's operator the Dread Pirate Roberts, totaling around 173,655 coins. And it looks like it happened again this week for another 4,000 bitcoin.

And don't forget the first 1,000,000 coins or so that are believed to still be in possession of fabled bitcoin inventor Satoshi.

It seems like large chunks of the currency are held by a few people or groups.

Now I wonder, since the ledge is completely public, if we couldn't identify stolen coins and blacklist them from being used in future transactions?

BitCoin is so hot, it seems that even the TSA want's some of the action, actually looking for the cryptocurrency during screening, if that makes any sense at all.

Finally Hosting E-mail On My Cloud

Thu, 20 Feb 2014 03:52:00 GMT

I started out my day hearing the rants of a friend who was just fed up with cloud services treating him poorly. Mixing up account credentials and failing to jump though the proper hoops, you can quickly find yourself at a dead end with no where to go and no one to call.

In my journey to open source all the things & apps that I use daily, one of the last major reliance I have is on mail providers. E-mail continues to be the golden standard among all the notification bubbles around us. It's been long overdue, and partially attributable to the rather burdensome stigma setting up a server can be.

Setting up an open source server on linux, say postfix on Ubuntu can challenge your patience and persistence. Dealing with spam, DNS SPF TXT & MX entries, SSL & webmail takes more than just a few steps. Then you have the mysterious problem that is deliverability, which as led to many startups that are successfully doing nothing but helping you send email.

The problem for users is that cloud email is becoming increasingly frustrating. The number of changes that have been made to webmail apps in the past two years, improving the app is nearly zero. For the most part it seems like the changes are dumbing down to the massive scale of the usage.

Another common use case that I thought would have better accommodations by now is the need for multiple addresses, and multiple domains. It's excruciating trying to manage more than a couple webmail accounts, and becoming worse with the increased pressure to provide a phone number for each account.

I might be special, but can't be the only one with more than one website that they'd like to receive email from. With those influences finally pushing me over the edge, I decided to take the Adam Curry challenge to setup an iRedMail mail server.

I always mean to write badass walk through's to capture all the problems I bump into along the way, trying to be like those awesome pages you find on the internet that answer your exact problem, but I'm writing this after I got things mostly running. To get my feet wet, I used the AWS free EC2 micro instance that I haven't been using. Hopefully if it goes well and gets usage, I'll be upgrading it and growing the user base.

I'll spare the gory detail for today, but suffice to say I'm a little proud that I got it running to solve at least a couple issues today, and can now setup all the accounts and domains that I need in minutes. When I have more time I'll add more details, or just feel free to ask if you have any questions.

Although this took a bit of valuable time out of my day, I think it was well worth it, and honestly a task I've been putting off for far too long.

The state of news, reporting and journalism in 2014

Wed, 29 Jan 2014 01:15:00 GMT

There have been a ton of new news site's launching in the past month. I've barely been able to keep up! Here's the news on news sites..

Slashdot's Rob Malda, aka CmdrTaco surprised me by launching a non-tech news site Trove.com, "The best news stories picked by people who share your interests".

Jason Calacanis just launched Inside.com, a "breaking news application".

Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg left their successful AllThingsD brand to start fresh with recode.net.

There's even a tech news site called "The Information", umm ya, that's $400 / year.

Another popular mobile news app that showed up last year was circa, which allows you to follow curated topics.

We already had a wave of flipboard like news aggregators that focus on mobile ease of use. It looks like it's time for another wave of competitors.

I haven't really played with many of these, but clearly the news isn't going away anytime soon. With the passing of Google Reader last year, I'm excited to see some new blood and approaches to this massive daily habit of reading the news. We spend a lot of time doing it every day, and it's part of what I consider my professional interests to be on top of the latest trends and tech.

It's time to take another look at the development toolbox and features for news: RSS blogs and podcasts, aggregation, social signals, mark as read, mobility, ease of use, topics and source subscriptions, discussion and sharing.

There's an endless stream of news coming at us, and we have to pick and choose how to cast our nets and what to even bother with. It really is the epitome of our human challenge with the internet, finding signal in the vast amount of noise. In the digital information age, I think this is a very exciting area that can improve humanity with the freedom of knowledge around the world.

I'll be following these apps this year, so let me know if I missed any or you have any tips for getting your news.

Mobile Internet Applications: HTML Websites vs Native Phone Apps for User Interface Efficiency

Wed, 29 Jan 2014 00:16:00 GMT

In software application development, the first decision is always the selection of a programming language and platform to build on. With specific requirements to achieve a task, you can compare potential platforms for their benefits and limitations for your objective.

What happened to the Desktop Application?

Remember when the term "app" referred to desktop applications like word processing, image / video editing, productivity tools, games, etc?

Recently AOL sold Winamp, a highly adored old-school desktop app for playing mp3's. Besides your basic offline tools for creating, writing, drawing, drafting, multimedia production, etc.. what desktop app can't you live without? If it's not your web browser itself, I'm sure it requires the internet to be used. Tools like productivity, product management and knowledge collaboration with teams isn't usually effective without the internet.

When Apple released the first iPhone, developers were clamoring to build apps for the device. They were told to embrace the most unique feature of the mobile phone, it's full web browser. At the time the standard for mobile web dev was the very basic WAP platform, so a full browser was an amazing delight.

Of course native applications were inevitable if for the gaming contingent alone. Games are highly custom applications that require the most performance and flexibility a platform has to offer. Unfortunately, it's still not the first choice to build a game in the browser, but the technology is getting better.

Although Apple started by promoting HTML5 mobile applications, the release of their App Store revealed two very important advantages:

App Design and Usability Standardization. Using the same interface components creates familiarity for the users and raises the bar for quality out of the gate.
Distribution through their store to millions of users, with credit cards on file.
Also worth mentioning is notifications that are some equivalent to email for internet marketing.

This has attracted many applications to be developed that do nothing more than a webpage.

Being a big fan of the internet, and a hack web dev, the following is my criteria for a native mobile app.

Does the application require native API or hardware access. There's been progress providing the browser this same features, but for instance raw access to your camera will require a native application.
Does the application require the internet? If your application necessarily requires the internet like say, a newspaper, or even twitter, I'm not sure that I understand the benefit as a user. Sure the interface looks appy, and you get a nice bookmark on the home screen, but often it's just a glorified website.

