Rather than relying on external sites, services and aggregators, I’m going to try and use my blog as the dumping ground for the meta I speweth into the river. I realize that there is no silver bullet or perfect solution for this, but I’m hoping that with a few new tools, APIs, services, and techniques, I can piece together a reasonably complete archive. Once I have the archive, I can continue work on the LifeSplicing Engine I conceived a few years back.
Just an early sketch from a couple years ago.
To start, I’m looking at the Lifestream WP plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lifestream/) to see how many services I can pipe in for free. For services, sites, and data sources that don’t readily make themselves available, I’ve got a few ideas I want to try using some RSS/ATOM/OPML trickery to normalize the floe.
This is likely going to be a very messy, noisy, and disruptive exercise. Please forgive any unwanted noise I spill into the river and remember that you can always block/delete me from your social graph if I become too much of an annoyance.
The next great battle for domination over Operating Systems for netbook and smaller class devices is upon us. Chrome OS vs Windows 7, with a few others like Moblin, Jolicloud, Android, and a couple other flavors of Linux out in the wild. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the coming months and years, especially with the next generation of hardware due out.
The Atom and Ion processors are game changing chips helping to fuel this (r)evolution. I believe the Intel Atom, Moorestown, and Medfield processors will be as important, if not more important than the original Pentiums.
I’ve been hacking around with netbook class hardware for about 9 months and have a multitude of netbooks, nettops, and I just recently completed the buildout of 5 new Atom-based desktops that each cost $191. The Intel N280 chip that is powering the Asus Eee 1005HA that I’m typing this on is an amazing chip that only consumes 2.5 watts of power. Pretty cool to see my battery meter say “10 hours” of life left. This is also made possible with innovations in energy efficient backlit LED technology.
I see this as the beginning of a new wave of innovation in software, hardware, and computing in general. It opens the door for developers and engineers to rethink the traditional Human Computer Interaction (HCI) patterns. In the coming months and years, sw and hw platforms like ChromeOS, Windows 7, Atom, Ion, and Medfield will drive more pervasive computing models helping bring access to more and more people and an entire new class of small, powerful, smart, always-connected devices.
With announcements recently from Nokia about plans to use the forthcoming Intel Moorsetown and Medfield processor line for its next line of smartphones and similar mobile devices, it’s only a matter of time before the floodgates open to a whole new class of smart always-connected internet devices.
I’m very excited about using all this shiny new hw and sw tech to tackle some really hard problems.
So just as I was getting ready to do some serious netbook hackery using one of several assorted Asus Eee 1000HE netbooks, the Eee Top touchscreen nettop, or the swanky new Eee 1005HA which is by far the coolest netbook I’ve used so far.
So what does this mean? It means that I’ve got a new arsenal of APIs, protocols, devices, browsers, and OSs to build the next gen HCI with.
I’m talking auto, home, mobile geekery. Embedded, wearable, you name it. Combine this with what’s coming in the latter part of 2010 with the Intel Medfield line of 32nm Atom chips, and we are talking about some serious new classes of computing devices. Something in between the current generation of smartphones like the iPhone 3GS, HTC Hero/Ion and the size of my new 1005HA netbook. I’m with Arrington on this one. Screw software, I want to get into the HW biz and build cool new gadgets for specific use cases that are all in the $150 price range.
I just proved that you can build full featured Atom-based desktops for $191. If we can do that with today’s generation of hw/sw, just think what will be possible with all this new crap.
That’s why I’m so excited about things like Atom, Medfield, Wave, Android, Moblin, Jolicloud, Boxee, and now, Chrome OS.
Last Thursday at 1:26pm Pacific Standard Time, I received an email from my boss, who had just gotten off the phone with an exec from HQ asking if our team could possibly pull of a small miracle and build a demonstration that showcases the value of our company’s products and solutions for a VIP press and media event at the CeBIT conference.
Meeting this challenge required 4 near sleepless nights, working through the entire weekend and around the clock with a virtual team distributed around the globe. While it was a pretty intense and tiring effort, we were able to put together an impressive demo showcase and I’m happy to report that the entire management team was quite pleased with our execution and delivery.
The demo showcase we built was delivered earlier today by Software AG CEO Karl-Heinz Streibich to German Chancellor Dr. Angela Merkel and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger at a VIP press & media event at the CEBIT conference in Hanover, Germany.
Here are some pictures from the event. You can see one of demo pages we built being shown on a 60″ Flat Panel touchscreen monitor that was used to “deliver” the demonstration.
Karl-Heinz Streibich, CEO Software AG, meets international leaders at CeBIT 2009
Karl-Heinz Streibich, CEO Software AG, meets international leaders at CeBIT 2009
Karl-Heinz Streibich, CEO Software AG, meets international leaders at CEBIT 2009.
