Sunday, August 31, 2008

Fax over IP, FOIP and IP Faxing being sent to a machine near you.

Years ago the standard telephone line (POTS or Plain Old Telephone Service) was all we knew. It worked for local and long distance. It also worked great for analog devices such as modems and fax machines. These devices send a high pitched, modulating squeal and are received on the other end. This modulating squeal is deciphered on the other end and turned into usable data or a fax.

The advantage of POTS technology is it is a one-to-one dedicated connection from one phone, modem or fax to another while the call is in place. This dedicated circuit is continuous and uninterrupted. The circuit is such that when a message is sent, is received in the same order it is sent. So, sending the message "Mary had a little lamb" was received as "Mary had a little lamb". It worked reliably with little complexity.

Then along came the internet. The internet was brought to life expressly to combat the simplicity of the one-to-one connection. The problem with this type of connection is obvious: if the line is broken the communication is lost. The US military saw a need to continue communications during a war even if certain telephone lines were damaged. Therefore the internet protocol doesn't rely on a dedicated connection.

IP communications break a message into packets. These packets are sent in any of an infinite web of servers to go from the server to the receiver. If one path is broken, damaged or busy, the packet gets re-routed. It eventually gets to the receiver where it is reassembled and put in order. Because the message is broken up and potentially sent all over the plance, the same message may be received as "had a Mary lamb little" Then the receiving device reassembles it and reorders it into the original message.

This works great for lots of things such as email. It has proven to be a challenge for real time or streaming media where the message has to quickly be sent, received, reordered and delivered.

One of the last devices to come into the internet age is the simple fax. But now, with the advent of the T.38 IP fax protocol, this is on the verge of changing. The old fax machine will be a thing of the past in short order.

Currently there are two common options for IP faxing.

1. A T.38 device send to a T.38 fax server. This server then converts the message to a standard analog fax protocol and sends to a typical fax.

2. Newer devices are smart in the sense that they can send to another T.38 IP fax or to an older traditional fax.

IP faxing is a way to save on long distance cost, reduce the number of needed standard phone lines and improve fax quality all at once.

Saturday, August 30, 2008

Computer + Home =Amazing Home Automation (Smart Home)

Ever wish your home appliances had some intelligence? Like maybe the lights could come on as you pull in the driveway; or maybe the temperature could be adjusted to just the way you like it as you leave the office. Maybe you wish you could automatically open blinds or curtains during the day and close them at night. Or even yet, ever wish to know what is going on around the house while you are gone?

All this and more are possible with home automation. This technology (also called Smart Home or domotics) is the convergence of various technologies to allow this to take place. You can now pull up your hose from your iPHone, look at surveillance videos, change temperatures, turn on lights, or have these settings done automatically based on the time of day.

Building automation isn't new, so the technology is tried and perfected. Only recently has some of this commercial quality automation technology been applied to the home. There are a lot of quality home automation vendors and home automation products available to help with this. The technology is amazing, affordable and very cool all at the same time. Now your homes is at your command!

Friday, August 29, 2008

Speed up slow PC Computer

Is your PC getting slower and sloooooowwwer? Here are some tips to speed it back up.

1. Computers don't get slower, they just get more loaded. Modern computers are inherently very fast. What you are seeing whey the computer gets slower isn't the computer, it's what's on the hard drive. They get loaded with extra drivers, software, fragmented (for windows machines), unneeded processes running the the background.

2. Try degragmenting on a windows machine.

3. Remove unneeded running processes (automatic printer or webcam ubdates).

4. Remove old drivers from unused digital cameras, scanners, etc.

5. Clear internet cache.

6. Try software especially written to speed up slow computers.

7. Add more memory.

Utilizing these tips in this order will help find the least expensive solution to your slow PC.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Climate Change, Fact or Fiction

Climate change; is it fact or fiction. Is it man-made or a natural phenomenon? Be a part of the research while you sleep! By using an otherwise idling PC and joining a distributed network dedicated to climate change, you can use your home PC in a small way to help unlock the puzzles surrounding the climate change debate.

