IEEE Internet Computing: Wireless Grids: Distributed Resource Sharing

IEEE Internet Computing: Wireless Grids: Distributed Resource Sharing

An article that I need to read, looks interesting.

Idea: Using Pop3 servers as online file storage

I've done a quick google, and can't find this anywhere, so here's the idea.

You should be able to construct a standalone app or an explorer integrated thing that looks and acts like file storage, but connects to a pop3 server and actually stores files as encrypted attachments of some kind. You might go for the hotsync style where you synchronise a local folder with your online storage, and can sync from online to local or from local to online, or some clever combo.

With such a piece of software, a pop3 account becomes file storage for backing up, or for centralising your files between machines. Excellent!

Add to this that you can get gmail accounts with 1gb of storage, and that you can get pop servers that talk to gmail, and suddenly you've got some very decent free online storage.

Emlyn

Google AdSense Tour

Google AdSense Tour

Spot the crazy word in the page above. What were they thinking???

Let them sing it for you

Let them sing it for you

Type in song lyrics, and have the song generated from samples of famous songs, singing your words. Zany! It's worth trying once, you'll laugh your butt off! (then you'll probably never go back there, but hey)

Backwashkids - Write for Us

Backwashkids - Write for Us

A kids magazine site looking for columnists. It sounds like fun... maybe I could write columns for them? I'll check this out further...

MIT OpenCourseWare %7C OCW Home

This is one of those sites which I keep meaning to get back to... I've got some learning to do particularly in molecular biology.

MIT OpenCourseWare %7C OCW Home

a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world. OCW supports MIT's mission to advance knowledge and education, and serve the world in the 21st century. It is true to MIT's values of excellence, innovation, and leadership.


MIT OCW:
Is a publication of MIT course materials
Does not require any registration
Is not a degree-granting or certificate-granting activity
Does not provide access to MIT faculty


What is MIT OpenCourseWare?
MIT OCW is a content-rich Web site that is 35 gigabytes in size; offering access to 701 courses that contain 11,425 HTML pages, 13,973 unique PDF pages, and 8,805 images -- overall, 38,977 total files for use by MIT's global audience. All of this is made available through the generosity of 447 MIT faculty, with many more signed on for future publication cycles.

Chimes Of Freedom Flashing%3A UNOS - Part I

Here's a guy thinking along the same lines as myself, but further progressed...

-----
(from his blog, click the title above to go to his blog)

UNOS

In this article I’m going to pull together some ideas which have been percolating in the background for several months, and which have been discussed, enhanced, and embelished with a group of friends who also develop software.

The fundamental idea expressed, and hopefully elucidated, in this article is that existing monolithic operating systems have been made obsolete by advances in hardware capability and continually falling prices, together with advances in programming techniques and networks, both local and wide-area. Instead I advocate for an architecture that has no centralized operating system, hence the un-OS, or UNOS.

Video of Humanoid Fighting Robots at Robo-One

Watch it a few times and feel your jaw hit the floor...
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2004/0810/robo23.mpg

Here's the full article...

Combat robots wow crowds
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996286&lpos=home2

Hidden Cargo Pants

Scott-E-Vest has announced the Hidden Cargo Pants. The pants have 14 pockets and the patent-pending Personal Area Network (PAN) from Technology Enabled Clothing. The pants have multiple, layered pockets and magnetic closures.

In addition to the traditional button closure, the waist can be adjusted with hidden drawstrings, for extra comfort. The pants are 100% cotton with Teflon coating to repel water and stains.

http://www.scottevest.com/v3_store/hiddencargopants.shtml

Shifty tiles bring walking to VR

A moving floor for VR. Bloody fantastic! The photo is the real killer...



Cool ey?

Idea: Disposable Code

I've had it with the current software methodologies, they all suck, and they all seem to miss something important... ability to cope with brilliance.

I'll continue this later, so it's just a teaser for now!

Idea: Units calculator

I've been doing this electronics course; I'm still doing the basic introductory stuff. Part of this has been in dealing with units of measurement and conversion between SI base units, SI derived units, and other systems of measurement.

Here is a post of mine in another blog with excellent references on units of measurement.