What's wrong with apps that are just glorified websites?

Well there are a few limitations that come with joining the app store.

Being accepted by Apple's high standards.
Longer development cycles that end with another approval process makes maintenance more difficult.
Maintaining your app with operating system updates and changes isn't as controllable as the open web.
Websites now offer full features that make them suitable as desktop applications such as offline support.

I'm sure you've all experienced visiting your favorite social network, which will have both a mobile friendly & formatted HTML website, as well as a native application on multiple mobile platforms.

As Jeff Atwood put it, "I love phone apps for websites because it is just so much fun to learn two totally different and incompatible UIs for doing the same things".

There's even a blog dedicated to how annoying the application pushers are based on the idea, "Any modal message—full-screen or alert—that interrupts user flow to ask them to download your app suffers from #doorslam #ux antipattern".

When Google announced ChomeOS, the big question was, "What about all the Android apps we're building?". They're not going to work on a Chrome Book.

It also appears that the explosive growth of the App Store has subsided and we're all starting to feel app fatigue as this Forbes contributor says, "I’ve lost track of most of the Apps I’ve downloaded, like stale forgotten browser bookmarks".

I also just noticed a headline that Facebook updated it's native app that now requests access to your text messages, but no one knows why. Just another example of taking unnecessary liberties - currently a hot topic.

The advantages of building for the native web.

Standards based, universal platform. It's the most deployed software development platform in the world that I know of. Not everyone has windows, or a mac, java or flash, but everyone has a web browser that speaks HTML and JavaScript.
Decentralized architecture levels the playing field around the world without any approval processes. The internet is the core technology to build on top of. Why would you build in a walled garden like AOL's old keyword pages, when you could build a website? The same could be said for facebook or iOS applications.
You don't have to ask permission, or jump through hoops to publish / ship your product on the web. That includes regular maintenance or updates. I lean toward a platform without limitation or gatekeepers for it's creative freedom, where I think the biggest innovations happens.

I'll stop here for now, and perhaps elaborate later, but I wanted to write out my feelings on the topic as it seems practical for the state of software development. The first and most difficult step can be choosing a development platform, hopefully this will help give you a framework to decide.

Home Feed Update

Tue, 14 Jan 2014 22:29:00 GMT

As I continue to harden the House.js foundation, you'll notice some improvements to my site. Today I've redesigned the homepage feed to reflect the work I've previously done to the URL bookmarking app.

The big changes since my last homepage redesign is the use of Bootstrap 3 and many small user interface, and under the hood improvements to the House.js platform like asynchronous javascript optimization for faster client loading.

Sure it could use a few improvements like perhaps comments, favorites, filtering, etc.. For now the feed provides a quick aggregate view of site activity including blog posts, URL bookmarks, image uploads, checkins, todo lists and more.

Building Fundamental Internet Applications: URL Bookmarking and News Subscription

Mon, 23 Dec 2013 11:52:52 GMT

Watch the video on YouTube

As usual it's been too long since my last update, so I'm going to restrain from over editing, and simply publish. I'm always trying to get the product perfect before showing it off, or considering it complete, but in reality, these tools are a work in progress that I use everyday.

It is worth taking a moment for me to pay tribute to the open source software that found me in high school and stared my journey as a web developer. The Edge CMS was a PHP framework that I was able to morph into a URL bookmarking in 2001. Even looking at it's source code today, I warmly remember all of the feature it came with including classifieds, news, forums, picture of the day, and more.

Recently I've taken some time to bolster the House.js URL and bookmarking application, which ultimately supports many other functions of the website like blog rss subscription, and saving links for other reasons. At first my goal was simply to bring the frontend user interface up to speed with Bootstrap 3, but with usage, I was quickly fighting bugs and http behaviors.

Now I'm confident that I've at least made progress toward bolstering and hardening the backend web service involved with archiving web URLs. I read the docs and made use of command line options for curl and phantomjs that were new to me, and now improve the robustness of the process.

What's a Bitcoin and why should I care? Because it's really cool!

Sun, 22 Dec 2013 14:00:00 GMT

There's a lot of questions with the recent hype around BitCoin. Especially during the holiday spending season, what does this mean for about the proposed future of spending money?

Let's start with some basics questions:

How do I get the currency?

Coins are kept in your wallet application on your desktop computer. You can also use an online service to manage that for you.

You can exchange dollars for coins on markets like mtgox. Right now it's right at almost $700 per coin down from the recent hype that took it up to $1,200.

This should remind you that it's speculative and if you need pay your rent with coins, they're only as valuable as the current exchange rate.

The best way to get Bitcoin of course is earning them for services and goods which you can do by accepting the digital payments to your unique address. Companies like BitPay make it easy for exiting ecommerce sites to accept Bitcoins.

Where does a Bitcoin come from?

The other way that you can obtain Bitcoin's is by mining them with your computer. It's built to be purposefully intensive so the growth rate is predictable.

"Miners" dedicate computational resources to maintaining the network accuracy and are rewarded with new coins created at a predetermined rate, currently 3600 coins a day.

Where can I spend it & what can I buy with it?

There's an exhaustive list on the official wiki that includes everything from web hosting, hotels bookings, and professional services, to gambling and drugs sold on the Dread Pirate Roberts now defunct Silk Road. And now there's a CoinMap that helped me find a small local grocer that's a long time advocate of sustainable agriculture and food production in San Diego.

How does a transaction work?

When you want to send money to someone, you open your wallet and create a transaction to their address such as, and the amount you want to send.

Fee's can be included essentially as a tip to the miners for their work, and as a deterrent to spammers. Here's a visual of what happens behind the scenes to make it happen.

How does it work? How do I know it's secure?

Bitcoin is the first, and inspiration for more than 60 other cryptocurrencies. The software and algorithms are open source that provides the transparency most nerds love and trust & making adorable spin offs possible.

The History of Bitcoin

When I have more time I'll elaborate on the history, because it's so intriguing. The idea originated from the character known as Satoshi Nakamoto, who bestowed the idea on the world as a white paper four years ago, and then vanished a year or two later, saying "the project was in good hands". It's estimated that Satoshi could have nearly $1 billion dollars worth of Bitcoins that he mined early on.

