Andrew Munsell

Mapping Ebola with D3

Ebola has been a big topic in the news lately, but just how bad is it, and how quickly is it spreading? As a part of a web programming course in the iSchool at the University of Washington, I developed an interactive visualization of the 2014 spread of the disease using D3 and web technologies.

View the Visualization

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Microsoft Band

Shortly after the sync applications were leaked early, Microsoft officially unveiled their latest wearable product-- the Microsoft Band. The Band is not a smartwatch, but rather a fitness centered wearable device with several smartwatch-like features. The device's claim to fame comes from its unique blend of 10 sensors that constantly input data and send it up to Microsoft's new Health platform.

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Remote Access to ReadyNAS with ZeroTier One

I recently purchased a diskless ReadyNAS 104 device from Netgear and filled it with a trio of WD Red 3 TB drives for my personal file storage. In this configuration, the NAS has a capacity of approximately 6 TB (one of the disks is used for parity), and houses backups of my files, photos, and home videos.

But, considering the device is attached to my apartment's WiFi network, it's not so useful outside of the premises. Netgear provides a client application called "ReadyNAS Remote", which provides remote access to the NAS device presumably by relaying your traffic through one of their servers. However, this can be slow and potentially a security concern. As an alternative, I compiled ZeroTier One, a mesh VPN, to connect to my NAS remotely.

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Getting Started with Panamax: Creating an Internet-Accessible App

The world of Docker has had some very exciting releases lately. From the self-hosted PaaS Flynn having their first beta release, to the 1.0-and-beyond release of Docker itself, to the new Docker web UI from CenturyLink called Panamax and based on CoreOS, Docker has become easier to use for newcomers.

Today, I'll briefly go over how to setup and use one of these tools--Panamax--and create your own application template to produce a fully internet-accessible web application that requires zero configuration.

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HSTS: Enforced HTTPS

Though HTTPS has been an option for my site for a little while now, I haven't enforced it outside of various commerce related pages (e.g. the shopping cart). Starting now, not only is HTTPS required to browse my site, I've enabled the HSTS header to ensure that unencrypted connections are never allowed.

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Setup Hack and HHVM on Digital Ocean

PHP is an interesting language, and to many it is considered a language that is archaic and badly designed. In fact, I largely agree that PHP's design is not optimal, but there is no other language in the world that is both easy to learn and deployable on almost any shared hosting service so easily. This is changing, but for now, PHP is here to stay.

By design, PHP does not have explicit typing-- a variable can be any type, and can change to any type at any time. This is in stark contrast to other languages, such as Apple's Swift, Java, and many others. Depending on your background, you may consider PHP's lack of explicit typing to be dangerous.

Not only this, but PHP is not the most performant language by any means. You can see this for yourself in TechEmpower's famous framework benchmarks. These results clearly show that PHP is at or near the bottom of the pile, being beat outright by languages such as Java and Go.

So, how do you make one of the most popular languages in the world for web applications usable again? Many say that PHP simply needs to be killed off entirely, but Facebook disagrees.

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Looking Through Glass

Over the course of two days in a relatively quiet area of south Seattle, one of the biggest companies in technology took over a quiet building called Sodo Park.

The space, a small, old looking building, is commonly used for events such as weddings, holiday parties, and other corporate gatherings. From the outside, it wasn't apparent anything was occurring at all-- only a few lone parking signs across the street gave any hint of the company's presence. But as you walked to the front door, flanked by a couple employees in nondescript black T-Shirts, it was apparent that this was more than just a "corporate event."

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Install and Secure RethinkDB on DigitalOcean

RethinkDB is a distributed document-store database that is focused on easy of administration and clustering. RethinkDB also features functionality such as map-reduce, sharding, multi-datacenter functionality, and distributed queries. Though the database is relatively new, it has been funded and is moving quickly to add new features and a Long Term Support release.

One major issue still remains with RethinkDB, however-- it's relatively difficult to secure properly unless you have security group or virtual network functionality from your hosting provider (a la Amazon Web Services Virtual Private Cloud, security groups, etc.). For example, RethinkDB's web administration interface is completely unsecured when exposed to the public Internet, and the clustering port does not have any authentication mechanisms. Essentially, this means that if you have an exposed installation of RethinkDB, anyone can join your database cluster and run arbitrary queries.

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The Fight for Wireless Power

Nowadays, it's rare that a technology direct from science fiction makes it to a household appliance before your smartphone or laptop. For example, fingerprint scanners, common in some industrial and high-security applications, finally appeared in several laptops, the Motorola Photon, and most recently the iPhone 5S. But wireless charging has been integrated into electronic toothbrushes for over a decade, and yet we've seen a minimal number of consumer devices integrated with the technology.

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Introducing Jekyll Themes

The past week I've been busy with a small project of mine that I've been planning on getting off the ground since March of last year-- Jekyll Themes. Jekyll Themes is a repository for authors to list themes and pre-built templates for the Jekyll static site generator.

While I've previously written about how to create a Jekyll website from scratch, a lot of developers or bloggers don't necessarily want to spend the time designing or creating a website from a blank canvas. Thankfully, there are a lot of great themes out there, but many of theme are spread throughout individual GitHub pages and projects. Hopefully, with Jekyll Themes, the themes scattered across the internet can be consolidated into a single listing where they are tagged by their color scheme, responsive-ness, or other attributes.

