Technology Bytes

Still in fund raising mode

Technology Bytes Podcast for May 19th, 2010 [ 1:59:52 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

We’re in fund raising mode.

Technology Bytes Podcast for May 12th, 2010 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

“….a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: nonhitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.”

I think that most of you will recognize that passage from the late author Douglas Adams, creator of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series of works. Douglas Adams passed on May 11, 2001, and on Tuesday, May 25th, people around the world will honor the author by taking their towel with them wherever the day may take them. If you want to find some fellow hitchhikers to revel with or get some more history on the event, you can surf to www.towelday.org.

And if you’re plugged into the Internet right now, chances are extremely good that your data is traveling through an Ethernet cable along some point of its journey. Ethernet, the thought child of Robert Metcalfe, will have been around 37 years as of this Saturday, May 22nd.

Ethernet has enjoyed nearly two decades of supremacy as the de facto way to connect computers together in a home or office. It wasn’t until the recent widespread adoption of wireless technologies that the Ethernet cable started becoming an afterthought in people’s laptop bags and backpacks.

I’m curious as to how many of us in the studio could actually produce an Ethernet cable from their laptop bags right now… Anyone?

Most people are wireless these days, and since Kaveh Kanes closed, I know of no coffee shop in Houston where I can show up with a 20 foot Ethernet cable and expect to get connectivity. Of the two, Wireless is actually the more venerable technology, though, with Ethernet borrowing some of its tricks from one of the very first wireless networks that was created to connect several University of Hawaii computers together in 1970.

This network, the aptly named Alohanet, used amateur radio to link nodes together. Using one frequency to transmit and another to receive, a machine receiving data would immediately re-transmit that data back the origin machine, thus introducing the ability to detect and correct errors during transmission. Aloha also tackled the issue of collision detection, a condition when two computers try to talk at the same time, by just dropping both transmissions and simply trying again. Transfer speeds on Alohanet maxed out the Data Terminal Equipments built-in baud rate of 80 words per minute. That’s Teletype speed for you old timers…

Another networking technology was coming on very strong in the 70s that may have displaced Ethernet if not for one single flaw. IBM’s token ring technology overcame the problem of collisions by using a 3-byte token that was virtually passed between computers connected in a ring pattern. Only the computer in possession of the token was allowed to talk, or transmit data, while all other remained quiet. This ruled out the possibility of data collision. Token Ring speeds kept up with Ethernet speeds, with IBMs 16 MB/s Token Ring technology being introduced in 1989, eventually becoming the IEEE standard for token ring networks. Both Apollo Computer and Proteon offered other proprietary token schemes in the 80s. And though IBM did beat out those companies, it was Token Ring’s large plastic connectors and thick IBM Type 1 cabling that kept it from overtaking Ethernet. Token Ring speeds eventually hit 100MB/s, but would never see the multi-Gigabit Ethernet speeds realized today.

Early Ethernet cabling looked a lot like the coaxial cable that used to bring cable television into homes before satellite hit the scene. Now, Ethernet cabling takes the form of 4 twisted pairs of wire sheathed in a plastic coating. The end connectors are known as RJ-45 connectors, a larger version of what you still find on the ends of phone cabling, which is known as RJ-11.

So happy 37, Ethernet!

That’s exactly the half-way-point of this season’s sizzle and that’s that for BarretTime.

The original Newton commercial circa 1993

The iPad commercial

The Alley Theater has been kind enough to offer all geeks a discount on tickets to their production of Intelligence-Slave, a new play by Kenneth Lin. Here’s a PDF with all the necessary info.

It’s fund raising time again, so there’s no avoiding tuning into talk that expresses the cost of a KPFT membership in equivalent units of other stuff. Like a cup of coffee. Whether is was the five-cents-a-day fare that Sally Struthers spoke of before the age of Star Bucks or the proverbial four dollar frappachino, that calculation is rarely omitted from fund raising efforts. Possibly because it’s easy math…and nearly everyone in the geekosphere can relate to caffeine.

And you certainly wouldn’t want to have to figure out what a KPFT Basic Membership would cost you in terms of terabytes transferred to Amazon’s Simple Storage Solution if you had to do it by hand, would you? Especially if they’re computing megabytes as a powers of two rather than the mega-means-one-thousand bytes methodology that is extremely popular with hard drive manufacturers.

No, you would want, maybe even *need*, a calculator.

