Microsoft Response Point

 We have made our first foray into VOIP market with Syspine’s Response Point System. We are setting up our system  using Syspine’s DOS-A50 4 Port System and 16 phones. It gave us the opportunity to upgrade our Switches with SMC’s Programmable units. We placed a POE switch to support our upstairs systems and to power our phones over the Ethernet connections. We want to try the phones in line with our computer connections to see if there is any significant traffic increase (which translates to network slowdown) with the addition of the new units. When you consider adding 16 new devices to the network infrastructure it is quite possible that there might be some change in how the network functions. It is going to be another week before the system goes into full production and we really see what kind of traffic is generated.

The reason we jumped so quickly on this change in our infrastructure was caused by our focusing on the renewal contract from our current phone line provider. They were requesting that we sign a new contract for a new contract that would lock us in to a two year period to gain a certain rate. We were not very happy at that cost and so we decided to look for alternatives. Since part of our business is providing business class phone systems we have a lot of resources to choose from and the one that looked the most promising to us was converting our standard phone service (PSTN) to digital IP Trunk Line Service. The cost savings is tremendous. We plan on retaining two PSTN lines for backup and for other primary services (Fax, Credit Card and Emergency Services) our primary phone service will now be through the internet. Our provider Packet8 is giving us 12 lines and with the cost of the two PSTN lines we are keeping, we will have about a $500 per month savings by moving to the new service. With the cost of the Syspine equipment purchase we will be able to upgrade our phone system and have it pay for itself from the savings inside of one year. Now part of the reason the savings was so great is the number of lines that we are using but even for a smaller installation your cost savings could be just as significant.

Over the next month I will be documenting different aspects of our new system and how we integrate it into the way we do business. I will talk about the IP Trunking Technology and how it has worked for us and some of the other products that are available for the system that you might want to consider. So be sure to come back to site to see how we are progressing and hear about what tweaks we have to make to get the system to perform to our requirements. I will be posting more detailed configuration information both on our Solutions Pages and creating a configurator on our Products Pages. For now,  let me give you some system specs of what we are using and what the system can do. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate contacting me.

Bob Appleby

How to add the Print Directory feature for folders in Windows XP and in Windows Vista

Had a recent request from a customer to be able to print a directory listing and other than using screen capture  techniques or applications like Jing or Snagit from TechSmith. I did a brief search and found a Microsoft Tech Article describing a method of adding in a batch file that can be called to print directory listing from within Explorer.

The Intro to this paper describes the process as: This article describes how to add the Print Directory feature for folders in Windows XP and in Windows Vista. After you follow the steps that are described in the "More Information" section, you can right-click a folder and then click Print Directory Listing to print a directory listing of the contents of a folder.

You can find this article at: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/321379

Bob

Linksys has a new Power Line Ethernet System

I am ordering in  new product from Linksys to see how well it works. Let me describe the situation for you and see if it might sound familiar. I know that not many of you have setup a Media Center System in your home but we are using one to host up music and television to our kitchen under counter TV using a Linksys Media Center Extender. The problem is that it is connecting wirelessly and every time we turn on the microwave it disrupts the signal between the wireless router and the extender. The easy fix for this is to run a wire to the room and eventually that will probably be what I’ll do, but I don’t crawl through tight spaces as well as I used to so it isn’t that easy of a project.

So… Out comes Google Search and I begin to look into what is available in today’s technology using Ethernet connectivity through your household power grid. Linksys has several products that fit into this category but the ones I am particularly interested in are the new Power Line Series 300 products. These devices turn your existing electrical wiring into a digital network instantly. The PLE300 and PLS300 will dish out speeds up to a staggering 200mbps which is ideal for supporting HD content video.

The PLE300 is a single connection device for extending your network into those hard to reach areas and the PLS300 provides a 4-port switch to allow you to connect multiple devices to this box. The concept is great, next week I will report on how well it works. Wish me luck!

