Summersault Blog

As a software engineer, one of the genres of programs that you’re always on the lookout for is the “killer app,” the tool or utility that immediately becomes the “best in class” for a given problem space and technology. One problem space where I’ve been hoping for just such a tool to come along is answering that age old question, “how can we quickly schedule a meeting between a bunch of people with separately maintained and very busy calendars?” In the past, it meant lots of back and forth conversations, disjointed calendar checking, and that sense that you were spending time on “administrivia” when you could be out enjoying the world.

Enter the free web tool Doodle.ch.
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Microsoft Exchange is a common choice for organizations looking to share contacts and calendar events internally. It also works as a central mail server, allowing emails with large attachments to be sent around internally as well.

There are two major problems with Microsoft Exchange as a solution.
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Writer and prolific blogger Dave Pollard has a post up about when not to use e-mail, in response to people asking him how to reduce inappropriate use of e-mail in their organizations. I don’t agree with all of his rules (for example, I think it’s fine to send a group of people a link to a document/policy/site update instead of waiting for them to be notified via RSS or regular browsing), but find Dave’s points useful to consider.

What do you think?

Kelly Jackson Higgins has written a great article on Seven Ways to be Mistaken for a Spammer, first noticed from a Slashdot post. Kelly’s advice and observations are very much in line with our experiences as a company that hosts e-mail accounts and tries to fight the ever-rising surge of spam, and as developers who are often creating software that sends legitimate e-mail to users all over the Internet. The main don’ts from the article:

1. Ignoring “unsubscribe” requests.
2. List “repurposing.”
3. Providing unclear privacy checkbox instructions, and ignoring users’ responses.
4. Losing track of internal desktop and server machines that can be used against you.
5. Not keeping databases and address lists up to date.
6. Having vulnerable mailer forms on your Website.
7. Working with non-reputable third-party mailers.

Whether you take Kelly’s word for it or ours or someone else’s, these items are SO important to pay attention to.

Congratulations to Charlie Peck and his student group from Earlham College, who just had their LittleFe project featured in the UK information technology journal, the Register: Educators boost US tech fortunes with cheap cluster. There are some good quotes from Charlie, who has served as a colleague and mentor to several Summersault staff:

“There’s something very visceral about it,” said Charlie Peck, a professor at Earlham College and one of the project’s leads, in an interview here at the Supercomputing conference. “If I can make learning this stuff accessible and interesting enough, then the students may be willing to put down their Gameboys.”

Little-Fe is a complete 4 to 8 node Beowulf style portable computational cluster used for teaching key concepts in parallel computing such as speedup, efficiency, and load balancing.

When people use the CC field for a long list of e-mail recipients of which I’m one, I usually send them back something like this note:

Hi. This is a boilerplate message that I send to people who send e-mail messages to me as a part of a CC to a large group of people. I would like to discourage you from using this particular approach to send a message to a large group of e-mail addresses. Here’s why:

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When we started in 1997 and then opened our first real office in 1998, the first phone Summersault ever owned was a small, gray two-line office model with, I believe, five separate voice-mailboxes. It cost us around $200, after we spent a long time researching and discussing just the right one to get. It sat quietly on my desk, and when the occasional call did come in (it could even do a conference call!), everything worked just fine - we never had to open it up, reprogram it, reboot it, back it up, or monitor it. It’s not hard to long for those days, as Summersault’s growth has meant some costly and time consuming expansion in our phone infrastructure over the years. But our recent experience installing and configuring the Asterisk open source PBX phone system has given me some hope that we’re returning to an era where the phone is once again a useful tool that saves people time and makes communication more efficient, instead of less so. This article touts some of the benefits of this kind of phone system, and has some notes and tips on how it might help your business or organization - large or small - have enterprise-level phone system features on the cheap.
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I did an interview this morning with Chris Nolte on 1490 WKBV AM about the “dangers of unsecured home wireless networks.” I thought I would post a few follow up notes about that issue here:

The general problem is that a lot of vendors that make home networking products want their items to be as easy to use “out of the box” as possible, and so they make the default mode of a wireless access point to be one where anyone can join the wireless network created by that device. For the average home user, this means that as soon as they plug in their wireless router to get their own laptop connected wirelessly, they’re also providing a free ride to anyone within a radius of that signal.
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As a Linux user, I’m a fan of “Flash Video” for Video content delivery on the web, used most visibly now by Google Video.

Flash video depends only on the Flash plugin, which nearly everyone has, is well supported on Linux and seems to generally “just work”. There also seems to be a lot of flexibility to integrate the player with the design of a particular website, which is a nice feature for developers.

Finally, Flash video is nice for the smaller file sizes of the video format. For example, converting my AVI file to the FLV format reduced the file size by about 75%!

I was pleased to find that there are already free, open source tools that allow me to publish content in the FLV using Linux. (But I believe the same tools could also work on Mac and Windows and provide some pointers for those platforms at the bottom.)

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I’d like to expand on one of the points in Tim Berners-Lee excellent recommendations on designing a good URL. He suggests leaving access out of the URL. An example of that would be the inclusion of “Public” in this bug tracking URL.

Tim is concerned about this primarily because URL access changes over time, causing the URL to need to change when the resource hasn’t changed.

There’s a bigger problem with putting access in URLs. In the era of web2.0, more sites are data-driven, providing different views of the same resource depending on how you access it. Commonly, an administrator may see links to edit and modify the data, while the public has fewer or no options to alter the content.

The problem comes when people try to share URLs to resource between different access groups. Instead of displaying the resource, the user may be prompted to login, since they are a different group than the one needed to view the resource. That’s somewhat silly– why block me from accessing a resource that I can see, even if it’s a bit different than what the sender sees?

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