Here are the seven Computers And Teaching newsletters from the project.

Newsletter #1 ERIC abstract (download full PDF from archive.org):

A brief overview of the Computer Aids to Teaching Project is first presented. The workshops, seminars, demonstrations and open house events conducted in the course of the project are described, and the information services provided are discussed. An outline of the project’s 1st workshop designed to introduce users to the PLATO IV computer-assisted instructional system is included, along with instructions on how to operate a computer terminal. Lastly, a brief article reviews the development, current status and future potential of ARPANET, a geographically distributed network of different computers interconnected by a communication system based upon high speed message switching.

Newsletter #2 ERIC abstract (download full PDF from archive.org):

Details relating to the daily operation of the Computer Aids to Teaching project are provided, along with some feedback from readers of the previous issue of the newsletter. Following this are a brief article which discusses the possibility of making man-machine interactions more personal and a review of two seminars which dealt with the establishment of a National Science Network, a net of computers and computer users connected by high speed communications lines. A description of HYPERTEXT, a student-controlled instructional system consisting of pieces of discrete texts, is presented, followed by a look at the future possibilities of computer terminals in the home. Lastly, some instructions on how to operate a computer terminal are given.

(This newsletter contains the COTTAGE INDUSTRY article.)

Newsletter #3 ERIC abstract (download full PDF from archive.org):

Included in this issue of the newsletter are details about the usage of the currently available computer terminals,information about equipment soon to be added to the Computer Aids to Teaching, Project, and an announcement describing a workshop and open house held in March of 1973. Some recent publications are cited and a student guide to HYPERTEXT is provided, along with an author’s guide to HYPERAUTHOR. Lastly, instructions on how to operate a computer terminal are presented.

Newsletter #4 ERIC abstract (download full PDF from archive.org):

Information relating to the installation of the PLATO-IV computer terminal is presented. This terminal is connected to the University of Illinois’ system, making it possible for personnel associated with the Computer Aids to Teaching Project to keep in touch with the development of the large-scale PLATO system. Problems associated with the authoring of programs, with their modification and adaptation to new hardware systems and different universities, and with the cost of developing computer-assisted instructional (CAI) courses are discussed. Also offered are details on a workshop and seminar run in conjunction with the Project and information about a CAI summer workshop for teachers held at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Newsletters #5/6 ERIC abstract (download full PDF from archive.org):

This combined issue first gives descriptions of the PLATO terminal and of an interface which has been completed to allow them to be linked to the CDC 6400 system at Northwestern University. Details are next provided relating to four events; 1) an open house at the Computer Aids to Teaching Project; 2) the Computer Caravan, a traveling computer exhibit; 3) the summer 1973 workshop at the State University of New York at Stony Brook for computer resource personnel; and 4) the Festival of Educational Alternatives at De Paul University. Two new articles are presented, one on the evaluation of computer-assisted instruction and the other on community uses of interactive computers. Also included are reprints of several articles which appeared in earlier issues of the newsletter.

Newsletter #7 ERIC abstract (download full PDF from archive.org):

Recent developments in Northwestern University’s Computer Aids to Teaching Project are reviewed in the first section of this issue. Included are pieces of information about the use of the PLATO IV system, and about increasing access to System Development Corporation’s Educational Resources Information Center(ERIC) files, along with news about personnel, facilities and equipment changes relating to the Project. The second half of the newsletter offers an article which outlines some of the concepts and issues facing designers of computer-based learning/information exchanges. It reviews briefly some of Ivan Illich’s basic ideas for de-schooling society and for building dynamic learning webs in which teachers and students come together as their needs and interests dictate. In addition, it touches upon the role of the computer in such a system, the types of information found in the system, and some possible means of financing such endeavors.

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I made some guesses about the “cottage industry” that access to computing might support in the future and a lot of them were right. Um, actually everything in my article is commonplace today…Here are some of the things I wrote. They’re based on conversations I was having with many people at the time, so they’re not all my own original thoughts, but look at how many of them we’ve been able to realize by 2017!

