KalSMS Growing
It’s been a good first year for KalSMS, which I’m particularly happy about since I didn’t really have much time to work on it myself (nor, evidently, on this blog). It truly took on a life of its own.
In India, Sheldon D’Souza was using it to power a food ordering startup and contributed some polling code to the codebase (it’s still in a separate branch, I really didn’t have much time for non-work stuff).
In Liberia, local activists were using John Etherton’s Ushahidi KalSMS plugin to track conflict indicators and humanitarian needs.
I had the opportunity to give a talk on KalSMS at the inaugural Dar es Salaam GTUG meeting. Allen Machary, one of the engineers I met in Tanzania (an impressively sharp and passionate group, btw), later joined Bienmoyo and ended up using KalSMS for part of a mobile pregnancy care program he was working on. Here’s a photo I got from Lushen Wu, Allen’s colleague, of a training session in Tanzania.
KalSMS is not pictured, but is somewhere around here
I’ve been hearing from people interested in putting it to various other uses: cross-network SMS service in Poland, salsa club promotion in LA, activists communications in Northern Africa, marketing for a fashion boutique in Finland and so on. Who knows how many of these got built, and how many others I never heard of.
All that has been a pleasant surprise, since about a month after I released KalSMS Ushahidi project launched SMSsync, which has similar goals and obviously much more resources behind it. With my rapidly shrinking spare time and negligible Java skills, I assumed KalSMS was done for. But people still seemed to find a use for it, and improve it.
I was particularly happy to get an email recently from Jesse Young of Envaya, who have taken the codebase and added a LOT of functionality. Envaya’s version is now out as EnvayaSMS, the history page lists the major features they added.
If you’re looking for new features, EnvayaSMS is your best bet. I’m still going to keep KalSMS up, with minimal maintenance, in the same place, and it’s also out on the Amazon Appstore now for easier download. There may be a place for having a minimal feature and the super-simple UI it enables.
When I get some free time, I might integrate some of EnvayaSMS new features down to KalSMS, keeping the UI minimal. If Python/Ruby/etc on Android ever become viable I’d be happy to rewrite the whole thing in a language that doesn’t feel like it was designed by a committee of lawyers.
It’s been a fun ride so far. It’s a great feeling to see my code gets picked up and used all around the world, and have much better programmers than myself take it places I never thought it’ll get. Thanks everyone. Keep KalSMSing.
KalSMS
KalSMS is a small Android based SMS gateway I’ve released as open source. “Kal” is a Hebrew word meaning “lightweight” and “easy”, so it fits KalSMS’ primary goal of being very easy to install, maintain and work with.
KalSMS is a very thin layer between SMS to HTTP and back to SMS. For example, a simple SMS weather service works like this:
- A user sends an SMS “weather 10026″ to a phone running KalSMS
- KalSMS intercepts the SMS message, and sends it to pre defined URL. In this case http://qkhack.appspot.com/weather?msg=weather+10026
- In this URL, a script uses Yahoo!Weather API to get the weather forecast for zip code 10025, and formats an XML response like:
<reply> <sms-to-sender> Fair 37F today, Mostly Clear 34F tomorrow, Partly Cloudy 37F Friday </sms-to-sender> </reply> - KalSMS parses the response, and sends an SMS back to the user with the weather forecast.
In effect the phone running KalSMS has now become an SMS server, running a weather application.
I’ve been working recently on applications that are meant to be used in places like India and Africa. This taught me that (a) SMS is accessible by a LOT more people worldwide than the web, and (b) it is MUCH harder to build an SMS app than a web app.
KalSMS tries to help this by leaving the heavy lifting to a web app, and just providing a simple, as thin as possible layer between SMS to the Web and back again. This means developers can work with the tools they already know, use state of art technologies like Heroku or App Engine that make launching a web app extremely simple and cheap, and just use an Android phone to enable the SMS part.
Current solutions require either collaboration from a local cellular provider, often a challenge for low budget projects, or setting up your own server – that is, an actual computer running the SMS gateway software connected to a cellular modem. This is non-trivial to install and maintain, and since the solutions out there are tightly coupled you have to write your actual application in a specific language or framework dictated by the SMS solution.
