Category Archives: Lemonisms

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The return of WebPhone
When I first started to really use the Internet, I was involved with a group of friends in lookin at what was possible. We played with a lot of software – including WebPhone and CUSeeMe.

WebPhone was an application that looked like a little phone on your desktop, and it allowed you to use Voice over IP (VoIP) to talk with other WebPhone users over the Internet. The other day I found a list, that I was keeping, of all of the places around the world that I spoke to using WebPhone. I remember one day when we talked to a professor and his class at Kent University. They joked about us having Internet in Utah, and we joked back that we just heard they had a shooting on the campus.

CUSeeMe was a Video Conferencing package that we used at the same time. It was really impressive to set-up a “reflector” on one of our servers, and then to connect to the server using the CUSeeMe client. You were able to see who was connected in a list, open a video display of one or more of the participants, and then type back and forth. Audio was possible, however not well implemented.

What was interesting is that we were doing this with 14.4kbps modems, and then 56kbps modems. It seemed that as the bandwidth increased, the use of these applications dropped off. I just spent some time to go and find some of the “remains” of CUSeeMe … I’m going to see if I can get a reflector going again.

In the mean time … it was interesting to read about this new application catching attention … a decade later! Skype is almost exactly what WebPhone was …

OK, Skype has 240,000 downloads in just half a month. It took ICQ 60 days to get that many back in 1996. What’s different? Well, for one it was an established company that released Skype. ICQ was released to 40 users and no one knew anything about ICQ. But, remember, back in 1996 no one had weblogs. In fact, I had one of the first five public pages up about ICQ, while Skype has been talked about everywhere.

Anyway, Skype is now my new bar of release excellence for a small-company software product.

Hey, during that Sun keynote this morning the IP telephone from Vodaphone failed on stage. They shoulda used Skype. Hasn’t failed for me yet and the audio quality is unbelieveable.

People are asking me “you were the NetMeeting bigot, why you so excited about software that just does audio?” (NetMeeting was Microsoft’s audio/video/collaboration product that was released in 1995). For one, it works. For two, its user interface is clean and uncluttered. Don Norman would love it. For three, it makes you feel good using it, and makes you want to use it with your friends and family. (Translation: the audio quality rocks and is better than NetMeeting, or even MSN Messenger 6.0).

[Robert Scoble: Scobleizer Weblog]

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Grid grows … because it is becoming possible!
Grid Computing, Utility Computing, Distributed Computing … they are all buzz words evolving through the last decade or more. Why is everyone talking about them so much?

One of the core reasons is because it is becoming possible to build and manage in a simple way. At SCO we have been looking at Grid and Utility computing, and have some ideas on how this will evolve and emerge. Some of the foundation technologies have been coming together, and I believe we are going to see this accelerate.

First is the computing power and bandwidth. Computers and the Internet have evolved to the point where the overhead of distributed computing is something that is completely manageable and acceptable.

Second is the networking protocols and standards – like SOAP – that have emerged as the standard way to have application components communicate across the network. These standards provide the “least common denominator” langauge for interoperability between components written in different langauges on different operating system platforms. Software can call functions in other software … even if it exists on an entirely different machine.

Third is the virtualization that I talked about in my last post. As more software components are written in languages that can be executed on a diverse set of hardware/software platforms, it provides more places for these components to “live” … hence distributed computing.

I agree completely with these forecasts, and believe that we are going to watch the continuing acceleration of distributed applications … and I’m going to continue to work in this area.

Survey: Interest in grid computing grows. Corporate IT decision-makers are showing more interest in grid computing at their companies, with 20% saying they could adopt it within two years. [Computerworld News]

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Virtualization … above the OS
For over six months now, I have been looking into the evolution of software technologies, and where we are heading beyond the Operating System. For a proper abstraction of an operating system to be created, there are two core solutions required. The first of these is what I call “encapsulators”. An encapsultor is a software component that wraps some sort of logic or programming and exposes it through a standard interface. At SCO we are developing a series of encapsulators that wrap up OS functionality, terminal sessions, and SQL databases and expose them as SOAP web services.

