Archive for May, 2008

CurrentCost

Published May 26, 2008 Tech , currentcost 0 Comments

After completing the WS-Policy Round 1 implementation a few weeks ago and getting pulled in to more WS-Policy stuff at work I was looking for another spare time project. About then, Rich told me about the CurrentCost device he had set up and it seemed like a fun thing to work on.

We had a tweetup at work where it seemed like lots of the problems were already solved…. so, being that I was looking for a fun challenge, I’ve ignored all that for a few of weeks, bought a device independently, built a cable, and this bank holiday weekend connected it to a slug, written a really suspect python script to read the data from the device and publish it to an illsley.org XMPP id. I’ve also written an XMPP client which is running on a box at work retrieving the data and putting it into a .csv file. One of the good things about using an illsley.org XMPP id is that the google backend records all the messages so I could not have the client and extract the data from google later.

Even that’s not ideal, so the other options I’m planning to explore are Amazon SQS and Amazon SimpleDB, before probably caving and recognising that the MQTT solution is best and asking the guys at work nicely if I can properly participate.

There are lots of interesting things to do with the data, which I’ll start to play with once I have a meaningful volume of it. One possibility which surfaced this week when I saw an internal demo is snaffling an early build of WebSphere Business Events and seeing what interesting things it can do with power usage events.

Clouds forming indoors

Published May 25, 2008 Tech , apple , cloud computing 0 Comments

A topic I’ve considered a fair amount over the last 18 months is where ‘the cloud’ ends and the personal computing device begins.

It was first triggered in my mind by frustration at the amount of time needed to download large podcasts. It’s a simple scheduled task which can’t happen when my laptop is off, but when I get up in the morning I want to quickly get any new podcasts to sync to my iPod, not wait for a 100MB download. There is, however, a wireless router with a processor capable of http downloading sitting connected to the internet 24/7, and if it downloaded the podcast, it would be very quick to copy the file across when the laptop reappears on the network.

I considered scratching that itch with a Slug, but that approach would have missed the point - I want to continue using iTunes in the normal way. I want iTunes to automatically hand off that work when my laptop isn’t on.

More recently, I’ve been considering power consumption and the kinds of tasks that really don’t warrant the 60 watts the MacBook can pull, or even the lower power levels it pulls, simply for having the screen on. I want these tasks to happen somewhere, when and where is appropriate.

After 3 failing hard disks in the last 2 years, backups are a topic close to my heart. Ever since the Time Capsule was announced I’ve wanted one, and last Saturday was the day I caved and spent the money. I’m happy with it so far - though it does run pretty hot and I’ve not taken that extra step of trying a restore from backup.

The list of things it can do is pretty impressive, and made me reconsider these cloud thoughts. If there’s a company that can pull off linking home devices in a seamless, usable manner, and if there’s a company looking to leverage it’s software to sell consumer hardware, it’s Apple. They are also a company which has shied away from building a ‘home server’ - a product category that I can’t imagine resonates with more than 0.5% of consumers. A cloud of routers, home entertainment devices, capsules, and more all of which can communicate, and interface well with software is far more up their street and something I’d be willing to shell yet more money into.

Of course, I’d also like such a home cloud to extend to the ‘big cloud’ for appropriate tasks, but I’m guessing that’s yet further years away.

[I did start this post last week before the Forrester report]

In defence of social networking

Published May 6, 2008 IBM , Tech , social networking , twitter 6 Comments

One of the perks of working at Hursley is the occasional trip to the pub at lunchtime. Today was one of those days, and in-keeping with previous trips with that particular group, I got a bit of a ribbing about participating in a relatively small number of social networking type activities. First I think it was blogging (the, um, rabble rouser ;-) of the group now has a blog), then it was having a SecondLife avatar, and facebook, and today it was twitter.

Every time I start by defending the technology because I’m under (gentle) attack and feel I should, then sip on a pint and the discussion disappears so we never really address the issues. This is a brief attempt to do just that, because I think it’s an interesting discussion, not because of the comments.

Blogs - I think the potential value of blogs is clear. My blog is generally of interest to me, and occasionally to others. There are other blogs, written by authors, politicians, technologists, and CEOs which get these people closer to those who are interested and have opinions than before. A good thing.

SecondLife - shrug It’s an interesting experience, and probably represents a style of interface we’ll use regularly in the future. I’m not at all hooked and may never log in to that particular metaverse again.

Facebook - An excellent way to keep in touch with friends I don’t see every day, or indeed very regularly at all. Useage has dropped off a bit recently, but that’s at least in part because I’ve been experimenting with twitter. It’s a closed data platform which really isn’t something I’m comfortable with. I want to own my social graph, so facebook having proved it’s value to me, I’ll probably move as much out of their environment as possible.

Twitter - It’s been nearly 2 months, and this experiment is ongoing. I’d liken this to working in open plan writ large. I know what lots of people are doing. Lots of it is unexciting, and easily ignored. Some of it’s interesting, and stimulates ideas or laughter, and even seems to foster a sense of team… see the #currentcost activities in hursley spilling onto twitter as an example. Twitter deserves a full post at some point, but the short version is that while it’s quite compelling, at least over the short term, I don’t really know where it goes from here.

[UPDATE] The other interesting thing about twitter from a work perspective is that it’s large scale consumer pub/sub and event notification.

Dopplr - Every so often I get a notification that someone else is sharing their trips with me. I don’t travel enough for this to be interesting to me, though I know some people who do, so I should probably speak to them to work out if it’s as useful as the theory sounds.

So some successes, some not, and some undecided. Overall, I’ve got what I wanted from them. These technologies/services are all a means to a particular end for me. The end? Fun experimentation and keeping an eye out for interesting technology trends. I don’t need these technologies to be great for the experiment to be worthwhile.

About

I’m David Illsley, I work in Web Services development at IBM Hursley, which involves work on the Apache WS Project, where I am a committer and PMC member. When not working with technology, I spend a lot of time on the backstage aspects of theatre, and a sadly decreasing amount of time reading.

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