Category Archives: IBM Projects

IBM projects we are working on

Hursley Research – ITA

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The Hursley lab is playing a major part in a large research project, known as ITA. ITA, is a joint US and UK programme of fundamental research into network centric systems. It’s lead by IBM, but with a number of industrial and academic partners (Boeing, LogiaCMG, Honeywell, UCLA, Cambridge, Columbia etc. – there’s a full partner list here).

In the UK, the project is going to be run out of the Emerging Tech group, which means a few of us on eightbar are likely to be involved. There are some interesting themes around collaboration and social networking as applied to military environments, which we’re likely to be responsible for. Anyway, we’re off to New York in September to get started, so I’ll be able to write more about what we’re actually going to be working on then.

The Darren and Roo show: Day 1

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We’re still in Nottingham, enjoying the first full day of the IT Specialist Institute, 2006. Since we’re staying in the University halls, the rooms are not quite hotel-quality, but definitely not bad. Probably the worst bit (for a 6’4″ freak like me) is the small bed.

The breakfast was great though, as was the opening presentation from Sudhir Chardha, who presented on innovation and the GIO (Global Innovation Outlook). We are not giving our presentation until tomorrow afternoon (2 – 3pm if you’re attending the Institute and want to attend). Today we’ve been mainly hanging around underneath Darren’s very cool posters, chatting to people, demonstrating Second Life and talking about why Virtual Worlds are important.

Darren and his posters

There has been a fairly steady stream of conversations. We’ve also managed to add two more people to our (probably not very comprehensive) list of over 100 known IBM SL users who can access Ian’s island.

Wimbledon, Shuttles and July 4th

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I am currently onsite at the Wimbledon Championships. This involves sitting in the basement of the media centre with my collegues from Hursley, Atlanta and Raleigh. Being couped up delivering wimbledon.org always brings an interesting group dynamic. We have a strange 14 hour day, with a mixture of customer visits (a.k.a. tech tours), checkpoints, testing out new things and the day job.
With my Wimbledon second life demo as part of the tech tour it was natural that a few of the guys in the room would get into it too. Yesterday was a prime example and trigger. It was July 4th. There was a shuttle launch. We have lots of bandwidth. So streaming media of the launch both for the Uk and the US guys in the room was a must.
The difference this year was that some of us had Second Life running, and were at the excellent spaceport alpha. It turned out that of the 70 or so people at the event in the prime location 5 of us were IBMers from eightbar in Second Life, including a husband and wife team. The event was the first one I have seen that had overflow areas as more areas of land were turned over to streaming the video.
The nature of the event and the buzz we had in RL and SL in an enclosed space made it all very exciting and enabled a few more people to ‘get’ why metaverse technologies really do work.

spaceport alpha

More pictures are on snapzilla and the SLURL to spaceport alpha

Deploying Servers

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Deploying servers inside of IBM is fairly easy. It normally consists of finding an old Thinkpad or desktop machine, sticking it under your desk and finding a long enough ethernet cable to reach from the network port across the far side of the office. My trusty 5 year old IBM desktop has happily been running several demos and prototypes over the years. It’s surprising how many people have things like this and still manage to make them reliable.

Lots of cool technology used internally starts out this way and gets moved to the proper internal infrastructure when it proves to be so useful. IBM has been pretty good at recognising this and the internal IT organisation are providing more and more internal hosting options for people with prototypes that they want to demo and try out. Anyone can get a LAMP stack to host their applications internally for free, for example.

e server

Anyway I needed to run an externally accessible test server for some customer work I’m doing and with a very helpful colleague (thanks Dave!) I managed to get the setup I needed using some existing infrastructure. Getting things like this up and running inside of IBM (or any big company I expect) isn’t always easy, legal and security is normally a bigger problem than any technology, but now I know it can be done, it is an incentive to try and come up with some externally facing demos and prototypes.

Internationalised URLs

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One of the web projects Rob and I are working on at the moment has some internationalisation requirements that are pretty key to its success. The standard user-application interactions aren’t that problematic, there’s some things to think about encoding/storage wise, but it’s a well understood area.

The tricky bit is that URLs are ASCII only. You can encode non-ASCII characters and handle things in the application to make it look and act like it’s coping with different character sets, but this only really works if you think of a URL as a pure reference, that isn’t containing any information in itself. For web 2.0 type applications (and when using REST), this doesn’t really work as the URL contains information in itself. If you want a piece of information referenced by a URL like http://mysite/user/page1 making that URL make sense in languages not using ASCII is hard.