Mike Thompson, a British designer working in the Netherlands, recently published the design for a solar-powered lamp, that uses water, CO₂, and blue-green algae to charge a small battery, which then powers a small LED lamp when power is needed.

I was pretty excited when I saw the story cross my feed reader. In High School, I spent some time doing a bit of research on a similar battery, using blue-green algae and a purple chemical whose name I can not recall, which would strip the electrons from chloroplasts as they were excited by a proton of light. The reaction was stimulated by heat as well, you’d get a sharp rise in the current drawn from the reaction. However, the chemical had a saturation point, and after a while, it couldn’t draw any more electrons. We did some work to see if there was a way refresh the reaction, but got nowhere.

So, to see something that functions identical to work that I was doing a bit on over ten years ago, was pretty interesting.

Now, reading the PDF linked above, the mechanism for this is a lot more involved. It required inserting 30 nanometer wires into a chloroplast, it’s able to produce about 0.6 milliamps per square centimeter, not much, but if all it’s going to do is charge a battery to power a small lamp, then it doesn’t need to be much. Now, I don’t remember the exact output of the reaction that I was working on all those years ago, but I do remember it being more prolific, though immensely shorter lived.

However, once done, you have a system that requires you only add water and CO₂. And, if you read the document, a large part of the reason behind this is to make people more cognizant of their energy usage by making the generation of that energy more personal.

I think this is a really interesting project, but I’m not sure it’s sustainable. Cory Doctorow in his new book, For The Win, several times makes the claim that all the gold ever mined on Earth, would create a block no larger than a regulation Tennis court, but that the certificates for gold sold amounted to roughly double that. Gold has value because it’s rare. It’s current value, according to Yahoo! Finance, is over $1200 per ounce.

Admittedly, the amount of gold in a 30 nanometer wire is miniscule, and if anything is going to be in the way of this process, it’s likely to be the difficulty of building this device than the cost of gold needed to build it. However, the general idea of making people more cognizant of their energy use decisions, is valuable, and I’m in favor of any research that focuses on energy generation in novel ways, and I think algae could be a really interesting source of electrical power if we can find an easier way to recover that energy. I’m not sure this method can be done at scale, but in a world where 2.6 Billion people still defecate openly; by streams, rivers, or lakes; generating energy on the small scale, to provide light into the evening, is certainly not going to hurt anyone.

I’ve been interested in the micropayments space for quite a while. The web is full of content that is great and helpful, but the barriers to actually paying for it are pretty high. Using something like PayPal, as many sites do, is problematic because PayPal’s fees are high, and it takes a LOT of clicks (and typing) to make the donation.

My feeling has been that what we need is a company that lets you put a few dollars in an account, and then with a few clicks, donate a few cents to whatever you’re interested in supporting. It appears, however, that someone has likely beaten me to the punch, at least potentially. Flattr is a recently released project based out of Sweden, which takes this Micropayments problem and makes it dead simple for the end user.

How does Flattr work? You begin by setting up a Flattr account, at this time either by requesting an invite or getting an invite code from a friend. Then, you seed your Flattr account with funds, it’s worth doing several months at a time to avoid being too heavily dinged on processing fees. Choose how much money you want to give per month, from €2 to €100. From there, you just keep an eye out for “Flattr This” buttons, which you can see at the bottom of this post (and every post on my blog), or in my sidebar. Your monthly Flattr budget will be split evenly among everything that you’ve Flattred.

If you’re a content provider, then Flattr does require that you Flattr things every month in order to qualify to earn any revenue, which I see as being more of a way to seed the system. However, I don’t see it as a big problem, you should always be able to find something to Flattr. If there is a weakness to Flattr right now, it’s that the Beta status, and particularly the slow ramp up of the invite system, weakens Flattr’s ability to reach critical mass and usefulness. I’ve put Flattr up on my blog on hopes of earning even a small amount of revenue (my goal is to make my blog at least pay it’s own expenses), however, I suspect most of my readers have never heard of Flattr, but even now, having read about it, that doesn’t make it trivial for you to sign up and begin using Flattr.

