Tech Friday: The Forgotten Art of Scripting

Well, maybe it hasn't been been forgotten by everybody, but it has been a long time since I looked at scripting, which might be considered another name for "accessible programming for casual users".

In the beginning was the shell script.. any of several flavors of command line languages that manipulated UNIX operating system shells. These included component programs with funny names like AWK, and SED that allowed the manipulation of data and (especially) text files. And they all still work and and are used. I'm personally fond of grep, which is a sort of search engine on steroids available on any UNIX variant (like the Mac OS X)

Then there was the DOS batch file, which appeared in the earliest versions of DOS and has been carried up through all versions of Windows with the availability of the Windows Scripting Host. It has now has morphed into the PowerShell... but you can still write and execute a simple batch file if you want. Great stuff for network administrators.

Then there is JavaScript, which has nothing to do with Java, used for calculations and manipulations of web pages. I wrote my TimeCard web page program in JavaScript; and it works, and it it is fast, but working with the language was kind of a mess.

Why bother?

The later versions of the Tandberg Codian Multipoint Control Unit (MCU) for videoconferencing includes an XML-RPC interface to allow programmers to interact with the box without going through the provided web interface. The latter, by the way, is actually quite good. Our idea is to figure out the basic sub-set of functionality that we usually use 90% of the time, and build a custom interface for that 90%.

XML-RPC is, (it appears) to be a languishing standard for having one machine issue calls to another machine, and allow the second machine to execute commands. The reason I call this "apparently languishing" is that Google searches for XML-RPC turn up documents mostly from the early part of the decade. Also, there are few good tutorials on how to get things to work... right now I'm winging it using an (excellent) free client for the Mac which sends XML-RPC commands to the target box from a Mac workstation. Still, XML-RPC is what our box expects to receive...and for the moment at least, that's what it will get. Once we've figured out what to send...we'll figure out how to send it, ultimately using any scripting language that will work, but starting with AppleScript, which is native to OS X and which comes with an editor and dictionary built in.

Odds and Sods

"The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces." Glen Prickett senior vice president of Conservation International quoted in Thomas Friedman's book The World is Flat.

Delicious Monster has developed a personal inventory program that works with bar codes. You can inventory your books and CDs using the iMac's camera.

The Lean Startup, blog and workshops, has a ton of information about using a lean engineering methodology for product development.

Apple has released version 4 of the Safari web browser. Two nice features are a cover-flow interface which works like the Finder or iTunes to flip through the browser history, and a sort of marquee that shows a customizable set of pages based on pages most frequently visited. Lifehacker has a work-around to allow you to add pages of your own choosing.

I like the update. It crashes every so often, though.

Interesting take on libraries from Don Lancaster:

Many of the fundamental premises of what a
library once was now border on the ludicrous...

• That information is scarce.
  
• That info is only available at a special place.
  
• That only one copy of info is available.
  
• That a specialist is needed for info loan.
  
• That info is only available during restricted hours.
  
• That control freaks should be in charge of anything ever.
  

If libraries are to survive, they will have to totally rethink
what they are and what services they are going to offer
to which people in what manner.

He expands this in a full discussion of soon-to-be obsolete technologies.

Still I actually bought a book yesterday. In a store. (!)

But what I really want is one of these.

Single Payer Health Care - Sen. Bernie Sanders

In our morning paper there was an article about Bernie Sanders who has introduced legislation in the senate to establish a real single payer health care plan. This is not the watered down version promulgated by Obama and Senator Bauckus who are discouraging participation of single-payer advocates in the debate about revamping health care. I sent him a note.

Dear Senator Sanders:

Hi.... I was delighted to see coverage of your single-payer health care initiative this morning in the Free Press. I only hope that you'll be able to convince your colleagues that have been corrupted by the insurance companies campaign contributions.

I don't think this issue takes on the urgency that it might since all members of Congress are covered by a single payer government provided health care plan. Hey....all we want is what you guys have!

I've lived both in Canada (single payer), and German (hybrid single payer+employer system) and both systems were far superior to what ordinary Americans are able to get even in Burlington with Fletcher Allen and a high-deductible CIGNA policy obtained through the Chamber of Commerce.

The amount of energy and frustration to say nothing of the dollar cost that we personally invest in attempting to manage our personal health care is just crazy. And we are the "lucky" ones with health insurance, and good hospitals and doctors.

Thanks for your advocacy on this issue. It should be at the top of the everyone's list.

--- ------

I still like reading our printed paper. For one thing, it doesn't provide ad-links to colon cleansing products. In fact the Gannett web site which hosts the paper (it is a Gannett paper) is a disaster.