Good to know:

You might have heard that Bitcoin is completely anonymous, but actually the entire block chain is public, showing all transactions. Anyone can see senders and recipients of transactions, including the amount, but accounts are represented by non identifying hashes.

Other potential uses for distributed crypto apps:

There's a Namecoin for DNS promoted by the Dot-Bit project called to distribute domain names that could be interesting.

Signatures for contracts could be digitally signed and authenticated and verified by multiple parties.

I also recently stumbled on this guy who is "publicly traded". I've thought that would be a great idea for a community site like reddit to give a say to the users as shareholders.

What BitCoin is good for right now.

If you need to transfer money internationally, it could save you on fees. You're free to engage in transactions you might not be able to otherwise like gambling.

Besides those specific purposes, I find it hard to see Bitcoin's getting into most consumers hands. It's currently unstable and a speculative market.

Questions that I still have:

With all of these computers grinding away to solve some algorithm hashes, could we harness that power to a purpose like folding proteins or something?

Using Google Helpouts to offer your expertise, advice and office hours from anywhere

Tue, 05 Nov 2013 21:40:00 GMT

I'm pleased to be among the first batch of providers offering their services on Google's new Helpouts. They've built a clean marketplace for individual, one-on-one expertise over Google Plus Hangouts.

Hangouts is a disruptive communications tool offered for free by Google, that seems to eliminate any need for Skype's frustration, limitation and price. Not to mention the open ended capabilities of Hangouts via app plugins to enhance the real time experience.

One of the major features of Hangouts that make it an ideal tool for teaching is the ability to simply screen share. Without any effort you can show rather than say what you're discussing. Combined with multiple participants, and publishing a recording directly to YouTube, the ease of use is currently unmatched.

Today I'll be chatting with a handful of complete strangers about full stack web dev. Given any luck, I might even be able to help them out.

Bootstrap 3.0

Wed, 18 Sep 2013 22:58:00 GMT

Choosing the right tools can make your work delightful, but choosing the wrong tool often leads to difficult decisions and more work down the road. Walking the fine line of usefulness and capability, to be both simple but customizable, is difficult.

Deciding to use a tool set or framework, such as Twitter's Bootstrap, is no easy decision. You worry that its either too much or too little for your project. On top of having to learn all of it's behaviors and idiosyncrasies, you'll probably want to customize it anyways.

After using Bootstrap 2 to power a few one page websites, I've run it through my constraints and criticism successfully. That's saying a lot considering my usual skepticism, but it's beginning to look time tested. Really my only concerns would be that it's more than I need, or that it deprives some creativity. Remember when you'd go to a website and instantly realize that it was a FrontPage template? I don't want to build a sterile boundary void of creativity.

Despite my concerns, I'm now realizing this is another amazing open source project that is worth adopting. With almost 60,000 followers, this project clearly has legs, which means that I don't have to worry about fixing all the tiny bugs in IE or Opera that plague web developers.

With their recent major release of Bootstrap 3, it seemed like a good time to migrate what I had from 2 > 3 and reap the benfits of their reasonable defaults, thoughtful typography, responsive grid system, plus clean components like form inputs and buttons. With some extra goodies like tooltips, modals, and glyph/icons, it starts to feel like a relief rather than a bloat.

Now that it's responsive centric, it appears to be a solid foundation for most web apps that want to be mobile and desktop friendly without a lot of extra work.

It's exciting to see libraries of snippets, templates, and themes, and even an interface builder, to support creativity in the community. I'm looking forward to spot unexpected sites in the wild, built with bootstrap.

San Diego Snaps

Mon, 20 May 2013 01:34:00 GMT

Just a quick collection of snaps in sunny San Diego from my iPhone.

From the OB Pier, Balboa Park and Sunset Cliffs.

How to use Google Plus Hangouts, On Air with a YouTube Channel to Live Broadcast and Podcast Instantly

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:27:00 GMT

Watch the video on YouTube

Recently I've been looking at publishing platforms online including multimedia audio and video streaming.

As a start up entrepreneur I'm always trying to stay on top of the latest tools and tech available. As a creative whose medium is the Internet, it's important to know the evolving capabilities and tools available.

With bandwidth and device connectivity improving, rich multimedia and collaborative applications are beginning to gain adoption.

It's worth taking a moment to review the state of live video streaming on the Internet. It looks mostly the same as a few years ago with ustream.tv, livestream.com & justin.tv sitting at the top.

However, YouTube is finally offering a product to consumers for free! I guess this is old news but I don't think they've made it obvious or easy for users to find. Thus, I thought this post might document my current experience testing out the platform. To my surprise, I've also seen it work on a mobile iPhone, and they just announced paid channels.

The purpose and motive of my exploration into these publishing platforms is my desire to create. You have to know the medium exists before you can express yourself through it.

With that said, I hope this gives you confidence to try it out and see what's possible.

For the Smoking Hot Coffee show, we've been using hangouts in favor to Skype because of the price and ease of use. We can quickly and easily get more than two people chatting, screen sharing and recorded.

In my pursuits of open source, documenting my life, and generally blogging more, I've tested out what hangouts can do for live coding.

Now I see people using this to do things like streaming video games, sporting events, news & politics, howto's, pet cams and more. Ultimately the creativity of the content is up to you. Early on YouTube live streams seemed limited to the White House or Coachella, but now with Google Plus Hangouts, you can publish your thoughts and screencast in minutes without any software or downloads.

When I realized that it wasn't intuitive what I could do using all of these tools, Google's Plus Hangouts, with live streaming and auto publishing to YouTube, I decided to document the state of this tech.

There's no better way than to demonstrate and show the tool itself. If you're reading this, hopefully you can watch the attached video I'm going to quickly demo publishing a screencast with no downloads or software via YouTube.

The things I struggled with the most were understanding how all of these things fit together: Google Plus, Hangouts, On Air (streaming) & YouTube. It's easier to show than tell, but there's many ways to start a hangout, but you have to do it from plus.google.com to check the "on air" option which streams the hangout to a normal YouTube embed player, but also publishes the live stream as an uploaded video in your YouTube account. Unfortunately I wasn't able to achieve this when attaching the hangout link via GMail's Calendar.

You can invite your "circles" to the hangout and I suppose they might get notified about it. Also I think it's only mutually circled "friends". Otherwise, only those you invite can join in to participate in the hangout, and those who are just watching it live, can comment on the video like a normal clip.

