Technology Ramblings

In an earlier post I discussed the explosion in connected devices in your home and that the number of connected devices will continue to grow in the coming years. Between all of those new devices and the modern approach of streaming audio and video content along with 1Gbps cable networking becoming more and more common - your WiFi network starts to become a much more critical component to any overall home solution. The challenge has been is that while overall bandwidth for WiFi has been growing - with 802.11ac, 2.4 & 5Ghz bands, 40, 80 and 160 channel widths - one of the biggest challenges is consistent coverage in your home. While 5 Ghz provides great bandwidth it's challenge is often range.  Signal strength tends to degrade quickly. This is especially true as your home size increases.  The average home size in the US is now some 2500 Sq Feet and depending on the overall layout and location of your WiFi Router and Cable/DSL Modem - you can end up with a lo...

I've always had an interest in home automation and whole home audio/video systems.  Over the years I've implemented a little of everything from X10 thru PCS, Insteon, etc., all the way up to Omni, Crestron, AMX and other systems.   In the early days, both the solutions and the protocols used were in most cases proprietary and while the controller could provide connectivity via serial links - there were often crude control packages for various devices.  You often then had to "code" the functions into your controller and insure that the connector was working properly and even then - operation was not always smooth or reliable.   Depending on your controller and the various endpoints you were trying to control you also had to deal with wiring.  As I stated most used serial connections - so if the devices were not close together - you were then trying to figure out how to get a wire there. So several technologies started to change that paradigm.  The fi...

Yesterday I watched Elon Musk announce the Tesla Model 3.  This $35K all electric vehicle with 215 mile range is as Elon describes it the 3rd phase of his vision of producing zero pollution vehicles (ZPV).   I also witnessed something that I don't every remember seeing and that is people lining up to pay the $1,000 reservation fee for a vehicle that will not be delivered until late 2017 - so maybe 18 - 20 months from now.  It was a news event here in Scottsdale, were some 350 - 500 people lined up in Scottsdale Fashion Square mall - where Tesla has a showroom.  Since many of those folks did that during the day - they were laying down a deposit on a vehicle sight unseen since the debut was not until 8:30P PDT. As of the time of this post about 1PM PDT on April 1, estimated 200,000 people have reserved a model 3.  That number may easily double or triple in the coming weeks.  That means that Tesla brought in yesterday $200M and a potential $8B+ i...

On day 2 of the BUILD conference in San Francisco - the keynote discussion was presented by Scott Guthrie - who runs Azure for MS. In my opinion - if there is one area of Microsoft that is really executing in a leadership position it's Azure.   From it's humble beginnings of some hosted services like Web Sites and Databases - Azure today has 30 regions and over 1M servers - and is growing rapidly.  Those 30 regions are more than AWS and Google combined. Along side traditional VM hosting capabilities the PaaS services that are available are simply amazing.  From Web to Mobile, Big Data to HPC and IoT to Analytics, Machine Learning and Containers - MS continues to innovate in the space and expand offerings. One of the more strategic announcements that MS made yesterday was that the new Xamarin software would be free to Visual Studio users.  Combined with what is called the Xamarin Test Suite - a mobile developer can test their application across hundreds to dif...

Today at the MS Build Conference in San Francisco - MS announced Windows 10 Anniversary Edition - or what we previously had been calling Redstone 1.   The edition is planned for release "this summer" - so if it is truly an anniversary edition that should mean July 29, 2016.   The features and demos that were focused on following the announcement were the following.. 1. A big emphasis and expansion of Microsoft Ink.  So more integration across more apps and some cool things like rulers and app relevance were demo'd 2. Cortana taking a bigger role - again with more integration across more apps -  like Skype - and access via the lock screen.  Also some backend capabilities like the Cortana intelligence engine. 3. Updates to MS Hello to support biometrics as well as integration with Edge for site logins. 4. BASH shell integration through a new partnership with Canonical (Ubuntu) and subsystem.   5. New Skype UWP app along more 3rd party UWP apps ...

Each year - I take a look at the trends occurring in the enterprise space and try and predict where we are heading. First - looking back - a few of predictions I discussed for 2015 are starting to take shape.. Hyperconverged solutions from vendors like Nutanix, Simplivity, Cohesity, ScaleIO and VMware are gaining traction.  These systems provide a modular approach to compute/storage virtualization and are an excellent value.  They are very quick to deploy, provide good performance and when combined with SDN solutions provide a basis for the software defined data center.   I see this trend continuing for the foreseeable future and everyone from the vendors mentioned above to EMC and even Cisco have released appliances.  So now it's the scramble for market share.   Chances are if your planning on purchasing new compute/storage infrastructure in 2016 - you'll be looking at hyperconverged. Next was the emergence of 40GB networking and SDN. ...

One of the technology areas I follow is home entertainment systems.  As a person who has had upwards of 11 TVs and various sound systems in a home and have built and maintained various content management, distribution and automation systems for whole audio/video and device management, I was intrigued by the approach that Vizio has recently undertaken with their SmartCast technology. In recent years we have seen an explosion in what are called "Smart TVs". These TVs run an Android or Linux OS variant - like Tizen, WebOS, etc on the "main board" of the TV and come with a number of streaming applications such as Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, etc., that allow you to stream internet content to the TV.  In addition some devices had DLNA capabilities that would allow you to stream local content from a PC or laptop. Anyone who has purchased a "Smart TV" knows that one of the challenges with that technology is that based on the relationship between the content provid...