Category Archives: Lemonisms

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More automated video security
I have always enjoyed working with video. There are numerous ways that it can be used for entertainment, and also for applications like security. This is a very impressive suite of applications for video security.

As PCs and their web-cams are becoming more cost effective, software suites like this can now be used as extremely ‘intelligent’ solutions for monitoring a home or business. This software has the ability to detect motion on any of its cameras, and then begin to record to generate notifications. What was really impressive was that it even supports multiple zones to monitor within a single camera image. The screenshots give a more detailed explanation of the features.

As I get some time … I might give this a try. I have some ideas on what I can do with something like this …

ZoneMinder 1.17.2. A Web-based video camera security, motion capture, and analysis suite. [freshmeat.net]

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Making spam more difficult or costly to generate
I do like this track of thinking … how to create the various hurdles that have to be jumped … how to make spam more difficult or costly to generate.

Microsoft project aims to make spammers pay for spam. The goal is to use technology to make it expensive for spammers who send out millions of unwanted e-mail messages, according to a Microsoft researcher. [Computerworld News]

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Wired about US jobs going to India
Yes … this is a well written article. When I grew up, I was lucky enough to live in Pittsburgh, PA. I grew up as the US steel industry was hitting some very hard times … and steel jobs were going off shore. I remember the arguements and anger … I remember how people suggested that it could be stopped … and *should* be.

Eventually people accepted the inevitable …

Jobs to India — A Broad Look [Slashdot]

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802.11 is here to stay …
I really like this perspective on 802.11 wireless networks. I have to agree with most all of his points.

There was one other quote in here that blew me away …

“And while many technologists would tell you that the x86 architecture is anything but elegant and certainly far from optimal, Intel recently shipped its billionth x86 processor.”

One billion of anything is a lot!

Why 802.11 is underhyped. Venture capitalist J. William Gurley sees parallels in the history of how the x86 architecture and Ethernet unfolded to dominate their respective markets. [CNET News.com – Front Door]

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Oblix? Buying Confluent?
Knowing both of these companies, and people working at them, I was initially confused by the announcement of this acquisition. Why would Oblix purchase Confluent?

Oblix is the maker of software to manage user identites within large distributed software systems. Confluent provides a web-services security management solution. It seemed to me that there must be some common thread … and then I found this article:

U.S. Postal Service taps Oblix for identity management
It’s designed to allow the Postal Service to manage millions of user identities
Briefs by Linda Rosencrance

FEBRUARY 04, 2004 ( COMPUTERWORLD ) – The U.S. Postal Service has selected Oblix Inc.’s NetPoint to give online customers secure and password-protected Web access via single sign-on to software tools and resources.

Once fully deployed, NetPoint will offer business customers and consumers a simple and collaborative interface through Web services, Cupertino, Calif.-based Oblix said in a statement.

Ok … now it makes sense. Oblix lands a large government contract … is adopting web services standards in their product … and immediately requires security for this solution!

Nice project to land … congrats to Oblix *and* Confluent!

Oblix buys into Web services management. The maker of identity management software plans to acquire Web services management start-up Confluent Software, accelerating consolidation in the marketplace, CNET News.com has learned. [CNET News.com – Front Door]

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Planet-Lab … planetary-scale applications platform
While looking around at some interesting monitoring software (Ganglia link below) I came across an Intel Research sponsored project that I hadn’t seen before … PlanetLab. The home page of their web site states:

PlanetLab is an open, globally distributed platform for developing, deploying and accessing planetary-scale network services. PlanetLab nodes support both short-term experiments and long-running network services. To date, more than 200 research projects at top academic institutions have used PlanetLab to experiment with such diverse topics as distributed storage, network mapping, peer-to-peer systems, distributed hash tables, and distributed query processing.

This is a very impressive project, and I downloaded a lot of their documentation and courseware to read through. I can only imagine what is going to occur as we all contribute our computers into communities of machines like this!

The link below is the distributed monitoring system that I was checking out …

Ganglia 2.5.6 (Monitoring core). A scalable distributed monitoring system. [freshmeat.net]

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Another result of plentiful processing power
This is an article that takes a slightly different look at what we can expect from all of the processing power that is being made available by the evolution of microprocessors. I have commented on why I think this makes ‘virtualization’ more and more probable, however this article explores what we’ll get from the ability to ‘brute force’ analyze data.

The Rise of Intelligent Agents: Automated Conversion of Data to Information. Automated tools that can make sense out of mounds of information are just a few years away, consultants Martha Young and Michael Jude predict. Will your network be ready for the deluge? [Computerworld Software News]

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hard disk capacity trends 2005
These are the five words that I typed into Google to see what I could find about growing hard disk capacities. One of the articles that I found – Trends in the Development of an Ultra-small Hard Disk For Mobile Terminals – was exactly the type of info that I was looking for. In addition, this paper from IBM provides some very good insight and analysis of the hard disk density trends.

Overall, I am amazed that I am able to buy hard disk storage for ~$1/GB … or less. A quick check at CompUSA on-line will show a number of 160GB-200GB hard disks priced around this number … and they are not a “cheap” store. At other on-line stores the prices are even cheaper. I’m amazed to see this 200GB, 7200RPM Seagate hard disk for $199.99!

Combined with our 4Ghz processors that are coming from Intel this year, computers are continuing to meet and/or exceed the estimates of Moore’s Law. I’m thinking about when exactly I’ll own my first server with more than one ‘terabyte’ of storage? It’s only a few years away … if that.