The second, almost more important solution, is what I call “virtualizers” … Virtual Machines … or “dynamic language” support. The article below touches on this subject, as it explains how much of the development of new software has moved from being written in C or C++ – and tightly coupled to the OS platform it was written for – to newer languages that have greater portibility.

As more people move to developing in languages like Java, C#, PHP, Perl, Python, etc. their resulting applications can migrate between operating systems much easier. There is a flip-side of this flexibility however, and that is the commoditization and marginalization of operating systems themselves. We are moving into a new phase of computing … where the hardware computing platforms that we are using are able to execute so quickly, that software layers of virtualization produce completely acceptable performance levels. This means that more development will occur in these languages, and more applications – and application components – will be developed in a form that is cross-operating system ready.

The value of the operating system of the future, in my opinion, is going to be judged by the encapsulations of its functionality, and its support for virtualized execution environments.

App dev rides the virtual machine. Today’s enterprise developers have many choices when it comes to virtual machines that handle the plumbing and let them focus on user features. [Computerworld News]

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Access Points with intelligence!
I am very impressed with this project, and like to see technology like this hitting the commodity mainstream. Linksys has implemented an Access Point with a mini-Linux running inside. These guys have now started to create distributions of additional tools, etc. that can run inside the AP.

What I really like about this is the possiblity of putting additional authentication code inside of the AP for controlling access through it. I am currently involved in a project where we require a PC dedicated to provide this type of functionality. The PC siots between the Internet and the Access Point and provides the authentication and access control. If we could embed our code inside of this AP, we could eliminate the cost of the Access Point.

I might have to go buy one of these and take a look at what’s possible!

Linux on the Linksys wrt54g 0.2. A Linux distribution for the Linksys wrt54g wireless access point. [freshmeat.net]

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Mesh Networking continues to emerge
As I have been watching the wireless world explode over the last 8+ years, I have begun to realize that “mesh networking” is where it’s at. Mesh networking is the peer-to-peer solution in the wireless world. It begins to leverage the power contained in each radio to provide “relaying” capabilities for other nodes. Mesh will break the trend of “client-server” designs of traditional multi-point radio networks, and allow for self-configuration and distributed designs.

Mesh networking is going to change the entire way that wireless networks are designed, and also enhance the overall usability and capabilities of these networks. These guys are working in the right area!

Firetide Intros Mesh Routers. You can sign up to be an early adopter: Firetide is introducing a cool new product that it calls a wireless mesh router. It aims to eliminate the wired backhaul from traditional APs. So a company could distribute a slew of Firetide routers which self-configure to pass data from one to the next, back to an AP that is connected. Firetide is also opening the door to companies that want to be part of its early adopters program. HP Labs is already using Firetide gear. In a briefing Firetide gave to Glenn a few weeks ago, the company discussed some specific scenarios, such as unwiring hotels, in which so many of the costs were in the wireline side that their products could drop a project’s cost by more than half…. [Wi-Fi Networking News]

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Faster, smaller, more …
In continuing to watch the advances in technology, it was great to see this article that talks about some of the advances in hard disk technology.

I was talking with some friends the other day about going to Costco and being able to buy 160GB hard disks for less than $1 / gigabyte! When I looked on-line I found 200GB hard disks at extremely affordable prices also. It is amazing to me that it is now affordable to have 1 terabyte of storage at home – if you wanted to – for ~$1000 … in 2004.

The rate of technology evolution is still cranking along. Even though this article refers to a slight slow-down, I believe it will be made up for in the near future. Anyone want to guess on when we’ll see the first 1000GB drive? Will it be within the next two years?

Seagate spins 100GB platter. Seagate Technology on Tuesday said it has pushed the data-density envelope in the disk-drive industry, announcing a product that squeezes 100GB onto a single 3.5-inch platter. [CNET News.com – Front Door]

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A nice Network Management Tool
I use MRTG for monitoring and graphing many of the devices on my personal network, and also on our 80211.net wireless network. MRTG is a very simple, yet powerful application. I happened to come across this project the other day, and we’re about to give it a test. It appears to be a very good extension of the capabilities of MRTG without getting too complex.

