Joe@Nitobi

September 10th, 2007

I have a hobby of hacking the firmware on the Linksys WRT54G. I originally started doing it because I wanted to learn about how Embedded Linux worked, and I thought it was cool that it could run Linux. That’s how I got introduced to the Community Wireless movement.

Basically, the problem with the DIY Community Wireless hacking is that you’d have to either take off the shelf routers, flash them (and void your warantee) and then hope that you got something working. Then you can write applications for it like WifiDog, or various Mesh Networking Applications such as Optimised Link State Routing. This was great, but it ran into two big problems:

1. It’s hard to convince someone to run a hacked Linksys router in their home, because it looks sketchy
2. You’re at the whim of the manufacturer, who may not like that you can extend your hardware, or may change the hardware randomly or End of Life(EOL) it because they can make something that is cheaper.

In fact, the original Linksys WRT54G was changed after Version 4.0 to run vxworks because it took less processing power, voltage and memory to do what they wanted than they needed from their prior cookie-cutter design. Also, Netgear also discontinued the WGT634U because of similar logic. The reason I mention the WGT634U router is because that is what MIT Roofnet originally used to build the prototypes for what is now Meraki Mesh.

After BarCamp and talking to Boris at Bryght, I decided to buy some Meraki hardware. Now, I was expecting some unmarked boxes, and the devices to be large, but I was very suprised to find a branded box, like what you would find in FutureShop, and a very small device. Not only that, but it is extremely user friendly. I was also impressed with the range of the device. I put one in my Window at my apartment, and it seems to have a 100m (about 300 ft) range. Now, this is important, since the way mesh works is that you put a bunch of mesh nodes out into the world, and they route between each other to the nearest gateway node, the node with the least latency.

When I compare the Meraki out-of-the-box solution to the alternative, which is the Freifunk OLSR, there’s really no comparison for how easy it is to use. I think that Meraki has a very interesting project and it’s worth testing out. The main advantage of us testing out mesh is obvious, since we can facilitate a test bed for Ajax components in mobile devices right outside our window. With the release of the iPhone and the iPod touch (more importantly the iPod Touch, since we’re in Canada), content that is dynamic, and takes advantage of both geography, as well as the various user agents, is critical to providing a user experience like nothing else.

With more and more mobile devices equipped with Wifi for mass adoption, it just makes sense to at least play with the stuff. I’ll have pictures up here soon of us playing with the hardware!

Posted in General, Linux, UI, mesh, FtN | 1 Comment »

July 5th, 2007

Even though we’re doing a lot of work in Ruby on Rails, and we blog about it a lot, we don’t sell a back-end for it. So the question that people may ask is how do we use our Components with Rails?

Here’s some information on how I’m using Rails with the current version of Grid. In Rails, you can use Builder to create XML, so the first thing that I am going to create is a grid controller. In that grid controller, I define a getHandler method, which looks like this:

What this does is use the paginate function to do some pagination of the table. We set the PageSize using the Nitobi Grid’s PageSize paramater, and we use the SortColumn and the SortDirection coming into the function from the grid to determine the column sorting.

I then have a view (rxml) that looks like this:

This is very basic. I’m just starting out with builder, so I don’t have the Error Handler here. I suppose that I should have that there, but I don’t know what will happen if its nil. (I suspect it will break). That’s definitely something I’m going to have to ask around about.

And, I make sure that I have the getHandler set in the Grid Definition like this:

Of course, I make sure to include grid and toolkit. Once this is all done, I have a grid that can load. I still have to get the savehandler working on Rails, but this should be enough to get started with Rails. If I find any interesting interactions with Grid, Toolkit and Prototype, I’ll post them here.

Posted in Grid, Rails, UI | 1 Comment »

June 24th, 2007

I just finished hacking a bunch of Infrared LED lights, and here is a picture of the results:

So, this is a picture of my hand. This picture was taken by an off the shelf webcam that I modified to only pick up IR light. My hand is touching a piece of acrylic which has LEDs lighting the edges of it. When my hand touches the Acrylic, this causes the tips of my hand and the heel of my palm to form white blobs which can then be tracked by software. This is called FTIR. I now have a multi-touch interface, similar to the Microsoft Surface sitting at my home. The best part about it is that it’s cost me less than $400 to make. This touch screen is very similar to what Jeff Han is doing at his company, Perceptive Pixel.

This is mentioned on this blog because I think this changes everything. This is evident because of the upcoming release of the iPhone, which is also multi-touch. I think with devices like the table that I built (using instructions from multitouch.nl), Microsoft Surface and the iPhone, onclick may become antiquated. Of course someone already made something for Flash, so I guess that means that Adobe is already prepared for this, but what about the rest of us??

It’s definitely food for thought. I’ll be posting updates about the table to this blog, so stay tuned!

Posted in UI | No Comments »