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Transform your app-dev quality by involving the whole community in testing
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Build your dev and test labs for less – a lot less – with virtualization
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Software Common Hacks and Counterattacks: A Guide to Protecting Software Products against the Top 7 Piracy Threats
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By Larry O'Brien
June 15, 2008 —
I had two weeks to secure my home against a second burglary. Local youths, or as the responding officer called them, “punk kids,” had been breaking into dark houses, drinking the liquor, and stealing whatever cash and small valuables were lying around. We had been madly fortunate in that as the lock had been jimmied free from the door, the burglar’s tool—a small screwdriver, judging by the wood scars—had lost leverage before the last of the screw threads had pulled free. Apparently, the burglars had moved on to easier targets, not realizing how close they were to getting in.
My resulting journey into the world of home security was a painful reminder of what it’s like to be a consumer, not a producer, of technology solutions. Two of the most humble artifacts in software development are the glossary and the simple flowchart that illustrates the highest-level views of the system. Developers and user representatives are so close to their systems that they become deaf to the density of acronyms and the overloading of general-purpose words with connotations specific to the system.
For instance, with the Insteon protocol, “senders” and “receivers” are used, while other protocols have “sources” and “sinks,” an understanding that’s important because “receivers” are perfectly capable of sending out acks and nacks. The lack of a simple flowchart for “pairing” the automation appliances was terribly frustrating, but the utility of such a diagram would probably be lost on someone who had learned the operation months or years earlier.
A variety of technologies can add security to a house (the technology of “dog” having been thoroughly diluted in recent months by irresponsible neighbors who had trained the neighborhood to understand that dogs barking meant either that the sun was, or possibly not, present).
Our neighbors pay a fee for ineffective remote monitoring of door and window sensors, and I thought that I could harness some surplus CPU cycles to create a decent system. Surely the tying together of motion sensors, video cameras, alarm horns and the Internet (for receiving messages on cell phones and monitoring the imagery before calling the cops) was a solved problem. Again, this is familiar to me “from the other side.” Clients have difficulty understanding that no, in fact, it’s not a solved problem, and solving it for the first time will take a good deal of time and effort.
My wife and I were heading for vacation in two weeks, which introduced a serious time constraint, particularly since we live in Hawaii and package deliveries take several days. Home security technology falls under the rubric of “home automation,” and there are a handful of technologies from which to choose.
By far the most established is X10, but it has a bad reputation for reliable signaling. Z-Wave and ZigBee seemed to have few products in the channel, while Insteon seemed to have many and also boasted X10 compatibility.
So I ordered two motion detectors, an Insteon-controlled outlet controller and an Insteon-USB linking unit. In so doing, I locked myself into a technology stack in a manner that probably would strike a person knowledgeable in the field as unforgivably ill-informed.
I also headed over to the local big box store to investigate security cameras, which are a world unto themselves. I was impressed by the performance of the three wireless cameras in the US$150 bundle, but was stymied at the receiving end. Although my graphics card had TV-in capabilities, it also had notoriously cranky drivers, and I could not get the video cameras to display. As a quick alternative, I tried to convert my existing Webcam into a security system.
HomeCamera.com, still in beta, looked to be exactly what I was seeking. Basically, you run an ActiveX control, and images are pulled from it in response to your requests when you’re logged in remotely. Seemingly better still, scene-based motion detection is used to trigger events, sending you an SMS and beginning to record the scene. Unfortunately, the system isn’t quite there; I never received the phone messages, and the motion detector proved overly sensitive to dawn, dusk and other changes in lighting.
When the Insteon units came, I quickly found out that the software I’d bought was not only unpolished and inflexible, but it was also burdened with a clunky registration process and locked its license to my hardware.
In a few hours, I found OSS foundations for a much better experience. Being able to open up Visual Studio, import a few COM libraries, and start reacting to signals from my motion detectors with phone and e-mail messages, Webcam activation and greatly amplified “Intruder alert!” sounds constituted the type of control over technology that is denied to most users.
A great deal of home automation hardware and software seems devoted to controlling lawn sprinklers and home theater lighting. That doesn’t particularly interest me, but a few months ago, on Hack-A-Day, there was an article on an Arduino-controlled espresso maker.
Larry O’Brien is a technology consultant, analyst and writer. Read his blog at www.knowing.net.
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