Blaise Pascal is generally credited with inventing the digital calculator. And by digital, I mean a technology that uses discrete values rather electronic. I have seen some misinformed folk on the ‘net under the impression that Blaise was typing out 55378008 to elicit giggles from friends. That is simply not the case. Blaise’s calculator, known as the Pascaline, was a collection of eight movable dials, each one representing a power of ten. So as the first dial representing the numbers zero through nine would make one full revolution, it would move the second wheel, representing the tens, one click.

This was actually an improvement on the Slide Rule, which was invented in 1622 by William Oughtred. Early-day slide rules came in both rectangular *and* circular models. An engineer with a slide rule is his pocket is probably a pretty old engineer; an engineer with a circular slide rule is ancient.

In 1820, the Arithmometer came on the scene. It was the first commercially successful mechanical calculator.

In 1886, the Comptometer became the first successful key-driven adding machine.

In 1878, W.T. Odhner introduced the Odhner Arithmometer that improved on the earlier device with the addition of a pinwheel engine.

And in 1893, The “Millionare” calculator was introduced. It was the first in its class to perform direct multiplication. Snopes neither confirmed nor denied that these early calculators were, in fact, covered with gold.

Other cool calculated names? The Arithmaurel in 1842 and the curtly name Curta. The Curta was the first miniature calculator that could be held in one hand. And while it was introduced to the world in 1948, it was developed under peculiar circumstances in 1938.

These circumstances included Nazi’s bunkered away in underground salt mines, forcing a Mr. Curt Herzstark (Spoiler Alert: the Curta) to work on a small, black metal cylinder, no bigger than the palm of his hand.

If you want to know more, you can Go Googling or you can check out the story re-enacted by real live people on the Neuhaus stage of the Alley Theater.

They’ll be putting on Kenneth Lin’s play, Intelligence-Slave, which centers around Curt, his work on the world’s first miniature four function calculator and his dealings with the nasty Nazi’s that designated him an intelligence slave during the second World War.

The play runs from May 23 through June 20th here in Houston at the Alley Theater. It’s actually the play’s world premier, otherwise I would rattle off some reviews for you. You hear that, bloggers? This is brand new territory…

Another spoiler alert? You can spell Sieg Heil using the same upside-down technique on any pocket calculator with an LCD disply. Actually, I’m not entirely sure that’s in the play; I’ve only read the first act. I do know that the cast has spent some time with an actual Curta device so they would be able to more accurately operate the prop-Curta on stage.

For details on the play and performance times, hit www.alleytheatre.org. (Either spelling of theater works with that…)

A warning: The play is recommended for mature audiences due to “language and subject matter”. I’m assuming this mature subject matter is the math behind 9’s Compliment, not the Nazis. Nine’s Compliment is the notion that you can perform subtraction operations by adding the radix compliment, or in our own decimal system, the Nine’s compliment of a number.

If you want some Allied Action, you’ll have to search out Hugh Whitemore’s play, Breaking the Code, which centers around Alan Turing and his efforts to break the German Enigma code at Bletchley Park during World War II. The play was adapted for television in 1996 by the BBC and was re-broadcast in the US by PBS, so there’s a good chance you can find it.

While that’s not certainly not it for this calculated cry for currency, that that’s for BarretTime.

Allright. I’m sticking with the TV theme of the night. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the skit from Sesame Street with Lefty the Salesman trying to sell the Golden AN. The plan went something like, “Take the Golden AN, put it in the tan van. Give it to Dan, who takes it to Fran.” He can’t quite keep the order together, so he audibly tries to work it out. Which would have been fine had a police officer named Stan not been passing within earshot. Stan gives him “ten days in the can for stealing the Golden AN.” The skit ends with Lefty saying “I should have ran!”

If you’re old enough to remember that skit, you may, from time to time, have issues with the myriad of ANs that exist in the world of computers today. From WANs to MANs to LANs and even CANs, PANs and HANs, it seems like there’s a new Lefty at every elecronics show trying to move yet another AN. So how do you keep them all straight? To help you out, we’ll borrow a bit from Grover’s Near and Far skit. I don’t know if Jay Lee has a Grover in addition to his Kermit, but the skit entails Grover running into the foreground of the television frame, shouting NEAR, running to the background, shouting FAR. That’s pretty much it. For our own AN tour, we’ll start with Far and work our way up to Near.

