May 2006 Archives

These look interesting:

he WIP300 and WIP330 are the first in a line of Wireless IP telephony products from Linksys that will enable users to make low-cost Voice over IP (VoIP) calls through 802.11g wireless networks.

I still haven't gotten over a country hip enough to even have a Minister of Culture, much less one as totally cool as Gilberto Gil:

Minister Gilberto Gil, a renowned musician who accepted President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's invitation three years ago to join his cabinet, commented at the opening of the Global Internet Congress here. Participants in the four-day conclave are discussing current tendencies in cyberspace and challenges facing the World Wide Web.

"Hackers create, innovate, solve problems and voluntarily exercise a mutual help organization," which he said meshes with the founding principles of the Internet.

from www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/05/29/1661679.htm.

Thanks, Bruce!

I've been really busy with real life, so have fallen way behind on my usual blog reading. That's too bad, because it wasn't until 2 pm that I read Tim Bray's post about WKCR (Columbia University's radio station) playing an entire day of Sun Ra. But I'm listening to it now, and if you can, I urge you to do the same.

I was fortunate enough to catch several live performances from Sun Ra and the Arkestra before he departed for other regions of the galaxy, and it was always an experience worth catching!

There's an interesting article by Kate Rothgeb in last Wednesdays issue of the Daily, the University of Washington's student newspaper.

Students have accused members of Housing and Food Services (HFS) of going on Facebook and discovering pictures of resident advisers with cups in their hands. HFS staff assumed they were drinking alcohol and used that as evidence against them, said Hansee Hall resident John Stevens.

As a result, the Student Senate is calling for the university to let them know how students' online presences will be used.

The resolution requests staff and administrators to tell students how online social networks will be used "so students know what to expect," McCuin said. It also aims to protect admissions and awarding of scholarships.

If an administrator or admissions counselor is going to use online social networks to see what a student is involved in, students have a right to know what is being used against them, said senator Sam Al-Khoury.

There's a really interesting dynamic at work here. Students are living large parts of their lives in public on social networks like Facebook and MySpace, but largely assuming that it's only their peers who will be looking at those sites.

But what do you expect if you belong to a group with a name like I'm Not Going To Lie, I'm Completely Wasted In My Face Book Pic...?

The students here are trying to paint this as a free speech issue, but that doesn't quite seem like the heart of the issue to me. I think it's actually more of an authorization and access control issue on the social networks. People using the networks assume that the use of the network is limited to their peers, without stopping to worry how that is defined or enforced.

Facebook, for example, limits accounts to people who have email addresses in the .edu space. While that includes most students, it also includes all faculty and staff of educational institutions, as well as alumni, donors, friends of the institution, etc.

This is all part of us learning how to live in the new social reality created by technology. It's a fascinating ride.

Technorati Tags: privacy, social software, social-software

The multitrack master tracks from Eno and Byrne's 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts are now available for downloading. The site also lets people upload their remixes of the tracks for sharing. Very cool - I'm downloading the tracks now.

Eno, by the way, has also collaborated with Paul Simon on his aptly titled fine new album, Surprise. The credit reads: Produced by Paul Simon, Sonic Landscape by Brian Eno. Worth a listen.

Technorati Tags: music, open-source

This upcoming Computer Science Colloquium here on the Seattle UW campus looks really interesting:

Indrani Medhi (Microsoft Research India)
Host: Anderson
Designing a Text-Free User Interface for Illiterate Users
Colloquium
Friday, June 2, 2006
1:30 pm, CSE 403
Abstract
*NOTE: THIS LECTURE WILL NOT BE VIDEOTAPED NOR WEBCAST*

Did you know, 26% of the world’s adult population is illiterate and 98% of all illiterates live in the developing countries! The world is experiencing a substantial ‘Digital Divide’ in terms of the gap in access to information and communication– illiteracy playing a significant role in widening this gap. Hence the need arises for a platform which enables free flow of information by surpassing the barriers of literacy and computer skills.

