It’s unreal – every single multiple-input dedicated DVR I am looking at for taking care of recording my home’s CCTV setup, only supports Windows. When network access is provider, it invariably involves loading an ActiveX control, which of course is not supported in OS X. Even more ridiculously, manufacturers such as AverDigi, a branch of AverMedia, claim to run “embedded Linux” as some sort of badge of honor!

Let me get this straight – you use embedded Linux so that you can serve Windows-only ActiveX-infested web interfaces? Far worse, many of them use weird codecs that come in their Windows-only install CDs, which means that you’ll have to go back to a Windows machine or a VM in order to use these things. Mobile support of course isn’t much better, with Windows Mobile devices supported, again, via ActiveX, and Symbian via Java applets.

I’ll keep searching, but my hopes are fading…

It was all due to a clogged up heat sink in the ATI X1900 card that sits inside my Mac Pro – since the idle fan was not pulling in an airflow, it slowly wound up to full speed, until it was full-on all the time. The build-up of dust was quickly cleared by a blast of compressed air…but this brought about an idea – why don’t idle video cards reverse the fan for a few seconds, say once a day, in order to blow back any dust build-up? This way, the heat sink radiator would be kept clean and efficient.

I had been an avid user of Camtasia for Windows until 2006, when I switched to Mac, so I was pleasantly surprised when I read a TUAW post announcing that Techsmith were porting it to OS X. It has been a long-missed app on the Mac, with other contenders available, such as ScreenFlow, not as powerful.

Now, once Camtasia has been released, it looks like ScreenFlow doesn’t have much to fear – the Mac version is severely crippled compared to the Windows equivalent, by the looks of the comparison table available. These are some of the important features they left out:

• Only full-screen recording, you cannot record only a region of the screen – duh!
• Recording cannot be paused.
• No audio-only tracks, ScreenDraw, or markers.
• No captions.
• No audio enhancements or replace a portion of the audio track with silence.
• No production preview or batch production.
• No customization whatsoever of the Flash player controls, the start and end screens, or the about box.

This may seem offset by features like upload to YouTube or iTunes, but these are bland features as they both only take a couple of extra steps to do manually. Frankly, I will stick with ScreenFlow for the foreseeable future.

After I created a script to enable Growl notifications for Entourage, complete with subject, from and the first part of the email, I have adapted the script to work with Mail. The reason is that I have dumped Entourage – in fact, I have dumped Office and gone with Mail + iWork, now that Snow Leopard’s Mail supports Exchange.

Below are a couple of samples of the notifications shown from my script, which you can download here. Enjoy!

I got started with weather stations with a cheapo Huger WM-918, even though my interest in meteorology has been growing since a young age. It was fun to predict thunderstorm based on natural factors such as the behavior of ants and flies, or the flight patterns of certain birds – all of this, once you had been accustomed to the factors of a certain place, was remarkably accurate.

Back when I installed the Huger, I was mostly a Windows/Linux user, and the best application to connect the weather station to my PC and the internet was Virtual Weather Station by Ambient Weather. It was, although visually appealing, a resources hog, using an instruments library that caused the host PC to grind to a halt. If you were serious about running the software full-time, you needed a dedicated machine to handle the load. Maybe the resources issue has been solved by now, but the screenshots look exactly the same as back then.

Fast forward to today, and I’m the proud owner of a Davis Vantage Pro2 with an extra solar radiation sensor, which I installed on the roof last week. It’s an excellent weather station, with many options and accessories, which allows you to get -very- professional about weather without going into high-end stations that cost thousands.

I became a Mac ‘switcher’ in 2006 with a new MacBook Pro – since Apple made the change to Intel processors, I could run those Windows apps that were not available for OS X (such as electronic circuit design software) in a virtual machine or through Boot Camp, while enjoying the stability, performance and yes – beauty – of Leopard.

Naturally, I started looking for Mac software that would allow me to monitor the Davis station and upload real-time data to the internet, and the results of the search were frankly disappointing. There simply are no beautiful Mac OS weather applications, at least, none that I could find.