Once you've given it a shot, you can start to play with the screen sharing and dream up the great ways that you can quickly collaborate and publish interesting content - quickly.

Startup Lessons Over Coffee

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 01:14:37 GMT

After getting back from our trip to SF for the ad-tech conference, it felt like we might be on to something.

Getting startup founders and entrepreneurs to share their story with us has been a great success! Since everyone wins from the education, exposure and networking, it almost comes naturally.

With the last two weeks of the internet startup podcast under my belt, I'm here to report on my progress as a student of internet entrepreneurship. I've realized that there's always more to learn.

I'll be brief and let you dig into the material yourself, but I want to reflect on the great conversations that we've had with amazing entrepreneurs around the world!

So far I've been impressed by everyone we talk to, and am only limited by my own questions and interviewing skills. This has surpassed my expectations for what the Smoking Hot Coffee podcast could be as a channel for the startup community.

I learned about topics from fundraising in LA, to guest blog posts, targeted email marketing, digital identity, connecting saas solutions, ad retargeting, and even how to handle a failed startup. I'm still trying to digest it all and make sure that I'm doing my best.

While our audience isn't huge yet, my feeling is that I'm not the only one who learned something from the past 10 episodes, and I hope other entrepreneurs find the lessons educational and encouraging. However, you can expect us to be applying what we've learned to our show, hopefully bringing it to a large enough audience that we aren't wasting this great content.

Look forward to an evolution of SmokingHotCoffee.com with even more ways to stay updated and engage with the startup community. Until then, you can subscribe through the usual channels. If you learn something, please share it with your colleagues. Otherwise, let me know how I can do better!

Startup Hustle

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:23:00 GMT

This week was the Ad-Tech conference in San Francisco. Amul and I went to spend a couple of days learning about the latest in digital advertising and to create some content for Smoking Hot Coffee. We were able to meet with Saeed Amidi, the CEO of Plug and Play Tech Center who was gracious enough to give us a tour of the startup culture there which led us to interview several great startups right there in the building.

We didn't have a rigid plan or expectations going in, but came out with a handfuls of amazing startup food. I learned a lot at the conference, and was able to meet great new friends like Max from WhatRunsWhere in person. It charges my startup batteries to be around all of the energy both at the conference and in the tech center.

It's nice to be home and trying to relax for the weekend, but the gears continue to turn in my head while I learn from the industry, the companies we interviewed, and the great people that we met.

I'm looking forward to publishing all of the great content that we captured from incredible entrepreneurs during the week. Hopefully others find this content useful and as educational as I do. These guys are fighting the good fight - creating business through innovation, and improving our lives with apps, tools, marketplaces, and more.

Follow me in the journey of entrepreneurship while supporting and learning from others in this noble pursuit!

News Reader

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 20:40:00 GMT

Building an open source web platform is finally starting to pay off. The investment I've spent developing a common platform for modern apps, makes my dreams possible.

When I set out to build the house.js platform, I had all the apps in mind. I know this broad approach appears to be vulnerable to lack of focus and specialization, but I hope open prevails. My strategy is one of perseverance and exploration. Over time, per the attention it receives, it will be thus improved and sharpened. The community rules.

Google, facebook, and twitter on the other hand, have show us their ability to give, and take at their own will. Specifically when Google made the off-hand announcement to shut down their RSS Reader, I was forced to react quickly.

Let me be plain. I want to be able to edit, modify, and improve the applications that I use the most. Radio is something I couldn't get away from, so I had to build my social radio to enjoy tunes my way. Startups are another addiction I've pacified and feed with my community site and podcast. Even my text & code editor that I use every day... can no longer be bulky native apps. I guess I'm a control freak, but I actually feel great about the problems I've avoided, and others I've deserved.

In short, building a news reader on house.js was planned, but not scheduled. Google changed that when they pulled the rug out from under me - kudos!

So within a few days I was able to put together the pieces for a basic RSS reader. WeFavorite is slated to be a community of favorites from around the web. You can already connect Google to import your existing reader subscriptions - before it's too late!

I'm excited to evolve this with my usage and yours. Hopefully we can take this further than where Google and others have left it. Please try it out and give me feedback so we can make this better together!

Google Reader

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 03:42:00 GMT

In light of today's sad first world news, I figured that the best thing to do would be to write a blog post about it.

Google is shutting down it's only dedicated RSS reader product that it offers and the Internet has burst out in rage over the closure of this popular destination.

Why would Google shut down something that people are using instead of protected social steams? They must have a G+ solution for everyone being displaced here.

Today I quickly checked the stats of a popular comic xkcd which has 250k subscribers via Google Reader. John Gruber has 360k, and Slashdot has over 500k subscribers via Google Reader.

John Resig tweeted that he's had 3.5 million visitors via Google Reader. Where will his audience come from now they are being exiled?

I can't understand how a media company can let go of hooked users and constant eyeballs, no matter how few.

Podcast

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 05:37:54 GMT

You know that I'm always experimenting with the latest web tech that I can get my hands on. I aspire to apply my creativity using the best tools I have to produce something cool and unique.

For a few years, I've been a podcast subscriber on and off to mainly tech podcasts that provide me valuable information, also including the non tech podcast No Agenda from Adam "the Podfather" Curry. With great respect for the effort and humility of podcasters, I adore to do more than subscribe, but to also share my voice and opinion.

Like all of my experiments, I don't know where this will end up, but I'm excited for the journey and I welcome you to follow along.

Luckily, I've found a co-host willing to take a chance with me, sharing our opinions on the latest news in startup culture. My friend Amul Patel, is a natural compliment to have a candid conversation about all aspects of internet life, including design, marketing & business plans, for the latest websites and mobile apps. His background is in marketing and design, while mine is in web & app dev, we overlap with our passion for clean, usable consumer products, and heart for entrepreneurship.

For the time being we are using youtube to host our video podcast because it's so easy to use, but will eventually offer an itunes podcast. You can subscribe to our channel here http://www.youtube.com/user/smokinghotcoffee .

So far we've produced 6 "cups" of smoking hot coffee for your viewing pleasure. We hope that you enjoy our video podcast that tours and discusses the user interface and design aesthetics of the web. In each show we review a handful of startups bookmarked by ourselves and users on SmokingHotCoffee.com .

