Tag: fun

another fun project: digipass

As a customer of digitec, I often deal with their collection notices which I get via email and which invite me to go to their store and fetch my order (yes. I could have the goods delivered, but I’m impatient and not willing to pay the credit card surcharge).

Ever since Passbook happened on iOS 6, I wished for these collection notices to be iOS Passes as they have a lot of usability benefits:

  • passes are location aware an pop up automatically when you get close to the location
  • Wallet automatically turns the screen brightness all the way up
  • passes could potentially be updated remotely
  • once added to the Wallet, passes don’t clutter your mailbox and you’ll never lose them in the noise of your inbox.

So my latest fun project is digipass.

Next time you get a digitec collection notice, just forward it to

digipass@pilif.me

After a few seconds, you will get the same collection notice again, but with the PDF replaced by an iOS Wallet pass that you can add to your Wallet.

I have slightly altered the logo and the name to make it clear that there’s no affiliation to digitec.

The pass will be geo-coded to the correct store, so it will automatically pop up as you get close to the store.

As I don’t want access to your digitec account and because digitec doesn’t have any kind of API, I unfortunately can’t automatically remove the pass when your fetch your order – that’s something only digitec can do.

The source code for the server is available under the MIT license.

Disclaimer:

  • I’m not affiliated with digitec aside of being a customer of theirs. If they want me to shut this down, I will.
  • I am not logging the collection notices you’re forwarding me. If you don’t trust me, you can self-host, or redact the notice to contain nothing but the URLs (I need these in order to build the pass).
  • This is a fun project. If it’s down, it’s down. If it doesn’t work, submit a pull request. Don’t expect any support
  • The LMTP daemon powering this is running in my home. I have a very good connection, but I also have not signed an SLA or anything. If it’s down, it’s down (the message will get queued though).
  • The moment I see this being abused, it will be shut down. Just like my previous email based fun project

A new fun project

Like back in 2010 I went to JSConf.eu this year around.

One of the many impressive facts about JSConf is the quality of their Wifi
connection. It’s not just free and stable, it’s also fast. Not only that, this
time around, they had a very cool feature: You authenticated via twitter.

As most of the JS community seems to be having twitter accounts anyways, this
was probably the most convenient solution for everyone: You didn’t have to
deal with creating an account or asking someone for a password and on the
other hand, the organizers could make sure that, if abuse should happen,
they’d know whom to notify.

On a related note: This was in stark contrast to the WiFi I had in the hotel
which was unstable, slow and cost a ton of money to use and it didn’t use
Twitter either :-)

In fact, the twitter thing was so cool to see in practice, that I want to use
it for myself too.

Since the days of WEP-only Nintendo DS, I’m running two WiFi networks at home:
One is WPA protected and for my own use, the other is open, but it runs over
a different interface on shion
which has no access to any other machine in my network. This is even more
important as I have a permanent OpenVPN connection
to my office and I definitely don’t want to give the world access to that.

So now the plan would be to change that open network so that it redirects to a
captive portal until the user has authenticated with twitter (I might add
other providers later on – LinkedIn would be awesome for the office for
example).

In order for me to actually get the thing going, I’m doing a tempalias on this
one too and keep a diary of my work.

So here we go. I really think that every year I should do some fun-project
that’s programming related, can be done on my own and is at least of some use.
Last time it was tempalias, this time, it’ll be
Jocotoco (more about the name in the next installment).

But before we take off, let me give, again, huge thanks to the JSConf crew for
the amazing conference they manage to organize year after year. If I could,
I’d already preorder the tickets for next year :p

Attending a JSConf feels like a two-day drug-trip that lasts for at least two
weeks.

tempalias.com – Public launch

After announcing tempalias.com here on my blog and sleeping over it, hoping the live server wouldn’t die over night, last friday I first implemented a garbage collection facility to prune expired aliases and then publicly announced tempalias.com on both Haker News and Reddit.

The echo was overall positive and in the first two hours after the announcment, I fixed a lot of small things based upon suggestions of people posting to my announcement:

During the first day after its announcement, I had 4700 visits and in the second day it was still 1403 which might be some indication of the service being used by some people. As of right now, there are 652 valid aliases in redis.

During peak time, I got around 20 concurrent requests which the server handled easily (load of 0.01).

What was most interesting to me was that the announcement also generated quite a bit of traffic (3000 visits, so 75% conversion from the service to the blog which is nice) on this blog here and what I liked even more was the fact that the various entries in my development diary were read and sometimes commented upon which in turn lead to, drumroll please, 3 more twitter followers.

