Years ago I worked on a product called InfoCentral.  It was a wonderful database that gave as much power to the connections as the objects the connections were between.  You could manage your connections, including possibly multiple connections of different types between objects.  It gave you the ability to realistically map life’s complex realities into a software metaphor.  I really enjoyed that program and have been unable to find anything even close to its power in the years since.  Hopefully something like that can evolve from the successful roots of Facebook.

Currently there’s a way to avoid seeing news from specific people posted to your main page, but even that nice start needs to be improved.  Here are a couple of suggestions that would really help in connection management.

1.      Be able to prioritize, perhaps with as few as 3 levels you could group people into for news you would rather see first… priority level A, B and C.

2.      Be able to block anything having to do with, showing or related to specific individuals (without them knowing)

3.      Be able to “drop” someone from your relationships and yet have them continue to think its still there.  A stealth mode.  Someone you don’t want to offend but perhaps this relative posts updates a little too frequently for your tastes.

Small changes add up to big differences in what you see and experience when using social networking software.

One of the demos I saw, which really made an impression on me, was an app that used twitter to make phone call with some text to speech tech, and then allowed the person who answered to say/record something that was then posted back to twitter as an audio file.
During the demo, Travis Spencer (his blog post here), had his app call his cell phone, he left a message, and then played it back to the audience when it showed up on twitter (here).

Aside from the fact that it all just worked (and we all know how demos can go wrong), this was cool to me because of the connection between social media, the twillio APIs and the *mobile device*.

Smart people are spending time making the web - the social web - do really cool things with our devices.
Exposing capabilities of the device to web developers will help that kind of innovation flourish.

I'll not get into deep details about the application, but it does have many features (shutdown, restart, standby… even screenshot). While it doesn't have a huge crowd of users, it does have a lot of buzz and attention from top gadget and technology blogs (like LifeHacker, Gizmodo). This shows that there is a lot of interest in remote control and remote management solutions, even in home consumer markets.

And of course, I couldn’t stop thinking about Intel AMT when I saw these links. :)
What if we could add to the simplicity of this interface the features available in Intel AMT? For example, one short SMS message and your system is powered down (the "macho" way, without waiting for apps to close :) ).
Or what about setting 3PDS information to be retrieved later? Your computer could become your always-available note taking device :). Everyone in the family can 'tweet' the groceries list, and then anyone can retrieve it from a remote computer, without need to wake up the Operating System.

And even cooler, with an SMS message that stops a Software Agent from sending heartbeats, one can block the network connection with System Defense. Forgot a VoiceOverIP application connected? System Defense can block the specific protocol or port at a remote SMS command from the road.

I believe this simplicity and this availability will come.
In the future, technologies like AMT will be spread enough and easy to use enough for us to have such a straightforward interface. We will see semantic parsers that will let us text our machines "block all connections apart from port 31426, update the antivirus and then shutdown".

We are getting close, step by step. And Intel AMT can add a myriad of features to this future :).

Want to attend the show but can't afford a pass?  No problem!

Come by and join our Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/intelsoftwarenetwork.  Then write a message on our wall asking for your complimentary SIGGRAPH pass courtesy of Intel and I will message you directly with the registration information. It's that simple!

Need details on what we're going to be up to at the show?  Well we've got them.  Check out our Intel @ SIGGRAPH page and watch in the upcoming weeks for blogs, tweets and Facebook updates about our activities.

Want to win a $25 gift card to the ultimate nerd paradise, ThinkGeek.com?  It's easy with Intel Software Network!

Just Ask us anything about software running on Intel Architecture and you'll automatically be entered in our drawing.  That's it!  No strings; we just want to know what you're curious about and how we can help answer your questions.

Questions will be accepted through July 16 and you can enter multiple times - so what are you waiting for!  Start asking today!

We'll be using the fan page to post updates, relevant news & website highlights to keep everyone informed of all the great things we're up to.  If you have suggestions about our website or Facebook pages, make sure to leave us a note on the wall.  We'll also post any ISN event notices on our Facebook page so you can keep informed on where we'll be and when.

Surf on over to http://www.facebook.com/pages/Intel-Software-Network/94251532337 to find the fan page; become a fan and let the software development fun begin!  :-)

http://intel.com/software/tv

Here is the show schedule for Tuesday, June 16th.

8:00AM PACIFIC, June 16
Parallel Programming Talk with Clay Breshears & Aaron Tersteeg with special Guest, Duncan McCallum, CEO Cilk Arts Multicore Programming Software

Episode 35: Duncan will be give a quick overview of Cilk++ and answering questions about using the technology. Cilk++ provides a simple set of extensions for C++, coupled with a powerful runtime system for multicore-enabled applications. Cilk++ enables rapid development, testing, and deployment of high performance multicore applications.

