Talking Glass

Since being selected as a Google Glass Explorer in June, I have had a lot of fun learning about Glass, wearable technology, privacy, modern programming, security, rapid design iteration, and celebrity. Wait . . .  celebrity?!?

Glass gives back what you put in and when I have stepped out, evangelist-like, people's interest and enthusiasm has followed. From a 94-year old acquaintance telling his friends about me and my 'gadget glasses', to random people in public engaging me to ask questions and ask for a try, to the planned out events I have listed below, people are curious, engaged, and excited about the slice of the future which Google Glass displays.

As my journey continues (I get to swap my Glass out for the next version next week!), I can see that more and more people will come to understand that this is about getting technology out of the way so it can truly assist us be more in touch with the world and with those around us. Check out these presentations and interviews about Glass . . . enjoy!

Streaming Media West 2013 - Session C103 - Using Google Glass to Capture and Publish Videos

Interview with Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen, Almost LIVE

Mediasite Webcast - Consumer Video in the Enterprise

Google Glass + Mediasite: Consumer Video in the Enterprise

Today I gave a live webinar at Sonic Foundry in Madison, WI that discussed how to use a consumer device, in this case Google Glass in the corporate setting. I am told that we had 500+ people watch live and you can check it out, too! Let me know what you think in the comments.

Here is what was discussed:

• How the Google Glass + Mediasite integration could help large organizations communicate.
• The revolutionary impact the first-person point of view will have on education, training and communication.
• How Glass could provide hands-on learning with detailed demonstrations and labs.
• A step-by-step demo on how to get Glass video into a corporate video management platform.

Check out the slides and Mediasite Catalog that contains the test videos.

Enjoy!

How To Capture and Publish Videos with Google Glass

Today, November 19, 2013, I presented a session (C103) at the Streaming Media West conference that showed how to use Google Glass to capture videos for the corporate or enterprise environment and automatically publish them to a corporate server for employee use. The aim of my talk and demonstration was to show how the new form factor of Google Glass, a wearable computer can remove barriers for the regular employee to create and publish video information for corporate use.

On my website, I have posted the slides today and will link the recorded presentation when it is made available to me. And here is the Mediasite Catalog that contains the test videos.
Enjoy!

Google Glass at Streaming Media West

If you are in Southern California mid-November, come and check out my talk on Google Glass at Streaming Media West conference. It is at the Hyatt Regency in Huntington Beach on November 19 at 1:45 PM. 

The description is below, but I hope (may the demo gods allow!) to show a live example of recording a video, uploading it and publishing it to our Mediasite corporate streaming server. I'll talk about Google Glass and the uses it can have in industry (doing actual work!) and the services you need to set this up for yourself. Here are the details:

Session C103, Nov. 19, 1:45 PM
HOW TO: Using Google Glass to Capture and Publish Videos

Google Glass can make the creation of video content for business, education, and entertainment easy for all people who want to communicate simply and quickly. This presentation looks at Glass and its capabilities, discusses the best practices for capturing content, explores example real-world uses, and details the steps for setting up sharing. Attendees see a live demo of the workflow from recording to publishing right in the session.

See you there!

Canning Tomatoes Through Google Glass

This post is a bit of an excuse to use my Google Glass while cooking because, I like technology . . . all of it! In some cases it is the state-of-the-art Google Glass or Leap Motion and in others it is the technical details and optimized process of home canning. But it is also an attempt at seeing home canning as a technological process that has benefitted from an systematic architectural plan. It is also an excuse to see the everyday process in light of the Zachman Framework . . . and show you how I like to spend some of my time.

The canning process and the technology behind it provides some clues as to how to successfully design a process and a supporting system. It also illustrates the need for solution evangelization, too. When my mother was making jams and sauces in her 1960s kitchen, she used the inferior technology of paraffin wax to seal the jars. While no one got ill from this technology, throughout the years, the study of home food preservation systems has informed and changed the way the process is carried out. Not using wax today is well-known, but I still find it on the shelf in the store right next to the new, safer lids and bands.

Our relation to technology is mostly dependant on how we learned. We still find people today who prefer paper checks to move money, envelopes and stamps to communicate, and margarine for baking. In the latter case, we have gone from butter to margarine and now back to butter based on lobbying and the desire for a better solution. The definition of "better", of course, varies. About canning, recently Stephen Colbert cast aspersions while talking with Emily Matchar about her book Homeward Bound.

The Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving is the architectural blueprint for home canning. Why is it more than a cookbook? It has recipes, but more importantly, it covers all 6 columns of the Zachman Framework:

• What - This is the recipies and the equipment.
• How - This is explored in-depth as canning has a very specific process model.
• Who - You, of course, but also the roles of the boiling water, the lids, the acid, the sugar, etc.
• Where - How you layout your tools and raw materials, including final storage is the "where" element.
• When - Timing is critical  in canning and there are pages of timing models for each type of food.
• Why - There are many motivations like saving money, getting back to basics, or giving a gift.

One of the processes documented is "boiling water bath canning". How does it work? A site on Exploratorium called Science of Cooking explains:

"As heating begins, the contents of each jar expand, and changes in internal pressure take place. Initially, gases are vented from the jar. When the processing period is finished, the atmospheric pressure outside the jar is greater than the pressure inside. This difference in pressure pulls the lid down onto the jar and forms a vacuum seal."

