Category Archives: Technology

Here Be Dragons

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For those of us in Hursley who are old fashioned enough to still have TVs, a must watch has always been, Dragons Den. People with ideas or businesses have to present to a set of investors with the hope that they will pay for a stake in their company. It can often seem very similar to the sort of thing we have to do here, presenting emerging technology to customers, or trying to convince our IP attorneys about a patent disclosure.

One of the businesses yesterday was doing online downloads, but with the songs dynamically mixing together when transitioning from one to the other. He did a great job of explaining the idea, won over the investors and got the funding. A much better job than I did several years ago trying to patent an idea for desynchronising music to make it feel more live. The idea was that you’d download the song, but it’d never sound exactly the same twice. So maybe the title, “Britney Spears In Your Living Room” didn’t help with some of the more traditional reviewers. Luckily, a great mentor in the form of an IBM master inventor wouldn’t let them win and it did at least get published (hit guest user and then go the url again – great i know). Next week, my brilliant idea for centripetal submarines…

Virtual Worlds introduction presentation

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When talking about Virtual Worlds with customers and other IBMers, I often start with some examples of the state of the art in Second Life. They give a flavour of why integration between the metaverse and real life is both possible and important, and why people are paying attention. I usually find it helpful to put Second Life in the context of Web 2.0; pointing out that it’s really all about two concepts that have already been changing the shape of the web: user generated content and social networking.

I reasoned that I could save everyone some time by putting the highlights of my introductory presentation up here. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list of projects, rather a taste of what has caught my attention (and that of the media) in the last few months.

Introduction

Depending on the audience, I will usually start by visiting the Second Life website to show the interactive map, all the time reeling off some interesting stats – largely gleened from Google TechTalk video – to help
people realise this is not just a game:

  • A glance at secondlife.com shows us the number of residents, how many residents have logged on recently, and how many US$ changed hands between players in the last 24 hours.
  • Yes, people make and sell things for money. 25% of users are currently sellers, 75% are primarily consumers.
  • Easy to build and script (using Linden Scripting Language but moving to support Mono).
  • Rich scripting API includes support for email, XML-RPC, HTTP Request, …
  • Video and audio streaming are easy. Mozilla’s Gekko core (Firefox’s rendering engine) is eventually being integrated, so any surface will be able to be a web page.
  • It’s growing fast. According to Linden Labs, the rate at which new land is added exceeds how fast you could explore it.

BBC One Big Weekend event

  • The BBC, who are frequently early adopters, announced an event in Second Life in May 2006. The streaming video from the One Big Weekend event (being held in Dundee) was shown in-world to provide people with another means of following the action.

  • The key thing here is the party happening in the foreground. People are dancing, showing off and chatting.

  • More: Read about BBC Radio 1 ‘One Big Weekend’ island on BBC Online, and the announcement.
    Eggy Lippmann collaborated with Rivers Run Red on this one.
  • The BBC also did a Second Life session for Newsnight around January 2006.

American Apparel

Warner Brothers

  • Warner Bros, who promote Regina Spektor, are marketing her latest album within Second Life.

  • The New York loft apartment (also built by Aimee Weber) houses a tape recorder playing clips of Regina Spektor’s music, with the mood of the room changing with the music.

  • More: read the press release and creator’s blog.

Baseball

  • Major League Baseball (MLB.com) paid the Electric Sheep Company for a virtual baseball stadium to host the Home Run Derby event.

  • I’m not a baseball fan, but even I was hooked enough by the lively atmosphere that staying up until 2am UK time was well worth it.

  • More: Eric Rice has a great summary and Ian wrote up the event on Eightbar too.

Forbidden City

Amazon

Wimbledon

  • Eightbar readers can’t have missed the fact that Ian Hughes worked on a prototype build for the Wimbledon tennis championships.

  • It involved displaying the path of the ball (thanks to the ‘Hawkeye’ data captured on-court) as well as clothing and even flying towels.

  • Read the original Eightbar post on Wimbledon demo for more.

So there you go. Naturally, this list will be out of date almost instantly, as more things are happening all the time. Let me know if I’ve missed something important though.

Ricetta: Media PC alla Linux

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Apologies for resorting to a pseudo-Italian title …my way of making this slightly interesting! So, here’s how the IBM Thinkpad Linux Media PC is coming along so far, and if you have any ideas feel free to comment as I’d love to see what other useful stuff I can do too.