One such distributed networks dedicated to climate change research is http://climateprediction.net. This is a project sponsored by Oxford University with the stated goal of predicting the climate of the 21st century using distributed networking.

Distributed Computing

Distributed computing isn’t new but more people are relying on this concept to increase research computing horsepower. Distributed computing works like this: A central computer is connected to many other “worker bee” computers called nodes. These worker bee computers, more and more, are your desktop computer. During times of low activity such as at night and during the day while the user is at work this central computer sends small computing activities to the computer nodes. The object of distributed computing is to have as many nodes as possible so each computer does small amounts of work but the overall effect is a huge supercomputer.

Many researchers are using distributed computing for health research, climate change research and even the search for extra-terrestrial communications! The benefit of distributed computing can be magnificent. In some cases the computing power of a distributed network can be hundreds of times more powerful than the computing power a researcher would otherwise. This can cut time consuming and expensive computer modeling time from years to days.


For a list of some of the distributed networks visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects.

Monday, August 25, 2008

Fighting Cancer with the Computer

Imaging fighting cancer, ALS, Huntington's or Mad Cow Disease on your way to work, or while you are asleep. This can be done by everyone with a computer by a process called distributed computing. Stanford University isn't alone in using unused CPU time for good but they have the goal of using your computer's idle time and cpu for cancer research, Alzheimer's research and Parkinson's research. See Stanford's site for details.

There is also the Help Conquer Cancer Project. This project runs on the IBM sponsored World Community Grid. With distributed computing the Conquer Cancer researchers hope to use the World Community Grid to reduce computer time for certain research calculations and modeling from 162 years to 2 years.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Zoneminder Video Sample

Check out video security surveillance video captured using Zoneminder. Captured using a Four port capture BT878 capture card with Day/Night auto-iris zoom video surveillance camera.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Zoneminder Security Surveillance Video Server Install

If you are looking for a good video security surveillance system look look no further than Zoneminder. It's free, open source and the features are excellent. Below is a step by step recipe for installing with Fedora 9 Live CD. It will take approximately 30 minutes to get up and running. For video surveillance capture cards that are certified to work with Linux and Zoneminder try Bluecherry. Zoneminder works great with multiple security camera types including day/night surveillance cameras, ip surveillance cameras and pan-tilt-zoom security surveillance cameras. Often, some of the vendors specializing in security equipment or surveillance equipment will run specials on capture cards and cameras.

Zoneminder works great for home security surveillance or office video security surveillance. This video surveillance server has all the features of the expensive surveillance packages including video motion detection, video masking (removing areas that aren't important), video zones, video triggering, etc. You don't even need a powerhouse computer as a video server.

You can also monitor the surveillance server from over the internet and watch what's going on while you are away! For a sample video of what this system is capable of, watch a sample here.

1 Install Fedora 9 LiveCD
Tell it to remove all partitions
Manually select Hostname to be whatever name you want
Time Zone (Select New York) and uncheck UTC
Select Root Password
Finish and reboot
On bootup
Disable Firewall
Disable SELinux
Enable Network Time Protocal
Create user name and password
Reboot

2 Open terminal
Log in as root (su)
type yum -y install mysql-server ; yum -y insall zoneminder

gedit /etc/httpd/conf.d/zoneminder.conf and remove or add # in front of line indicated and save

Go to services and select, start and save httpd, sshd, mysqld

3 Download and install webmin http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/webadmin/webmin-1.390-1.noarch.rpm

4 Open firefox and go to localhost:10000

Log in as root (root here, not su)

Go to services->MySQL
Under MySQL databases click create db and name it zm Don't select anything other than the name
Click on the zm database you created.
Select execute sql and browse from local file to /usr/share/zoneminder/db/zm_create.sql

5 Go to terminal as root and type service zoneminder restart

6 Go to Firefox, to to localhost/zm and it should be ready to go.

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Java Netbeans Tutorial

Netbeans Java Basics.

This guide is based on Netbeans 6. To use Netbeans you will have to have Java installed plus Netbeans. Any projects produced with Netbeans will run on any computer with any O/S that has java installed. This currently includes cell phones, computers, pocket pc, etc.

