Software Systems Architecture

[koko] "Onward"

Tue, 07 May 2024 00:01:00 CDT

May 7, 2024 -- Five decades ago, I was immersed in working on my dissertation when Wally Stopher (as he called himself then) came to my door and announced "this is Roky Erickson" -- my jaw dropped. They came by a couple of times. Roky let me copy a cassette he was carrying and let me tape him playing my upright piano. Wally, more recently, "Henry," was/is better known as "Oat Willie" for his infamous candidacy for Texas Governor in 1968, and for the campaign slogan "Onward, through the fog", coined by his late partner, Linda Miller.

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Keeping in practice

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 13:35:00 CST

January 18, 2022 -- When I was in 9th grade, my clarinet teacher wanted me to forgo my other interests to focus on clarinet, accept that I needed a much better instrument, and persuade my parents to buy me one. She predicted that if I did not, I would become a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. My eclectic nature rebelled, and I mostly abandoned clarinet for years. However, 20+ years ago, I got a professional grade instrument. I've (re-)gained prowess and enjoy learning new things. With all of my instruments, I'm trying to be more disciplined about reading music, not just playing by ear, and practicing multiple times a day. But if I were asked to play seriously, I would have to at least redouble my efforts.
"Keeping in practice" applies today not just with music, but many other skills, keeping ready to take things to another level as needed, anticipating potential opportunities and challenges, and preparing accordingly.

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Pervasive videoconferencing

Mon, 27 Jul 2020 01:22:00 CDT

July 27, 2020 -- Time, again, to assert the obvious: videoconferencing is more than "mainstream", videoconferencing is pervasive. Saturday afternoon I tried to join a large Zoom meeting, but was turned away: "This meeting has reached a maximum of 500 participants. Please try again later." I did try again later. The maximum had been increased to 1000, but I was again turned away. It is hard to fathom a successful video meeting with 500 sites, but apparently that one was working well enough to double the site count! That morning I spent 90+ minutes in a Zoom meeting with about 40 participants across about 35 locations. The main technology distractions were people showing spreadsheets differently than intended.

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just keepin' on keepin' on

Mon, 01 Jul 2019 12:22:00 CDT

July 1, 2019 -- tl;dr sustaining Dell UNIX -> prolonging JAWS -> exploring NEXTSTEP 486 -> reviving timbl's WorldWideWeb browser

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now that videoconferencing is Mainstream...

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 12:46:00 CST

December 6, 2018 -- time to assert the obvious. I've stopped trying to keep track of conferencing revenues and unit sales, primarily because my previous sources are no longer available: Elliot Gold retired almost 6 years ago. Andrew Davis is no longer at Wainhouse. Partly because the numbers seem less relevant when video calling seems so pervasive. Partly because the companies that I think of as equipment vendors seem most interested in touting their "cloud" offerings. Partly because every day I see Apple ads for FaceTime, or a news broadcast using Skype to interview a subject, or ESPN broadcasts including several anchors stylized as a multipoint videoconference.

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Computing 2017

Thu, 20 Oct 2016 10:00:00 CDT

Predicting the future is hard. Even when the concepts are right, the timing is often not. When the year 1984 came along, Nineteen Eighty-Four seemed mostly fictional. 30+ years later, some of Orwell's predictions were prescient. With human travel to Mars merely anticipated, travel to Saturn as in 2001: A Space Odyssey probably won't happen any time soon, but HAL 9000 is very recognizable. So Billy Joel may have been prescient, too, just wrong about the year.

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It looks like its a-dyin

Thu, 11 Jul 2013 22:00:00 CDT

Four score and seven years since the Herbert Hoover TV demonstrations, "distance multimedia", "video conferencing", "telepresence", whatever we want to call it, video calling is still trying to grow up.

Irrational exuberence was en vogue a year ago, but even skeptics didn't forecast sales plummeting. Analysts were forecasting 20% year to year industry growth. They were so wrong!

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Videoconferencing? Telepresence? Expectations

Tue, 15 May 2012 18:00:00 CDT

A couple of months ago, I seemingly started channeling Alan Greenspan after seeing a report of US$3 billion dollars in video calling revenue for 2011 -- that report also forecasting dramatic growth in the next few years. US$3B in 2011 seemed twice reality and US$22B in the next five years seemed impossible. Part of my thinking was wrong -- the industry has been growing faster than I realized. But the optimistic forecasts seem to already have been tamed by Polycom's April earnings report, and 40+% stock price decline in the last 3 months, and the analogous 12% Cisco stock price decline last week. I remain skeptical of the US$22B figure, but now understand and accept the US$3B figure.

There were at least 4 reports for 2011 industry revenues that I saw at roughly the same time:

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Looking Back at Mainstream Videoconferencing

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:40:00 CST

Last year's biggest video calling news was financial -- Cisco acquiring Tandberg, Skype separating from eBay and Logitech purchasing LifeSize. Let's assume these are signs of maturation, that video calling is significant enough to be termed "mainstream", and look back at the predictions Joe Duran and I made in 1996. We prefaced our book,

Down the Road is our vision of the future of videoconferencing:
Chapter 13: "Barriers Breaking Down" is mostly about the current challenges to successful videoconferencing. With the technologies and developments we see on the near horizon, these challenges will be overcome, and mainstream videoconferencing will surely be a reality.
Chapter 14: "Things to Come" concludes our vision of where videoconferencing will take us, once videoconferencing is mainstream.

