Nokia unveils shape changing nano-phone concept

Nokia unveils shape changing nano-phone concept

telecoms.con, Feb. 25, 2008

Nokia has unveiled "Morph," a shape-changing mobile devices

concept based on nanotechnology. The concept demonstrates how future mobile devices might be stretchable and flexible, allowing the user to transform the gadget into radically different shapes and functions.

KurzweilAI.net

End to a Big Weekend

Anna had a pretty big weekend... It started with her 6th birthday party and we had about 15 people over for the party. Her big sister made it to town the same day so she got to celebrate with both of her older sisters too. Then the next day we went to lunch with her sisters, then went to the mall to have her ears pierced. She sat in that chair all excited and braved it quite well, even thought the left ear didn't go all that smoothly. Then to top off the weekend... She had been playing with a loose tooth all weekend but with some help from mom at bath time it finally came out. So, the tooth fairy will be making a visit tonight.

View it at YouTube

View it at YouTube

View it at YouTube

Wireshark

I've been having some issues with Voice Over IP (VOIP) at work.  We went with a proprietary system since we have an existing analog Nortel phones and PBX system we wanted to keep a bit longer.  So, our phone guy suggested MCK / Citel model PBX Gateway II and Extender 7000 devices which interface with the analog system and convert the voice to IP Packets using standard compression codecs.  The system requires QoS (Quality of Service) to be implemented (as I'm sure any VOIP system would) to perform properly.  Our phone guy suggested a Q1300 QoS box by Kentrox to manage the traffic.

I've been through a few reconfigurations with this hardware and some changes in ISP's along the way.  However I've never really gotten the system to work satisfactorily to date.  Several discussions with the support from both Citel and Kentrox, both of which have been very helpful every time I've called.  Currently we have a dedicated 5MB fiber EtherMAN between offices.  So, I've put the extender's IP on the same LAN as the main office and the rest of the remote office is behind a firewall device that I have set to limit the Egress and Ingress bandwidth to 3Mbps and tag it as BE.  I have the rest of the main office behind a firewall that also limits the bandwidth to 3Mbps and tags it as BE too.  The QoS box limits all traffic that isn't coming from or bound for either the Extender of the Gateway to 3Mbps as well.  All traffic between those two devices is tagged as high priority and put in the high priority queue.  All other traffic is tagged as BE (Best Effort) witch is lowest or next to lowest priority and put into the associated queue.  I've statically fixed all the ports to a fixed rate to eliminate any issues with auto detection.

With all that the sound quality is good, while the connection stays up.  The problem I'm trying to solve now is the Extender will loose connection suddenly 3-4 times a day, dropping all active calls.  There are no detected errors on the Ethernet line it's self, and no errors that I can see with the packets between the Extender and the QoS.  However I do see some transmission errors between the QoS and the Gateway device.

This brings me to the title of this post.  I have a laptop setup with Wireshark, previously known as ethereal.  To sniff all traffic for analysis.  I can't seem to find a hub though, which I would need to see all the traffic.  So, I'm looking for a simple hub, but I might need to buy a managed switch so I can tell it to mirror the traffic from other designated ports to a monitoring port where I can have the laptop plugged in.  Not the least expensive way to go.  I've done some test captures on our LAN, using the latter method, just to see how the analysis would go.

Field Trip!

Today  I stayed home from work to go along with Anna's class on a field trip.  Overall it was a pretty good trip.  The school rarely has access to school busses for field trips so it's a big deal when they do.  It's been two years since they were able to take the kids on this annual field trip.  We went to Hiram Johnson for a play put on by the Sacramento Junior League.  It's intended for the grade school kids and it's intended to help increase kids interest in reading.  The play is called The Tail Spinner.

Snow Day

While we didn't make it up to the snow last year, today we drove up to Nyack in Blue Canyon.  Across from a snow park where we would have to pay, we found a nice open area with a view of the mountains and few people to contend with.  This was the same place we took Anna to 2 years ago for her first trip to the snow with the church youth.  Anna had a lot of fun and we met several other families who also found this free "snow park".  Here is a video of Anna and me sledding down the hill.

View it at YouTube

Here is one of Julie and Anna making snow angels

View it at YouTube

When I move closer to see the results the camera shakes a bit when one of my legs sinks into a hole.

Almost lost a tree

We had a  bigger than usual storm with lots of rain and wind.  While the surrounding area did suffer some damage with fallen trees and limbs crushing a few cars we came out of it relatively unscathed.  The only near casualty was a small tree in our back yard that was blown over.  It fell against the deck so it didn't come completely out of the ground.  So, I put in some big stakes and used two small come-a-long style synchs to  pull the tree back into place.  Hopefully it recovers.

Lots of people were without power for several days but we only had a minor 5min outage the first morning.  My office was half down for 3 days though.

On The Road Again...

We spent some time in the car over the Christmas vacation week.  We picked-up Nana from her home in Watsonville, stayed the night there and brought her back to Sacramento the next day, to spend the week with us.  Unfortunately we saw many accidents amongst the holiday traffic along the way.

We had more family over for early Christmas gift opening, then later Christmas dinner and gift opening for the rest of the family.

The next day while the big girls went shopping I took Anna to breakfast at a restaurant of her choosing.  Then we went to feed the ducks at the park and played on the massive playground equipment / maze.  Squeezed in some quick tech support at the church for some networking problems.  Hit Starbucks on the way home and played educational games on the computer until the shoppers returned home.

Then we repeated the trip to Watsonville to return Nana home and stayed the night again before coming back home the next day.

In between this I ended up working while on vacation for about 16 - 18 hours.  Of course these were the late night early morning hours so I lost some sleep too.  Luckily for all but 6 of those hours I could remote into the office to work. Sitting on the couch with my laptop.

Better flight stats results

 

Posted by Nick Weininger, Software Engineer

The holiday season is upon us, and we know that many amongst you are traveling to be with family and friends. To make sure you spend more time celebrating and less time waiting at the airport, we're introducing a new flight status feature that we hope will make your travels easier.
For the latest information on a flight's status, simply search for an airline and flight number, and the first result will tell you whether your flight is on time or delayed as well as the estimated departure and arrival times. Here's a quick example for a specific American Airlines flight:

Hopefully this makes your travels a little smoother. Happy holidays from the Google Search team.

P.S. We're still working on building a search feature that will find your lost luggage ;-)

Better flight stats results
Karen
Tue, 18 Dec 2007 20:48:00 GMT

Below Freezing

This doesn't happen very often here in Sacramento...

This morning I got up early to go for a run before work.  This time I skipped my usual routine of checking the temp & weather online, because I already knew it was going to be cold.  So, I just put on the cold weather running clothes and headed out the door expecting to get my usual 3 miles in.  Everything had a heavy coating of frost and it was pretty cold.  I headed down the street, but as I rounded the first corner heading for the 1/4 mile I was already thinking it was too cold to be out.  By the time I crossed the 1/2 mile I turned around and sprinted back home.  When I checked the official temperature it was 29-30 degrees out!  If the sun was out that probably wouldn't feel as cold, but in the early morning before sunrise it was cold!

More of Anna playing in the Surf

Watch at YouTube