The article is entitled COTTAGE INDUSTRY (download PDF) and is a forecast of what’s to come, viewed from 1973.

First, I proposed working from home (in your bathrobe or whatever):

As our economy moves more and more toward services and farther away from manufacturing, people find themselves doing tasks they could really be doing at home, if it were acceptable. Take programming a computer with time-sharing, the programmer could work from a back room, and could work any hour of the night or day.

And my favorites – co-working spaces, coffee, teleconferencing, cloud computing, email, voicemail, flat-rate all-you-can-eat phone plans:

Or, if one felt the desire, it would be possible to set up neighborhood work-centers,’ where people gathered to do their work and drink coffee. Communication would be carried out on the telephone or picturephone. “Paper” based jobs would be carried out in conjunction with computer communication systems, in which the computer stored all information. Letters would be written by typing them into the computer then when the recipient signed-on, the letter would be printed on his terminal. A secretary could be located in Chicago for a boss in San Francisco; the secretary would handle communications and route letters via computer to the boss, who would dictate a reply. The reply would then be played back automatically when the secretary called the boss later in the day, typed into the computer and routed to the originator.

Is this a pipe dream? Perhaps not! There are people in telephone companies today who look forward to the day when all calls will be included in the monthly charge. It would then be advantageous to work long-distance. The telephone network would hold your calls, record callers’ numbers, route your calls to another number, or “camp” on a busy line. Once the computer has been connected to this network, just imagine the possibilities!

Personal Computing — or at least home “terminals”:

When PLATO-IV plasma-displays get down to $700 each (roughly the cost of a color TV console), people will begin to think of buying them for their families. Learning will take place in the evening, after school and during lunch breaks. The school may have to take on more socializing tasks — teaching kids how to deal with each other and how to settle disputes.

Social networking and social organizing online:

They may begin seriously trying to direct a student’s inquiry, starting neighborhood study groups oriented toward solution of local problems. And the giant communication network may be used to form larger nationwide task-forces of people, communicating via the computer.

Community computing (credit here to Vic Bunderson et al), online shopping, social effects:

One of the first incursions into interactive computer controlled networks is the TICCIT (say “ticket”)system, by MITRE Corporation. This is centered around a cable TV system in Reston, Virginia. The cable TV will be computer controlled, and will provide information and educational materials to citizens on their own television sets, as well as regular TV fare. Signals are sent to the individual TVs in the homes of children studying lessons, displaying information much like that PLATO-IV will display on its screens. The child presses a key on his telephone to respond. Eventually keyboards will be included. Shopping can be done the same way. Items are displayed on the screen, and buttons are pushed to order. Information of community interest can be displayed, and citizens can even vote on issues.

TICCIT is designed to be a local system, comprising a few hundred homes. Can you imagine what could be done on a truly large system such as PLATO-IV with thousands of homes? It could change the structure of society.

Post Script: What did I miss?

Well I definitely missed cell phones. I almost missed personal computers because of my focus on terminals, although a couple of years later (say 1976) I knew about KIM-1 and other kits, which presaged this. I missed hand-held phones and tablet computing and such. I missed the entire software ecosystem that has grown up alongside those technologies, although my next two company startups transitioned into personal computing rapidly. Also, by 1977 I was working with PDP-11/43 systems, which reduced the mainframe to small-room size, and racks of dial-in modems for remote users. So still terminals, but by 1978 I was focusing on the Apple-II, which was the real game-changing device for all of us.

