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Cndnsd Vrsn: 4 PM Wednesday 1/26 ACS Room 123- Home Automation
The next meeting of the Front Range UNIX Users
Group (FRUUG) will be held at 4:00 P.M. on Wednesday January 26.
Gary Koenig and Terry Bolinger will
update us on the latest home automation technologies,
with a special guest appearance by Alek Komarnitsky.
At our December 2001 meeting, Gary Koenig gave us an
overview of the latest home automation technologies
followed by a tour of one of McStain's "smart" homes
in Lafayette. This year, Gary Koenig and Terry Bolinger
of Web Mountain Technologies will tell us what's new
with home automation from the point of view of Power Line
Carrier (PLC) technology. Their company develops and manufactures
products for home automation based on a new standard for power line
carrier technology known as UPB, the Universal Powerline Bus.
Gary and Terry will talk about home control, including structured
wiring, and the four reasons that people choose to incorporate
a level of automation in their homes, including safety,
convenience, energy savings, and... ego. They will discuss
how X10 technology is used in homes today, its limitations and
performance issues, and how UPB hopes to overcome many of
X10's limitations. They'll talk about competing systems
from other commercial vendors, including hard-wired and
wireless home control systems. Finally, they'll show how
well their system works for IT professionals-- including a
demonstration.
Alek Komarnitsky, a long-time FRUUG member was so inspired by Gary's
last talk in 2001 that he decided that by the following Christmas he'd
re-do his entire, over-the-top lighting display at his house to work
with X10 controls that would be available to visitors at his Web site.
Well, not quite. He got as far as a prototype state machine
implementation that would make visitors think they were controlling the
thousands of christmas lights at his house for xmas/2002. But since
(even in 2004) the current state-of-the-art in consumer webcam
technology is not yet capable of providing the image quality and
pan/zoom speed desired, he wrote an image generator that used a set of
pre-shot still images.
After (inter)national press, radio, and TV attention in mid-December
over the "Colorado man who allows bazillions of people around the world
to turn his 17,000 christmas lights on and off" (including a ride in
the ABC-7 helicopter to provide a live report for the 6:00 news
(see
www.komar.org/xmas/movies), Alek finally fessed up by
approaching the
Wall Street Journal,
which broke the story that the webcam/webcontrol was as real as Santa -
sparking yet another media frenzy. For more information, check out
Alek's page at
www.komar.org/xmas/hoax.
Alek will begin the meeting with a
fast-moving, 15 minute overview of how the whole thing was done.
Terry Bolinger is founder and President of Web Mountain
Technologies. With 28 years in the high-tech world, mostly
with telephone equipment manufacturers, he's also held a VP
position at XCEL Communications.
Gary Koenig has been active in home control, home automation,
and digital audio/video for the home since 1998. He has more
than 30 years of computer industry experience that includes
acting as programmer, system analyst, operations manager, system
administrator, IT manager, consulting and training manager, and
is now VP of Sales and Marketing at Web Mountain Technologies.
This meeting will be in room 123 of the CU Academic Computing
Center building at Arapahoe and Marine Streets in Boulder. Marine St intersects
Arapahoe at 38th St; the Computing Center is on the southwest corner.
At our November meeting, Barb Dijker told us of the
success she's had at Netrack
cutting spam with greylisting.
Announcements, presentation slides, and
writeups for past meetings are available in the FRUUG Meeting Archive.
www.fruug.org/mtgarchive/index.html.
We continue to set up meetings as we have interesting
topics to cover. Let us know if you have a topic
that you'd like to hear about or would like to volunteer
to give a talk.
Four great books on spam arrived from O'Reilly just after
our November meeting on Spam. Those books include:
- Spam Assassin, covering version 3.0
- Degunking your email, spam, and viruses
- Spam Kings, a fun read that follows the history of some of the
high-rollers in the spam world.
- The Spam Letters
We have an extra copy of Spam Assassin to give away to a FRUUG
Library Merit Badge Holder, just click on the link in the
News column at the FRUUG Web site.
We have lots of new books from Addison Wesley and Prentice Hall PTR
including:
- Building Applications with the Linux Standards Base
- Defend I.T.
- Designing Software Product Lines with UML
- Java Application Development on Linux
- Linux Application Development
- Linux Programming by Example
- Outsource, Competing in the Global Productivity Race
- PHP 5 Power Programming
- Point & Click Linux
- Secure Architectures with OpenBSD
- The Tao of Network Security Monitoring
You may check out books using your business card as your
library card; you must be on the membership list to check books out. Books
are due at the meeting following the one in which they are checked out.
Remember that your FRUUG membership entitles you to discounts
on your book orders from both New Riders Publishing and O'Reilly &
Associates; refer to the FRUUG Web site for details.
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