Bob

November 15 Scott’s beautiful Creation

We recently had the opportunity to build a system for one of our customers that gave us carte blanche on putting it together. The basics, a beautiful Samsung 26 inch screen, a quad-core Extreme processor, and Vista Ultimate tops the list. The only thing that we probably should have done was moved the customer to 64-bit and run up the memory. We were a little worried about driver availability so we hesitated on that one. Scott is going to put together a complete write up on this one on his site and I will update the pointers when he finishes. Scott’s site is: http://cid-c1df53b40a2f504d.spaces.live.com/?mkt=en-US&partner=Live.Spaces.

We put together a little movie on this as well that I will push up to the network when I get a chance as well.

Paperport – How to scan multipage documents

There are a lot of different products out there to help you manage your documents, and Paperport is one of the packages that have been out there for quite a while and is maturing quite well. I recently had a customer ask me how to scan multi-page documents and make sure that your pages stay in order. Here is a quick video showing you how to do it with Paperport 11 professional.

See video here.

New Windows Live Features!

If you are trying to keep up with the cloud computing onslaught, Microsoft has just release a new product updates that enhance your web interaction dramatically. If you are a media producer, photos, video, or written content, then you will love some of the new interaction within Microsoft’s Live programs. The new download is available for updating your current applications at: http://download.live.com/. I had originally heard about this new update on Windows Weekly, and finally this morning I decided to load it up and give it a little whirl.

They've added some functions for photos and movies in photo gallery and moviemaker. This new moviemaker program is not as extensive as the version that comes with Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate, but the one feature that I do like is its ability to post directly to Microsoft MSN’s Soapbox site. When you tell it to publish all of the information that you need to enter to publish it is presented for you to fill out in a nice dialog box and it very quickly and easily converts in uploads your video content to the site. Once it is there it is very easy to attach the video to your blog and voila! you have your presentation ready and available for all of your readers. Believe me, this is much simpler than the convoluted process you had to go through before. It also appears that if you are using Windows Live Writer, and you use the insert video function, this will also allow you to post the video up to Soapbox or YouTube. You can also connect directly to either your YouTube or Soapbox account to connect videos that you have already uploaded to the site's.

I use Windows Live Writer for creating and posting all of my blog entries no matter which site I'm currently posting to. We have added quite a few new features including an edit, preview, source tabs at the bottom of the screen too quickly change your view of the blog you are currently editing. You can turn on word count so that you can get a handle on how verbose you are as you are writing. There are quite a few more features included in the options tool that allows you to control your experience with the application as well.

There is a new toolbar add-on into Internet Explorer that gives you direct access to your Windows Live applications. This gives you direct access to your mail photos and calendar sites as well as quick search, mapping and translation buttons. There are new versions of Messenger and Mail which are quite interesting as well if you use these programs. It's worth a look, and these programs are all free. Can't beat the price!

Intel Project Submission

October 04

Intel Project Submission

Well, we had a busy evening on Thursday and Friday. I helped Scott, Ed and Chris put together video submissions for an Intel contest to show innovative ways of using Intel products by system builders. Scott used an Atom Board in his project. He installed all of his components into a model of the Millennium Falcon. He rigged up the hard drive LEDs so that they flash when the hard drive is being accessed. The left-hand side gunnery bay/observation deck is used as a docking area for the wireless mouse.The large antenna on the top deck is actually a wireless network adapter. The right side is where all of the motherboard connections are.

Ed's creation to the left, beautiful work of art that he created in his woodworking shop.  The top is a sheet of tempered glass so you can look into the system and see the different computer components that he used in the system.  He designed the system as a media center server that is being used for all his digital media functions in the family room.  He is running Microsoft's Media Center and is using the system as a DVR as well.  Looking at the front left you will see an area that houses a disk array that is used for both his programs and storing all of his digital data. The right front side has several components for controlling fan speeds and reporting on different conditions in the box. It also provides different connections for connecting different kinds of devices to the unit. Listen to his video for the full description.

Chris has a unique system as well. The Trogdor the Terminator is Chris's idea of the ultimate game machine.  He has lots of bright lights that will dazzle you when you are looking at the machine.  He had a friend who paints cars, custom paint the outside of the case, he has a side panel etched with a wonderful design. But the truly remarkable addition to his work of art is the addition of a fully functional Atari game machine in the top area of the case. The Atari cartridges are inserted into the top of the case and all of the game connections are located on the front panel during. Be sure to listen to Chris's video to get a full insight into all of the things he has done to his box.