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MY TOP APP PICKS FOR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION ON iPAD

• iSSH— gives you secure shell (SSH) access to your servers using name+password or digital certs. If you use a command-line editor on your server (I use vi), be aware that up-down-right-left arrows won’t really function if you use the onscreen keyboard, but from a bluetooth keyboard they do work! Recently I’ve also had trouble with ESC, and I’ve had to tap its onscreen “button” instead on the physical key. You can also configure iSSH to emit true function keys (which are needed for some configuration work—in htop, for instance).
• 1Password— what a great way to keep all those passwords in one place! And encrypted too. 1Password for iPad syncs with 1Password on my Mac through Dropbox. When I make a new password, or change one, it is always available on the iPad as soon as I need it. This way I can use those 20-character random passwords that I’d never remember if I had to commit them to memory.
• Dropbox— Well of course you already know I use Dropbox for sync’ing 1Password across devices. And you can do without it if you sync the two devices “locally” on wi-fi, but I would never remember to do it—Dropbox lets it happen more in real-time and effortlessly.
• DropDAV— (Not an iPad app, but essential nevertheless) I need DropDAV because I have a buddy who watches my back and serves as sysadmin when I’m on those long air flights or otherwise indisposed, and he and I need to share documents, which we do through DropBox. DropDAV isn’t an app, it’s a service. Sign up and it makes your DropBox documents available to Pages and Keynote through WebDAV services on DropDAV.
• WordPress app— HTML textboxes don’t scroll properly on Safari on the iPad. This is a really big problem if you’re trying to admin a WordPress blog in Safari. So the WordPress iPad app is a necessity, though you don’t really have access to all of the WP admin features (it’s designed for bloggers, not admins), which means I’m constantly back and forth between this app and Safari even when I’m working on a single blog. This needs improvement, but I can make it work well enough for now.

PROBLEMS WITH THE iPAD

• No Flash. This means I can’t fully utilize a lot of tools, like Cloudkick, when on the road because they use Flash extensively. (However, I can log in at CloudKick even with my Yubikey one-time-password USB device, as long as I have the iPad USB camera adapter with me. That’s a trick to be explained elsewhere.)
• There’s no PGP mail encryption/decryption for the iPad mail app. Although I have other ways of dealing with encrypted mail when I’m on the road, this is still a big problem. If you rely on encrypted mail, be sure you have an alternative available when you’re traveling with your pad.

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However, as I started relying more on the iPad for my mobile life, I realized that I could go without the full backpack[1. At least on business days. On weekends I trek around the city on foot, and I prefer to have some weight on my back just to get a better workout, as well as to carry a windbreaker, sweater and other supplies.]. So I checked at REI and found two items I couldn’t live without[2. I have no connection or contact with the manufacturers, bought the products at full retail, and can highly recommend them after months of use.].

The first is this Outdoor Products 10-inch  Power Laptop Sleeve. {The blue bag in the photo.} They may call it a sleeve, but it’s a full carrying bag, padded on all sides, and large enough for a 10” clamshell computer (the type with a flip-up display—Acer, Asus etc.), so it handles an iPad with room to spare even when the iPad is already in a protective case. The bag has a shoulder strap that clips on two ways, so you can carry the bag in a “vertical” or a “horizontal” orientation. You can sling it on your back, around the front, or almost under your shoulder. Over your coat or under your coat. Over the shoulder, or across the chest (strangle-hold around your neck) because the strap loosens and shortens. You insert the iPad through a zipper pocket that allows easy access in either orientation, then you zip it closed. There’s an outer zippered pocket with a little slip-in pocket for SD memory cards, clip-ins for carrying pens (I keep a small LED flashlight in there as part of earthquake readiness), and an interior zippered pocket for headsets and the like. The case is soft enough that it expands as you feed it more gear, yet padded enough to protect against bumps and grinds. I don’t believe the case is waterproof, because water doesn’t bead up on it, so I have taken additional precautions.

Oh, and perhaps the biggest surprise of all, I use a bluetooth wireless keyboard and it fits nicely inside the sleeve along with the iPad. Just barely, but it definitely fits.

