Free Cloud Storage (24 GB)

It has been so easy now to store your data in cloud using many different services. See below:

• www.box.com provides 5 GB free and 25 GB for $9.99/month
• www.dropbox.com provides 2 GB free and 100 GB for $10/month
• www.sugarsync.com provides 5 GB free and 60 GB for $9.99/month
• drive.google.com provides 5 GB free and 200 GB for $9.99/month
• windows.microsoft.com/en-US/skydrive/home provides 7 GB free and 20 GB for $10/year 

It is a challenge to take advantage of all of them at the same time. A new service at http://otixo.com/ allows you to manage multiple cloud services with a single login. As per the website, you  can 

• Search and find your files across many cloud-based services in one simple step.
• Copy and Move files from one service to another without downloading to your computer. It's as easy as drag-and-drop!
• Share files with your friends and colleagues.

In addition, http://www.yousendit.com/ can be used to send large files.

Free Webinar on MIMO in 4G Wireless

My friend's company Uspurtek LLC is organizing a free Webinar on MIMO in 4G Wireless.

Date and Time:
Tuesday, July 31st, 2012
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM Central Time

For registration:
http://www.uspurtek.com/

Learn from industry experienced and Licensed Professional Engineers, how MIMO is revolutionizing the world of 4G Wireless Broadband Communications. MIMO stands for Multiple Input Multiple Output and this new Antenna Technology allows the wireless communication standards to push up the data rates and reliability of current wireless communication networks.
This 1 hour live and interactive webinar aims to provide an exciting learning experience in the comfort of your desk. Participants will earn 1 Professional Deveopment Hour (PDH) for meeting their learning objectives.

Participants Will:
• Understand the basics of MIMO
• Learn how the benefits from MIMO are realized
• Learn the basics of Antenna Diversity, Beamforming and SDM
• Recognize the applications of MIMO in WiFi, WiMax and LTE
• Appreciate the not so far future of massive MIMO
• Earn 1 Professional Development Hour (PDH)
 
Who Should Attend:
• Telecom Professionals expecting to expand their understanding of MIMO
• Young Engineers, Recent Graduates and Students with interest in MIMO
• Licensed & Professional Engineers with interest in MIMO
• Technology Sales and Marketing Professionals with interest in MIMO
__________________________________________________________________
Presenter:
• Iqbal Singh Josan
• Licensed Professional Engineer
• Senior Member IEEE
• LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/iqbalsinghjosan
• Twitter: @uspurtek

Accidental Mummies of Guanajuato

Natural Science Center, Greensboro has an exhibition of mummies of Guanajuato, Mexico. I went to see them on the very first day. It is very interesting that how these mummies were formed. Only 1 in 100 bodies buried in Guanajuato ever experience the mysterious process of natural mummification. Unlike bodies that are "artificially" mummified through an embalming and wrapping process, accidental mummies form only in certain climates and conditions.
The Accidental Mummies of Guanajuato features 30 mummies on loan from the Museo de las Momias de Guanajuato (Museum of The Mummies).
Here is the press release of this exhibition:
http://www.natsci.org/about/newsroom/documents/Accidental%20Mummies%20Press%20Release.pdf

The exhibition will stay open until Dec. 30, 2012.
For more information, please visit Natural Science Center website:
www.natsci.org/

IBM ICA CON - April 20, 2012

Keynote Speaker: Bala Rajaraman- IBM Distinguished Engineer

Smart Cloud:
Business needs are driving Information technologies.
Cloud builds on and leverages the standards which preceded this market cycle.
Cloud enables innovation while managing change and complexity.
Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC): Open Architecture, Dynamic Interaction, Federated Data, Common Services.
IBM SmartCloud Foundation

IBM Cloud Academy (IBM ICACON) 2012- April 19-20

I am at IBM Cloud Academy in Raleigh to attend 1st International IBM Cloud Academy conference.

Keynote Speaker: Mike King: VP, IBM Global Education
Usage of Cloud:
- Operational Efficiencies and Effectiveness from Shared Services: Enterprise Risk Management across the University of California system
- Campus Buildings are ripe for improving operational efficiencies with cloud: Many universities are saving money using IBM's building management tools.
- World of R&D 2010: Governments around the world are increasing investment in R&D.
- University of California has 25% of system revenue from funded research.
- Over $60B in research annual funding to US academic institutions, and growing globally.
- North Carolina State University, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, University of Bari, Italy, University of Warwick, UK.

