I saw a documentary a while back that identifies many major countries that have dedicated groups of people who monitors online activities to capture and snoop on online traffic on a daily basis. The documentary suggest that they not only track and monitor their own citizens but steals industrial information to help their own local companies to give them the added advantage.

I am not really surprised to know that but it came to my mind that there are many entities throughout the world that requires secure communications on the Internet. These sensitive groups include the military, government bodies, privacy groups, research labs and etc. In general, the online needs for these groups must meet a few basic requirements:

• Prevent easy ears dropping
• Identify the real identity of the server they are connecting to
• Able to host their own server hardware in secure data centers
• Software used cannot be dominated by a particular group, organization, country or company

I guess there are a lot more requirements but these are the common ones. The critical question then is how do you easily implement such a set of secure online communication tools for them without spending major time and effort? Well, if you do have such a need, why not try Hiitch out! Hiitch have build in features that solves those basic requirements out of the box. Plus it is open source so it allows you to customize your own solution under the GPL v3.

Depending on how your Hiitch setup is like, it can be customised to manage a small group of people to a reasonably sized organization of a few hundred or more. Happy making the lives of “Big Brother” a little harder.

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Have you ever dream of becoming an entrepreneur? Sure most of us have. I guess we are all thinking about becoming successful entrepreneurs when we think about doing our own start ups. However, while in the excitement of our plans, we are often overly optimistic. The road taken by any true entrepreneur can only be described as “crazy”. My entrepreneur journey started four years ago. My life has been in constant struggle since then with the ups and downs of two start ups.

My first start up company was one based on Linux services. I have strong roots with open source software and development. So when the opportunity came for me to stretch out my entrepreneurial wings, I decided to venture into the arena that I am most familiar with; open source. As it turns out, Singapore was not ready for open source. Majority of all Singaporean companies use Microsoft products. Many choose the risk of using illegal software then try to use something new and legal like open source software. I finally admitted defeat when I was unable to sell any of my services. There is really nothing bad about failures but the need to manage ones own emotion and self image while spiraling into despair is indeed a real challenge. I fell into a deep depression soon after. Perhaps my strategy was wrong or because I was too inexperienced. The bottom line was that I failed!

The year that followed, I swear I will never do a start up again. I got myself a proper job like everyone else. A year later, a good friend of mine suggested that we band together to build a new product named Hiitch. They needed a technical geek to oversee the development and I was the chosen one. This time round I thought perhaps I had a better chance of success because the guys I was working with were very talented in their own fields of work. More importantly, I was well rested from my last defeat both emotionally and financially. This time round, I made sure that I prayed about it and got God on my side first.

We spend a year building the product and along the way, I had some pretty good job offers. But like any other true breed entrepreneur, I rejected them and stay on course. By the way, some people called that being stupid, which I feel is somewhat correct. Anyway, when the product was finally about to be released, we had exhausted our motivation and finance. Hiitch had lots of potential but the risks were high and the pressure is in learning to sell it or the value added services on top of it. We had done some pretty stupid things along the way, like refusing opportunities for funding and instead opt for another more painful strategy. Our current strategy is to self fund ourselves through the slow and painful steps of taking in external development projects. We hope to be financially viable while still staying focused on developing our own products for the technology market. This strategy helps us cover the short term financial needs of cash flow while also ensuring that our company has a long term future through our own products. The cycle for this strategy is probably slower and less spectacular but fits us well for now.

Technically, we are still not out of the woods yet but by God’s grace, we are finally growing financially. If there is anything in this company, it is talent. Talent doesn’t always put bread on the table but it sure helps our customer see our value. A typical work day in the office consist of product brain storming sessions, project developments, financial forecast, planning and projection, loud music, complaining about our poor internet connections, lots of jokes and plenty of meal breaks. It might not seem like it for now but we hope to be a commercial force to be reckon with in the near future. Make sure you watch out for us!

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We are looking for 2 J2EE/Java Software Engineer to be station in Taiwan, Taipei for 5 months.

Requirements:

• Must be a fast learner and able to pick up new things quickly
• Have working experience in developing with:
  · J2EE/Java (Tomcat, Eclipse)
  · Database (Oracle and PostgreSQL)
  · Linux/Unix (RHEL)
  · XML (Webservies)
  · Subversion
• Preferrably 2 years or more of software development experience
• Able to adapt to new environments easily
• Must be able to work independently and within a team
• Responsible and dependable
• Have your own laptop
• Basic understanding of developing software for mobile devices is a plus
• Basic knowledge of DRM is a plus

Remuneration:

• Good Salary
• Accommodation and airfare will be provided
• Opportunity to tour Taipei

As the project requires candidate to be station in Taipei, we are looking for someone who is able to converse in Mandarin and English.

If you have 5 or more months to spare and love to work in a different environment, drop us an email with the subject title “Application for the position of J2EE/Java Software Engineer”.