The next one isn’t from REI, but I’ve got to mention it. I enclose the iPad directly in an incase Book Jacket that is heftier than Apple’s sleeve and really gives great protection. Yes, I drop my iPad just like I drop my iPhone (and their iPhone case has saved my phone numerous times when it went flying across the room on the floor due to my waving my arms with great abandon). The case makes the iPad seem twice as thick as the naked iPad would be, but makes it so much safer to carry. And even inside the incase, the iPad fits snugly into the Power Laptop Sleeve!

And finally, since it’s rainy season in San Francisco, REI sells “4 litre” Sea to SummitUltra-Sil Dry Sacks (waterproof bags) [3. I use these bags when I’m camping in the wilderness, to keep dry supplies dry. They really are so waterproof they’ll float in a river.] and I bought a cute little yellow one (with a white interior, just like the raincoat my Mom got me to wear to kindergarten) and this bag fits very snugly around the incase and completely waterproofs the iPad for when it gets a tad rainy. I even use the larger 10 litre size sack to put entirely around the Power Laptop Sleeve when there’s a downpour, thus enclosing everything in a waterproof skin. I carry the sacks rolled up inside the larger Laptop Sleeve when I’m not using them. Yes, everything fits nicely.

And I don’t have to carry a backpack to business meetings any more! W00t!

The post My iPad’s cute little raincoat keeps it travel-ready appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Ten reasons my buddies might have quit blogging (remember, I call blog posts “articles”):

• Too much time goes into writing a single article
• email inbox is over 1,000 and need to catch up
• too busy reading other blogs
• watching video more than ever – still haven’t seen all the TED videos
• iPad doesn’t provide an easy way to write for the blog (get a keyboard!)
• 400 podcasts stacked up and no longer commute to work so I can’t get through the backlog
• don’t have anything original to say and got tired of repeating what others were saying
• started tweeting and then I didn’t even have enough time for tweeting
• quit blogging for {pick one} summer/trip/vacation/religiousholiday and just never got the energy to start again
• got a real job. (Whatever that is…)

Hmmm…the balance to be struck is between consuming and producing, I think. And consuming is far easier than producing.

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It’s not uncommon to find a hotel over 250€ per night that has a 15€ or higher charge for Internet access. But in the hotels I frequent—I’m fine with just a bed with barely enough space to move around the edges, a shower, and Internet connection, for just over 100€ a night—it seems to be more common to have a free Internet connection included.

Perhaps this is a reflection of younger travelers looking for less-expensive hotels and being attracted like flies (there is one buzzing around my head at this instant here in Paris’ 5^eme where I am connected while sitting in the hotel lobby preparing to take the metro to a meeting) to hotels that provide connectivity.

And the true boon is that Skype on my iPhone can connect to the free wi-fi Internet and I can make Skype calls without having to purchase those “overseas” (and overpriced) mobile phone minutes! Quite a difference to spend USD$0.02 per minute rather than $1.29.

{Part of Sky’s series on using tech when traveling}

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Media: A major benefit for all of us will be that embedding media (videos particularly) will become standardized and greatly simplified, so the web developer won’t have to worry so much about plug-ins, players and compatibility.

Geo-location: But more fun perhaps than that, there is a geo-location feature built into HTML5, and it’s available today on some browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox). In this article Dive into HTML5 — You are here (and so is everybody else), there’s a cookbook for creating a web page that locates you and displays a Google map centered on your coordinates. My page will figure out where you are located and display the Google map — but only if you have an HTML5-compliant browser, sorry. Mobile browsers are particularly good for this because they know your location quite precisely.

I took an hour this morning to build the page, and subject to some debugging (and figuring out that the whole process is asynchronous), I had it working. Clearly if you’re at a wired location, Google is using your IP address and maybe some routing information to locate “approximately” where you are, but on my iPhone it gets much closer to the real location. I used the “You are here…” article, plus some advice from Google code.