High School: Visit to Another World

I've been working with our local software developers' trade group to create a "virtual tech academy"; creating content for an online learning platform which can be deployed over the internet to rural schools throughout our state. The target is a replacement course for our antiquated one-course "computer science" requirement that is written into our state education standards for high-school students. The current requirement is heavy on Microsoft Office-type skills, and doesn't begin to explain the depth and reach of computer science and IT that we want to convey to students.

After an aborted attempt to have my local high-school pilot the project, we were fortunate to find a more rural union high school willing to be our host. The development team consisted a CS professor from a local college, and a teacher and a librarian/media teacher from the school. They have been working on this throughout the year. 

The school has an enrollment of 4250 students, 94% white with 6% African-American, Asian or Hispanic. Median household income is $68973 almost 20K over the median income for the state. However, 9% of the students qualify for reduced/free lunches. Ninety students receive English as a second language services, and they speak over 30 different languages. 

Today I was invited to sit in on the final class which was devoted to ethics and computing. This is the first time I've been in a high school class in years. The class, taught in a seminar style with only 9 students went well. The students were very engaged. There were several interesting ideas thrown around. 

Cell phones and social applications like Twitter and Facebook allow students to stay connected in almost real-time to friends and family. Some of the older people in the room (ahem) described how going off to college cut off communication between a college freshman and their family in the days when long-distance phone calls were expensive, and a single land-line phone might be shared by an entire floor or dorm wing. Our college professor theorizes that new college roommates don't really get to know each other for a semester or longer, because they are tethered electronically to their high-school friends and family. I recall I tried to call my parents once a week or so, but we kept our conversations short. I transferred my "life" and loyalties to my college environment within a matter of weeks, and developed several life-long friends during the first month or two at college. 

I asked whether students felt they had adequate access to computers at the school and they said that they did. We held our class in a well-equipped computer lab, and there are several clusters and labs throughout the school. 

When we asked how students would like to have their own laptop, like in Maine, I was surprised to find that they were less than enthusiastic. They were worried the machines would be underpowered. ("old Macbooks...."). They were worried about breakage and theft. The librarian/media person said that maintaining laptops is a nightmare during a project where they were loaning out laptops from the library. 

We asked about the digital divide. They all had computers and internet access at home. In a survey of the ninety incoming freshman, roughly 85 did have DSL or cable  (and a computer at home to use). Of the five others some had computers but no access (too far away for a connection), and two had no computer at home. 

They all agreed that they could not do their homework without access to the Internet. Their teachers provided alternatives and time for work during the school day for those students who didn't have access at home. 

They love Twitter... but they think is "stupid", and expect that they'll be bored with it shortly if they aren't already. 

They don't want to give up their textbooks (!) Even though they have electronic access to many of the course materials online, several still said they appreciated having a textbook, "especially for math".  Kindles haven't made it here yet. 

I couldn't help peeking.... the school uses Novell Zenworks as a desktop management tool. They use Moodle which interested us, because we're looking to roll out versions of the courses that we develop on a platform which is based on Moodle. 

Odds and Sods

New Honda Insight

Who knew that a car review could actually be funny? Too bad it is about the hybrid Honda Insight 2.0. I actually owned a 2001 Insight for about three weeks, but found it to be so tiny that I thought it wouldn't be at all practical.  Exchanged it for the now "classic" Prius (sedan, not the egg) from 2003, and I'm hoping the Prius will last forever. I did walk around a new Insight parked in a lot last weekend, and marveled at the size (large and Prius-like) and the Ford-like slatted chrome grill. And the current version of the Accord looks like a Saturn.  What happened at the Honda styling studio?      

ATA Conference

I should probably have more to say about the American Telemedicine Association Conference that I attended earlier this month, but my participation was somewhat clouded by the fact that I was suffering from über-jet lag and a stomach bug throughout. I found the venue, Las Vegas, weird and distracting. I spent most of two days at the conference itself. Comparing it with the previous year in Seattle, it seemed more subdued, perhaps we're all taking a breather in the down economy. Perhaps the most interesting thing was a thorough demo of the Intel Health-Guide device. This is now deployed in pilot projects. My own presentation, with video clips, went over well with our audience of perhaps fifty or so. Other presenters with whom I appeared showed frightening projections of alzheimer cases, child abuse, and situations of multiple co-morbidities (a fancy way of saying that a patient suffers from several major diseases at once). This reminded me of the current economic collapse as people prognosticated five years ago that the sub-prime lending was going to have a ripple effect throughout the American economy with effects that nobody would possible believe, like the bankruptcy of one or even two of the major auto companies. Well, health care in the U.S. is in the same position. In both cases, sub-prime lending, and employee-based health care, the consequences are (would have been) entirely avoidable, but people and government have to recognize when a business model has become unsustainable and have to have the fortitude to effect radical changes to that model.