IBM Watson System:
- Understands natural language and human speech.
- Generates and evaluates hypothesis for better outcomes.
- Adapts and learns from user selections and responses.

Q: Can the future of education become a more outcome-focused continuum supporting lifelong learning?
-Technology Immersions- Any device learning
- Personal Learning Paths- Student-centered processes
- Knowledge Skills- Learning communities
- Global Integration- Service specialization
- Economic Alignment- Systemic view of education

IBM Smarter Education Framework integrates analytics with partners, such as Desire2LEarn, to improve student outcomes.
- In Hamilton County, Tennessee's department of Education uses predictive analytics to improve student achievement: County achieved 8% increase in the graduation rate.
- Mobile County Public Schools implemented system for early intervention.
- Alabama State Dept of Education improves strategy decision making and student achievement with integrated data analytics.

Keynote Address: From Computational Thinking to Computational Values

Hal Abelson, MIT received award for outstanding contribution for computer science education. He delivered the keynote on Mar 3, 2012. He has written a book Structure an Interpretation of Computer Programs. Google has Ngram Viewer, it is like a time machine for word play.

Links:
http://books.google.com/ngrams
An article about it appeared on cnet:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20025979-93.html
A research paper Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books by Jean-Baptise Michel appeared in Science magazine.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2010/12/15/science.1199644

MIT has made very large number of courses ( 2745 as on date) available free under its OCW program.

MITx is a new online tutoring initiative, it will be launched on Mar 5, 2012.

DSpave@MIT is MIT's institutional repository built to save, share, and search MIT's digital research materials including an increasing number of conference papers, images, peer-reviewed scholarly articles, preprints, technical reports, theses, working papers, and more.

There is a book discussing the issues of copyright of academic work, Who Owns Academic Work ?

BOF session: Teaching with App Inventor for Android

Presenter: Jeff Gray, Univ. of Alabama

App Inventor for Android is a visual blocks language for building mobile apps. Like Scratch, the language’s drag-and-drop blocks interface significantly lowers the barrier to entry. Beginners can immediately build apps that interface with mobile technology (e.g., GPS, Text-to-speech, SMS Texting) and build apps that have a real-world impact. App Inventor has moved to MIT Center for Mobile Learning from Google.

I have used it myself, it took me 30 minutes to create an example app. I did it when it was still hosted at Google App Inventor website.

New link of App Inventor
http://appinventoredu.mit.edu/  This has a lot of useful resources to teach from middle school students to Master level students.

There is a book App Inventor: Create Your Own Android Apps available for sale at amazon.com .

BOF session: Teaching Open Source

Presenters: Heidi Ellis, Sebastian Dziallas, Mel Chua, Karl Wurst

The session is on how to involve students from a wide range of backgrounds in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects. The notes of discussion can be found at

http://openetherpad.org/tos-bof-sigcse-2012


Teaching open source link (POSSE):
http://teachingopensource.org

Open source projects can be found at the following links:
http://xcitegroup.org/
http://hfoss.org/
www.ohloh.net
www.sourceforge.net

50 ways to be a FOSSer
http://xcitegroup.org/softhum/doku.php?id=f:50ways

Online Collaboration: Classroom Salon

I found this paper very  interesting. The presentation was done by John Barr, Ithaca College and Ananda Gunawardena, Carnegie Mellon. Classroom Salon is an on-line social collaboration tool that allows instructors to create, manage, and analyze social networks (called Salons) to enhance student learning. Students in a Salon can cooperatively create, comment on, and modify documents. Classroom Salon provides tools that allow the instructor to monitor the social networks and gauge both student participation and individual effectiveness.
It is very similar to Facebook, but it has analytic components to allow instructor to see how many comments has been posted by each student.
Link to create your own salon.