And the interface asks you whether to reveal your location before it goes ahead and gives it to the web page to work with. Nice!

That bit about it being asynchronous is important. Anyone used to writing plain-vanilla javascript code knows that usually javascript statements are executed one after another, right down the page (as it were), and you’d think that making a function call to get the current location would actually complete the task and then return control when it finished, to execute the rest of the javascript statements. But this particular interface simply triggers the process of getting the location, and then when it has completed, it makes a callback to a javascript function where you can complete the rest of the work of putting the map up on the page (or any other thing you want to do with the location information).

This kind of asynchronous execution of statements and functions, with callback functions being given control later on when some action is completed, is common in most programming languages, but many javascript coders don’t use it very much. This is one case where you have to pay careful attention and plan ahead.

To get a better idea of how it works, look at the page I wrote and then view source to see how the javascript is written.

Now the InfoWorld article also mentions that HTML5 might not be a fully-adopted standard until 2022, which means that everyone will have blown by it long ago by then and we’ll have a hodgepodge of implementations none of which will completely match the eventual standard. Ahem! Things have to work faster than that in the online world!

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In Sci-Fi Channel’s series Caprica, portable computing has become “foldable” and takes the form of sheets of “paper” on which characters, symbols and other stuff light up so you can read them. The paper is touch-sensitive and you can move the characters around as well as tap them (read “keyboard”).

In Minority Report, John Anderton (senior investigator in the Department of Futurecrime) has his wall-size glass see-through display where he can touch, drag-and-drop, and call up data (and photos) from the archives. But nothing really portable, like a pad/tablet in that particular vision of the future. This theme has been picked up in numerous films over the years, most notably recently in James Cameron’s Avatar where displays are mostly glass or 3D. (Let alone that the ultimate in displays and projection is the “avatar” itself.)

And cyberpunk novels (William Gibson for sure) are campy and amusing because of their notion that data will be passed around on floppy disks. But at the same time you can “jack in” — meaning connect a computer or network into your brain directly. So there are direct computer-human interfaces, but we were still mostly using rotating disc storage of one sort or another for our real computers until just the last 2 years (SSD in the Apple Air being a primary example). Personally, I prefer this solid state or even (future) non-rotating optical storage and it’s clear that it already pervades the entire portable devices market. (The iPad has solid-state SDD storage, all phones do, cameras, etc.)

In Star Trek (the  2009 movie being the prime example) there are lots of glass-see-thru devices, and on some Trek series like DS9 (first illustration above) the portable devices look like an iPad, and you can tap on them, read data from the screen, but (interestingly and entirely the point here) the data stays with the device and one crew member will frequently hand off a device to another crew member (containing a task or assignment to be completed). This idea of “disposable” or at least “transient” devices somehow linked to the information they hold that aren’t in any sense owned by an individual, is I think not going to happen because of ubiquitous wireless, but it’s worth noting. It’s kind of like smart paper, isn’t it? And the same happens in Caprica’s vision of its parallel universe. Presumably the Trek pads talk to the mother ship and can receive assignments wirelessly, but like the economy of Star Trek (long past money and into “everyone is taken care of”) the devices just don’t have personal “ownership” like today’s phones and pads.

This kind of device handoff won’t happen for the iPad, of course, until its price reaches the disposable or discretionary level.

[1] My first table was a Toshiba Tablet PC, from around 2005, and although it required a stylus rather than finger touch, it had great handwriting recognition and operated smoothly once you got past the 5-minute MS Windows boot up time. (And sometimes even longer…)

[2] Apple is releasing the iPad in international markets today, and WSJ reported on the big frenzy on opening day in Japan!

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Well, in some ways, Apple did top it—for one, the price is really, really aggressive. In other areas, the announcement was exactly what we expected. And that, in my opinion, is why the iPad is getting poor reviews from so many people, though they haven’t used it yet. Like a kid on Christmas eve, they had just gotten too overwrought in anticipation of all that candy they had hoped for!

