Category Archives: Tablet PC Thoughts

Progress with Asterisk

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Funny how small the world is.  I’ve been coming up to speed on the Open Source Asterisk
PBX solution.  One of the first things that you have to purchase
are the cards for the PC that connect to phone lines.  For my test
solution, I want to have two phone lines connected into the PBX to do
some basic call handling/call routing/voice mail/e-mail notification.

In reading up on this, the technical terms for what I want are FXO line cards.  These are cards that act like a modem or phone and can “answer” calls.  (NOTE: the other type of cards are FXS cards which allow you to connect a telephone to the PBX and the FXS card will “ring” the phone and provide dial-tone.)  There are several solutions out there … from cheap to quite pricey!  I found a Digium 4-line card that can have FXO or FXS modules attached to it.  For what I am doing right now … it’s too much money.

There is also a lot of talk about the Intel chipset modems that can work.  Many Asterisk web sites refer to these as the X100P or X100P-clone
cards.  These are single-line cards that are actually “modems”
with voice capabilities.  In looking into this, I saw mentions of
the $65 card … and that’s more what I was looking for.  The best
part is that I found the link to DigitNetworks and they are selling the X100P cards
for $39.99.  Even better … they are on sale this month for
$25.95!  I just picked up two of these and ought to have them in
the next day or so.

So with these two PCI cards, I’ll be able to install them into my Linux
box, and then install and configure Asterisk to use them.  This
ought to allow me to have the two lines answered – for two different
companies – and walk the caller through a series of prompts to transfer
them to the correct extension, or voice mail box.  I’ll blog more
about it as I make progress.

So why is it funny how small the world is?  It turns out that
DigitNetworks is just up the road from here in West Jordan, Utah!

The evolution of RSS

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It is very cool to see how RSS is being used for a wider range of
solutions than just blogging.  In experimenting with my iPod, I
have been studying the RSS enhancements that Apple has started to use,
and this article talks about a bunch of the enhancements that Microsoft
is experimenting with.

Where I have been thinking a lot lately is on new ways to use
RSS.  Since there are now so many news aggregator applications
that can consume RSS, it’s about time to think of new ways to create
feeds that are customized to the requestor.  And these would not
necessarily be the time-ordered “news” feeds … but maybe new forms of
reference material on demand.  What about educational content
being delivered on demand via RSS?  You simply subscribe to a
“feed” that begins to release content to you – posts or enclosures – on
a regular basis.  Your aggregator consumes the feed and presents
you with the content is more of a “chapter-order”.  At some point,
maybe there is even an extension that tells your aggregator that a feed
is now “dead” … or “finished”.

I’m thinking about how I might experiment with these Microsoft
extensions … in addition to some of the things I’m doing with my
iPod.  In the field of “identity management” I begin to think
about how I might want to give someone the ability to “subscribe” to
“me”.  I could easily do this via SSL, and then add
authentication.  People who I want to share with could then
subscribe to updates to my identity attributes.  Things like
sharing my GPS location could easily be done this way.  It’s fun
to see this whole area of technology get more and more mature.

Microsoft making RSS a two-way street.
Microsoft is creating extensions for the RSS syndication format to make
it multidirectional, a move that could allow RSS to be used to
synchronize information such as contacts and calendar entries across
different applications. [Computerworld News]

January Utah Dev Geek Dinner

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Tonight was the Dev Utah January Geek Dinner.
There was a good turn out and it was fun to see some of hte people who
came. This time there was a basic catered dinner, and then the
fun began. Overall … a big turn-out of geeks. There were
a few people that I wanted to track down to ask questions about Asterisk … I’m about to set-up my first Asterisk server.

During dinner, I talked with Russell Page of Politis Communications. One of his clients is Handheld Entertainment
… a company making extremely low cost handheld video devices.
They actually sounded pretty cool. The devices start at $99 and
are sold at Walmart. They really need some marketing folks …
their web site is pretty lame.

The first presentation was by Nathan Nelson of Nelson Legal. He
started off by talking about various business issues with getting a
company going. What legal entities exist, what types of steps to
take to create them, etc. Pretty brief … good information for
the new entrepreneur.

Dave McKenzie then presented about Software Patents. He works at Kunzler & Associates
and they focus on Intellectual Patent Law. He covered the
standard stuff about patents, why and how you might want to file them.

SoftwareFor.org gave a brief
presentation of their Software for Starving Students. It’s
actually a very cool CD that they have put together of a wide range of
free software.

I’m going to post for now … I’ll post again when I get home if there
was more stuff in the “after event”. There are a few people that
I want to catch up with …

Converting DVDs and Videos for the Video iPod

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I have to admit that it has been harder than I thought to find a free
solution for converting DVDs and various other digital movies into the
right format for the iPod … on Windows.  Yes, yes … I know …
if I was using a Mac then it would just be there.  But I’m not …
yet.  (NOTE:  I’m seriously interested in buying a iBook,
PowerBook, MacBook at some point soon … and I will.)  For now,
my primary laptop is running Windows, with Linux in Virtual PC. 
My Tablet PC is also running Windows.  So I want a Windows
solution.  There are a number of commercial application that look
good … but I wanted to see what I could find for free.

I bought an iPod Video a while back, and have been doing most of my
experimenting and research on the audio side of things.  I moved
from the music and smart playlists into podcasts.  I’ve learned a
lot, and see some very interesting ways that this platform can be
leveraged into new businesses and business models.  So what about
video?