http://www.classroomsalon.org/

SIGCSE 2012: Lunch at The Pit Barbecue

I joined Maureen Biggers (Indiana University), Monika Witoslawski (Michigan State), Chunbo Chu (Franklin University) on lunch at The Pit Authentic Barbecue , close to convention center. Surprisingly, I could find many vegetarian entrees. I ordered their barbecue tofu with fried okra and sweet potato fried, enjoyed eating them. It was a lot of food, I could not have finished this whole plate myself. Interestingly, when the plate arrived, tofu looked like chicken, but I was told that it was made out of raw soya, hence texture looked like chicken.
Website of the restaurant:

http://www.thepit-raleigh.com/

SIGCSE Supporter session by Microsoft

I am at SIGCSE in Raleigh for next 3 days. Right now, I am sitting is a session on Empowering Students: Teaching Software Development with Windows Phone, being presented by Rob Miles from University of Hull, UK. This is a very interesting session. His website is www.robmiles.com . He has published books on Java, C# and Windows Phone programming. They are available for download from
http://www.csharpcourse.com/
Microsoft has presentations setup at their booth on the following:
TouchDevelop
Pex4fun
Project Hawaii
Kinect for Windows
Try F#
.NET Gadgeteer
XNA Game Studio 4.0
Kodu
Windows Phone
Windows 8
Imagine Cup
Academic Search
Windows Azure
DreamSpark

I will try to find about all these products and how I can use them in my courses. As educator, you can join Microsoft portal for educators at
www.microsoft.com/faculty

Microsoft has another session Creative Uses for Kinect in Teaching.
- Kinect has 4 microphones.
- You can write Kinect applications from C++ or .NET code.
- Kinect can be used from WPF, XNA also.

Cloud Computing

As per NIST’s draft definition:

“Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.”

Cloud Computing is different for different people. For a non-technical user, it is about storing your data on an external source, which is accessible from anywhere, but from a technical perspective, it can be viewed from service models:

Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS): Use of applications running on a cloud infrastructure.

Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS): Deploy consumer-created applications on a cloud infrastructure.

Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications.

What are the essential characteristics of Cloud Computing?

·         On-demand self-service

·         Broad network success

·         Resource pooling

·         Rapid Elasticity

·         Measured Service

What are the deployment models?

·         Private cloud

·         Community cloud

·         Public Cloud

·         Hybrid Cloud

Cloud Computing has evolved from several different technologies and business approaches over a period of time. Some of them are Utility Computing, Grid Computing, Autonomic Computing, Platform Virtualization, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and such.

Cloud Service Examples:

Salesforce.com

Amazon Web services

EC2 commercial services offered by Amazon to small companies

Microsoft Azure

VMware

Google

Open-source Cloud Platforms:

Eucalyptus: http://open.eucalyptus.com/

Nimbus: http://www.nimbusproject.org/

Enomaly: http://www.enomaly.com/

Abiquo: http://abiquo.com/

Xen: http://www.xen.org/

For more information:

http://csrc.nist.gov

Cloud Security: A comprehensive guide to Secure Cloud Computing, Ronald Krutz, Russell Vines, Wiley.

Snap Circuits: Electronics kits for kids

I spent a lot of time this summer to find some kind of electronic kits for my eight year old. Finally, I found Snap Circuits made by Elenco Electronics. I bought Snap Circuits Jr. 100 Experiments (Model: SC100, $23 on amazon). This model has only 30 parts, but it is possible to build over 100 projects. What I like the most about this kit is that there is nothing to solder, all the components/wires have snap buttons at the end. It is very easy to connect components together for kids. All parts are mounted on plastic modules. Absolutely, no tools are required. The kit also comes with a manual.

Once all the experiments are completed, there are upgrade kits available. I upgraded SC100 to SC 300 using upgrade kit UC30; this makes it possible to complete another 100 experiments.  You can upgrade it to SC750, which allows up to 750 experiments.  Elenco also manufactures stand-alone kits for musical recorder, FM radio, motion detector, flying saucer, water clock etc. The kits have been priced very reasonably.

Links:

Snap Circuits: http://www.snapcircuits.net/
For complete list of products: http://www.elenco.com/

 

Comparison: SAN vs NAS

According to Executive Chairman of Google Eric Schmidt, every two days we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. It is approximately 5 Exabytes (1 Exabyte = 1024 Petabytes, 1 Petabyte = 1024 Terabytes). Every human being, who has any digital device, is essentially a content creator. Data center managers are facing this arduous task of providing low-cost, high-performance information management solution.