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A happy lunar new year to all Chinese celebrating the event. 2008 marks the year of a rat. A rat year is a time of hard work, activity, and renewal bringing opportunity and good prospects.

This year we have been busy developing new features for Hiitch as well as some side projects, so stay tuned to our blog for more updates.

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Joining an online support group can be very beneficial especially if you or your loved ones are experiencing difficult times such as coping with illness. Hiitch provides a secure platform for people within a support group to discuss common issue they are experiencing in their lives.

Hiitch allows you to post questions, advice, and carry on discussions with other members of the support group in a private environment. Its also allows you to blog and share your own inspirational stories on how you deal with such issues.

Some of the support groups you can set up using Hiitch includes: Addictions, Alcoholics, Conditions and Diseases, Depression, Disabilities, Divorce, Health, Infertility, Parenting, Quitting Smoking, Self-Help, Women and many more.

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Following Google’s effort on open social, they are at it again, this time they are trying to do a similar stunt with mobile platforms. Honestly, as an entrepreneur I am a big fan of Google because of their ability to achieve so much success at such a short period of time. Google’s reputation was what got us interested in their Android platform. After discussing among ourselves, we decided to start exploring the possibility on creating an innovative solution on the Android platform.

The initial process to get the platform and development tools up and running is very simple. It took me merely 15 minutes to install and write my first “Hello World” application. Playing with the Android emulator was both impressive and fun. It has all the charm of the iPhone with the additional capability to allow developers to build real applications on it. As much as I like this new platform, there are down sides. These down sides become more apparent to me as I started reading through their documentation and following their tutorials.

Source Code Portability?

The first issue I discovered was the way Android was designed. Activity, intent, service and content providers was the new way Google wanted developers to think on their platform. But wait, the first warning signs lighted in my mind. That means that the applications I write for Android cannot be reused on another Java enabled phone without making major architectural changes to the source code. Bummer! There goes my source code portability, now I got to write one version for Android and another for other Java enabled phones. The new design concept on the whole is good except that it makes reusable code harder to write because now I got to add more layers of needless abstraction in my code to ensure it can be reused on other mobile phone platforms.

Hidden Complexity?

I might be wrong here but while running through the tutorial I started to get the feeling that Android was designed for and by web developers. The concepts and unnecessary complexity seem to have come from a web development mindset. Instead of thinking the normal Object programming model, Android’s programming model indirectly forces you to think tags for GUI, code for event handling, services for facility or code reuse and content providers for managing data. I understand why the web programming model is designed the way it is because the code is often broken up into server and client side then glued together by requests and passing parameters. But why does the Android’s non-web application development model resembles it so closely? Are they trying to attract web developers onto their mobile platform? I personally felt somewhat handicapped by the development model.

In summary, it will take a while before I get comfortable with this new platform. With the prize money that Google is offering, you can be sure that many others like ourselves will be giving it a go. However, whether this new platform can retain its users and developers is still an open question!

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Goodbye 2007, hello 2008! A Happy New Year to everyone from Hiitch. In Technology, I hope OpenID takes off in a big way so that we can do away with multiple log in account.

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We are going to add compression to our 128 bit SSL streams. This will improve connection speeds on the whole but unfortunately break previous client binaries. In short, members of our current default network before the next upcoming release will have to uninstall, re-download and install the next upcoming client release that supports the new compression feature in order to sign in to our platform. Automatic upgrade is not available for this new release.

Our testings have shown that we are able to improve connection speeds by an average of 5.4 seconds using a common 512KB down stream 256KB up stream broadband line. We are pretty excited about this new improvement and hope that this new and improved technology will help better improve your experience on Hiitch. Therefore as an advance warning, you might want to take this into consideration in regard to your private network implementations of the Hiitch platform.

Do feel free to contact us if you have any questions, collaboration proposals or need better support from us with regard to your own network implementations using our platform.

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The Hiitch server is a multi-threaded application server that you can tune to scale it to your desired hardware setup. It also implements customizable security features that you can use to secure your own network’s integrity and privacy. Hence, understanding some of the key concepts in its design implementation is important. We will begin by describing the detail interaction process that goes on in the server that is unique to every individual Hiitch network implementation.

Server Interaction Process

Before any information is communicated between the client and the server, the clients will first request for the authenticity of the server. Each client has an associated digital certificate that ties it to a particular server. The client will then verify the digital signature to see if the content is coming from the intended server and proceed to send its confidential information to sign in to the server. This whole verification process is unique to each network. During the server installation process, our default script will assist you to generate a set of public and private key pair, also known as a digital certificate, that identifies your particular network. Without generating this digital certificate and exporting the cert to your clients, the integrity of your network can be easily compromised. Once the verification process is correctly completed, the clients will start a new secure session with the server.

