I’ve been very busy over the past months with NeuClear and VERAX one of the companies sponsoring the development has just released their first NeuClear server beta.veraxpay.com.
This shows some of the new features included in the NeuClear framework. Little by little the final pieces in the NeuClear puzzle are falling into place.
NeuClear Accounts
Accounts in NeuClear are universal across the various assets. You can log into NeuClear Bux and VERAX Beta Dollars with the same account details. Of course you can create as many accounts as you want to within the NeuClear Personal Trader. The point is that the accounts are under your control and not under the banks control.
Banks manage your account details (not the transactions but everything else) in what they call a CRM. This is closely guarded information that they often resell in the US. NeuClear takes this out of the control of the individual bank and puts it back in your control.
From a technical point of view a NeuClear account is a RSA KeyPair. Your account identifier is a 32 character base32 encoded hash of your public key. You can easily perform payments to this 32 character ID if you wish. However the reaction from most people when they see this account id is that it is ugly. So we need another way to specifying account information. Also in business you might want to know a bit more about who you are actually sending money.
Our solution is the account page. It is simply an html page with a few extra bits included and a digital signature. When you publish your account page you basically are explaning as little or as much that you want to share with the world about who you are. See my page for an example. This is something that I can actually say over the phone. Dad, please send me $100 to http://pkyp.org/pelle
Non geeks can quickly create a page with the Publish Account Page screen in Personal Trader. There is also free hosting for these pages at PKYP
PKYP.org == Searchable Accounts
The PKYP.org web site (short for public key yellow pages) is a public directory of NeuClear account pages. As mentioned above it also allows free hosting of these pages when created within the Personal Trader. You can submit an externally hosted page to it as well.
PKYP uses lucene for searches, which is incredibly cool. I recently added a rest like web service to it. Essentially all you have to do is append xml=1 to the search url: eg. http://pkyp.org/results.jsp?query=pelle&xml=1 and you receive the data as xml.
I have also created a quick little Java class which searches and returns results:
Iterator pages=PKYP.search("pelle panama");Integration with VERAX Beta Dollar
One of the features that I think is cool in the VERAX Beta is that you can actually search in the payee field. Lets say some one wanted to send me money they could say. Hmm. I know his name is Pelle and that he lives in Panama. He can just type those search terms in to the payee field and it returns all matching accounts.
Please go ahead and create your own account pages and pick up your $50 free beta dollars at VERAX.
I’m sure by now that everyone has heard of PearPC. Well I am a mac head who never got around to actually buying one (I’m saving my pennies honest mr. Jobs). PearPC to the rescue.
There are two real problems with PearPC:
- It is slow
- It brings your machine to a halt
So my main development machine is a 650MHz P3 Dell notebook, whose only saving grace is a wonderful screen 1400×1050. I also have a desktop pc running some flavor of Athlon (What kind of geek am I, I cant even remember the speed?).
It is pretty unrealistic of me to run PearPC on my notebook, due to its lack of speed. But it runs alright (of course still slowly) on my athlon pc. Of course I can’t run anything else on it while it’s running.
Why not connect the two then? My first thoughts where TightVnc which is normally excellent. It handled the display part fine, but hitting F12 to switch to the Mac mouse didn’t work no matter how hard I hit the key. I guess the friendly PearPC developers are using some lowerlevel X function for this, that vnc doesnt support.
Then I remembered my university days, when we actually used X windows as god or at least Jim Gettys intended. Remotely over a network. I’m not running a gigabit ethernet or anything, just regular 100. It runs just fine. See the included screen shots.
While it doesnt really solve the slowness of PearPC (only buying a mac will solve that) at least I can have it running without slowing me down on other things. See the above CPU meter as proof.
I was interviewed over the weekend for the Japanese magazine Networker it was a long and very enjoyable interview. The journalist was very knowledgable and enthusiastic.
The interview was about NeuClear my Open Source framework for payments and trade.
BTW. Check out the new Publish Account Page feature in NeuClear Personal Trader and it’s related PKYP.org, which is the Yellow Pages site for NeuClear Account Pages.
PKYP.org uses Lucene as it’s search engine as well as Prevayler. Lucene was pretty easy to setup and use. I haven’t quite mastered it yet. (Note annoying duplicates).