Adobe Forms

With grants.gov and many federal agencies, Adobe PDF files rule. After experimenting with some intermediate ideas like PureEdge forms, which require a downloaded application, and which is restricted to the Windows platform, NIH, at least, has settled on a combination of javascript forms and Adobe forms and PDFs for assembling complex grant applications of  30-50 components.  Our state government has not caught up, and I found myself translating some Microsoft Word documents (not even Word forms) into Adobe forms and the process has gone pretty smoothly.  There are all sorts of good things to this evolution to PDFs, and the Adobe Acrobat and Reader programs should be high on the approved tools list for any kind of workflow that requires forms. 

Tech Friday: Video-The Right Tool For The Job

Two Stories: 

I

I've been participating in a entrepreneur boot camp of sorts which requires us to create slide show presentations to introduce our company. Because the leader is using an older Dell laptop with Microsoft Office 2003 installed, we are required to create these presentations to run on PowerPoint 2003 on her laptop. After the presentations have been created, our team was asked to record a voice-over to accompany these slides. This was recorded using Audacity on a Windows machine using a Samson condenser microphone with a USB interface. We did it in a couple of takes, and listened to the playback. All seemed well, although the team expressed some trepidation at attempting to synchronize the playback of the audio with the individual slides, a finicky process which would take some hours.  So the question is, why not use the sound recording function in PowerPoint 2007, (Windows) or Keynote '09 (Mac)? 

II

We've been engaged in a study comparing a 15 week exercise program delivered in three "modes", 1.) a live class at the 'Y', 2.) an interactive version delivered over the internet using multi-point two-way videoconferencing, and 3.) a DVD version of the program.  As part of our telemedicine project we had a contractor create a version of our program for delivery on DVD. We shot great footage with professional audio, lighting, and camera work. The footage was edited to create a 15 week version of our program.  Once the raw edits were created, we sent them off to a DVD guru who used one of those $1,200 authoring programs to put it together.  The result was OK, but non-intuitive. The users of the DVD basically hated it and several dropped out of the study.  

Now, a year has past and the study subjects who participated in the live session and those who took the interactive tele-version of the program want to have a DVD version of the program as a reference so that they can continue their exercise. We decided to provide them with a free DVD, using clips recorded from the telemedicine session. I combined these using iMovie '09 and the result is better than the original professional DVD. (!)  I subsequently bought David Pogue's Missing Manual book on iMovie and iDVD and am looking forward to re-doing our original DVD as well as create some promotional material for sharing on the web.  

Now, video editing isn't my favorite pastime, but it is certainly no worse than grant-writing, and if the results are near-professional, then why not take advantage of what has really become a disruptive technology? 

On the other hand, here is an example of Eva Sollberger's Stuck in Vermont video blog. Eva is a one-person video production company. She shoots, edits and publishes. This particular episode is about 6-8th graders creating their own news show.  It sure beats Channel 5 eyewitness news. 

 

Top 50 Healthcare 2.0 Blogs

RNCentral has posted a list of the 50 (fifty!) Healthcare 2.0 blogs, where Healthcare 2.0 is loosely defined as the transformation of health care delivery from a top-down process ordained by physicians, hospitals, and insurance companies, to a shared process involving patients, with  large dose of IT (electronic medical records, telemedicine, patient social networking) added in.  

Cloud Computing Redux

A year or so ago I railed against the cloud. Or rather, I railed against the paid cloud. Notwithstanding the fact that even then I was already paying for the cloud.

The subject came up during the Freedom To Connect conference. We were sitting around having lunch, several pretty hard-core networking types and somebody was grousing about cloud computing. "It's not secure!" "It's slow!" "What if you're not connected to the Internet?", (this at a conference of which the entire point was being connected all the time at ultra-high speed). But, I'm Cloud-Boy.

web site	hosted at my ISP
eMail	hosted at my ISP
virtual disk	iDisk hosted at MobileMe
project management	BaseCamp
time cards	Harvest
Calendar	Google Calendar
RSS reader	Google Reader
word processing	Google Docs (occasionally)
invoicing	QuickBooks via eMail

Then there are the mandatory online applications when dealing with the federal government:

• Employee withholding and tax payments
  
• Applying for federal grants at Grants.Gov
  
• NIH Commons for managing those grants once you've got them.
  
• Electronic Funds System for drawing down funds.

Unfortunately, our state of Vermont is far behind... they actually require paper for virtually every step of the grant application and management function. Hmm....I wonder if you can file for a gay marriage license online?

I guess the point is that you'd be nuts not to take advantage of some hosted applications, and even if you are dead set against the cloud, you might be using something in the cloud and barely realizing it.

