Mini-ITX ESXi Server
—

http://www.orbitmicro.com/global/ms-9820-010-p-8895.html?ref=base
MSI IM-Q35 Mini-ITX LGA 775 Motherbaord
$235

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136319
WD 640GB 7200RPM SATA HD
(2x) $74.99

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827129045
Pioneer DVR-218LBK CD/DVD Burner SATA
$27.99

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134864
Kingston Value-RAM 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR2 800 Kit
$310

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115131
Core 2 Quad Q9400 2.66GHz LGA 775 CPU
$189.99

http://www.mitxpc.com/proddetail.asp?prod=6600
Morex 6600 Mini-ITX Storage Enclosure w/250W
$69.95

http://www.provantage.com/intel-e1g44etblk~7ITEN0EK.htm
Intel Gb Eth Quad-Server 4 PCI-E NIC
$387.27

http://www.logicsupply.com/products/pelx16_c11
PCI-Express x16 Flexible Riser Card
$39.00

Total Cost: ~ $1410

Curious to see what people think of this. Am I crazy? Let me know.

A zero-defect-generation mission statement raises a flag over a leading-edge team player. The leadership positions get up to speed on communication. Venture capital signs off on a best-of-breed B2B flatulence solution. We’re making forward progress towards the six-sigma guesstimates by implementing the teamwork that is emerging.

We are pleased to announce that enterprise writeoffs have synergies. Our vice president has even said that “closure is going to get your input on a leadership position.” Extensible critical paths have a geography. Quality-oriented feedback swiftly has tangents. Having each of you that is fiscal, it follows that gating factors interface with a productized executive advisory board. Each of you utilizes operating capital.

Design-driven major players

The quality-assured tangent gets up to speed on a goal. Truly we must. We feel that the writeoff will enable a horizontal market. We must put enabling dialogue in place so that extensible revenues engender standard geographies. Mind-blowing contexts evolve into the soup-to-nuts staffing. In order to obtain the time frames, we took a close look at the proactive big picture to understand what it means. The customer—which is task-oriented—is going to have to be compliant because a task-driven big win is customer partnerships. A solution establishes an action item for a lightweight environment. Surely, we can conclude that bleeding-edge strategy indicates that progress attacks the problem of headcount readjustment.

Contact: Nathan Tyler
Google Inc.
+1 650-623-4311
nate@google.com

What: Texas Holdem Poker, $25 buyin, with $20 rebuys allowed

Where: 10402 Daines Dr., Temple City, CA 91780 at the END of the long driveway

For everyone who is going to ask

Google Maps URL: http://is.gd/9Vug

When: TODAY, this Friday at 7:30PM

Why: Because its fun!

What to bring: Your poker face, your money, BYOB since I dont know what you all like to drink.

If you got questions, or get lost, call me on my cell at 562-331-1603 or DM me on Twitter @docwho76. Hope to see some of you there!

In his talk, Hawkins went over problems that Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers have struggled with, and through trials and tribulations, had grudgingly concluded were if not impossible to solve, extremely difficult at best. One of the problem domains Hawkins examined was visual processing. For example, if you were presented with a series of photos of dogs and cats and asked to classify the animal in each photo, you could do it easily, but a computer using traditional AI techniques would fail miserably.

Hawkins then took a quick tangent through the neural mapping of how monkeys see as a way to introduce the audience to the concept of hierarchical temporal memories. Think of a Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) as a pyramid; at the lowest level you have the greatest number of neurons processing visual input in a very basic way and passing up the hierarchy a reduced set of information that encapsulates the input seen. The other key aspect of this system is the temporal aspect of input processing; we don’t just see what is happening in the present—we have a memory of what things looked like in the recent past as well, which helps us process the massive amount of visual data coming in every second. This process happens at each level: at each step the amount of information and speed of its flow is reduced. Crucially, information can pass bi-directionally between different levels of the hierarchy. It is this bidirectional communication that allows you to see a photo of a cat, recognize the shape, color, and other aspects passing them along to your brain, which then processes this information and recognize the photo as a cat.

