MS Walk Louisville KY 2012
The Louisville MS walk was a great success and we had a great time! Food, fun and friends! Below are some of the photos from the event. You can see them all on Facebook or you may see the originals, and in large size, over on my photo site.
Fight MS And Find A Cure!
The Julep in Louisville
I took a few Red carpet photos from “The Julep” event in Louisville this Kentucky Derby 2012.
“Mobile Rhino Insurance” A JoeTuesday Production
Joe Canning created another masterpiece from two terrible actors. He has created a few other videos as well, Ready2move and a Louisiana Hot Sauce commercial, check them out here and here.
Often in the IT field the Right/Left side the brain does not get equal exercise. To keep the right side of my brain active I take photos, Joe Canning creates videos!
How to control traffic lights with your smart phone.
How to control traffic lights with your smart phone! well…. Almost, kinda, sorta….
With so many smart phones, relaying information to the “cloud”, It would seem logical to consolidate some of the historical trajectory information and “tune” the cities traffic lights accordingly. This would be a dynamic configuration that would account for road constructions, road obstructions, Traffic patterns, Collegiate and Professional game traffic and emergency vehicle prioritization.
Imagine the traffic lights being “aware” of football games, parades and other special event traffic and automatically tuning their timing. The lights would be able to time themselves accordingly as they are aware of the traffic conditions, speed and density. We could tie in weather conditions to increase the yellow light timing and bring the entire intersection to a stop when icy and slick. Easing not only the time and energy spent in traffic, it would also reduce the wear on the automobiles and reduce emissions. Go Green!
For this to work, we don’t need a large percentage of adoption. A 2% user base would be sufficient for modeling. We could augment complex interchanges with cameras and sensors, this with the intelligence from the phones (or cars themselves) should allow us to better time our lights, prioritize the traffic flow and light length timing. This could be added to government cars or city transportation to increase priority routing and aid in initial timing statistical generation. Think about it on your way around this week. What would you change on your traffic lights?
Panorama photography in a parking garage
I recently took another panorama photo with two people appearing many times in the photograph. This one was of two people in a parking garage moving from shot to shot. This picture is BIG so it will be a little slow to load. It has the same pair of people in it 9 diffident times. I have a few other sets of these on my site as well. The blending is not perfect in a few places and the color was really ugly as the lighting was completely different form indoors to out, but for one try it’s not to bad.
Click photo for a larger version
Henry Vogt Machine Company
Thanks to Henry Heuser and Frank Horlander I was granted access to building 28 at Henry Vogt Machine Company industrial complex. Its an amazing place with wonderful people. It has amazing history, beautiful design and has employed many people from Louisville. I hope to return in the winter and again in the spring, This place has so many photography opportunities.
How the smartphone will reduce your auto insurance rates…. One day…
In the not so distant future, Auto insurance companies will offer automatic daily adjusting insurance rates based on your driving habits. For instance if you lived in the City and only drive during the weekends it would be nice to only cover your auto when you use it and cover it how you use it. What if the insurance company could verify this and adjust your rates as you may only drive 50 times a year? That is a compelling solution for infrequent drivers that today have to pay for full time coverage. I guess the inverse is also true, If I drive 300 miles every day, I would expect my rates to be elevated when compared to someone who drives 10 miles per day.
As the car “Music Interface” (what is called the “car radio” today) will become the link between the smart phone and the automobile diagnostic link. Install an application on your smart phone, and you’ll be able to download the performance, MPG, driving habits and system health of your auto. It would also become the link to perform a vast array of traffic, road conditions, real time fuel economy measurements and reporting well beyond insurance adjustments alone.
Internet has rendered typical “FM music radio” obsolete.
The more I read the title to this, the more ridiculously obvious this is, but anyway, I’m going to post this as I think some of us might not have realized it just yet.
As the printed newspapers continue to shrink and try to find profit as they switch to a digital service, the FM music radio stations are poised to succumb to the same financial pressures. The smart phone and mp3 players have supplanted the traditional music delivery service for the “digitally connected” among us. I have no expectations for my children to “tune” in a radio station…..unless you consider selecting your custom music stream from Pandora “tuning in a station”.
You will see car stereos main features become Bluetooth paring for data and audio. Dashboard “radios” will start adding physical interfaces for radio that help keep the “eyes on the road”, similar to the track selection that exists for the ipod, but they will improve on them for the application layer. The car radio will begin dropping the “1-6 station” memory buttons favoring direct music service selection buttons, namely for Spotify, Pandora, YouTube Disco, Slacker or similar music service. I guess this also spells the decline for satellite radio as well except for the long haul drivers and residents that do not live in decent cellular data coverage areas. Satellite radio was the stepping stone used to help transition free FM radio listeners into a paying customer revenue stream. Shifting the over prevalent radio advertisement music disruption downward and helping the consumer enjoy a better product.