SI are the standard units, as below:

---------------------------------------------

 SI base units

---------------------------------------------

Base quantity          Name           Symbol 

length                 meter          m 

mass                   kilogram       kg 

time                   second         s 

electric current       ampere         A 

thermodynamic temp.    kelvin         K 

amount of substance    mole           mol 

luminous intensity     candela        cd 

---------------------------------------------

Anyway, if you want to do conversions, just go to Google.com . For example, try typing in "200 feet per second in furlongs per fortnight" . It's got a calculator that understands units built into it.

I was grinding away at this basic stuff in the labs at TAFE the other night, when it struck me that this is a very easy thing to build.

If you restrict yourself to the 7 standard units (I've listed them above in the third paragraph), you can describe any measured quantity using a scalar value for the amount, and a septuple for the units. Each entry in the septuple represents the index or power for the base unit that entry represents. You need to define a strict ordering, so we'll use that in the table above. Then we can have the following representations, by example:

10 m / s^2 => 10 (1, 0, -2, 0, 0, 0, 0)
20 Joules = 20 m^2 kg / s^2 => 20 (2, 1, -2, 0, 0, 0, 0)
30 kW = 30 000 m^2 kg / s^3 => 30000 (3, 1, -3, 0, 0, 0, 0)
911 Fahrenheit = 761.48 Kelvin => 761.48 (0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0)
etc...

Once you've got this representation, it becomes pretty easy. If someone asks for quantity Q in units U to be converted to units V (ie: they want converted quantity R), then
- you need to convert U to U' where U' is entirely described in SI base units, and so is described in the format above
- you need to convert V to V', where V' is entirely described in SI base units, and so is described in the format above
- If the unit septuple is identical, conversion is possible. If not, conversion can't be done. You can tell them what the problem is, by subtracting V' from U', and explaining to the user that U converts to units V * (U'-V'), not V
- If the conversion can be done, then lets do it. Now to get U into form U', we need a lookup telling us what each non-base unit it in terms of base units. It will be a scalar and a septuple, where the scalar is a multiplying factor to be used in conversion. For example, google tells me that 1 foot is 0.3048 meters. So, a foot is represented as:

foot conversion -> 0.3048 (1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0)

Where you see "12 feet", the conversion tells you to replace "feet" with 0.3048 meters, so it reduces to 12 * 0.3048 meters which is 3.6576 meters.

Where we have complex units, they consist of many units multiplied together (consider division as a multiple of the inverse). So we can take each unit, raise its multiplication factor to the power of the unit in the expression (eg: 12 feet squared is 12 * 0.3048^2 meters) and multiply each element in the unit septuplet by the power of the unit, then multiply all these seperated unit results together by multiplying all the multiplication factors and adding all the septuplets

eg: We want 14 square feet per hour in square meters per day.

U is square feet per hour

foot conversion -> 0.3048 (1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0)
hour conversion -> 60 (0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0)

square feet -> 0.3048 ^ 2 (1 * 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0)
-> 0.09290304 (2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0)
per hour conversion -> 3600^-1 (0, 0, -1, 0, 0, 0, 0)

U' = square feet per hour -> 0.09290304 * 3600^-1 (2, 0, -1, 0, 0, 0, 0)
-> 0.0000258064 (2, 0, -1, 0, 0, 0, 0)

V -> V' is easier:

V is square meters per second
square meters conversion -> 1^2(1 * 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0)
-> 1(2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0)
day conversion -> 86400 (0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0)
per day conversion -> 86400^-1(0, 0, 1*-1, 0, 0, 0, 0)
-> 1.15740741 × 10^-5(0, 0, -1, 0, 0, 0, 0)

V' = square meters per day -> 1.15740741 × 10^-5(2, 0, -1, 0, 0, 0, 0)


Note that V' and U' are compatible (same septuplet). Now, the answer is:
14 * 0.0000258064 / 1.15740741 × 10^-5 = 31.2154214

ie: 14 square feet per hour is 31.22 square meters per day


--

So you can see that any units can be converted to any others. It is trivial to implement multiplying to different quantities with units together (convert to base units, multiply scalars and add septuplets), and addition (convert to base units, must have matching unit septuplets, these are unchanged, add scalars together). So an expression evaluator is fairly straightforward (all the work will be in the parsing & expression analysis).