Now, why is all of this important? With this enhanced understanding of how information is actually processed it’s possible to try and build an electronic model of an HTM. This is where Hawkins’ company, Numenta, comes into play, creating an electronic HTM development platform for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms called the Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing or NuPIC. (You can download it here.) NuPIC has its own language and syntax, affording developers near-limitless flexibility to build HTM based applications. To help users new to this development platform see what is possible, Numenta has created a demonstration HTM application called Pictures. This HTM application takes in as input a set of photos scanned in at multiple angles and then builds up an ability to start recognizing these photos, even when the images are obscured with noise.

In Hawkins’ talk, he showed recognition results for the Pictures HTM application under different kinds of visual impairment (i.e., static noise, dynamic noise, etc) that were surprisingly good. As the amount of visual noise became denser and more complex the HTM’s accuracy did decline, but was still significantly useful. According to Hawkins, based on Numenta’s experience with creating and enhancing the Picture’s HTM application he predicts that the computer vision problem of asking a computer to ask if a picture is of a dog or a cat could be solved within the next two years. Hawkins also showed examples of photos the Pictures HTM recognized as certain types of objects, like cars or boats when the application had been trained with photos of those objects and then given a set of random photos to try and determine what they are. This demonstration of the power of HTMs is but scratching the surface of what is possible.

Hawkins is keen to caution that HTMs are not a cure-all solution to all kinds of AI/computer learning domain problems. HTMs assume your problem domain can be expressed as a spatial-temporal hierarchy. This is a technology that will have far-ranging implications once it starts to get into the hands of the truly imaginative and creative developers out there. While Hawkins technology currently doesn’t have immediate implications within the security realm, it is easy to see how one might apply the technology to age-old problems within the industry. Natural applications for an HTM could be processing log data from IDS and firewall systems, better face recognition systems, ability to identify dangerous objects in photos or videos.

These are just a few of the applications that this writer can think up. There are likely far more out there that I haven’t thought of that could be just as important or better. Year after year we hear about new security products and services from the industry aimed at businesses and solving their security challenges, but the process has become an incremental one. This was evident at this year’s RSA show. What is needed is something revolutionary, not evolutionary, to help the industry. Perhaps HTMs will turn out to be something these security companies will add to their arsenal and turn into useful tools and solutions that we need.

(Originally posted at TechRevu)

Designers have had two basic options previously, a phone number style keypad with predictive text input or somehow shoehorn in a small keyboard for users to thumb with. With predictive text input systems a user can deal with short messages, but anything longer than an SMS-length message is usually out of the question. On the phones with a built-in thumb-style keyboard there are different consequences of this design choice, usually resulting in either smaller screen sizes or keyboards too small to be useful for long emails. Of course, when the iPhone was introduced the third option, a virtual keyboard was revealed to everyone. All of these approaches have their tradeoffs and some work better for people then others.
But is there a better way to get input for your Smartphone while on the go? The Eleksen Wireless Fabric Keyboard is a worthy choice for all power Smartphone users to consider. You probably haven’t heard of Eleksen, a UK-based company that specializes in touch-sensitive interactive fabrics for wearable consumer electronics garments. Its main technology is ElekTex, an electro-conductive fabric touchpad optimized for the creation of flexible, durable and rugged fabric touch screen interfaces. Eleksen took this technology and mated it to a small Bluetooth module to create a wireless keyboard out of fabric that could be rolled up and fit into your pocket.