Some people I’ve spoken to about Flattr feel that the equal disbursement Flattr does every month isn’t ideal, they want to be able to add ‘weight’ to their Flattr’s, giving some people more than others each month. Frankly, I think that overcomplicates the problem (Flattr only allows you to Flattr something once per month, that something can be a Blog or an individual entry. Flattring an entry doesn’t preclude you from Flattring another entry or the blog however). The beauty of Flattr is that you just don’t need to think about what you’re donating. I’ve allocated €2 per month for the time being, and if I want to Flattr something, I don’t need to decide how much to give. It’s a one-click process, requiring no more thought than ‘That was awesome, I want to donate to that.’ It’s this unthinking simplicity, and the ease of budgeting the static amount per month, that makes Flattr appealing to most users.

That said, I don’t think that Flattr is the end of the story of Micropayments on the web. It seems great for many uses, but I think there is room for those more…thoughtful…disbursements where you do want to decide how much to donate. However, I think Flattr has a lot of potential, and I sincerely hope that they can continue to grow and thrive.

Fiddler2 is a great tool for doing web inspection, but it also provides excellent tooling for modifying data in HTTP requests while on Windows. On Linux, I usually use WebScarab or Paros, both of which are cross-platform in Java, but I find that Fiddler is a better project when on Windows.

To provide a simple example of using Fiddler2 for web debugging, I’m going to talk about the workflow for the Doctor Who: The Adventure Games geolocation check, and discussing how it can be examined using Fiddler (as I was on Linux, I used tcpdump and wireshark, but that gave me a TON of noise). First, install and start Fiddler. I would probably immediately go to the File menu and make sure that ‘Capture Traffic’ is turned off, so that it doesn’t overwhelm you immediately. Then, go the Filter’s tab on the right part of the screen:

You’ll then want to set the options the way that I have above. Set the Host Filter to only show the following hosts, then put www.bbc.co.uk in the list. Then, filter to only the /doctorwho/tag/api/geo/isukrequest URL path. Then, we want to break, and to do that we’ll break response on Content-Type: text/plain. This will ensure that we can intercept the response for any geolocation request from this particular API.

Firing up the installer, watch your fiddler window, until you see the following show up in the Web Sessions window:

Click on that line, and then choose the “Inspectors” tab, instead of the “Filters” tab on the right. You should then see the following on the bottom half of the view:

From the drop-down select the “200_SimpleHTML.dat” option, then click on the “TextView” option, and change the content to 1. Click Run To Completion, and you should be done.

Fiddler2 is an awesome tool for web developers, however it, or another Web Proxy, should be a core tool in any security toolset. Seeing how an application responds to simple tweaks of the input or output is really interesting, and is at the root of most security research. If Fiddler has any apparent weakness, it’s that I don’t see a good way to automate fuzzing responses and the like, however, that may just be something I’m not seeing.

This weekend saw the launch of Doctor Who: The Adventure Games, a series of downloadable adventure games starring The Doctor and Amy Pond which coincides with the currently running series of Doctor Who.

Many people world-wide (and in Britain) have been disappointed with their attempts to install the game, since it calls to the BBC to determine if you’re in the UK or not. I have a friend in London who can’t install the game because of this check, which just seems laughable to me.

Knowing that the geolocation check in the installer was almost certainly related to a web call, I set up tcpdump to capture all the network traffic on my machine while I attempted the install. I then loaded the resulting pcap file into wireshark, and filtered out all the traffic not going to the BBC netblock with the following filter rule: ip.addr >= 212.58.224.0 && ip.addr <= 212.58.224.255.

This showed a single HTTP request to the following URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/tag/api/geo/isukrequest

The response was a 403 with a 0 in the body.

