Solar Experimentation 2011

Earlier this year I found a portable solar power company, Goal Zero, that designs and distributes very practical portable solar panels.  They use super efficient monocrystalline photovoltaic cells which are the best on the market today.  I bought one of their kits from Amazon, Guide 10 Plus Adventure Kit + 4 AA batteries, after doing a lot of research and tested it while on vacation in summer 2011.  The Nomad 7 solar panel works as advertised.  It charges AA/AAA batteries with the Guide 10 device, and directly charges my Android phone, iPod, Nintendo DS, Nook Color, and all portable small devices that can use the built-in USB interface.

So on 17 December 2011, while out X-mas shopping my sister called me and said CostCo has some GoalZero solar gadgets on display.  So I serendipitously saw Goal Zero display at my local CostCo store.  This was a special event for the X-Mas 2011 that had many more of the Goal Zero products.  I was able to physically touch and inspect many of their products. The quality of their solar panels and designs are excellent.  I was really surprised at how small and light the Boulder 15M panels are.  The Boulder 15M mono-crystalline solar panels are 17-18% efficient which is really impressive.  See the GoalZero Learn page for details.  I ended up buying an additional Nomad 7 solar panel, a Scout 150 Power Pack, two Boulder 15M panels, and a Luna light on 12/24/2011.

After making the impulsive purchase, I started testing the Scout 150 with the two Boulder 15M solar panels chained for total of 30W of solar panels.  Given the time of year, this equipment has been performing as expected.  I attained a 60% on a sunny day (6-hours of quality sunlight) in late December (12/28/2011) which has the poorest quality of sunlight of the solar year.  Based on my observations, a 100% charge of the Scout 150 Power Pack would require about 10-hours of quality sunlight in Dec/Jan.  I can see getting a 100% charge from the solar panels in May-July which has much better solar radiance at our geo-location.

As a side note, I have been able to keep my Chromebook and Acer netbook (AAO L110) off-grid for 3-days in a row and recharging (not to 100% though) them both from the Scout 150 Power Pack.  This has been quite a fun time for unplanned solar experimentation.

Interestingly, this inspired me to start planning and scaling up to a self-designed solar power storage system with much more capacity. I saw some Kirkland deep cycle batteries while at CostCo for really good prices.  Approximately $63 for 85aH and $83 for 115 aH marine deep cycle batteries.   According to my research on the Kirkland batteries are made by Interstate which is an excellent battery manufacturer.  My next experiment dubbed Winter2012, will be a fun learning experience with the science and engineering of solar power and power storage.

IBM Open Sources Its EGL Technology

On December 8 2011, IBM open sourced their Enterprise Generation Language (EGL) technology and has donated the technology to the Eclipse Foundation.  Here is the developerWorks blog announcement, “The open era for EGL begins today”.  See the new Eclipse EGL Development Tools page.  Prior to the new Eclipse EGL project, EGL was released as the Eclipse-based Rational Business Developer suite.


EGL (Enterprise Generation Language) is a high level, modern business oriented programming language, designed by IBM to be platform independent. EGL is similar in syntax to other common languages so it can be learned by application developers with similar previous programming background. EGL application development abstractions shield programmers from the technical interfaces of systems and middleware allowing them to focus on building business functionality. EGL applications and services are written, tested and debugged at the EGL source level, and once they are satisfactorily functionally tested they can be compiled into COBOL, Java, or JavaScript code to support deployment of business applications that can run in any of the following environments:

• Microsoft Windows, Linux, UNIX running JVM, for example in the context of a Java EE servlet container (IBM WebSphere Application Server,Apache Tomcat, GlassFish)
• IBM System z: CICS Transaction Server, IMS, z/OS Batch, UNIX System Services, WebSphere Application Server, z/VSE, Linux
• IBM System i: IBM i5/OS, IBM WebSphere Application Server, Apache Tomcat
• Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari browsers for Ajax rich web applications

 This is a welcome tool addition to the continuously evolving open source Eclipse ecosystem.  

