JustHumans Financial Models

A number of users have asked about reliability guarantees with JustHumans, a free hosted "form spam reduction" solution for webmasters. If JustHumans were to go down, users would loose the ability to get forms posted for the duration of the outage. This is obviously a problem that needs to be addressed.

JustHumans, while in beta at the moment, is still under active development as we iron out all of the remaining minor kinks. The idea with the project has always been to concentrate on making a 100% functional hosted service that solves real problems for users before thinking about what to do with the service. But users are asking about reliability and I don't believe that problem gets fixed without a financial component.

So we started thinking about financial models that would support JustHumans. After kicking some ideas around for a little bit, I have decided to post them here for public comment. The important thing to remember is these are ideas only. All of this is open to discussion and nothing will be implemented anytime soon. If we were to decide on a strategy and plan to roll something out, nothing would happen without a number of emails to all JustHumans users and at least 6 months of continued free service. The trust of the JustHumans community is far more important to maintain than short term financial gains.

To fix the reliability problem, JustHumans would need to have a financial structure around it that grows with the service. We see three options for this: "good", "better" and "best" for lack of better terms.

The "good" option would be to keep the free system going by having it advertiser supported. Users would complete some simple advertising awareness objective like "Click the RED Skittle" instead of the generic or uploaded pictures the system currently uses. This works well as an idea because users who are filling out forms have a vested interest in getting their form submitted and advertisers have a vested interest in capturing the user's attention. If we were to marry the two by making the user solve a simple puzzle that an advertiser has created, both the user and advertiser get something out of it.

Some webmasters won't like peddling a random advertiser's message, particularly if they are a for-pay site. (and possibly even a direct competitor of some of the advertisers!) For them, the "better" option of the JustHumans service would be a pre-paid account (say $10 to start) that would be charged 2 cents per legitimate post through the system. This way, heavy users would pay more for the service than light users yet the cost would still be small enough for the average not-for-profit to cover. In the event that a user's balance in this pre-paid system were to go to zero, they would automatically switch back to the advertiser supported option above. Emails would go out before the account got in danger of being converted and the user could always recharge their account at any time.

The "best" option would be to purchase the JustHumans code so it can be made to run directly on customer's websites. (ie: Make it no longer a hosted service) This is the only 100% failsafe option in terms of JustHumans reliability. We don't have the code packaged up for sale yet but we were thinking a $500 price tag.

To be clear, we are a long way from actually doing any of the above options. Nothing is decided and everything is open to discussion. We will send an email to all of the JustHumans users about this if we actually decide to put a financial model in effect and give at least 6 months of free service past when we make such an announcement.

We would love to hear from you, our users, about these ideas. Please leave your comments and let us know what you think about them. Would you continue to use the service if it were run in this way? What plan would you likely go with? Do you have a better idea on how to make JustHumans reliable? How could we make this better? comments...

DVDs on AppleTV with Handbrake

The AppleTV is great at playing rented and downloaded movies but leaves you out in the cold with your existing DVD collection. I can rip my Audio CDs into iTunes and play them on my AppleTV but DVDs have no such support.

To remedy this, some say the AppleTV should have had a DVD drive but it is a forward thinking move on Apple's part not to have one. As I mentioned before, physical formats will become a thing of the past. Having a DVD drive in an AppleTV would have sidetracked the whole point of the AppleTV by making it a glorified DVD player. By making the AppleTV unlike anything else in the livingroom, Apple kept the focus on creating a bridge with the computing world with its concept of downloaded files. Five years from now when the DVD collection will be considered "so 2000", Apple's ideas about breaking free of the physical formats will seem commonplace.

But we still need to unlock the those DVD collections and turn them into files that the AppleTV can play. The AppleTV is fairly conservative about what it will play, opting for a maximum of 1280 x 720 MPEG 4 video encoded at no more than at 5 Mbps but this resolution is still far better than the best DVDs out there. So all we need is a way to take those DVDs with their MPEG 2 video files and transcode them into MPEG 4 within the above constraints.

Thankfully, the free program "Handbrake" exists with a built in preset for the AppleTV that takes all the complexity out of doing this. Over the past few months I have been ripping all of my DVDs into files that can be loaded into iTunes and played on the AppleTV. The thought is to rip and eventually throw away all of my DVDs just like I did with my Audio CDs back in 1997.