Now that this mini-project / event is over, I’m going to try and catch up on some much needed sleep. It was a privilege and honor to work with such dedicated colleagues around the globe, with a near impossible deadline, to pull this off. Now I can add a new line to my list of accomplishments on my resulme: “Built a demo for the Terminator!”
It took me a while, but thanks to @kibmcz, my blog is now running on the latest Wordpress release – v2.7.1. We have OpenID enabled and will be working on tweaking the WicketPixie Theme I was using before the upgrade. Please pardon the cruft as I get things back into shape.
Major props to KtecK Labs for the Wordpress hackery.
PS – I’m going to start using my IRC channel more, so be sure to come stop by:
The timing of this couldn’t be more relevant. I recently reconnected with my good friend Duane Nickull who I worked with in the early stage of my career in the enterprise software business. We worked together on an early web services and e-business standards initiative led by the United Nations CEFACT group and the OASIS standards organization. We co-edited a standard called the ebXML Technical Architecture specification nearly 8 years ago.
Duane just crafted an excellent blog post recapping the challenges we faced, the experiences we had, and the lessons we learned. This is in support of his new O’Reilly book “Web2.0 Patterns“. I highly suggest that anyone responsible for building systems, managing software projects and cross-organizational initiatives check it out:
My day started at Zoka Coffee in the University District.
Coffee, breakfast, and some light coding / app config. Then bailed for home, which is where I’m at right now. As it’s a holiday weekend, where many our out squeezing in one last extended summer weekend, I’m pretty well tied up with the reality that are my unavoidable deliverables. I’ve got no problem spending my weekend this way, as I know I am working hard towards something much bigger. So with that, here’s a list of what I’ve got on tap this Labor Day weekend.
What are you all doing? @infinitelymeta me on Twitter or *Like* this post on Friendfeed to get in on the conversation. That’s where I tend to hang out on socnets these days.
Happy Labor Day everyone!
Brian’s Uber List
New range/oven delivery for unit 2214 (one of my new tenants stove broke so I replaced it with this:
Put out For Rent sign for my soon to be available 1BR apartment in Eastlake, Seattle WA 98102. It rents for $1400 and is the entire lower floor of an historic Victorian home that was built in 1908. An excellent spacious unit with great lighting. Email eastlakeassociates at gmail if interested or call 206.328.3379 and leave a message.
Java/JSF/AJAX – I’m putting the final interfaces and code tweaks in place for a project that I’ve spend a quarter working on. Final interfaces in place, but still have 75+ line item bug list. Need to go code complete by Monday evening to begin FTP transfer of Development VMware image from one side of our network to an internal only host. Still have A LOT of work ahead of me to finish this project and go into team only beta next week with Public Beta (internal corp net) on Sept 8.
Landscaping & trim to prep for fall. Luckily, I really enjoy this task. Especially when my 5.5 yr old nephew Logan joins me. He makes some pretty good coin and he’s a GREAT helper.
Working with my friend Thom, the Ichthyogenius on our latest project, Reef In A Box that we are looking to launch in the coming months.
Working on the YTranslate.us engine. Coding in PHP/mySQL/Python/etc. Toying with new SMS gateway (thanks to Mona’ Friendfeed post).
Meeting with contractor on some fix-r-up-r projects for 3 of my apts in preparation for Fall/Winter.
Looking for electrician to install some motion-sensor aware lighting in my back alley and in between my building to deal with my unwanted-persons-on-my-property challenge.
Water changes & general maintenance on my 300 gallon reef tank.
Prep/meet with GC on new reef tank project. Wait till you see what I’m going to build. It’s gonna pop!
Shade garden v2. Part of the landscaping stuff I suppose, but definitely worthy of mention.
Replace fire extinguisher in common area to be in compliance with recent Seattle City Fire Department inspection.
OMFG. I can’t muster the energy right now to capture the energy, passion, class, & inspiration that is Gnomedex. Until I come down off cloud 9, here’s where my attention’s currently at.
I predict this will be the buzzworld du jour today and in the weeks/months ahead. “Everything as a Service”. Makes perfect sense to me. Cloud computing, which really started to take off when Amazon launched it’s AWS platform, is here to stay.
Today, Techcrunch broke the news that they alluded to over the weekend. Essentially, a partnership between Intel, HP, Yahoo!, and a few others to build a new cloud computing platform to allow developers and researchers to test the next generation computing model.
This is a very important development that holds promise for Infinitely Meta, and the engines that we want to build and deploy to the cloud. Our original plans were to leverage Amazon’s AWS cloud and Google’s App Engine (and related sites/services) as the deployment vehicle for our engines, but this new project may trump both Amazon and Google. Remember that we can’t yet discount Microsoft, as they are also working on building their cloud under the Mesh umbrella.
As we continue to build our prototypes, we will likely deploy our engines to whatever cloud we feel will meet our needs. Most likely we will deploy our engines across all available clouds for the highest degree of fault tolerance and redundancy.
I find it VERY interesting that the last domain I registered was http://federatedclouds.com
