Category Archives: Technology

All gathered around an ambient penguin

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Today saw the unusual sight of several of us charging into the pervasive lab, stopping only to use the finger print reader to open the door. Our aim…. to see Dave’s ambient penguin at work.

Dave Conway-Jones (aka DCJ), who is currently working with the Sensors and Actuators organisation in IBM, has put together a zigbee networked device attached to a postcard of a penguin. Two LEDs are in the place of the penguins eyes. When someone’s sametime instant messaging status changes (who is associated with the Penguin) the eyes go from red to green, and back again.

Its neither WiFi nor bluetooth, but some more emerging technology at work. Its also hooked up to a publish subscribe MQ broker, so asides from catching our interest en masse it is using lots of robust middleware to make sure the penguins eyes light up.

Being an ambient inidcation device there are lots of options for what the lights represent, and I think DCJ is likely to start a bit of a rush to build lots of interesting ambient devices. This is not a challenge to ambientdevices.com or the Nabaztag rabbit as neither of those feature blu-tack, selotape or card board. However the homebrew ambient device, with this simple networking technology, does have some interesting potential.

We could post a picture of it here, though I suspect the postcard of the penguin has copyright on it, and DCJ admits he was inspired by the Wallace and Grommit films, rather than the March of the Penguins or any Linux branding.

More IBM Blog Visualisation

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A few months ago I wrote about a visualisation of IBM’s blog social network. Using information about who commented on who in our internal blogs, I generated data for a social network diagram. It was kind of interesting, but not very user friendly. It quickly developed into a complicated diagram (as the nodes and links built up) until it became hard for a normal user to tell much from it.

So, I decided to play around with a new way of visualising the same data, showing pictures of the people commenting, scaled to represent the strength of the link between that person and the blog. More comments, in both directions, strengthens the relationship and makes the picture bigger. It’s also more personal, as each IBM blogger gets their own page with pictures of all their connections. Apart from the information contained in the image scaling, it’s nice just to be able to see on a single page what all your blog contacts actually look like.

Blogometer

– Darren Shaw (Emerging Technology Services, IBM Hursley)

Go with the flow

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Last night the BBC child of our time programme started. It is about the lives of a set of kids that the BBC are following/stalking throgh their lives from birth. The kids are now 5 or 6 years old. The programme itself is fascinating, especially having a 2 1/2 year old and seeing where things are heading.
However the phrase that struck me was about “Flow”. They were trying to measure the kids various amounts of “Flow”. I had not realized this was a psychologists term, though I am well aware of the principle. Flow is what happens when your mind is challenged by something and you are so engaged in the activity that time passes and you dont want to stop. We all need an activity to get Flow. Hobbies are usually what we consider as a way to get Flow, but for many of us in this sort of techland our jobs also give us Flow. For the programmers/hackers amongst us do you get ‘Flow’ when you are solving a problem, and you just “get in the zone”, “focus”. I find it also happens when I enthuse to customers and collegues
For me the emerging tech stuff, and all things around this business catch my interest and make it less of a job. Obviously video games also have the same effect on me.
I have recently been introduced to an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) called perplexcity thanks Gareth! This game you buy/trade puzzle cards, each card is a simple or very very complex puzzle, it mixes web, with pen and paper and the different styles of puzzle means that different thought styles are needed. My wife and I have realize that this has given us a combined “flow” as (apart from the BBC programme mentioned) we had the telly off and were trying to solve some of our puzzles. You start at 8 pm and before you know it it’s midnight.
So for me go with the flow used to mean not bothering and meandering along, not it means find a challenge and loose yourself in it as that feels great, either work or home.
I am not sure whether the nature of the tech industry attracts a certain type of person with a certain amount of “Flow”. The eclectic mix of technologies and the art of putting it all together, tinkering with settings, producing complex technical architectures all have a fascination for many of us in Hursley.

Game On in 48 hours

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At http://lucidion.uwcs.co.uk/gce/2005/ you will find the entries that several teams from Warwick university made in a 48 hour codathon. The aim was to produce a decent quality game in 48 hours straight one weekend. I was asked to be a judge as our university relations (hi Yvonne) looked me up our internal directory and found I had been a serious gamer for many year and some experience in creating games quickly. It might be worth mentioning that there is a good book on amazon “Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever ” for those people that maybe dont take gaming seriously.

Anyway, the games, and my ramblings on the games can be found all at the URL above. Enjoy

Dont forget to look at gametomorrow where we discuss the future of this type of entertainment

Ian Hughes (Emerging Technology Hursley)

It’s Coming

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At the moment almost nobody uses Linux on their desktop; even in Hursley. Windows is everywhere but in the short time that I have worked here (~ a year), I have noticed a difference! Linux desktops are definately increasing in number.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend that most people install Linux, Windows is (in my opinion) currently better for the average desktop user. If you split computer users into four broad types then I would suggest that some of them might look into Linux:

  • Complete Novices: This type of user is going to need some hand-holiding and what they use should depend on what their friendly “expert” is comfortable with. If my Gran got a computer, I would install Linux – I’d set it up for her and have a couple of icons on the desktop. She would use those and not dream of changing the setup or installing new hardware without my help – Linux would be ideal, I wouldn’t have to worry about viruses etc. and I’d be comfortable answering questions because I’d be intimately familiar with the system.
  • Normal Users: The largest group of users and, at the moment, I think they should steer well clear of Linux. My Dad uses Windows, he might buy a scanner or a new camera, plug it in an expect it to just work. Windows is still way ahead in this area – hardware manufacturers often don’t support Linux, the market is too small and installing drivers can often be fiddly. Windows just works. Linux (currently) doesn’t – there is no competition yet (even the CEO of Redhat agrees).
  • Experts: These are people who know and understand computers, but are different to my fourth category (geeks) because for them the computer is a tool. Most of this group of people use Windows, it’s easier to setup and certainly in the past would have made them more productive but I think that is on the cusp of changing, I’ll elaborate on this in a minute.
  • Geeks: The difference between a geek and an expert is that geeks fiddle with computers for fun. Basically the only people who currently use Linux as a desktop OS fall into this category. Many geeks currently use Windows but have played with Linux on and off. I think many geeks will soon ensure they have access to Linux because I think this is where computers are changing most quickly. Even when innovation happens on other platforms, it quickly comes to Linux as well. Because Linux is evolving so fast little, tiny ideas are appearing that might take a while to appear on other platforms.