Reclaiming 15 minutes every day

The ZDNet blog, If Forrester likes Macs for IT today, they’ll love Chromebooks tomorrow , hits it right on the money. Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operatives or HEROs are really the types of people that are migrating to the instant on computing experience.

It's all about the 'boot time' reclaiming that 10-15 minutes first thing five times a week first thing in the morning. The 8 seconds to cold boot a Chromebook and instantaneous wake from sleep are the primary reasons I like it. That is roughy one hour of time weekly gained and countless hours of increased productivity due to getting online and starting my mental work when I am ready and not waiting for when my computer is ready. As a high-output high-productive user this is all the difference in world.

Back after a few months in the Google+ Realm

I've been playing in the Google+ space since I joined it back in June when it was invitation only. Since then I have really slacked off on posting anything to my blogs. I have even almost stopped 'tweeting' and find myself spending less and less time on Facebook. Google+ I can say has become a place where I spend a lot of time not just lurking and doing nothing like I would do on Facebook, but actually having discussions on various subjects with people about topics that interest me.

I like the ability to be expressive in G+ with longer posts and the capability to add font effects and multiple links within a G+ post. This has long been an issue I've had with FB and Twitter. The 140-character limit in Twitter has always been a constraint that I have found frustrating at times and at other times a blessing when I was a at a lost for concise words. I think I like the balance that G+ represents which is be as expressive as you want or as concise as you want. Just be expressive.

I find that G+ has been replacing what and where I used to spend my time on the social media net (ex. Facebook, Twitter, etc..). What I have been experiencing these past few months can be summed up a 'new way' to spend my time on the 'social web' that blends research, socialization, technology, politics, techno-politics, local news, and news that interests me.

I have recently just realized a way to bring blogs back into my social web and the G+ experiment. It's taken a few months but now I think I see where blogs and G+ can and will coexist.

Upgrading Removable Storage on Android Device

Upgrading your removal storage (microSD) on your Android is really easy. Just unmount, remove the microSD, copy all the files from the old card to the new microSD card, install the new card into your Android device. Android will detect the card and mount it automatically. Ignore the messages to format the card. You are done.

I just did this on my Android phone upgrading from the 2GB microSD card that come with the phone to a larger 8GB Sansdisk microSD card I had laying around. I copied the files from the old card to a local folder on my Mac, then copied the files onto the new microSD card. There is no proprietary DRM or other stuff on the removable storage that Android creates so is really straight forward. Good to know. This should also work on any Android tablet.

Google News Badges is something different

These kind of bring gaming to reading News, good strategy. See the Shareable News badges post. This kind of makes reading news a bit of a game for online news junkies.

Google+ First Impressions

I was provided a Google+ invitation in the first week of the Google+ launch. After activating my account and using it for the past week, I can say that this thing has potential. I really like the Circles features and how it is nicely integrated into my Google Docs and Android mobile phone. I think Google has finally developed a social networking product and applied its lessons learned form past failed attempts (Buzz, Wave) and even learned a few lessons from its competitors (Twitter, Facebook). Powering Google+ is Java on server-side, Javascript (using Closure framework), and some HTML5 on the client-side (Google+ Technological Details). For storage it uses BigTable and Colossus (Google Filesystem v2). The technical details are discussed here. The technology stack employed by Google+ definitely provides evidence based on scalability lessons learned from Twitter who started off using Ruby on Rails (RoR) for everything and has been spending the past few years migrating their server-side processes towards Scala (language that runs on a JVM) for performance reasons. Twitter still uses RoR for client-side but has since migrated its server-side infrastructure to Scala.

