LDS Tech

David June 19th, 2008

This week the LDS Church has launched a beta for the new meeting house locator at http://beta.maps.lds.org.    The current site at http://www.lds.org/basicbeliefs/meetinghouse has been adequate, but the new site utilizes both Microsoft and Google mapping technologies to provide the kind of mapping experience that most of us have come to expect from online maps.  Here are a few features that really seemed to stand out, beyond the expected address lookup, mapping, and directions:

• Ability to switch between Google and Microsoft maps.  Some locations are more current with one map versus the other.
• Ability to switch to Microsoft 3D view of the current location if Virtual Earth 3D is installed (also in beta)
• Even if you don’t know the address or your address isn’t found, you can use your mouse to place a marker on the map to identify your location.
• Not only will the application return the closest meeting locations, congregations and times, but it will provide a local contact name and number if you have questions.

I noticed a few bugs switching between maps, particularly when my connection was running slow, but for a beta launch it looks very promising!

• General Technology , Internet Content , News
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David May 20th, 2008

The LDS Church has received great appreciation for its efforts from Hurricane Katrina.  President Henry B. Eyring even mentioned a personal phone call from Pres George W. Bush to Gordon B. Hinckley at a recent multi-Stake Conference address, admiring the quick and effective efforts of local church members.  But even the best organizations would be amiss if they didn’t take advantage of what they may learn from others.

With thousands of people affected by the Sichuan, China earthquake, Google China staff members rolled up their sleeves and joined other rescue organizations.

At the request of the government, we obtained new satellite images of Sichuan province (Earth KML) to help them better focus their recovery efforts. We developed and launched a “lost loved one” search based on our Custom Search Engine (CSE). To populate the CSE index, hundreds of Googlers worked around the clock looking through published tables, hospital records, news reports, and community sites. We tuned our Chinese news search, video search, image search, blog search, and oneboxes. We also partnered to build community sites, and launched both homepage promotions and a map-based information page. Google China has an extremely dedicated and passionate team and I am deeply honored to work alongside them.

Google has also set up a donation page so that you can donate directly towards recovery efforts.  Similarly, donations can be made on the LDS Philanthropies donation page for any of the humanitarian projects around the world or using a donation slip at your local congregation.

• Genealogy , General Technology , News
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kbaker May 16th, 2008

There are many technologies and gadgets I like. But one of the most fascinating to me is Global Positioning. I’m still amazed by the fact that Global Position Systems (GPS) work, and work as well as they do. Maybe its my love of clocks and timepieces, maybe its the thought of receiving messages from a satellite orbiting the earth. Whatever it is, I love GPS.

But what is it good for? There are many, many uses for a GPS and I hope to be able to get into some of them in future posts. But the first thing I did when I bought my GPS was I used it to determine the latitude and longitude of some special places and locations. Using the GPS I recorded the lat/long of the grave sites of my ancestors and added the location data to the genealogical information I already had about them.

Now the lat/long coordinates given by a GPS are on average accurate to about 20 feet. On a good day I’ve gotten the accuracy down to around 8 feet. So armed with the lat/long from my notes and a few digital pictures of the area, any one of my children or grandchildren could easily find the grave site of my great-grandfather. This offers a great way to enable family and friends to find important personal landmarks.

And I don’t believe GPS is going away any time soon. Many industries use GPS as part of their daily operations. Even the new flight control systems in development today will use GPS information as their primary way of knowing where the planes are in the sky.

A GPS is not for everyone. It’s a fun gadget with few uses in your daily routine. But as GPS enabled phones and cameras become commonplace, you will have more opportunities to take advantage of this new type of information.

• General Technology
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David May 13th, 2008

John Finlay, founder of the popular PhpGedview open source web genealogy application, has launched GedLynk, an open source Java based desktop utility to synchronize and merge genealogy data with New FamilySearch (NFS) as well as PhpGedview web sites.  It is still in early beta, but it already looks promising.  I saw a demonstration of this utility at the NFS API Conference in March 2007, while the GedLynk site has launched this past week (May 8). 