The Eleksen keyboard has a QWERTY layout comparable to a full-size keyboard, minus the numeric keypad in a series of five rows of keys. The keys are also color-coded by modal use of the SHIFT key as well. Due to how Eleksen’s ElekTex technology works the keyboard doesn’t support multiple-key chording, which only slightly alters how one uses the unit. To enter a capital letter for example, one would tap the SHIFT key followed by the letter key in question instead of chording the SHIFT key with the letter simultaneously.
The keyboard itself takes some getting used to as tactile feedback from keys is non-existent, however a user’s Smartphone can play a beep for each registered keypress as part of the Eleksen Smartphone driver to provide some feedback to the user. Eleksen provides drivers for practically all Smartphone platforms including Windows Mobile 2003/5/6, Symbian S60 v2/v3, UIQ, PalmOS, Blackberry OS4.1+ as well as for Windows XP. Previous versions of the keyboard had issues with staying in place on smooth flat surfaces, but Eleksen has placed strips of non-slip surface on the back of the keyboard so it will stay in place and this works well. In extensive use of the keyboard the only real aspect of it that requires time and training to get use to is the response characteristics of the spacebar. If you are the kind of typist who is used to just nonchalantly tapping the spacebar while typing, you may find that you have to use a bit more force when hitting the spacebar on the Eleksen for the keypress to register.

While the Eleksen keyboard is not perfect, considering the advantages of the unit’s form-factor for both portability as well as ease of typing it greatly offsets its minor shortcomings making it a strong competitor in the mobile accessory space. This performance, combined with its average street price of $75 makes it a great value for the money and a recommended buy.

Think about that for a moment there. Live video to the web, with viewer feedback. Real-time.

Video taken from RSA 2008 keynote using Qik and Nokia N82, handheld

This is the kind of use for advanced technology that allows one to talk about enabling citizen journalism on a massive scale without getting laughed out of a room full of journalism majors, or worse, broadcasters. However, one point that established media types will bring up is the concept of GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out. People used to watching news on major broadcast networks have a very high expectation of quality when it comes the the finished video product. Conversely, people who go to video websites like YouTube have a much lower expectation of quality because they don’t see it as competing with television or other traditional broadcast networks.

What does this mean for something like Qik however? It means that if people are going to use this application for something more serious then the more trendy lifecasting applications there has to be a concerned effort to work at improving the quality of the video output to Qik both in content and in raw video quality also. Improving the content of Qik videos is something that is outside of the scope of this article, but improving the raw video quality from Qik is not.

The biggest problem with getting good video out of these phones comes from the fact that they are, in essence, phones. There are camcorders that take better video, cameras which shoot better quality pictures, in essence these phones are technological compromises albeit getting less compromised with each revision. One of the biggest complaints about video quality however arises from Jerky-Cam(tm) a.k.a hand-holding the phone and not holding it steady enough. This has a two-fold effect on the video due to compression being done on the video. First, the video becomes more and more garbled as the codec struggles to keep the output video within the boundaries of the bandwidth limits its settings. Secondly, this additional movement causes the codec to spend more bits encoding movement leaving less bits available for detail in the scene.

The easiest way to combat shaky-cam is to mount the camera onto a tripod, yet this introduces some issues that are unique to the mobile video world I suspect. Chief among these is portability, after all we are talking about taking a small phone and now having to lug around a tripod that is many times the size and weight of the phone itself. More important however is the fact that the phone manufactures havent seen fit to add a standard 1/4″ screw thread mount point to their cameraphones, making use on photographic or video tripods more problematic then it should be.

Partially extended Manfrotto 682B monopod

After looking around the market for solutions to this problem I had a brainstorm and came up with the following solution that I think is a good first step towards getting better video out of Qik and other video applications on the cameraphone in the future. Manfrotto is a well known and respected manufacturer of tripods, monopods, and other gear for photo and video professionals. As it turns out they make a self-standing monopod, the 682B, that lets you have a free-standing monopod. While this is not as stable a platform as a traditional tripod would be it is significantly lighter, smaller, and more portable then others. Using this as a platform for a Nokia N82 for use in Qik is a good compromise between size, weight, and stiffness. However, even using the monopod we still need a way to mount the cameraphone on. This is where the Nokia DT-22 universal tabletop tripod comes in. It comes with a screw-tight clamp that fits most all N series phones and easily detaches from the tabletop tripod and will screw onto a standard 1/4″ camera screw. If you wish to point the camera at various angles you will want to invest in an inexpensive ball mount for the monopod like the Manfrotto 484RC2 mini-ball head with quick-release plate mount.