NetMRG 0.10pre2. A network monitoring, reporting, and graphing system. [freshmeat.net]

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Advances in model rocketry …
When I was growing up, I really enjoyed building and launching model rockets. There were several of us in my neighborhood that would buy and build the Estes Rockets that we bought at the local hobby shop. I remember that we all would look through the Estes catalogs at all of the new rockets, the multi-stage rockets, and the rockets that had payload capabilities.

One of the neat gadgets that you were able to buy from Estes was a camera that would take the 110 film cartidges. It would take a series of pictures as the rocket went through its flight. You would have to take the film to get developed after recovery. I remember that we all talked about getting one of these cameras.

This article brought back all of these memories as these guys have taken this to a whole new level. They are now putting a video camera in a model rocket, and sending live video feeds back to the ground as the flight takes place. Amazing. I went to their site, and enjoyed checking out the recorded videos that they had.

Pretty soon, with a set-up like this, you’ll be able to watch them launch their rockets live! All it will take is tying their existing video feeds to a streaming video server attached to the Internet. They might be able to use a 802.11 point-to-point wireless link to get from their “launchpad” to the Internet.

If I get motivated … maybe I’ll play around with some of this stuff … it might be fun!

2.4GHz Wireless Video from Model Rocket [Slashdot]

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More on Google …
I posted about Google a couple of weeks ago (or months ago?) and expressed how impressed I am by this company. This is another post to expand on my thoughts about why I consider them so amazing.

There are a number of organizations across the planet that are all exploring ‘artificial intelligence’ and the creation of ‘thinking machines.’ I often believe that people miss the point when they see these being created within a single computer, or even having some sort of human form or appearance. In my opinion, it will be massive clusters/networks of machines that will give birth to ‘artificial intelligence.’ All of this will occur – IMHO – just as the brain works … through the accumulation and abstraction of huge volumes of ‘sensory’ data, combined with powerful pattern matching.

So this is where Google steps in. Google’s architecture is one that is massively distributed, and contains evolving pattern matching capabilities. Google is constantly ‘crawling’ or ‘spidering’ the Internet web sites gathering massive amounts of raw data, human knowledge, and anything else it can find. All of this data is then stored (cached), ranked, and indexed. When you go to Google and make a query, they use some very sophisticated pattern matching to return the results.

To get an idea of the types of pattern matching that are emerging from Google’s data, go take a look at their Google Sets. To see what this is capable of, enter three or four names of small towns near where you were born … click Small or Large sets and see what you get. It’s pretty cool.

So how does Google get even better? Well, one way would be to have humans type information and knowledge into Google so that it doesn’t have to go crawling and hunting for it. How would you do that? First, have it subscribe to all of the news groups that are used by millions(?) of Internet users. All of their posts would then flow into the databases of Google. Second, purchase a “Web Logging”, or ‘blogging’ company and offer the service for free. Users of the service would then be typing their thoughts, ideas, and knowledge directly into the Google databases.

And that is exactly what Google has done. Buying DejaNews gave them the NNTP news feeds and the first capability. Buying Blogger gave them the second capability. Google now has millions(?) of Internet users filling their databases with vast amounts of human knowledge. For free! This article seems impressed that Google purchased Blogger, and then chose to ‘give the product away for free.’ What else would they do? There is nothing like being able to ’employ’ people for your business and not have to pay them!

Google is amazing …

Google Helps Offer Blogger Pro For Free [Slashdot]

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Fuel Cell progress … Laptops, and that means Wearables!
This is a good article about the progress of methanol fuel cells. Apparently, there are several laptop vendors who are going to introduce Methanol Fuel Cell batteries for their laptops in 2004. It seems that the form factor and size for laptops is perfect for this.

If they are going to work for laptops … they will be perfect for wearable computers!

Fuel Cells To Appear In Laptops In 2004 [Slashdot]