The Perfect Eye

Well, just for fun we followed Autumn along as she entered and competed in the Synopsys Science and Technology Championship with her project The Perfect Eye and created a little video on the science fair experience and at Great America for the ceremonies.

Since the project had the interest of some people in the San Jose Astronomy Association, a little notice on a local astronomy list mentioned the vid – and then the traffic started. Within one minute of posting, people were clicking and watching – thousands of views in less than a week, many repeat complete views. I had to allocate more bandwidth.

I guess everyone loves a science fair.

Massive Video Production (MVP), Berkeley physics, and all that

Wow, after a year of work with my old department at Cal doing a case study of technical issues in massive video production (MVP) for physics alumni outreach, lots of late nights, and crossing my fingers, it all paid off. I got an acceptance to the ACM SIGCHI Advances in Computer Entertainment Conference (ACE2004) to present the results of our work in Singapore in June.

I’ve never been to Singapore before, so I’m really excited. As CTO of ExecProducer, I’m proud of what we achieved over the last year technically. As a Berkeley physics alumna, I’m proud to have done a project with my department. And as a writer, I’m absolutely thrilled that they liked it.

Robotics and the Next Generation

Went to the 2004 First Robotics Regional Competition in Silicon Valley, held at San Jose State University. And it was awesome to see all these kids running their “bots” through the paces. Got some great footage, even though Los Gatos High School’s robot broke midway through competition.

Seeing the excitement, the fun, and the high-tech hijinks reminded me of the days when we were putting together workstations on-the-fly in a Berkeley workstation spin-out called Symmetric Computer Systems. I haven’t seen this kind of serious fun for a long time in the computer biz.

Maybe we should all be building bots…

Interplanetary TCP

Google put out a lunar job listing, for the person who really needs to get away from people.

So I went and asked Vint Cerf “Perhaps this is the first real use of interplanetary TCP?”. He laughed. I think you will too.

OK, I like Google. Always have I suppose, because it’s minimalist. And I like the logo – it’s kind of simple and childish, but it’s very Stanford. Yes, I know, I went to Berkeley, but my dad and brothers went to Stanford, so even if there’s a rivalry, it’s a friendly one. Besides, usually Berkeley gets the axe to grind – I’ll take a bear over a tree anyday.

Welcome to “In the DataCenter” – Topical Internet TV Tech Commentary

Well, a miracle finally occurred – Sun and Microsoft announced today that they were going to kiss and tell. The long-running antitrust lawsuit and bad blood is now at an end. In fact, they are eager to spread their prosperous love!

All the world loves a lover, and no one should miss such a wonderful opportunity. So in the spirit of spreading more good news, I’d like to invite people to tune into a topical Internet TV in-depth technology commentary program we’ve been working on at TeleMuse Networks called In the DataCenter, where we will find out that Making Up isn’t Hard to Do.

In partnership with ExecProducer, a stealth company working on very cool realtime video projects, In the DataCenter uses state-of-the-art video, server, and Internet technologies to instantly create rich media for wired and wireless networks.

Why am I doing this stuff, when I already write for the “dead tree” press? Well, it’s hard to instantly respond to a news announcement like the one today from Microsoft and Sun and place it in a magazine with a 3 month cycle. Yet it’s at exactly these times when expert commentary is most desired. So instead of reading it, we “webvid” it.

So I’m pleased to announce our first public In the DataCenter written, shot, produced and sent to my newsletter groupies the same day the announcement was made. And no, I didn’t know about it ahead of time. I hope you enjoy it as much as my subscription audience did.