Virtualization tool

I think that the trend nowsaday is moved toward virtualization where one can run one OS on top of another OS. There are a lot of server which has low utilization. Each server consumes power. Producing power may produce CO2. Running low utililization server is not sustainble for economic and environment. It would be a good idea to move a lot of low utilization servers into one server using the virtualization technology.

Personally, I do not have a data center, so I don’t read need to care about saving power. However, I use virtualization technology usually for testing software running with different configuration from my default windows. I usually use VMware server (the free version) to create a virtualized OS. However, VMware server consumes some resouces (memory). I have seen VMware Player for quite a long time, but I have not tried. I tried today. It is really impressive. It lets me run the virtualized OS that I created with VMware server. It seems to me that VMware player does not consume much computer resource.

Integrating Ubicomp technology into Emergency Response

I have seen some papers presenting ideas of using information technology especially the ubicomp in the prcoess of an emergency response. It is really interesting.

The first paper, Secure Transmission of Pre-clinical Ultrasound Video Data at the Scene of a Mass Casualty Incident, presents e a portable ultra-sound device for a medical team. I think that the device can send an image back to the hospical through UMTS (3G) for further real-time analysis.

The second paper, Envisioning Collaboration at a Distance for the Evacuation of Walking Wounded , implements a prototype handeld for an emergency responder which can transfer information eg. images to an off-site team who is on a way or in the operation center. It  can help off-site  team to have a better understanding of the situation without bothering the onsite team which needs to focus on working. One interesting feature is that an emergency responser can tag a victim with a tag (probably RF-ID)  and add necessary information regarding the victim’s status on the tag. The response team could have an overall picture of the victims  through these distributed tags from the operation center.

The third paper, Designing for material practices of coordinating emergency teamwork, that I read is similar to the second one. They implement 3 prototypes. The first deivce is for the victim who can walk. The responder put the first device on the victim to guide him to a safe zone. The second device is a hanhled device like the first device, and it is used for the responder to give him or her an overview of the situation. The third device is the big screen in the operation center to gice an overview of the situation.

I really like the idea of using technology to improve the emergency process. Paper 4 ,Handy Navigation in Ever-Changing Spaces—an Ethnographic Study of Firefighting Practices, where it study about how ubicomp can be used  by firefighters to help navigating, gives a strong point that technology should be used for augmenting but not for replacing current practice (prabably including human inteligence too).

Flood causes the failure of the mobile phone system

I attened to Mobile Response 2008 in B-IT, Bonn. Interestingly, I found out that one catatrophy can cause a lot of effects on other things which makes it more difficuly to rescue or recover. An invited speaker talked about the flood in UK (probably the one occurred in last year) and its effect on mobile system.

I have learned that the mobile system fails when there is a flood, because there is no power to supply the base station. As you may know, the mobile system has become an important communication tool for the last decade (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1240824). The base stations which serve mobile phone can last for around 2 days on its battery. The flood  took longer time than that.

Additionally, without power, there is no water, because there is no power to do something related with pressure on the water.  A disease could come with the flood as well.

Interesting talk.

Level of disaster in Germany (MANV)

There are four levels of disasters in Germany.

Its classification is called MANV (Massenanfall von Verletzten).

Level 1 : Up to 50 people are affected. Local or nearby medical services can handle.

Level 2 : Between 50 to 500 people are affected. Assistances from other regions are needed.

Level 3: More than 500 people are affected.

Level 4. The infrasture is destroyed.

source : wiki and www.iscram.org/dmdocuments/ISCRAM2007/Proceedings/Pages_377_383_42ISEC_01_A_Secure.pdf

Mcafee

It is quite interesting that John MaCafee send his Mcafee copy to pirate software in Asia to help widespreading of his software.

John Mcafee did have a good vision when he spoted a rumor about virus on a newspaper. He though that one day the virus would become real, and it did.

source : http://www.stanford.edu/class/msande273/resources/McAfee%20Case.pdf

Experimenting with Flex

I have been experimenting with flex.
It is really cool that you can quickly create an application running on a flash player with Flex builder. A Flex application can be run on any platform. A Flex application simply needs only a browser with a flash player plugin.

The idea of creating an application and running on every platform of flex is similar to Java application running on a Java virtual machine. Well, Java is not actually 100% run everywhere.

The application and its layout can be represented by xml script stored in the mxml file. Additional logic such as event handling can be created using action script.
Following is my first flex application example: http://nguan.blogspot.com/2008/06/blog-post.html.

Flex technology is similar to Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight. The new generation interface application created by .NET framework 3.5 can be created using an xml file called xaml similar to flex. For the new .NET, it would be really cool if you have Windows application and you can instanly port it into a web (not 100%).