Text-free user interfaces for illiterate and semi-illiterate users is an application designed at Microsoft Research India such that even novice illiterate users require absolutely no intervention from anyone at all to use. It is based on many hours of ethnographic design conducted in collaboration with a community of illiterate domestic laborers in 3 slums in Bangalore, India to understand what kind of application subjects would be interested in, how they respond to computing technology and how they react to UI elements. The UI eliminates the need for text, uses unabstracted cartoons versus simplified graphics, provides voice feedback for all functional units and provides consistent help features and a movie dramatizing the purpose of the application. Results show that the text-free designs are strongly preferred over standard text –based interfaces by the communities which we address.

Prior to the usability tests, most subjects had never seen a computer and none of them had ever touched one. Because of the unique nature of the subject group, for me the user studies were very different from traditional user studies I had done earlier. My talk will describe the design process, the design principles which evolved out of the process, the final application design, and results from initial user testing.

Bio: Indrani Medhi is an Assistant Researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research India. She has a Master's degree in Design from the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA. She received her Bachelor's in Architecture from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur, India. Her research interests include using extensive ethnography methods in designing applications for emerging markets and the BOP; identifying social and cultural factors in UI design. She has done ethnography at a variety of places such as post offices, railway stations, nationalized banks, coffee cafés and urban slums.

People are always accusing government and academia of being inefficient, and saying they should be run more like businesses. Now Gizmodo is reporting this:

Not sure why we didn't see this earlier, but everyone's favorite wireless brand, Cingular, is going to go bye-bye. AT&T is currently purchasing Cingular's parent company, BellSouth, and will remove the Cingular name, replacing it with the euphonious AT&T Wireless. Gone, too, will be the dancing orange fellow we all know and love.

Branding and building the Cingular line cost BellSouth $4 billion. Oh well.

Does this mean when I need service I'll have to report now that I have a service that is AT&T that used to be Cingular that used to be AT&T?

Technorati Tags: telecom, puppy

Sheila is giving us the update on Chandler.

With the 0.6 release folks in OSAF are "dogfooding" the app themselves.
Mitch Kapor and his assistant Esther are using it and push the capabilities.

0.7 will enhance the calendar and bring more people in to use it. It will also bring in some of Mimi Yin's design vision for a collaborative PIM.

The Scooby web client has to catch up with Chandler. They're looking at 2 month release cycles for Scooby.

They launched a hosting service in December using the Cosmo server. Foxmarks is using Cosmo as a repository. Foxmarks is on the Mozilla download page, so it's gotten quite popular and the usage has forced them to get Cosmo performing to meet the use. The next version of Cosmo will implement CalDAV free/busy reports, to support CalDAV scheduling in Chandler.

Looking for Chandler beta 1.0 in about a year. Sheila is working on a concrete plan for the 1.0 roadmap.

Sheila asks whether people have satisfied the needs they had that led them to originally invest in Chandler. Jack Duwe remarks that three years ago when this started, Oracle had just purchased Steltor, and at this point Oracle hasn't pulled the rug out from under them, which was a concern at the time.

Greg notes that what's emerging is a client that looks to be nice and integrated (like Outlook), and that most of us have become rather settled in our environments. One possibility is that we say this has been an interesting collaboration and learning experience, and we go on our separate ways. Or we could find new ways, now that our three years of funding is running out, to continue the collaboration.

Technorati Tags: Calendaring, CSG-Spring-2006, chandler

Paul Hill from MIT starts off by stating that, since universities are in the business of nurturing lifetime and multi-generational relationships, then we need to be in the social software space.

He then asks why we would encourage (or allow) faculty to do course interactions in commercial services, and what the relationship to FERPA and other regulations are. This will drive us to create many parallel services of our own.

we encourage students to collaborate and work in teams. There are pedagogical styles that support engagement and reinforce learning objectives. We want to increase interaction between students and faculty. IM helps facilitate that at MIT. Zephyr, MIT's messaging system, has seen a decrease in use, and there's anecdotal evidence that faculty are asking students for their IM handles on commercial systems.

Policy issues - are you going to provide logging of IM? Will these systems have implications for ID management? How will you respond to requests for logs, etc.?

Will you create a closed community or an open community?

What are the long term implications for your namespace?
Convergence - shared whiteboard and IM

Paul shows scripts.mit.edu - allows anyone on campus to run pretty much any script through a web server.