Before reviewing the contenders, let me clarify the beautiful part. I believe in functional software, but I am also very maniacal about user interfaces and their visual appearance and function. A beautiful GUI shows that the developer put a lot of extra effort during development to make the user experience pleasing as well as functional. I myself have designed what I consider these days awful interfaces, but when I did, I tried my best to make them look good, particularly when compared to alternative options (and I was proud of the results, being completely self-taught on the subject).

My first major release was StumbVerter, with over 750.000 downloads since it was released in 2002. I paid particular attention to the toolbar, the layout of the app, and the icons representing WiFi signals. Then came TrunkSniffer, which was a commercial application (now freeware) used by amateurs as well as trunked network operators and intelligence agencies from various countries. In this case, I remember spending a lot of time making the knobs, dials and graphs look good – while the dialog windows look like complete crap to me when I look at them now.

At Whisher, we hired a specialized firm, Ergosign, to design the GUI and test the usability of the software – and I have to say that it’s one of the engineering areas where we achieved the best results, and I am most proud of. We could criticize many things on the client and service, but the GUI was always well designed, appealing, usable – and beautiful.

Let’s look at the weather software contenders, shall we? I will concentrate on visuals and usability, as they relate with Mac OS, rather than functionality – some apps even post weather data to Twitter, for example.

Davis WeatherLink [link]

It makes sense to start with the manufacturer of my new weather station. When you purchase one of the data logger options, you get a free copy of the WeatherLink application, which reads data from the logger and shows real-time conditions, history, and uploads data to the internet. Here is the app’s main screen:

Now, do I really need to explain what is wrong with this GUI? Standard fonts, child-drawn dials and bar graphs, and Windows 3.11 style icons, make for a very ugly thing to have to look at. On top of this, the Mac OS version is actually written in Java, which makes it sluggish. WeatherLink will freeze every now and then, requiring a restart. Basically, they transplanted the Windows app into Mac OS without paying the slightest attention to OS X GUI guidelines.

Weather Display [link]

Way more featured, but way more ugly than WeatherLink, comes Weather Display, which is a Windows application that has been transplated to Mac OS in some obscure way. The pain starts after installing the app:

That’s right – you get a folder in /Applications, not an application bundle with its corresponding icon. This is sometimes used by other apps, such as Microsoft Office or iWork, but they use descriptive text as the folder name, and show the app launch icons, not a confusing bundle of stuff. Once you open the folder, it gets worse (the screenshot shows only a handful of icons, there’s a ton – click for a full-size version):

In order to start the app, you need to click on the icon named WeatherD – strangely, not named like the parent folder, logic dictates it should be called WDisplay, for example.

Here is the Mac OS version in all its glory shame:

used to send emails to the Whisher developers with screenshots and big red WTF arrows pointing at the slight defects that sometimes happened in the GUI design – in this case, the screenshot would be overwhelmed by red arrows, so I will point at a few of the most blatant issues:

The interface on Windows looks somewhat better, but it is still a mess. They are asking for $70 for this software, and it seems like it is quite popular – it is actually loaded with very useful features. I may be too purist on this, but if I’m going to pay for an application, I want it to look good – unless it’s something where functionality is 100% more important versus looks (e.g. command-line wireless tools such as airodump-ng).

Below are some honorable mentions, honorable in the sense that while they are not as ugly as the two apps above, they are still not really that good-looking, but at least the developers made an effort at developing for Mac OS.

LightSoft Weather Center [link]

This is actually one of the best apps in terms of visuals and OS X guidelines compliance, but the gauges look very simplistic, and the multiple window arrangement makes usage a little awkward.

WeatherHawk

Sadly, it only works with WeatherHawk stations, but it’s by far the most visually appealing application, with a very nice wind gauge, simple to read graphs, and well-spaced (although a bit too wide) data fields. This app is made by AfterTen, who has WeatherTracker in the works, and by the looks of their other apps, it should be the best of the bunch.

There is one final application called wview, which is in reality a set of daemons that retrieve data from various weather station models, store it in an SQL database, and automatically generate HTML files with related graphics which are then uploaded to a web server. The default templates are ugly, but it’s up to the designer to make them as gorgeous as possible, so it’s at least possible to make it beautiful.

