Ohio IT Skills Blog

2006 Products Of The Year

Link: 2006 Products Of The Year - Web development, security, software, storage, server, imaging, hardware, notebook, operating system - CRN.

The end of the year is always fun to look backward and forward - a natural human instinct as former hunters and foragers.  In this case - what we are hunting and foraging is significantly different than the prey of our ancestors.  But the process serves a similar purpose - to check the lay of the land and our status in our landscape.  The products mentioned here are both the results of the past - and the harbingers of the future.  So the educational value of lists like this is as benchmark against our own expected experience - and an insight into what that landscape may look like in the near and mid-term future.

(-- originally posted by Rich Bowers, Coordinator, Ohio IT Clearinghouse)

Art & Technology Exhibit

ElectroPolyglot - the end-of-quarter exhibit of the work of students in the Art & Technology program of the Ohio State University - was held at its re-scheduled time on Friday, December 1.

This event was originally scheduled for the night before and was intended to be a joint event with the DorkbotColumbus group.  Just before the originally scheduled date, one of the graduate students in the program passed away.  Dept Chair Sergio Soave and Professor Ken Rinaldo made the difficult decision  to change the date of the exhibition and enable students to attend the out-of-town memorial service.  No question it was a time of sadness.

But when it opened to the public on Friday - there was a palpable energy - of exploration, fun, and learning.  We will hope to post some pictures and a short video soon - but bottom line - scheduling confusion aside - these students are pursuing the highest values in the social acceptance of technology - seeking out new connections, new approaches, new experiences.  Be sure to watch for the next such event at the end of the Winter quarter at OSU.  The schedule announcements - along with a variety of information including a Dorkbot blog are available ate the DorkbotColumbus Web site.

(-- originally posted by Rich Bowers, Coordinator, Ohio IT Clearinghouse)

Technology360: Coming Soon via Your TiVo: Internet Video on Television

Link: Technology360: Coming Soon via Your TiVo: Internet Video on Television.

TiVO has been a pioneer in tapping regular household appliances into the home network - and now they are taking advantage of that connection to bring a new family of content to your television:  Internet video.

It certainly could be argued that this is a very limited event.  Culturally, anyway.  But technically, this demonstrates the ever-increasing trend of connections and integration among communications and media tools.  Understanding enough about these advances to evaluate them for your own family's needs, and understanding any potential risk or advantage these new products offer - are just the latest in consumer burden relative to technology.

All that means is that everyone needs to catch up with the basics of the technology - how it works  at a practical level -  what risks and opportunities may be attached - how to be a smart buyer - and a good member of the growing community online.  Look for opportunities to learn more - not only about the latest and greatest new products but also about the principles and trends within which they operate.

(-- originally posted by Rich Bowers, Coordinator, Ohio IT Clearinghouse)

Podcast - The Platform Lab - Interview with Director Steve Gruetter

This podcast is available here:  Podcast: The Platform Lab

The Platform Lab is a unique resource created to give Ohio IT enterprises and departments a competitive advantage - providing access to space, tools and bandwidth for disaster recovery planning, product and process testing and other activities.  Coming up on its fifth anniversary, the Platform Lab continues to attract new clients and grow, along with the continuing adjustment to strategies coming from corporate and government planning for technology expansion in the state.

The interview with Director Steve Gruetter covers everything from the history of the place to the trends emerging in the uses of the facility - along with its expansion in other areas of the state.

More information about the Platform Lab can be obtained here -  More information about Tech Columbus and the Business Technology Center is available here.

(-- originally posted by Rich Bowers, Coordinator, Ohio IT Clearinghouse)

DorkbotColumbus - First meeting success!

Dorkbot is a loose international confederation of like-minded people who are fascinated by applications at the edge of technology, art and life. "People doing strange things with electricity."

Columbus has launched a central Ohio chapter, and the first meeting attracted nearly 100 attendees.  The primary presenter of the meeting was Ken Rinaldo, professor of Art & Technology at the Ohio State University, in the Department of Art, describing recent work completed during a sabbatical from OSU, and prior to that time. Ken's most recent work focuses on Autotelematic Spiderbots (click on the "Art" option on the left-most blossom that appears). (Picture credit: Ken Rinaldo, photo by Rich Bowers.)

These man-made "creatures" have sensors to detect their surroundings, built-in reactions to certain events in those surroundings, a need to feed (re-charge), and - collectively - demonstrate something of a meta-level of group-wise behavior.

