CellStream Online School

Hello followers of the CellStream Blog!
It has been some time since my last post. One of the reasons is we have been busy evaulating some excellent software to provide a new service we intend to call - the CellStream Online School.
Here is a short list of the products we tried:

• Moodle
  
• SAKAI
  
• OLAT
  

All three are 'open source' licensed tools that center around a common theme. They are 'Course Management Systems' (CMS) that allow on-line learning.

Honestly, all products are excellent. Choosing any of them would be a good decision and they all have good reputations, receiving raves from their customers. Our analysis boiled down to the following simple differences:

• Moodle was the easiest to use and had the best all round set of features. There are a few minor glitches (their install process is poorly documented, and a couple of features need refinement - but nothing that prevents a top notch experience for the students).
• SAKAI was more complex and has features that expand its application beyond CMS to project management and such. It was simply more than we needed.
• OLAT was straight forward and easy to use. Like the others, it is under continual development and falls just a hair short on features today.

Bottom line is we chose Moodle and have been very pleased with the features and functionality thus far. Our first courses have been loaded and if you would like to see it , click here and then go to the Cisco How To course (log in as a 'guest').

Look for more announcements on course availability in the future.

Mr. Obama - I have a first step idea for Health Care

Dear President Obama,
The cost of health care in this country has been out of control for years and something needs to be done. I find few people who disagree. Medicare/Medicaid programs are already government programs that are HUGE budgetary costs to all of us regardless of age.

In the year 2009 we should have no American citizens that do not or cannot receive decent, human, moral, medical care. I would offer that for the most part this is already true. If I am uninsured and I show up at a local hospital with a broken arm or leg, it is highly likely that I will be taken care of, and that someone pays for my medical costs, somewhere.

Where we have started is by introducing a 1000+ page health care reform bill - an all at once attempt to 'fix' the problem. I have received countless forwarded viral emails from friends and associates documenting the problems with this bill from 'reputable' sources. So far, I have looked closely at two of these viral emails because they had citations and strong comments that concern anyone who reads them - including me. In both cases, cited passages in the bill (using quotations) were simply 'made up'. I downloaded the bill and used my PDF viewer to search for the terms cited. I have stopped reading the emails.

To be fair, I have not formed an opinion on the bill one way or the other, yet. Nor have I analyzed the bill and its impact or potential impact. But what I have read, as a function of verifying the assertions made in the two emails I mention, does not align with the interpretations in the emails. So, Mr. President this bill and the amount of garbage it is attracting is perhaps a wrong first step. It is perhaps, too much, too soon with too little factual information available without reading 1,000 plus pages.

For my blog followers, here is a link to the bill:

http://edlabor.house.gov/documents/111/pdf/publications/AAHCA-BillText-071409.pdf

I have come up with a option first step. Since this is not necessarily my area of expertise, it may have wholes, but I respectfully submit it for your consideration. Instead of looking for ways to finance and perhaps control the costs of the health care system that really is not a system, but rather a system of systems, much like the Internet is a network of networks, what I propose is that you pass a simple bill that going forward, makes all insurance companies 'not for profit' while leaving them in the private sector!

The idea comes from a simple set of questions. Let's say my insurance company makes a multi-million dollar profit. Where does this money go? Why aren't my rates lowered? Why didn't I receive a dividend?

Imagine a world where insurance companies actually paid out claims, where doctors offices don't have to have three or four staff members filling out insurance forms. Imagine an insurance system where the focus was on the insured, and not on stock market performance, where executives and managers made a fair salary. I mean, how can an insurance company operate in today's world unable or unwilling to insure people while executives of those companies earn millions of dollars in bonuses? If you meet an honest and good insurance person, who dedicates themselves to the betterment of their fellow humans by providing this service, they will agree. Most of the independent agents I meet agree. It is the big company policies that make their job so difficult. I have heard that insurance companies fund huge lobbyists in Washington and in the states, protecting their interests. If this is true, it is wrong in every way. This means that my money is being used without my permission to benefit the company I am insured by, without me knowing if it benefits me. Seems like taxation without representation. I have further heard accusations that these company policies reward individuals who defer claims payments and find exclusions, and excuses not to pay out claims. Whether these are true or not is not important. What is important is that insurance needs to be simplified, needs to be removed from a profit generation ecosystem into a service oriented ecosystem.