View of N82 from the front of the Monopod

However, we still have some other issues to address that are more difficult to handle with a mobile phone device. These devices are not equipped with the kinds of designs or battery life that enable them to take video for long periods of time, say and hour or more. Most of these phones would be bricks within the inside of an hour of doing live streaming video to the Internet. Because of this we also need a portable power supply to help augment our phones internal battery. This is where the PPC Techs Lil’Sync USB battery power supply comes in. It’s a 4400mah rated Li-Ion battery and it charges via mini-USB and can charge one device via a regular USB port. Combine this with a Nokia CA-100 USB to DC charging cable for your N series Nokia phone and you now have a way to keep the battery lasting longer for video recording.

Velcro backing to hold Lil’Sync to Nokia DT-22 clamp

Now once you have assembled all these parts you may still have one important hurdle left to jump over if you live in the United States like I do, bandwidth. Unless you are using a Nokia N95-3 or N95-4 model designated for North American usage you will have imported a European GSM phone that has support for 3G networks only on European GSM frequencies and at best will only have access to an EDGE class network for streaming your video over. This means that any attempt to stream video, even if on lower quality settings and a 320×240 resolution in Qik will result in instant building delay between what users on Qik.com see verses what you are seeing in real-time with your phone. It also means getting user feedback will be greatly delayed or nonexistent as well. Short of having an N95 with support for North American 3G networks you will have to rely on WiFi networks for streaming. This works in fixed known locations, but not on the road in random places. For these situations there is a final part to this solution made by a company called Cradlepoint.

Cradlepoint makes EVDO to WiFi bridge routers, specifically the PHS300 or Personal Hotspot. The PHS300 has a built-in Li-Ion battery for 2-3 hours of use without having to be plugged into an outlet. Using an EVDO USB adapter or a EVDO ExpressCard/34 combined with an ExpressCard/34 to USB adapter along with a subscription to a subsequent EVDO unlimited data plan you can provide a WiFi signal to your Nokia with sufficent upstream bandwidth to support full real-time video streaming.

Nokia N82 with Lil’Sync and CA-100 USB Charge Cable

At this stage I have assembled all of the parts mentioned in here except for the Cradlepoint PHS300 which is my next step. I may have to machine a custom mounting plate to hold the PHS300 and the Lil’Sync onto the camera ball-head mount. I will report back once I have acquired the unit and looked into integrating it into the monopod.

Ultimately however, there are still some issues with the phone as a streaming video platform. Namely, when someone calls you! When using Qik, if you get an incoming phone call your video will stop streaming and you wont be able to restart your video stream until after you get off of the phone, unless you are using WiFi for your streaming connection from what I have seen. The Qik client itself is also undergoing frequent changes and the company and its main coders are rather open to suggestions and enhancements to the program which is great.

All of the information can be found on the Evite which is here:

Evite for Dan’s 32nd Birthday Party!

The important thing to remember is that it is THIS WEEK on SATURDAY. I have email addresses for a lot of you people, but not all of you so I have posted this on MySpace where a bunch of you are as well as on my main blog, Vox, LiveJournal, and Twitter.

Hope to see you all there!

You may also have noticed that the blog is now running WordPress 2.5 and this has caused its own set of headaches. Namely, dealing with broken plugins, semi-functional Wordpress themes and general digital decay and cruft. Most of the blog is working but you will see some parts are, shall we say, running at reduced capabilities.