Watch Live: www.intel.com/software/tv or listen to podcast at: www.blogtalkradio.com/MulticoreSoftware

Show Notes: intel.com/software/tersteeg

10AM PACIFIC, June 16
Teach Parallel with Paul Steinberg and guest Professor Charlie Peck of Earlham College: "Teaching Parallelism to Students; Teaching Parallelism to Faculty"

As a member of the Supercomputing Conference's Education Program Steering Committee (2007-2011), Professor peck is one of a group of academics developing and delivering curriculum for teaching high performance computing, Parallelism and computational science to undergraduate faculty and students. Working with colleagues from the Supercomputing Education Program, he is co-PI of the LittleFe project. LittleFe is a low-cost, portable, computational cluster primarily used for high performance computing and computational science education, outreach, and training.

2:30PM PACIFIC, June 16
Visualize This! Host Arti Gupta interviews Scott Crabtree

Scott Crabtree, Intel Engineering Manager, will share the game demos developed by his team and discuss tips and techniques on how to use parallel programming techniques combined with the power of multicore processors for enhanced game performance.

Be sure to tune in and watch live on June 16th. If you miss the live broadcasts, all shows are available on-demand at the same link, typically within a day or so of broadcast time.

For more on the launch of Intel Software Network TV on June 9th, read the announcement here.   Follow @isntv on Twitter for notice when a show is going to be live, or subscribe to the RSS feed to receive high quality downloads of new show episodes as they become available.

One of the highlights he listed was the conversation which was engendered by a post I did about two years ago called "Why Linux people lust after DTrace." My intent was simply to write up the notes from a talk I had attended by Bryan Cantrill from Sun about DTrace, and some random musings based on my own shaggy dog history in the industry.

Frankly, I wasn't prepared for the resulting thunderstorm of comments on my blog, as well as the comments which popped up on other blogs which referenced my post. Suddenly I had a steady stream of comments and post views on a topic that, well to be honest, I wasn't prepared to address. Heck, it was just a random post, why was there so much response?

And better yet, how could I replicate this outpouring of passion?

Since I posted this, I have learned a lot more about DTrace. The community has extended DTrace probes into MySQL, JavaScript and Python, to name a few. Intel extended DTrace to support an OpenSolaris version of PowerTop. (And I believe there are other DTrace-based tools which are forthcoming). I also learned more about similar options in Linux, and the pros and cons vs. DTrace.

Here's a shout-out to Bill for mentioning my humble little post in his 2000th post party!

And, a little full-circle irony here: In the original post, I commented on how Oracle engineers in particular wished they had a version of DTrace for Linux. I guess with the coming acquisition of Sun by Oracle, they may be able to finally satisfy their lust for DTrace!

If you don't know about Moblin, read Imad's blog for a complete introduction to the operating system, including a lot of good links. In fact, I'm typing this from my Asus eeePC 901 running Moblin.

Some of my favorite features:

• Social media integration - I think Moblin will become famous as the first OS to really be designed with the Internet designed in from the ground up. And the way people use the Internet these days is with social media apps like Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook. Moblin beta has Twitter and Last.fm built in now, will have more later. The very desktop is built in with social media and can be extensible to new internet services.
• Fast boot - the boot time on my flash-based netbook is fantastic, beats anything out there.
• Animated user experience - I've played with a lot of animated desktops like compiz and the like. This one beats all.

This has been a great story for some of the legendary open source experts at Intel. I'm proud of the accomplishments so far, and more to come.

It is a beta, so set expectations accordingly that we need the community to test it and file bugs and help us to make it better.

Moodle stands for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. In the technical terms, Moodle is Open Source Learning Management System (LMS) which enables learning professionals (educators) to create engaging online learning courses. Moodle is the brainchild of Martin Dougiamas, who designed the program while working on his Ph.D. at Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia. He developed it as an Open Source application for his dissertation using a social constructivist's approach to learning. As a result, Moodle is developed with features which facilitate this approach to education, particularly with interactive community components such as blog, forum, survey, and virtual conference. Dougiamas programmed Moodle in PHP, a programming (or scripting) language that can create web pages based on user input and data-based information. Moodle's Philosophy of learning  is its focuses on collaboration, activities and critical reflection. This social-constructive approach involves a strong community of learning orientation rather than simple online computting courses and exercises. In general, a constructive amount of connected activities within a learning community is a very powerful stimulant for learning, not only bringing people closer together but promoting synergy among educators and learners.