I’m actually brewing an idea after this post, but I have to put things into order before I post again giving more details.

So I was checking through the backlog of TheFunded RSS entries for interesting posts and reviews, and found – wait for it – spam! And not just one post, but six, all by different users by names like Felicia or Kassidy. Here is a screenshot of the spam posts in question (click for a full-size image) – the links to the actual posts return a 500 server error, and they have been removed from the live RSS feed – Google Reader still has them as of a few minutes ago:

This in itself wouldn’t be out of the ordinary, if TheFunded was your average vBulletin or phpBB-based forum, which are frequently infiltrated by spammers unless very draconian rules are applied.

And what are these rules? Most usually, things like posting restrictions for so many days, and in some cases, per-user vetting of new registrations – in essence, what TheFunded claims to be doing with its new members. Money quote from TheFunded membership application form:

Please fill out the form fields correctly. The application will be manually processed to ensure that you do not work in venture capital. Processing may take up to five days, though you will normally be approved in less than 48 hours.

and

Applications without a valid biography available online will be rejected. At a minimum, you must have a LinkedIn profile with reasonable number of connections in place or a bio on your corporate site.

To me, this can have only two explanations: TheFunded doesn’t really do proper checks of membership applications, or their server was attacked and posts inserted into their database.

We are on autopilot

In the first case, the problem would be shoddy management of applicants, which is worrying to those who contribute based on the premise of complete anonymity – if you write bad things about your investors, they are not going to be happy about it. TheFunded shields executives and founders’ comments about VCs and their funds. If random people can get into TheFunded, then VCs also can, violating the main premise on which TheFunded was built.

We got pwned

Equally as worrying, since a security issue that allows spam to be posted could also be exploited to access the database of members, and data that could link them to their real identity. In TheFunded’s favor, their FAQ explains how anonymity works, and it is actually very good as described, thus, no hack on the content server could reveal a true user’s identity, but still, a hack reveals weak points – we all know how Twitter had some of its confidential memos leaked a short while ago.

In either case, it would be good if TheFunded could explain what happened, and what have they done to fix the issue, other than delete the posts (and presumably also Felicia & Co.’s accounts!).

Success is what defines Benchmark Capital, who turned $6m into $5b between 1997 and 1999 with their investment in eBay, and have now completed two transactions, the sale of FriendFeed to Facebook, and of SpringSource to VMWare for $400m. A big round to you guys, well done! TechCrunch has more details on the deals.

It appears than an input validation vulnerability is present in wp_login.php, used by WordPress 2.8.x to validate logins and reset passwords. An attacker can bypass the emailed password change link validation by submitting a crafted input to the password reset function in wp_login.php, as described here. The fix is at the bottom of the article, it involves changing one line of wp_login.php.

I say all this as I just had my password reset through an anonymous proxy, so it appears there is an automated attack taking place – fix your WordPress today, I just fixed mine!

Check out this post:

https://forums.garmin.com/showthread.php?t=274

If you are running the latest release, downgrade to the previous one otherwise uploads from a Forerunner 405CX will invariably fail.

After Whisher was acquired by wifi.com in mid-January, I was to continue working as CTO for the new venture as part of the deal. Since I had worked on the technology since the very first day, it made sense that I continued to oversee the development of the new phase of the project. In April, news came out that Rob Monster, who headed the venture fund Monster Venture Partners, had shut down the fund and needed to cut costs on all the startups he was funding as a result. This lead to an awkward situation which left me in a limbo, with no income, and no significant equity. I’m waiting for the issues to be worked out, but things are not particularly promising right now.

Spiritus – the divine breath – inspiration^[1]

What I need most after this transition was inspiration, so after I saw Martin’s post about TechTalk ’09 in Menorca, I sent an email asking if I could join the event. Reply quickly came that while the full event was…well…full, I was welcome to come on the Friday for the talk itself, scheduled for the afternoon. The TechTalk is a loose-scheme round table, where people can stand and share their views, problems or ask questions, and then interact with others during the rest of the event, in a very relaxed and beautiful setting.