I then decided to test a frighteningly simple theory. I started up the nginx instance on my machine, dropped a file named isukrequest containing 1 in the /var/www/nginx-default/doctorwho/tag/api/geo directory on my Ubuntu 10.04 machine, added a line containing 127.0.0.1 www.bbc.co.uk to my /etc/hosts file, and began the install.

Note: Actually, I had to disable to /doc location section in the /etc/nginx/sites-available/default file, as it matched the /doctorwho request, and completely messed up the request.

The install worked perfectly, and I was able to launch the game in Wine1.2 (from the Wine PPA) on Ubuntu 10.04 while running in Virtual Desktop mode for Wine. I haven’t tried full-screen just yet, and the option to let DirectX programs lock the cursor doesn’t seem to be working really well, but the game is playable. I’ll have a more thorough review later this week, once I’ve had an opportunity to play through it.

I expect the BBC will eventually release a non-UK exclusive version. Some people feel that they’ll charge for it, since many UK residents feel the reason they’re getting the game at no charge is because it was developed using their TV Licensing fees. That may well be true, and if the game gets released outside of the UK with a charge associated with it (there has been no word from the BBC about this possibility to the best of my knowledge) I would encourage people to consider paying for it. However, I would encourage the BBC to use this series of games purely as a way to drive interest in this season of Doctor Who, which has been, by far, the best since the show relaunched.

I was also surprised by just how easy circumventing this was. There was no encryption. No handshake. No reverse engineering was required, just a tiny bit of observation of the traffic on the wire, and setting up a web server on your own system. The ‘attack’ on this system is completely trivial, not even running afoul of anti-reverse engineering provisions in certain laws (which I disagree with). A simple challenge-response handshake would have made this task even remotely challenging, and protected the software via anti-reverse engineering clauses.

I’ve been using LINQ in C# since shortly after Visual Studio 2008 was released. It was an awesome addition to the language, allowing you to call into a database model in a method that is identical to how you deal with in-memory collections. Admittedly, LINQ is basically an entire data-munging framework built around various classic functional programming constructs such as map and reduce.

If LINQ has a problem, it’s that writing a new provider can be really difficult, since it requires pretty deep understanding of .NET expression trees, however most people won’t ever need to do that. Plus, LINQ is one of the primary reasons why extension methods were added to .NET, and even if LINQ wasn’t as great as it is, extension methods are something to get excited about in a statically-typed language.

Anyway, for manipulating pure data, LINQ is a wonderful too, and Chris Pietschmann has released a version of LINQ for JavaScript. And it’s in the flexible Microsoft Reciprocal License, so it’s easy to download and use. It’s about 7k raw, with very clean code, and about .7k after minification and gzip, for a minimal impact on page weight. And, if you’ve ever written LINQ, the syntax is basically identical to the lambda syntax.

var myList = [
  {FirstName:"Chris",LastName:"Pearson"},
  {FirstName:"Kate",LastName:"Johnson"},
  {FirstName:"Josh",LastName:"Sutherland"},
  {FirstName:"John",LastName:"Ronald"},
  {FirstName:"Steve",LastName:"Pinkerton"}
];
var exampleArray = 
        JSLINQ(myList)
        .Where(function(item){ return item.FirstName.match(/^Jo/); })
      .OrderBy(function(item) { return item.FirstName; })
      .Select(function(item){ return item.FirstName; });

/**
 * exampleArray = [ "John", "Josh" ]
 **/

Now, the blurb that Chris wrote for JSLINQ is a bit wrong. He says the following:

LINQ to JavaScript (JSLINQ for short) is an implementation of LINQ to Objects implemented in JavaScript. It is built using a set of extension methods built on top of the JavaScript Array object. If you are using an Array, you can use JSLINQ.

The important distinction is that JSLINQ works on array-like objects, such as HTMLCollections. But, also that I first red the ‘extension methods’ comment to mean that he was modifying Array.prototype. Thankfully, that’s not the case, which is why you need to call JSLINQ on your collection first.

