Geeks in Paradise | Brian Chee » April 2007

April 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Listen to whale song live from Davey Jone's Locker...

TAGS: Lab Freaks, Toys and tools

To say that I live a double life is an understatement. Part of the time I work with the editorial staff of InfoWorld to do big iron reviews of emerging enterprise gear. The rest of the time I work at the University of Hawaii School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology (SOEST) as a researcher. One of the cooler projects has nearly a 20 year history of visiting the same spot in the ocean to sample the ecology. However, at roughly $15k/day to run a modern research vessel, this starts adding up.  The long term answer was to reuse an old fiber optic cable that was pulled up from the ocean floor (recycling at it's best!) and to that end we now have the Aloha Observatory, cabled version.

The University of Hawaii School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology has deployed an undersea cable to support an undersea science platform roughly 100kilometers north of the Hawaiian Island of Oahu at a depth of approximately 5000 meters. 

 

The Station Aloha Cabled Observatory is the latest in experiments at this particular spot in the ocean. To get the whole story, check out the

Station Aloha web page.

What I've done is taken the raw audio feed coming off the undersea equipment whose cable lands at Makaha on the Hawaiian Island of Oahu and providing that live feed via an open source streaming audio server called Icecast.(Kudos to the folks at the UH SOEST Engineering Support Facility for modifying the older telephony repeater system for scientific purposes)  So while this is live, we're purposely leaving it in its native format of Vorbis OGG to avoid adding any artifacts in the conversion process. This stream from a broadband hydrophone is being used for real science, but it's still pretty cool to be able to listen to whale song live from the middle of the pacific ocean, 5 kilometers down.

So to finally tie this back to the enterprise, the Icecast server is available on both the Linux and Windows platform and can provide both audio on demand and livecasting of events. It also has the ability to have rebroadcasting servers that could be setup for load balancing. You would actually use a minimally configured Icecast server to digitize through your PC sound card, and then stream that to a rebroadcast server configured to handle a larger load. Since you can digitize using different codecs (mp3, quicktime, etc) and at different sampling rates, it would conceivably be possible to stream over an EvD0 or EDGE cellular card on a laptop. (NOTE: doing such a thing at a live concert is NOT a good idea and is illegal...end disclaimer) The client end of this equation could be a free or commercial copy of Winamp or even the Windows Media Player. (NOTE: ogg requires a special .ogg codec from Vorbis OR you can just use Winamp's native ogg support.) Instructions for installing either a client or a codec is at the Station-Aloha server page.

So when you ask what your tax dollars are funding, this is an example of the collaborative science being done at the School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology (SOEST) at the University of Hawaii.

by Brian Chee of the Advanced Network Computing Laboratory and a Senior Contributing Editor for InfoWorld Magazine.

 

Posted by Brian Chee on April 25, 2007 07:41 PM

April 23, 2007 | Comments: (0)

How you keep everyone on the same page...

TAGS: None

 I love the concept of remote collaboration, but let's face it. When I'm part of a WebEx or a Microsoft LiveMeeting and connect to a meeting room, the folks a the corporate office always use the white board. Then they try desparately to describe when they're drawing on the board...my knee jerk reaction is to then mute my phone and go to sleep. I know others are in the same boat when I got exactly the same reaction from some Microsoft engineers in my lab the other week. So let's just face up to reality, a picture is worth a million words, so how about sharing that picture with the rest of us...

 

 

Virtual Ink (now owned by Rubbermaid Newell) has been around for quite a while, but for some reason hasn't been able to break out of the education market. This portable device is even better than sliced bread, and is now one of my travel companions at Interop. Here at HotStage, the engineers tend to redesign at the drop of a hat, and even with most of us in a single location, it's still not easy to stay on the same page. However, now when we hide in the conference room, I drag along my laptop and my wireless Mimio Xi so that every stroke on the white board is saved and then distributed to everyone in the meeting.

So while this may look like chicken scratches in the dirt, it's diagrams like this that go into the building of the InteropNET. Our fearless leader (Glenn Evans) scribbles his way across the board, while the rest of us roll our eyes back in our heads when we realize just how much work this means.

Well the reality is that it could be more if we didn't have the same notes. Just keep in mind the if you ask 10 people to tell you about a bank robbery, you'll get 10 different versions. Not something you can afford in a network expected to deliver 100% uptime for the class rooms, meeting rooms, exhibit floor, wireless, Voice over IP Telephone System, etc, etc... So while this may sound like a gimmick, just think of this product the next time you're on a conference call and someone starts in on a white board you can't see.

Check the Mimio website for compatibility statements for your remote collaboration system, and if you're looking at using for a conference room in your office, you may also want to check out Wall Talker. A wall covering that doubles as both a dry erase marker surface and a projection surface that's a perfect match for the Mimio stick. Just keep in mind that the maximum size the Mimio can support is 4 feet by 8 feet. With Mimio studio and a projector, you could project a world map on the board, markup it up and save both as a single image.

Here's a scanned brochure that I snagged from a Hawaii design firm for www.walltalkers.com

Posted by Brian Chee on April 23, 2007 02:47 PM

April 21, 2007 | Comments: (0)

BgInfo v4.10 from Microsoft

TAGS: Testing notes, Toys and tools

I totally agree with the article written by Bryce Cogswell Published: March 16, 2007 in the Microsoft TechNet. When you have a bunch of machines all configured similarly for either testing, or just a rack of similar machines doing different things. The desktops all start to look the same, especially if you're buring the midnight oil on deadline. It's just all to easy to make a modification to the wrong machine.

 

 

Our of self defense I started editing the wall paper with the machine names in my lab, but Microsoft has released a really cool tool that does such things automatically. As an added bonus, if you put it into the scheduler, it will refresh the image periodically with current information on critical items like the amount of free space left. The amount and type of information is configurable during setup.

Neal Allen of Fluke Networks brought this to my attention (thank you Neal) at Interop HotStage. His luggable had it running, and he's setup it up on the desktops of the virtual machines he's got running on the lunchbox luggable the Fluke folk use for testing. Wow, so simple, but yet oh so very useful.

Kudos to the Microsoft folks for a wall paper that totally makes sense.

*NOTE: much thanks to Microsoft for NOT locking down their images on the technet site.

/brian chee

 

Posted by Brian Chee on April 21, 2007 10:43 AM