The counterpoint is all too obvious: if no one can "make money" providing insurance, then who is going to do it? The answer is simple - the good people in insurance will do it without hesitation. Not for profit does not mean that hard working, dedicated, professional people do not get paid. I would counter that if this is the reason these companies are in business, then they have lost their purpose, and it is all the more reason their ecosystem needs to be changed.

This, Mr. President, is an important idea. I have no numbers, and I have no true expertise in this area. I simply have a creative idea for a first step in directly reducing the cost and the benefits of a system that has suffered from greed, improper attempts to manage and regulate, and has brought us to the brink of bankruptcy. Good Luck, Mr. President, because we need to do something, but right or wrong the current first step is likely to fail with all the hoopla and misinformation swirling like a tornado around the subject.

A Posible Network Vision - Net Model X

If you close your eyes tightly and consider the future of the Internet, what does your mind's eye see? Most of us would say "Depends on the day!" Fair enough. Let me share with you what I will call Net Model X for a moment. This is just a capture of one of the possibilities.

The vision starts with deep breathing and relaxation: relaxing the arguments of peer-peer vs. cloud computing, thin vs. thick client, and all the other computing debates. These all become options instead of preferences. Addressing becomes automated and simplified - it disappears. The Internet is a smart, flexible cloud that supports client-server, peer-peer, as well as cloud computing ecosystems concurrently and effortlessly with a special new twist: if you want a computer or server, the cloud simply provides it to you. You don't need a box with memory and disk drive if you want a server. No, all you do is birth a virtual machine inside either your router or the service providers router or a dedicated virtual store on the network. You select the server software of your choice from an online OS vending machine, it installs and you can configure it. You can make this server private or public. Again, addressing is meaningless and fully automated.

The appliance you use can still certainly have disks and memory if you need it (developers likely will), but most of us simply have a killer I/O appliance (a table sized HD screen that can integrate multiple "desktops" with a physical motion detector so my hand becomes the "mouse" and of course the irreplaceable keyboard in the form of a foldable mat that can be standard size, compact or supper compact) and Net Model X does the rest. If I need a farm of servers, then this is provided to me by a service provider attached to the Net Model X. I can install software from a SW Vending machine if I want or use network based applications.

Net Model X costs me money to use. I am billed based on an algorithm that combines processing MIPS with memory consumption and application usage metering plus support - taxing me is eliminated. This billing can be offset by advertising - but a more effective advertising - one that is controlled by me - on things I have interest in. The more I accept advertising, the less my bill is. Advertisers have to pay more to get to hard to reach people, therefore offsetting the higher costs of their services. Regardless, I have consumed less hardware and using less power/cooling/heating at home or work lowering my carbon footprint and lessening the land fill burden of my upgrades. I am also able to do more without as much travel - the usual benefits of networking all still apply. The point is that Net Model X is easily paid for in savings that the technology provides.

My vision of Net Model X blurs quickly in areas like the evolution of television to non-existence, replaced by my ability to watch content as selected from a Video Vending Machine. News and current events will be available in the evolved Twitter model where individuals provide feeds - I can select an event from a global perspective, zoom into the event and then select from one of many feeds to view or listen - like a director would in a TV studio. Social Networking has evolved on Net Model X to one giant tool embedded in Net Model X that like the television director model I can build my circle zoom into the circle and interface with anyone in my circle as needed. The Net X Model also has a new search and information retrieval system that is 1000 times more powerful and accurate than today's grazing model. The ability to focus searching is built into the tools preventing or allowing search results that are more accurate. I'll stop here in this blurry part of the vision since I don't want to confine your imagination on where all this part could go!