Personally, I think the ability to query the DOM with this is less useful than the ability to query over data sets, especially since YUI3 already provides pretty rich support (using CSS Selectors built into modern browsers). However, the ability to take an existing list and filter it down using LINQ style expressions can be very useful. YUI3’s NodeList is not an array-like object. There are basically two options.

The following example will get all the anchor tags on a given page which reference internal links (links to the same domain as the page):

JSLINQ(Y.NodeList.getDOMNodes(Y.all('a')))
    .Where(function(item){ return item.href.match(location.host); }
    .Select(funtion(item) { return item; }

Y.all('a[href*=' + location.host + ']');

The second example does require the ‘selector-css3’ submodule to be loaded (it isn’t by default), but it’s a far cleaner syntax for querying the DOM, so the examples of JSLINQ that query the DOM aren’t necessarily the most useful, but if you need to do any client-side filtering or munging of data, LINQ is a really nice syntax for doing that, which is SQL-like, but still unique to your environment. If you’re already familiar with .NET 3.5 and LINQ in that world, then I’d suggest looking at JSLINQ for your projects, it’s familiar, and it looks as though it should work well.

I am a reformed emacs user.

Used it for years, on a dialy basis, as my sole programming environment. Eventually, I got tired of it. It took forever to start up (I didn’t just leave it open), it wasn’t always available, like when booting from a Live CD or something, and it was disturbingly overkill for any need to perform a simple edit on a configuration file. Unfortunately, the default editors that were (and are) on most Linux distributions are dinosaurs like pico or nano, which are downright unpleasant to use.

Oh, sure I’d tried Vi before, but it had seemed so obtuse. A model text editor? Why would I want modes on my text editor? But over time my love for emacs waned. Doing simple things like copying text required mastery of obscure chorded commands, and hardly an incantation existed that didn’t require a half dozen modifier keys. It was originally the desire for a text editor that I didn’t mind opening for quick edits, one that I didn’t feel I needed to marry just to learn to use, that originally drew me to vim.

Soon, switching between entry modes was second nature. The first time I wanted to search, and found it no further away than the Perl regex language…I knew I couldn’t go back.

Then, I found myself out in the workplace, a free software hacker trapped in a Microsoft Ghetto (it’s a big ghetto, don’t get me wrong). Sure, I could have installed Vim on Windows, and I did, but I’ve always found Visual Studio makes for a painful tool when trying to use other editors. Sure, other’s have done it, but it wasn’t worth it for me. However, recently, I’ve decided to refocus on learning vim. In part, because I’m tired of hearing people brag about features of their editors that Vim has had forever, but also because those skills finally translate into my day job, now that there are bindings for Visual Studio 2010 to behave like vim.

Still, there is much to learn. Rob Conery, a former Microsoftie who’s since gone out on his own, has started posting Vim Kata on his blog, an extension of the code kata’s that have gained popularity lately, this is just a repetitive set of instructions you can repeat to get a little better at certain vim commands. Plus, Drew Neil is doing weekly vimcasts, which lack the repetition of the kata’s, but provide great information and more explanation than Conery has.

Lately I’ve also been looking at modules for vim to make it more complete. To help with my recent YUI3 presentation, I started using SnipMate, a port of TextMate’s snippets to vim, creating a custom snippets file for that. I’ve installed the Gist script, to make working with Github Gists easier. I’ve been learning to configure vim so that I automatically get the file formatting rules I want for whatever platform I’m working with.

I won’t say that Vim isn’t a complex editor, and that the modal editing takes some getting used to. However, I will say that since I’ve really worked to learn Vim, I’ve found there is a logic to everything it does, and that my programming has probably gotten faster. Certainly, there is something to be said for the tools in Visual Studio which aid in refactoring, or IntelliSense, which helps make sense of an immensely complicated API. However, ultimately these editors are just text editors, and I’m increasingly convinced that no editor mangles text as efficiently as vim.