To install Netbeans, go to http://java.sun.com/javaee/downloads/index.jsp and choose the full install including Netbeans. This will install java and all of the basic Netbeans plugins.

After installation, start Netbeans. We will develop a basic calculator with multiple forms. This will use many of the skills necessary to develop basic applications.

When open, start a new project. Select file->new project, JAVA and Desktop Application. This will allow development of a general gui type Java Application. Give it a name, (ie FirstApp) and select finish.

A blank project will appear. This is actually a complete java application as it is. Try it. Near the top find the Green Triangle which says Run Main Project. It will compile and run a complete java application with a blank page. You will notice a standard menu and other familiar features already built into the basic java application. Close this and we will add some more to it.

On the left side of the screen is the development portion of the app. The block shown with File and Help is the main screen (called mainPanel). This is the screen that will open by default with your java application. We can add other screens (called jFrames or java Frames) to this to allow the user to have other options.

First, let's add some items to the mainPanel and see what happens. On the right side of the screen is the Palette. This is a selection of many pre-build components such as buttons, check boxes, etc to build familiar and easy to use applications. For this demo we will always use Swing components.

Now grab a Swing Controls Button and place it anywhere on the mainPanel. It is named by default jButton1. Java sees this button as having 2 parts, a variable name and a text label. First let's rename the variable name to something meaningful. Right click jon jButton1 and change the variable name to addButton. This can be anything you want but it's helpful to use something meaningful. Now java sees the variable name as addButton but the user still sees jButton1.

Let's change that and tell it to do something. Double click on jButton1. This is where we will change the text label and tell java what to do with it. A screen comes up labeled Set Action. Under Action, select Create New Action. By Action's Method will will add something that will tell us what the button does. Type openAdditionFrame. Under attributes change the Text to Add. The tool tip is helpful. This is where you add a hover-over baloon to tell the user what this button does. We'll use this. By tool tip type This button opens the addition frame.

When you click OK, it opens a new screen with lots of code. This all of the background code to make the java app worki. The curser is automatically placed near code labeled openAdditionFrame. This is the method we named earlier. We won't worry about any code now. On the upper left there are two tabs, Source and Design. Source is where you can view and edit any code with the project and Design is working on the GUI.

Go back to Design. Now lets compile and run what we have so far. Click the Green Triangle to perform this. We see our old familiar application come up with the Add button. The button does nothing yet but we can verify our application frequently by compiling and running.

Now we want to make the Add button open a separate screen (called a jFrame) where we will make a basic addition calculator.

We need to first create the second frame. While we are in Design mode on the right side of the screen select Swing Windows->Frame. Drag on top of the mainPanel. Now on the left side of the screen there are 3 tabs labeled Navigator, Projects and Inspector. Click Inspector. This will show us all of the files contained in our project. We should see FrameView, mainPanel, menuBar, and statusPanel and jFrame1. This is the second window we just added. Right click and change the variable name to addFrame.

Now we're ready to add some code. On the left side of the screen double click mainPanel. This brings our opening panel back up. Make sure to be in design mode (upper left of mainPanel). Now double click on the Add button we created.

This brings back the code editor. We will have some code like:

@Action

public void openAdditionFrame() {

}

This is called a method. A method begins with an open brace { and ends with a closed brace }. In between is we add the code to make things happen.

Now add the following code to make the method look like:

@Action

public void openAdditionFrame() {

addFrame.setBounds(400,400,400,400); //This opens the addFrame Frame to the position and size //indicated

mainPanel.setVisible(false); //This hides (not closes) the mainPanel

addFrame.setVisible(true); //This opens the addFrame Frame to the size indicated

} //above

//Anything with double slashes at the beginning are comments. Java ignores this.


Now click the Green Triangle to test. It should open the main panel. Now when you select the Add button another blank window should open. Close everything and return to the editor.

Now select the Inspector tab on the left. Again it will highlight the files included in this application. Double click on addFrame. It will bring up a blank window (frame) similar to the mainPanel except there is no menubar at the top.