The process is simple. Start Handbrake and drop in a DVD. When the DVD is recognized, Handbrake will automatically select the largest video which is usually the main feature on the DVD. Pick the "AppleTV" preset from the drawer on the right and then click "Picture Settings..." to check if you need to de-interlace the picture. (Just set it to "fast" if you see frames with blurred lines. The picture will clean up if de-interlacing helped.) Then you click the big "Start" button near the top and wait a while for the process to finish. The result will be a video file that you can drag into iTunes and sync to the AppleTV.


(Screenshot)

This works well for DVDs but what about other video files like the ones you make with your video camera? Shouldn't those be viewable on your AppleTV as well? Thankfully there is another free (but Mac only) program with handy presets for the AppleTV for that as well called VisualHub. Similarly, you drop video clips in just about any format into the main window and select iTunes on the tabs and AppleTV from the pulldown and click "Start". I usually check "H.264 Encoding" and set the quality to "High" as well. The resulting files can be dragged into iTunes and synced to an AppleTV.


(Screenshot)

Now that I have a little system figured out for all of my video media files, I have been on an encoding binge to get everything converted. The problem is that the AppleTV can't store everything I have converted. There is a way to hack your AppleTV to add external USB storage but that is the subject of another post. Additionally, the AppleTV's menu system isn't the most convenient for navigating what will become hundreds of video files. I'm afraid I'm going to have to wait for Apple to figure that one out as they add more and more space to the AppleTV units of the future. I suspect we won't see significantly increased AppleTV space until the menu system for local files becomes more navigable.

The sooner we convert to a world without physical format limitations, the better. You know that whole HD-DVD vs. BlueRay debate? That was so 2000's... comments...

Simulating Weightlessness

Since as early as I can remember, I have always wanted to go into space. Unfortunately, that's about as far as I thought at the time and the whole thing remained just a dream. It wasn't until I got older that I realized that I could have actually done something about it in my life. Of course, had I been smart, I would have joined the military with the goal of becoming an astronaut and had them pay for everything. But apparently I'm not smart. Instead, I'm going to rely on the burgeoning private space industry.

While I can't afford the ~22 million it would take to catch a lift with the Russians to the Space Station, there are other things I can do to prepare for my eventual trip. So this weekend I went to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida and boarded a Boeing 727 with a largely empty interior. We took off of the runway the Space Shuttle lands on and flew out over the Atlantic Ocean into a Military Operating Area some 10 by 100 miles in size. Aside from the 50 or 60 feet of leg room I had, this would have been a normal flight up to this point. But this airplane is certified to do parabolas which mimic varying levels of gravity. Most interestingly, it can give you 30 seconds of weightlessness!

We started out lying on our backs on the floor while the jet pitched into a parabola. We waited through about 45 seconds of 1.8 Gs which felt to me as if I weighed about 320 pounds rather than my regular 180. As we started to crest the first parabola, the jet mimicked the gravitational force of the planet Mars, or 1/3 Earth's gravity. I was roughly 60 pounds at this point so I did a few push-ups - using one hand - and I was able to get well up into the air!

The call came to lie down on the floor again for the troth of the parabola. I was 320 pounds again and stuck to the floor. Once we pulled out, the jet simulated the gravitational force you would feel on the moon, or 1/6 Earth's gravity. I was 30 pounds and so tried my push ups again. This time all I needed was a fingertip or two of one hand and on the last one, I pushed all the way up to a standing position! I tried walking around a little and almost hit my head on the ceiling more than once. Remember those movies of the guys jumping around on the moon?

After another simulation of Moon gravity, we did our first zero gravity simulation. This, of course, was what I had come for. The jet started to crest the parabola and I could feel my weight against the floor slowly roll off to zero. Your tenancy is to push off of the floor as you get up so everyone pretty much inevitably ends up at the ceiling. I was no exception, but the experience was nothing short of spectacular! It was almost exactly as I had imagined it would be. That whole "equal and opposite reaction" stuff that I had thought through for years was brilliantly apparent. Thankfully there were a number of surfaces and hand holds that we could use to arrest any unwanted drift and everyone was clearly elated!