Standards in this space - SIP

Jabber/XMPP is gaining critical mass. There's now 26 people in the back channel chat room - last CSG the max was 8.

SVG will be of interest - not coming as fast as hoped, but there are plugins for most browsers.

Blog standards? There are lots of posting APIs, but no formal standards.

Also in wikis there are de-facto standards, but not formal ones. RL Bob notes that divergence of markup makes it hard to make content portable.

Ken asks what the implications of Infocards will be in this space for access control. Paul says that the focus of Infocard is the phishing problem, not total identity control. RL Bob - "Just a new way to log in."

Bob notes that there are a number of people working on Shibboleth-enabling Confluence - Internet2 among them. At MIT IS&T is introducing support for campus for both Media Wiki and Confluence.

Paul shows an ink enabled wiki. Unfortunately, the ink standard is a Microsoft "open standard". But at least the information is published.

Yale supports Jive for chat, integrated with their auth systems.

Technorati Tags: CSG-Spring-2006, social software, social-software

In 2005 student surveys they didn't ask any direct questions about social networking, but they learned a lot from qualitative interviews.

In the 2006 survey they asked direct questions

One of the most popular groups in facebook is I Just Tried to Ford the River and My Fucking Oxen Died - a tribute the the Oregon Trail computer game, which was many people's first game. Students are commonly in 30-40 groups.

Students aren't blogging, by and large.

Students don't think of IM as technology - it surprises them when we talk about it that way. They consider IM their personal space, not a place for the institution.

There's a good study on the k-12 expereience at netday.org. 78% of high school seniors use IM every day.

Technorati Tags: CSG-Spring-2006, social-software

I've been acting as the ringleader for this morning's workshop on social software. I started off with a brief setting of context [pdf] about social software, and then presented some results from our membership survey on the topic.

Technorati Tags: CSG-Spring-2006, social-software

Jim Phelps from Wisconsin is talking about the emergence of Web 2.0 and what the distinguishing features are. It's a good primer on what's going on in the Web 2.0 space for folks who might not be completely up to speed on it.

Putting stuff up to share, starting with friends and family, leading to the discovery of others who share the same interests, which leads to the formation of communities.

Folksonomies - a sense of content and context - the tags people have used to describe a resource. Jim shows Flickr and Technorati, YouTube, etc. Jim also shows Jon Udell's infoworld explorer, and Udell's delicious affinity app.

Jim notes that by using Udell's affinity app to see which users have similar interests and what else they have bookmarked, one can easily accomplish the same kind of literature analysis that traditionally takes academics weeks in the library.

Jim shows Connotea, a social site oriented towards academic researchers, that I hadn't seen before. He also shows CiteULike citation manager and tagger.

There's lots of discussions about what the roles universities should play in this space, how responsible are we for what students and staff do in non-university hosted spaces, how hands-off can we be?

Technorati Tags: CSG-Spring-2006, social software

Yesterday was a lovely spring day in Madison, with mild temperatures in the 70s (farenheit). Today it's gray, raining, windy, and temperatures are down in the low 50s and dropping quickly. They're saying we may have some snow before the day is out. Wow!

Klara says that Wisconsin has been using VMWare to achieve server virtualization, using VMotion. They're achieving some economy of power and cooling that way. One comment from the audience is that it's harder to monitor virtual servers. Shel reports that they're seeing a lot of uptake on use of VMWare offering, especially for departments that want to have staging and test servers available.

This panel exceeded my attention span, mostly I think due to a long day after a short night's sleep. So I missed a bunch of no doubt interesting points.

The day ends with some discussion of whether it makes sense for CSG to broker some experiments with multiple institutions working together to help each other do backup and data resumption services.

Technorati Tags: CSG-Spring-2006, data-centers

Sue is the Chief of Police for the University, and also a Vice Chancellor.

They did a physical security survey of every building on campus - ended up being just under 2500 spaces surveyed. The State of Wisconsin bids every access control system as a separate bid. They had seven different access control systems for 345 buildings.

With new federal regulations they told the state that they wanted to do a single access control system. The first priority was to secure things like select chemicals, nuclear reactor, etc. That's done, now moving on to next priorities.

Now they have a single system mandated. Using Andover system. Departments have local control over access and hours, but the central control is in the hands of the police.