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Kraken.io - Image Optimization Web Service

Kraken is a web service designed to perform a similar function to desktop based applications such as ImageOptim. For as little as $7 a month (for half-a-gigabyte of images processed a month), you can have Kraken.io process your images and compress them. Alternatively, you can use their free web service by uploading files individually. The service works significantly faster than ImageOptim because of the powerful servers that they use to crunch your images.

But, how does it compare to the desktop equivalent?

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Using Jekyll For Blazing Fast Websites

When I first started my blog, I used Tumblr. I didn't choose it for the social integration or community, but rather to offload the management of servers to a third party.

My decision was justified when one of my posts, Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous, hit the top spot of Hacker News. Over the course of two days, over 22,000 visitors visited my post. It's common to see the servers of front page Hacker News posts struggle or even go down entirely due to the surge of traffic, but thanks to Tumblr, my website stayed online the entire time.

But while Tumblr was resilient to sudden surges in traffic, the service has had its struggles and periodically went offline. There's several huge, day long gaps in my Analytics-- a sign I need to move to another platform.

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Deploying the Right Way: Dokku on Digital Ocean

While I've previously gone over development environments using Vagrant and Puppet, recent advancements in LXC container management (see: Docker) and applications that have popped up using this technology have made deploying to staging or production environments easier-- and cheaper.

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Nike's Missed Opportunity

In February of 2012, Nike released the Nike+ FuelBand-- a sleek, discreet wristband that tracks your everyday activities and awards you "NikeFuel points", a proprietary metric designed to consolidate different types of activities into a universal standard. With competitors such as FitBit already gone through several iterations of high-tech wearable pedometers, Nike needed to develop a device that worked well, and looked good.

The original FuelBand received mixed reviews, with many users complaining about reliability over time. Despite the hardware issues, Nike's FuelBand was a solid entry into the "Quantified Self" movement that seems to be increasing in popularity.

Fast forward a year and a half, and the second generation Nike+ FuelBand SE device is nearly available for public consumption. But, with only small improvements in tracking and an update to the Bluetooth 4.0 standard, Nike has missed a valuable opportunity to differentiate themselves in the expanding field of wearable electronics, and instead spent over a year creating a minor iteration of its existing device.

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iOS 7's Design is Confused

Today, Apple unveiled the newest version of iOS 7. While the fact that the design was changed radically is not surprising, the actual changes themselves are…confusing.

With Windows (Phone), Xbox, Google, and various other companies taking a "flatter" approach to UI design, it only makes sense that Apple would want to follow the trend of simplicity-- especially now that Scott Forstall, the guy known for the skeuomorphic design elements present in previous versions of iOS. After all, that is what Apple strives for (especially in their hardware).

iOS 7 directly reflects the transition from Forstall to Ive's rule over iOS, but are the changes truly an improvement?

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PNG vs. WebP Image Formats

Previously, we went over how the new WebP image format compared to the traditional JPG. One neat thing about WebP is that, unlike JPG or PNG, WebP has the ability to use either lossy or lossless compression, with or without transparency. While JPG is traditionally used to display photos, which have a high level of detail and are generally more complex and can suffer from a little bit of detail loss as a tradeoff for compression, WebP can also be used like a PNG, which is often used for web graphics with transparency or subtle patterns.

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JPG vs. WebP Image Formats

There are several kinds of file formats for images on the web. Primarily, web developers use JPG and PNG image files, depending on the content of the image itself. However, Google has made a push recently to use a new format-- called WebP-- that is supposedly more efficient than JPG, yet still has the ability to have transparency. In other words, WebP is the best of both JPG and PNG file formats-- but does it really reduce image file sizes?

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Taking the Work Out of Optimization: Using Mod_Pagespeed

Since I originally moved my blog to the Jekyll platform, I've been looking for several ways to push the performance of my website further.

Over the last couple of months, I've been exploring several content distribution networks for my new web course Extreme Website Performance, such as CloudFlare and Amazon's CloudFront, as well as forgoing a CDN altogether and focusing on reducing the number of network requests used (and therefore taking the bottleneck away from the distribution servers).

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Multiple Gradients in CSS

Recently, a Redditor asked whether it was possible to create a background that looked like this UI mockup by Mike from Creative Mints.

In fact, it's quite easy to do so using multiple background images in CSS. The following solution requires no images, though it does require a browser to support multiple background images and radial CSS gradients.

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Now is the Future

I've had an iPhone for about a year and a half now, after previously owning a Windows Phone and Palm Pre. Each time I switch platforms, there's something I miss from my previous experiences, and something I long for in a platform I haven't tried yet. For me, Google Now for Android was this feature that I so desperately wanted to try.

A couple of weeks ago, Google released an update for the Google Search app on the iPhone, with Google Now as the headline feature. A while back, it was rumored that Google would be releasing this update with Now baked in, though this rumor was shot down by Apple, and Google later admitted that Eric Schmidt's comments were not necessarily accurate (or, rather, not interpreted correctly).

Recently, Google Now was also featured at Google's I/O conference. In addition to new cards, such as location aware reminders and public transit information, Google revealed several new services designed with a similar goal to Now-- to make your life easier, and to delve deeper into your personal information.

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