From the Palette select Swing Controls->Text Field. Drag 3 of these in a culumn onto the addFrame.

The will be automatically named textField1 -3. Change the variable names. The one on the top will be no1TextField, the middle one will be no2TextField and the bottom will be no3TextField. Now you can edit the default text. In textField1 and textField2 put 1 as the default. Leave the sumTextField blank. Size each of them so they are the same. Now drag a label beside each text field. Name the top one Number 1, the middle one Number 1 and the buttom one Sum.

This will allow the user to input 2 numbers and we will calculate the sum and place that value in the bottom field.

Now we will add 3 action buttons. Drag 3 buttons over. Double click each to add a new action and change the default text on each button. Name the action and text Add, Clear and ReturntoMain.



We're ready to add some code here.

The add button is where the meat of our application lies. Double click on it to get to the code editor.

It will open up like:

@Action

public void add() {

}

Now we have to start adding some code. A few things first. All java (and C, C++ and C#) statements end with a ;. You will get an error if each statement isn't ended properly. Also regardign variables. The most common variables are String (text values), int (integer or whole numbers), and double (numbers with a decimal).

Also, java treats all values in a text field as text regardless of what you put there. If you want to value to be used with an integer or double variable it has to be converted.

In between the braces, declare 3 variables:

double no1;

double no2;

double sum;

Now when we select the Add button we want java to read the value in no1 and no2, internally add them and place the sum in sum.

To read in no1 and no2 add the following code:

no1=Double.parseDouble(no1TextField.getText());

no2=Double.parseDouble(no2TextField.getText());

This is kind of a mouthfull but here's what's happening.

First we're reading the text value (get) in no1TextField with the statement “no1TextField.getText()”

Next we are parsing (converting) it from a text value to a double value with Double.parseDouble(...)

Now we are storing the value of each of these text fields in the variables no1 and no2. So again, we read in a text value, convert it to a double and store it to no1. If we wanted a text value, such as name we wouldn't have to convert anything.

Now we will add:

sum=no1+no2;

This tells java to add the two converted values together and store them internally into the variable sum. Next we must send this internal value out to the sumTextField. First, remember though that all textField values MUST BE TEXT. So now we have to convert the double value sum to text and post it (set) to the sumTextField. Type:

sumTextField.setText(Double.toString(sum));

Here we are converting the double value sum to string with Double.toString(sum). We are then posting the string value into the sumTextField.

Both of these examples are compound statements where we are doing 2 things in1 statement (reading value and converting) or (converting and posting). This is a little confusing at first but more efficient.

Now the method should look like:

@Action

public void add() {

double no1;

double no2;

double sum;



no1=Double.parseDouble(no1TextField.getText());

no2=Double.parseDouble(no2TextField.getText());

sum=no1+no2;

sumTextField.setText(Double.toString(sum));



}

Click the Green Triangle to test it out.

Now the Add button on the mainPanel takes us to the addFrame. On the addFrame the add button works as we would expect by reading in the top 2 numbers and putting the sum in the sum box.

Now we'll work on the Clear and Return buttons.

Double click the clear button. The method will come up. We want to clear the values in the 3 boxes to start a new calculation. The method should read:

@Action

public void clear() {



no1TextField.setText("");

no2TextField.setText("");

sumTextField.setText("");

}


This simply puts a blank character “” in the textField. You could have replaced them with any number you wanted.

Now for the return button. This will close this frame and take us back to the mainPanel.

Double click on ReturntoMain and make the method say:

@Action

public void ReturntoMain() {

addFrame.setVisible(false);

mainPanel.setVisible(true);

}

This hides the current addFrame and makes the mainPanel visible again.

Now Click the Green Triangle to compile and run. All should work as expected.

One other thing. Java variable names are case sensitive, so no1 and No1 aren't the same variable.

This is a simple example but demonstrates several things to get going.

Monday, August 4, 2008

Reducing Energy Consumption

Here's my new blog about Reducing Energy Consumption at Home, Work and at Travel.

http://reducingenergy.blogspot.com/