Each department has to fund the system themselves.

They have fingerprints for each cardholder in high risk areas. Cards are issued by the police. So far they're not integrated with the HR system to automatically know when people leave.

The web site for this is at http://www.uwpd.wisc.edu/Access%20Cards%20and%20Control.html

Sue goes on to tell a couple of hair-raising stories about mistaken identification of dead kids based on borrowed or forged driver's licenses used for - she uses that as an intro to talking about authentication and authorization as being a central problem of our time that we need to be thinking about. That, of course, comes as no surprise to this crowd.

Technorati Tags: CSG-Spring-2006, security

Jim Pepin - USC is moving into an old garment factory downtown LA. They're building on the fourth (top) floor so that there's no possibility that the data center can be innundated by water from floors above.They're dedicating about 5,000 sq ft to administrative computing (payroll and personnel). There will be two data prep rooms for building stuff out - one 800 sq ft, one 300 sq ft. This will all be 24 inch raised floor. There will be about 4500 sq ft for high perfomance computing with 7 50 ton air conditioners, with 1.2 megawatts of air and power.

Jim notes that people under 40 aren't used to having water under the floor in a data center, unlike guys that grew up with mainframes, and that's creating some debate in the data center design world.

Shel from Berkeley is talking about their new data center. It took them 7 years to justify need, 2 years to get budget approval, 18 months to build base building, 6 months to build the data center, and 1 weekend to move in. The facility is on the periphery of the campus, and researchers indicated that if they couldn't come to touch their machines that would be an issue - but they never do actually come. It would have been cheaper to build further away.

They built redundant power (2500 KVA).

They're on the third floor of a building, which required a unique seismic design.

Ten percent of the cost was moving out of the old building. They planned for 75 hours downtime, it ended up being 62 hours for about 400 servers.

$11.7 million for data center and move. base building $23 million. Electrical service was $4 million.

Shel got signing authority for any data center space on campus. That allows them to move more folks into the central data center. There will still be some departmental data centers, but fewer of them.

They went to 18 inch raised floors in most spaces rather than 24 inch. All the cabling is in ladder racks above, tied down.

Each four cabinets have 96 fiber and 96 copper connections. There's conversation on the back channel about whether that's enough network capacity in an era of high density blade servers. Walter notes there that "for an IBM 14 blade chassis, we'd want to have something like 37 copper ports per chassis: We'd use switches for uplinks (8 ports) but for iSCSI SAN, we'd want each blade to have a direct connection to the switching backplane (28 ports) plus one management port."

Lessons - Don't rely on your campus design tema or architects. 65-80 wattt per sq ft is plenty - if you have a separate ultra high density room. Design for expansion or modular - you will need it. A full load bank for testing is a good thing. Standardize, standardize, standardize. Design for lights out. Use the move opportunity to plan change.

Michigan - Is building a new 10,000 sq ft data center which will also house Internet2. A big chunk of the electrical service is outside the building. They're building 24 fiber connections to each half-row of racks. Clusters will have switching built into the racks for their own distribution.

east half of room is "server class" space - low density 160 watts per sq ft. Going with Liebert XD power stuff. The high density part of the room will be Liebert XDO planning average of 240 watts per sq ft across the entire space with ability to go to 300 in small areas.

2 mw for equipment, 2 mw for cooling, lighting, etc.

There's some discussion about whether people are providing UPS to research clusters or not.

Michigan is using flywheels to provide complete equipment power until generators can come up - flywheel can carry load for about 25 seconds, generators are guaranteed to be up in 12-13 seconds. They decided not to go with batteries for the leaking and exploding reasons.

There will be ~ 400 fibers on three paths between campus and the facility.

Took three years of discussion with strategic deans to get them to agree that they would stop building local data centers and move into this one. They'll be subsidizing about half of the operating costs centrally. Electricity will be paid for by customers - priced to drive behavior. Shel notes that at Berkeley they charge $8 per rack unit per month, all inclusive. Shel is willing to provide the cost model if people are interested in seeing what's included.

Harvard - They were faced with an eighteen month eviction notice. They were looking for 4-5k sq ft - they ended up with 5k sq ft of computer floor, plus a staging area. Facility designed for central administrative computing, not research computing. Now FAS is bringing in lots of research computing.