The universal bulding block in this excercise is the AN, which stands for Area Network. The network is the medium used to connect any number devices or users to other devices and/or users. So really, all you have to do is learn and understand the first letter of each Area Network acronym. It’s not like I’m asking you to memorize CCMP. Anyone want to take a guess at that? CCMP? It’s my latest acronym.

Counter Mode with Cipher Block Chaining Message Authentication Code Protocol aka the new 802.11i encryption protocol that does away with parts of WEP and WPA.

*You* don’t have to memorize that. All you have to do is remember ‘Area Network’ and make an educated guess at the first letter.

So, starting with farthest out, we’ve got the WAN or Wide Area Network. If you have a hardware router or wireless access point at home, chances are it has a WAN port on the back that you connect to whatever device provides your broadband. And that’s what a WAN is, a large network designed to cover very large distances. Several routing protocols exist to make this happen, with TCP/IP (or Transmission Control Protocol slash Internet Protocol) being the most widely known. So when you see WAN, think Internet, and plug things in accordingly.

A little closer to home we have the LAN. This is the Local Area Network that interconnects all the computers in your home or all of the computers in a small office. Most home broadband routers, firewalls, and Wireless Access Points will have a LAN port on the back. Some have several. If the WAN port faces the Internet, then the LAN side faces the computers on your side of the device. Most LANs use a certain class of TCP/IP address that isn’t routable on the WAN. These IP addresses usually start with a 192, 172 or 10. And if you remove the wires, you’ve got a WLAN, or Wireless Local Area Network. So that’s your one hard AN acronym. Technically, you can have up to 254 hosts on a LAN. If you want to go beyond that, say, in a large office environment, you have to look back to the WAN or decide to go MAN.

Now there’s some gray area surrounding MANs. MANs are Metropolitain Area Networks and can usually be recognized by their exellent personal grooming habits (that’s where the term MANscaping comes from), their fashionable wardrobe and their stylish accessories. Remember: It’s not a purse, it’s a Metropolitain Area Network Bag. Actually, it’s a purse.

Continuing the run into the foreground, we have CANs. CANs or Controller Area Networks, have already been deployed in newer automobiles, in factories and even in some hospitals. These simple network devices replace short runs of wire where wire just won’t do, letting things like the air pressure sensors in your car’s valve stems communicate with your car’s controller, flashing a ‘low air pressure’ warning on the dash. Another application is letting multiple pieces of medical equipment communicate with each other without the need for runs of wires all around the operating table, tripping both doctors and nurses.

HANs or Home Area Networks are definitely the new hotness. This network connects household appliances like washers and dryers to Smart Energy Meters and thermostats that are popping up in parts of Texas. With a HAN, you can easily do things like schedule your washer and dryer to run when energy prices are low. And your appliances will know the current price of electricity because the SmartMeter on the outside of the house makes that information available to the main HAN controller. Giving you the ability to turn on your AC remotely or even pre-heat the oven if you’re on the way home from the store with some frozen fare.

Both Controller Area Networks and Home Area Networks take advantage of low power devices with a very small form factors. The ZigBee standard is one that’s being leveraged more and more these days, due to the small size and the fact that it can run months if not years on a single battery. If you remember WarDriving or using Network Stumbler in the early days of WiFi, know that this is going to be the next version of that. There’s already a Network Stumbler-esque program for the ZigBee standard, which is quickly becoming the defacto standard for HANs and CANs.

And finally, the PAN, or Personal Area Network. BlueTooth is an excellent example of this. PANs let you connect personal devices to other personal devices. For instance, streaming music from your phone to another BlueTooth device, like a pair of wireless headphones. Several of Dwight’s mice would also land in that category, along with any kind of pairing you do between your phone and your laptop or car.

So, you’re now ready to handle anything “AN”, golden or otherwise.

To check out some PAN, HAN and CAN gear in person, come out to this Friday’s Geek Gathering, happening at the Coffee Groundz in Midtown Houston at McGowan between Bagby and Brazos. Things get started at seven and can go quite late. We’ve lined up our own 8-bit DJ for a return performance, along with Brenden Macaluso of Recompute. He’ll be bringing at least one Recomputer, a very green PC that’s made of corrugated cardboard held together with non-toxic white glue. We’ll also have a smattering of Arduino gear and open source hardware. WiFi and electricity are free, but coffee, beer, wine, liquor and food will set you back a dollar or two. All of this happens this Friday starting at seven on the Siete de Mayo.

And while that’s nearly it for the cessation of your Cinco de Mayo, that’s that for BarretTime.