So although some geeks have been using Linux for a while, experts haven’t. For them it is all about the applications. They are arriving… Fast!

Applications, applications, applications

Total Cost of all these applications? £0.00

Given that people here at Hursley are either Experts or Geeks, I hope a few more might take a look at Fedora, Ubuntu or one of the other Linux distributions that include the majority of the programs listed above. There will be some initial setup pain but I think some people at least will never want to go back.

Good move by VMware

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VMware have released the VMware player a cut down play only Virtual Machine that will run images created using their VMware Workstation, ESX and GSX products.

This is a clever move by VMware, the VMware player will be especially useful in the Enterprise market where pre-installed demo images of serious heavy weight middleware and other applications are an easy way of providing try before you buy demos. The availability of a free player will help encourage software firms to use VMwares fully featured products to create such demo images.

The player could also help in the uptake of linux as well, there are plenty of pre-installed Linux ISO images out there such as Knoppix to use in VMware. This provides a free means for users to try out Linux while still running their Windows setup.

‘Gmail’ becomes ‘Google Mail’ for UK users

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Google recently announced that they are changing the service’s name here in the UK due to a trademark dispute. From today, all new invites sent to people in the UK will be for @googlemail.com (rather than @gmail.com) addresses. Nothing changes (so far) for existing users.

Gmail logo
The Gmail logo.

Google Mail
The new Google Mail logo.

Why is this happening? The dispute with gmail.co.uk has been rumbling away for a while, and this seems to be the result. Google are still contesting their right to use the Gmail name in the UK, only now it’s being done in court.

What Working Group?

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The web evolves quickly; not so long ago AJAX was the hot new thing and now it is increasingly main-stream. Predicting the next big thing is very hard but I think one new development in particular is not on people’s radar in the way that I would expect. The WHAT-WG (Web HyperText Application Technology Working Group) is coming up with a set of specifications that should allow Web Apps to be richer and faster to write. Importantly they are ensuring that new features degrade gracefully in older browsers (primarily IE6) so authors don’t have to wait until the internet population as a whole have upgraded from legacy browsers before using cool new technologies.

The group is backed by Mozilla and Opera so we shouldn’t have to wait too long for browsers that take advantage of these new features (Ian Hickson, the spokesperson for the group, has worked on Mozilla/Firefox and Opera and has just been hired by Google). These new specs – if done right – will make all our lives easier so I encourage any reader who is experienced in writing web applications to check out the draft specifications and to suggest any good ideas that might spring to mind. This working group may define the web of tomorrow – the more useful input that it gets today, the better!

Riding the Fifth Wave

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We have all been feeling it, a change in the landscape. The term web 2.0 has been used a lot, but the most appropriate one that sums it up for me if the “fifth wave”.

We have had mainframes, minicomputers, pcs, and client-server/Internet. Nominally these could be called waves 1 to 4. The fifth wave is all the enabling technologies that have become pervasive. Broadband, always on connectivity, open standards, easy to use tools, scripting, J2EE etc. When all these tools are put in the hands of of people with ideas and allows them to implement those ideas we have the fifth wave.

Fair enough not everyone can feel the wave yet. It may be more of a settling of the levels. However, it is clear that there are platforms and avenues for the new ideas. People remember the dot.com era, so we have the balance of ‘yes thats very good but will it work’. The important thing is that there are enough of us around who understand what the wave is and can help generate those innovative solutions to problems. I think its fair to say there are here in Hursley.

Ian Hughes – ( Consulting IT Specialist Emerging Technology Services, IBM Hursley)

So you dont know the way to France either

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As part of my day job I work in a team looking at Business Innovation and Optimization. The short version of this is that if you use Websphere Modeller to create your business processes, Websphere Monitor to put instrumentation into those processes and then deploy it all on Websphere Process Server, you get in the position where you can use business dashboards to see what is going on in the business. IT and Business management become holistic and role based views of the active system let people have the control they need. Once you have all this instrumentation, you can then analyze what is happening, and fix it. We have the concept of On Demand, and this really is.

As part of this work I was looking at how to make better use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and how to place business data and information onto those in real time. One of the leaders in GIS is esri.com. They have recently created a set of public web services to allow access to some fo the power of GIS. I have spent a few days putting thigs together, JSPs, WSDL generation to code in order to prove that we can hook the results of Websphere Monitor up with GIS.

The initial examples I looked at were just around getting existing maps, quakes, satellite images etc. However I soon came across the getThematicMapImage. This allows me to make a request of a web service having provided some data to associate with each geographic unit. ESRI then generate, on the fly, a colour coded map. It worked really well, and proved that my code was able to be in control of the numeric data whilst the web service was in control of the complicated geogrphic information. In the example I used US States as that was handy and easy, the rest of my team are over in the US as well.

arcwebonline has some live running samples and the sort of thing that can be done with the web service.

There are lots of other suppliers and it just so happens I went down this route as one avenue to investigate. Web services, whilst a little tricky with versions of generators, certainly helped me prove what I needed to do.

Ian Hughes (Consulting IT Specialist Emerging Technologies, IBM Hursley)