Dr. Chuck's Web Log

BUG in United Airlines Easy Check In - Leap Year!

Today (2/29) checked into United Airlines online and zoomed off to the airport. As I walked up to security and the guy said that my boarding pass was for March 1 not February 29. Yikes!

People who know me know that this is a very likely occurance - screwing up my own reservations and getting the wrong day. Sometime I will have to tell you about the worst travel screw-ups.

I went to the counter and she quickly reissued my pass for today (2/29) and apologized. Whew! A programmer bug - kind of neat.

By the way if you look at the URL of the image, my cell phone camera has no such problems.

Lansing Airport Business Center

This rocks. Free wireless Arialink sponsored by Smart Office Systems (SOS) - no entry fee.

This absolutely rocks. I will start flying out of Lansing more often and start coming to the airport really early rather than waiting until the last minute.

This is very cool.

Movie Review: Miracle

I went to the Miracle movie about the 1980 Olympic hockey team starring Kurt Russell. I am of course a hockey player and hockey fan so I should have liked the movie. I lies Mighty Ducks, Slap Shot, and even Mighty Ducks II. But something about Miracle kept me from engaging.

First the good stuff. Kurt Russell is superb in the role of Herb Brooks - clearly an actor who has absolutely polished his craft. The acting was good in the supporting roles as well. it was nicely shot for the most part.

There were three things that bugged me: (1) There was just oo much Kurt Russell - it was as if this were a vehicle for him to scowl a lot - it got tiring just watching him do the scowl thing one more time. (2) There was not enough footage of the time period between the selection of the team and the Olympics - I can imagine that there could have an a number of ways that we could have watched the team growing closer and more confident. (3) The hockey sequences were pretty badly choreographed - they felt repetitive and not at all engaging.

On my scale, it gets a 3 out of 5 - worth a rental at the $2.50 level as sson as it hits the video stores.

Chuck's Rating System: 1 - Worthless, 2 - Worth a $1 rental on the budget shelves, 3 - Worth a one night $2.50 rental, 4 - Worth seeing in a movie theater once, 5 - worth going to at least 2 times in the theater. Unlike most rating system - this tells you what to do with the rating.

Scotland - Here I am

I will add a picture once I have a faster connection.

I made it to Scottland - slept overnight on planes twice once SFO->DTW and once DTW->EDI - a shower and bed looks really nice after that.

tMobile rocks here - I am using the wireless internet (internet2.voicestream.com - my US configuration works perfectly in Einburgh). I have not yet made phone calls but sent a lot of Picture SMS - just fine - take a look at for the pictures.

A330 Has Problems When Too Many People Press Keys at the Same time

Well I got to fly the A330 again - wonderful. But it has a problem where too many people are trying to press their keys at the same time and the response gets really slow.

My guess is that there is a slow network that keystrokes are sent across. In a steady state there are probably only 10-20 keys per second. But when the whole plane is trying to fire up their screens unsuccessfully and pounding on the keys - it probably gets to 200-300 keypresses per second - the whole thing slows down - the keystrokes seem to queue so perhaps TCP/IP is involved.

This is interesting because game usage creates a LOT of keypresses. This may limit the number of games which work effectively on the A330 - a whole plant full of kids doing FPS will be very unsatisfactory...

I talked to a friend David Tomanek and he said that he was on a A330 flight when they first came out and they had some technical problem and the Linux logo came up on the screens - pretty cool.

Close Call

I had to rush a bit in my trip from Urbana Champaign to Detroit Metro Airport today. Originally, I had planned to leave at 10:00 (Eastern) to make my flight at 7:22 (Eastern) in Detroit about 360 miles away. I figured six hours on the road making cell-phone meetings plus lunch on the road, followed by an hour in the Worldclub catching up on E-Mail would be a good way to spend the day and get to Washington, DC in the evening.

Well, lots of little discussions started up and when I realized what time it was, it was 12:40 Eastern and I had not left yet. Yikes! There goes lunch and the Worldclub. I had to hightail it - I made good time until I hit Chicago where at the junction between I-80 and I-294 the traffic Stopped for about 40 minutes. There was an accident at the junction of I-294/I-94 and I-80/90 (this is pretty much the most congested intersection on the planet). I was frustrated watching all of the spare time I had slipping away while I was not moving.

Once I was moving again I had to step up the pace a bit. I will let the reader do the math, but I finally arrived after parking, taking the shuttle, being first in line at security(Tuesday is a slow night) - I arrived at Gate A65 at exactly 7:10PM.

I had to go to the bathroom since about 4PM, but figured that I could not afford the time to stop. I was right.

Whew!

Report from Illinois

Well the long trip has begun. The first stop is at UIUC to kick off Integration Week for the NEESpop version 2.2 - We worked on lots of little things - did some design reviews of upcoming software and generally kicked the tires on the stuff in 2.2.

