Recently, Google took the reduction of privacy a little further by allowing you to setup a web site badge for Latitude. Up until this point, you could only share your location with select friends, however, now you can share it with the whole world via your website, blog, etc. I do use this, so you can spy on my location if you wish.

But to the privacy elements shall we… When you generate a badge, Google gives you a snippet of HTML code that looks like this:

<!-- Google Public Location Badge -->
<iframe src="http://www.google.com/latitude/apps/badge/api?user=1234567890&type=iframe&maptype=roadmap" width="180" frameborder="0" height="300"></iframe>
<!-- To disable location sharing, you *must* visit http://www.google.com/latitude/apps/badge and disable the Google Public Location badge. Removing this code snippet is not enough! -->

This works fine as is if you place it on your site, however, that number there (1234567890) is actually your API “username” and given inspecting this from your site, any user could simply place your position on their site or access the API by other programmatic methods. Notice Google’s warning that to disable it, you have to disable the badge globally via their site, but what if you just don’t want some people using your badge or plan to put it on a password protected area of your site… This is where a little privacy can help.

What I did for my site is use some PHP code to add a layer of abstraction to the Google Latitude API. It requests the content server side and displays it without ever revealing my Latitude user id. I then include my own PHP page within an iframe just as i would have the Google snippet and that’s it. Here is the simple PHP code to do this:

location.php

<?php
 
$url = "http://www.google.com/latitude/apps/badge/api?user=1234567890&type=iframe&maptype=roadmap";
 
$content = file_get_contents($url);
print $content;
?>

The resulting PHP page will generate a map that fills the entire browser. Then simply add an iframe that references that PHP script and your desired width and height and boom, no one can inspect your user id and you have added a little privacy back to Google Latitude.

<iframe src="location.php" width="650" frameborder="0" height="480"></iframe>

P.S. For the advanced users out there you can also do some creative things with the “$content” object within PHP such as inject your own CSS or even remove elements of the badge that you don’t want on your site since Google gives very limited customization to this.

I recently decided to adopt Trac for my development for Hydra Labs, as well as for my personal and school projects. Trac is a Python powered development tool that includes a wiki, ticketing system, and source browser. Trac focuses on being very transparent and does not require a large process to begin using it. Additionally, it is extremely extendable using a vast array of plugins available from the Trac-Hacks site.

My environment required a few moderate customizations because I wanted to have global authentication so that once I create an account to login to one of my projects, it would be valid for all the other ones. Also I needed to integrate authentication and authorization for the Subversion repository as well.

In Part 2 of this article, I will describe the complete setup process I went through to get this installed and customized to the needs of my projects.

For anyone that has not talked to me in the past few weeks, I wanted to let you know that I officially accepted an offer to work for Cisco Systems in San Jose, CA. I will be starting there this summer in June. I will be entering through the Cisco Choice Program as a Software Engineer which I will explain in a little more detail below.

Before starting work, Dad, William, and I will be taking a cross country road trip (similar to the one I took to get to California for my internship last summer) This time we will be taking the more southern route to get a different view along the way. Of course pictures of the trip and progress will be posted.

Now on to the details about Cisco Choice…

Cisco Choice for full time is very similar to the process of my internship in that I will get to select the department I wish to work with. The main difference this time is we are armed with a little more information. With the internship you are picking with a more limited view of the group based on a summary provided for each group participating. For full time the process is much more in depth.

It starts out with a week of introductions and presentations by the various groups and managers. Week 2 allows us to interview potential groups we are interested and get an idea of what some of the interesting projects they are working on. Finally you select the top several choices and after Week 3 you start working with that group.

Now all that is left is to finish one more semester at Purdue. Here is hoping that Senioritis doesnt kick in too early ;-)

It first zoomed into Purdue which made sense to me. In fact it was disturbingly accurate for not having an on board GPS…

What did surprise me was that a few moments later it suddenly zoomed out and panned over to California where it proceeded to zoom in to my apartment from this summer’s internship.

