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!

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.

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.

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..

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.

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.

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