As often happens with technology predictions, we were too optimistic in the short term and perhaps not optimistic enough in the longer term. Let's consider more specifics.

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"Video Conferencing" D.O.A.?

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 16:30:00 CST

After the long predicted "Year of the LAN" finally arrived, use of "LAN" and/or "Local Area Network" died off. "Ethernet" and/or just plain "network" were more sensible words to use -- there was no need to encompass the losers: ARCNET, Token Ring, FDDI et al. Even with the emergence and prominence of WiFi, displacing Ethernet in some contexts, there has been no apparent revival of "LAN".

Anecdotes, financial results, public opinion and popular culture suggest that we have experienced the year of video conferencing. However, with this arrival of video calling, the term "videoconferencing" is rightfully dying. A variety of terms, e.g., "telepresence", and brands, e.g., Skype, have emerged and become more useful than "conferencing".

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Flash Forward: The Year of Video Conferencing

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 13:00:00 CST

18 years ago, the long predicted "Year of the LAN" was no longer in question -- the Local Area Network had finally arrived. A dozen years ago our book predicted "Videoconferencing should become mainstream by the end of the decade ..." How wrong! ...

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On a Monday

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 13:20:00 CDT

It is another holiday in the U.S. (and Canada). It likely will rain, a fitting end to a "Summer of Rain" in Austin. I've listened to the three songs I usually listen to on Mondays, by the Boomtown Rats, Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five, and (The Rev.) Al Green.

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Desktop virtual machines (DRM bites me, too)

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 21:15:00 CDT

[V]irtual machine performance passes my test, but this application (playing DVDs) doesn't seem very usable.

Upside Down (Windows over Fedora 7 Linux)

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 08:15:00 CDT

Eventually, it dawned that I should try turning the software upside down. Instead of running Fedora in a virtual machine on Windows, the raw hardware could run Fedora and the Windows file server could be relegated to a virtual machine on VMware on Fedora.

Real Virtual

Mon, 21 May 2007 13:15:00 CDT

Sometimes I feel overly cautious as I re-engage with virtual machine thinking. When IBM, Microsoft et al aggressively tout the advantages of deploying servers as virtual machines, what's the sweat? Last month I plunged into decisions and experiences with virtual machines in the "real world" -- production environments. Alas, there was no time for writing stories then, and the thoughts are fleeting.

Free code meets free sectors

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 12:52:00 CDT

... 500GB disk drives are readily available for under $200 and have roughly a billion sectors, so the marginal cost of a disk sector is under 0.2 micro-cents. In the last week or so, I've become re-enamored^VRM with virtual machines and am using them to gobble up tens of millions of sectors with free software. ...

Looking at and past the windows

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 11:45:00 CST

(1965) "Same old places and the same old songs... It's the singer, not the song." - Jagger/Richards
(1929) "You may forget the singer, but don't forget this song." - A.P. Carter

Looking out the windows

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 04:45:00 CST

While the "real world" mourns President Ford and ponders the past, present, and future of our planet, many in cyberspace find now the time to ponder hardware, software, and Internet platforms.

blogs & S P A M revisited

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 04:45:00 GMT

My laments about blog overload coincided with Gartner... After months of a seeming plateau, there are widespread perceptions and statistics that spam has escalated.

blog, blog, blog

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 04:45:00 GMT

Reasons I haven't been writing?

Busy with family
Busy with work, both paid and pro bono
Writer's block
All of the above, but...

"blog overload" has also affected me.

Post-hiatus Miscellany: Surgery, Photos, Phones, Notebooks, Fedora 5

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 04:45:00 GMT

After the last long hiatus, "If Tomorrow Wasn't Such A Long Time", I did not expect another, but it happened, for similar reasons: personal illnesses, a variety of family challenges and blessings, and trying to keep up/catch up with commercial and pro bono professional activities.

The Really Difficult Parts; More iBook Struggles

Sat, 10 Sep 2005 04:45:00 GMT

Effectively identifying/sorting/searching/sharing digital photos is challenging. My iBook was seemingly dead but has been partially revived.

Let Me Keep My Metadata!

Fri, 22 Jul 2005 04:45:00 GMT

They Took My JPEGs! & won't give 'em back!

Sat, 16 Jul 2005 04:45:00 GMT

They Took My Kodachrome! Medical Addendum

Sat, 02 Jul 2005 04:45:00 GMT

Navigating Modern Medicine, Miscellany

Mon, 23 May 2005 04:45:00 GMT

Digital Photos, PHP, FC3, Dead Fans

Sat, 23 Apr 2005 04:45:00 GMT

(disc)centricity: Solaris X and Fedora in a Windows world

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 04:45:00 GMT