Business - Justin Foell

I find it amusing that some of my cycling friends have just discovered Strava, right at a point when I’m looking to leave. When they ask why, I cite Strava’s recent decision to shutdown API access to all but a select few app vendors. I had an inkling why access to the new API was limited, and I’ve confirmed it. Now I’d like to explain the correct way to do it, and how to monetize it at the same time.

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Strava API the wrong way

I had a suspicion that no open source projects would be able to use the new Strava API, and I was right. All you have to do is read this one sentence at the top of the new V3 API documentation:

All developers need to register their application before getting started. A registered application will be assigned a Client ID and Client SECRET. The SECRET should never be shared.

This is a broken model. Essentially app developers need to get approved for access and then they’ll embed their OAuth secret in their code, which will be sent to Strava to authenticate before making any calls.

This. is. wrong.

Besides being a bad approach, it leaves out all open source applications because they can’t simply put that OAuth secret right in their code – it would be there for anyone to see (and use).

Strava API the right (Facebook/Twitter) way

Let’s take a look at how Facebook and Twitter handle app authorization. I know these guys aren’t exactly angels, but when it comes to web services API access, I think they have it right. When you use an open source application to connect to Facebook or Twitter, you as a user can set up and authorize an “app.” Think of an app in this case as more of an intermediary between you and Facebook / Twitter.

Here’s how it works: as an end-user, you set up an app on the Facebook or Twitter developer website. In exchange you get back the aforementioned Client ID and Client SECRET which are unique to you and the instance of your app. You put your Client ID and Client SECRET into your database (or wherever it goes) and since it is unique to you, it never needs to go anywhere in the code.

On Twitter the process can be almost fully automated and completed for you. You can have apps created and all you have to do is approve that they can access your Twitter stream, and then save the OAuth credentials it gives back.

This is a great model for open-source software. WordPress, software that powers over a billion websites, is open source, and you can install a plugin like Twitter Widget Pro which will display your Twitter stream on your website. This plugin automates as much as possible and walks you through the app setup and approval process.

To control (read: restrict) app access, Strava could easily add a 3rd identifier (I’ll call it App ID). Strava could have developers (not end-users) apply for an App ID. Based on their criteria, they could accept or reject those requests. The App ID could be public and exist in code – open source or not. Because you would need an approved App ID and a legitimate Client ID and Client SECRET to authenticate. Strava could block apps on occasion and still achieve widespread adoption.

Monetizing API Access

This is a no-brainer. If the system were re-worked to put the app and API access in the hands of users, Strava could simply make it only available to premium members. I’d gladly pay Strava $6 a month if they gave me back API access, plus it would help weed out anyone that would be abusing the system (although I’m still unclear on how someone would do that).

Also, you could still maintain the status-quo with the current V3 applications – they already have their Client ID and Client SECRET already set up.

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When I started writing regularly, I thought much of my content would relate to what it’s like working at home, part time, with kids at home. My oldest has been in daycare for the last two years, so it’s been easy-street as far as working from home is concerned. This changed recently when my daughter was born, and more importantly, when my wife returned to work. So it’s time to revisit what it’s like having a newborn at home.

I’ve discussed sleep deprivation before in regards to the 24hr Website Challenge. Sleep is an important thing to me and I can’t stress this enough: nothing can prepare you for the sleep deprivation you’ll experience with a newborn baby.
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Prior experience not applicable

When I was a young man (age 18-21) I marched in a drum and bugle corps. I figured this experience would have me conditioned well enough to deal with a crying baby in the middle of the night. In drum corps, we’d travel via bus at night, after the previous days show. We’d typically arrive at our next destination sometime between 2 and 5AM. We’d all stumble off the bus like zombies, grab our sleeping bags, set up a place to sleep (usually on the gym floor of whatever school we were staying at), and then go back to sleep. If you were really fancy you took time to brush your teeth with running water, and blow up an air mattress.

This is not what it’s like with a newborn. In drum corps the only variable was when you were going to arrive. You controlled how quickly you could set up your bed and get back to sleep.

Enter the newborn

Babies don’t know or care that you have to get up at 6:30AM to get to work, or that you were up until midnight feeding them the night before. They just know when they’re hungry and will cry until they eat. They also eat at their own speed, need to be burped, and generally be content before everyone can go back to sleep.

If your wife is breastfeeding, most of the burden lies on her. But as a good husband, you should help her bear the burden by fetching a baby, burping her, and putting her back to bed.

I should note that I was much more helpful with the nighttime routine with our first child than with our second. Maybe it’s because I was younger, or more excited as a new dad. Whatever the case was, I’m certainly not going to try to take credit for everything my wife has done for our children during these early development stages. So whatever sleep deprivation boogey-man stories I’m telling, you can bet she’s experiencing it to a greater degree.

