Posted by John Patrick on May 28, 2005 in
Motorcycles 
The motorcycle ride from Pennsylvania through New York to Connecticut on Interstate 84 was 119 miles. I did not see a single fellow motorcyclist during the entire trip. Perhaps it was the 47 degree temperature, the cloudy and drizzly sky, or the 35 mph wind gusts. Riding a motorcycle in 47 degree weather was very cold to start with but the wind chill made it feel as though it was 20 degrees. I have always been curious about exactly what wind chill means and how it is calculated, so I did a bit of research on it. If you are interested in this, see the prior story. The Widder electric vest and gloves provided adequate heat (see Motorcycling In The Winter for more about cold weather riding). It was the wind gusts that made the ride exciting. In fact, as recorded in the motorcycling log, this was the most challenging ride I have ever experienced. Crossing the Hudson River on the Newbugh Bridge required hanging on tightly to control the buffeting and also crabbing into the wind just like flying an airplane in a crosswind. In addition to focusing on remaining in control of the ride, I was thinking about the ThinkPad which was strapped on the back of the Sportster. Even though I knew it could survive a high speed drop onto the highway (it has happened before), I was glad that my computer and I got home safely.
Other patrickWeb stories about motorcycling
Posted by John Patrick on May 24, 2005 in
Internet Technology 
The evolution of the "browser" has had a huge impact on making content available to everyone everywhere. We also take it for granted that we can walk up to any computer connected to the Internet and expect to find a browser there. Not only that but we automatically know how to use it! The world went from zero to hundreds of millions of users in a very short time. In effect, the largest focus group ever validated that & browsing& was a fundamental human trait. No training required. Since most of us spend a good deal of time browsing, shouldn’t we have a browser that meets all of our needs and gives us the fastest, simplest, and most secure browsing experience? Just because Internet Explorer has the largest market share, does that mean it is our only choice? If General Motors sells the most cars does that mean we all choose a GM car? This story is about the history of browsers and why I have chosen to make the new Opera 8 my browser of choice on both the ThinkPad and the Sony Ericsson P910a mobile phone. Why? Speed, Security and Simplicity. (read more)
Posted by John Patrick on May 22, 2005 in
IBM 
A Google search on the word outsourcing produces more than 33 million results. After reading the story about the Nortel/IBM contract, it got me thinking about what outsourcing is all about and where it is headed. The aim of this short story is to offer a perspective on the past, present, and future of outsourcing.
Outsourcing used to be simple. Rather than hire employees to clean the office building, many companies decided to hire a cleaning company to do it. The cleaning company specialized in cleaning ,had experienced people, and could manage the cleaning operations better than a company could do themselves. The concept spread to the mailroom, overall building maintenance, and other functions of business. One of the largest targets of opportunity became information technology — hiring someone else to manage the computers and people.
In the sixties, IBM thought IT outsourcing was a really bad idea. However, some large customers concluded that if they outsourced their computer operations to a "datacenter company" they could save money. The theory was that the outsourcing company had a larger number of mainframe computers and therefore a lower unit cost for computing. IBM did not like this because it was perceived at the time that it would result in selling less computers. One of the outsourcing companies was Shared Medical Systems in Philadelphia (now part of Siemens Medical Systems) when I was the IBM branch manager there. SMS was buying a lot of new IBM computers but hospitals around the country were returning computers they had been renting from IBM to use SMS instead. At the time companies like SMS were considered by IBM to be competitors. (read more)
Posted by John Patrick on May 20, 2005 in
Personal Computing 
Bill Reith says " the correct unit of measure is not ‘yottabytes’ but ‘awholelottabytes’". He also pointed out that a key issue is how to retrieve all the data. In particular he says that often he finds himself saying "I know I have an email…or a document… on that subject around here somewhere. Where the heck did I put it?". Part of the answer is meta data. I envision that increasingly software that is used to save emails, pictures, music, etc. will make it much easier to add tags of our choosing. Some software will undoubtedly figure out what the tags should be and create them for us. Another part of the answer is better tools for finding things. My favorite is X1. X1 indexes your email while you are sleeping and it can then sift through tens of thousands of emails and find what you are looking for as fast as you can type in the search box. It is one of the most amazing pieces of software I have ever used.