So you can do units a calculator, and a units convertor. You can also give feedback on mismatching units as I described above (eg: 10 meters squared per second in feet per second yields a mismatching septuplet of (1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0), so you can say "meters squared per second converts to feet meters per second, not feet per second", maybe you could do some magic to work out that feet meters is silly and convert it to feet squared :-) ).

Also, you could allow other units, like "dollars" (so you could work with dollars per cubic meter, or something along those lines). Lots of others, actually; "byte" might be a nice base unit. Maybe allow the user to define arbitrary extra base units!

There might be a way to allow users to add new units, by giving the scalar and the septuplet (or longer vector, as above). Also, we might be able to rip the scalar out of google using it's API to look up the conversion!

Food for thought, ey?

Idea: Web based Identity Management incl. Online Schedule

Here's an idea I've had on the boil for a little while...

In the corporate computing environment, computer users (ie: all employees!) have many systems to access (e-mail, web, file systems, documents, databases, applications, etc etc etc). There is a concept of an overall "identity" for a user, which is the totality of the things that person needs to access (so security they need), and could also in my opinion incorporate all the "addresses" they have in the system. For instance, a typical user might have an email address, a messenger account or some other IM presence, a (Outlook based or similar) calendar/schedule, outlook or other system based Contacts, a piece of networked filesystem where they can store their documents, plus a profile of username/password combos (ie: accounts) in an array of systems (ie: a security profile) defining what they can and can't do in what is usually quite a heterogenous environment.

In the greater computing environment outside the corporate castle (ie: the internet), and the non-computing environment (ie: the world), users (ie: people!!!) have lives and interactions, and have these same kinds of things; schedules, contacts, email, phone numbers, files, systems they can and can't access, etc etc. But in this environment, it's anarchy, with each person having their own quixotic combination of services to which they subscribe, methods for accomplishing things, contact points ("addresses" in a broad sense), etc. Each person has, in the systems sense, a complex and unique "identity", in part chosen by themselves (like what services they use, how they use them), in part chosen by others (such as whether company X is willing to give person Y access to service Z).

This real-world identity, of which the corporate identity (for corporate employees) forms a significant part (eg: people often use their work email for personal purposes), is increasingly difficult to manage, and in some areas there is no good solution, so people are stuck with shitty ones.

For example, people now can have many email addresses, multiple phone numbers, many IM addresses, lots of accounts (hundreds sometimes!) on lots of websites each with their own username/password combo. So that approaches unmanageable, and people have to limit the services they use, or compromise security (eg: using the same username/password combo everywhere) to cut down the complexity.

As examples of "identity" components with no good solution, a person's files are an ongoing drama. You have files at work, at home, on some websites, etc, but unifying your access to them is pretty much impossible, without drastically limiting your identity (eg: only ever using the one computer). Also, Contact management and Schedule/Calendar management become an ongoing nightmare in the increasingly distributed computer environment. People have their contacts and calendar on their PDA, on their phone, on their work system, maybe at home, all trying to sync up, almost successfully.

There are partial solutions to these problems. For example, nerd keys (those USB file storage keys) are a way to move files around more easily from one environment to the next. Contacts can be coped with by restricting oneself to a primary machine (say a PDA). But these are fraught (what if you lose that nerd key, or it fills up? What if you lose that PDA?).

I think there's a space for more all-encompassing solutions. If you look at identity as a whole, all the pieces have solutions of one kind or another, but the bigger picture of managing all of that stuff is still totally out of hand.

Personally, I love a chaotic environment; orderliness crushes my soul. Also, I'm a software developer, so I swim pretty easily in the murky ocean of IT. But even with this kind of crazy personality, I still find it is becoming harder to personally manage all this stuff, and it'd be cool to solve it somehow.

Also, I find personally that I love the freedom of the hereogeneous internet, it's my favourite place in the world. The idea of being centrally managed, even by myself, really triggers panic buttons for me. So any solution that I can personally live with had better not restrict me, or it can go get f&*ked.

Urm, back to the all encompassing solution, being conceived by an anarchist...