So how does distributing and providing Net Model X work? A few more deep breaths and concentration. Delivery requires dedicated teams of people - today's service providers, to deploy the bandwidth, maintain the bandwidth freeways. They are the new "Geek Squad". They are more trained, more knowledgeable than ever before. If Net Model X is broken for someone, then someone has to be reachable locally and in a distributed fashion. They need to have local language and ecosystem knowledge. They provide the bandwidth and the support and earn part of my bill for doing so. I am not sure how long the multiple provider model exists in the Net Model X. After all, for some, it has never existed! It really does not matter, until everyone is served by one method, options will exist.

Mind you, this vision of Net Model X is not completely out of the question. There are a number of network innovations and directions that already hint of this vision as being a real possibility. Then again, now that I am discussing it with the readers of this blog, Murphy's Law will apply, and some of it may never happen. Time will tell.

Speaking at the Wisconsin State Telephone Association

As many of the CellStream faithful know, we are hugely dedicated to the Independent Telephone market, and have been since the founding of the company in 1998. We were recently invited and happily accepted an opportunity to speak at the Wisconsin State Telephone Association conference.

A short video and interview was made at the conference. Enjoy!

Skype for the iTouch

It is Wednesday April 1st, the day Skype released its support for the iPhone and iTouch. While I do not have the iPhone, both my wife and I have the iTouch. Here is what you need to know:

In preparation for this momentous day, I ordered ($29) a new earbud and microphone appliance from Apple. It is ridiculously expensive, but really the only source right now. If you have an iTouch, this a mandatory item to make your device an internet phone.

Then I went to the Skype site - click on the download button, then select iPhone (this is stupid, but they do not say iTouch anywhere on the web site, unless you do a search). Realizing this was dumb, I went to the iTunes App store on the iTouch itself. Searched for Skype - and installed the program. Easy.

Ran the application and used my Skype credentials to log in. My contact list showed up, just as if I was on the PC. I repeated the process on my wife's device and we called each other - it worked absolutely perfectly.

Then I decided to have some fun. She called my account again, this time I was on my PC not my iTouch. I selected video call, and things did not work properly. So we tried again and just used the normal voice call - it was flawless. I did a few more tests, comparing calling land line vs. iTouch to iTouch and vs. iTouch to PC. Delay is the same in all. Quality was the same in all (better than cell phone).

This is a no brainer people - if you have an iTouch - you now have an internet WiFi phone! If you have an iPhone, I'll bet you can save minutes by using your WiFi when at home, at the office, or in a WiFi hotspot you can connect to.

I officially predict that the next version of the iTouch will have two additional things: a) a microphone built in, and b) a camera built in.

The down side...well, no WiFi, no phone service. I'm over it. Now both my wife and I have WiTouch!! You heard the name here first!!!

P.S. Just heard on CNN that the app is the number one download today - no surprise.

Cloud Computing and Virtualization - A Missing Link

I have been messing rather seriously with virtualization recently. Specifically Microsoft Virtual PC and Microsoft Virtual Server products, as well as SUN's Virtual Box. The good news is they all work pretty much as advertised, albeit they have differences. I now have a machine that runs Windows VISTA, Server 2003, Windows 98, SUN Solaris, Ubuntu, all simultaneously! I even found I can run some old software again, even DOS! This capability also helps me to realize that in this machine I have now created a miniature version of what cloud computing is going to be. How cool is that? But, alas, reviewing the functionality or comparing the two products is not the purpose of this posting.

