Ho John Lee’s Weblog

There has been an unusual amount of rain in Bangalore during the past few days. Each morning the newspaper reports flooded streets, power outages due to fallen trees, and people drowning in uncovered storm drains.

I’m not sure if these trees came down in the storms, but there are a lot of fallen trees and branches all over the city at the moment.

We took a different route to the office this morning. This area is a bit older than other sections of Bangalore.

This is a typical cafeteria lunch here. I actually took this photo a few months ago during a previous trip; since then there’s a new caterer for this building. They have round trays instead of rectangular ones, and they have added a non-vegetarian option.

The way the cafeteria works, there aren’t really choices of what to get. I generally bring a protein bar with me to have with lunch, as otherwise it’s hard to maintain an adequate protein intake to support my training routine. If you look at the tray, you’ll see white rice, brown rice, lentils, flat wheat bread, a chick pea/spinach/carrot curry, some fried rice puff thing, and some onions. There’s also some sambar on the rice, which is more or less vegetable broth.

This is pretty typical of what things look like in the morning when I’m out here in Bangalore. This was taken this morning on Hosur Road on the way to Koramangala. The traffic here is a bit lighter, as we left early to avoid the congestion.

A few different things to observe from a visitor’s perspective: cars driving in the left hand lane, autorickshaws (the yellow golf cart-like vehicles), solar panels on the lamp post, countdown timer on the intersection signal, generally small cars, somewhat random lane positions.

I’m always a little jealous of the internet and wireless services available outside the US. I’m at the SATS Premier Lounge in Terminal 1, which has free internet access via wireless. There are also free internet access PC kiosks placed regularly throughout the airport. None of this “sign up for T-Mobile” business like we have at the San Francisco airport.

The local television ads for the “25000kbps” i.e. 25mbit internet service and the Nokia “widescreen” TV phones also make me wish for more progress on the broadband front back in the US. Most people in the US have no idea how miserable our wireless and internet services are compared with places like Singapore, Korea, or Hong Kong.

I’ve been putting this off for a while, but I’m finally biting the bullet and migrating to a new notebook computer. Aside from moving into the new system, this is also tangled up with assorted technology upgrades. My setup is a bit more complicated than the average user, so productivity is taking a hit this days.

I’m still running my nearly indestructable HP Omnibook 4150 on the network this evening, but I just moved my primary desktop to my new IBM Thinkpad T42P this afternoon. So far, so good. I haven’t had “that new computer smell” for a long time, and it I am already very happy with the reduced weight, faster performance, nearly silent operation, and really long battery life. The built-in wireless is also working well.

…or at least it may prevent the Avian Flu.

In today’s Wall Street Journal (Wednesday May 11, 2005) there is an article by Hae Won Choi reporting on research at Seoul National University on using kimchi extract to cure avian flu. (Link – unfortunately it’s only available to WSJ online subscribers)

South Korean microbiologist Kang Sa Ouk thinks he’s come up with a new weapon in the battle against the bird flu virus: kimchi.

Last December, Dr. Kang used a bacteria extracted from kimchi, Korea’s fiery national dish of fermented vegetables, to treat 39 chickens with avian influenza. Over 10 days, 22 of 26 chickens given either a diluted or concentrated culture fluid of the bacteria as a substitute for water showed signs of recovery; all 13 chickens given just water died.

This following part sounds like familiar advice from Korean friends and relatives:

Step-by-step article on using the Sipura SPA-3000 for Asterisk PSTN trunking at GeekGazette, via Sineapps:

For us serious Asterisk PBX geeks out there, the SPA-3000 provides a cost-effective means of bring a PSTN trunk into the PBX while still functioning as an ATA. Not only can you use the SPA-3000 as inbound and/or outbound trunk, you can also easily configure the SPA-3000 as a PSTN failover should the primary trunk into Asterisk fail. Considering what you can buy the SPA-3000 for right now, this is one of the best deals going.

I see from the GeekGazette site that Slashdot has been here as well.

This follows a recent firmware upgrade to the SPA-3000, as described at Voxilla a few days ago:

The enhancements to the SPA-3000, a very popular adaptor among “do-it-yourself” VoIP enthusiasts because of its built-in gateway functionality, includes an often-requested feature allowing PSTN calls to be routed directly to a VoIP destination without the SPA-3000 “answering” the PSTN line until the VoIP destination answers.

More cool stuff from Google — the Web Accelerator (beta) — article at Search Engine Watch
It appears to turn Google’s infrastructure into a big prefetching web cache, among other things, which should do good things for end user performance, but should also give Google an (even more) amazing view of a big piece of web traffic. The network engineer part of me really likes the idea, but it also makes the privacy advocate part of me really twitchy…

description from SEW:

+ Prefetching material
In part, determined by an algorithm developed at Google that looks at
mouse movements and aggregate traffic to sites to try to determine what to prefetch
+ Caching of pages on Google’s own servers
They will also try to determine how frequently material is updated and continuously have the latest copy available on their servers. Mayer said that GWA and Google’s new search history product are completely independent of one another.
+ Parallel downloading
Download multiple parts of the page (images for example) at the same
time.
+ Differential fetching
Instead of downloading the entire page, GWA will try send only what
might have changed on the page
+ Compression

A good roundup article on the use of blogs and personal video in response to the December 2004 tsunami in Indonesia

The tsunami of Dec. 26, 2004, has become another defining moment in the evolution and use of blogs. These distributed, interactive resources rallied around the disaster in ways that allowed readers to learn of the disaster, find ways to help through direct donations or volunteer opportunities, and cope with the grief that such an event inevitably brings.