In today's internet connected world, virtually every educational institution or corporation, one way or another, has by now adopted a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) or CMS (Course Management System) for use either as an aid to its traditional courses (often called a "integrated" or "hybrid" course system), or as a tool for its distance or off-campus education program via some commercial CMS, of which are expensive to license and which are rather rigid in the ways that they can be used. Moodle is different, rather than just publishing , assessing and reporting the information educator think learners need to know, it  create a platform on which each participant in a course, no matter if he or she is an educator or learner, can switch role in between. Your job as an educator can change from being originator of knowledge to being an influencer and role model of class culture, connecting with learners in a personal way that addresses their own learning needs, and promoting and facilating discussions and interactive activities in a way that collectively leads students towards the learning goals of the class achieving multi-threaded knowledge transfer.

Moodle has a very active community cross over 200 countries with 670k member. With a user base of this size situated around the world, it is common for moodle user to receive help within a matter of hours from different countries, some time with different language, regardless of the local time of day. Moodle community members not only give help, but have also continue to add new module or plugins codes to help a user to modify a current feature or create a new one. Now let us take a closer look at some of the top key features, blocks and modules of Moodle which are of the interest of academic and software developer training community.

• Interface languages: when a user logs on, there is a drop down menu from which he can select an interface language. Once set, that language choice remains unless another language is selected. These language modules have all been created by volunteers.
• Multiple material type support: Moodle platform is well positioned to host different learning materials such as animation, case study, drill and practice, lecture/presentation, quiz/test, video, live chat, survey, simulation and virtual conference etc. All are materailized by  Assignment Module, Chat Module, Choice Module, Forum Module, Journal Module, Poll, Quiz Module, Resource Module, Survey Module and Workshop Module. Embedded Shockwave Flash (.swf) files.  
• WYSIWYG HTML editor: It is the embedded tool in Moodle for users to edit text entry areas like resources, forum postings and journal entries. Copies of forum posts, teacher feedback etc can be mailed in HTML or plain text, and electronic assignment submissions. Instructors have various choices for course formats such as by week, by topic or a discussion-focused social format. 
• Activity Report: It is the full logging and tracking report for each student with graphs and module details (Access/Number of time read) as well as details of each student involvement like postings and journal entries.The course activity in Moodle includes Forums, Journals, Quizzes, Resources, Choices, Surveys, Assignments, Chats, and Workshops as well as virtual areas for group work. Instructor can easily get full reports of the activities of individual students, or of all students for a specific activity.
• The quiz-making function:  Self-assessment quizzes and online testing.  Quiz types such as: Multiple choice, True/False, Numerical, Matching, Description, and Cloze. A wide range of options allows you to randomize the questions and multiple-choice items, specify a time frame for availability, choose whether the students receive feedback or not, decide if they are allowed to view the correct answers, and determine how many times they may take the quiz and how it is to be scored.
• Modular design: Each functional feature of Moodle can be regarded as a module. Moodle is built in a very modular fashion. New functions can be created and activated merely by dropping them into the site's directory where all of the plug-in modules are stored. There are site management, user management and course management for different users with different access.

Entering "Moodle”, an open-source platform, which is not only free but also highly adaptable for computer science education, universities and corporation education organization are quickly discovering that they can spend far less on down payment by implementing Moodle, and then  use some of the savings to tailor it to work precisely the way it is needed for a tight fit. And evidence have shown that moodle ( LMS) is no longer a tool used by low budget on-line or distance learning institutions. In stead, more and more universities wih PhD and MS curriculum  and professional training organization have finished their transition of traditional instructor lead class into moodle based dynamic online class, integrated with community ingredients,  such as California Tech Computer Science Curriculum, Virginia Tech Computer Science Curriculum , Oregon Inst. of Tech. Curriculum for Computer Science and Tech and International conference such as Super Computing Education moodle which is  sponsored by  ACM and IEEE. At the same time, more universities have been systematically evaluating and piloting Moodle as the online learning management system. For example, at University of North Carolina at Charlotte (http://www.lmseval.uncc.edu/ ),  In 2008,  10 faculty participated the pilot and taught classes based on Moodle, and created a focus group to discuss their Moodle experiences, and in the following term in earlier 2009, the pilot extended to 18 new faculty members selected based on a variety of criteria, including college representation, course types, experienced vs. new users, fully online vs. hybrid, and face to face courses  and concluded that moodle offers advantages include ease of use and mastery, minimal support, collaboration with the open source community, flexibility, and adaptability to the needs of faculty and students.

On technical side, Moodle can run on virtually any machine, Windows, Macintosh  or Linux, as long as the followings are installed: 1) an Apache web server, 2) the page generation freeware, PHP, and 3) a database application, usually, but not limited to MySQL.  All are open source. Applications exist for all platforms and are listed under "Installing Apache, MySQL and PHP" at http://moodle.org/doc/. Some basic fact about moodle is listed below:

It is not yet to know how long Moodle can keep its exponential growth. For sure, it will help academic or corporate educators connect with learners, but in the larger scope, perhaps it will connect and optimize the fragmented knowledge and resource in different institutions, and eventually make the knowledge transfer process in an orchestrated and connected way, especially in the United States, where people expect more from universities and employer, while at the same time the available tax dollars are dropping.