They built the room at 55 watts per sq ft. The back channel thinks that sounds awfully low. They have dual 450 Kva UPS, and they're adding a third.

Technorati Tags: CSG-Spring-2006, data-centers

Bill Clebsch is talking about the results of the data center survey of CSG folks.

There was 100% response from the CSG schools.

60% of the data centers were over 20 years old. 36% answered their facilities are 11-20 years old. That means that 96% are over 11 years old!

Intel says it's not worth investing in data centers over 8 years old. Intel is fond now of buying old supermarkets for data centers because they have high ceilings. They're also using two foot raised ceilings and cooling to 66 degrees instead of 68.

39% have 10-20k sq ft of usable space; 36% have 5-10k sq ft.

Bill notes that the older faculty, who bring in much of the money, have an "anthrpomorphic" relationship with their computer - want to be able to touch it. Younger faculty don't care.

There's a 50-50 split on wehther facilities are centrally funded or have rates for usage. It's hard to incent researchers to come into the data center - they perceive the space in their own buildings as "free".

The majority have no required standards in place for data center equipment.

Everybody's looking for more - floor space, power, etc

50% are planning expansions of 51-75% more floor space.

Most people are expecting 11-20 years of use from new facilities.

Many people are using consultants to help plan - it's important to find an consultant that understands high performance computing.

Current allocations for research and academic computing are low in data centers (64% allocate less than 25% of existing space), but future needs are thought to be very high (36% plan to allocate 26-50%, 29% plan to allocate 51-75%).

2/3 of respondents have some level of colocation service. 1/3 offer a service where faculty buy into large "condo" clusters.

There's some discussion of whether there are ways for groups of institutions to collaborate on backing each other up for disaster recovery.

Technorati Tags: CSG-Spring-2006, data-centers

We're here a the Pyle Center at the University of Wisconsin for the spring CSG meeting.

Bill Clebsch from Stanford is leading the Data Center Workshop.

The first panel, being introduced by Jim Pepin from USC, is setting the context.

There was a meeting two weeks ago with NSF about cyberinfrastructure in a campus level. Twenty years ago we were the people supporting high end folks on campus. Over the last ten years we've gotten to a point where we dont change anything quickly. Whole lot of stuff going on on campus around clusters and networking. People in departments want to build clusters - what will that drive in terms of campus infrastructure for housing those.

Previously there were no line items in grants for facilities and operations. The sweet spot used to be 32 node clusters, but now it's 128 or 256 nodes. If faculty want to get funded they need to be at the cutting edge of research, and the 32 node cluster in a grad student office isn't that. There's been a lot of pushback and rethinking at the funding agencies.

Kevin Moroney - You could suffer "death by [NSF] Young Investigator Awards" with 16 node clusters.

Jim notes that science has become team science, which drives more computing.

The back channel has some chatter about water-cooled racks in machine rooms.

Penn State has just invested in some water-cooled racks.

Some discussion about power consumption - people are planning 18-24 kW per rack for high performance computing and 4-6kW for an enterprise computing rack.

Walter points out in the back channel that "APC has a 'half rack CRAC' where you have a 'real' system in the rack "hut". he hut is a set of back to back racks which has a roof so that heat is contained in the hut and the in-rack AC units suck in that air and exhaust room temp air. A new CMU research facility that is using the APC system has a writeup at http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/PDL-FTP/News/newsletter05.pdf"

Jim and Kevin note that in colo offering if you charge by rack then people will stuff the racks as full as possible, raising the kilowatt per rack average in the machine room.

Jim notes that USC has rented some colo space in a downtown facility for mirroring for disaster recovery.

There's a bunch of discussion about offsite backup, disaster recovery, and how campuses prioritize what services will be brought back in which order.

Theresa from MIT notes that for key communication services (web, email) it's good to have geographically distributed load balanced services, so that one location can go down and service is only more heavily loaded.

Patrick from MIT says that funding bodies are starting to hold campuses responsible for recovery of research data, so if the data center is holding research data it's another thing to worry about.

