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)

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!

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…

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..

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.

Continue reading →

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.

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.