Ho John Lee's Weblog

These are my links for April 13th through April 15th:

• On Netflix’s video streaming security framework – A black box look at Netflix video streaming implementation for "Watch Instantly" , built with Microsoft Silverlight for Windows/Mac or various hardware clients, and various authentication and DRM services + HTTPS
• Nati Shalom’s Blog: Designing a Scalable Twitter – A look at using in-memory data grid vs memcached architecture for a simplified Twitter-like service with goals of 10 billion tweets/day, 100 GB stored/day (with 10:1 compression), immutable tweets i.e., there are no updates, only inserts, client applications limited to 70 requests per hour.
• agile approach | World Bank Open API 2.0 Launched – Economic development indicators for 200 countries from World Bank. 1000 API calls/day free for non-commercial use, info at developer.worldbank.org
• "We think you’d also like…" and the Math of Suggestion – Teil 2 | Gründerszene – Simplified overview of recommendation algorithms used for suggesting alternative shopping choices.
• 15 Firefox add-ons for Web developers | Webware – CNET –

One of the applications investigated for the Kuppam i-Community program was using RFID or other tagging system for tracking cattle. Much of the farming there is in small herds, so they don’t typically have a large animal management issue, but it turns out that cattle are commonly used as collateral for securing small loans from the bank. There are a number of problems with the same animal being used as collateral for multiple loans, or being declared lost, missing, or deceased.

from BoingBoing:

New Mexico State University researchers are testing a retinal scanner and radio frequency identification (RFID) tag system for cattle. Part of the USDA’s planned National Animal Identification System, the technology could help identify and keep tabs on animals that may have been in contact with diseased livestock.

A note for my friends working on Telegu and Kannada local language projects for rural development projects in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, India.

From the August 2005 Wikipedia News:

The Kannada Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.

The Telegu Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles

One of the reasons we selected Mediawiki for use in the Kuppam i-Community program was its strong support for local language content and localization. It would be great to see some of the local language content in the Kuppam wiki make its way into the Telegu Wikipedia.

There are other local language Wikipedia projects for Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil, Gujarathi, Marathi, Kashmiri, and Urdu.

One of the nuisances of installing wireless access points, VOIP phones, and other small networked devices, is the need for power in the vicinity of the device. This can be a major challenge, if you’re building a small wireless ISP using an access point on an antenna mast, which is why wireless user groups have come up with homebrew POE hacks. In the past, power-over-ethernet support has been for relatively expensive equipment geared toward commercial, large-scale installation, such as rolling out a building full of Cisco 7940 IP phones.

There are a some cheap power-over-ethernet adapters available now from Linksys and D-Link:

D-Link DWL-P200 (5V or 12V, list price $39.00)
Linksys WAPPOE (5V only, list price $39.99)
Linksys WAPPOE12 (12V only, list price $49.99)

The 802.11af standard for power-over-ethernet has been published, so products are beginning to come onto the market that can directly accept power and ethernet over a single RJ-45 connection, without requiring a power splitter at the device end. I would be happy to see all the little power cube transformers under my desk go away sometime in the near future…

This story is discussed at Slashdot. The service is intended to provide a minimum of 2mbps to all subscribers, including rural villages, by December 2006.

A consortium led by Gurgaon-based Aksh Broadband Limited has been selected to implement the Rs 400-crore Andhra Pradesh broadband project, which aims at extending broadband services to each and every village of the state in the next two years.

The project, once completed, is expected to give a stiff competition to other broadband service providers, including the BSNL, as the promoters have indicated to charge just Rs 100 a month for a domestic broadband connection.

The project will provide services with a minimum bandwidth of 2 Mbps, which is almost eight times higher, as compared to the bandwidth offered by the BSNL.