Spent the week in a snowy Achter­hoek.

Mo­tion is a piece of soft­ware that does some­thing with a we­b­cam, like when you point a we­b­cam - or sev­er­al we­b­cams - at some place it can be con­fig­ured to de­tect a cer­tain amount of mo­tion in a par­tic­u­lar area of the im­age and then cre­ate a movie or send the im­age some­where. All very com­pli­cat­ed so I just in­stalled it and plugged my we­b­cam in and for­got about it. And when I re­turned from a week's hol­i­day some­where in some di­rec­to­ry it had stored a bunch of im­ages like this:

Born in 1973 I just missed the Apol­lo era of moon land­ings, but I was around on April 12 in 1981 for the fu­ture that was the Space Shut­tle. The Space Shut­tle is the icon­ic part of space flight of the 80s, with the lo­cal hero Wub­bo thrust­ing in­ter­est to in­sane lev­els.

So a cou­ple of months ago I was a bit sur­prised I didn't have a clue about what was ac­tu­al­ly hap­pen­ing in space. Visu­al­ly I could see Irid­i­um flares and the ISS pass reg­u­lar­ly, but if there were peo­ple on the ISS and how much I didn't know; could be none or two dozen, both prob­a­bly un­in­ter­est­ing enough nowa­days to not make the head­lines if it all just goes ac­cord­ing to plan. Fright­ened by this de­te­ri­o­ra­tion of in­ter­est in such an in­ter­est­ing part of civ­i­liza­tion I de­cid­ed to wipe of the dust and find out.

There is of course a site that an­swers ques­tions like "How many peo­ple are in space right now?": http://www.how­manypeo­plearein­spac­eright­now.com/. Based on that I cre­at­ed a wid­get that dis­plays the in­for­ma­tion from that site and now I have that in­for­ma­tion on my OS X Dash­board. And as part of de­bug­ging that wid­get I close­ly fol­low any­thing that has to do with get­ting peo­ple into space. Just like in the 80s.

I haven't fig­ured this out com­plete­ly yet, but I got start­ed on writ­ing an Apache Wook­ie Con­nec­tor Frame­work in Perl. What it seems to do is get some wid­gets from a Wook­ie wid­get serv­er and set up the em­bed­ding in an HTML page. This isn't very in­ter­est­ing un­til you re­alise that HTML page could be the main screen on your phone or the desk­top on your net­book, and the Wook­ie serv­er some kind of app store. And the wid­gets aren't just some piece of HTML with CSS and JavaScript. The Wook­ie serv­er takes care of the same ori­gin pol­i­cy by pro­vid­ing a proxy API so the brows­er does all re­quests through the same ori­gin of the Wook­ie serv­er, and the Wook­ie serv­er does the ac­tu­al re­quests. But apart from re­ceiv­ing and send­ing data from and to oth­er ser­vices via HTTP the Wook­ie serv­er can also store data it­self. Based on API keys and user IDs wid­gets can store data re­lat­ed to a par­tic­u­lar wid­get be­long­ing to a par­tic­u­lar user in a par­tic­u­lar en­vi­ron­ment on the Wook­ie serv­er. And be­cause it's on the same serv­er wid­gets can also share data be­tween them, even be­tween dif­fer­ent users. Cur­rent­ly not ac­tu­al­ly in real time, but wid­gets can use the Wook­ie serv­er to com­mu­ni­cate be­tween them like in a chat wid­get that sends mes­sages to the Wook­ie serv­er and then re­ceives up­dates from oth­er wid­gets in the same chat ses­sion. And all that in an easy HTML + JavaScript en­vi­ron­ment, which was orig­i­nal­ly what I was try­ing to get in to.