The project on github now has 22 watchers and on release day has seen 1496 page views according to their stats.

One question I was asked a lot is why I was writing an SMTP proxy instead of just hooking into an existing MTA. In retrospect, I was a bit unclear when I stated in the first entry of the diary:

Of course this old solution had one big problem: It required a mail server on the receiving end and it required you as a possible user to hook the script into that mailserver (also, I never managed to do just that with exim before losing interest, but by now, I would probably know how to do it).

My reasoning behind writing a proxy was the fact that I wanted you, my dear reader to fetch the source code and experiment with it or even host your own clone of tempalias.com. You should be able to do so with minimal effort, hence the solution should be as self-contained as possible without requiring a lot of infrastructure. Relying on a specific mail server would have severely limited the size of the audience, especially as the mail server I would have written the plugin for was to be Exim which isn’t that widely used these days.

Then, there’s another reason: As a long-time mail server administrator, I know that it is imperative to fork as little as possible during mail delivery. Hooking this into an existing mail server would have meant the server to fork for each incoming email, only to ultimately reject it in most of the cases as tempalias is much more about rejecting email than it is about delivering it.

No. Using the awesome performance of Node.js to reject tons and tons of email relying on any SMTP server as a smarthost only if needed felt more robust and easier to access for my readers. Hence I went the SMTP proxy route.

So. Am I happy with the launch?

Yes. I was able to make a service that is useful to some people. I was able to learn node.js from the inside out. I got to know some really bright developers in the process and I was able to contribute to open source projects.

On a personal level though, I would have hoped that spending 44 hours in developing an useful (and good looking) web service in a quite unknown but really sexy programming environment, documenting the steps in the process would have yielded a bit more social interaction with the community than a whole three twitter followers.

Maybe I should have stated my goal more clearly:

You should follow me on twitter here.

(this was a friendly nod to an article of the same name by Dustin Curtis, a person obviously way better in marketing than I will ever be)

Next time: Bookmarklet fun!

Double-blind cola test

The final analysis

Two of my coworkers decided today after lunch that it was time to solve the age-old question: Is it possible to actually detect different kinds of cola just by tasting them.

In the spirit of true science (and a hefty dose of Mythbusters), we decided to do this the right way and to create a double blind test. The idea is that not only the tester has to not know the different test subjects, but also the person administering the test to make sure that the tester is not influenced in any way.

So here’s what we have done:

  1. We bought 5 different types of cola: A can of coke light, a can of standard coke, a PET bottle of standard coke, a can of coke zero and finally, a can of the new Red Bull cola (in danger of spoiling the outcome: eek).
  2. We marked five glasses with numbers from 1 to 5 at the bottom.
  3. We asked a coworker not taking part in the actual test to fill the glasses with the respective drink.
  4. We put the glasses on our table in random order and designated each glasses position with letters from A to E.
  5. One after another, we drank the samples and noted which glass (A-E) we thought to contain what drink (1-5). As to not influence ourselves during the test, the kitchen area was off-limits for everyone but the test subject and each persons results where to be kept secret until the end of the test.
  6. We compared notes.
  7. We checked the bottom of the glasses to see how we fared.

The results are interesting:

  • Of the four people taking part in the test, all but one person guessed all types correctly. The one person who failed wasn’t able to correctly distinguish between bottled and canned standard coke.
  • Everyone instantly recognized the Red Bull Cola (no wonder there, it’s much brighter than the other contenders and it smells like cough medicine)
  • Everyone got the coke light and zero correctly.
  • Although the tester pool was way too small, it’s interesting that 75% of the testers were able to discern the coke in the bottle from the coke in the can – I would not have guessed that, but then, there’s only a 50% chance to be wrong on this one – we may all just have been lucky – at least I was, to be honest.

Fun in the office doing pointless stuff after lunch, I guess.

My favourite asterisk feature

I’ve just included this into the context of the dialplan where the calls from and to our internal phones live.

[intercom]
exten => _55[6-8][1-9],1,SIPAddHeader("Call-Info: sip:asterisk;answer-after=0")
exten => _55[6-8][1-9],2,Dial(SIP/${EXTEN:2})

this is as useless as it is fun.

Too bad softphones are getting some real attention in the office lately, as they don’t support the answer-after feature and even if they did, where is the fun of just making yourself heard on the headphones of the victim as opposed to doing that directy on their speaker – loud enough to be heard in the whole office.

VoIP is fun and it’s about time I do more to our asterisk config but just watch it work and never fail.