In a brief discussion on power infrastructure (most campuses here have multiple power routes into the data center) Jim says that USC is always being compared to Disney for what they do - Steve Worona says that's a Mickey Mouse solution :)

Theresa says that the financial systems can actually stand some outage time, but it's the communications infrastructure - web and email - that is truly critical to keep running, along with the network. That's the lesson of 9/11.

About a third of institutions here report that they've had a total data center outage within the last three years.

Technorati Tags: CSG-Spring-2006, data-centers

The rest of this week I'll be in Wisconsin. I'll be attending the Spring Common Solutions Group meeting in Madison, where there will be a workshop on data center futures and I'll be leading a short workshop on Thursday on social software. I'll be blogging those sessions as we go. CSG is a small meeting, usually in the 50-75 people range, where IT leaders from 25 leading US research universities attend. It's always a convivial and highly interactive experience, and I always learn a lot.

Next weekend I'll be in Milwaukee visiting my friend Jim Fricke, who is now directing curatorial efforts at the soon-to-be-built Harley Davidson Museum, and my old college bud Bryn is coming up from Chicago. Should be great fun!

Technorati Tags: CSG-Spring-2006

Over the last few months I've consulted some with the folks from KEXP radio, Seattle's famous indie station, about how to get going with blogging.

I'm pleased to say that the KEXP blog is now live and on the net at http://blog.kexp.org.

The DJs at KEXP are extremely knowledgeable and highly opinionated - that's a good thing in a DJ!

I look forward to keeping up with the posts from some of my favorite DJs, like DJ Michele, Jon Kertzer, Don Slack, Darek Mazzone, and (especially) John Gilbreath.

Nice work, Jason, Louis, and all!

Technorati Tags: blogging, music, kexp, radio

I didn't realize till he just posted a comment here just now that my colleague Jim has a blog, which (just like Jim) is erudite and quirky, and a generally good read. I'm adding it to my subscriptions. I especially like his About Me page.

Technorati Tags: friends

The first thing I do when I bring my Sunday newspaper into the house is remove all the advertising circulars and dump them into the recycling bin. I don't read them, I don't look at them, I don't give them so much as a glance.

Today the advertising in the Sunday Seattle Times weighed just over three pounds.

I'd gladly pay the Times a bit more to not deliver those ads to me at all.

I can't imagine that this is an effective form of advertising for the firms that purchase the ads - and it certainly doesn't make any environmental sense.

Technorati Tags: advertising, newspapers,

My colleagues and friends who develop the Catalyst Web Tools here at the UW have done an open source release of their Solstice framework. Solstice is a web app development framework for perl developers. It's what the Catalyst folks use to develop tools that we use heavily, including the highly regarded (and recent award-winning) WebQ quizzing and survey tool.

Solstice is a model-view-controller framework (as is Ruby on Rails) that can make it easier for perl developers to build robust, maintainable, and highly functional web applications.

Next up the Catalyst team is working on open sourcing the web tools code, which should be widely useful as both apps to use as-is and as starting points for how to develop and extend Solstice applications.

Technorati Tags: open-source, tools, software

There's a terrific article on the network neutrality debate by Farhad Manjoo in Salon. If you're wondering what the fuss is about I urge you to take the time to read it.

Dan Gillmor got eloquently passionate about the issue when he gave the New Media lecture at Columbia University:

I've talked a fair amount about openness here. This is not only an issue for journalists in their own work. It's one of the most important policy issues facing us all. If you think media consolidation is an issue today, it's nothing compared with what we're facing tomorrow.

I beg you to write and call your member of Congress and U.S. senators, and your state representatives -- the duopoly is well-wired, in the wrong way, in our state capitals, too. Tell them you want an open Internet, not a walled garden or fortress where giant companies get to pick what innovations will succeed or fail.

Last week Dan posted about AT&T's apparent participation in helping the NSA perform what may be illegal spying against American citizens, and noted:

There's plenty of shame to go around, and you expect this from the current government. But one of the most disturbing parts of this is the phone company's seeming eagerness to give up its customers' most private information without appearing to care that it's violating basic rules of business and decency.

And these companies are run by the people who want to control the Internet by ending any semblance of network neutrality. Feeling safer?

Technorati Tags: net-neutrality