LDS Tech

kbaker April 22nd, 2008

A few months ago my eleven year old daughter came home from school and said her class had spent the day watching the movie "We Are Marshall". Now I won’t get into the whole topic of whether I felt that was a good use of my daughter’s school time or not. But I will tell you one of my first thoughts was "What is the school showing to my kid without my permission."

Having not seen the movie I wanted to know what it was about and if it contained anything inappropriate. We subscribe to Netflix and it has been a good service for us. One of the great things Netflix does is include the review and rating of a movie from www.commonsensemedia.org. This has proven very helpful to me in choosing what movies and programming I should rent.

Using Common Sense Media, I read the review and ratings of "We Are Marshall" and was relieved to find it was a decent movie for my daughter to watch. I did rent the movie from Netflix after the fact and generally agreed with Common Sense Media’s assessment.

And the great thing about Common Sense Media is you don’t have to be a member of Netflix to use it. It is it’s own site and open to everyone! Actually, Common Sense Media is a non-profit with the mission statement of being "dedicated to improving the media and entertainment lives of kids and families." They offer a synopsis of a movie and rate the content in terms of age appropriateness. Their rating categories include sexual content, violence, language, social behavior, commercialism, and drug/alcohol/tobacco use. From all this information you as a parent are better informed about what is out there and what your family is watching.

There are other sites out there that provide similar services. One mentioned to me by a friend was www.kids-in-mind.com. These are all resources we need to know about and use. Happy watching!

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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.

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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 14th, 2008

Genealogy expert, DearMYRTLE, raised a concern about my previous quote regarding PAF.  She did some research into whether my sources were considered "official" or not.  Contacting Gordon Clarke, LDS Family History Department, directly she found that Paul Nauta was the only person who can make "official" statements such as this. 

I’ll concede that this statement on the future of PAF is a bit premature for the general public.  Nevertheless, for software engineers who will be using the New FamilySearch API or the PAF API to create plugins for PAF, this statement from the Family History department makes some good suggestions for how new products can complement the technology offerings which the LDS Church has made and will be making to the community.  The Ancestry Insider has offered some additional insights into specific areas of this message.

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David April 14th, 2008

Back in March, I had commented briefly about the rising costs of wheat and other commodities.  From CNN this afternoon (April 14, 2008), it looks like that trend isn’t getting better any time soon.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick has said the surging costs could mean "seven lost years" in the fight against worldwide poverty…

"In just two months," Zoellick said in his speech, "rice prices have skyrocketed to near historical levels, rising by around 75 percent globally and more in some markets, with more likely to come. In Bangladesh, a 2-kilogram bag of rice … now consumes about half of the daily income of a poor family."

The price of wheat has jumped 120 percent in the past year, he said — meaning that the price of a loaf of bread has more than doubled in places where the poor spend as much as 75 percent of their income on food. 

As an LDS Church member, I have been encouraged to prepare for these types of crises.  I have been doing what I believe is most important for my family, but there is so much more that seems to be left undone.  It is sad to see how this can affect the poor of the world so directly.  There are a whole host of things that we can do to alleviate the pain and suffering of those less fortunate as ourselves.

I have noted a number of attempts that people have made to help alleviate problems such as these.  Some of the most effective I have seen have revolved around the LDS Church Welfare programs to distribute food to those needing it immediately after disasters and educating others on how to be more self reliant (such as digging wells and burying water lines to villages in Africa). 

A few years ago, my wife and I started using the Square Foot Gardening program for ourselves and have been impressed with how well it works for our own needs.  SFG has formed a non-profit foundation to educate the poor around the world to help them provide food for their own families.  They continue to look for volunteers willing to help educate the poor in how to raise their own produce.

Do you remember the old saying “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, but teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” ? We believe that the same can be accomplished by teaching a person to garden in a simple easy way that they can do, like the Square Foot Gardening method.

Even SFG techniques are the tip of the iceberg in permaculture (sustainable agriculture) options.  Since the 1970s, researchers have been investigating how we can design systems which replenish each other.  I did my own research a few years ago by building a small "chicken tractor" (movable chicken coop), multiple compost bins (for mulch and manure), and incorporating Native American gardening techniques such as "Three Sisters." It was a neat experience and one that I would be happy to share with others.

There is a whole host of common sense technologies and techniques that have been lost in the last few generations where we as a people haven’t needed to learn how to produce our own food in sustainable ways.  But by harnessing the knowledge of experts and sharing that information over the internet, we can recapture some of this knowledge and share it with those that need it the most.  (Too bad the 90% of the world that can’t afford a computer with internet access can’t directly learn from this information.)

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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 6th, 2008

I posted an article on Thursday regarding the multimedia options available for the LDS community.  While the streaming video technology is still relatively new, video, audio, and transcription downloads are readily available within a short time of their original presentation.  The "official" transcription from lds.org takes a few days because it is reviewed for spelling and grammar, since this becomes the permanent record of the talk.  Here are a few resources available for obtaining Conference talks:

• Deseret News (local newspaper) - summaries of each talk, audio & text transcripts
• KSL Television - video, audio, and news stories related to LDS community
• LDS.org - official site for LDS Church General Conference, includes video, audio, and transcripts. 

As an aside for those who really enjoy listening to the inspiring music between talks, the download files for individual talks at LDS.org don’t include the music, but the full sessions do.  If you use an MP3 editing tool, you can extract just the music and save them to separate MP3 files.  When the General Conference audio files are released on CD to LDS Distribution Centers, you can also use these to save the music to separate files.  (I haven’t compared the differences between these to see how the quality of download vs CD files compare)

[EDIT] Here is an open source utility which can split MP3 files without decoding them.  Since the audio is encoded when it creates the original MP3 file, if your utility decodes it first before splitting it, there will be a loss in quality of the recording.
I have heard from some people who have compared the CDs of Conference with the MP3 files, and they have said that the CD quality is much higher.  That makes sense, since most downloads are created at a reduced bit rate to reduce the download size.

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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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David March 31st, 2008

The Salt Lake ColdFusion Users Group (SLCFUG) is sponsoring a Rich Internet Applications (RIA) conference this Friday, April 4, 2008.  If there is still room, you can register here. 

You’ll learn about cutting edge Flex, AIR, and AJAX programming. You’ll be readying for the next phase of web development.

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