What is more fascinating to me is that within the virtualization layer - something they call the Hyper-V layer - there has to be a virtual network allowing the virtual machines to connect to one another as if they were on an Ethernet. I have been exploring this virtual network, trying to see what you can fiddle with, and what you can't. While my exploration continues when I have spare moments, I am beginning to realize that we are actually in the very early days of the virtualization product cycle. Let be more specific: in order to truly virtualize computing, I need to be able to virtualize a network, and not just with an Ethernet Switch (both Microsoft and SUN advertise they have a virtual Ethernet switch at their virtualization layer). I also think we need virtual routing, with multiple nodes so that I can clearly configure subnetworks and create rules for routing, authentication/access, filtering, and a whole host of other functions.

I would imagine that having a virtual cloud in between my virtual machines is exactly what the developers of the next generation of cloud computing applications will need as well. This way they can simulate cloud computing more authentically and create the applications that we will all need. Of course the same could be said for testing. But, to have a virtual cloud, you need a plurality of network devices, that can be created on demand, and configured between my virtual machines (If Cisco is listening, I would love to be able to install IOS as a virtual machine!). Without this ability, we are apparently relegated to simple Ethernet connectivity in these early days. This limitation can be problematic at best. I recently fired up two Windows 2003 servers as virtual machines and they went crazy (which one was to be the DHCP king, etc.) because I could not separate them from each other on the virtual network, at least not easily.

Having all these cool virtual machines has limited functionality without networking. I have already conceded that running old applications is a good thing, and running an application that is better suited to Linux vs. Windows may be interesting to some. At the end of the day, having four or five virtual machines running does not improve my ability to multitask per se. I know, I am taking the fun out of it. But really - what is the end purpose of this for end users? Has the computing, memory and disk capacity cost shrunk so small that it is just a neat thing we can now do in computing? I have no clear answers today, but perhaps running simultaneous network games would be cool. I think that getting rid of some boxes in my house would be good, but I quickly return to needing a virtual network. For instance: get rid of my router and DSL/Cable Modem would be cool - just make then virtual machines! Now I just plug my cable or phone line into my NIC and I am there! With the kids getting older and needing their own machines, perhaps having one big server running virtual machines for each family member allows them to carry around cheap laptops, but I need Authentication and Authorization services especially if they are connecting from a friends house or the Starbucks.

Another possibility that cloud computing concepts raise - dare I say it - is the reduction of the role of the IT department. No more updating, imaging or software license management. Its all in the cloud. Before I run completely down that rat hole, let me come back to my point and how it connects. Virtualization and simulation go hand in hand. In order to simulate the functions of cloud computing we need to virtualize the cloud. These first steps to virtualization open the door, but the cloud is not without its components of networking and infrastructure. So to simulate we need more components inside the virtual world - more networking components. It will be fascinating to watch this world of virtualization and whether we get these components quickly, and who produces them.

To try vrtualization yourself, check out Microsoft's Virtual PC at http://www.Microsoft.com/Virtualization .

To try SUN's Virtual Box - go to www.virtualbox.org/ .

Life Vests in Planes - I Officially Change My Mind

A USAir jet crashed today into the freezing Hudson River after a bird strike shortly after takeoff from LaGuardia airport in New York.  Miraculously, everyone survived.  

The pilot, Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III, was a hero and a good bit lucky, but a hero nonetheless.  

I should make clear that I have, for years, asked students in my classes (engineers) to consider why life vests are under your seats in planes.  I have been known to say "If you are going to put something under my seat - make it a parachute!"  I cite that in my life I have never ever witnessed, seen an image, or read a report of a single person that walked, swam, or has been pulled out of the water after an air plane crash with their life vest on.  

Well, today I was proven wrong.  

I have seen now people with their life vests on, plucked from a plane that successfully landed - and I can use that word - in water!!  While I concede this for today, one in a row does not make a pattern.

This landing will be studied, analyzed, and recreated in the coming months.  They will likely load the data into simulators, and one has to wonder if any other pilots will be able to recreate the situation and land safely.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5527910.ece 

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/01/19/hudson-flight.html

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/nation/6217237.html