Other patrickWeb stories about personal computing
Posted by John Patrick on May 19, 2005 in
Personal Computing The amount of data and meta data that we are creating and saving is growing at an incredible clip. The data includes emails, presentations, documents, and other things but the majority of the data for many people is digital pictures and digital music. The meta data is data about the data. For example, a song (track) is data. The data about the data (the meta data) includes the name of the artist, the name of the album, the name of the composer, the length of the recording, genre (classical, blues, rock, pop, opera, etc.), the artwork from the CD case, and potentially a whole more. For a digital picture the meta data includes the date, the camera used, the various settings of the camera at the time the picture was taken, the size of the picture, the lighting, and potentially the latitude and longitude and digital ID of the photographer at the time the picture was taken. Meta data also includes "tags" that we assign to pictures and music — things like "favorite", "top ten", "family", "vacation", "Carribean cruise", "Private", "Aunt Sallies birthday party", and on and on. At some point there may be more meta data than there is data.
My first computer, a Radio Shack TRS-80, had 80,000 bytes of storage on the hard drive. An average email these days is probably 5,000 bytes, so the TRS-80 hard drive could store sixteen emails. My current ThinkPad hard drive has a capacity of 80 billion bytes — one million times more storage. A bit hard to imagine — until you start to think about the explosion of music, pictures, and meta data. Fortuntately, the technology is keeping up with our insatiable appeatites to store more and more data. Hopefully, the availability of affordable and easy-to-use backup technologies will be there too and we will have the patience and discipline to use them. Losing a few emails is one thing but losing pictures of a baby’s first few steps is another.
Pretty soon we will have a new word in our technical vocabularies — the yottabyte. How big is a yottabyte? Let’s start with the basics. An alphabetic character such as an "a" is represented in most computers by a combination of eight zeroes and ones called a "byte".
1,024 bytes is a kilobyte
1,024 kilobytes is a megabyte
1,024 megabytes is a gigabyte
1,024 gigabytes is a terabyte
1,024 terabytes is a petabyte
1,024 petabyes is an exabyte
1,024 exabytes is a zettabyte
and finally — or at least for now…
1,024 zettabytes is a yottabyte
Other ways to look at a yottabyte are that it is 2 to the 80th power bytes, or 10 to the 24th power bytes , or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. I have no doubt we will have lots of yottabytes of meta data.
P.S. You can find some interesting information about the origins of the yottabyte in the wikipedia. Also, if one would commit a single byte of information to store the location of every atom contained in the human body, it would require about 5,900 yottabytes. Not long ago, no one would even try to describe what it would take. Maybe BMUS (beam me up Scotty) is not so far fetched after all.
Other patrickWeb stories about personal computing
Posted by John Patrick on May 17, 2005 in
Blogging,
IBM,
People 
I first met Irving Wladawsky-Berger sometime in 1992. I was impressed with his keen interest in technology and the things I was working on. We have continued as friends and colleagues ever since. Irving has had a distinguished career at IBM including heading up the IT group in IBM Research, getting IBM into the supercomputer business, managing IBM’s UNIX systems business, starting the Internet division, leading the charge with Linux, and now focusing on the new area of collaborative innovation. All of these important assignments have been intellectually challenging and not surprisingly, Irving has always been up to the challenge.
My first experience working with Irving was when he asked me some questions about the ThinkPad. No matter how technical an issue may have been, Irving got it instantly. In the early days many people had difficulty grasping the significance of the Web. Not Irving. With every new idea presented by anyone, Irving has always had an uncanny ability to see the implications even beyond the person with the idea. My ten years working with him were certainly the most rewarding of my 38 years at IBM. When I e-tired, Irving wrote a nice letter.
More recently, Irving has started up a new blog to focus on his interests in various aspects of information technology including the Internet, servers and supercomputing, standards and open source initiatives like Linux, the evolution to Web services, and content management. Irving has always been interested in public policy issues and I am sure he will be writing about key issues in health care and education, support for R&D, intellectual property, and other areas.
In addition to Irving’s depth in business and science, he is also a delightful person to know. Born in Cuba, Irving has not only supported diversity efforts but has taken time personally to mentor numerous high potential people in the company. I also have no doubts that Irving’s love of baseball will find a place in his blog. I for one look forward to reading his future postings. I have placed a link in my blogroll and also subscribed to his RSS feed in the new Opera 8 browser.
