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Wed, 31 Mar 2004
Cool Travel Map
Tue, 23 Mar 2004Hacknight was interesting tonight because I enter the room and was asked to sign this NDA. It sounded kinda fun so I read it over, didn't find anything completely unreasonable, and signed it. Now I have completely given up my freedom of writing in my blog and talking about the experience in detail... The "game" was basically a GPS (Lets call it location aware) supplimental reality game. In the demo, we chased (and captured) virtual ghosts across a park using PDAs. We were ghost busters! :) The entire concept is going to lead to some really great things I think, what we experienced is only the start. The magic card / RPG geeks are going to go crazy over this crap when it is finished. Also, Peter and Michael brought a Soekris for Tacoma node. Sounds like we are going to startup the snownet project again, and we should have TacomaNode finished in about two weeks. It will feature a soekris with an orinoco card (and some 'hacks' to correct our timing and retransmit issues), as well as a colo'ed machine with about 30 gigs, and some bandwidth to use (!). I expect we'll be on the roof next weekend if all goes well. Baldi needs a lot of work if we can't connect up to it, I have heard that things aren't fairing well :DSun, 21 Mar 2004
R/C Plane Software
Being able to actually apply trig to something really makes me happy...I might even work in some calculus by the end of development.
Fresnel Lens
Streaming Audio and Video Data Over Today's Cellular Networks
I've streamed high qualiy audio over my handset before, even while driving on the freeway, and had great success. At the time, it was a 80-90kbps Windows Media stream, and it did not break up during my 30 minute commute. Very impressive. It was buffered, and the bursty nature of 1xRTT may have kept the stream up during times of contention and lack of throughput. I really didn't look at the statistics or even cared at the time. Who knows for sure. On The Upload... But a bulk of that traffic was in the forward (downlink)..kinda cool...big deal. You couldn't possibly upload at those rates with a dinky cell phone with 3 bars, right? Originating streaming content is a whole different story too, because if you lag behind with low throughput, all of your viewers/listeners will suffer. Well, I wanted to find out for sure. 1xRTT To The Limit....Everyone Fhqwgads I started a RealMedia stream, turned on video (quickcam) and audio (laptop mic). I started out a little low, using the "28k Modem" codec. Got video, got audio....no lost frames...hmmm..this was getting a little spooky. I was streaming video from my cell phone! Bumped it up to 56k...looked better, no lost frames. Went to Single IDSN (64kbps circuit), still quite good. Went to Dual ISDN (128kbps) circuit and we still looked golden. At this point, I was in awe. This means, for the last two years, one could have originated some pretty high qualiy video and audio streams from almost anywhere, during 1xRTT data services. Lets Try Some Audio Since my victim computer left with someone, I started playing with just audio. Could someone originate a near-CD quality audio stream from an 1xRTT network? Yes. Pretty much, and with no interruption. The RealAudio codec wouldnt go above 60kbps, so I couldnt push it near the throughput limits I expected on the upload, but it worked great in both mono and stereo. Given the other remote options (phone line and analog cellular phone @ 3KHz bandpass sounds like AM radio), this would be perfect for studio remotes. Thats is in ideal conditions -- and just what you need is network congestion or cellular subscriber contention at the time you need your data throughput the most! GPRS is cool too! I dropped down the audio codec to "28k modem" and streaming live audio to a friend's GPRS modem. No breakups, it worked perfectly. We were all very impressed. Now, his GPRS modem likely would not originate 28k audio streams (he only gets a slot of about 1kB/sec for upload on GPRS, while the download is considerably fatter), but this was pretty damn cool I thought. Damn, I thought it was cool when i could pull a 8kbps stream via CDPD. Conclusion 1xRTT is pretty cool....but I cant wait until CDMA2000 EV-DV :p, a little over a meg and half of upload! For past blog entries, check out the archive on the side or click here. |
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