(that's me on the right)

Over the next 11 parabolas we did, all simulating zero gravity, we played with water floating around like globules in front of us, M&Ms disbursed in the air and we even played catch with one another. I was the ball. With the water and the M&Ms, the trick was to get them fairly still floating in front of you and then figure out how to do a Homer Simpson and fly through them eating as you go. I think I only got 2 or 3 M&Ms, mostly because I wasn't using a hand hold.

All in all we had some 6 minutes of weightlessness and one and a half minutes of diminished gravity across 15 parabolas. The jet flew from the bottom of the parabolas at 24,000 feet to the top at 32,000 feet, a difference of roughly 1.5 miles. I estimate that from the "release" point, the jet threw us a little more than half a mile up into the air and let us fall back that half mile before "catching" us.

After romping around in our playground over the Atlantic, we headed back to the Kennedy Space Center, landing again at the Shuttle landing facility runway. At roughly 3 miles long (15,000 feet) it is one of the longest runways in the world though unfortunately there wasn't a window near me. At 3 miles, I don't think you need to use much to stop the airplane though it seemed like a normal landing to me.

I would say of the trip, most significantly I learned that I don't have a "sea sickness" problem with zero gravity. I'm just as happy to be upside down floating around as I am to be stuck to the floor flying straight and level. I had refused the medication before the flight which turns out to have been a great idea. This will come in handy when I eventually make it into space though I probably need to try out how 6 to 8 Gs feels to see how I do with that first.

If you are interested in trying this out, Zero Gravity is the only company in the United States certified to do parabolic flight. You can also do it in Russia though I haven't tried that program. As you would imagine, it isn't cheap but you do get to keep your flight suit at the end. OK, so it is an extremely expensive flight suit! Go try it and leave a comment. comments...

My Cat on Google Maps Street View

Like many cat owners, my cat and I have an intense unspoken relationship. Who knows what's going on in that little pea brain of his? Well I was about to find out.



(Screenshot)

In yet another move to one-up me, I find that "Hobbes" has managed to snagg the limelight of Google Maps Street View fame. Even his classic "and what are you looking at?" pose is in there!

I'd like to take this opportunity to publicly bow out of the competition. He's obviously won. No sense in fighting it. My endorsement is currently up for grabs... comments...

Linux Tutorial: Deploying OpenSer Under Heartbeat v2.0

heartbeat (or more formally, Linux-HA) provides application monitoring with the ability to restart or migrate a service (like OpenSER) and dependent resources (like IP addresses) to other machines in the event of a failure. Typically a monitoring process returns the status of a resource. (can be as simple as a ping or as complex as a full fledged application level test) In the event of a failure, a tree of services (typically the IP alias and the service that runs on top of it) are restarted or migrated to a new, more desirable node.

The Linux-HA project started as a simple process monitoring and failover application that didn't take service hierarchy into account among other things. Version 2 of Linux-HA was major rewrite of the application which added hierarchically defined services and used the industry standard OCF definition to describe service monitoring tools and dependency trees. read more...

Linux Tutorial: A Machine with Two IPs in the Same Subnet on Gentoo

This is the first in a hopefully long series exposing some internal configuration challenges I have come up against over time. Hopefully it will help other people with similar issues.

While building out a number of Linux based server farms, I ran into several interesting Linux networking configuration based architecture issues. In many of our setups, we have each machine connected to two separate switches. If one switch / Ethernet cable / Ethernet port goes down, the other one takes over. The thought was to initially do this with OSPF but while the idea worked, it didn't play out well in the real world. So we found other ways of migrating traffic from Ethernet port to Ethernet port.

The simplest way to do this was to move IP aliases from device to device but we ran into issues if the primary address on both Ethernet interfaces were within the same IP subnet. The kernel would always choose one of the interfaces to source traffic regardless of which IP the traffic was "from". As it turns out, the kernel consults the routing table to find the device to use to send a packet and the destination address was all that was being used to pick the device. Because the default route is on exactly one device, that device was being used to send all traffic, regardless if that device had the IP we were sending from or not. I needed a way to take the source into consideration before selecting which interface to use to send a packet.