You can read about the Google+ ‘buzz’ (no pun intended) all over the web these past few weeks. The adoption rate is even at a respectable level, 10 million users in the past two-weeks (see Google+ grows to 10 Million Users). The question now is, can it become a viable social platform for all of Google’s apps and services. Based on what I have seen, I think yes. And the really important part is that Google is just starting to rev up its enterprise integration services leveraging Google+. This will be an interesting evolution to watch.

Google+ Technology

Behind the scenes of the recently launched Google+ project is Java, Javascript, and some HTML5 as per mentioned in the Google+ Technological Details article. Interesting that they use Java on the server-side, Javascript and HTML5 on the client-side. Google has learned some lessons from Twitter and Facebook on this implementation. They are also using BigTable and Colossus which is Google's real-time indexing system.

Chromebooks Are Now Officially Available

One future vision of computing, web-based ChromeOS Chromebook devices, are now available for everyone to buy. I have been using my pilot Google Chrome OS Cr-48 notebook since Dec 2010 and the instant on web-only OS has completely replaced my netbook. Cloud services and Chrome applications have matured considerably in this timeframe and will continue to evolve for the better in the next few years.

There are numerous product reviews and analysis of this new strategic class of products. This article, "Google Believes Less is More", sums it up quite well.

Future of Education using YouTube

I just happened to watch a CNN News Video about the future of education using YouTube. After seeing this news segment I checked out the Khan Academy. The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization created in 2006, by Salman Khan. With the stated mission of "providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere", the website supplies a free online collection of more than 2,300 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and economics.

I have spent many hours searching YouTube and the web looking for videos like all these. The nice thing about the Khan Academy is that is uses YouTube and organizes 1000s of original Khan videos in once place. I think I will be spending a lot of time in the future viewing these videos with my kids and for myself.

Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, has put together a 'rock star' software engineering team including John Resig, creator of jQuery.

Chromebook, Nothing but the Web

I have been a pilot tester of Google Chrome OS using the Cr-48 notebook that Google provided me six months ago in December 2010. Yesterday, at the second day of the 2-day Google IO 2011 conference in San Francisco, Google announced its Chromebook products which will be publicly available by 15 June 2011 at Amazon and BestBuy. Amazon is already listing Chromebooks here An excellent overview of the second day is summarized in “Chrome Browser, Web Store, and Chromebook” article.

Now that an official name has been dubbed for this new class of device, I can start using the word ‘Chromebook’ to refer to my prototype Cr-48. To gain an understanding of what a Chromebook is, watch this short video on YouTube Introducing the Chromebook

that concisely describes it or read the information available at the Chromebook site and the various short videos describing its features. On the Chromebook site there are several short videos that describe the main features. I provided links to these videos here for your convenience:

• Instant Web
• Always Connected
• Same Experience Everywhere
• Amazing Web Apps
• Forever Fresh
• Security Built-in

I have been my Cr-48 on a daily basis and it just simply works for everything I do in the cloud. New features that Google has been internally testing for the past few months (Coming this summer) will be the ability to work offline in Gmail, Calendar, Google Docs, and various other cloud tools that leverage HTML5 including the recently announced Google Music Beta which is essentially cloud-based music service that is very similar to Amazon Cloud Player.

For Business and Education users, Google has established a new business model where it is providing a lease for a very low-cost monthly subscription (approx $20 for education, $28 for businesses) that includes the hardware. See this video for more information, Chromebook – Business and Education Overview. The details on this plan are not yet available but I am curious if they will also provide a low cost personal pay-as-you-go plan which would really be nice.

Most Valuable Delphi Application Today - Skype

Skype for Windows is developed using Delphi. Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it has agreed to acquire Skype for $8.5 Billioin. "Microsoft to Acquire Skype" This makes Skype possibly the most valuable Delphi application today. "The $8.5 billion Delphi application" This can be verified in the Good Quality Applications Built with Delphi listing and also at SkypeShop.
Additionally, the Embarcadero Delphi and C++Builder Application Showcase has Skype in its index.