Other patrickWeb stories about blogging
Posted by John Patrick on May 16, 2005 in
Healthcare,
People 
A search at Google for "Wow" yields more than 20 million matches. A visit to the Wiktionary finds that "wow" means "an indication of excitement or surprise. A typical expression, according to the Wiktionary is "Wow! How do they do that?".
If you visit the Danbury Hospital Wellness on Wheels van, I guarantee that you will say "Wow!". I had the privilege to stop by and visit the van late last week. It was quite a sight to behold. Moms and dads and kids lined up for well-child visits, sick visits, physicals for school, sports, or camp, work physicals, TB or lead testing, immunizations, screenings, blood pressure checks, health education, or travel vaccines. WOW is part of the hospital’s Partners in Health program.
The WOW van offers primary care services at no charge, although there may be a fee for some adult immunizations. The minor income and modest budget understate the long term economic and public health benefits. By providing a safety net for some who may not seek care at a doctor’s office or at the hospital, much more costly emergency care may be avoided. Also, by encouraging and providing immunizations, some significant diseases can be avoided. By offering school and camp physicals to many who could not otherwise afford to have them, a broader segment of the local population can participate in activities which help them to be more involved in the community.
The most impressive part of the WOW van is the people who work there. Headed by Dr. Jack Fong, chairman of the hospital’s pediatrics department, the staff includes a physician, nurse, immunization outreach worker, medical case manager, and a driver. The entire team is compassionate toward their patients while dedicated and enthusiastic about their work. As I left from the visit, there was only word I could think of. Wow! We are so fortunate to have this resource at work in the community.
Posted by John Patrick on May 10, 2005 in
IBM 
April was a busy beginning for the second quarter at IBM. Here are the IBM announcements for April. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
Posted by John Patrick on May 10, 2005 in
Home Automation 
You would think by now that there would be no pagers in use – it seems like everyone has a mobile phone. In fact, traditional pagers and paging services are on the decline, but there is valuable paging bandwidth that can be used for other purposes — like the CoolSentry program. Today, a technician from SolvIt stopped by the house and installed CoolSentry devices on the compressors of our air conditioning system.
Like many parts of America, Connecticut has an electrical distribution system that is not designed to cope with the increased demands that are placed on it from growth of business and residential needs. In the event of a surge in demand, such as during a blistering hot summer afternoon, the result can be a blackout. The CoolSentry program is designed to help prevent blackouts through better management of electrical usage. If a surge in demand occurs during the summer, the power company will use a paging signal to activate the devices attached to air conditioning compressors and turn off the compressor for 20 minutes per hour. Some power is left running to keep the compressor fan turning even though the compressor itself is not running. The result is less electrical demand in the system with little or no noticeable effect on the air conditioning. The installation technician told me that he and eight other technicians were each doing 10-15 homes per day. CoolSentry is a good example of wireless technology at work to stave off potentially very negative problems. Paging lives on even if the pagers don’t!.
Posted by John Patrick on May 8, 2005 in
Podcasts 
I podcasted the last paragraph of the "Podcasting For The School Bus" story in case some readers who are not already into it may want to get a taste of what podcasts are like. I think of poadcasts as mini radio programs — they are actually syndicated radio programs being "broadcast" from blogs instead of radio stations. A podcast can be any kind of audio — music, an interview, a phone conversation — and there is no need to have an iPod to participate. The podcaster puts a link to the audio content into their blog posting. The listener subscribes to podcasts using "podcatching" software — often called "aggregators" which periodically check for new content and automatically download it. The listener can listen to the content with iTunes on their PC or Mac or, if they choose, can also sync it to their iPod and listen to it on the train. There are many ways to do create a podcast, and many more are sure to arise soon.
For this story, I dictated the last paragraph of the "Podcasting For The School Bus" story using Copytalk, a tool I use for dictating short emails and story ideas. I normally call Copytalk with the Sony Ericsson P910a and then dictate. The dictation is transcribed by a real live person at a transcription center with near perfect accuracy. I then receive the dictation as an email. The copytalk dictation was converted to mp3 and placed in iTunes. If you want to listen, you will find it here.
