These wireless tags know what’s in the box

Wireless is everywhere these days. Wireless networks surround us, our phones run on wireless technology and connecting devices with cables seems to be a thing of the past. One of the applications of wireless technology is making it easier for objects to be traced and tracked. Radio Frequency Identification (or RFID) tags are being used to track visitors in theme parks, for building access control and for the management of inventory at retailers. Executives from retailers and technology firms have gathered this week at the EPCglobal Conference in Baltimore to discuss the implementation of RFID technology. RFID chips are passive and consist of a circuit and micro-antenna, where information in the chip can be retrieved by a computer sending a radio signal across a large area. Walmart’s deadline for the implementation of RFID for its Top 100 suppliers is 1 January 2005. The world’s largest retailer hopes that, by using electronic pallet, crate and stock tracking, the company will have higher levels of efficiency and reduce theft. One of the more controversial uses for RFID is the European Central Bank’s proposal that RFID tags be embedded in its currency, the Euro.

sensor development

(From an article I posted on my website)

Intel, the global microprocessor giant, is driving research in a direction which, at first glance, looks like it has nothing to do with its core business. Through a lab funded by the company at Berkeley, Intel is concentrating on developing sensor networks, where motes (small, low-cost, low-power computers) monitor and relay data across a self-sustaining network. At least, that’s the idea. They’re pinning their hopes on this field, because they (and other companies) see this technology as not only different, but transformative. The motes run an ultra stripped-down operating system, TinyOS, which enables them to be programmed to ‘intelligently’ collect and relay information. The short-term solution is not to create ultra-small or ultra-cheap motes, however, the end goal sees scientists hoping for the development of smart dust: speck-sized wireless sensors which are intelligent enough to organize themselves into autonomous networks; the basic result being tiny, self-configuring, networked hardware that is everywhere.

LINKS:
How motes work
Intel's Exploratory Research: Deep Networking
Habitat Monitoring on Great Duck Island
Intel's Tiny Hope for the Future
US to put Intel motes on Mars

atom-smashing supercomputing

(From an article I posted on my website)

In early September, journalists from around Europe gathered in the UK to see the world’s fastest and largest network in action. The Large Hudson Collider (LHC) Computing Grid will be used to process data collected from subatomic experiments that will be conducted at CERN’s underground laboratory in Switzerland. Because of the nature of the experiments, the amount of data generated is going to be immense: 10 petabytes (over a million gigabytes) of useful data every year. As a solution to this data processing challenge, scientists adapted a form of distributed processing (similar to that used in SETI@home) and created a ‘grid computing’-based model for remote supercomputing. More than 6000 computers at 78 sites around the world will process results from the CERN experiments. By 2007, when experiments start, the ‘Grid’ will be the equivalent of 100000 of the fastest computers in the world today. Already, the scientists involved have set a new world record speed for the transfer of data: they sent a terabyte of data across 7000 kilometres in less than half an hour (at an average of 5.44 gigabits a second).

LINKS:
Part and particle of the super Grid
The God Particle and the Grid
LHC Computing Grid Goes Online
Grid Goes Live
Internet speed record set

the moblogging revolution

In 2003, when a large-scale blackout wiped out electricity in North America leaving 60-million people without power, Diego Salinas created a unique bit of history. Salinas managed to take a few photos with his camera phone and posted them to a website (about a dozen people contributed 65 more photos over the next 24 hours). Now, not only was Salinas’ website part of history, he also helped popularise ‘moblogs’ on the web. A combination of ‘mobile’ and ‘blog’, these websites allow anyone to post pictures taken with their mobile phones. Moblogs first developed in Japan, where mobile phones with cameras became popular in the late 1990s. The term itself though, was coined by Adam Greenfield in 2002. What made Salinas’ site part of history was the fact that it was one of the first moblogs that moved away from the idea of a personal diary to a moblog about events and ideas. It showed that audiences can engage in ‘peer-to-peer’ journalism where mobile devices can be used for instant publishing.

The best CMS in the world... ever

Wishlist of features in an Open Source CMS:
• Workflow: create, edit and publish
• Online editor (with bold, italics, links) for use in browsers
• Collaboration – allows a single story to be divided between different journalists (photographer, writer, etc).
• Content classes (image/story/etc)
• Assigning of tasks
• Archiving capability
• Dynamic sitemap
• Visitor statistics
• Built-in search functionality (plus statistics)
• Design templates (including Cascading Style Sheets)
• Contents separate from design (allows contents to be extracted and used elsewhere)
• Easy-to-use admin interface (with levels of customization)
• E-commerce functionality
• Import/export classes (e.g. xml)
• Basic image handling (resizing, file type conversions, etc)
• Menu Management
• PDF generation of content on demand
• Trash can (deleted content can be restored)

Two examples, I’ve experimented with and looked at:
JetBox
eZ Publish

The biggest wiki of them all

Wikipedia, the web-based encyclopedia, is probably the most well-known wiki in existence today. Wikis are websites that allow any user to add content (much like web-based forums), but additionally allow the content that has been added to be edited by any other user. Wiki’s are based on three main principles: ease of use (users can post without knowing html), wide-open read/write access and their emergent structure (the navigation structures that users invent). This means that all the content on wikipedia.org has been created/updated by users and is legally free (published under the ‘copyleft’ GNU Free Documentation License). Because of the fact that any of Wikipedia’s users can add/edit content, no article can ever be finished. One of the key problems with Wikipedia, according to users, is the difference in the quality of the entries. The success of Wikipedia, however, is demonstrated by the recent announcement that they now host over a million articles.

Practising what he preaches

Technology columnist Dan Gillmor’s new book “We the Media, Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People” has just been released and is one of a handful of new works published under the new Creative Commons 2.0 licence.
This licence is a new form of the previous 1.0 version first created back in 2002. The licence (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0) allows anyone to “copy, distribute, perform, and make derivatives of the work” according to creativecommons.org.
The licence also allows anyone to download the book for free from the publisher, O’Reilly’s website. In an interview with Creative Commons’ Glenn Otis Brown last month, Gillmor said that this unique form of licensing “was an opportunity to live up to the things I've been preaching.
“Creative Commons is offering one of the only alternatives to the stifling and, I believe, dangerous ways of the copyright cartel that is trying to lock everything down.”
Because of this license, Gillmor is looking forward to what people do with the book, like inserting hyperlinks and creating audio versions of the chapters.

new media intensive

it starts.