As usual, the MobileMe suite of applications from Apple have a little extra. Theoretically at least, you can sync your Safari links, and dashboard applications. (I still can't get the dashboard apps quite right). The iDisk is effective in that it essentially mirrors one or more folders that are present on a particular machine, my desktop iMac for example, and replicates that disk to one or more other machines. (can work for Windows too...although I haven't tried it. ) The neat thing about the iDisk though is that there is still a local copy of the folders on each machine. This unloads many of the objections to Cloud Computing...the notion that if you aren't connected, you don't have access to your files. True disk transfer happens at "FTP" speeds, so sometimes it takes awhile to sync with the cloud.

Grants.Gov Down April 18-19

I'm currently testing Grants.Gov applications on the Mac, which looks encouraging, as they have done away with the PureEdge forms and now work exclusively with Adobe PDF forms. Last fall, we ended up punting, and we set up a Windows machine purely for the purpose of being able to fill out the PureEdge forms. (and the proposal was rejected anyway...)

Grants.Gov site will be down this weekend, April 18 and 19th for a system upgrade to help cope with the influx of applications related to the stimulus package.

This is terrible timing for anyone trying to meet an April 21st deadline for submitting an application.

Grantsmanship Center: Research Proposal Workshop

The Grantsmanship Center is holding a Research Proposal Workshop geared for grantseekers in the sciences, social sciences and humanities. Excerpt from their notice:

If you conduct research in the sciences, social sciences, or humanities, grant awards are critical to your professional life. The ability to obtain highly competitive research grants can be essential for your career.

The Grantsmanship Center's three-day Research Proposal Workshop is designed to train researchers to compete more effectively for grant funding. You will learn a proposal development process that begins with a well thought-out research plan. The resulting proposal will have a predictable set of components that reflect this plan and that flow logically. A proposal that is clear, logical, and convincing is more appropriate for funding, more competitive, and more likely to be favorably reviewed.

This is an intensive, highly interactive workshop. Attendance is limited to 26 participants.

The workshop will be held May 19-21 (three days) and costs $1195 or $1095 for early birds. This is an incredible deal, considering that you'll be applying for multi-year, multi-thousand dollar support.

TGCI is also offering a five-day workshop Competing for Federal Grants in June.

Grants.Gov - Told You So?

The latest newsletter from Grants.Gov discusses efforts they are using to keep up with the massive influx in applications related to the federal stimulus package, something that we worried about awhile ago.

Freedom to Connect Day 2 SmartGrid and Muni Fiber

=========================
Terry Huval -- Lafayette LA fiber project
Huge benefit to local businesses
Filed lawsuits. Unknown citizens sued he city. 3.5 million dollars cost in litigation etc.
Cable co. raised their rates every 6 months until they finally stopped in Lafayette, and they think that the rate savings ALONE in cable rates saved the citizens of Lafayette $3.5 million. so, they got back the cost of defending themselves in litigation.

20% less than standard pricing is the target for things like triple play services

They offer:

TV and phone and internet service (Triple Play)
SmartGrid

Overlaid the existing electrical infrastructure

Value of the topology, head end has generation and reliable substations also have electronics, mini hub in each substation.

Head end - 3 96 fiber rings 4 fibers 20 gigs per second Alcatel/Lucent product

Installed at each home:
2 fibers for RF video
2 fibers for IPTV Internet, Phone

This provides:
Optical terminal - includes a TV coax 4 POTS telephone lines, battery backup
2 100 megabit fiber connections


Topology

OLT - OLT 72 ports --> Local conversion point - 9

OLT provides 2400 customers.

Passive optical network.

At the home, the electric meter,



Issued bonds in July 2007
First customers served in Feb 2009 Remaining customers to be served by early 2011

VIP bundles video / internet / phone

84.85
10 megabit 2 way symmetrical (LK now foaming at the mouth).

=============
Offerings for home internet service
10 megabit
30 megabit
50 megabit download and upload speeds

Calling rates: 5 cents for international, Europe, Caribbean, S. America and Asia

======
100 mbps peer to peer -- within the system
included with every fiber internet product with a non-static IP
opens doors for citizens and businesses
$5.00 per month for a static IP

They also offer a TV Web Portal
basic internet access w/o a computer

Business
10 meg
100 megabits for $200 per moth

Medical hub
education
movie industry - tax credit made available

80% businesses wanted LUS
Borrowed 100 million 60 used for build system
50% market penetration for the business plan
23% penetration allows for breakeven

So many people are so excited to support the community owned system
Just as important as electricity

More jobs, future of telecommunications, etc.