Of course, while I like to think my iPod has the same idea i have in mind, there is actually a logical explanation for this. iPods and iPhones (the ones without GPS) can actually determine your location based on wireless access points. (The complete details I am not fully aware of but that is the general concept) What seems to be happening here is my iPod is used to seeing my access point (which was with me in California) and therefore is not sure where I am. So when it sees other access points here it jumps from mine to them and therefore goes back and forth between locations. An interesting effect. I do wonder how long it will take it to realize that my access point did in fact travel with me back to Purdue…

Here we go (attempted to keep in order of occurrence):

1. Accepted internship with Cisco
2. Road trip across the country (to get to Cisco in San Jose)
3. Visited Garden of the Gods
4. Climbed to the top of Pikes Peak (well, drove to the top)
5. Visited Las Vegas
6. Got a tour of the Googleplex
7. Spent 2 days in Yosemite National Park
8. Went to the Google I/O Conference
9. Visited the Mystery Spot
10. Visited San Francisco
11. Got my laptop stolen (from a locked trunk) in San Francisco
12. Traveled the 17 Mile Drive in Monterey
13. Redesigned Hydra Labs web site (work in progress)
14. Got hired by Cisco to work through the school year
15. Vacationed at Deep Creek Lake in Maryland
16. Released 1.2.0 of Dtella
17. Wrote this post

Time it took me to do all this: 13 weeks! Lets see if I can keep up this momentum as I head back to school…

I installed VMware Workstation on my new laptop so that I can test applications i develop on various platforms. The first one I decided to try on it was Ubuntu 8.04 which was just released a few days ago. The results were amazing. Not only did VMware perform exceedingly well on my system, the entire installation of Ubuntu took under 10 minutes to complete.

Once i rebooted the virtual OS, performance was on par with my native windows OS. There was no lagging or other issues I used to find in virtualization. And while I have always been a RHEL / CentOS guy, this latest release of Ubuntu is proving to be quite functional out of the box. Package management is a breeze with built-in tools for adding and removing applications from the online repositories. The other element that I appreciated is Ubuntu’s small disk footprint. It starts out with the essentials and allows you to add on as necessary and thus a standard desktop install only uses 2.4GB.

Will i be using VMware more now? Absolutely! Will Ubuntu replace my beloved RHEL and CentOS on my servers? Doubt it. While it proves to be a nice desktop environment, there is still more support for RPM based packages on the Red Hat architecture. But who knows, as Ubuntu becomes more and more popular on desktops it may one day overtake Red Hat as the dominant distribution for servers.

Last night, Google launched App Engine which allows developers to create web applications and publish them on Google’s infrastructure. The exciting part of the App Engine in my eyes is that the language you use to develop on it is Python. Google provides many API’s to interface the Python programming language with the various services they offer. You can authenticate via Google accounts, use Bigtable to store data, and use Google Aps to bind your application to your own domain. They opened the initial “Preview Release” to the first 10,000 developers to sign up. From the looks of it, those 10,000 spots filled up within the first few hours of the launch.

I was fortunate to be one of the first to sign up and got my account last night. I created a basic hello world application to test and overall the system seems very easy to use. My demo is at http://labs.appspot.com.

I also created an account for the PyAMF project and we were able to get a PyAMF echo server running on App Engine. It is currently located at: http://ae.pyamf.org We are continuing to work with it today and tomorrow to write up some examples and a How-to to get people started quickly. We will continue to add more examples to the site as time progresses and we get everything documented.

The most noticeable addition to Hydra recently has been the addition of the Flex UI. Flex is an open source Flash framework from Adobe that allows for rapid development of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Behind the Flex UI is the powerful Twisted framework that powers the data back end. Communication between Flex and Twisted is handled by the PyAMF library. PyAMF is an implementation of Adobe’s Action Message Format (AMF) for Python. This library allows for data to be exchanged in a binary form which is many times faster than the traditional XML mechanism.

Enough talk, lets get to the show! Here is a shot of the CPE LiveGrid module from Hydra. LiveGrid handles adding, searching, modifying, and deleting of CPE’s and assets withing the system. This module was originally based on an XML API, however, after changing to PyAMF speeds over doubled when running:

The second example here is of the CPE LiveDiag module. This allows for real time graphing and analysis of a CPE’s performance in the network and will allow network administrators to make faster diagnostics when problems occur. This module was also a port from its original XML interface to the PyAMF library:

These are just a few of the new interfaces coming in the release of Hydra EMS.

1. ETG – Emerging Technology Group
Creates solutions in new and adjacent markets built around advanced video, voice, and data communications.

2. CDO Ops
Enhance productivity and operating efficiency in the CDO organization, improve hardware and software quality across Cisco products and systems

3. NMTG – Network Management Technology Group
Implements network management solutions capability for Cisco products and supporting key Cisco markets.

I am hoping for Emerging Technology as it sounds like they work with a diverse range of technologies and are always on the bleeding edge of development and technology.