On top of all of this I am also attempting to figure out where I am having my birthday party still. My real birthday was April 12th which has come and gone and I was unable to celebrate at the time due to working in San Francisco running a show for work. I had a place in mind to have a party this Saturday evening on the 26th, but that fell through. My other alternate in mind wont work either since I know the person will be out of town in the mountains for the weekend. This leaves me with two remaining options, one in Marina Del Rey but I’m not really sure how many people would be able to make it or want to drive all that way or try and figure out yet another possibility. In any case, if you’ve got any ideas I am all ears.

In any event, when you pickup your registration info and show badge you’re handed three things. A show planner, the addendums to the show program, and how to connect to the RSA WiFi network. The howto document for connecting to the wifi is larger then the show program addendum! So while in the press room I attempted to get online with RSA wifi network and discovered that I might as well have been trying to negotiate with the Packet Nazi (motto, “No packets for you!”). So why is this so damned hard? Lets outline the problems here:

1. Your RSA website name is different from your RSA WiFi name
2. Your RSA website password is NOT your RSA WiFi password
3. You must be running an OS that speaks WPA and PEAP. Support WEP only? Tough titties for you.
4. To get your RSA wifi password, you have to login with a RSA website password not given to you. So you must request it be sent to your email.
5. Your RSA website login is NOT your email address (seriously, wtf were you thinking guys?

So basically, you have to login to the RSA website with something other then your email address, with a password that is auto-generated for you. Except you dont remember the username you specified, so you have to get THAT emailed to you as well. Then, once you login to the RSA website you can get your WiFi password.

Armed with that password, you then use PEAP and 802.1x to login to the WiFi, EXCEPT your username here is now your email address you used to register your RSA badge with! Basically, I watched a few people in the press room struggle with this, myself included. And in one case, a person had a laptop that only supported WEP and they had to revert to a wired connection. Incidentally, the WiFi instructions document covered only Windows systems and only briefly mentions OS X in it anywhere and doesn’t give instructions for OS X. Where is my FAILboat?

Did I forget to mention that most of these steps you cant do unless you are connected to a network of some kind? Catch-22 galore, yay!

Moral of this story? RSA needs single-signon badly! I mean, why on earth do I need a separate username and password for the RSA website different from my RSA wifi credentials?

http://tinyurl.com/2hsxpl

It’s Apartment 204 in Building 6. Right now the Building 6 elevator is broken so you need to park closest to the Building 7 elevator and someone will let you in the door. To park take the small traffic circle and drive down the ramp to the bottom level parking structure. There will be a phone on the left, dial 262 for the apartment for someone to buzz you in. Park as close to the Green Building 7 elevator as possible. You might have to park a ways down the structure depending on how crowded it is.

It’s a pretty big apartment, lots of room. Booze and food will be there, but as usual if you want to bring some beer or food that is always welcome. There will likely be some kind of console gaming going on either Rock Band or Guitar Hero III or the like. The apartment also has a pretty huge outdoor deck as well for all the smokers.

Anyways, let me know if your going to make it or not. Hope you all have a great New Years!

What this means is that barring any bizzare unforeseen circumstances (i.e. I owe the uni money somehow, I turn out to be a figment of my own imagination, etc) I should be officially graduated from UC Irvine with my bachelors degree in Information and Computer Science.

So what does this mean for you, the non-existant reader who cares about this? Well since UCI only does commencement once a year it means I wont walk until June 2008 roughly, and tickets for commencement go on sale sometime in March I am told. It supposedly takes the university about seven weeks to process the paperwork to certify and print a degree at which point they either mail it to my permanent mailing address or notify me that its read to be picked up.

I already have a job as a consultant which I am now going to be working for full-time basically with benefits and other nice things which should help me out a lot with my stupid money troubles finally. The plan so far is to spend some time paying off my small remaining debt and taking car of a few things on the car I have had to put off and then getting a decent amount of cash saved up before moving out of the parents house.