Ingredients
1 Thinkpad T23
1 cheap homebrew Serial IR Receiver
1 URF (thats right, radio) keyboard
1 remote control
1 television
1 Amplifier with Speakers
Spaghetti/Seasoning to taste (Cables, s-video, audio, etc)

Method
If you follow what I’ve done so far, you start by thinking “Ooh, Ubuntu is all trendy right now, lets have a play”. After a day or so you chicken out and run back to what you know with your tail between your legs and install Fedora. Sadly, Ubuntu didn’t live up to its tag line, “it just works”, for my T23 as I couldn’t get a few things going, namely suspend to RAM and given I know Fedora/Redhat a lot better I reverted. Fedora Core 5 is now installed and up-to-date so who needs apt-get anyway?

I updated the bios and controller microcode on the T23 to the latest level before starting as a wise precaution having been bitten by these sorts of issues in the past. All went well. Fedora install went well. Next I checked the Fedora extras repository had been added to the software update configuration and added another repository where I could download all the codecs and media packages that don’t get supplied by Redhat (for legal reasons they say). So now, I have a fully updated T23 running the latest Fedora code and installed with all the browsers and media programs I think I’m going to need.

Next on the menu is how to turn the thing on without waiting for an entire laptop and OS to boot? Suspend to RAM as mentioned earlier. All the ACPI code gets installed by default with Fedora so it’s just a case of understanding how it fits together and writing yourself a script to do the suspend. A few experiments with suspending to RAM lead me to get a corrupted display on resume, but a bit more fiddling and I got there eventually. So now I have a Linux box that will start up and shut down in just a few seconds.

I thought autologin would be useful too. This will help with (see my previous post) wife acceptance factor number 2 – it has to be easy to use. The less confusing and time taken to boot into the GUI the better. So, I do what everybody would do, and completely forget Redhat screw around with the KDE display manager and use the KDE control center to set autologin – of course, it doesn’t work! Some head scrating out of the way and I remember I’m actually using GDM so fire up gdmsetup and configure up the autologin easily for my mediapc user.

In order to speed up Amarok for a large collection of media, it has been attached to a MySQL backend. It uses SQLite by default which would be a lot slower in comparison. There are probably going to be a thousand-and-one other little tweeks to make as I continue, even simple things you get used to on a PC you use regularly such as having your browser preferences set as you like, and downloading various firefox extensions, desktop setup, etc.

I don’t actually have the serial IR dongle yet. However, it should work in exactly the same way from a software perspective as the IRDA port I’ve got working on my T41p but give a longer range for remote control reception. However, the keyboard I do have. It’s a wireless keyboard but it uses radio so is actually relatively long distance for a wireless keyboard, and has the added bonus of a built-in mouse and small size. It’s perfect for home media PC use for simple browsing on your TV. I got the recommendation for it from a guy here at Hursley so thanks to him for that! I don’t want to go advertising any specific places but I’ll just say if you find it on-line you might want to check eBay buy-it-now items too as I got it for about a third of the price!

Hopefully, a few cables and some spaghetti later it will all connect up nicely to a good amplifier and screen and all will be wonderful, having achieved all the aims I set out for in my previous post. Wireless or wired integration to the home network should be trivial, along with all the rest of the configuration. Now I’m wondering if there’s anything I’ve missed?

IBM TP LMC

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Roughly translated… IBM Thinkpad Linux Media Centre – while not a product IBM ships (or is likely to ship), is something I’ve been thinking about for a while and just started toying with recently. I have an old Aiwa stereo at home that keeps asking me for retirement so this idea has been seeded by my need for something a little better. As the other eightbar bloggers know, I’m completely in love with Linux and the media player I use, in spite of much teasing about its capability and a longstanding comparison with iTunes.