I’ve had a long experience with video and video editing … starting
with 3/4″ tape decks in the late 70’s … and all the way up to my
current digital video editing set-up.  I wanted to know how to
easily take a DVD, or existing digital video content, and get it
converted to MPEG4 format and moved into my iPod.  Here’s what I
found that seems to work:

  1. For doing the conversion of content I’m pleased with Videora and their Videora iPod Converter.  Based on the Open Source FFmpeg
    project, this is a clean – and free! – application.  It installed,
    and was easy to figure out and use.  Once you install it, you can
    do “One Click” conversions, or create a queue of conversions and just
    allow your machine to run all night.  Videora has an insteresting
    add-on that I might look at which is their automatic downloading tool –
    Videora.  So that is the solution for converting video to the proper format.
  2. For grabbing video from a DVD, I found the Open Source DVDx
    project at SourceForge.  I’m going to test this tonight, however
    the claim is that it will rip a DVD to various digital video formats
    … which I can then feed into my Videora iPod Converter.  It
    appears to work easy enough, and there are other people using this tool
    for this same purpose.

So I’m about to jump into really using my Video iPod and seeing what
might be interesting to take on the road.  In my initial test, I’m
impressed by the size and video image … I’ll have to watch a few
videos to really see if I like it or not.  In either case, I now
have two key tools to be able to get content into the right formats for
the iPod!

More and more autonomous

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I know that this is older news, however I still love reading articles
about this race.  This is truly amazing and is going to alter a
lot of things.  The fact that a computerized car can drive itself
131.6 miles and avoid getting stuck.  Oh yeah … and this is only
2005.  So what are we going to be hearing about in 2010?

With the current rate of technological advances, five years is a huge amount of time for amazing developments to occur.

Driverless robots reach milestone in DARPA race.
Stanford University’s Racing Team has accomplished a historic feat of
robotics, finishing first in the DARPA Grand Challenge, a 131.6-mile
driverless car race that no artificially intelligent machine has ever
conquered before.

Stanford’s “Stanley,… [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News]

The word ‘Identity’

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I liked reading Phil’s post about the word ‘Identity’.  This is
one of the core issues surrounding the subject … the definitions and
understanding of the words.  Without a common language and lexicon
it becomes very difficult to nail down specifics on anything!

Years ago while looking into Identity I came across an article that
discussed the origins of the word … and it was a real breakthrough
for me.  From Dictionary.com, Identity is:

[French identité, from Old French identite, from Late Latin identits, from Latin idem, the
same (influenced by Late Latin essentits, being,, and identidem, repeatedly), from id, it. See i-
in Indo-European Roots.]

“Being the same as” … so the two core thoughts in this are that it is
something that is derived from observing, and it is relative or
comparative.  There is an observer who assigns you identity by
comparing you – or some aspect of you – to something else that is
known.  I believe this is the cornerstone of identity.

On the Word ‘Identity’.

On the way back from a meeting in Salt Lake this afternoon, I was
pondering the word ‘identity’ and the way it is used in the physical
world and the way we use it in the world of IT. Something I heard on
NPR set off this navel gazing–I can’t remember what. Coincidentally,
when I got to my office, I found this post from Tim Greyson on the living language of identity. And so, a post…

If I ask my wife, kids, or neighbors “what is identity?” they
answer in various ways that I think reduce, at their most basic level,
to this: “identity the sum total of who I am…my uniqueness.” It
includes not only attributes like height, eye color, and so on, but
also their personality, hopes, and dreams–everything that makes them
them. One way of sussing this out is to ask: do identity twins have
different identities? We would say yes, even when we can’t tell them
apart.

…

[Phil Windley’s Technometria]

Next generation electronic companies

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My father worked for Westinghouse Electric Corporation for over 30
years.  While growing up I was introduced to the broad range of
products created and produced by Westinghouse … from appliances, to
power generation, to nuclear power plants, to military radar.  To
me is was amazing the breadth of products and markets that Westinghouse
participated in … from consumer products to advanced military weapons.

This article reminded me of this same scenario with a slight
twist.  The folks at iRobot are not only the producers of the
Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, but also some very advanced military
robots.  If you haven’t yet listened to the talk by Helen Greiner
– co-founder and chairman of iRobot – she gave a great presentation at Accelerating Change 2004.  It’s very cool to see a company like this involved in such a wide range of applied technologies.

iRobot unveils sniper detector. The robot maker equips its PackBot combat device with gear to help soldiers find enemy marksmen. [CNET News.com]

Remote control … using your brain!

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There are many ways in which the interface between humans and computers
has evolved in recent years, however I think that the biggest jumps are
about to occur.  This article is an example of just how far things
are progressing.  We are now able to isolate specific thoughts
with electrodes placed strategically around the scalp.

My thoughts are not about how to detect thoughts of walking … but
instead how the detection of thoughts can be converted to new forms of
communications.  What if I could think
about sending a message to you, and the computer would generate an
e-mail or an SMS message to you?  I actually think that research
like this is taking us closer and closer to ‘artificial telepathy’ …
technology that will allow us to ‘think’ to each other.

Computer users move themselves with the mind.
Computer scientists have created a brain-computer interface that can
read your thoughts. It allows you to stroll down a virtual street. All
you have to do is think about walking.

The technology detects brain waves by using electrodes placed at st… [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News]