It is great to see the ingenuity of our technicians and their craftsmanship to put together some very unique systems. I wish them all luck with their entries in Intel's builder's contest.

Other Interesting Hobbies...

Kathy and I visited Kecksburg this weekend for their fireman's festival. This is the third annual fireman's festival incorporating a car show and Kecksburg's  number one attraction: The UFO. The fire department had the typical skill and food booths that most fire departments have as well as some booths showing off local vendor's crafts. There was a native American booth (Teepee) with some "Natives" pounding on drums, chanting and dancing, a leather working booth and my brother Ed Appleby and John Stein were there with their club to demonstrate their skill with blacksmithing. They had an area setup above the fire hall with several different crafts being shown including woodworking, rope making and Ed and John were pounding away on metal making all sorts of useful items. My niece, Patricia was also there but I didn't get to see her demonstrate her skill. There was hardly enough room with Ed and John to do their work. I took some pictures of John putting together a flag holder and Ed making a candle stick holder as well. Kathy came away with some booty for their stash and bell from the leather maker as well. She loves to put these on the door handles.

According to an article in Pittsburgh Live this is the first year that the UFO angle is being incorporated with the festival. An interesting cover-up story that has some strange turns. There have been documentaries on this incident on the Sci-Fi Channel, Unsolved Mysteries and soon on the History Channel. The Crash occurred on December 9th, 1965. A lot has been written about this incident but interesting enough I hadn't heard a thing about that I can remember until this past weekend when John told me they were going to have a booth here for the fireman's festival. If you are are interested in these kind of things be sure to take a brief tour of all the articles on the Internet describing the incident. This should get you started.

Chrome! Do we need another Internet Browser?

Google is making a compelling reason for using yet another web browser.  After reading the comic book that is available that describes generally the reason that Google brought out a new browser product makes for a compelling reason to use their program.  The one negative that I've heard so far is that when you save your passwords that you are typing into the system for accessing secure areas, they can be easily viewed in the password area.  They are not encrypted, they're sitting there and standard text format for all the world to view who has access to your desktop system.

However, Google touts the new security functions that are built into the browser that disallows any cross talk of information between tabbed windows or from your local storage sources.  Each tabbed window is maintained as a separate thread which allows the processing of Web-based applications to occur simultaneously without interfering with processes occur in another tab.  You can easily detach a tab to separate a browser window from the current window that it resides in.  If you're doing a lot of research this makes it very easy to display information side by side from two separate tabs at the same time.

The default home page shows the nine most visited websites with thumbnails, in nine most recent book marks, and a quick search far too quickly jump to information pages that you may be looking for.  It allows you to add a quick link bar at the top of the screen for those sites that you want to be able to quickly get to on a daily basis.

Another new feature that I like is the ability to create an application shortcut that you can store on your desktop, quick launch bar or  start menu. (see picture at right).  This will display a very clean interface with only the site application in the window making it appear as though it is a true program application.  This delivers greater screen real estate for that application and make it easier to work with the online application as well.  If you're an avid user of programs like Google's document applications like Blogger, Calendar, Docs, Gmail etc..., You may make great use of this feature.

As in most applications there are many different features that can be accessed through easy to learn keyboard shortcuts.  Be sure to check these out. If you plan use this application it will help you to become more efficient with it.  The address bar that sits atop the normal Google Chrome window simplifies your Internet experience by doubling as a search box.  To open a new tab click on the plus icon next to the last open tab. You can reorder your tabs by clicking and dragging them to a new position and as I have mentioned above, you can't drag that tab completely out of the current window and create a new window for that tab where you drag a drop that tab. Because the tab windows are running as separate threads you have complete crash protection between tabbed window sites. To browse the web without storing a record of the session you can open a window in incognito mode by clicking on the page menu and choosing new incognito window. A new window will open that won't save and information from the Internet session. For more feature information go to Google Chrome's Feature Page.  If you want to download go to Google Chrome's Download Page.

