Next week I will be in Washington State. The trip is courtesy of Microsoft and I will be visiting the Techfest 2008 at Microsoft Research. As far as I know, this is a regular event that was initially started to allow Microsoft research to demonstrate their activities to one another and to a range to employees in the company at large. More recently, it has been opened up to include non-Microsoft attendees. The official description says it allows attendees to "exchange ideas with colleagues, show off their latest innovations, and shine a light into the future of computing". No matter what computing platform you prefer, there is no doubt that MS Research has an enormous group of very smart and influential people, and it should be interesting.
2008
2008
Techfest is just starting, but is already clear it is very cool. It makes Microsoft look very good by showcasing the impact their work is having.
It's an impressive set of attendees. On the bus here I sat with Bob Constable.
It's also very well orchestrated. Right now Craig Mundie is chatting with Alan Alda doing a great job illustating how much impact the work might have. This works surprisingly well.
The techfest (see prior post) features a large number of individual projects from Microsoft research. Much of the event is for internal consumption by Microsoft employees, but today only they have a "public" day that is also open to invited visitors and the press.
The event features a cross section of prjoects, and only a sample of what they are doing.
THere are several projects on sensor networks. This includes a very nice system for environmental monitoring that uses low power nodes and grid networking to collect data in outdoor environments.
There is a cool project from MSR Asia that all allows you to record the photos and travel history you experience as you move about. A nice aspect of this is that is allows gps tracks and time-stamped images to be intergrated and fused off-line.
2008
There is a contest going on with Iceland Airlines, who have a new service out of Toronto. [ As of March 17th, 2008, the contest is now finished. I won the free trip.]
If I can get lot of people to click on my photo, I will win a free trip to Iceland with my wife and kids. This would be great since she has been wanting to go there for a decade or more, and all my professional travel is universally to warm destinations. (And it's too costly for us to just fly there for fun.)
Help me out. Visit
http://www.icelandair.ca/home/packages/contest/contest1/
and click the image of me with two pseudo-Icelandic girls (who are actually both from Toronto), as shown below. Pretty please!
Warning: The iceland air web site will require an email address and name.
2008
The St. George's School Robotics Team, with Nicholas playing a key position, recently participated in a regional robotics competition. They built a robot that had to drive around under remote control and shoot bean bags at a large (30 foot high) score board. Their robot had an uncannily good throwing arm. In addition, they also designed and produced an shiny exhibition booth that featured a working animatronic flying dragon, and descriptive video (in two languages) and associated materials.
Unfortunately, they experienced an electrical short early on in the competition which badly damaged their hardware, and the robot was not able to perform well. That's how so many technology demos go. Nevertheless, the whole thing was very impressive. A big high profile competition like this is a great way to stimulate enthusiasm for, and interest in, science and technology.
The robot itself operated using a differential drive steering mechanism: two independently powered real wheels. Two small front wheels provided balance. As is often the case with differential drive, good straight-forward steering was tricky, but they addresses this by using a pretty large wheel diameter and comparatively low torque.
2008
Well, you asked for pictures from the High School robotics competition I mentioned. Here are a couple of the team and their dragon-robot sculpture. Sadly, I have no pictures of the actual robot in the competition, due to the awful lighting.
2008
A while back I got a Celestron SkyScout start finder, courtesy of my wife. This is a portable gadget that uses a combination of GPS, magnetometer, and inclinometer, all solid robotic sensing technologies, to identify a star. You look through a hole to target a star, but the star identification process has nothing optical about it, which is a very neat trick. I describe it in the enclosed video (which is my first little experiment in video blogging -- next time, I'll try not to do it right after a bad night's sleep).
Oh, if you want to find it on Amazon.com, then click here. They call it
the Celestron SkyScout Personal Planetarium. They also have a version
combined with a green laser pointer.
Shortcomings of the Celestron SkyScout: takes a few minutes to acquire a GPS lock, LCD display is not great in very cold weather. Neither of these is serious.
Shortcomings of the video: too low a speaking volume, cluttered background, I look really tired.
2008
I recently configured a Linux (Ubuntu) web server for SSL support. I had not done this for a long time, and had largely forgotten how. Here is the recipe and a fix to this problem.
Prologue: making your own SSL certificates
The easy solution to generating self-signed certificates needed for SSL is the the CA.pl perl script, which is included in the openssl installation tar ball. You can find it at
http://www.openssl.org/source/
or else Google for "openssl-0.9.8 tar gz".
You need to generate suitable security keys (certificates) before you can use SSL. This can be accomplished using these steps from a suitable configuration directory:
perl CA.pl -newca
perl CA.pl -newreq
perl CA.pl -sign
You will have to answer various questions. The questions are stored locally, so the actual answers do not matter much, except for the domain name.
In particular, you should enter your server host name (e.g. www.dudek.org) when asked for a "common name".
This should produce the files newcert.pem and newkey.pem in the current directory.
Setting up Apache to use SSL
The apache2 configuration section for SSL then needs to use these keys with lines like:
SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/newcert.pem
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl/newkey.pem
Whoops: error -12227
After this I was getting the error in my log file
OpenSSL: Exit: error in SSLv3 read client certificate B
which leads to an error -12227 from Firefox when the site is accessed.
After searching Google I found other people complaining about this, but with no actual diagnosis. Well, I have the answer. Looking at the error logs, I found that it was due to having configured apache/ssl for client authentication without having provided suitable certificates (the detailed story is that apache needs to understand you are acting as your own certificate authority, and not depending on an external one).
Solution to error: SSLCACertificate
The fix is to change the line in the apache config file that reads:
SSLCACertificate require
to instead read
SSLCACertificate none
After that, it should all work.
... ...
There's more. Read the whole story on "apache2 SSL configuration, error -12227 and self-signed certificates"
2008
Earth hour came and went in Montreal. We kept our lights off as a symbolic gesture, but not much change was apparent from the houses in the neighborhood, or the broader bit of cityscape I managed to see. The impact of electrical usage from Earth Hour would have been limited, but the symbolism and publicity could have been important. On the whole, I am quite dismayed and a bit disappointed by my brethren.
(In all honesty, I did come close to forgetting start-time of the event myself.)
2008
I've been hearing about Twitter for a while now. It's a communal micro-blog. In general, I have though it was ridiculous and constituted a way for people to waste time. Worse, I tend to value my privacy and a site that wastes time and exposes your privacy seemed really pointless.
That said, I keep hearing how good it is, and came across the following video that
makes a compelling case for using Twitter. I am still very unsure about it, but
the idea of maintaining links with far away friends seems good.
On the other hand, it's not clear whether (a) the idea will scale, (b) it's not merely suited to a few very web-oriented people, or (c) I am just a cynic. I'm there as gdudek.
Your opinion?
Sorry, this poll was not enabled for voting for a long time. That's finally fixed.