Without using a NFS utility, a person has limited options for adding data to New FamilySearch.  These include manually adding each individual record using the forms on the web site itself, searching for existing or duplicate data which represent the same individual, or uploading a GEDCOM file with this data included.  By synchronizing data using an NFS utility, the selected record in your personal data file will be compared with the data available at NFS.  New online information available can be downloaded and while missing online data can be uploaded to NFS.  Utilities which can synchronize entire files of data will not be available for some time.

The following individuals and organizations are currently listed as Web Service Affiliates with New FamilySearch, suggesting that they are actively working on products or services which will interface with NFS: FamilyPursuit, Generation Maps, Incline Software (Ancestral Quest), Bungee Labs, Bruce Rogers (Kin2Me), Millennia (Legacy Family Tree), Progeny Software, RootsMagic, US FamilyTree, Ohana Software, World Vital Records / Family Link, One Great Family, nGenisis, LLC, RedBugz Software, Living Genealogy, R.C. Martin, Peter Ivie, US Family Tree, Universital, and Walter Sorenson. 

I haven’t heard if any of these companies or individuals are also releasing beta versions of their software, so please post a reply to this post if you happen to know about any beta software that is available which supports the New FamilySearch. 

• Genealogy , General Technology
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David May 1st, 2008

I have been impressed with how much Adobe has been utilizing the open source methodology as of the last few years.  Just a year ago they released the Flex source code as open source.  To encourage porting Flash content to mobile devices, Adobe has started Open Screen Project in partnership with media companies ARM, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics Inc., Marvell, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Verizon Wireless, and leading content providers, including BBC, MTV Networks, and NBC.

The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment – taking advantage of Adobe® Flash® Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR™ — that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and consumer devices, including phones, mobile internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes. The Open Screen Project will address potential technology fragmentation by allowing the runtime technology to be updated seamlessly over the air on mobile devices. The consistent runtime environment will provide optimal performance across a variety of operating systems and devices, and ultimately provide the best experience to consumers.

Specifically, this work will include:

• Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
• Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
• Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

Of course video content is not the only functionality that will benefit from this arrangement. FamilySearch Labs have several applications which utilize Flash.  Won’t it be nice to use your mobile device to look up scanned census records or browse your family tree using a player designed specifically for your it?

• General Technology , News
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David April 21st, 2008

I was approached by Cassie Telford, site administrator for http://tech.lds.org, to be a guest blog contributor for the site.  I agreed to make a few contributions and as a start have submitted my post from last week, How can engineering skills help in emergency preparedness?.  The audience at tech.lds.org is certainly much larger than this blog site, so there should be more of a discussion regarding the topic of emergency preparedness there.  Take a look at the edited post and link to the discussion forum.

• General Technology
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David April 21st, 2008

Please welcome fellow technology enthusiast, Keith Baker, who joins LDS Tech.  Keith will be writing blog entries on a regular basis to round out the entries which I post myself.  He is a senior software engineer working with Java and Microsoft technologies for the past fifteen years. Keith has been an active member of the church for twenty years.  He and his wife have three children and live in the Rochester, New York area.

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David April 14th, 2008

I was inspired by a presentation of a small alcohol stove built using two paint cans and fueled with denatured alcohol at a recent preparedness fair at church.   A few days later I decided to try to build it from memory with my own "custom air vents" to make sure that the fire would get enough oxygen.  I placed this on top of my kitchen stove and lit it to see how long it would take to boil a small pot of water.  It was working even better than I had supposed, but then it really started going!  I ended up with two foot high flames licking the bottom of our stove vent hood!  My wife rushed to get the fire extinguisher to save her kitchen cabinets, but I held her back for a moment because I thought that I could still get the flames under control.  I used kitchen tongs to put the lid of the paint can back on the smaller can to limit how much air the fire could get.  Luckily the flames died down quickly enough for me to carry the whole ensemble out the back door to the patio. I should probably not mention that last year I was a boy scout leader, teaching 11 year old boys about scouting basics including fire safety.  Probably not the best example, right?  Rather it was more like the bad example of young scouts playing with fire when the scout leaders aren’t looking! 

Since I want to stay on my wife’s good side and to not burn up our kitchen, I have done some more research on the subject:

I found the Base Camp Trail Stove, showing exactly how I should have built the paint can stove (above), including a warning to not try to light this stove in the house.  Too bad that I didn’t read that earlier!