Look for updates as we push this new program to it's limits.

250GB! Come on now Comcast! You had better rethink this!

Comcast is planning on instituting a 250GB limit to the amount of data users can send and receive beginning October 1st. I have received my email from them so we know this is what they are planning to do. Why do I think this is a problem? Let me show you an example of a heavy internet user, me, and how I compare to their model of an average user which they say never even comes close to 10% of the 250GB limit! Really?

Your Monthly Allowance:		250GB
Let's start with my new hobby that I have embraced so grandly. I have gotten a new digital SLR camera that takes pictures at a 10 megapixel resolution. Currently I am only storing in JPEG format but I will be collecting the images in raw soon and this number will increase dramatically. I am taking about 500 pictures per week and storing to my network drive. These images are automatically being transferred for backup to my Amazon S3 off site storage account. This backup is using bandwidth. Average picture size is 2.5mb x 500 x 4 weeks per month.	2.5*500*4=5,000	245GB
Now I am also taking about 1/4 of those pictures and posting them to a gallery account on line so that would use: 2.5 x 125 x 4	2.5*125*4=1,250	243.75
Still have lots of bandwidth. Now, about once a month I am taking some video which probably averages about 2gb per month throughout the year on average. December, April, May and June seems to be the heaviest months. On these months I will take about an hour's worth of video which is equivalent to 5gb. Again, I am backing this up to Amazon S3 and posting most of this to my galleries. Since we are talking about worse case scenarios, this would be about 10gb of data being posted	10GB	233.75
I have started watching a lot of my favorite television shows on HULU because it is simpler and these presentations have fewer and shorter commercial breaks. A typical 1 hour show (40-48 minutes real time) is using about 250mb per show. Let's say that I am watching 5 of these per week. (so what happens in a family of four, with kids that watch 3 hours of TV per day, 7 days per week? 3*7*250*30=157,500. There's a chunk!)	250*5*4=5,000 Or for a typical family that accesses their entertainment around 150GB	83.75

Most other browsing, email and even remote access to work probably wouldn't amount to much. But there are some people using the system rather heavily that I wouldn't call abusive that could come very close to Comcast's cap. Add things like movie downloads, High Definition Movies can be 8GB or more per movie, streaming music from online radio stations, music and podcast downloads from music sources like iTunes, Amazon, Audible and Microsoft Marketplace. The Internet is becoming a big source for our daily entertainment and even though Comcast doesn't think this cap can be reached easily in a true digitally oriented home it can be pretty easy to come close to that cap every month.

Here's the icing on the cake! Comcast is not even going to give you a method of seeing where you are on your usage cap! They leave that up to you. However, if you exceed it they will call you up and tell you that you have exceeded it and if you exceed it again you will be cut off for a year. If this is the only service available to you then this is plain unacceptable! I know that when I signed up for service Comcast was touting unlimited usage. Where has that gone?

I Can't work this way!

September 26

I Can't work this way!

I heard a scream from the adjoining office. What is that. I can't work with this in the way!

The image I have inserted at the right shows Jude's frustration with Microsoft's need to hold your hand in sometimes the most annoying ways. While the Paste Options Button can be helpful at times to control the format of the information that you are pasting, it can seem to get in your way when you are trying to see the underlying cells. If you want to turn off the Paste and/or Insert Options Button features it is very easy.

Click on the Office Button, then click on EXCEL OPTIONS button. Pick ADVANCED and then scroll down until you see the CUT, COPY and PASTE section. You will see three check box options. The first two when checked will display the options button you see to the right when you copy and paste. To turn it off, you will need to uncheck these boxes. Be sure to click on the OK button to save your changes.

To turn this option back on all you have to do is go back into the advanced options and recheck those options.

Here's a quick video  to show you to do it.

Power Tip: Launch Apps Quickly!

One of the things I like about Vista is the search function that allows you to quickly find an application that you can launch by quickly typing in a few characters found in the applications name. This works real well from the search function. You also have the ability to launch the RUN command dialog by holding down the Windows Key and pressing "R". Type in your command to launch and Voila. up pops your program if you typed it in correctly. In fact, you can drill down through your directories very quickly by typing in your starting point and let Vista prompt you for the directories that are on your machine. I put together a quick How to Series Video that you can see the Windows Key + Search function in operation.