Server Threading Model

Once a secure session has been authenticated and started on the server, its threading model kicks in. All clients requests are harvested and then independently processed by a pool of worker threads. You can tune and configure the total number of threads you want as socket harvesters and the number of worker threads attached to each socket harvester. The flexibility of the threading model will enable you to control the performance ratio between accepting requests and processing instructions on each server. Socket harvester threads are responsible for receiving incoming requests and then queue them up for processing by worker threads. Worker threads are responsible to resolve incoming requests to a combination of instructions and then processing those instructions to satisfy the requests. The result of this design is a very advance, efficient and scalable server that you can optimize with your dedicated hardware setup.

Server Performance Considerations

The Hiitch server was also designed to work with other techniques that can help you to easily and cheaply scale your network. A few of these techniques that you can use in combination are load balancing, network file system (NFS), high availability and etc. With a good amount of bandwidth, you can improve your social network performance by load balancing multiple Hiitch servers on a few old computers sharing their storage space using NFS. Hiitch servers will work seamlessly across the entire cluster of machines as if they were one single computer. High availability is a build in feature on Hiitch servers, although not extensive but it should be reasonable enough to meet your average needs.

Future Server Developments

Future developments will move toward a peer to peer (P2P) Hiitch servers system with clients that can connect across different networks securely and dynamically.

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When we first started working on Hiitch our focus was mainly on on-line dating. However, as we progressed, we realized that Hiitch was becoming more and more like a dedicated and secure social networking software than merely an on-line dating tool. We like to see ourselves as still in the process of allowing our users discover for themselves what Hiitch really is to them.

In this article I would like to discuss a few examples of how you can make use of Hiitch for your own social networking purposes. Hiitch has many features that can help you deal with your everyday social networking needs that cannot be found in today’s instant messaging (IM) culture. Before I go on, I like to highlight the fact that Hiitch is not and never will be an IM software. IM is only a supported feature in Hiitch and not what it is about. Hiitch is about discovering new people on-line and providing a common ground to communicate and share yourself with others. OK lets proceed with the scenarios that Hiitch can be of use to you.

At Work

You have a small company or team that you work with. Everyone is usually hard at work on their own desk all the time. Some of them are physically not in the office most of the time. You would like to setup a dedicated network with them so that you can share things on-line and communicate more simply together at real time. You thought about using MySpace, Facebook and etc to help you tie everyone together but you hate the idea of checking your web browser all the time for new information. You are also skeptical about all the negative publicity about security and etc from these service providers. You feel that the common IM software like MSN live, Yahoo messenger, and etc just isn’t cut out for your social networking needs. This is where Hiitch can help you.

Hiitch sits nicely on your system tray and notifies you when items of your interests are received. Your contact comes on-line, you are notified (only if you want to). Someone in the team sends you an urgent file, you get notified and that file remains available for you always at anytime and anywhere until you choose to remove it yourself. If you are offline, messages send to you are kept for you until you come on-line. You can even send quick messages to your teammates without disturbing them during their work through your contact list. Your on-line status on Hiitch will help maintain your intentions to others in the network. So, if you set ‘do not disturb’, then no one can IM you directly. If you set yourself to ‘private’ then only your contacts will see you as on-line and etc. A new team member comes aboard and you are interested to get to know him/her, you can simply browse their profile card and read more about them, browse their photographs and etc. You can post news about company events or instructions on the community interface and notify your team as soon as you post them. If you keep them private, only your teammates in your contact list will be able to read them. You can also get others outside your team involved when you require feedback on ideas, get advice from others or want to do a community survey. You can also setup appointments with your teammate in another country without worrying about time zone conversions, Hiitch does it for you automatically and notifies both of you when the appointment is due.

At Play

Have you ever considered your own secure private social network? You are old enough to be responsible for yourself. You want to meet new people and get others to notice you. However, you don’t want to look desperate and try those on-line match making sites like eHarmony, Match and etc. You like your social life to pick up but you want to do that at your own time and have it all in your own control. You would also like to keep your existing friends and family as part of your private social network. This is where Hiitch can also help you.

Hiitch allows you to setup your own prospect criteria and helps you find them automatically. You just need to make sure you put in the right information about yourself and the kind of people you are looking for and leave the rest to Hiitch. When Hiitch finds people that you may be interested in, you get notified about them. You can then choose to view their profile immediately or bookmark them for later browsing. If the person that you have bookmarked has also done like wise, then Hiitch will notify both sides to encourage you to get to know each other better. Hiitch helps you keep track on the interactivity with others on your contact list. When you see that your interactivity with your best friend is getting low, you can send him/her gifts to brighten his/her day or just simply message or IM to keep in touch. Hiitch is not just about serious social networking. You can also search for other people manually and browse their profiles and pictures at your own time. You can even vote for pictures that you think are cool or just purely interesting if you like them. If you find a handsome man or babe, give them the compliment by voting for their pictures. You can also publicize about yourself by writing articles for the Hiitch community at your own spare time to share your views and ideas with others. Who knows, may be you might just become the most popular person within our community.

Hiitch is made for you to reach out to others and also for others to reach out to you simply and easily! There is much you can discover with Hiitch. Try it for yourself today by signing up for a demo account.

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