After one week, we've got our feet wet, and are now looking for your feedback and input. We want to know what you'd like to see on the show, what parts you like about it, and don't. I'm also looking forward to improving the website, allowing you to track, follow, rate, comment on hot startups and more.

This is a great start to 2013 as I'm crossing an item off my list. I'm looking forward to continuing this project as a natural expression of my passion for web & startups. So far it's helped me overcome my challenge of publishing regularly. Wish me luck!

Migration into 2013

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 07:47:00 GMT

Test post

Music, Movies, and Microcode

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 07:03:00 GMT

It's great to finally read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

What seems like amazing creativity and science fiction can become reality if we want to build it.

Inventing on Principle

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:21:09 GMT

Late last night I ran into this talk from Bret Victor and saved it to watch it in it's entirety this morning.

It appears from the comments that I was among others who were also wow'ed by his presentation titled "Inventing on Principle".

It's refreshing to see someone speaking with calm confidence about a big idea. I keep thinking about what he said and will have to watch this again in the future. For anyone working in technology and creative fields, it's hugely insightful and encouraging.

Bret's website, worrydream.com, is amazing and the tools he demo's are a shining light of hope for what can be done. Not only is it possible (and he makes it look easy at that), but his tools allow creative expression in a way that wasn't possible before.

It reminds me that we should continue to be diligent in our principles and that we can get beauty from these often ugly machines.

Passion

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 03:21:27 GMT

Having a stated passion is a critical advantage to success. That probably goes without saying, but I'm thinking about why it's important and reminding myself to focus and also share more.

In daily life and work, when an obstacle or challenge presents itself, you don't want to spend much time thinking about how to react, but to thoughtfully and quickly take action. The best way to be prepared for those situations is eliminating uncertainty with a decided attitude and passion. The stronger your passion, the less clouded you are by distractions and choices remain simple.

I love taking things apart and to demystify the magic of how they work. It's like seeing the simple magic of a television remote control, and wanting to rip it open to see what makes it tick. And if you can put it back together again, even better! I was also interested in problem solving malfunctions in these systems, for instance the remote control stops working and requires troubleshooting.

I didn't always have Google, Wikipedia and YouTube at my fingertips, which has changed everything. Now I have search on my phone today, like I saw the "Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy" in the 90's.

Anyone can publish anything to the internet, and have an audience anywhere. It supports communities from small to large sizes.

Today if I want to understand how a remote control works, I can get the community curated definition of infrared from Wikipedia. And if it breaks, I can search Google for "how to diagnose the model x3 remote ..." or a very specific terms and find someone has posted information similar to your experience.

We're still in the early days of the internet, and it's still a very magical information dispensing device. But we have to remember that it's people like you and I who have have contributed small and large bits of information into the mass, such that no topic goes unspoken, question unanswered, or interests unrepresented.

At first, the idea that people actually take time to contribute information seemed crazy. Not today, but we still aren't totally familiar with how to share, and what sorts of things we can be sharing. Our ability to share is constrained only by the freedom of the internet and the restriction of bandwidth.

In reality we're limited to the interface metaphors that we've come to love and hate like forums, feeds, comments, wikis, notifications & email. Web publishing has come a long way and I continue to investigate it's complex evolution as we continue to expand our digital lives and participation in communities online.

Jukebox Status

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 21:42:57 GMT

Every post I feel is too far from the previous. I'll blame it on being head down and working with such dedication.

Since I took my jukebox project to StartupWeekendLA and got second, I've been working on completing enough to make it useable, which it turns out it has been. I've been alpha testing the site with a few friends to great success. Hanging out with your friends listening to music is fun.

It's been a strange distraction to my already unfocused approach at problem solving. I didn't approach this seriously as a business, but tend to use it a lot, so I don't mind working on it. It certainly has been a great learning experience and challenging in many way from the project conceptual level to the low level execution of building and running a web app. As much as this feels like too much fun than work, the tools I'm building will be useful for my next project too.

Next week I'll be talking about jukebox.js at JS.LA in Santa Monica. Watch for a lot of code cleanup and improved documentation leading up to that. I might have a couple unannounced tricks up my sleeve as well. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Startup Weekend Pitch for Disco.js

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 23:07:58 GMT

Attention hackers and music fans everywhere!

This weekend I'll be attending Startup Weekend LA in Santa Monica and pitching an open source project. I know it's not a killer business model, but I'm looking to work with and learn from other javascript hackers for a couple days to see what we can accomplish in two days.

I'll do my best to post updates, but the idea is that anyone can watch our progress on github, and to have a live demo by Sunday.

Here's the pitch:

My name is Jeff Pelton and I'm a javascript hacker.

Being a coder and desk jockey like many of us, I spend a lot of time plugged into my music collection or the "radio". The problem is that I don't trust iTunes after losing my history in a system crash. The cloud should solve that and also be available online, but comes with unfortunate restrictions.

My plan for this weekend is to build an open source, web based, music player, and social radio. This may sound like a tall order, but we will have a working demo in two days and all of our work will happen on github for everyone to see.

If you're a javascript hacker or frontend designer who's interested in building a better music app and social radio, join team disco.js!

The technology stack of course is all javascript. Node.js, Mongodb, and Backbone.js are the weapons of choice. Obviously my goal is to meet and learn from hackers at the event, but this is also a chance for me to shamelessly plug my open source platform as a service framework that I'm putting together. It's just a bunch of open source components put together to provide a basic app development platform. The goal is to minimize your dev time on the server, so that you can focus on the application experience. This weekend gives me a chance to prove it can support a complex app like disco.js, and to get feedback from other developers and hopefully improve the architecture.

Now that I've reached this milestone, I'm really looking for feedback and support. If this is at all interesting to you, please don't hesitate to let me know!

House.js Progress

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 06:22:00 GMT

It's been too long since the last update, but I've been coding away.

Though I haven't received much feedback, I'm doing my best to put the parts together to build a useful web platform that you'd want to choose when starting a new web or mobile app project.

It's 2012 and it shouldn't be very hard to quickly build a dynamic internet application.

There are a bunch of pay solutions, and I can elaborate elsewhere that they aren't suitable for me.

My goal in open sourcing the project is to offer my solution to the problem and to hopefully spark some interest from others working on the web.