Proof of concept time then… before shelling out a whole lotta wonga on HTPC cases, wireless keyboards, IR receivers, new speakers and all that other good stuff, I thought I would try hacking around with what I have. So far this consists of an IBM Thinkpad T41p and my current stereo remote control using the IRDA port of the laptop. To illustrate the point of how old the stereo is, take a look at the remote I’ve hooked up to the laptop: Old Aiwa Remote Control

Unlike many home-brew media projects, I’m not bothered about PVR as I have a commercial one of these I’m already happy with so I just want something I can hook up to the TV to play music and do some simple web browsing, e-mail and maybe a few office type applications. Thinkpads seem to fit the bill perfectly, especially for a proof of concept. There are, of course, a few other factors involved in the design of this idea, needless to say it has to have quite a good wife acceptance factor so must be good on the budget front and easy to use, has to have a remote control, must be connected to the internet, and of course it absolutely has to run Linux otherwise the world might implode.

Stage 1 seems to be complete now. Conveniently enough, I just happen to have a laptop running Linux already and pretty much configured the way I want. Add to this a bit of fiddling around to get the IRDA port working as an IR receiver for remote controls and a few simple config files and I have a daemon that is listening for IR signals from the port. After that, it was a fairly simple job to hook up a client to execute commands on my system when a button is pressed on the remote, and once I was that far I was laughing all the way to hooking it up to my media player.

The Darren and Roo show: Day 1

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We’re still in Nottingham, enjoying the first full day of the IT Specialist Institute, 2006. Since we’re staying in the University halls, the rooms are not quite hotel-quality, but definitely not bad. Probably the worst bit (for a 6’4″ freak like me) is the small bed.

The breakfast was great though, as was the opening presentation from Sudhir Chardha, who presented on innovation and the GIO (Global Innovation Outlook). We are not giving our presentation until tomorrow afternoon (2 – 3pm if you’re attending the Institute and want to attend). Today we’ve been mainly hanging around underneath Darren’s very cool posters, chatting to people, demonstrating Second Life and talking about why Virtual Worlds are important.

Darren and his posters

There has been a fairly steady stream of conversations. We’ve also managed to add two more people to our (probably not very comprehensive) list of over 100 known IBM SL users who can access Ian’s island.

Everyware and nowhere baby thats where its at..

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Apologies for the title but I just needed some way to work in the name of the book i’m reading, “Everyware” by Adam Greenfield. Adam manages to get through an impressive list of technology areas in the book, neatly knitting together a story of ubiquitous computing that encompasses the more obvious topics of RFID, Motes, Mesh Networks and Mobile Devices with Web Mashups, IPV6 and a plethora of everyday gadgets.

Adams vision of Everyware is one of almost effortless and unknowinging interactions with our surroundings, surrounding that are actually networked devices receiving and broadcasting information, which is collated, distributed and presented to users (I prefer participants) in intuitive, helpful and appropriate ways. It’s a nice vision although occasionally a little scary. He doesn’t present it as any kind of Utopian future but more one that we are almost unknowingly creating often in isolation through small advances here and there in different fields of technology. The book also covers a lot of ground on the social, moral and privacy aspects of such a future.

The theme struck a chord with me simply for the fact that we use a lot of these technologies here in the Emerging Tech group in Hursley (well we are emerging tech after all) . Motes, Zigbee enabled devices, RFID and other funky Gizmos can usually be found spilling out from under Dave Conway-Jones office door. (shhh don’t tell the inspectors! )

Dave and other folks like Andy Stanford-Clark (No you don’t have to have a double barrelled name to work here) are experts in hooking up this kit up to messaging technologies like MQTT so that we can take real world sensor inputs and make them available to any other devices or computers that have expressed an interest in these events. The beauty of MQTT is that the client is so small you can run it on just about any device making it both a publisher and a subscriber of information.

Any of this starting to sound like Everyware yet ? In fact in his book Adam talks about the concept of an Event Heap which is used to communicate events to other interested devices. This is almost exactly the same principle as the Publish Subscribe (pubsub) mechanism MQTT uses which makes it such and effective tool for communicating realtime events around any local or remotely distributed system.

If you make it into Hursley at any point then maybe you’ll get time to come and visit Dave’s Pervasive lab where you can see all manner of Everyware enabling technology in use.

Ambient Orbs, Rabbits, Penguins and the Availabot

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Ambient (or ‘calm’) technologies, as demonstrated by the lovely creations of Ambient Devices and the whacky French Nabaztag rabbit, unobtrusively display ever-changing data. Something which can be left on the desk and ignored, but catches your attention as it softly changes throughout the day, is a valuable tool in this information-overloaded age.