One of these pictures in MINI-Most and the other is a design document of how to build a new DAQ-control capability into CHEF as part of the experiment browser as well as how to store data from the DAQ into the repository in the most natural way and using Data Turbine as the transport for the live and/or stored data. It is a lot of software, but we are finally starting to come up with tools that both work technically and fit the user's needs and work-style requirements. There is a LOT of work left to do but the hardest part is understanding what to do - this picture may look simple but it took a lot of work between the IT folks and engineers on the project and experience with our earlier versions of the NEESpop to get us to the point where the way forward is clear. There are a lot of people who get credit for getting us to this point: Kincho, Jim, Jun, Ken, Tim, Drew, Chen, Jerry, Paul, ...

Today I have to leave and go off to Washington DC tomorrow for the NSF PI Meeting for the NMI Portals project. That should be fun - for the first time, I will see the rest of the NMI PIs and get a sense of how we can best fit in.

Hockey

I play Hockey on Sunday nights and tonight the game is at 10:55 PM. Way too late - any I have to drive down to UIUC after the game.

Making my 10.3 Mac print on windows

I had printing working on 10.2 through windows to a LaserJet 4 with Postscript.

But (like many things) it broke on 10.3. 10.3 should work better becuase I did not have to remember weird strings like

smb://teresa:fred@severance/compaq/hplaserj

However when I would type the ID/PW it would hang forever.

Then I checked my notes and made the following change to my file /etc/smb.conf file - I added a line as follows in the [global section]

name resolve order = bcast lmhost host

Perhaps the lmhost and bcast should be flipped - but I figured what-the heck. The I rebooted and all is good.

Why does Apple not even test the simplest things before they ship software. No mortal human wants to ever read the smb.conf file. I whould send them a bill for two hours wasted. Perhaps I could get half of my $129 back or something..

Dr. Chuck Goes Racing

Two years ago, I went to the local stock car track and participated in spectator drags. My Good buddy Richard Wiggins came along to tape it for me so I could have A Stock Car Racing Video Memory.

My brother Scott, his son John, and my son Brent also watched the spectacle - they all appear in the video as well. The crazy thing is that I borrowed Scott's car (all in great secret) and had to promise to give him my car if I smashed his car up. It all worked out with a happy ending - nobody got hurt.

New Home Computer Likes Video

Well my new home computer is all built up with begged, borrowed, and stolen parts.

Athlon 900 + MOBO From My Brother Chris (free)
768MB RAM Scavenged from other computers
40GB boot + 50GB (4-way Raid) Disk
120GB scratch internal + 120GB scratch firewire
Nifty front panel card reader for all types of media +USB + Firewire

She runs like a top. I might spring for the $40 to buy a 1500 Athlon processor.

This is a video editing dream. I am now going to digitize the 50-60 hours of MINI-DV footage that I have in my spare time.

As a test, I digitized a few things:

• Me driving my car in a race at a local track with camera work by Rich (2002)
  
• An On-the-Road Segment at Supercomputing (1998)
  
• My Interview with Richard Stallman (1999)
  
• My segment from Disney World. (1999)
  

The craziest trip I have ever went on.

Starting next week I will go on the craziest series of travel that I have ever gone on. I hope to be able to blog away the whole time and take lots-o-pictures as I go in my images site.

It will allow me to test the International use of my new T-Mobile phone and test its data capabilities at lots-o-airports.

He is the itenerary:

2/16-17 Champaign Illinois working on NEESgrid
2/18 Washington DC at NSF for the NMI project
2/19 2/20 Stanford for the Sakai Project
2/21-2 Travel to Edinburgh, Scottland
2/23 Speak in Scottland at a workshop (click here)
2/24 Meeting at Cambridge for Sakai
2/25 Travel back to Detroit
2/26-7 Visit Indiana for the Skai and NMI projects - for tool work
2/28 Home in Holt, MI
2/29 Travel to Boston
3/1 Visit MIT for Sakai
3/2-3 Travel to Berlin for NMI - Meeti with GridSphere development team
3/4 Travel from Berlin to Brimingham, UK
3/5 Speak at workshop in Birmingham, UK (click here)
3/6 Sleep a whole day :)
3/7 Travel back to the Detroit
3/8-9 Home in Holt, MI
3/9 Travel from DTW to Troy, NY
3/11-12 NEES Awardees meeting at RPI

Whew!

Sakai Project Moving Out Into the Open

Well, the Sakai project is moving out into the open a little bit. It has been a pretty small group effort up until now. But this week and next week we are going to ramp up our interaction between IU, Stanford, MIT and UM - new tool development will start.

The new site is up at www.sakaiproject.org so the the next few months I will be quite busy with all of that stuff. Todat and tomorrow we hd a UM pre-workshop which is a lead in to the Stanford workshop next week.

Off we go...