I can see how the iPad could knock off the ebook readers and the netbooks all with one fell swoop. Maybe even the TabletPCs (remember, I’ve had a Toshiba TabletPC for 5 years).

First, here’s what I like about it:

• I love the glossy and really bright screens. (I only have one “old” non-glossy screen left in my office.)
• I love the multi-touch gestures. My iPhone is the first device I’ve been able to interact with in the way I really wanted to – touching the screen. My MacBook gets close, though, because of the multi-touch (example: two-finger wipe to scroll up or down) gestures that make it so fast to operate!
• I love the size of the screen (and consequently the device). I read ebooks on my iPhone now, and they’re just a tad too small (that is, I’m having to swipe to turn a “pages” every 1 or 2 seconds), so having 4x the screen real-estate will be wonderful.
• I’m impressed that they were able to put the iWork suite on the iPad. I use Pages and Keynote a lot, and from the demos I’ve seen, these will be pretty easy to use on the iPad. I love the idea of using the iPad to draft presentations and documents while I’m on a flight from here to Delhi.
• Battery life. 10 hours sounds great and we’ll probably get 6 hours in real life, but if I can keep it charged up while I’m in that airplane, then I’m one happy camper. (More and more flights I’m on have power plugs now, and I’m starting to choose airlines and flights based on whether they have a plug under my seat so I can run the computer. One question—can I plug the iPad into the airplane charger?)
• Did I say price? I think $499 is really good as a starting price. I just received, as a gift from its manufacturer, an electronic pictureframe that’s priced higher than that, and it only does pictures. And it’s more than a high-end Kindle, but it does a lot more than a Kindle!

And what’s questionable about it:

• Only running one app at a time. I absolutely can’t stand this on my iPhone. What a pain! But, I don’t think this is going to get fixed any time soon.
• No microphone. They’d better fix this—I want to record interviews and notes, and I want to use the iPad as a speaker phone (thru Skype if not through real 3G phone). Maybe the iPhone headset (which has a microphone) will be usable in the production models—that would be OK.

Will I get one. Yes, most certainly at some point. Certainly not the first or second or even third production models, but I’ll bet you I’ll be working with an iPad before then end of 2010.

Read what I’ve said about my use of ebooks and ebook prices. Also read this note about what Amazon is saying about prices higher than $9.99.

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Oh, and I subscribe to Scientific American digital (monthly) and read it as a PDF on the screen rather than get all that paper that just piles up before I can get to it.

As in quantum-tunneling^[1] effects, you can get me past the initial resistance to an ebook if:

• The price of the ebook is 60% or less than the price of the physical book; or if
• I don’t want the physical book hanging around anyway after I’ve read it; or if
• It’s available in PDF so I can read it anywhere (though I do purchase prioprietary DRM formats frequently); or if
• It’s $9.99 even if I think I could find a paperback for slightly less somewhere else.

It is just so much easier to take an ebook with me and read it on my screen (or iPhone in the case of the Kindle^[2] and Fictionwise readers)!

[2] There’s a Kindle book reader iPhone app that allows you to buy and download Kindle books from Amazon to read them on your iPhone. No reason this wouldn’t also work on the iPad, since they say 140,000 apps already run on it. (I wonder who took the time to test that assumption…) Fictionwise.com also has a reader available in the app store.

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Organizing a tour for 15 geeks was a nightmarish task for TG Co-Founder Renee Blodgett, who worked for weeks to put this one together – much shorter lead time than for previous tours. And her co-organizers Eliane Fiolet and Phil Jeudy, plus two web developers, did a heroic job.

The online developers were tasked with creating the new web site, but I came in for the last few weeks to preside over one of my (current) specialties –  ensuring that we can mash information together in real time. Here’s what it required and what I learned:

{Eliane’s photo-mosaic of the geeks – at left.}

This trip is largely a different set of geeks than for the UK, with only Renee Blodgett, Tom Foremski, Robert Scoble and myself overlapping from the summer UK visit.