Now as far as celebration of my graduation goes, frankly I have no idea when it will happen or what shape it is going to take. This is complicated by the fact that basically I am already working full-time and have some big projects in the works already for CES (which I am going to again to work) and some other stuff. I would like to have a party with all of you people that could/would want to do such a thing as soon as I can figure out a good time for it. Odds are sometime the weekend after CES or in Janurary sometime since everyone is going crazy with holiday events.

I saw the below photo while scanning through Digg while waiting for some software to finish compiling. I think it is pretty telling as to why it seems so many people these days who are watching the various news networks are not as well informed as they once were. In a nutshell we can blame the proliferation and boosting of importance of fluff/celebrity “news” pieces. Oh yeah, and commercials for making sure you dont die/your dick feels big enough for your ego/buy a SUV/etc.

Next up we have a high altitude photo taken from a NASA chase plane of the Space Shuttle Columbia taking off from Cape Canaveral

Here we have a graph of US national debt as a percentage of GDP. Notice the difference in spending patterns of the “new Republicans” verses the supposedly spend-fast Democrats. Just goes to show that sometimes parties change their mantras without people really realizing it. After all, GWB was supposed to be a small government Republican when he ran back in 2000. If we only could have had things gone differently.

I thought this piece of work was interesting because I have seen it used for both sides of debate on wether or not God exists. Atheists look at Nature and marvel at its complexity and beauty that it forms out of the natural laws that man has discovered and began to learn over the course of time. On the other hand, proponents of the existence of God look at something like this and point to it as proof that nature, reality and the whole of being must obviously be the work of a creator.

Ok, last but not least is this riotously hilarious photo from The Onion. I nearly choked on my drink when I saw this and simply had to share it with everyone. Don’t say I didn’t warn you earlier!

While I was at it I also updated all of my plugins and tinkered around abit with the backend scripts for the Redoable WP theme I am using in an attempt to get some annoying MySQL errors to stop when I am in the administrative interface with some luck. Apparently the  author of the theme is swamped with real work and uni studies so I can understand their predicament. In the meantime I might go check out the K2 theme people and see where they are these days. Last I looked it was at a point where you had to sync with nightly SVN updates which I thought was rather ridiculous a thing to have to do for a bloody WP theme to work reliably.

More updates to come.

Except, if you go to the DMV website and try to lookup your fees online you have to have a RIN number to enter in along with your license plate number for their system to show you your registration fee information. But I never got a renewal letter from the DMV, so I have no RIN. So no online help there.

Some perusal of the DMV site does net me a 800 number to call. I call it and am immediately in voice menu jail, however the system wasn’t designed by Kafka so after about two minutes I was able to navigate to the “Talk to carbon-based lifeforms” option. After waiting on hold for about another minute a decently nice guy comes on the phone to help me out. I explain I had gotten no renewal notice and that I know my registration is probably due ASAP. The man then tells me “Oh, well the computers here are confused because it shows the title for your car was transfered in 2005″

WHAT? THE? FUCK!?!?!?

I talk to the man some more and ask him “What is the name of the person it was transfered to?”. He tells me “I can’t give that to you, its a conflict of interest.” So I try a different tactic “Can you tell me exactly when the transfer supposedly happened?” He says Janurary 16th, 2005. “Wait a second, I got a license renewal notice for 2006! How come that one got mailed to me if the title was supposedly transfered to someone else?”

“Dont know” he says.

“If I come into the DMV office will they be able to tell me the name on the transfer?” I ask him.

“Yes”

“How come I never received any notification paperwork from the DMV at my permanent mailing address, which has never changed since I’ve had a license in CA?” Getting pretty fuming mad by this point wondering if this was some kind of aborted ID theft attempt or something.

“I don’t know sir, you’ll have to talk to someone at one of the field offices about that”

Gah….so now I know how much my registration will cost me (way too much thanks to 4 old parking tickets now totaling $572 dollars, thanks County of Los &*^&*^%# Angeles) and have to smog the BMW and go into the DMV office to find someone to talk to/yell at for this title nonsense. Le sigh.

Richard and Michelle’s Wedding Photos I took