By being Android-based, KalSMS installation is a matter of scanning a barcode, maintenance means keeping the phone working – something almost all people in the world now know how to do. Basically an Android phone with KalSMS replaces a computer, network connection, cell modem, a UPS system and whole bunch of software.
I’ve got plenty of opinions on aid efforts and their effects over the years, but in keeping with the unwritten “produce or shut up” motto of this blog I’ll just say I think things will start to improve when more people pay attention to Bill Easterly than Bono. In my corner, I hope hackers will use KalSMS for various projects simply for its simplicity and reliability – and perhaps in time will seep into the developing world projects I had in mind when building it.
MacBook Time Lapse in Make Magazine
I had the the idea to use iSight for time lapse photography during a record setting blizzard in February, now we’ve just been through perhaps the hottest July on NYC’s records and the new volume of Make Magazine carries the print article. Make is one of my favorite publications, which makes me particularly stoked about the whole thing.
Randi & Patrick, thanks for your photos! Unfortunately Make had to pick just one (it’s only a two page piece..) I really appreciate both your help!
TheRealURL Chrome Extension
Lately I’ve been using Chrome quite a bit, and liking it a lot, which is why I was particularly excited to get a note from Don Magee at Tactical Coder saying he’s now using TheRealURL to power his Chrome URL Expander extension.
Don has some kind words for TheRealURL, too:
This is done by using the API found at: http://therealurl.appspot.com/. I know this is the second time I have switched backends. This new backend is even faster and supports every single url shortening service I have tried.
Thanks :)
I installed it on my Chrome and it works great. Note that the UI is a bit different from the Firefox extension – rather than displaying the long URL in the status bar, it inserts it in the HTML instead of the short one. So now we got Firefox, Thunderbird and Chrome covered (all, by the way, thanks to the kindness of developers I’ve never met, volunteering their code). If someone wants to do an IE/Safari/Opera extensions, let me know – I’d be happy to help any way I can.
Open Sourcing Crowds Machine
I’ve been way too busy recently to give Crowds Machine much attention, and since it’s such a resource hog I’m frankly not that motivated to improve it – better performance will just mean more users which will lead to higher hosting costs.
So I figure the best thing to do is open source the code, so that people would be able to install their own instance (and hopefully give it some much needed TLC): http://github.com/niryariv/crowds
The code is layers upon layers of Rails, much of it written when Rails (and myself) were young & naive. I updated it from time to time, but it’s not my submission to Beautiful Code. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported – if that’s a problem, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.
How To Disable Google Buzz (er, #GoogleBuzz )
[UPDATE: I didn't like the original text, so I cut out most of it. If you're getting this via a feed reader and this post appears twice, sorry.]
Here’s a short guide to the confused user: How To Disable Google Buzz. It’s not in sarcastic font but if you’re reading this you probably don’t need it. (BTW, I think a good indicator for when a community gets too big is that sarcasm needs to be explained: it means members don’t trust each other’s intelligence enough to assume outlandish claims are meant sarcastically).
My point obviously isn’t that Google Buzz should or shouldn’t be disabled, my point is that most of these things take only as much of your life as you allow them, so all the hyperbole around Google Buzz (or iPad, or whatever) is pointless.
It’s my first time trying out AdSense too – please feel free to click on the ads, I’m sure these are all fantastic products and services.
While we’re at it, I’d like to suggest a one reason why Google botched Buzz’s launch like that: when you launch something on top of Gmail, you just don’t get the chance to grow organically, learning from mistakes and user feedback as you go. There are a lot of benefits to size, but also some drawbacks.