The issues: 1) mashup of geek blog posts; 2) Flickr photos; 3) conferencing.

Pickup geek’s writing from their own blogs: The biggest issue is to create a central web site that incorporates information from all of the geeks while they’re on the road. You can’t ask busy people to write up duplicate posts for a central blog — they’re busy writing for their own blogs. So the answer is to syndicate their blog posts — pick up posts from their blogs, copy them to travelinggeeks.com and insert them there, with a minimum of fuss. Ideally this is a 100% automated process. Well, surprisingly, this still is a very hand-built kind of process, although once you’re done, it can run 100% automatically. Underneath everything the site is built on WordPress, which supports blogging as well as more “static” pages. There’s a neat WordPress plug-in called FeedWordPress^[1] that lets the blog read RSS feeds from each geek blog and copy the relevant posts over to the TG blog for republication. But things have gotten more complex since the geeks visited London… now we need to not only bring in blog posts, but we need to deal with Twitter streams, Twitter hashtags, Flickr photos and YouTube channels. Our “bloggers” are no longer simply bloggers.

Mash multiple feeds together: OK, so some of our bloggers have several places where they interact online. The trick is that most of these now present/expose RSS feeds, and you can read and manipulate data from those feeds to create a single mashed feed that contains only the information that you want to use. Yeah, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, all present RSS feeds that let you get at your photo-stream, your video-stream, and your tweet-stream. The trick here is to use Yahoo Pipes^[2] to mash them together. Pipes will read multiple blogs’ RSS feeds, check to see if there are blog entries in a particular category, and then mash only those articles into a new RSS feed that Yahoo Pipes creates. The system is so flexible that not only can it recognize categories, but it can search through the text of a blog entry or any of the other characteristics that typically appear in an RSS feed. If one of our geeks has, for instance, three feeds, Pipes can filter each feed according to different criteria, and then can merge them together into a single feed, with things interleaved chronologically, that I can have FeedWordPress read and digest. (FeedWordPress can’t do this mashing of multiple feeds…)

Mashing the geeks’ photos: On the UK trip we used a couple of tools to help manage photos. One of those was MobyPicture, which lets you upload a photo once and have it copied to your accounts on multiple online photo sites. It’s particularly useful for mobile phone users, and there’s also an iPhone app, which I find very handy. Though I do love Moby, on this trip we didn’t need this kind of multiple uploading, so we gave all of the geeks access to a Flickr group Traveling Geeks, making the membership “Invitation only” but the viewing “Public.” They’ll upload to their personal accounts, mark the photos for the group, and we use the flickrSliDR slideshow maker to then include all photos, even the most recent, in a slideshow.

Zorap: This hot media-sharing space provides video, audio (mp3), photo and other media sharing within a common space (a room). The tech is rather demanding, so it’s not for the faint-of-heart and you’d better have a fast computer, but when it works it is marvelous. Multi-way (not just two-way like Skype) video conferencing is coming of age.

We are counting on broadly-available wi-fi support at most of the venues in Paris. Orange is supplying us with 3G connectivity to fill in when we can’t find wi-fi. Over the last two days (on my way to Europe) I have used a 3G iPhone tethered to my MacBook while on the California Zephyr (rail in the US) for 5 hours, and wi-fi on American Airlines (excellent bandwidth) within the US. So more and more I’m becoming accustomed to haveing a connection wherever I go.

[2] Yeah, I’ve used Yahoo Pipes for some time now.

[3] Yahoo Pipes has a problem with Typepad-generated “categories” that took me some hours to puzzle out. Typepad “categories” have an extra layer that appears with the XML of an RSS feed that makes filtering impossible if a post has more than one category. Rather than create a whole inscrutable article about it, let me point out that a solution has been developed, which consists of breaking the categories out into a list and then processing the elements of that list rather than trying (unsuccessfully) to parse the malformed feed. I’ll have to write an article on this later.