Amazon's CloudDrive and CloudPlayer

Amazon continues to be an innovator in the cloud computing universe. This spring Amazon recently announced and released their CloudDrive and CloudPlayer services. Being an Amazon customer, I decided to give it shot this past week and uploaded a few personal MP3s to the CloudDrive and then used the CloudPlayer to listen to my MP3 files using CloudPlayer for the Web and the CloudPlayer for Android. Bottom line, this is as simple as it gets and works.

I also tested the CloudDrive and CloudPlayer on Windows, Mac, ChromeOS machines and using Chrome web browser and it all works in a consistent cloud-like manner. This is a step in the right direction for the future cloud-based, online everything world. As a side note, the streaming CloudPlayer for Android works nicely also. I was quite surprised at the Android App.

Chrome OS has new UI Behaviors

Since last December 2010 when I first received my Cr-48 Chrome OS notebook, I have been requesting a capability to allow switching between Chrome browser window instances without requiring a keystroke or plugin. After four months, the Chrome OS team finally implemented this enhancement as a new UI widget in the upper right-hand corner of the Chrome OS interface. It works very nicely and allows me to switch between browser windows without touching the switch window key. Good job folks!

Additionally, I noticed a new Chrome browser behavior in the most recent Chrome OS update. When I double-click on a word or phrase within a web page, after a few milliseconds, a search icon popups up near the highlighted text. When I click on the search icon, it opens a new browser tab containing the search results page as if I searched for the highlighted text in Google Search. Now this is really practical and very efficient. I can't wait until they put this in the general Chrome web browser release for all platforms.

Keep up the good work. I think Chrome OS is maturing very well. All my Adobe Flash issues appear to be resolved with the last few updates to Chrome OS and the Flash Player 10.2, sandboxing, and other features that are not active. The major areas I see that need to be enhanced prior to general release this summer are chromoting and Java support. I haven't seen much activity on the chromoting and Java support would be icing on the cake.

James Gosling Goes Google

James Gosling, the father of Java, has gone Google according to his latest blog entry today. This is good news for all things Google in my opinion.

Chrome OS and Flash is now Rock Solid

Since Google updated Chrome OS in early March with the new embedded Flash 10.2 player, I have not had a single Flash Player crash in over two-weeks. It looks like Adobe and Google have resolve the Flash Player stability problems in Chrome OS and the Chrome web browser. At least that is what I have observed on my Cr-48 the past few weeks.

Time for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) at Home

I think it's time to migrate to a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) model at home. At least the thoughts are brewing around my head. The primary problem is cost. I wonder if there are low-cost or FOSS solutions to this problem? Maybe using VMware, VirtualBox in conjunction with Chromoting/VNC, web applications, elastic cloud services to make all this happen. At this point, I haven't put a lot of thought to it but I can envision the need as we continue evolving forward in the Generation M2 (media multitasking) world.

At any rate, I see the need since the proliferation of computing devices seems to be exploding in my household. In the past few years we now have Android, Linux, iOS, Chrome OS, Mac OS, Windows, and cloud-apps, in use on a daily basis. Additionally, on the family/personal entertainment side there is DS, PS3, Wii, GameCube, PS2, etc. etc. We live in a post PC ubiquitous computing environment where traditional OSs such as Linux, Mac OS, and Windows make up an ever increasing smaller portion of the platforms we use on a daily basis.

Android Application Development without Coding

Android application development is becoming a critical element of any systems engineering and especially software engineering architecture today. So what technology do you use to develop Android applications for the mobile and emerging tablet market segments?

In the past few years, Android development is centered on Java/Dalvik, Python, HTML5 (Javascript, CSS3, HTML5), C++, and any other web development languages and systems that support mobile clients. In today's IT environment, yet another platform and yet another set of APIs, SDKs, and framework is not really desirable to me. It is just more to learn, more issues to uncover, more workarounds, more techniques, etc. The folks over at Google Labs have the same viewpoints and have created something interesting.