Anyway, good by FM radio, We still have the memories.
How cable companys can improve the Internet experance.
When you, a typical individual buys a car, you have options. Faster engine, upgraded interior, custom paint, special radio the list goes on and on, you have choices. I kinda like choices, I bet you do too. When buying Internet access the choices are much fewer. You can pick provider and a speed option. That’s about the end of your choices.
I don’t think speed/bandwidth should be the end of the consumer Internet service options! We can deploy some really exciting options (service enhancements) while adding value for the consumer and improving the Internet experience.
- Reducing latency – Image / video / content caching
- Kid safe web surfing – DNS / Proxy / Content filter
- Firewall, Virus and Mal-ware protection - Firewall / IDS, AV file scanning and malicious code scanning
- Application and service prioritization control – Customer controllable bandwidth traffic shaping.
If we provide some additional features the customer may see us as an additional benefit, not simply a ISP. Giving the customer a reason to say! The main service offerings Internet providers have had is “Speed/Bandwidth”, we are approaching the point where we need to start improving and focusing on the response times of requested data, quality of data and safety of the data.
Reducing latency – Image / video / content caching
Basically, when your computer connects to ebay as en example, there are delays and retransmissions that occur and these are the typical reason a web site can “feel” slow. Reducing the delay/response times and nearly eliminating the retransmission of data will be the next user experience frontier.
Bandwidth (speed at which data can be transfered) is part of the experience, another major part is simply how long your request takes to arrive to the web server, how long the web server internalizes the request and then how long it takes to start sending you the content requested….and repeat for each element and content item on the website.
Here is a practical real world BEST CASE of a WORST CASE scenario.
You request data from a website in foreign country. Lets say, a website hosted by www.afrihost.com (Web hosting company in South Africa) Just a simple ping to them takes 271ms on average.
Below is a break down below are timing measurements.
Kentucky to Chicago – 21ms
Chicago to New York – 11ms
New York to London – 70ms
London to Johannesburg – 120ms
Johannesburg to Cape Town – 50ms
As we know the speed of light and switch/router delays add up. In the above example, we are in the 275ms range. Thats nearly 1/3 of a second. For every request you have to wait a 1/3 of a second. When your browser makes at least 5 calls to the web server you are seeing minimum of 1.6 seconds of delay for which there is no possible cure for… without content caching that is.
How your browser operates is more “chatty” than you might expect…..When you view http://www.msn.com or http://www.woot.com in your web browser, your PC has to communicate A LOT of times for all the content. Each image is a separate request and often there are additional pages requested and processed. Typically one page is built from data from many servers content. When you type in “www.ebay.com” and press enter, your PC connects to DNS servers (Think of this as a Phone book for web sites and servers), finds the IP address of “www.ebay.com” and then the browser requests the default page of a web server located at the IP address the DNS server provided you. The web server then determines as much as it can based on your IP and browser type. (Physical location, potential income, visiting frequency, etc) The web server then sends your browser some HTML code. This code contains the “layout” of text, images and instructions to contact other servers for other text data, advertisement, images, video and music. Your Browser then connects back to the web server and requests the images, or other web pages that contain additional commands. You can often see this in a real example as you may wait for some of the images to load on the browser. With all the communications back and forth between your PC and the various web servers, it’s understandable where response time is just as important as bandwidth.
Retransmitting or retrying after a failed request is another point of delay. An example would be if you and I were in the same room, and for whatever reason I have a lot on my mind. You ask me a simple question, “Hey Steve, What time is it”….. “Steve?” I respond with, “sorry, I have a lot on my mind, what was your question?” You ask again, “What time is it” and I answer your question with “It’s 6:35 PM”
You can see where I, as the Time keeper was busy or slow and eventually answered your request. Once I did answer the request it was quick, but the time it look for me to answer you was longer than the actual answer…. You still with me on this?
Caching servers are the mechanism we can use to answer the requests for or on behalf of the busy/slower web servers. As we are the ISP we can anonymously analyze the requests going to the web servers and answer the requests for popular pictures or common download files. There are companies that do this akamai and cachefly are an example. They are for paying sites that have heavy traffic and want to improve the customer experience using the same process I’m recommending the Cable Companies provide. If we deploy this for the top 25% of the commonly visited websites we would improve the customer experience, reduce the ISP’s bandwidth consumption and in turn provide a better experience for the web servers we don’t cache for…. Kinda cool.
Next I’ll work on items 2, 3 and 4
- Reducing latency – Image / video / content caching
- Kid safe web surfing – DNS / Proxy / Content filter
- Firewall, Virus and Mal-ware protection - Firewall / IDS, AV file scanning and malicious code scanning
- Application and service prioritization control – Customer controllable bandwidth traffic shaping