There has been occasions where I’d look over and see the baby on the boppy in front of my wife. The baby could be eating, but could be sleeping, and my wife definitely looks like she’s sleeping. I’d say, “put the baby to bed, you’re falling asleep!” But she was always quick to retort that she was just resting her eyes.

The deprivation also isn’t like what you might experience with a normal work or school week. Staying up late and getting up early, you just want to get to the weekend so you can sleep in. Do these babies know what day of the week it is? Heck no! My son is 4 years old and still has a hard time getting the days of the week, but he can read a digital clock and knows not to bug us before 8AM. So that’s the best you’re going to get on Saturday and Sunday: 8AM – minus all the times you got up in the middle of the night for your newborn.

Advice

If I were to give advice to breastfeeding mothers (which I’m not qualified to), it would be to nap when your baby does. This obviously only works when you’re on maternity leave and not operating a vehicle. Many busy mothers feel they need to get stuff done while their baby is sleeping. Do yourself a favor and get all that stuff done when you have nesting urges, before that baby is born, so you can nap yourself back to reality.

For those mothers and others (like me) who are also trying to get work done during this period, hopefully your work is flexible. Tell your coworkers about your situation – you did tell them you had a baby, didn’t you?!? Your ability to work will become sporadic, and spread out throughout the day. If you do technology work, buy yourself a laptop if you don’t have one so you can be mobile. Make sure it’s powerful enough to do everything you’d normally do. Even if it just means being able to work on the couch rather than in your office, it will help.

The good news is this situation is temporary. Once your baby sleeps through the night, you will be able to as well.

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Garmin is the Apple iPod of GPS products. So when it came time to purchase a new GPS, I grabbed a Garmin eTrex Vista HCx. It had a great feature set for a handheld unit: SD card expansion, turn-by-turn directions, etc. And because it’s a Garmin, it had the best “hacker” support, namely: free maps from Open Street Maps.

The one thing that I was dissatisfied with was the software support under Linux. Sure you could plug it in, and retrieve data, but simple editing of tracks (splitting, joining) was tedious. Garmin’s free MapSource software worked well, but I wanted to avoid booting into Windows just to use it. Luckily I found this thread on ubuntuforums.org. I rehash here much of the info provided there, and include some updates.
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An Aside about Strava

I use my GPS mostly while cycling. A while back a friend tipped me off to a site called Strava where you can track your rides and compete virtually with others.

I’m not a competitive cyclist. I ride more to shuttle kids to the library, or for picking up groceries. But I do like to use my GPS while riding and upload the data to Strava to track my miles, calories burned, etc. It’s also fun to see what sort of excruciating rides competitive cyclists are doing.

My beef with Strava is that they just recently shut down the version 1 & 2 API access to their site. They are launching a new V3 API, but your application must be approved to use the service. Unless a new version to any API is fully available, it’s customary to leave the old version(s) of the API accessible for a period of time so developers can update their software. Unless the old API is causing undue stress on server hardware and equipment, there should be no reason that an old API is turned off before the new one is available.

My guess is that they (like Twitter) want to control who can/can’t use their API. It could also be a stupid knee-jerk reaction, like I’ve seen many governments and businesses make. Recently there was a lawsuit brought against Strava. They may now want to control the exact wording of the competitive elements of the apps so Strava users aren’t feeling coerced into regaining their top time by riding dangerously. It all feels like a digital nanny-state to me. My guess is that no open-source projects will be able to use the V3 API because there’s probably some DRM key (or equivalent) required to connect.

Nevermind that I’m a contributor to the Strava plugin for WordPress (which no longer works thanks to Strava). WordPress only powers a billion websites and has the largest market share of any web publishing platform. Isn’t the point of having an API to promote the widest adoption possible?!? If Strava doesn’t change, maybe I can convince tons of WordPress cyclists to switch to Garmin Connect – they don’t seem to be ostracizing developers.

/end soapbox

Back to installing MapSource…

Installing Wine

The first order of business is installing Wine:

sudo apt-get install wine

Then run winecfg (as your normal user). This will create a ~/.wine directory:

winecfg

Just click OK when the dialog appears.

Installing MapSource

In order to install the latest MapSource, you actually have to install an older version of the software first because MapSource checks for the presence of an earlier version during installation. Fooling the earlier versions to the presence of MapSource is actually quite easy:

cd ~/.wine/drive_c
mkdir Garmin
touch Garmin/MapSource.exe

Get an older version, like MapSource_6153.exe from http://gawisp.com/perry/mapsource/

Then run the installer:

wine ~/Downloads/MapSource_6153.exe

Follow the on screen instructions. Accept the license and it will install. At the end of the install you can launch MapSource – don’t do this! Uncheck the check mark and just exit the installation.