As a kid, I had visited Menorca every summer with my parents. We would rent a small house for a month, in places such as Cala en Porter, Cala Galdana, or the beautiful Cala Morell. Menorca is also ripe with archeological features (one of my other interests), with many neolithic constructions such as the Naveta d’es Tudons, and the many taulas and talaiots from around 2.000 a.C. The archeological museum in Mahón, with its necropolis, is also of great interest. Going back after many years would be very interesting, even if I didn’t have the time to tour around the island.

The arrival

Call it fate, but Jordi Vallejo (Fon’s CTO) and I had been trying to meet so that he could give me one of the new Fonera 2.0 routers to try out. Even though we live very close, plans were always thwarted one way or another. Turns out he was sitting two rows in front of me on the flight from Barcelona to Menorca. We took a taxi to Torrenova, Martin’s villa, which left us at the gate after a difficult ride through narrow dirt tracks.

A lesson in optical physics and muon detection

Behind our taxi was a small rented Mercedes, and in it was Isaac Shpantzer, who offered us a ride to cover the rest of the dirt track up to the villa. And what a ride! It turns out that Isaac was a NextNet founder, invented OFDM, and was currently working at CeLight, a company that develops high-tech for communication and military applications. One example is a high-bandwidth optical communication system that points a blue laser towards the sky (and it is blue for a reason, but I’m not telling – it’s really really clever), and uses coherent detectors to grab scattered photons which have been modulated to convey data. We are talking terabits per second throughput – truly amazing. He was preparing a demo on Friday or Saturday night, but sadly I was leaving earlier, it was sad to miss it!

Another interesting development he explained during the trip was a nuclear device detector – picture a small nuclear bomb inside a steel crate shipped to the US by a terrorist group. Current detection methods are essentially x-ray arches and physical inspections. CeLight’s method relies on cosmic radiation detection. This radiation is composed in part of a negatively-charged particle called the muon. Powerful x-rays work at 120 keV, whereas a muon has an energy just over 105 MeV – thus, it has a huge penetration power, much higher than electrons. Every square meter of the Earth is hit by about 10,000 muons per minute. Since nuclear weapon cores consist of very dense, positively charged material, placing two detector plates above and below a steel container should show a straight path of muons hitting both plates, unless they pass through the nuclear core, in which the polarity difference deflects their trajectory. It’s a very neat idea, and they have a working prototype already.

Settling in

We moved into Binisegarra for a couple of hours before lunch, and had the chance to talk with a few people. Many were chilling inside the pool, trying not to get stung by the approximately 4,921 wasps that were flying around it (my most accurate count, they were moving so it was hard to keep track). Saw many known faces such as Loic, Anil, Michael Jackson (no, not that one), Rodrigo, and Ola.

Time for lunch

We had a very nice buffet lunch, and talked to Dina Kaplan of Blip.tv, who also runs the NY Founders Club, which is an interesting idea which could be taken to Barcelona. There are some events already happening here to promote interaction between startups, but nothing like Founders Club (if there is, let me know!).

The talk

Since there were so many people this year, instead of having everyone stand up and say their bit, volunteers spoke about their startups, problems or questions for the audience. It was interesting to hear Isaac’s presentation (which was way less technical than in the car but still left some puzzled faces), and Deborah’s project involving the location of firefighters in 3D space through time-reversal techniques – it’s a shame we didn’t get to talk more on the subject. Ola (the other half of Sweden!) related his most embarrassing story ever, involving clothes (or the lack thereof), a hotel in Chueca, and room locks – all in exchange for solutions to his fix-the-world problem.

Catching the last flight home

It was sad to have to leave as many activities went on during the weekend, and those are the real opportunity to talk to people about their projects and learn from them, but it was time to go. Alejandro Santana was kind enough to drive me to the airport, even though he had a later flight to Madrid.

In all, it was a very good experience after many months of stress due to a number of situations, the worst just having come to light as I was typing this post – more on it later. All I can say is that I found the inspiration to get going again, and look for new exciting projects (either join or start them). Thanks Martin for hosting such an event in such a beautiful setting!

[1] Quote taken from the movie Always, when Hop tells Pete that his task will be to inspire a young pilot as he gets started in firefighting attack planes.