Roo\'s desk, complete with ambient orb

Eightbar has previously reported on a friend and colleague who is responsible for a wireless ambient penguin (see the a description and video). Using bi-colour LEDs, this ‘Wallace And Gromit’ inspired creation keeps track of our manager’s instant messaging status (off for online, green for active and red for away).

Ambient penguin

When I read about the Availabot recently, I was very impressed. It brings together not just ambient online status awareness, but also rapid-prototyping ‘3D printing’, for a truly personal touch. Having a desktop avatar which not only represents a friend’s online status but also looks like them is a great idea. The fact that it physically falls over in such an amusing way helps too. (Don’t miss the video of the Availabot in action.)

When 3D printing becomes a bit more affordable, this sort of hack is going to be wonderfully easy and popular. I’m looking forward to a world overrun by hobbyist gadgets.

Amazonians push the envelope

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3pointD are reporting on the recent news from Supernova 2006 about pioneering ‘Amazonians’. Some Second Life users, who also happen to be Amazon employees, are exploring the potential of “a bridge between Amazon Web services and Second Life so you can go into Second Life and actually try things on there and buy them”. Interesting news indeed.

I have been wondering for a while which existing major online brand will be the first to make the move from e-business to v-business. American Apparel recently announced its virtual store, but if the Amazonians can get their company’s support might Amazon be the first company to really start the blur the boundaries between the real, the online and the virtual marketplace?

The fact that it’s “not being done under the auspices of the company” is not necessarily a bad sign either. The need for early-adopter employees to try some things out before their employer really ‘gets’ something (or can feels it can support it) is something most bleeding edge types can probably relate to.

A tool for browsing and choosing items to be sent to your home in meatspace would be the next baby step for online shopping. At its most basic, using a virtual world to act as a store and shopping cart for existing real life goods will be a refreshing change from current online shopping models, and provides some pretty interesting possibilities for a richer user experience too. In the same way that some booksellers already offer a PDF download while the dead tree is in the post, I wonder how long before Cafepress (or one of their competitors) offers avatarwear as an option for its user-designed products. Here’s my design. I need that on a T-shirt, a cap, oh and something off-the-shoulder for my avatar while I’m waiting.

Gradually, the metaverse matures.

My latest Second Life toy – a Last.fm player

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I’ve been a fan of Last.fm for a while, and a really big fan ever since I noticed that Matt Biddulph, while he still worked at the BBC, pulled a very nice hack to update his ‘sekrit’ user every time Radio 6 plays a song.

Anyone following Eightbar in the last few months can’t have failed to notice that we’re getting pretty interested in virtual worlds and the metaverse. Second Life is not the only virtual world out there, but it’s a popular one. Since it makes it fairly easy to build things, and now lets you make HTTP requests from within scripted objects, it’s a pretty handy environment for knocking up 3D artifacts which render web data in slightly more interesting ways than, say, the average RSS reader.

Roo\'s last.fm player on Second Life

In between enjoying Second Life’s third birthday celebrations, I created this ugly beast. My Last.fm feed watcher (despite its similarity to a squashed fly – those are supposed to remind you of speakers rather then eyes) displays the title and artist of the last song I listened to. Eventually it might provide a more complete interface to show more information about my listening habits, but for now I’m happy to keep it simple.

Deploying Servers

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Deploying servers inside of IBM is fairly easy. It normally consists of finding an old Thinkpad or desktop machine, sticking it under your desk and finding a long enough ethernet cable to reach from the network port across the far side of the office. My trusty 5 year old IBM desktop has happily been running several demos and prototypes over the years. It’s surprising how many people have things like this and still manage to make them reliable.

Lots of cool technology used internally starts out this way and gets moved to the proper internal infrastructure when it proves to be so useful. IBM has been pretty good at recognising this and the internal IT organisation are providing more and more internal hosting options for people with prototypes that they want to demo and try out. Anyone can get a LAMP stack to host their applications internally for free, for example.

e server

Anyway I needed to run an externally accessible test server for some customer work I’m doing and with a very helpful colleague (thanks Dave!) I managed to get the setup I needed using some existing infrastructure. Getting things like this up and running inside of IBM (or any big company I expect) isn’t always easy, legal and security is normally a bigger problem than any technology, but now I know it can be done, it is an incentive to try and come up with some externally facing demos and prototypes.