Google Labs has released and is experimenting with a new lightweight browser-based development platform called AppInventor which leverages underlying Java technology and does not require any coding in our traditional understanding of programming. How is this possible? It uses a new metaphor for application development I first observed in Scratch. Instead of coding in the traditional sense using drag-n-drop, code snippets, classes, and XML etc., Scratch implements a jigsaw puzzle like paradigm for defining application logic. Visual components are placed onto the application in the traditional drag-n-drop paradigm, but the application logic, behaviors, and other aspects normally coded in snippets are all defined using visual jigsaw like building blocks.

I have played with Scratch a few years ago when my son was in Kindergarten and saw its potential. A few years later, I can see its practical application in AppInventor and the need to experiment with code-free application development for Android platform. I recently created my first sets of Android applications using AppInventor and can vouch for the no-coding paradigm is a viable software development model for simple to mildy complicated applications. The next few months is going to be fun working with AppInventor!

Breach in RSA SecurID Systems

This past week, RSA announced that their very popular authentication token SecurID technology experienced a security breach. In the RSA press release, it was stated that a 'very sophisticated attack' was used to steal source code and other unspecified documents. Details about the breach are still sketchy and may endanger the security of the RSA token technology widely used by many organizations for two-factor authentication purposes.

An advanced persistent threat (APT) is mentioned in the RSA notice. According to other sources, this type of sophisticated attack was used against Google in China in 2009. Discussions, impact assessments, and industry analysis is occurring on a daily basis since this breach was announced. "What the RSA breach means for you (FAQ)" The next few weeks and months ahead will yield the true impact of this cyber threat.

PMI Agile Certification?

This almost sounds like it came out of a strange dream.. but it is real.

I just received an e-mail from PMI last week announcing a new 2011 initiative for a PMI Agile Certification which they are developing and piloting this spring in May 2011. The goal is to provide an Agile management certification starting in the third quarter of 2011.

The initial eligibility requirements are documented here. This new certification is intended for agile practitioners who are seeking or need to demonstrate a level of professionalism in Agile practices of project management. This looks interesting and is something to keep a watch on this year.​

How do you use the Camera on the Cr-48?

I was wondering about how you use Chrome OS Cr-48 to take pictures with the built-in camera? Here is one way to do it cloud-style, use Picnik. Browse to the Picnik website and click on the Library tab, then select the Webcam Photo. This will launch a flash application that will enable the Cr-48 camera and you can now take pictures, edit them, and download it in PNG, JPG or GIF formats.

One nice feature is that you don't even have to login to an account on Picnik to use this feature.

Adobe Releases Flash Player 10.2 That Is Optimized for HD

Adobe just released Flash Player 10.2 which contains significant performance optimziations. The video processing is now off-loaded into the GPU and reduces CPU utilization while watching online Flash streaming video. The Adobe Flash Player See Whats New summarizes the new capabilities. Of particular interest is their new Stage Video accelerator technology which permits playback of HD video (720p, 1080p) with very little performance impact.

I installed and tested this on my Mac and Windows machines and can see the vast performance improvements that Flash Player 10.2 brings to the web. This has not yet been pushed out into Chrome OS based on what I have seen. I am sure it will be shortly though since the performance improvements are significant.

Chromoting

I tried the Chromoting (remoting) features in Chrome OS last night. See Chromoting announcement from June 2010 (PCWorld, PCMag, Engadget, Fortune). This VNC capability is not yet working in ChromeOS but once it does, then using remote desktops via VNC for Windows, Mac and Linux machine will all be supported. For now, ThinVNC (HTML5 and AJAX based) is what will work for Windows. I installed and looked at Web VNC which is on the Chrome Web Store and can report that this is not a viable solution for me since it requires that you connect and proxy through a cloud service sponsor, CloudSigma, servers. I see several security issues with using the CloudSigma VNC proxy approach.