It is incredibly sophisticated work - and also a great deal of fun.  Which matches the goals of the Columbus group: demonstrations of art, fun & technology. (Picture credit: The Autotelematic Spider Bots 2005 by Ken Rinaldo and Matt Howard. Photo John Marshall)

Notice of Ken's work was taken by the local newspaper as well, appearing on the day before the meeting.  The story covered (registration may be required) many of the basics of Ken's work, as well as some of the challenges of mounting international exhibitions of such sophisticated equipment.

A brief introduction to the Columbus effort by yours truly, highlighted the irony in the name "dorkbot."  Far from being a world of irrelevant, self-absorbed technologists - Dorkbots around the world demonstrate the leading edge of technology and the cusp between man-made machines and bio-mechanics.  Some of the presentations (in the past in other locations, and in Columbus' future) show how fun and the joy of discovery can have serious real-world impact. 

As long as we have the Ray Kurzweils of the world hammering on the approaching "singularity" between man and computer intelligence - we need to keep in mind the implications and the impact of the speculative and even practical applications that merger can have.  Dorkbot represents a balance between science - and science fiction.

Ken Rinaldo's work is on display - in the flesh, so to speak - at the Hopkins Gallery on the OSU campus, during limited hours, until only November 2.

The next meeting of Dorkbot Columbus will also take place on the OSU campus, at Haskett Hall November 30- and will consist of live demonstrations of projects created by Rinaldo's classes during the Fall quarter.  Imagine over 100 "strange things with electricity" all collected in a limited space - it should be quite a party!

If you would like to be included on the DorkbotColumbus email list for notification of upcoming events, simply write to dorkbotcolumbus @ dorkbot.org.  (Remove spaces to activate this email address.)  And - if you have a project - a job - a hobby - or know someone who does - that you would like to see presented at a future DorkbotColumbus meeting - please send it along to the same address.

BTW, Columbus is not alone in joining the Dorkbot brigade!  Dayton has a group - and Cleveland is in the process of getting its own group started as well!  If you live in an area here in Ohio bereft of Dorkbots, check the main Dorkbot site for start-up guidelines, or contact me.

(-- originally posted by Rich Bowers, Coordinator, Ohio IT Clearinghouse)

The Tooth about IT

{If you are getting this blog entry instead of an expected PODCAST, you need to come back to the blog and re-subscribe to the new feeds - there are now separate feeds for the blog and for the PODCAST.  Check the menu in the right column of this blog to accomplish this change! - RAB)

One of the issues that frequently emerges in discussions about the importance and the direction of IT is the unexpected places it turns up.  I had a recent experience  that illustrates that point in perfect clarity.

I was at my dentist's office to have a crown installed to repair a tooth that had broken.  I am, unfortunately, all too familiar with the procedure.  I have been there before, other crowns, other procedures.

So I'm expecting that the dentist and his assistant will take an impression of the problem tooth, and that will be used to send to the lab to create the crown - which is supposed to look like the tooth it is replacing.  In this case it is a bicuspid - so it has that peak-and-valley shape associated with such teeth.  Then the dentist will carve away most of the tooth, leaving behind a peg on which the new crown will be mounted.  This process takes about an hour, everything is shipped off to the lab and in about a week I'll come back in for another hour to have the crown installed.  My dentist is a little far away (he moved from a more convenient location, but I like the guy!), so we're talking about two trips, a total of perhaps 2 hours drive time, plus two hours in the chair.  Plus a fair amount of inconvenience and some risk with a temporary cover on the now-naked tooth area.  Sigh - oh well.

Wrong!  This time, everything went according to plan until we got to the part after shaping the mounting peg from  my tooth.  Then - he takes a hand-sized wand and starts positioning it like a camera in my mouth.  When he snaps a picture, that portion of my mouth came up on a display of a small unit wheeled into the area behind my chair.  The dentist then set about editing the picture of my tooth stub.  When he felt finished - with a satisfied sigh, he hit a button on the console. 

Then he gestured to me to follow him - we went to a little room right behind the cubicle where I had been sitting.  On a counter in this room was a box about the size of a typical laser-printer-scanner combination kind of machine.  He reached into a drawer and pulled out a little near-cube of white, ceramic-looking material - about the size of a standard CandyLand die.  He opened a little window in the box, and mounted the cube of material in a space between what looked like two dental drills, poised off to each side, facing each other. 

Then he hit a start button.

The machine start clicking and humming like an ink-jet printer often does, before it can actually start printing.  The two  drills visible in the little window, moved back and forth and all around - not unlike two martial arts fighters posture at each other before they initiate the actual combat.   Suddenly water started to spray inside the box and onto the cube, and the drills started carving away.  And exactly 10 minutes and 46 seconds later, my crown dropped into a little tray.  Just as if it had come from the lab - miles and days away - the crown was ready to install in my mouth.