Finally, I really enjoy my new habit of adding pictures to posts. I hope readers like it too. Here’s a photo of a shiny object:
Time Lapse Photography With MacBook’s iSight
After the weekend blizzard barely touched New York, I was particularly glad to wake up to a snowy morning. My trusty old Canon A85 recently passed away, so left with only the Macbook’s built in iSight camera to document this I figured it might be fun to try and take some time lapse shots. Here’s one of the results:
timmargh‘s blog post showed me how to get going. First I had to install iSightCapture to control iSight via the command line, then write a script that will take photos in fixed intervals. Initially I used Tim’s AppleScript, but then converted to a quick Ruby script instead:
path = "~/lapse" # directory where images will be stored. must exist and be writable.
duration = 4 * 60 * 60 # Time to run, in seconds (4 hours here)
interval = 5 * 60 # time between each photo, in seconds (5 minutes here)
end_at = Time.now + duration
i = 0
while Time.now <= end_at do
i += 1
system "/Applications/isightcapture #{path}/%05d.jpg" % i
sleep interval
end
This will take a photo every 5 minutes for four hours. A few notes:
1. The directory in path (“~/lapse" here) should exist before you run the script. If you have more than one machine it may be a good idea to make it a shared folder, so you can check on the progress from your other machine.
2. Photo Booth, or any other app that uses the camera, should be off or iSightCapture won't work.
3. WordPress code view adds some ' 's in "copy to clipboard" which will break the script - use the "source view" icon to get the clean version.
4. If you're taking photos over a long time period, remember to turn the screen off (ie, minimal brightness) - this will help the battery last the whole time, especially if you're on an older MacBook.
5. If you want to get some sound indication that photos are being taken you might add the following line at the start of the while loop:
`say "cheese"`
Once you have some photos, GIFfun will let you combine them into an animated GIF. If there are more than a few dozen file size can quickly get out of hand, so you might convert them to video instead - ffmpeg can take care of that. Installing it is pretty simple if you have MacPorts:
sudo port install ffmpeg
You can then cd to the image directory and create the video:
ffmpeg -i %05d.jpg lapse.mp4
Finally, here's a photo of the whole setup, taken with the other MacBook's iSight :)
The Not-Really-That-Much-Hype Cycle
So TheRealURL extension got “public” status at the addons.mozilla, and I guess it was on the “new add ons” or similar page for some time, which resulted in some nice graphs:
This is after about a week of pretty much flat lines, when it was still in the sandbox. The red line active daily users. Nothing crazy, but nice steady growth, all in all. I really like the way the blue line – daily downloads – matches nicely to the Hype Cycle line:
Well, there wasn’t that much “Peak of Inflated Expectations” so the “Trough of Disillusionment” wasn’t that deep either ;). 1,522 downloads in total so far, in about 2 weeks.
TheRealURL Firefox/Thunderbird Add On
TheRealURL Firefox add on (which also works in Thunderbird, Flock, and Seamonkey) lets users get URL information on links – once the extension is installed, right clicking a link will show a new option in the context menu, “Get TheRealURL”:
Clicking it retrieves the URL’s information from TheRealURL’s JSON service and displays the unshortened URL, the page title and the content type on the status bar:
You can change the information displayed via the add on preferences settings:
I find it useful for checking URLs in possibly-spam messages, which recently started using URL shorteners to mask their addresses, and generally checking short links in blogs/twitter/etc. I was happy to discover Softpedia now lists it, with a %100 clean guarantee.
TheRealURL extension’s code was contributed by Rod Whiteley, creator of Mail Tweak, following a message I posted at MozillaZine forums. It was pretty amazing to post an idea on the evening and have a working first version by morning. Rod did an incredible job, with a lot of attention to detail, which I’m very grateful for. Thanks Rod!
Crowds Machine, Day 1
I’ve been working on Crowds Machine for a while, starting this an idea long ago and running it for my personal use for about three years now, but only recently I took some time to make it publicly usable – the first users I don’t personally know showed up only in the last 24 hours, following its mention in Waxy.org Links.
Here’s what this first public day looks like in traffic:
Keeping in mind it’s Christmas, and the site was down for a while till I fixed up the server, I’m pretty happy with that. But the real surprise is here:
There were less than 10 crowds in the system, so this means 1 in every 4 new visitors created a crowd. That’s pretty incredible. Maybe the holiday timing helped here. Maybe allowing users to log in with their Google accounts. Having to process 12,274 feeds a day might prove a bit of a challenge though…
I always assumed there’s a high entry barrier for CM users since they have to load in quite a few feeds to make it useful. Visitors so far seem to have no issues with that, most just importing their feeds list via OPML. Obviously these are not the typical Web users, but that’s ok. Crowds Machine isn’t meant to be mainstream – that’s the whole point of it.