Google's Picasa Application

I was very much impressed in the enhancements to the Google's Picasa program which I had to go back and review again for the article that I just finished for the Laurel Mountain Post. I reinstalled it on my Vista Desktop at home and it automatically found all the images I had on the local machine. I then redirected it to the Network Storage Drive I have setup and Bingo! it found all of those pictures for me as well. The Picasa interface is simple and easy to use and they have added quite a few enhancements that allow you to edit your images, post them to Google's Picasa site, create a self playing CD with the Picasa software on it to pass along your pictures to friends and family and to create a movie/slide show as well.

You need two things to get started. First and Internet account, and second, a Google account. With Google everything centers around having a Google Email account so if you don't have one go ahead and set one up. It is free so even if you decide not to use if for your general email, you can use it for all the other Google Apps that require know who you are. Click here to setup your own account. Once you have established your account go to Picasa's site to download the application.

As you can see in the picture on the right the program interface is simple and straight forward. The program once it installs will automatically search your local storage drives for pictures and will set them up in folders. The first time you send your pictures to the web you will be asked for you associated GMail information and once you enter that everything flows from there. If you have a lot of pictures and you want to use this space as a backup for you files you will want to upgrade your storage capacity. For $20 per year Google will give you 10Gbytes storage that is shared between your email, Picasa and Google docs locations. If you plan to be real active in all of these three sites and you have more than 10Gbytes of photos and videos you can go to the next level. The only problem that I see here is that you are given around 6GB by GMail and 1GB by Picasso for free anyway and the $20 is just giving 3GB to be shared between applications. If you are going to buy the extra space you may want to consider starting out at the 40GB level.

Picasa's import function seems to be slow if you have movies on your camera. It appears to read the file before it will give you the thumbnails of the contents of the the device for import selection and since movies are typically very large compared with snapshots the process takes a long time. Since the program has to read the entire contents of your memory cartridge before you begin to pick and choose what to import this takes time as well. Once it is up you can preview and choose the images you want to bring in. Using the Shift or Ctrl Key you can pick and choose which pictures you want to import. A button on the bottom begins the import process.  You get a dialog box that allows you to enter the directory to store the images, Meta Data for Date, Location and Description and the ability to delete the pictures off of the card when you are importing.

Once you have the images on your system, you will have many options to choose from to work and view your images. You can pick and choose a selection from same or different folders to produce a slide show, push the images to your Internet Picasa Storage Area or publish a GIFT CD to give out to friends and family. You can place a star on photos to select them as favorites and they will automatically be placed in a star folder as well that you can show in a slide show or produce a CD. If you right mouse click on a photo you have many options that you apply to picture very quickly, including, moving to a new folder, publishing to your Website, making it a screen saver, rotating the image and even deleting it from your system if you are getting rid of the "BAD ONES".

I have put together a little video overview of the image manipulation functions that you can access here: Picasa Video Overview

Since I seem to be on the topic of backup... Let's take a look at Windows Live Mesh

Windows Live Mesh gives you the ability to store up to 5GB for free on a centralized storage area on the Internet. Once you setup your account you don't have to load any software to be able to access your data from any machine. All you need is a browser and an Internet connection.

Windows Live Mesh is still in beta but it seems to working pretty well. It will interesting to see where Microsoft takes this capability. The basic concept is the ability to load a small application on your computer, and link it to your Live Mesh account. Anything that you drag into the folders of the account gets shared to all of the systems that are part of your Mesh Network. This allows you to synchronize information with your business workstation with your home workstation without having to drag the files back and forth or emailing them to different email accounts.

Just install the live mesh software on each device.  Then add folders to your mesh.  Your forceful than be automatically synchronized and always available for all the systems you have set up on the mesh.  You'll also get access to the machine remotely and init programs on that machine the matter where you are.

It is all so simple to share files and photos with friends and family and colleagues.  Simply invite them to a folder.  Everyone has kept up to date because files can be synchronized automatically with all of your devices in all of their devices. To take a tour of this product click here. Enjoy!

