Ho John Lee’s Weblog

I stopped by the BlackDog booth at Linux World today, initially drawn in by the spectacle of Tux the Linux Penguin riding on BlackDog’s mechanical bull. Not something you see every day.

The whole scene at the BlackDog booth had sort of a early dot-com boom circa 1996 feel to it. Here’s a company I’ve never heard of, with a relatively huge booth and lots of happy staffers recruiting riders for the mechanical bull, but almost no one bothering to mention what they were actually selling, other than large posters announcing “The World’s First Linux Server that will take You for a walk”. It took me a bit of effort to find a person who could explain what they were selling.

Here’s another project, Ndiyo, working on reducing the cost of IT for rural and developing markets. Their system is called Nivo, and uses a thin client approach to reduce the number of separate systems that need to be operated and maintained, vs the HP 4-4-1 which adds display, keyboards, and mice to a single Linux system. Some benefits of consolidating more users onto shared hardware include the centralized administration, lower power consumption, and lower cost per seat. Similar approaches can be implemented for Microsoft Windows, but unrestricted / free licensing is particularly attractive in the rural markets.

Pictures and story at BBC, Engadget, comments (some even on topic) at Slashdot

not-for-profit UK developers Ndiyo are looking at using them to bring more affordable computing to the developing world. They’ve designed a small (12 x 8 x 2cm), sub-$200 thin client box called Nivo that runs on open source software and has ports for ethernet, keyboard, mouse, monitor and power.

More fun with Google Maps and TiVo.

Haven’t been looked much lately at developing directly on TiVo hardware vs trying ideas out on MythTV-style PVR platforms while experimenting with video, media servers, and TV-centric information appliances. A while back it looked like you could hack things into the TiVo, but it seemed that the main advantage of the TiVo was that it worked out of the box and it was relatively cheap compared to building your own, i.e. it was an actual product, not a development platform. Building a system from parts, i.e. MythTV on Linux or Windows Media PC, isn’t an end-user-friendly activity, but can give you Unix-like flexibility where everything is possible, but you may need to do it all yourself.

Saw an article about TiVo’s latest plug for developing applications on the TiVo, I should go take another look.

A couple of days ago, I posted about the Nikon RAW image format and the general issue of access to “digital negatives”. Interest in this topic has been building for a while, and this being the age of instant communities of interest, we now have the OpenRAW group:

OpenRAW is a group of photographers and other interested people advocating the open documentation of digital camera RAW files.

After Canon dropped support for their Canon D30 DSLR in their latest software release and Nikon removed features of their own RAW converter Nikon Capture, plus the encryption of features in Nikon’s D2x digital camera RAW format (NEF), some members of the mailing list D1scussion founded the OpenRAW mailing list to coordinate their efforts to motivate camera makers to openly document their individual RAW formats.

This web site is the first result from this discussion and has the goal to gain public awareness of the RAW Problem.

There is also some followup and the official response from Nikon at DPReview.com:

During lunch yesterday, I spent a few minutes with Netstumbler to test a simple cantenna intended for use for low cost rural community networks. I will write about the cantenna separately, it’s based on this design and provides around 8dB of gain. Even more valuable for a cluttered RF environment (such as around here), the directionality of the antenna reduces the noise floor substantially. With the directional antenna, the noise floor was around -88dBm, vs around -66dBm with the built-in omni.

An informal survey from my office (sitting in my chair with the antenna and revolving through 360 degrees a few times) turned up 24 access points, 11 of which were unsecured. I expected to pick up a few networks while pointing toward the window, but I was surprised at how many popped up while pointed through the opposite side of the building. It probably helps that I’m on the 2nd floor, but this was more than I expected. A similar experiment a couple of years ago turned up only 2 SSIDs, not including mine.

Here are some notes from Geoffrey Moore’s talk at OSBC last week on Ross Mayfield’s Weblog.

Commoditization takes all the earnings of the industry down. Managing core and context is center stage. Core is what you choose to be different about. If you are Dominos, the Pizza is context, 30 minutes is core. If you are Chuck E Cheese the Pizza is context and the animals are core. Tiger Woods competitive capabilities are core, the rest is context — focus on the game! What ever you have that is core, however, becomes context over time.

We are horrible at managing less differentiated goods. Scarce resources get tied up in context. Context build-up: what once made them great now leads to weakened competitive performance and lower returns on invested capital. Need more healthy processes to extract resources from the context to the core.

Here is another great proto-application by Paul Rademacher based on Google Maps (via MetaFilter). It displays the filtered search results for housing ads on the map with clickable location markers. (Image, in case the site becomes inaccessible, it seems to be getting slow)

Having web service interfaces both open (documented, reachable) and free (without charge) is allowing a lot of previously impractical applications to bubble up from the combination of various services and software, plus relatively limited quantities of new code.

Last updated: April 5, 2005

Here are some notes on building multi-site VOIP PBX services using Asterisk and SIP Express Router.

General approach:
1. Use Asterisk for PBX functionality at each site
2. Use IAX for inter-site traffic to minimize NAT-related issues
3. Use SIP Express as a front end to SIP clients at single sites

Platform technology:
Both Asterisk and SIP Express Router run on Linux and don’t require very powerful hardware. SIP Express in particular can handle hundreds of calls on a small generic Intel-compatible server. Asterisk provides more extensive functionality, including voicemail, transcoding, and conferencing, and requires somewhat more server resource. For a small office scenario, any current Intel-compatible server should be adequate. In the recent GeekGazette article Kerry Garrison implements Asterisk on a Pentium II/450MHz/386MB RAM/12GB HDD/48x CD-ROM/Intel 10/100 system combined with a generic Intel Winmodem card for line access.

The Asterisk@Home project packages a pre-built CD image for Asterisk running on Linux

SIP Express Router installation is simple, and it can easily be downloaded and run nearly out of the box, especially if call accounting is not required.

In the Red Herring, another initiative for affordable computing clients for emerging markets, this one led by Nicholas Negroponte.

See also discussion at Slashdot.

The founder and chairman of the MIT Media Lab wants to create a $100 portable computer for the developing world. Nicholas Negroponte, author of Being Digital and the Wiesner Professor of Media Technology at MIT, says he has obtained promises of support from a number of major companies, including Advanced Micro Devices, Google, Motorola, Samsung, and News Corp.

The low-cost computer will have a 14-inch color screen, AMD chips, and will run Linux software, Mr. Negroponte said during an interview Friday with Red Herring at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. AMD is separately working on a cheap desktop computer for emerging markets. It will be sold to governments for wide distribution.

This looks interesting, if it works.
http://www.nvu.com/
From the web site:
Nvu (pronounced N-view, for a “new view”) is an Open Source project started by Linspire, Inc. Linspire is committed exclusively to bringing Desktop Linux to the masses, and realized that an easy-to-use web authoring system was needed for Linux to continue its expansion to the Desktop. Linspire contributes significant capital, expertise, servers, bandwidth, marketing, and other resources to guarantee the continuation and success of the Nvu project.