tech: February 2003 Archives

This cool little app lets you control a variety of applications - iTunes, PowerPoint, etc. - from a Bluetooth-equipped Ericsson phone. It's even got a proximity sensor - when your Mac loses the signal from your phone, due to you walking out of the room, it can perform an action such as pausing the currently playing music track. Very cool.

Bluetooth, a wireless transmission standard which can be thought of a as a replacement for cables, was named after the 10th-century viking Harald Gormsson Blåtand. He conquered Denmark and Norway, sending his adopted son Harald Gråfäll to rule the latter kingdom in his stead. But, as often happens, once Gråfäll got his mitts on the tax revenue from Norway, he balked at sending tribute back to Blåtand. In retaliation, Blåtand sent his nephew Gull-Harald Knutsson to kill Gråfäll. No sooner had the assasination taken place then Knutsson himself was killed by Håkon Sigurdsson, sent by Blåtand to eliminate any connection between him and the murder of his foster son Gråfäll. Sigurdsson was given an earldom of most of northern Norway for his services. These guys were the original Sopranos.

Blåtand himself was baptised in 960, and is credited with having build the first cathedral in Scandinavia at Roskilde, Denmark. His attempts to conquer Sweden through his emmisary Styrbjörn Starke were crushed by Erik Segersäll, the king there.

I've read two explanations for the name "Blåtand," or Bluetooth. One holds that it was poor dental hygene which was responsible for the nickname, the other that Blåtand was a common name for somebody who had dark hair and/or skin. Have to do some more research on that one.

So our video group's Sony DSR-30 DV deck became non-communicative this morning -- it plays tapes OK, but refuses to listen to polite commands issued over the 1394 bus. We'd had this problem at our uptown location before, and we thought the only solution was to send the (heavy, delicate) deck out for (expensive, slow) service. Seemed like this would be the same deal, which would seriously throw a wrench into our production pipeline.

Desperate, I turned to google for help - and sure enough, there's a three-finger button combination which resets the deck's motherboard. For those of you with a non-responsive DSR-30 -- and I think you know who you are -- hold down PAUSE, REC and press POWER. Listen for a string of outraged beeps as the deck's memory disappears down the drain. (Perhaps it's singing Daisy if you plug in headphones, I didn't think to listen). Then everything should be good as new.

Disclaimer: Don't blame me if your deck resets to SECAM Quadraphonic mode after trying this.

My dad recently got to beta-test the new Connnexion service aboard a Boeing jet from Switzerland coming back to the USA. Apparently it worked well, although Lufthansa has decided to give out entire laptops rather than let users connect via their own equipment.

As a thank-you gift, the stewardess gave him this nice piece of schwag which soon made its way to my hands: a Lufthansa-branded USB-powered gooseneck white LED.

This entry over on Karlo's blog caught my eye... I think my rechargable toothbrush uses the same technology, since it manages to recharge itself on the base station with no exposed metal contacts at all, just some kinda Star Trek-esque proximity power transmission.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that people have tried to do wireless power transmission over large distances with microwaves - with the unfortunate side effect of frying any carbon-based lifeforms with cells who got in the way.

Clontzman alerted me to a newly-redesigned ESPN site today. One of the most-hyped features is ESPNMotion, a kind of hybrid streaming/cached video delivery system that straddles the boundaries between web and desktop video.

Looking at the FAQ, it's a little difficult to determine exactly what ESPNMotion actually is. System requirements include Flash, which initially made me suspect that it was doing video through the Sorenson Squeeze codec, which is exclusive to Flash. But further down the page we discover that Windows Media Player is also a requirement. It seems odd to involve that software and bypass the much-hyped Sorenson features of Flash, but I never did get jocks anyway.

I installed ESPNMotion on a sacrificial testbed system we keep around for our webmasters to look at pages on a PC. The installer itself is a Win32 app, but before you get to that you need to make sure Flash 5 and WMP7 are installed. The installer is responsible for a piece of tray lint, as well as a background app called "Digstream."

The background app invisibly connects to ESPN's servers (presumably through port 80 to avoid most firewalls) and downloads WMV files in the background. When a quorum of these are saved into c:\...Application Data\DIGStream\ESPNMotion, the tray lint springs to life and alerts you that ESPNMotion is ready for you. Clicking on the notification icon takes you to the main ESPN.com page, and through the magic of JavaScript the web page calls up the dormant WMV files on your hard drive and plays them within the frame of the ESPN site.

This is the real key selling point of DIGStream, or whatever shell corporation sold the tech to ESPN. Since all the clips are downloaded in the background, and you aren't told about it until there's a critical mass (or mess) of them for you to peruse, the system creates the illusion that the video is streaming instantly to your web page, without any of the annoying buffering, hiccups and delays that usually plague on-demand video.

A little investigation reveals the following about the files themselves. So far, they seem to be between 1 and 7 megabytes in size. All are suffixed with ".wmv" as any regular Windows Media file should be, and are encoded with WM9 codecs. Windows Media 7 (the latest available for Windows 98) is capable of using WM9 codecs, so that should take care of the low-end users without a problem. Bitrate is just under 700kpbs, a level of data that would never work on the web but is perfectly fine playing back from winchester storage devices such as your desktop hard drive.

What does ESPN do with all that throughput? For one, they bump the FPS up to 30fps - something that contributes to the dramatic increase in perceived image quality versus normal streaming video. Compared with most clips streamed over HTTP or RTSP, these local files look much more like a DVD player window, which is pretty much the only other time most users will have seen nearly 30fps on their computer.

Strangely, ESPN has decided to encode at least the audio portion of these files in Continuous Bit Rate as opposed to Variable. (WMP doesn't report any details on the video portion of my stream). Since ESPN presumably has enough time to really massage the compression on these clips, you'd think they would go VBR to reduce their size somewhat.

Finally, a note on bandwidth. As a pseudo-network administrator for my department, I have to wonder about dozens of employees running ESPNMotion in the background all day long, sucking down clip after clip of WMV files. Depending on how often ESPN plans to push out new files, this could be quite a waste of bandwidth. At least in regular streaming media clients, the bandwidth is only in use when someone is actively viewing or buffering a file. ESPNMotion's behind-the-scenes approach may make things easier for the end user, but it risks raising the ire of those who have to manage ever more scare shared resources. Some open architecture for supporting local caching servers - as PointCast was forced to do before common sense overtook their own momentum - would go a long way towards making ESPNMotion a more friendly network citizen. It's possible that if DIGStream uses port 80, many corporate firewalls which contain caching web proxies would work seamlessly.

I'm also curious as to whether the URLs from which the background app is collecting the videos are patched into Akamai or another similar bandwidth distribution schema. You would want that kind of geographic and topological strategy when you consider the popularity of sports in general and ESPN in particular on the web today. Netcraft tells me that at least one of their servers, motionslow.espn.go.com, is running Apache on Netware, about which I shall say nothing in order to be polite.

So here it is. Props to clontzman for the software suggestion, and ssimon for the domain xfer. I'll buy you a mint julip and caiparinha respectively.