What we need I think is some kind of representation of our "identity", a helper, that can unify this stuff enough to alleviate the burden without being restrictive.

What are the elements of the problem that needs solving? I think they are:
- We use lots of devices (phones, PDAs, laptops, home computers, work computers, library/internet cafe computers, ...)
- Some of these machines restrict us in what we can do (eg: Work machines, public machines).
- We have broad, complex "identity" profiles (all our phone numbers, web addresses, email addresses, accounts with websites, accounts at work, accounts at home, services we use) that need to be as accessible any place as any other place, where that is reasonable. It may not reasonable to expect to access your workplace's confidential computer system from an internet cafe, but it might be reasonable to expect to be able to access your schedule, your contacts, and maybe your personal files, from any access point.

Any unifying system needs to be broadly accessible. I'll assume it is primarily web based, as that will cover almost all needs. Offline access might be achieved with some kind of caching mechanism, or with special clients that talk to the system using other protocols (eg: maybe a WAP interface for retarded WAP phones), but in general I'll assume you can manage a browser from pretty much anywhere. Where you can't do that today, you will be able to in the future, and faster than ever before.. the options for connectivity to the web are growing at incredible rates.

From the preceding, a web based identity management system would need to do some or all of these things:
- Store private information, such as contacts, usernames/password, etc etc, so they are easy to lookup, or in some cases so they can be applied automatically without the user needing to retype them (like logging into a secure website using stored authentication details)
- Store a public profile, giving visitors access to details like email address, phone numbers, whatever parts of their identity a person wants to make public.
- Provide a file store, that files can be uploaded to and downloaded from. Along with clever desktop software or other similar solutions, this could turn into a synchronised store on each trusted machine (work comp, home comp, PDA) that the person wanted to nominate, and could be used ad-hoc elsewhere.
- Provide a schedule, which has the following features
- the person may update that schedule and view the schedule as required
- Other people could be given partial access to the schedule, with whatever necessary degree of granularity, so some could see part or all of it, some may be able to update it (eg: book appointments), some may not be able to access it at all
- The schedule should be able to deliver notifications to phones, PDAs, computers, etc, via protocols like email, sms, IM (?), paging (?), etc
- The schedule should be able to sync with local schedules (such as a corporate exchange users' workplace schedule) via their PC, not requiring integration by the workplace's IT people. eg: it should be able to communicate in both directions with Outlook running on a desktop PC. This may require manual action by the person, eg: opening the identity management website and logging in, opening outlook, then pressing a "hotsync" button in the website.
- The site could provide facilities such as email, web hosting, blogs, whatever. However, these are already commonly available, so it would be far more important to allow easy integration/access to external facilities. For instance, a hotmail user should be able to configure their "identity" so there is a button on their main page that says "hotmail", and pressing that button logs them into hotmail and opens it in a new browser window. Similarly with blogs, rss readers, web site editing/hosting, news posting, whatever. There are great solutions to many of the identity problems out there, and the aim here is to make them easier to manage as a whole, not to replace them.


I'm running out of steam here, and I've got heaps of other stuff to blog. I'll come back to this.

One final note: this looks like the Web Portal concepts of the 'net boom of the late nineties. It's similar, but I don't think they ever worked out why their portals would be useful to people, and desperately threw news, weather and sports info at people. Personal identity management is a strong concept online, not addressed, and can end up being an indispensable service online eventually.

Eventually *all* of our user computing will be online, and the GUI interface will be about serving up a browser and not much more. Yes, the NC dreams of the 90s will happen, are happening, they are just taking a while to come together. This personal identity management is one cap in that multidimensional arch.

Wow, I've got tons of stuff to blog

I'm really back-blogged (oh yeah, what a pun, you go big guy!), I'll try to blurt it all out now.

Wired News: I, Standard Man

Wired News: I, Standard Man

Stan D. Ardman is one lucky stiff. If his heart gives out and he stops breathing on the operating table, a simple reboot will bring him back to life. While he can cry, speak and convulse, he feels no pain. And the miracle of interchangeable genitalia means he can quickly become Stanette without having to go through a $75,000 sex-change operation.

(etc)

Getting heard

I'm thinking that Exterminate! is good enough to be heard out there on the radio. So I need to nut out a plan to get that happening.