I hate my infrequent updates, but I'm very close to a milestone where I can move my focus from the server to the applications. Of course this is the constant battle for full stack hackers, and the reason for this project.

The next two days are a sprint before Startup Weekend in Santa Monica. I hope to have it mostly strung together and duct taped by then!

If it's usable, I'm going to pitch: two days of javascript hacking on an open source web app. It might be a terrible business idea, but on the up side you'll design, build and deploy a useful application in two days transparently with open source.

The app could be anything really, but I have one in mind to pitch. It might be fitting that my music player was my first node app. Although it's usefulness has only been to myself, I put a lot of value in the radio because I spend so much time at my desk. Building it improved my life and programming skills and was a proof of concept and challenge for the platform. It's time for version 2.0 from scratch on the latest house.js. I'll elaborate as we get closer.

Wish me luck, cheer me on, or better yet, join me! If nothing else, at least tell me what you think of this madness, or if it makes no sense at all.

Keyboards

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 10:32:59 GMT

As much as I love my apple keyboards, they are very noisy, and well, QWERTY!?.

The iPhone's use of multitouch, I believe brought to us via the Mac Book, changed the rules of what was possible. They didn't add a button with their logo to the keyboard, instead they got rid of all the buttons. So the multitouch magic of drag, bounce and swipe make up for the difficulty of typing. They touted it as smart, but it doesn't always seem that way.

So while playing games is fun, swiping through lists & feeds feels great, and surfing the net is the best, we're left with a !@^* qwerty keyboard.

I'm dissapointed in Apple for not banishing qwerty with ios.

I know there's a better solution if you think about the problem with a clean slate. Obviously a keyboard interface designed in 1878 might not suit a touchscreen. I suppose I could work on this problem myself considering no one else seems to give a crap, except someone named Dvorak. Otherwise this is the coolest keyboard alternative I've seen, even among all the gaming consoles, cell phones and even the game controller style keyboards, is Dasher. It uses probability to determine the next letter you want to type. You move through a stream of letters as you go, choosing the ones you want to build words. Terrific idea even four years ago when I first saw it. I'm especially interested in how fitting it would be for use with eye tracking and the upcoming Google Goggles.

Also if Apple could crack the keyboard problem with ios they could get rid of roughly 80 buttons and the trackpad from the Mac. Replace them with an iPad, or just a multitouch screen that you can build words with.

I realize this could be prototyped easily and hope to find someone doing just that on kickstarter. Come on Apple! Also, are you really going to let Google have an Eye Phone before you?

Silicon Beach Fest Hackathon

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 04:22:03 GMT

What a great weekend hacking on CloudHero.me with the best team: Chris, Vik, Kailin, Sean, Phil and our coach James. The past 3 days seem like a blur already but the idea of helping entrepreneurs to get started and stay organized remains strong. I'm looking forward to see what the team will come up with in the future!

Thanks to the team for having me and to all of the sponsors and organizers of the event including Cross Campus in Santa Monica where we got our hack on and were provided with all the caffeine that we needed!

JeffPelton.com Site Update

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 23:03:11 GMT

Yesterday I spent some time making a few changes to the site, per some feedback I've received. Really it's just my playground though, and so, here is what I came up with.

I'm still at a point where I keep coming up with more questions than answers about where I'm going with the site, so I have to find good stopping point to package something up and move on to the next step. Although I enjoy getting into the details of frontend development and aiming for perfection, unfortunately, there is still as much or more code to be written on the server side. Back to work!

Drop me a line and let me know what you like or dislike about the site, and what you'd like to be able to do with it in the future. Also, if you haven't already, remember to login so that you can message me directly.

Apps & apps & apps & apps...

Tue, 29 May 2012 08:25:00 GMT

I think "apps-apps-apps" is the new developers

Product Design

Fri, 25 May 2012 23:29:29 GMT

I'm watching this talk from Nir Eyal about "Creating Addictive Products". I wish I had more time to write and think about this, but I'll come back to it later.

Human interface with technology, product design, and the tools we use every day always have me thinking. The fact that we build and use tools is what makes us human. I've always felt that we put up with bad tools too often. It's my goal for products and tools to serve us well and not the other way around. I appreciated that Nir says the goal of making addictive products should be for good and not mindless farming.

Smoking Hot Coffee!

Wed, 23 May 2012 00:54:45 GMT

Friends of the internet,

I put a site together over the weekend using an old domain I had collecting dust.

If you like technology, startups, or just seeing what crazy new websites are popping up online, you'll love https://SmokingHotCoffee.com/ .

Check it out and tell me what you think!

Cleanup

Mon, 14 May 2012 22:12:17 GMT

I just fixed a few more cross domain bugs so things should be a little smoother here now. Sorry if everything wasn't loading before. Let me know what you think.
[EDIT]
Wow.. That was slightly more involved than I'd hoped. "Safari is the new IE" uhg. They really don't like cookies, which I guess might be nice for the user... or just make the developer work harder to find a work-around.

JeffPelton.com

Sun, 13 May 2012 07:42:00 GMT

Well I finally pushed a little more work out to the site today. Things are starting to move along nicely now, and I hope to be posting multimedia and writing more often.

You can now login to the site with either a password, or your facebook, twitter or google account.

Go ahead, give it a try by clicking JeffPelton.com at the bottom of the page. Why, you might ask? So that we can chat of course! It's the best way for you and I to communicate privately online, in real time or on our own time.

Pushing work live, even as small as this is very exciting because there's still a lot behind the scenes that I looking forward to releasing soon.

Strand Ride

Fri, 11 May 2012 01:07:12 GMT

It's been too long since I've gone for a nice cruise up the strand. So I took a few pics to test out image uploads.

Seems to be working alright. Of course there is plenty more todo!

But I'm excited for the good weather and have to remind myself to go for more rides!

JeffPelton.com

Tue, 08 May 2012 07:44:29 GMT

I've finally managed to clean a few things up around here. I've finished most of what I needed to get photos on the site! Using asynchronous callbacks to do everything from uploading a file, reading it's meta data, writing it to the database, adding other info like location data and it's own map image, to slicing thumbnails and keeping everything up to date and in the feed. Whew. I think most of it is lined up right.

I'm finally committing myself to build out the site to make it everything I want it to be for the first time since I set out to this goal some six years ago. That was before I taught myself how to build web applications or that web development was even a real job.