The dentist did his thing - there were little adjustments and many fittings, in and out.  But after a few minutes, he called for the cement, and he glued the crown into place - after holding it steady for a few minutes - I was ready to go!

The visit took 30-40 minutes longer than the usual initial visit - but I didn't have to come back.  I saved travel time, chair time, and that miserable week in between when you hope the temporary doesn't fall off in your mouth. 

And how was that possible?  Because of dental CAD/CAM.  Combining photographic imaging, with a table-top manufacturing device, the dentist has eliminated a step - and a vendor - and provided an additional valuable service - at no additional cost - to his client!  All because of IT - and its application to a unique kind of problem.  But certainly a solution that this dentist did not anticipate having access to 10 years ago - even 5 years ago.

Turns out that the technology has been around for a while.

Sirona is the company that provides the technology.  The product line - called CEREC - is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year.  But until recently it has been so expensive and so support-intensive that it was primarily a feature found in labs and other major facilities. 

Now the price has been made reachable by the local practitioner.  But it's not just the cost of the gear that the dentist has to consider.  There is training, involved.  And the process must be able to be done in timeframe that offers a benefit both to the office (for cost purposes) and to the client (for time and price considerations).

This was interesting to watch.  The product is relatively new to my dentist's office - and though they had been to a special training program - they were still working out the kinks - seating their own new understanding into the actual "doing" of the thing - and working out the procedures relative to the standard office processes.

My dentist is a wonderful guy, but of an age that I would guess has caused him to miss a large amount of the videogame experience.  And he hasn't done much online digital photography either, I would bet.  Because - in his adapting to the interface of the editing process - I could tell he was struggling with conventions that the developer had used - that leaned heavily on conventions used in common videogames and graphics software.  As a result, my dentist is learning some new skills in what is to him a completely new context - and thus are taking some time to absorb.  His assistant, on the other hand, is a young lady I would guess as being mid-20's, and she has indeed played with videogames and is aware of graphics software (I asked her) - and she was able to throw in some advice while they were working through the editing of my tooth - based on the "intuition" she learned from other interface experiences.  The goals and the process looked very similar - and she could move more quickly through the uniqueness of the this particular application - because she new something of its common roots (sorry, no pun intended).

Starting years ago, there have been discussions and wide ranging experiments dealing with "faxing" physical objects.  Really, the issue is desktop manufacturing.  What kinds of items might be able to be delivered in this way?  Certainly one could image automobile parts or other shape-oriented kinds of products.  Not food, of course, but any number of other little things.  To date, two basic approaches have been dominant:  One - add-material, in which an object is built up by many many thin layers of a liquid hardening to a solid, under detailed instructions.  Two - remove-material, in which an object starts as a block of raw material which is then carved away according to detailed instructions to show - as Michelangelo described it - the hidden shape inside - like my crown from that block of ceramic material. 

It's not inconceivable that other basic techniques might be employable as well.  For clothing - or cloth-based objects - for example, why couldn't a machine be rigged to knit or weave a specific item from the raw material of a quantity of thread - on a desktop? 

Opportunity is everywhere - and isn't it amazing where it shows up?  It's exciting - as a dental client I love it!  But there is a dark side.  My dentist will now be using the remote lab facility much less.  And there are employees at that lab who are likely to be impacted in the long run.  IT has done it's usual job - bringing functionality down in scale and closer to the user - but the price is paid by the specialized vendors who are now going to be by-passed.

Those employees utlimately will need to find other jobs - how will they tackle their skills in molding materials into complex shapes - and apply them in a world which now utilizes IT to do much of that work?  That is the creative side of IT accommodation and economic development we have to work on.  And it is predictable.  In the sense that we can see - in this case - how key tasks will gradually be subsumed into an IT-based process instead of a lab-based process - we should start looking now for those alternative jobs.  Once these current jobs are lost, we are already way behind the 8-ball.

That's a lot to chew on.  But chew we must - for the sakes of the future workforce and business base here in Ohio.  And I am now much more capable of doing my part - since my tooth no longer hurts, and my new crown gives me the ability to jump in and crunch down with the best of 'em!

(-- originally posted by Rich Bowers, Coordinator, Ohio IT Clearinghouse)

Techies: They're everywhere - but Ohio?

Link: Techies: They're everywhere.

How much money have you wasted on useless electronic gear lately?  Well, with one exception - you haven't been trying, Ohio!