Storage area network (SAN) carries data between servers and storage devices through fibre channel switches. It enables storage consolidation and allows storage to be shared across multiple servers, which are spread geographically. Network attached storage (NAS) is an IP-based single storage device attached to a local area network. Let us compare these two technologies side-by-side:

SAN	NAS
Server class devices that are equipped with SCSI Fibre Channel adapters connect to a SAN.	Almost any machine that connects to a LAN.
Protocols: Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP), which is implementation of serial SCSI-3 over FC.	NAS solutions use TCP/IP and NFS/CIFS/HTTP based networks
A SAN addresses the data by logical block numbers, and transfers the data in (raw) disk blocks.	A NAS identifies the data by file name and byte offset, transfers file data or metadata, and handles security, user authentication, file locking.
File Sharing is operating system dependent, and may not exist for all operating systems that are being used.	A NAS allows greater sharing of information, especially among different operating systems.
The SAN servers manage the file system.	File system is managed by the NAS head unit.
Backups and mirrors require a block by block copy operation. A mirrored system has to be either identical, or greater in capacity (compared to the source).	Backups and mirrors are generated on files, not blocks (this may save bandwidth and time).
SAN uses single-mode or multi-mode fiber cabling depending on the environment.	NAS uses existing IP networks like Gigabit Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, ATM, and Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI).
Connectivity options: point-to-point, FC-AL (Fibre Channel Arbitrated loop), FC-SW (Fibre Channel Switched Fabric).	Gateway NAS, Integrated NAS.
Benefits: Availability, reliability, scalability, performance, manageability, return on information management.	Supports comprehensive access to information, improved efficiency, improved flexibility, centralized storage, simplified management, scalability, high availability, security.

For more information:

• How much data is that:  http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/tek1/how_big.htm

• SAN and NAS Solutions - Introduction, Topology, and Terminology: http://www.fortuitous.com/docs/primers/SAN_NAS_Intro.pdf

• Information Storage and Management: Storage, Managing, and Protecting Digital Information. EMC Education Services, Wiley, ISBN: 978-0-470-29421-5

• Technical Committee responsible for fibre channel interfaces: http://www.t11.org/index.html

OpenOffice.org: An Alternative to Microsoft Office

OpenOffice.org is the open source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and many more.  It supports the ISO/IEC standard OpenDocument Format (ODF) for data interchange as its default file format, as well as Microsoft Office formats among others.  It is available under Microsoft Windows and Linux platform. The first version was released on April 30^th, 2002; the current release is OpenOffice.org 3.  For the current version, minimum system requirements are:

Microsoft Windows

• Windows 2000 (Service Pack 2 or higher), Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 7
• 256 Mbytes RAM (512 MB RAM recommended)
• At least 650 Mbytes available disk space for a default install (including a JRE) via download.
  After installation and deletion of temporary installation files, OpenOffice.org will use approximately 440 Mbytes disk space.
• 1024 x 768 or higher resolution with at least 256 colors

GNU/Linux ("Linux")

• Linux kernel version 2.4 or higher, glibc2 version 2.3.2 or higher
• 256 Mbytes RAM (512 MB recommended)
• 400 Mbytes available disk space
• X-Server with 1024 x 768 or higher resolution with at least 256 colors

OpenOffice.org comprises a collection of applications that work together closely to provide the features commonly included in modern office suites. Many of the components are similar to those available in Microsoft Office.  See below:

• Writer: a word processor you can use for anything from writing a quick letter to producing an entire book.
• Calc: A powerful spreadsheet with all the tools you need to calculate, analyse, and present your data in numerical reports or sizzling graphics.
• Impress: The fastest, most powerful way to create effective multimedia presentations.
• Base: Lets you manipulate databases seamlessly. Create and modify tables, forms, queries, and reports, all from within OpenOffice.org
• Draw: lets you produce everything from simple diagrams to dynamic 3D illustrations.
• Math: Lets you create mathematical equations with a graphic user interface or by directly typing your formulas into the equation editor.

So, if you don’t want to spend money on a commercial office productivity tool, OpenOffice.org is the way to go.

Links: http://www.OpenOffice.org