As of tonight, Chris is no longer a Nortel employee. He was "terminated" (a nasty way of putting it) at 10 o'clock this morning and was home shortly after 11 in a very happy mood, despite the fact that there's still no severance pay in the offing, no more of the company-paid health insurance or life insurance, no promise of a decent pension, etc., etc. The sun was shining on the deck that's now clear of snow (I shovelled the last of it aside after breakfast) and having brought the deck chair up from the basement I'd put it out there with a symbolic cushion for him to recline upon. Instead of which, he drove me straight up the road to Wakefield to buy sandwiches made from Wakefield Bakery's best, multigrain loaves, which we ate side by side on a bench by the Gatineau River, before walking beside the mill stream to watch the melt water tumbling under the bridge. Not a bad way to begin his years of retirement, we felt.
Only I don't think there is going to be all that much retiring from the flow. Apart from all the work he's doing setting up his own Aviation Training company with his fellow groundschool instructors and friends Michael and Jean, Chris has now also been offered new employment with a startup associated with Carleton University. Last Monday afternoon I was at the university where people were meeting to exchange ideas about a related project known as the BigBlueButton: an open-source, real-time voice conferencing, video conferencing, document sharing, group chat, and audio archiving system. I quote.
Fred Dixon, CEO of Blindside Networks, took charge of the project supporters, software engineering graduates and undergraduates present. Each of us had to introduce ourselves and say what we were doing at the conference, which was a bit embarrassing when it came to me, but Chris pre-empted a hiatus by announcing he'd brought his wife along simply to meet everybody.
What an enthusiastic bunch they were! Almost every progress report was greeted by the exclamation, "Cool!" Fred told us that the contributers, developers, companies and users working together on this development, whom I've got to learn to refer to as an ECOSYSTEM, formed a "meritocritous environment"—I assumed he meant the university (although Chris says I misunderstood this). Anyhow he went on to say that he hoped other universities would want to adopt this technology too.
As the meeting proceeded, I learned about soft phones and smart boards, Google counters, hybrid classes and Virtual Machines. I was none too sure what was meant by cascading mixers or fibernetics or the Moodle Appliance, but I dare say I'll find out soon enough, once Chris gets involved in this kind of thing. Someone spoke of "the possibility of Dynamic Blogs". I'm not at all sure I'd want that for my blog. It's bad enough keeping the comments under control without having other people interfere with the content as well, which is what I suppose this implies. Still, everyone to his own taste.
"It's often impossible" to set up an on-line conference in some institutions because the infrastructure of webcams, microphones and the like just isn't there, but for conference participants using the BigBlueButton it's much simpler. No on-site installation is required; all that's needed is your laptop or notebook computer. An instructor "can kick a participant by the click of a button," or so I heard, and by double clicking on the mute button he or she can shut someone up. In fact all participants are muted by default. Seems a pity that can't be done in conventional meetings like Prime Minister's Question Time, doesn't it? It might be difficult to join a university seminar from, say, an Internet café where there could be 65 decibels of background noise, but this interference can also be cut out. What else can be done to enhance the flow of information to students at remote locations? The developers are talking about a low cost white board facility using Wii mode.
The BBB project is still in its early stages, though they have already consulted Volunteer Ottawa to see whether such a non profit organisation would find it beneficial. "Usability was an issue," apparently, for people relatively unfamiliar with computers. So now the developers have come up with a simpler user interface (using an embedded Google calendar) that automatically generates invitations by email once you've chosen your date and time, saying: "Please join me for a conference to discuss [insert topic] on Friday 11th..."
A Chinese presenter called Bo stood up and talked about a collaboration scheme for developers (I think) that he called Cloud Together (rather than Crowd Together) and I was still befuddled when he went on to mention node-based scalability and a cloud on top of a virtual host cluster. He explained that this was to do with SOA based, customized, hybrid node polymorphism, which had them all nodding their heads in appreciation, and customized collaboration mash up. Bo gave a striking example of how the new technology might be used in China, where there's a demand for modern language and music classes for up to 500 participants at a time!
A bright young man called Adam then came to the front and described how he and the Blindside people had been developing a screen sharing or desk-top sharing device, the first version of which had crashed after 10 minutes' use. He'd decided that Flash-Player would have to be reverse engineered for it to work properly and to judge by his excitement he was now making great headway but (in answer to a point raised by my husband which didn't seem to worry him too much) he had "so far slacked off on documentation and testing." He mentioned Emotional Hudson, ant builds and green balls; though I made a note of the terminology, I wouldn't like to be more precise about where they come in.
Next up was an Industrial Design student who'd been studying how to equip remote and local students to participate in BigBlueButton conferences. He gave us an interesting slide show (one that I could actually follow, I mean) analysing the video conference environment with its webcams on tripods, multiple speakers, cables taped to the floor for safety and so on, and told us he had come up with a less cumbersome solution for the requisite equipment—netbook, webcam, wireless speaker-phone and wireless microphone—all mounted into one small box or case for portability. The early prototypes of this integrated carry case were indeed cardboard boxes, looking decidedly amateur and ungainly; only more recently he'd created a more sophisticated model in plastic for a total cost of $1.50 a piece. Unfortunately when he lifted it up to show us, the handle fell off, but it's the principle of the thing that matters.
The last person to address the meeting, before Fred brought it to a conclusion, was Richard of Blindside Networks who gave us a "record-and-playback demo" for a remote conference facility of the sort they are developing. The server on the host computer, having recorded the "click to raise your hand" instances and all other such "events" at a conference, stores this information and can then play it back in real time for the benefit of anyone who was prevented from attending in the first place. There was talk of speeding up the playback so that you could fast-forward over the boring bits. I got the impression they weren't yet ready to offer this, but what a useful feature it would be! Chris, of course, is keen to try out all the BigBlueButton technology during the aviation training sessions that will be offered by his new company.
Fred Dixon' wants his team to keep the user interface simple enough for a developer to be able to set up a server in less than five minutes. His intention is to offer the BigBlueButton facility at no cost, so that "people get hooked on the free service... and then they'll need commercial support," in other words, management tools.
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