This latest study of early adopters by USA Today and Claritas has been published and shows that - while about 29% of US households qualify as "early adopters" in one form or another - the big, heavy-hitting Top 100 counties are focused on Denver, Washington DC, and Salt Lake City, along with a smattering of others from  Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Michigan and Texas. 

The single Ohio county in the Top 100 is Delaware County, coming in with 44.52% early adopting households, #40 in the list.  There are many other Ohio counties in the "over 29%" category.

The authors of the study take pains to point out that the issue is not all about money - that the thing that makes the difference in attitude, life style.  Early adopters like to try out new things, they don't mind re-inventing their habits.  There are 11 categories of buying behavior that define the acceptance of new technologies.

For whatever use such studies may serve, it can be extrapolated that populations which use technology are probably among the ripest for innovation in business and other aspects of economic life.  So while Ohio's pockets of early adopters are a positive thing for economic development - we should seek to understand what other priorities could benefit from technological assistance in the state.  All in the interest of preparing us for the boom to come, of course!

(-- originally posted by Rich Bowers, Coordinator, Ohio IT Clearinghouse)

Office in the Sky

The latest blog-storm is all about Google getting together with Sun and the possibility that these two will create a new version of Sun's Open Office application that will compete with Microsoft Office in a new way.  The announcement resulting from the big press to-do was less than specific or impressive.  The two companies agreed, basically, to acknowledge each other's existence, and to find new opportunities to explore together.  Fine. 

The elephant in the suite, however, is that there is really only one significant place where the interests of these two companies come together.  Sun has a collection of applications that competes with the Microsoft Office suite, called Open Office.  These applications are available for free as a download - and purely as a product-for-the-cost comparison, it's a great deal.  Open Office is available for platforms Microsoft does not serve (e.g., Linux), and has been developed as an open source project - giving it a certain anti-establishment, romantic appeal over and above the actual functionality of the software.

Google has made a huge impact in the last year or so applying a number of technologies collectively known as AJAX - which enables extremely rich functional experience in applications delivered over the Web.  Web-based applications do not reside on your local PC - they are called by virtue or your accessing a Web page.  Typically, any information the applications generate - emails, document files, etc. - are also maintained online, unless you explicitly pull down a copy to keep locally.  Gmail, Google Maps, some aspects of Google News, and a host of derivative products based on these - are all based on AJAX. 

The biggest benefit of this approach is the freedom it offers to the user - from being locked into a particular machine.  If you have a computer at work, a computer at home, and maybe a laptop you take on trips - that requires a lot of thinking and planning to keep files synchronized.  Not to mention multiple copies of the same software to use on each machine.  Web-based application would alleviate - if not eliminate - that problem.  All your software and all your data can live on the Internet - in the "sky" if you will - and you can therefore sit down at any machine - a client's office, a public library, a hotel room, a friend's house - and call up your work.  Save it all back to the "sky" - and you leave little or no trace of your presence on the computer you've used.

It's not hard to see how widespread adoption of such strategies could radically change the practice of computing.  There are also some key implications about the nature of the equipment and local software needed to make such a strategy accessible, as well.

So far, Microsoft has so owned the desktop - the computer screen's "desktop" that is - that no one has made any serious in-roads into the key applications used broadly across business, education and government - the word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and database kinds of modules.  Google, however, has become nearly as omnipresent as Microsoft - maybe more so in some ways.  So the pundits' impressions are that - if anyone could make a serious run at Microsoft in this space - it would be Google.  And the run is not simply at the functionality or the usability of a particular piece of software - it's the whole model of what that software is, where it resides, and how it's accessed. 

By teaming with the largely complete Open Office folks, Google can focus on the magic that enables a user to generate, save, access and manipulate his/her own information - independent of machines or software licenses - from any location with access to a telephone line.  Combined with the power that comes with having the ear of the press, the blog community, and a variety of trend-setters and "tipping" change-masters - Google and Sun may have perfect opportunity to spur a new level of innovation that the Web environment has been missing for years now.

For the record, a number of other developers have in fact pioneered the Web application approach for office-style functionality.  You can find a rather robust list here and an interesting example of a stand-alone word processing application here.  (There is an even larger list of Web-based applications outside of the "office" milieu.)

As we continue to evolve our sometimes-troubled relationship with the Internet, we could be looking forward to another fundamental change.  It used to be, luggage  makers would pride themselves on providing the space and organizational tools to put your "office in a briefcase."  But you still had to lug the thing around.  Soon, we may find that you can simply place your office in the sky - that great cloud of the online universe - and it follows you wherever you want it to go.

As Sky King used to say - "Hold on, Penny - We're taking her up!"

(-- originally posted by Rich Bowers, Coordinator, Ohio IT Clearinghouse)