The Big Apple

I am in New York City at visiting folks from the Mellon Foundation It is a great meeting and I am learning a bunch about Digital Libraries and work that other folks are doing.

I love New York in the winter with the smell of Chestnuts cooking wafting through the air. Or at least I think that it is Chestnuts..

Web Services as the Solution to All Problems

Recently I have been in some debates about how much web-services should be applied to any one problem. This is what comes to my mind after those discussions - services means a lot of things and the argument is when we use service to mean any of them. I will talk about the layers from top to bottom.

- At the top there are services which are little more than "convenience classes" - in a way these are not really "services" because they are really more part of the tools and applications than they "stand-alone-islands: of functionality. The APIs at this level need to be expressed in the language of the application and perhaps someday when we have implicit WDSL in a framework which supports it well - these can become "RPC-ized" over web services using implicit mechanisms. Given the nature of these APIs, it is not likely that a web-services implementation of this API will perform well unless the clients and servers are "close and fast" and perhaps even using the same framework so that serialization can be binary rather than XML. .NET shows the potential of this approach but is only successful because the framework helps a *lot*. There is no such framework in the non-.NET world yet.

- Then there are services which can be though of as "integration points" where some pluggable capability is to be inserted - these services can be expressed in a native language (i.e. JAVA) APIs - but at the same time, effort should be made so that these can work well under the 10ms rule. They may be implemented using local, native approaches but lets make sure not to preclude a web-serivces implementation. I.e. Solve the web services performance issues even before the web-services implementation exists. An interesting approach would be to put a 10ms sleep in every call on a native implementation of the API to simulate the pain.

- Then there are services which are a "collection point" for functionality which is published to the world. GPIR is an example of this, a campus-wide LDAP is similar, A campus-wide single signon is yet another. These are intended for extremely broad reuse across many languages - and they are so valuable that the effort to make web services implementations *right now* is worth it even with shifting technologies in the web services world and lame performance in the JAVA world. These implementations and their clients may be forced through 2-3 major rewites as the open source web services effort gets its act together - but that is worth it for these services.

- A variant of the last layer is the "read-only" collection point. These should be web services now - period. Basic SOAP support in a non-access controlled environment is pretty solid in a lot of languages and is already in heavy use. It is a no-brainer with a big win. Simple host/SSL certificate based stuff is also "sort-of" OK - it does not scale, is ad hoc, but tolerable.

- A disfunctional variant of the last version is the read-write web-services using ad hoc identity transfer all hidden by a firewall. When this approach is used, organizations can crow about their delightful commitment to web services and the fact that they use it heavily. For example Northwest airlines probably uses a lot of web services internally behind the firewall. But this is not proof that secure-identity web services works in the general case connected to the Internet - but it sure fires up the all-web-services-all-the-time evangelists.

I fear that at times the Web-Servces zealotry is fired by high-level executives who read airline magazines as their primary source of technical vision. I am a zealot in moving in that direction but I know far-too-well how hard it is to do without turning your project into a framework-building project.

If a company has the energy to invent their own .NET like framework and then program to is - then by all means - go do it. But dont jump on me and the projects that I am involved in encouraging us to solve these (very very hard) problems *before* we get to start line 1 of our own source code.

New PHP Hacking

Of course I had to play with my new v300 from t_Mobile. I had to play with the camera. They are having bugs - sending messages fails quite often. But I have done this - I have a mailbox that gets the messages - then I have a PHP that uses pop to load the messages, pull the JPGs out and post them to my dr-chuck.com site. Tres cool.

Check out www.dr-chuck.com/images - If you view source, you will see if it retrieved any images whie you waited - it retrieves up to 10 images each time someone goes to the site.

Later I will make this work so that as part of any BLOG post it will suck down all the messages.

But too bad that the messages seem so unreliable. Hopefully this is only a bug the TMobile will fix. And I cannot figure out where "My Album" is in the world of T-Mobile - from its name and how it works, I would guess that it is supposed to be a site that I can access in t-mobile space - but I cannot figure it out at all.

Some time I will clean up the code and post it. I learned PHP tonight :) Quite a fun little language - reminds me of a kindler, gentler time when C was the language of choice.

Update: The My Album is something that is part of My-Tmobile - if it ever works - it will be cool - but for now it is a bit bucket.

Welcome to T-Mobile

I now am a T-Mobile cell phone subscriber and I have it working with the high speed (56kbps) data on my cell new V300. It was a pretty smooth operation. Here are the important references:

http://www.taniwha.org.uk/

http://www.xochi.com/aircard/

The Robb Barkman page is the most important. Use the GPRS scripts.

I used the Motorola GPRS VID1 57k profile used the internet2.voicstream.com phone number, turned off PPP Echo Packets and turned on TCP header compression under PPP options.

I earlier tried to make a sierra card work and failed - the driver (both free and pay) was botched so I took it back.

Right now I am in San Diego and really getting 56Kbps. Tres cool.