Don't try plugging in your camera's memory card with the camera on!

How stupid can I be. You'd think that I would know better, but obviously when you are in a hurry you sometimes do some very stupid things. Here's a lesson for all of you so that you don't have to be the one to have it happen to you. When inserting a memory card into a device consider turning it off so it doesn't get the jolt from the power supply in the unit you are plugging it into. I had videos of the bike race that we have going on here in PA with the bikers riding across Pennsylvania. A nice overview of this event can be found here. I wish I could have saved the pictures I took, they were pretty neat but things happen. So be careful because sometimes there is no recovery. Anyway, I was so angry with myself, I reformatted the card, luckily I didn't blow it up completely, and took some pic's around the yard which you can see here. Enjoy .

Woops! Found a little problem with Carbonite...

We did a new installation on my machine with some of Adobe's graphics programs and we found out that Carbonate Backup caused a problem with installing CS3 on my notebook. It was becoming a problem because I planned on working with a lot of the applications this next week while I am off. Yes I am strange and find a lot of comfort in working on projects involving different programs and applications. I am truly looking forward to spending some time learning some new applications. Anyway, I started talking about how Carbonite caused a problem installing Adobe's CS2 Suite applications on my notebook. Once we uninstalled Carbonite the programs loaded without a problem. I haven't tried reinstalling the Carbonite program to see if the problem persisted yet. More later as we work with this.

Google Docs - A nice alternative word processing, spreadsheet and presentation application

I was a bit skeptical about Google's Google Doc application, but once I began playing with it I found that most of the general functions that I use can be found in these applications. I did bump into their limitations but for something available online in the cloud, these applications can fill a nice niche. Here is quick look at the Google Document Management Screen: Video Overview of the Google Document Mangement Screen. 

In the document management screen (overview of the file functions) you have the ability to download your document in multiple formats including a zipped HTML file, open document, PDF, RTF, Text, and Word format. Managed sharing allows you to set up individuals as collaborators or viewers of your documents and two email those individuals the site location of the document that you are sharing.

The publish command allows you to use this application to store documents that you can later push to your blog site. So you can work on a document and when you have it ready for publication you can then push is quickly and easily to your site. It works great with Google's Blogger and it has connections to other popular sites like Wordpress and LiveJournal. I tried unsuccessfully, albeit with out much real effort to push this up to Microsoft's blog program (which is what I use for my active sites) I will update this as I play with it a little more.

Other document management functions that you can apply from this screen includes Renaming the document, Deleting, Create Folders to manage your documents, and create spreadsheets, word processing documents and presentation files. The presentation program very simple, shareable slides that can be controlled from one machine to multiple connected viewing systems. If you were on the conference call, or speaking with the client, you could direct them very quickly to the document by sending them an e-mail pointer to the presentation document, and you would be able to control the speed of the slide presentation from your screen on theirs.  The one limitation that I found that bothered me, was that I was unable to share are a video from a site other than YouTube. Of course this would be the first connection that they would create since both are properties of Google. Even this has a limitation though, the video image control box will be shown on the slide presentation that you cannot controlled remotely.  This means it you can start the video you will have to have the individuals on the other side click on the play button themselves.  I inserted some links onto the pages and with that I was able to then give the users on the other side of the presentation the ability to jump to another video presentation URL.  So the real limitation here is the inability to control the whole presentation yourself, but, for a free application this is pretty nice.

Some other document control features that you have in this application include: uploading a PowerPoint presentation that would then be converted to this format, you can import individual slides from a PowerPoint file but individual animations are not imported. You can print the presentation, either to paper or to a PDF file, with or without speaker notes, and with a choice of how many slides per page. You can also save the document as a PDF document slide presentation the you can shipped out as well. The Publish button allows you to create a mini presentation module that you can insert into your site as a video module. My Live Writer Program didn't like it though.

I created a document that shows the basic formatting that you can do with a page and describes what you can expect and what the limitations are. You can see this more clearly if you jump to this video. You can see this document as a PDF file by clicking on this link.

