Month: March 2014

Shake: IOS app to help create legal agreements

Shake logo

Shake allows you to Create, sign and send legally binding agreements using your IOS device.

From the website:

  • When would I use Shake? – We designed Shake to let you quickly record
    agreements for everyday transactions that you otherwise might do with a
    verbal “handshake” agreement. For example, you’re lending someone you know
    $300 – given the stakes, you might not need a long, intimidating loan
    agreement, but wouldn’t it be nice to get something in writing? When does the
    money need to be repaid? Is there a penalty if it’s late? Use Shake to agree
    upfront on simple questions like this and you can avoid hassles later (not to
    mention awkwardness and hard feelings).

  • When should I not use Shake? – Shake isn’t for complex or high-stakes
    transactions. Are you selling your company? Shake is not for that. You should
    talk with a lawyer. Are you selling your used computer on Craigslist or hiring
    a freelance designer for a basic job? Shake is perfect for either of those.

Shake phone image

It’s Dangerous: Python crypto library for signing data before sending through untrusted environments

It's Dangerous logo

(via)

“Various helpers to pass data to untrusted environments and to get it back safe and sound.”

From the website:

Example Use Cases

  • You can serialize and sign a user ID for unsubscribing of newsletters into URLs.
    This way you don’t need to generate one-time tokens and store them in the database.
    Same thing with any kind of activation link for accounts and similar things.
  • Signed objects can be stored in cookies or other untrusted sources which means you don’t need to have sessions stored on the server,
    which reduces the number of necessary database queries.
  • Signed information can safely do a roundtrip between server and client in general which makes them useful for passing server-side state
    to a client and then back.

Gilliam: Micro-services framework built on Docker, written in Python

Gilliam masthead

I like the idea of micro services. It feels very Unix-y to me. This project is full of buzzword goodness: Docker, REST, JSON, event-driven IO… If only they had worked Git in somehow!

From the Gilliam website:

Gilliam is a open source Platform as a Service (PaaS) that allows you easily develop, deploy and scale your application backend. Unlike commercial
and many other open source PaaS systems, Gilliams is intended for Micro Service Architectures.

Gilliam stands on the sholders of Docker. Every piece of code running on Gilliam is a Docker image. To that Gilliam adds service discovery, a router,
scheduling and elastic scaling.

boto: Python interface to Amazon Web Services

https://github.com/boto/boto

Looks like a lovely API. The docs look pretty good. I love me some good docs!

From the boto Github page:

Boto is a Python package that provides interfaces to Amazon Web Services.
At the moment, boto supports:

  • Compute
    • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
    • Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR)
    • AutoScaling
    • Amazon Kinesis
  • Content Delivery
    • Amazon CloudFront
  • Database
    • Amazon Relational Data Service (RDS)
    • Amazon DynamoDB
    • Amazon SimpleDB
    • Amazon ElastiCache
    • Amazon Redshift
  • Deployment and Management
    • AWS Elastic Beanstalk
    • AWS CloudFormation
    • AWS Data Pipeline
    • AWS Opsworks
    • AWS CloudTrail
  • Identity & Access
    • AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
  • Application Services
    • Amazon CloudSearch
    • Amazon Elastic Transcoder
    • Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF)
    • Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
    • Amazon Simple Notification Server (SNS)
    • Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
  • Monitoring
    • Amazon CloudWatch
  • Networking
    • Amazon Route53
    • Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
    • Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
    • AWS Direct Connect
  • Payments and Billing
    • Amazon Flexible Payment Service (FPS)
  • Storage
    • Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
    • Amazon Glacier
    • Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
    • Google Cloud Storage
  • Workforce
    • Amazon Mechanical Turk
  • Other
    • Marketplace Web Services
    • AWS Support

Beets: Extendable command-line tool & library for cataloging, manipulating, & accessing your music library written in Python

http://beets.radbox.org/

Example:

$ beet import ~/music/ladytron
Tagging:
    Ladytron - Witching Hour
(Similarity: 98.4%)
 * Last One Standing      -> The Last One Standing
 * Beauty                 -> Beauty*2
 * White Light Generation -> Whitelightgenerator
 * All the Way            -> All the Way...

From the Beets Github page

pfSense: Open Source Firewall

pfSense Logo

From the pfSense website:

The pfSense project is a free network firewall distribution, based on the
FreeBSD operating system with a custom kernel and including third party free
software packages for additional functionality. Through this package system
pfSense software is able to provide most of the functionality of common
commercial firewalls, and many times more.

pfSense software includes a web interface for the configuration of all included
components. Knowledge of FreeBSD is absolutely not necessary. Unlike some
similar GNU/Linux-based firewall distributions, there is no need for any UNIX
knowledge, no need to use the command line for anything, and no need to ever
manually edit any rule sets. In fact, the majority of pfSense users have never
installed or used a stock FreeBSD system. Users familiar with commercial
firewalls catch on to the web interface quickly, though there can be a learning
curve for users not familiar with commercial-grade firewalls.