==========
Tim Denton

Broadcasting in New Media

Question: Should we be taxing ISPs to put money into a fund to go into promoting Canadian content?

Not a single group raised a question of free speech across the internet?

Net neutrality issue, should look at the filings

Lafayette TV --- This is the DRIVER in Lafayette for getting new customers. They must offer equal or better or cheaper service than the competitors.

Todd Marriot - current leader of the UTopia project - similar to the Lafayette project.
Question regarding “Open Access” model. Third-party businesses have infrastructure access.. with multiple service providers.

Answer: They are the only switched telephone provider, or cable TV provider on their muni network (at least until the bonds are paid off....) However, they need the services to pay for the network at this point. They assume that they are oversubscribed.

Terry Duval will play his fiddle. (cajun) (Old version of fiber networking)


===================
John Jorgensen Quintet plays

Introduction: April 2009

Welcome to Tech for Non-Profits, and the nascent Tech for Home Health Care. This site is the unplugged version of Microdesign Consulting. Part lab-notebook, part brain-extension, it is a repository for new and evolving ideas and projects that we stumble across as we pursue our start-up dream of a provider of home healthcare technology and continue supporting nonprofits, NGO's, government, public and private entities with services related to fundraising and technology.

Upcoming: I will be giving presentations at the Freedom to Connect conference March 30 and 31 in Washington D.C. (update: 4/2, copious notes below...) and at the American Telemedicine Association annual meeting in Las Vegas at the end of April. Both presentations will focus around the technical (boxes and wires), aspects, rather than medical aspects of one variation of home tele-health; two-way interactive, multipoint videoconferencing, with examples from our ongoing pilot studies delivering supervised exercise classes with senior patients who have fallen or have a fear of falling.

We are located in the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies, a technology incubator affiliated with the University of Vermont. Our major extracurricular activity is the Vermont Software Developer's Alliance, a non-profit trade group which promotes economic development in our area, primarily for software development companies. Both organizations, by the way, are looking to encourage high-tech businesses to start up and/or relocate in our state.

DonorPerfect Training: NYC in May

Didn't know that they had this. DonorPerfect will be holding two days of training sessions in May in New York City. $350 per day. Full details here.

Freedom to Connect -- Manifesto

I'm beginning to figure out that Freedom To Connect is a conference of people who espouse the following principals (with reservations by some).

1. Just as we first served homes with copper wire for electricity, and then copper wire for telephone service, we are now at an historical juncture where we should serve homes with fiber optic cable. It will actually cost less than either of the first two, because the poles and infrastructure are already in place for putting fiber into homes. Applications that would be supported by fiber include (but are by no means limited) to:

• The Smart Grid, or "infotricity" a two-way connection between the power company and home appliances, water heater, air conditioners, and furnace that would automatically smooth demand for electric power throughout the day. This would result in a projected saving of 25% of the current base power load and eliminate the need for new coal and nuclear power plants.
  
• "Triple Play", cable TV, telephone and high-speed internet service.
  
• Telemedicine, Telehealth and Distance Learning applications via two-way interactive multipoint videoconferencing
  
• Security monitoring
  
• Tele-Presence -- viewing a neighbor or relative (located next door or across the globe) in their home to share photos, stories, grandchildren, whatever.
  
• etc. ad. infinitum.

2. The notion that wireless technology is somehow a substitute for FTTH should be disabused. It is a necessary and desirable supplement, but not a replacement for FTTH.

3. Many believe wireless is actually twice as expensive to install and manage rather than fiber for the following reasons:
a. Wireless towers and transmitters still must be served by a fiber connection. ("backhaul")
b. Wireless requires substantial density to provide effective coverage.
c. Wireless is subject to interference, (leaves, weather, etc).
d. Wireless technology is volatile and becomes obsolete quickly.

4. There are many definitions of "under-served" populations. However, DSL technology with something like 320KB up and 1.5 megabits down does NOT constitute "broadband" in any meaningful sense, nonwithstanding that it is an improvement over dialup.

5. A working definition of broadband would be, at a minimum symmetrical speeds of, say, 20 megabits, (both directions), at the equivalent of $60.00 per month or less.

6. Under lobbying pressure (corruption? payoffs?) no less than 15 states in the U.S. have actually passed laws that prohibit municipalities or citizen groups from creating and forming their own broadband utilities. Examples cited in our meeting this week (Lafayette LA, and Glagsgow KN), described debilitating litigation initiated by incumbent phone and cable companies to shut down efforts to provide muni wireless and fiber networks. After the dust settled, the incumbents reduced their rates by three quarters when they had to compete with the municipality. So, unfortunately, incumbents must be seen as the enemy, until proven otherwise.

======================

Personally, I think this has parallels with other current battles.