Once you’ve installed MapSource the simple way, you can then update to a newer version of MapSource which looks for a “proper” MapSource installation. There may be some sort of secret sauce to having your upgraded MapSource fully functional. I initially had problems with the newest version crashing when saving a GPX file. But then it went away when I did a couple of incremental upgrades. If you have this problem, maybe try removing the latest version through the Wine uninstaller and installing a slightly earlier version. Please comment if you have any insight as to what works and what doesn’t.

Add Maps

Adding a drive

My maps exist on a Windows partition on my computer. Rather than reinstalling the (huge) files in Wine, I added a Wine system drive that linked to my Windows partition.

After mounting the Windows partition (simply by selecting it under devices in the nautilus file manager), I then made a symlink to my ~/.wine/dosdevices/ folder:

cd ~/.wine/dosdevices
ln -s /media/justin/OS "o:"

Replace /media/justin/OS with the correct path to your Windows partition, once it’s mounted in Linux. I chose “O” as my drive letter since I normally mount the disk as “OS” – you can choose whatever drive letter you’d like.

Add registry keys

This is most easily done by exporting registry keys from Windows and importing them into Wine’s registry. Here is a screenshot from my registry from Windows:

In the UbuntuForums post, the author notes that MapSource looks for maps under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Garmin\MapSource\Families, where as my installation (Windows 7) had the maps installed under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\Garmin\MapSource\Families. So I exported the keys from Families in my Windows installation and then installed them in the same place in the Wine registry.

wine ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/regedit.exe

After installing the key(s) into the Wine registry, I updated the values and changed any references to C:\ to O:\ – my custom Wine device that links to my Windows partition.

Once this is done you can test that your maps are being read correctly.

cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Garmin/
wine ./MapSource.exe

If your maps are installed correctly, they’ll show up under View > Switch to Product. Even if you have no maps installed, MapSource may still be useful to you for downloading tracks from your Garmin and exporting to other formats such as GPX.

Set up a COM device

In order for MapSource to be able to upload/download anything from your GPS, we need to set up a COM device so they can communicate. First load the garmin_gps kernel module (which strangely didn’t autoload in Ubuntu):

sudo modprobe garmin_gps
lsmod | grep garmin

And you should see something like:

garmin_gps 18212 0
usbserial 36911 1 garmin_gps

Turn on the GPS and connect it to the USB port. Then do:

ls /dev/ttyUSB*

You should see a device called ttyUSB0

Now we have to make this device visible as com1 port under Wine:

cd ~/.wine/dosdevices
ln -s /dev/ttyUSB0 com1

When you want to transfer data from your GPS, plug in your Garmin, then run:

sudo modprobe garmin_gps
cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Garmin
wine ./MapSource.exe

In the Transfer menu, select Receive From Device. You should now see your device and can transfer tracks, waypoints from your GPS into MapSource.

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There’s a valuable resource available to students, starving artists, savvy entrepreneurs and everyone else that often goes unused and forgotten: The Public Library.

Let’s face it, books (and other media) are expensive. While others think of Amazon first for books, I look to the library.

The American Library Association and the Dewey Decimal System date back to 1876. But in the age of smart phones and streaming media, we sometimes forget that we’re paying for this service (via taxes) and we should be taking full advantage.

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Skip to Ubuntu 13.04 Update

This post was originally supposed to be titled “My commitment to Ubuntu.” But I couldn’t take it. After 2 years of using Unity and watching it evolve one step forward and then dwindle two steps back, I decided it was time to give GNOME another chance.

Don’t get me wrong… I’m still committed to Ubuntu, and moreover Linux and Open Source in general. I’ve tried quite a few Linux distributions: Slackware, RedHat, Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, and Ubuntu. I don’t mean I installed and tried them for a week, I’ve used each of those distributions for over a year on a day-to-day basis.
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I have stuck with Ubuntu since 2008 because it seemed to have the most momentum, the most desktop distribution market share (which equates to better support), and the most polished overall package.

As such, I’ve always tried to stick with whatever Canonical recommends for mainline Ubuntu Desktop. That meant using atrocious iTunes wanna-be softwares like Rhythmbox and Banshee (to this day I’m unclear as to the difference between these two). However, I’d stick it out just so I knew what the normal user experience was – feeling the average users’ pain, and reporting bugs along the way.