I am a Moodler since 2009 and building a Moodle platform for Intel academic community. Currently, I am actively working on every details of the project. If you have any suggestion or comments that you want to share with the reader of this blog, you can add them here. I would also love to hear from you if you choose to email me at tao.b.wang@intel.com.

Intel does a lot of yearly giving to charities and has launched Small Things Challenge which will donate up for $300,000 to Kiva.org (a highly respected micro-loan org) and Save the Children. All you have to do is visit http://smallthingschallenge.com and click so that Intel will donate on your behalf. You can do this on a daily basis and also send on to friends and family to do the same. Of course if you're in a giving mood you can opt to do that too, but there's absolutely no gimmick or obligation.

So if you need your daily "attaboy" or "attagirl" you know where to go!

Thanks for supporting and please pass it on!

Cheers,

Amanda

http://twitter.com/amandamarvel

At 6:30 am the morning alarm turns on the wall display next to your bed, gradually illuminating to show the sun rising over Mt. Hood. The scene gradually brightens and songbirds gently ease you from slumber. Sensors detect your presence as you enter the bathroom: lights come on, the shower starts at the preset temperature, and your schedule for the day appears next to the morning news on the wall. You notice that a video conference is scheduled for 8:00 am with team members situated in four different cities.

As you walk into your home office at 7:45 am, your agenda for the meeting appears on your main display. Preparing for the meeting, you realize you didn’t shave and you set your appearance in the video-enhancement option to “clean shaven”. When the conference begins, your wall display shows you sitting in a conference room at a table with your colleagues. You wonder if any of the other men haven’t shaved today and who in the group might still be wearing pajamas. In the virtual conference realm, everyone looks their best.

You share the current architecture files with the team, allowing everyone to visualize the new art museum rendered beautifully before them as you guide them verbally through your tour, navigating exterior views with hand gestures and walking through interior views,. Their locally rendered views follow your voice navigation, leading to the main exhibit hall, where you let the team explore and comment. Collective feedback on improvements and suggestions are represented to all participants in real time, changing their individual rendered views, relative to their perspective in the exhibit hall. In an hour and a half of visual collaboration, the team agrees on the planning goals for the new museum. The meeting is adjourned.

Later that afternoon, as you’re driving to the new construction site, your heads-up display (HUD) in the car calls your attention to some road debris up ahead. As you casually veer around the obstacles, you notice that the movie theater is playing the new movie you wanted to see. You tell your mobile device to order the movie so you can watch it at home tonight. Just then, the HUD reports some traffic congestion and reroutes you along a less crowded route to your destination.

At the site, your eyeglasses project a model of the building that you have been working on with your colleagues directly onto your retinas. You walk onto the dirt where ground-breaking ceremony will take place in one week, but your eyeglasses project the virtual building before you. Walking into the exhibit hall, you notice the exterior windows are facing directly into the building across the street and would produce better natural lighting effects if they faced south overlooking the bay. You reach out and move the windows to the south side of the virtual structure before you, and then look around the hall at the effects of the late afternoon sun. This is much better—it will make a better impression on the visitors who tour the structure. As you head back to your car, you send the updated architectural specs to your team with a voice command and head home.

After a long day, you’re ready to relax. You take your mobile device, send a few follow up emails about the construction project, and then press a button to turn on your entertainment center, dim the lights, and queue up your movie. Three walls in the family room light up with the movie preview. As you settle in, the sensors detect your location and orient the film angles to the director’s preferences for the best perspective. Throughout the movie, you can choose to insert yourself into the crowd and participate with wild hand gestures in reaction to the main characters antics, getting huge laughs from your kids. One of the kids puts on the headset and by moving around the family room, changes the perspective of the movie, making it appear as if he is in the movie directly. He looks left, the film angle moves left. He ducks and the camera angle lowers. He moves right and is able to look around the corner to see the bad guy hiding in the alley. After a fun night in the home holodeck, you’re feeling very relaxed and also pleased that you didn’t get a flat tire from the road debris encountered earlier.

I find this very interesting for two main reasons:

• Firstly, it's a validation of the belief in social media from a corporate perspective. Many corporations are still behind the ball on the two-way communication and outreach to the online community, many times because of the concern about controlling the message. With these kinds of online apps it is increasingly making it easier for companies to take that leap.
• Secondly, this is one of a host of applications that are being built within the Cloud, online and web-based versus the traditional way on your company network (or even your own harddrive!) This seems to indicate a shift in how applications are being developed.

Are you now or are you considering to develop apps within the Cloud? If so I'd love to hear your thoughts on why and your take on benefits that come with this model.

Thanks!