• We can't have single payer healthcare because it would hurt the insurance companies.
  
• We can't have high-speed broadband, because it would hurt the incumbent cable and telephone companies.
  
• We can't have realistic fuel-economy standards because it will hurt the car companies.
  
• We can't get loans, because the banks won't lend any of their multi-million dollar bailout money.
  
• We can't have affordable higher education, because it would hurt the educational institutions (and the athletic programs).
  
• We can't find out who is responsible for the policies of torture and rendition, because it would "damage" our government's credibility and reputation.

Oh well. Might as well go back to watching television.

Freedom to Connect - Day 1

Free to Connect (F2C) is being held at the American Film Institute's Silver theater in Silver Spring Maryland, a suburb of Washington DC It is an exemplary demonstration of how to hold a no-frills conference... skeleton (but highly competent) conference crew, judicious outsourcing of food and reception, in a compact venue which offers lots of opportunities to meet the other attendees and presenters. The presentations are being streamed on the web, and there is an interactive Campfire chat which is projected next to the PowerPoint slides and which can be monitored by the speakers so that questions can be taken from outside the conference. As might be expected, the interactive chat is a mixture of serious comments and snark. Its a little disconcerting to type and see your comment projected full screen twenty seconds later.

About 250 participants. We were invited to bring our wireless laptops, and looking at the audience during my own presentation it seemed that well over 70% of the audience machines were Macs. We used my own Macbook for my presentation and the colleagues in our session; two were PowerPoint presentations that we ran in Keynote after listened to catcalls as Parallels tried to boot up Vista. Balance seems to be a mixture of Dells, IBM/Lenovo and a few netbooks. Acer Aspire, etc.

David Weinberger is live-blogging.

Session 2: Net politics and other applications
Ellen Miller, Sunlight Foundation,
Nathaniel James, Media and Democracy Coalition,
Larry Keyes, Telehealth via Broadband, and
Eva Sollberger, Stuck in Vermont Video Blog

4th set of presentations. Chris Savage is a lawyer, had a really interesting talk about the death of the Chicago School and how right now there is a unique opportunity to retool regulation to make it more consumer friendly.

Derek Slater - Google policy analyst. Talking about “Measurement Lab” an open platform for researchers to make measurements of internet bandwidth and for consumers to figure out what their internet speed is. There is so much we don’t know how the internet is performing. Could we fund some servers at the University that would host the Measurement Lab applications?

John Peha - FCC chief technologist. Mythology of Rural Broadband
1 in 3 households do not have access to wired broadband at any price.
Broadband has positive benefits for communities who have it, even for members of those communities who don’t subscribe.

Unserved communities don’t gain from broadband, and broadband installed elsewhere can actually degrade things in unserved communities.

Comment: Government should write the rules so that it easier to do the right thing than the wrong thing.

Technology neutrality is something to aim at.

The people who are comfortable with technology are the non-engineers they just use what works.

Comment: Technology neutrality is a false mantra.

Amy Wohl -- “recovering Chicago School economist.” When govt. attempts to fix mistakes by the market there is a lag.

---

The conference takes place on Monday and Tuesday. I arrived Saturday afternoon at Reagan airport and took the Metro to Silver Spring. Sunday, I ran around the mall. The Holocaust museum was jammed with school groups. I didn't quite know what to expect, I rather thought it would be like going to a cathedral in Europe, but it was more like the science museum. To get to the regular part of the exhibits you have to get a ticket and you are assigned a time. Because of the crowds mine wasn't until two hours later. I spent 90 minutes on the lower level looking at an exhibit of Nazi propaganda, and after that, I was done. Why people bring small children to this museum is beyond me.

I also went to the Native American museum, (outstanding kayaks) and the National Gallery. The Smithsonian museums are truly a national treasure..and they are all free.

Tom Friedman at the Freedom to Connect Conference

I'm at the Freedom to Connect conference, Thomas Friedman gives a keynote speech drawn from his latest book Hot Flat and Crowded. Notes:

Khakis, white shirt, tie. Looks shorter and younger than I expected. :-)
Turns out he lives in Bethesda, so it is just a quick ride on the Metro.
Based on his book Hot, Flat and Crowded.

Looks at the running chat -- “What the f*ck is that?”

Takes off shoes.
Someone immediately posts a photo on the interactive chat.

Motivation to write the book was that “we lost the groove of our country”.

New unit of measure -- the Americum == 300 million people living like Americans

First Law of Petro Politics:

Price of oil has an inverse proportion to the pace of freedom.

Moderated a panel between Al Gore and Bono.

According to the World Bank, 1.6 billion or 1/4 of all humanity have no access to electricity.