Moving from personal, journal-style entries, blogs have addressed politics, war reportage, and, now, humanitarian aid efforts. Their power to reach vast numbers of people quickly with eye-witness reportage, graphics, opinion, and collections of news articles, and their ability to side-step government and corporate control have made blogs powerful forums for sharing information. The current manifestation of tsunami-related blogs are another step along a road that continually sees blogs creatively reacting to world events and gaining in popularity, respect, and impact.

Lots of action on the video search front lately. This post on the Yahoo Search Blog announces the official launch of Yahoo Video Search.

So what’s changed in 1.0? We’ve partnered up with some major content publishers to fortify our content offering, including MTV, Buena Vista (including the latest clips and trailers for The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy), CBS News, Bloomberg (check out the latest news on the Federal Reserve), Reuters, The Discovery Channel, Scripps Networks (the good people who produce Home & Garden TV and The Food Network), VH1, and more.

However, great video search isn’t just about content from large publishers, it’s also about the long tail content from smaller publishers and individuals as well. To that end, we’re indexing the Internet Archive’s Moving Image Archive. One of the great things about the Moving Image Archive is that it encompasses a wide range of content — everything from the Prelinger Archives (a collection of over 48,000 “ephemeral films” from 1927 through 1987), to user-created Open Source Movies hosted by the Internet Archive, and other collections of video. (One of my favorites is the animated legos from Brick Films. Don’t miss seeing their version of Grand Theft Auto done entirely in Lego).

Microsoft has started a new site, microsoftipventures.com, giving broader exposure to intellectual property (IP) they are willing to license for commercial development by others.

A quick look at their catalog shows entry dates starting around April 26th, although the actual items listed look like projects previously available elsewhere on Microsoft Research. It’s convenient to have everything in one place, however, and having a named MS activity with a stated interest in licensing these items might make it easier for a 3rd party to actually have a licensing discussion with MS.

Article at Infoworld:

Microsoft said the introduction of the IP Ventures program was a response to demand from venture capitalists for access to the company’s library of technologies.

Microsoft IP Ventures:

Our goal is to license these technologies on either an exclusive or non-exclusive basis via a combination of equity, upfront cash, or royalties. Contact IP Ventures to learn more about a particular technology, or browse the catalog.

via Joi Ito’s Web:

David Beckemeyer writes about an R&D activity at Earthlink which has implemented dual IPv4 / IPv6 access on modified firmware for a Linksys WRT54G wireless home gateway router.

The Linksys WRT54G is inexpensive, widely used, and is similar to many other home gateways providing NAT routing and wireless access. (It’s also popular as a platform hacking wireless router code, as it runs Linux internally). After loading the modified firmware, the router still provides IPv4 NAT functionality, but in addition provides a publicly routable /64 IPv6 network, and can directly route to other public IPv6 networks via the experimental Earthlink IPv6 routing service. You do not need to be an Earthlink customer to use the free service.

Google Video has added indexes today for keyword searches on a number of commercial sources, mostly news. (via Battelle, SearchEngineWatch)

The search results page returns thumbnails and sometimes transcripts of the content, probably from the closed captioning. Sources so far include CNN, Fox, C-Span, NBC, ABC, PBS, Discovery Channel, Learning Channel, and a few others. The video returned in the search results isn’t actually available for viewing or downloading.

SearchEngineWatch also notes:

It’s worth mentioning that Blinkx.TV provides searchable access to content from some of the same sources including the Discovery Channel, Fox News, and CNN. Blinkx.TV also provides the option to limit by source and VIEW the full motion video on your computer.

Can’t tell whether the user uploaded video is indexed at all yet. Only got commercial content in a few quick queries, no video blogs (like Rocketboom) or video content that’s already out there via BitTorrent trackers.

Here’s something you don’t see every day in Harvard Square. From Dowbrigade via Scripting News, also see more here and here.

By the time we got there police and fire had arrived. Traffic was shut down through the square. The fire was not a building - it was a white limousine, which had apparently exploded just as it was entering Johnson Gate, the main entrance to Harvard Yard off of Massachusetts Avenue, a mere 50 feet from the office of Harvard President Lawrence Summers.

One comment suggests this explanation:

Word on the street. Mobile crystal meth lab goes boom. Plausible given the totally “pimped out” ride (as the young people say). I wouldn’t think there would be much of a market for Crystal Meth in Harvard Yard. Maybe the dudes were just passing thru.