I know the scope of my project is outrageous, but I hope that an open source strategy can make it possible, and maybe even help others solve the same problem as me.

Now I'm going to organize my thoughts and projects so that they are suitable to be open source. But in doing so I constantly feel a nagging for "simplicity" and "focus" in the echo's of "minimum viable products" and "lean" startups. I understand that concise mission statements and tight feedback loops are a good way to progress your startup quicker.

What I'm reminding myself is that this isn't my startup, but my dream. I have lots of business ideas that involve technology and websites, but this is different. Here and now, I'm setting out to solve the problems which plague me!

I didn't learn to program to write the most efficient or beautiful code. I learned to program machines so that I could interact with technology in a way that is beautiful and such that the machine begs to do my bidding, instead of the other way around. From a young age I've felt that computers ability, and our ability to use them has been unmatched. We don't know how to harness the power of what's right in front of us, and often it doesn't serve us well, or worse, we end up serving it.

I guess it's time to go back and watch some more Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay for inspiration. Although, I'm optimistic about the web today more than ever. So, I'm going to dream big and see what I can come up with!

Exif Image Orientation and the Behavior of Image Viewers & Browsers

Fri, 04 May 2012 23:25:39 GMT

If you take a photo with your phone, there's a chance that you're holding it sideways or upside down. When you take the picture, your phone saves the orientation (in 90 degree rotations) to the file's metadata (exif), and then saves the image as taken; possibly upside down or sideways.

So now your jpeg is upside down, but has metadata that can be viewed as intended. The problem is that not all image viewers correctly handle that metadata and will just show the image upside down. This is unfortunate.

Of course I'm mainly concerned with images in the web browser and I can tell you that currently my iPhone Safari correctly rotates the images for me :), but that Desktop Safari doesn't :(.

It seems like this is clearly the job of the image viewer, but that it's out of my hands for now. Therefore, I decided that I'd have to rotate the image myself. Of course I'm already using imagemagick to cut thumbnails so I'll just rotate them and strip out the exif, which is important or the new image would get rotated more than we want, on the iPhone for example.

Although searching about the exif behavior didn't find me much, finding the imagemagick convert options was easier than I thought it'd be! All I added was -auto-orient and -strip to rotate the image based on the exif and then strip the exif, which it turns out I want anyways for my thumbnails.

That left me time to write this!

Attitude

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 23:14:31 GMT

"Try not. Do or do not, there is no try."

Deep Space

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 05:36:00 GMT

This photo is worth staring at for a while.

Get the full resolution from http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1213/

Web UI

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 20:40:32 GMT

I'm sorry that I haven't put more of my thoughts down regarding these topics, and my lack of visual aids, but let me at least chime in.

There's a slew of UI/UX changes being made by big sites like Google and Twitter that have people talking. Well, at least has UI engineers tweeting.

Here's some of the recent ones:

1. The Google+ and Gmail logo aren't links to their homepage. Now they scroll you to the top of the page. I have to elaborate on this one. For a while I had the Google logo as a navigation menu, but now they've switched me back to the black top bar. Strange.
2. Google Chrome removed the "+" from within the new tab button.
3. Gmail redesigned the inbox and added a lot of white space. Others have noted they also changed their conversation UI.
4. Twitter recently removed the permalink behavior of timestamps in favor of a "Details" link.

I could dive right into each of these changes and give you my point of view on them, but let me start by stepping back to reflect on the nature of these changes.

Firstly, when deciding to make changes to a web product, consider both new and existing users. I feel that a lot of arguments forget about one or the other. For example, removing the "+" from the new tab button in Chrome can be seen as a simplification which doesn't negatively effect existing users, but does potentially increase the learning curve for brand new users. This is also an interesting usability pattern: "It might not be intuitive at first, but once you figure it out, you've got it".

On the other side, Twitter has removed a pattern from the days of blogging where the timestamp is commonly used as an anchor to the permalink for that story. Essentially you have a list of articles and want an easy way to find the detail page of any article. While using the timestamp as that anchor has been the norm, Twitter must have found that new users weren't finding that link. Hence, they've added explicit "details" links to do the job.

Getting to my point, I've always felt that there is still a lot of art mixed into the science of interfaces and usability. Surely these sites have plenty of traffic to draw statistical analysis, but the real question remains intent. Who is going to be affected by the change and for what gain and loss? Unfortunately there isn't always a one to one correlation between your desired influence and the result. I think we tend to fail at understanding chain reactions and the hidden complexity of seemingly simple interactions. In other words, I think we can make numbers tell the story that we want to hear.

With all that said, I'm mostly pro change as an opportunity for growth. The web is the most beautiful medium and should be constantly improved. What concerns me most is the intent of changes and the audience they consider. It's fun to think about and always a loft goal to keep interfaces intuitive, yet simple and minimal. The area that really intersets me is the learning curve of using new or changing applications.

Sharing

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 06:24:00 GMT

Watch the video on YouTube

Why don't people screen cast more?

I truly love Doug Engelbart's 1968 Demo.

circles

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 03:03:25 GMT

are awesome

Log Layout

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 21:59:17 GMT

So I've just implemented a new layout using the jQuery plugin Masonry. I might try out Isotope later on if I need the resorting stuff it has. Anyways, let me know what you think.

Early adopters

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 23:52:00 GMT

I'm making the move from Chrome to WebKit, which made me think about how quickly I can switch from one brand to another. Also I think that I can plot myself on the adoption (bell shaped) curve. As an innovator and early adopter I tend to get in early on, for example Chrome. By the time it's finally getting popular and hitting the top of the curve, I tend to realize that the tool I once adored has become an ad serving tool :(.

Compressed and Cached Javascript

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 06:07:00 GMT

For a while now I've put off doing this and am happy to cross it off my list. I haven't tested via my iPhone yet, but the page load speeds do seem to be quicker. I'm loving it!

Food Photo Roundup

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 21:52:00 GMT

Some of the references are as old as 2008, and others are very recent. In any case, it appears that using technology to assist convenience is a win for users.