Loosing a species every 20 minutes. We are experiencing the biggest loss of biodiversity.

An incredible list of opportunities masquerading as a series of disasters.
Solution to the problems of climate change, poverty, (and everything else) is abundant cheap reliable energy.

The country which dominates energy technology will be the leader going forward. This country has to be the U.S.

You’ll know it is a revolution when somebody gets hurt.

American golfers get 41 miles per gallon, based on the number of miles walked per year (900) and the average amount of alcohol consumed. (22 gallons) (LK: does this statistic factor in the lower efficiency of ethanol?)

The difference between technology and commodity.
Wind, nuclear solar, etc. are technologies == the more used the price goes down.
Fossil-fuels are commodities. == the more used, the price goes up.

Change the leaders, not the light bulbs.

When we leave Iraq it will be the biggest transfer of air conditioners known to mankind.

BANANA = build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything

Smart grid --> Smart home --> appliances automatically day trade electricity --- stores power in electric car battery.

The future is here it is just not widely distributed yet.

I love being a reporter. It is a noble craft.

Conference: Freedom To Connect

Another plug for the Freedom To Connect conference to be held in Washington DC March 30th and 31. To crib from the home page.

F2C 2009 will tell the story of:

• on-line, network-enabled industry and culture, new jobs and sustainable growth
  
• Burlington VT, where muni fiber enables business, artistic endeavor, and new telemedicine
  
• how Lafayette LA’s community came together as it built its muni fiber network
  
• the twin cities of Cedar Falls and Waterloo, Iowa, where one twin has a muni net, and the other doesn’t
  
• how municipal CIOs are planning for Seattle, Portland and San Francisco municipal fiber networks
  
• city nets, wired and wireless, that didn’t work — what went wrong and what that teaches
  
• what Obama’s infrastructure and economic recovery plans mean for tomorrow’s network
  

Tech Friday -- WES and Ruby

Microsoft has made available considerable information about Windows Embedded Standard, (WES) which is the latest version of Windows Embedded, based on Windows XP.

There are (roughly) three versions of embedded operating systems from Microsoft:

Windows Embedded Standard: Allows a stripped down version of Windows XP for powering set-top boxes, game boxes, and machines dedicated to a single application. This is what we're using in one version of our telemedicine set-top box.

Windows Embedded POS: An enhanced version of WES for cash registers and checkout scanner applications.

Windows Embedded CE: This is the version of Windows used for mobile phones and other hand-held and portable devices. The code base and software development tools for CE are different than Windows Embedded, with many of these related to WES.

There are a total now of twenty-nine (29!) training videos related to Windows Embedded Standard.

The Windows Embedded Developer Center site is the gateway on Microsoft's Developer Network to all things related to Windows Embedded.

The Windows for Devices web site has information related to all version of Window Embedded as well as hardware that runs under Windows Embedded.

Other Notes:

Smashing Magazine has a nice introduction to Ruby on Rails.

Remote Access via iPhone and iPod Touch

Logmein now has a version of Ignition for the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

Logmein continues to provide terrific value for remote access. We're using it extensively, with a combination of the free version for most workstations and LogMeIn IT Reach for our servers and critical workstations. Ignition is the desktop client which is slightly more convenient than accessing your Logmein computers from a web page.

Danner Article on U.S. Torture Policy

I don't even know how to title this blog post.

This is the article in the New York Review of Books by Mark Danner, that comments on the International Red Cross report about the treatment of prisoners (oh, excuse me, detainees) after rendition to Guantanimo Bay and other secret U.S. prisons.

And so, after a devastating and unprecedented attack, the gloves came off. Guided by the President and his closest advisers, the United States transformed itself from a country that, officially at least, condemned torture to a country that practiced it. And this fateful decision, however much we may want it to, will not go away, any more than the fourteen “high-value detainees,” tortured and thus unprosecutable, will go away. Like the grotesque stories in the ICRC report, the decision sits before us, a toxic fact, polluting our political and moral life.

A shorter synopsis appeared in the Sunday New York Times.

The author's web page includes audio interviews.

Revisiting

After more than two years, a former and much loved non-profit client called for some help in sorting out their donor database. That's another story which may be worth telling, but I was interested in seeing how they have weathered the economic downturn, and how some of the networking decisions that we took some years ago have held up. They have a main office and several field offices scattered among three counties. They have about 55 employees.

1. By the time I had left, most of field offices had a broadband connection. That work was completed, and each office now has a DSL broadband connection, either from a local ISP, or from Fairpoint (the company who bought the Verizon landline and consumer data service in the three northern N.E. states). After working with it for a couple days, I'd say performance is OK.. although today, curiously, there was a twenty minute outage.
   