I think it probably needs a couple of similar tracks to be viable, for a bit of depth. I'm wondering if I might make one or two other songs about Super Villians or Evil Robots of some kind. Any suggestions from cyberspace?

I thought I'd go for internet world domination, so I'm going to compile a list of internet accessible radio stations, to whom I can submit "new music". As a start, there's triple j in Australia (http://abc.net.au/triplej) and a bbc radio site "One Music" (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/onemusic/index.shtml). I need to get more...

The web site needs to be polished up before I submit it anywhere, so that it can take a bit of load, and so it presents excellent backgrounders, cool graphics, etc etc for vistors who come looking for music. I might look at hosting the important pages in the same webspace that the files reside in (thanks again Eugen!)

Any other ideas? Inspiration? I'd love any readers to comment... I think I'm probably talking to myself at the moment. There's a button just below this post, it says "comment", try clicking it...

Better mp3 hosting!

Now, thanks to the generosity of my virtual friend Eugen, I've got somewhere decent to put music that will be accessible to people.

Get Exterminate! Here (right click and choose "Save As")
Get Dido's Lament (Draft) Here (right click and choose "Save As")

Exterminate! by The Land Canaan

We (my darling wife and I, under the banner of The Land Canaan) have created a new, funny song based around Davros & the Daleks. It's called "Exterminate!", and you can download it free from my website.

It's chockers with Dalek and Davros samples that I've scrounged from the net. Thanks to all the Dr Who wav file archive sites.

Exterminate!

I've just had this really cool idea to turn a techno-style piece of music I put together a while back into an homage to killer robots in sci fi. Now I need samples. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know! My email is emlynoregan@gmail.com, or just add a comment to this entry.

My first little goldmine is here:
Dalek Wav Archive

temporary post

This is a temporary post so that I've got quick access to the URLs I need for my new electronics course.

Torrens Valley TAFE Intranet
Torrens Valley TAFE Web Portal
Torrens Valley TAFE Email

Sorry, these are private URLs, with no place on a blog. I'll move them to somewhere better on my website in the fullness of time.

Meanwhile, you can see the details of my course here.

Idea: Make a Dalek

Oh, btw, I'm getting into electronics so I can build robots. Seems like a pretty reasonable thing to do...

My first goal is to be able to build a Dalek. It can be small, it mightn't be able to do anything but roll around in a programmed kind of way. It might not have sensors, but it'd be so cool if it could yell "EXTERMINATE"!

It's a small goal, but hopefully doable, and I'll be so stoked if I can make it happen.

Blaaaaag

This post replaces one that I had almost finished writing, only to have my browser crash. Damn your eyes, someone else than me!

Blogging lag... yes, only days after I undertook to blog every day, I've had a big quiet spell. Why?

This last couple of weeks was particularly manic even for me. During the period, I started this blog, moved my website to a little self-hosted box, started building a new site to replace my current one in Delphi 8 (and it's red too, cool ey?), and got back into The Land Canaan, my old band, in a big way. And went to work. And looked after the kids. And started a night course at TAFE in electronics (robots man, robots). I'll blog something about that course in the fullness of time. But anyway...

Any such manic phase is just begging for a crash, and it came on Friday. It felt like I'd had my head rammed through a brick wall; I stumbled through that day all scratched and bleeding. I resolved to spend the weekend lying on my face.

Actually, I spent with my family in a small town at a friend's pub, staying in the upstairs rooms, lovely. Very calm. But no internet (probably a good thing). I floated through most of the weekend in a blissful cloud of intellectual fuzz, not uncommon for me in a crashdown period. It felt like my brain had been carefully placed in a box of cotton wool. Sometimes it's a lot more like many moons of deep depression, so this was a damned fine weekend.

And I think I might be ready to bounce back, which is excellent! Hopefully I can go completely beserk this week, get on top of the blogging situation, cut some code for my new site, get the real version of Dido's Lament done (the draft is on my main page), and some other stuff I haven't thought of yet. Woo hoo!

I'll try to finish the post I was doing, called "Space and Robots", about the new boom in fun sci-fi type tech, namely space and robots!