Snap-happy dieters reap benefits

"Watching what you eat really does help, at least if you do it through a camera lens. That's the conclusion of a study of dieters' eating habits comparing the effect of written food diaries with taking a snapshot of each meal."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19926725.300-snaphappy-dieters-reap-benefits.html

Improve your diet with your mobile phone

http://www.mostlyeating.com/improve-your-diet-with-your-mobile-phone

Eat Like Me

A registered dietitian blogging photos of her food.

http://www.self.com/fooddiet/blogs/eatlikeme

covered by the Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/08/AR2009060802310.html

Think before you eat: photographic food diaries as intervention tools to change dietary decision making and attitudes

"A pilot study using written and photographic food diaries was conducted with 43 participants. Qualitative analysis of participant interviews revealed that photographic food diaries can alter attitudes and behaviours associated with food choices, and they are more likely to do so than written diaries because they serve as an intervention at the point when decisions regarding what to eat are being made."

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1470-6431.2008.00725.x/abstract

PlateMate: Crowdsourcing Nutrition Analysis from Food Photographs - October 16-19, 2011

"Results of our evaluations show that PlateMate is nearly as accurate as a trained dietitian and easier to use for most users than traditional self-reporting."

http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~hq/papers/platemate.pdf

Apps

Meallogger http://www2.meallogger.com/lang-en/

The Eatery https://eatery.massivehealth.com/

Meal Snap http://mealsnap.com/

FoodSpotting http://www.foodspotting.com/

My Apps

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 05:16:00 GMT

Want to solve your own problems? You can't stand using software even when it's the best of breed? You want to use something like Flickr, but aren't sure if it will be around in five, ten, or 25 years? Think things like turntable.fm, foursquare, and yelp are cool, but you lack the confidence they will keep your valuable data safe and accessible? Have you ever lost years of iTunes play history, playlists and ratings?

You are not alone. There are lots of people who want a secure way to express themselves digitally. At the end of the day, technology is with us every step and more and more we input our messages, data and commands all through a digital device. When you look at that totality throughout your life, it seems critical to have ownership, and curation of it.

Want to make a better and have your own Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Gmail, Flickr, Delicious, Flipboard, Wordpress, New Tab Page, and every other app!?

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 06:25:20 GMT

Want to rewrite every application that you use? You think that it can be a little bit better, or maybe a lot better with just a little change?

Jeffshouse (codename) is the platform for your web applications. Keeping the server side as a thin API for use by the client, gives the user all of the power. Let users and yourself build a dream app, that's easy to improve upon. Start with the user experience in the web browser, desktop and mobile.

Write your own html and javascript powered with a data api also written in javascript in case you want to write any server side code, but you shouldn't have to. The rather large community has provided many common useful functions that you might want from your web server. Focus on the UI in javascript with API calls. There's even more of this in the community, as user interfaces are open by nature.

We're seeking the best of breed. Everyone should be able to give it their best shot or pitch in, and eventually arrive at something better than the sum of the parts. Everyone building on top of each other's work produces amazing results.

Screencasting & Live Coding

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 06:00:00 GMT

I'm going to try to start doing live coding sessions with chat to get help from those who might be willing to give it. Of course there will be a peanut gallery and a spectrum of people, but I hope others might have the same interest as me in getting good code along with a good user interface.

The Domain Dotcom Game

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 03:23:00 GMT

A few rules:

1. You may research the web for a word or phrase, but
2. You cannot check the whois availability at first
3. Take wagers if it is, or is not available ~?
4. When you check the whois, if it is available you must immediately purchase it.

I guess in a one man game you wager in your mind what the domain itself is worth, with many variables considered.

Jeffshouse lives on!

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 01:06:21 GMT

Jeffshouse might have moved. But it's back up and running! Slight downtime, but easy transition. To better days ahead!

Site Update

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 09:11:36 GMT

Quick UI update to make things more uniform. Currently it's my playground, so it will end up changing.

Site Status

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 05:04:51 GMT

Sorry that some of the previous links don't have their thumbnails, but that bug is fixed going forward. More updates soon.

Mark as Read

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 03:08:52 GMT

I predict a change.

Twitter, Facebook, Flipboard and other social websites should all have "mark as read" functionality. Obviously I don't want to open up today's newspaper and see exactly the same stories as yesterday.

Sites like Twitter.com should be encouraging me to reach inbox 0.

The implementation that's the best is seen in Google's Reader, which I highly suggest.
It's very simple. As you scroll through and read a post, it gets a check as being read, which you can undo to save it for later. Above the feed is a toggle between all posts and just new, so you can get to everything. This is also like Archive and All Mail in Gmail.

I hope dearly that this comes to G+ soon. It makes perfect sense to me.

1. They already have a super elegant selector highlighting the feed item you're looking at, on the left border of each post. Just add a checkbox ala reader.
2. You have the pain and gain of having to record each "read". I'm sure you can find some interesting ways to use that data.
3. Also this solves all the whining about superstars with content that dominates the feed, without having to use mute?

My question is, Why not?

Working on JeffPelton.com

Wed, 18 May 2011 04:42:19 GMT

doing some html work on the frontend feels good. Need a test text post to put into the mix.

Day 0

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 09:58:19 GMT

This is the haphazard unofficial start to something which has already begun.

This website and publishing platform will server as a portal for my life online.

A lifelog.

All of the photos from my iPhone, location checkin-ins, tweets, status updates, essays, and articles just to start. The incredible power of the iPhone to provide geo timestamped input instantly online from anywhere, is only the beginning of what technology will be able to record and tell us about ourselves.

In my mind, having all of this self published content residing primarily among so many other networks is unfortunate.

The reality of crashing hard drives, or sites going down, or the lack of data portability and durability in general, has prevented me from freely creating and inputing data as I need.

So from today on I am attempting to free my mind from blocks to creativity.

The architecture of the internet has matured enough to solve many these obstacles.

The main problem is that which the internet offers solve. Access anything from a web browser, so that you can't physically destroy your data if you wanted to. This is awesome. I can personally attest to a sad amount of data lost simply outgrowing machines, if not a failed drive. But simply maintaining the files and folders themselves can becomes a hindrance to it's longevity. I might think now that any papers from school days would be better off trashed. But if it were archived and just a search, or click away, yet private and secure, there's no reason not to keep everything.

Now that I'm making a full effort to overcome the problem before me, I'll be writing a lot more. Hopefully the beginning to something new and creative.

Carpe diem

Hello World.

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 02:42:00 GMT

This is the first post. A test of sorts. Let's see how long this will last.