   
2. With broadband available, they how have remote access software going to EVERY computer in EVERY office, as well as their central file server. Much desktop maintenance that required an on-site visit, can now be accomplished over the wire.
   
   
3. Electronic mail accounts are hosted by the local internet service provider. People use Outlook or Outlook Express as their desktop eMail client....and access their eMail account when away from the office via webmail.
   
   
4. They refreshed their desktop hardware with Dell Optiplexes that were donated by a local large employer. Although the machines are hand-me-downs, they are more than adequate for eMail, web browsing, and running the database application. The donor also gave them several laser printers that were only a few years old. Everyone is running XP, with Office 2007. (Without prompting, they said that Office 2007 is fine.) They have Norton Anti-Virus which is managed from the file server. No less than three of the staff said, in casual conversation... "well, I do have a Mac at home". I nodded toward my Macbook, running Parallels, wondering if this turns out to be a longer term gig, if I will need to get a new Windows laptop.
   
   
5. Their Dell file server is probably going on five years; but it is built like a tank, with RAID drives, and the original HP backup tape system. They have HP Procurve 2124 ethernet switches, and HP continues to keep replacing them under a lifetime warranty, when the fans go bad. I think we've replaced two or three switches with this client, and a couple of them with other clients. It takes one phone call.
   
   
6. Several old battles were, well, old, if not forgotten. They have made their peace with a state-mandated performance data application which gave us all fits for years. The Executive Director attributes this success to attentive support from the state agency which mandated the system.
   
   
7. If there is one especially popular non-business application being used by the staff, it is streaming audio. In fact, today, the first indication that there was a glitch in the internet connection was when a staff member came in and asked why her "radio" wasn't working.
   

In short, it Just Works. I think this is attributable to the existing staff who have educated themselves over the years, and new staff who have come on board with full expectations of a functioning network and desktop workstation and how to use it. Add in some longstanding support from management who recognize the value of investing in technology and training, and the efforts of the current part-time network manager who keeps it all humming.

NPower - Network Documentation Template

NPower Seattle has a Network Documentation Template which is in Word. This is a great start for documenting your computer network. The file is called SBS2003template.doc which suggests it might have been modified by one supplied by Microsoft, and it includes inserted Visio files to show the networking diagrams. If you are a MS shop this will work out of the box. If not, you can easily modify it in OpenOffice, or Pages, or whatever. The object of documenting your network is not necessarily perfection...but to have something to give you a clue when things start going haywire.

Desktop Video: First Impressions of Polycom CMA

I had a visit from John Palaszynski, our regional Polycom rep the other day and had a look at the Polycom CMA client. (CMA stands for Converged Management Application. Doesn't that sound like something out of corporate?) This appears to be their answer to Tandberg's Movi client...which is a little ironic, because although the Movi client appears to have gotten the greater mindshare, version 2 (much improved) has been rumored for almost a year, but not yet deployed. CMA is indeed available; and has been since August 2008 or so.

Both are "server-based" videoconferencing clients which work on the Windows platform. By server-based, it means that if a user wants to participate in a videoconference, they click on a web site within their browser which takes them to the video server. After authenticating the user, the server checks to see if the videoconferencing client software is installed on the user's machine. If it isn't, it asks permission to download and install the client. This gets around the issue of installing a fat client on the machine, (i.e. PVX).

The client looks a lot like a chat client or Skype. It has buddy lists and so on. So far I've been unable to ascertain whether there is an API, or whether the appearance is configurable. For example, I still don't think there is a way to have the client open up full screen and wait for a video call. There seems to be no way to suppress the buddy screen/directory window.

Many of the set-up screens look as if they were lifted from the Polycom PVX product; they are identical. One major improvement over PVX is the support for high-definition video.

Of interest is that if you have the CMA server, it does NOT replace the need for an multipoint controller (video bridge), if you want to make multipoint calls. So, the product appears to be ideal for a large corporate deployment on a LAN or VPN-WAN.

Here is the data sheet.

Here's a press release with a fair amount of background.

They also have a white paper describing a number of example applications.

Grants.Gov in danger of collapse?

A Heads Up from the superb Medical Writing Editing and Grantsmanship Blog:

A new funding mechanism covering hundreds of scientifically diverse research topics to be scored under new scoring procedures using new review criteria by as yet unidentified reviewers untrained in this process … and now, the feds suddenly realized grants.gov might not be up to the task of receiving 1.3 million submissions at 5 p.m. ET on April 27th.

We're preparing an application for the April 27th deadline ourselves. Fortunately, we had the unnerving experience during the conversion from paper applications to the online electronic applications (was it only two years ago?) and so we have yet to get out of the habit of submitting earlier than the last day. You have been warned.