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November 07, 2003
Digital ID World Presentation Slides and Audio
Digital ID World has put the presentation slides and audio for the conference online. This is a great service and an incredible resource. My hats off to Phil, Kathy, and the folks at Digital ID World for going to the trouble to make it happen.
02:24 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Mesh Networks: Monitoring Buildings
Mesh networks are interesting to me. I like to think about what you can do with lots of similar, wirelessly connected, sensors. For example, I've envisioned OnStar as an open platform for mobile mesh computing and monitoring. An article at AlwaysOn talks about Buildings That Know Their Limits, a feat made possible with meshes of smart sensors. The company doing it is called Sensametrics.
In a nutshell, the Sensametrics architecture is this: off-the shelf heat sensors, vibration sensors, and strain gauges plug into Sensametrics "wireless sensing units." These units have their own accelerometers, to measure shaking, vibration, or swaying, and also collate the data stream from the devices plugged into them. Via radio, they transmit only data thatās outside programmed parameters -- such as 'too hot,' or 'bent too far' -- either to the next closest sensing unit or directly to the Sensametrics console. If one of the Sensametrics units is trying to send data to a unit that has malfunctioned, it can send it via another path -- this is ad-hoc mesh networking.
The article explains this use of sensors and mesh networks in some detail. In the computer world, we're used to being able to instrument just about anything, pull in the data (using OpenView, Tivoli, or something like that) and make decisions based on the data. The rest of the world is just getting in on this game and I think its going to open up lots of opportunities and lots of challenging questions about privacy and transparency.
02:19 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Catching Up on Some OS X Apps
A few Mac OS X related items: uControl for Panther, tabbed terminal emulation, using your iSight camera, and the new Finder.
- I got the latest update to uControl, the utility that let's OS X users turn their CAPSLOCK key into a Control key. Without it, my hand starts to ache from reaching down with my pinky to hit the Control key. Even, when I'm not using Emacs, I'm using Emacs controls in Safari and Mail. This is one of the things that Panther broke when I installed it but the new version seems to work fine now. There are still a few pseky bugs, but its a huge improvement.
- The latest version of iTerm, the tabbed terminal emulator for OS X seems to have fixed a few bugs that bothered me and introduced a few more, that I can live with for now. Most importantly, the performance is improved.
- SecuritySpy is a nifty program that let's you use your iSight camera for something other than iChat. The program let's you monitor multiple cameras at once and even contains a web server that serves up images from the camera. You can create time lapse movies, or just snap shots when the program detects motion. I liked it, but its not worth $50 to me. I think its the software Apple should have included with iSight. If you're interested in using the iSight for other things, there's a couple of stories by Derrick Story on the O'Reilly Network that you might want to check out.
- I've heard mixed reviews of the new Finder. Personally I think its a nice improvement. I like the left hand navigation and especially how that carries through to applications. Much more convenient than a favorites menu for me. I used PathFinder in Jaguar, but the new Finder is good enough that I don't use PathFinder anymore.
The other utility that I use all the time that broke when I installed Panther was CopyPaste. CopyPaste kills the "c" key in Panther. There doesn't seem to be a new version of that yet.
Got any other "can't live without" OS X applications? Write a comment and share them with me.