I'll talk about the spreadsheet application as I have a chance to spend more time with it.

Intel Modular Server Seminar

This week we held a little introductory seminar using our new Intel Modular Server that we will be putting in place for our own network system. We are really looking forward to having this in place and the response from those IT professionals that attended the seminar solidified our view of just how great this product really is. Ken Lindsay, one of senior network technicians did the presentation and did a wonderful job showing the resiliency of the system. Beyond the redundancy of the  power supplies, motherboard and Raid drive arrays, all of the components interact to take advantage of the modular control interface. Unbelievable control to switch functions within the unit. We demonstrated losing a drive, rebuilding the array, switching your server to a spare server module and the ease of moving functions from one server module to another. If you lose a server module you can be up and running with your spare in less than 10 minutes. Down time is minimized by an unbelievably short time frame.

We also showed the management module's logging features to track faults and the potential growth path within the product as well. Be sure to contact to register for the next scheduled presentation. 724-838-7526 or email to sales@paconnect.com

3PM Uggg! On our way to Baltimore.

Nick and I got an early morning start yesterday to attend a Northern Video Show in Baltimore. We took the Route 30 Route to Breezewood, only encountered one deer that we saw, and followed the TOMTOM pretty accurately right into the Show Site north of Baltimore in 3.5 hour quick romp. The traffic was not bad and we ended up being the first to sign in and were able to have our discussion on the pros and cons of each service plan that we are considering for our service support software. I think that we have a clear winner but that is not what I plan on talking about right now.

I attended the refresher course on IP Networking while Nick attended the Avermedia and Azelea Networks presentations. the IP refresh was a good overview, didn't contain too much that I didn't already know, but it doesn't hurt to be reminded what is what and how things work. Will see if it gets me to a point where I might crack one of my many books on IP Technology to expand on it again. Nick said that the Avermedia presentation was interesting but he didn't get too much more out of it except contact information for their field support people which can always be useful. They gave us some hints on how to get the PTZ Sony IP camera integrated with their software that we are going to try and that would be really a good outcome of this show. Nick was really impressed with Azelea's Mesh Technology product. This is a product that lends itself for wiring campus wide areas to the Internet. The types of organizations that this works well for include municipalities for giving their police and emergency personnel remote access back into the city systems, setting up general campus or municipal access to the Internet, (they have done large areas in China for the Olympics, construction sites for local area communication, wireless broadband, video surveillance and other applications. In smaller setups like hotels this would give property-wide access to Internet access as well as employee communication within the property area as well. Some neat potential there.

We had broke for lunch and some face time with the vendors in their booths. I attended the ACTI presentation while Nick went to the ARM Electronics presentation. Again the biggest benefit was the contacts, we now have access to the main ARM support guy and I got together with the primary support tech with ACTI. The ACTI presentation discussed megapixel IP Camera technology and the different technologies used for encoding the video and the benefits and problems with the use of each one. Very good discussion of where the digital video technology is right now and where it is going in the near future. It gave me some insights into what to look for, how to size systems correctly and what we need to control when it comes to client expectations.

Nick's Arm presentation led him into some discussion about the problems we have had with night vision video capturing and we now have some solution paths to follow. Another product that I found at the Vendor Booths was from a company called Videolarm who claim to be the first manufacturer of video housings in the market. They have a fully adjustable Infrared Illuminator that might help us out in some of these low light areas. Distance adjustable from 100-660 feet, five year warranty and an adjustable beam angle of 30, 40 and 60 degrees. There other products are also highly ruggedized as well.

D-Link was also highly promoted by Northern especially in the IP video slide presentation. I have brought back some of their information as well. For the most part there wasn't too much being shown by the vendors when it came to lenses and such except by ARM. I think Nick got a good bit of insight with that. All in all this was a good conference to attend that gave us support for what we already know, reinforced that we are on the right track and gave us the contact that will help us on into the future.

ZDNet article on the memory usage by different Browser Programs

See the article here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=2024

Interesting to see how during the day your system can be bogged down more and more by simply using your browser. Think about your system having only 512mb of memory or less and you are using IE7. You can easily see what the consequences are.