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In the sense that data was being stored somewhere and the customer didn’t know where it was, then yes it was a cloud failure. But I contend that it was also a failure caused by the existence of a single-point-of-failure. (As system developers, this is our constant nightmare.) The product/service was set up to use a single data service with (apparently) inadequate backup. That created the possibility of this single-point-of-failure. The real failure was that T-Mobile didn’t provide the option to back up your data in a location under your control, so that you could later on restore it if the central service went down.

When I was working at Leapfrog to construct systems that would support “online” toys that would get and store data in the cloud (yes, in 2000 we were doing that too), we considered these same possibilities. We had not only a distributed Oracle database running on more than one computer, but we were streaming our data out to a backup in “real time” so we could reconstruct the data if something nasty happened. And once before we launched we had to take advantage of this when a database administrator‘s fingers slipped and he destroyed the data in a critical part of the database. These were multi-gigabyte databases that would have taken a long time to restore. We really didn’t want to lose them!

That’s why I still purchase CDs before uploading them to my iPod. At least mostly. The few albums I purchase and download, I always write off to CDs for safekeeping. When considering purchasing any system – computer or smartphone – consider how you’re going to back up your data, and maybe in more places than just one.

The post Is the Sidekick failure a cloud failure? appeared first on Sky's Blog.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski spoke about this [Wall Street Journal report] at the Brookings Institution earlier this week. He proposes that all carriers, including wireless carriers who handle data traffic, should have to carry traffic without regard to what its content is or who is providing that content. The new provision in his proposal is that wireless carriers would have to carry voice-over-IP traffic as well as other kinds of data, which brings very cheap voice communications to mobile devices – much cheaper than the rates now charged for mobile voice calls.

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The issue is the use of bandwidth by these messages, and for that matter, the use of bandwidth by everything else. Bandwidth, in spite of our living in the Internet age, was a recurring theme for the entire Traveling Geeks crew. We were on BT Mobile Broadband, which for the most part was reliable. I’d say that we varied between a high of 2.5mbps (mega bits per second) and a low of 4kbps (4k, yes), but if you disregard speed, we seemed to have access almost everywhere in London and Cambridge. Service winked out for a few minutes on the road between London and Cambridge, but regardless of that, there were several geeks online using their laptop computers during the entire bus journey that morning.  And I used BTOpenZones, which is a commercial service provided via wi-fi in public places, cafes and hotels. We were given complementary service by BT^[1] and I can see that an average (non-business) user is going to get pretty good service for £10 to £15 a month, but heavy users are going to be bumping against the account limitations and the issue for the geeks is really how much data we are pushing into the cloud. I uploaded a couple of really large videos one day, and overstepped the 4GB cap on my account without knowing it. So BT “topped-up” the account for me, but several of the geeks seem to have hit their limit more than once.

Although I travel a fair amount, I’m seeing that bandwidth is hard to find. Even with wi-fi access, I’m getting top speeds in the 100kbps to 200kbps range. I’m gathering that it is because I’m sharing the connection with others, and yes it does seem that speeds are best in the early morning when few people would be online – and that they can be pretty low when another geek in the same hotel is uploading video – so perhaps shared bandwidth is the real issue.

The post All those watches! All that bandwidth? appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Métro Paris

The talk about Apple taking down this app appears to be related to the stress it puts on the iPhone and/or that the 3.0 software toolset (the “API”) in the phone itself isn’t really ready to support this app. They say it won’t be available until 3.1 is released. (Does this mean it’ll run on my regular 3G iPhone?) It is a great step forward! And definitely visonary.

Métro Paris is available from the Apple iTunes/iPhone store now. Did I say it only works in Paris?

[2] Augmented reality extends the “real” experience with the phone by adding (in this case) visuals that provide additional information.

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