Read on to see how this is done. read more...

Flash on the iPhone

It is amazing to me how many people complain that the iPhone doesn't (yet) support Flash. What major mobile phone does?! I find this interesting because it reveals that people really see the iPhone's web browser as a real "full featured" web browser. Gone are the days of the "mini mobile web". People want to see the same web on their mobile as they do on their desktop. How did this happen?

I propose this happened when Apple rewrote people's expectation of what a mobile device could be. I don't remember hearing people complain about the lack of flash on the Blackberry before the iPhone came out. It is hard to ignore how much the rules have changed in the mobile marketplace since the debut of the iPhone.

Personally, I don't miss Flash on the iPhone. I use the FlashBlock plugin in FireFox on my desktop and laptop computers because most uses of Flash on the web are pointless and annoying. FlashBlock replaces Flash presentations with a little button that allows me to click it if I really want to see that presentation. I rarely end up clicking it. This is particularly useful when trying to read stories on websites overwhelmed with blinking Flash ads. FlashBlock is roughly akin to pressing the escape key in a browser to halt GIF animations back in the day.

So I guess I only want Flash on the iPhone if I can turn it off. That probably won't happen so I say forget Flash. OK, its a minority opinion but then again I suppose I'm not the most mainstream guy in the world. comments...

JustHumans Adds Field Sorting

JustHumans.com, the free picture based CAPCHA system for webmasters, has released an upgrade that provides form field sorting. Fields are now sorted in alphabetical order but users can also specify their own custom sort order. If you have a website and are plagued by form spam, you should look at JustHumans! comments...

HD Movie Rental Experience on the Apple TV

Last night I rented Pirates of the Caribbean in HD on my Apple TV and the experience was fantastic. The movie was playable about 10 minutes after I started downloading it. For an HD movie, I thought this was reasonable. I could imagine having a bunch of friends over, selecting an HD movie, spending 10 minutes getting popcorn and drinks ready and then starting the movie. Of course it isn't as convenient as having the movie start instantly but then again there isn't 30 Megabit Fiber in my neighborhood yet either.

I wondered if the movie would actually be in 720p or 1080p / 1080i format, but given that the Apple TV Tech Specs list a maximum resolution of 1280 x 720 at 5 Mbps, I think I have my answer. It didn't matter much in my case as my projector is only capable of 720p anyway but it is somewhat disconcerting that 1080p doesn't seem to be on Apple's To-Do list. Of course a 1080p movie rental would be quite a bit more to download, not to mention that it would probably be down-converted to 720p by the majority of consumers watching it anyway, but I still wish the Apple TV could do Main / High 1080p at 20 Mbits. My home videos are at that rate, so why shouldn't I be able to watch them in full resolution through my AppleTV? It won't be long before I get a 1080p projector so it looks like I'll be switching sources for the foreseeable future.

Apple's 720p restriction makes sense in light of movie rentals though movie rentals presumably weren't in the picture when the Apple TV was first designed. In hindsight it was a good restriction because the bandwidth is cheaper on 720p HD movie rentals. Come to think of it, HD movie rentals will probably be in 720p industry-wide for a long time to come. Because of this though, the Apple TV restricts all of your 1080i home videos as well. Either you down-convert your home movies or the Apple TV isn't your media center. I don't know, perhaps it isn't so important for people. I can't see Apple being able to differentiate a "Higher-Def" Apple TV enough to make it a viable product. Perhaps it just doesn't matter enough, but we'll see. comments...

AppleTV 2.0 Game Changer

Apple just released a free software update to the AppleTV supporting movie rentals. (among other things) This will probably be enough of a game changer for me to finally cancel my cable TV service. I get all the major networks in HD over the air and I don't really watch enough TV to justify my cable bill anyway so cable television is making less and less sense. I think given my HD TiVo and my AppleTV, I'll have home entertainment covered. The only thing keeping me connected to the cable company is Internet service. (funny how that worked out!) I can solve that by either a long distance WiFi connection to work or by getting another T1. (T1s are cheap these days) It is too bad FIOS (Fiber) isn't an option in my neighborhood! comments...