The process is the critical element here and it has been refined and documented so that anyone can have success. From not tightening the bands too much, the the water temperature, to your altitude, the "what", "how", and "when" are the focus columns in this system.

Enough of the justification . . . on to the fun! Read and view on to see how I turned 15 pounds of ripe tomatoes into 7 pints of crushed tomatoes in juice. These jars of summer will be great in December or March of next year flavoring pasta or caramelizing in a beef braise. The process begins as you pick the tomatoes, wash them and sort out the best ones.

I picked 27 pounds of tomatoes from a single plant (I'll get about 45 pounds total over the season) but in these videos I can about 15 pounds into just 7 pints.

You only need a very large pot, a knife, and the canning jars, but I have a few nice-to-have tools. But all in all they are not expensive. Check out my setup below!

You have to make sure to not re-use the canning lids as they need to be in pristine condition.

Once I have all of the stuff in place I can begin to peel, core, chop, mash and cook the tomatoes. For crushed tomatoes, you only really have to crush a few of them to get the juice going and then the heat does the rest of the job.

One of the processes you need to accomplish is peeling the tomatoes and the blanch / shock method is the best. To do this, you rapidly alter the temperature of the whole tomato so the skin splits and separates from the fruit. You cannot effectively peel a tomato like a pear, so this is one of the most import processes. Check it out here with the beginning and ending Glass button fumbling:

Finally, there is filling the jars, sealing them, and boiling them. I shot a few more videos and have toyed with mixing them together in a comprehensive video, but time is short and with all those ripening fruits, Glass and Leap to play with and Python to learn.

Google Glass Development Follies

By occupation, I am not a developer, coder, or programmer . . . nor do I play one on TV. Yet I have developed applications, web sites and client applications in the past. I have to say that was the distant past (chronologically: FORTRAN 77, BASIC, HyperCard / HyperTalk, Visual Basic, SQL in Access, FileMaker Pro, RegEx, HTML 3.2, LotusScript and JavaScript) and so for well over a decade I have not done any programming. In fact, many would see my previous list of "languages" and declare that I was simply scripting, not really programming at all! Which is fine and I am inclined to agree. However, my point is that while I am not a skilled developer I do know what development is and generally how it is accomplished.

Further, as an IT Enterprise Architect, I "develop" applications for a living. Just not down to the level of code, just like a building architect or shopping mall developer rarely grabs a pneumatic nail gun or diamond-tipped tile saw to complete the project. Yet all architects need to know the materials available and how the tools operate to properly execute a well-designed building. Thus, when I was selected for the Google Glass Explorers program, since it was a new UX and platform, I thought I'd try my hand at designing a native application for Glass.

My app, I mused, would be something simple: a location-aware service for botanic gardens and parks that would provide geographically appropriate information cards that could give the wearer rich information about their surroundings. For example, at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden near where I live the cards would appear when you are in the riparian zone on the mesa or in the palm oasis or in the wildflower meadow. A virtual reality tour of sorts.

A week after I got my Glass, I enthusiastically began. After a bit of research and reading the materials provided by Google, I began to setup my development environment. Mainstream Glass development involves hosting your service on the Google App Engine (GAE) and I set about to register for GAE, activate the API, and publish a sample application. I needed to select a language (FORTRAN 77 was not supported!) and at first I decided to go for the future and I selected Go, the new language for web applications invented by Google. The Go "Getting Started" tutorial provides a sample application and a step-by-step instruction and for the most part, I was able to follow and successfully deploy the application. The step-by-step lesson builds upon itself and when it got more complicated, my application in Go would not compile, but I had a working app up on the big bad internet, so I was feeling pretty good.

The next step was to try to get the Glass Quickstart application compiled and working on my GAE instance. This did not happen. The instructions left out some parts and did not clearly state where files or libraries should be located. After tinkering for several multi-hour sessions of the course of 3 days, I thought that possibly Go was too new of a language for me to tackle, with two few experts hanging out on the forums to help a newbie like myself. In looking at the activity on the various forums like GitHub and Stackoverflow (both new to me, sonny!), it seems that people were much more involved in Python. There was already another new Python Glass app on GitHub about counters, so this was encouraging.

So I plunged into Python. And like its reptilian namesake, my time, confidence and self-esteem were slowly squeezed to death. Not that Python, the language, itself had anything to do with it, but the development environment is not standardized all that well and the nature of the open source path is fraught with peril for the uninitiated. That said, there are a lot of tutorials, blogs, and books out there, but many times these resources begin with assumptions which lead to deployment errors. I tried again and again to get the Glass Quickstart for Python deployed, but error after error stopped me in my tracks. I was missing libraries, had the session.secret file in the wrong directory, etc. My being on Windows did not help matter either because developers today just don't do Windows (unless you're in .NET).

So, at this point I have posted a plea on StackOverflow, the Glass Explorers Community (private link) and directly to the Google developer via G+ that put the Quickstart up in GitHub. I have had no takers yet and might resort to getting (and reading) a Python book.

But hey, if you can help a harmless old script kiddie like me with Python, please, slither on by!