I found several other small stoves that I’m anxious to try out, built from two aluminum cans.  The first, Penny Alcohol Backpacking Stove, has gone through a series of engineering refinements for the optimal stove design, fuel type, and boil time, each of which is well documented with graphs for comparisons.  The flames for this small stove only go a few inches high, a much more reasonable height than the two foot flames I had with my own version, and light enough to carry in a backpack.  There are a lot of variations on the penny stove, one of which by LaMar Kirby includes a better stand than the original.  (Young children will be less likely to get impaled by the stand supports if they get too close.)  Here is yet another variation on the penny stove, with step by step instructions (including a short video).

This alcohol stove project is just one small way in which a good engineer can use their professional skills in emergency preparedness.  If you are looking for something more,  I would strongly recommend that you look at getting certified as a HAM radio operator (yes, they still use those, and no, you don’t have to know Morse code any more). Having a HAM radio is an excellent tool for preparedness, especially if you get involved in CERT (Community Emergency Response Team).  Receiving CERT certification can be done by anyone with a willingness to sit through the training classes and to perform the exercises as part of the class.  I have personally passed both certifications and I wouldn’t consider myself a hard-core preparedness person.

Let me know in the comments if you have come across any other interesting technology helps for emergency preparation or food storage (like this food storage calculator, even if the recommendations are a bit dated). 

• General Technology , Preparedness
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David April 8th, 2008

There are now thousands of instances where developers and businesses have used Google Maps APIs to create maps integrated with their own data (also called mashups).  Where geographic data used to be limited to specialized developers and organizations with a large budget, this ability is now in the hands of high school students with pet projects. 

Last night Google launched a preview release of Google App Engine, "a way for developers to run their web applications on Google’s infrastructure."  This promises to be equally enabling but not limited to a specific function like mapping tools.  Any generic application which requires an application server, web server, and database can be powered by this infrastructure.

With Google App Engine, developers can write web applications based on the same building blocks that Google uses, like GFS and Bigtable. Google App Engine packages those building blocks and provides access to scalable infrastructure that we hope will make it easier for developers to scale their applications automatically as they grow. This means they can spend less time dealing with system administration and maintenance, and more time building and improving their applications. (There’s more detail on the new App Engine Blog.)

…This preview of Google App Engine is available for the first 10,000 developers who sign up; we will increase that number in near future. So, developers, please sign up, download the SDK, and start your engines.

Here is a geeky step by step video for using Google App Engine with Python:

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David April 3rd, 2008

I don’t know about you, but I have been surprised lately with the availability of online multimedia content.  I’m not just talking about the popularity of YouTube with user-contributed content or downloading music from the Apple iTunes Store.  I’m talking about traditional media entities offering professionally written content on their web sites. Radio stations such as National Public Radio (NPR) not only have recorded podcasts of their broadcasts, but regularly suggest additional content for their listeners to find on their web site.  Do you hate missing the KSL Greenhouse Show on Saturdays?  Like many other sites, you don’t have to miss it if you subscribe to a podcast on the station web site.  Offering a mix of traditional and new media sources, here are the top sources for online news, ranked by the number of visitors (from Ars Technica):

Yahoo News

MSNBC

CNN

AOL News

New York Times

Gannett

ABC News

Google News

USA Today

CBS News

While most of these sites are offering short video and/or audio clips, some media sites are now offering premium content that they normally reserve for television or radio (together with new advertising).  Did anyone see the NCAA Basketball finals on CBS.com?  Did you miss seeing who was eliminated from American Idol on Fox?  (you can also see their recent performances on their web site) 

Most of these sites are using Adobe Flash streaming technology (like YouTube), but others are starting to use HD video plugins such as those created by American Fork, Utah company, Move Networks, including ABC, Discovery, FOX, ESPN, and Oprah.com.  BYU Television, also using Move Networks’ HD video plugin, is one of the first stations that has around the clock broadcasting content on their site.  In comparison, the lds.org site will host transcripts, video, and audio downloads of LDS General Conference once they become available, but BYU.tv promises to include live HD video of for all morning and afternoon sessions.  LDS Church members in Utah may not appreciate how rare it is to be able to watch Conference in your own home around the world as it is being broadcast. 

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