Why Ubuntu decided to drop GNOME in favor of Unity has always puzzled me. As per my rule, I went along for the ride into the Unity experience. I like the simplicity of Unity, having used it as part of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix / Edition or whatever it is/was called. But I feel it was moved into prime-time a little too early.

No Man’s Land

All of my complaints with Unity are in regards to hardware support (or lack there-of). For my office, I prefer to use my laptop (a huge desktop replacement) with an external monitor in “portrait” mode:

In the beginning (Ubuntu 11.04), multi-monitor support was abysmal. My monitor setup would get rendered as one large canvas. The laptop & monitor are like a backwards “L” and the rest of the area (above the laptop and to the left of the monitor) becomes what I call “No Man’s Land.”

System tray icons that were written for “legacy” GNOME support, like Skype, would be rendered up in No Man’s Land, where no one can see them. The only reason I knew is because you could see a tiny green icon up there when using Unity’s “Expo” feature. The mouse cursor could go up into No Man’s Land (confusing), and application windows could also be moved there accidentally.

Then on a later release all of the system tray icons needed to instead use a different “indicator” API. So every system tray app that was previously working in GNOME and hadn’t kept up with the Unity trend, now had to have an indicator wrapper to make it useful (or even visible).

The Last Straw

So after two years of Unity advancements, you’d think it would be awesome now, right? Nope – 12.10 is the slowest Unity ever. I tried it for a month and decided it was the final straw. I don’t know exactly what happened. Maybe I was previously using Unity 2D or had shut off all of the effects. Frankly I’m glad I don’t have to remember all the stupid minutia anymore. But in Ubuntu 12.10 there is no “giant off switch” for all Unity effects, and my computer feels like everything is “Powered by Java.” ™ Slow menus, slow window switching, slow window moving, slow desktop switching! I thought I had fixed the slowness by turning off vblank_mode for my Intel GM45 graphics card, but when I attached my external monitor, slowness resumed.

Maybe the Unity slowness is caused by the sheer size of my desktop, since it is effectively rendering a 3000×1920 pixel area. Maybe my graphics card is just a wimp. What ever it is, I give up. I found that GNOME is still alive and well in the Ubuntu repositories. I suggest to anyone that is stuck in the muck with Unity, exorcise your demons! Execute the `apt-get install` command from that page. Don’t bother with activating GDM over LightDM – GNOME really only recommends it because GDM is themed to look like GNOME “Remix” (see below). You can also skip the `apt-get remove` in case you want to go back to Unity – especially if you’re a masochist. If your user account was set to automatically log in, turn it off so you can choose between GNOME/Unity when you restart.

I tried the GNOME “Remix” and it was cute, but seemed to be plagued with similar issues that Unity had in the beginning: in-configurable virtual desktop switching, poor multi-monitor support, limited flexibility with system-tray apps/indicators.

Classic

GNOME Classic. Like Coke Classic, this is it. Why did we ever abandon this? It felt so comforting to be using GNOME again. Everything works just as I remember, plus it’s a little more polished. The ironic thing is, GNOME also uses the Compiz 3D compositing system, but it performs far better on my hardware/monitor configuration than Unity. Like I said, I don’t care what magic makes it work, as long as I can get back to work.

Update: Unity in Ubuntu 13.014

I’m happy to report that Unity in Ubuntu 13.04 is much better regarding performance specifically with my Intel graphics chipset. After 2 months of solid use I can report that it’s definitely back in a usable state (for me at least).

Unity, Ubuntu, and all Linux distros (including the Linux kernel itself), have always suffered from 1000 paper cuts. It’s always been useful for me as a tech geek, but I see and can understand how the minor annoyances add up to someone not being able to make the switch to Linux full-time.

My current issue with Unity is a strange bug where if I have a browser maximized on my 2nd display and I try to open a new tab from a different workspace (via Instant Messenger usually), when I switch back to the workspace containing my browser, it has magically moved to the primary display.

It’s not enough to make me abandon Unity again, but combined with something else it might be.

← Summary Only

Justin Foell

Technology, Bicycling, Hobbies, Kids, Life.

Category Archives: Business

Strava API – You’re doing it wrong

Strava API the wrong way

Strava API the right (Facebook/Twitter) way

Monetizing API Access

Newborn Sleep Deprivation

Prior experience not applicable

Enter the newborn

Advice

Garmin MapSource in Linux (Wine)

An Aside about Strava

Installing Wine

Installing MapSource

Add Maps

Adding a drive

Add registry keys

Set up a COM device

The Library

More than books

The Modern Library

Order of Precedence

GNOME sweet GNOME

Skip to Ubuntu 13.04 Update

No Man’s Land

The Last Straw

Classic

Update: Unity in Ubuntu 13.014