IBM and Univ Central Florida Partner for System Engineering Education, a place to look for Smarter Planet Engineers

May 17, 2010 Dave Ohara

IBM has a great marketing campaign with Smarter Planet, and I blogged about how this is great marketing for system engineers.

IBM has a press release announcing its partnership with UCF for System Engineering education.

IBM and University of Central Florida Team to Prepare Graduates for High-Growth Technology Jobs

IBM helps UCF's Institute for Advanced Systems Engineering students create, develop and manage the smart products and services of the future

ARMONK, N.Y. & ORLANDO, FL. - 14 May 2010: IBM (NYSE: IBM) and the University of Central Florida’s (UCF) Institute for Advanced Systems Engineering (IASE) today announced they are working together to prepare students for jobs in systems engineering, a profession that is critical to the creation of the smart cities, healthcare systems and advanced products and systems of the future.

To help create the systems engineering workforce that is needed to tackle society’s most pressing technology development and integration challenges, IBM is investing more than $2 million in software, in-kind donations and consulting. Through this relationship, UCF students gain hands-on experience using IBM’s most popular systems engineering software. In addition to its use in classroom activities, the IBM software gives students and faculty tools to compete for grants and participate in advanced research projects. IBM executives and technical staff provide input into the development of IASE curriculum and coursework, and support the university’s efforts to create a learning environment that emulates the real world of systems engineering.

I had a chance to interview University of Central Florida Professor Serge Sala-Diakanda.

The Institute for Advanced Systems Engineering (IASE) promotes the cross disciplinary research and education in systems engineering at the University of Central Florida, and is committed to developing advanced solution methodologies and tools for basic and advanced systems problems in a variety of application domains.

But first a little background. I have an Industrial Engineering degree, and so glad I chose technology companies (HP, Apple, and Microsoft) instead of traditional manufacturing to work which eventually led me to working more as a systems engineer rather than a typical industrial engineer.

Sometimes it is easier to recognize a job by who the people are with the degrees. Here is a short list.

Stephen Worn - DataCenterDynamics CTO

Tim Cook - COO Apple Computer.

John Muir - Sierra Club

Mike Duke - CEO Wal-Mart

David Harder - neighbor and part of a group of friends who have Industrial Engineering degrees. Gary Devendorf in another.

Interviewing Serge was a good chance to get into a lot of details on what UCF is doing in Systems Engineering.

Members of the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Advanced Systems Engineering gain hands-on experience with IBM’s most popular systems engineering software as they prepare for careers creating the smart cities, healthcare systems and advanced products and systems of the future.

The IBM SW products that UCF uses are in the Rational Family.

Rational Doors

IBM Rational® DOORS®, a family of requirements definition and requirements management solutions, improves quality by optimizing communication and collaboration and by promoting compliance and verification.

Clearcase

IBM® Rational® ClearCase® provides comprehensive software configuration management for any size project.

Rhapsody

IBM® Rational® Rhapsody® is a visual development environment for systems engineers and software developers creating real-time or embedded systems and software. Rational Rhapsody helps diverse teams collaborate to understand and elaborate requirements, abstract complexity visually using industry standard languages (UML, SysML, AUTOSAR, DoDAF, MODAF, UPDM), validate functionality early in development, and automate delivery of innovative, high quality products.

With all these SW tools from IBM, Serge and I discussed the issues for students to get real world experience as it can be big difference between the universities view of system design vs. the business environment. One of the things it seems like IBM could do is create a System Engineer Marketplace for engineers who are trained with the IBM tools. This is a problem I addressed by working co-op two times, and eventually having 1 year and 3 months experience as an engineer at HP before graduation. The time at HP was valuable to put things in perspective as I finished my degree.

Something we didn't talk about is UCF's location in Orlando is close to another place Industrial Engineers work.

System Engineering approaches make sense for green data centers, but one of the things I learned is it is extremely difficult to be the lone system/industrial engineer. Ideally, you need a community of other engineers to discuss ideas and approaches.

Google does have an opening for Control Systems Engineer. But, I doubt Google is looking for a System Engineer trained with IBM's Rational Toolset. :-)

The role: Data Center Control Systems Engineer

Data Center Control Systems Engineers possess demonstrated design, operation, and construction experience in the areas of complex and mission critical facilities. You will have extensive knowledge of large-scale facilities controls and monitoring systems for all infrastructural systems.

As the Data Center Control Systems Engineer, you have excellent communication skills and are able to work in teams and matrix organizations. You are expected to develop and maintain strong functional relationships across multidisciplinary teams to anticipate future controls and monitoring design requirements. You will be continuously involved in the improvement of plant performance based on historical data collected and collaborate on retrofit projects to improve plant efficiency based on business case justifications. For this position, you will be traveling as needed, possibly up to 50% of the time.

Story of Adobe & Apple High-Value Digital Image Applications, Adobe's angst developing for the iPad, and how Microsoft missed this battle

May 17, 2010 Dave Ohara

This is not a data center post, but one about competition and innovation.

If you are a high-end photographer person you use the RAW imaging format, a higher quality image format vs. JPEG.

A camera raw image file contains minimally processed data from the image sensor of either a digital camera, image, or motion picture film scanner. Raw files are so named because they are not yet processed and therefore are not ready to be printed or edited with a bitmap graphics editor. Normally, the image is processed by a raw converter in a wide-gamut internal colorspace where precise adjustments can be made before conversion to a "positive" file format such as TIFF or JPEG for storage, printing, or further manipulation, which often encodes the image in a device-dependent colorspace.

The RAW Imaging apps are dominated by Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop, and Apple Aperture. With Adobe in the dominant position with Photoshop Lightroom

Digital camera raw file support

The camera raw functionality in Adobe® Photoshop® software provides fast and easy access to the raw image formats produced by many leading professional and midrange digital cameras. By working with these "digital negatives," you can achieve the results you want with greater artistic control and flexibility while still maintaining the original raw files.

The battle between Apple and Adobe is about Flash now, and affects other Adobe products. As one of Adobe's product managers points out their Photoshop Lightroom user base has requested an iPad version, but there is no guarantees Apple will approve a Lightroom application.

Adobe announces angst-laden iPad software effort

by Stephen Shankland

Adobe has begun a new effort to bring imaging software such as Lightroom to the iPad and other tablet computers--but the leader of the work also is fretting over the control Apple has over it.

"I love making great Mac software, and after eight years product-managing Photoshop, I've been asked to help lead the development of new Adobe applications, written from scratch for tablet computers. In many ways, the iPad is the computer I've been waiting for my whole life," Adobe's John Nack said in a blog post Thursday. "I want to build the most amazing iPad imaging apps the world has ever seen."

Adobe's John Nack blog post continues.

These aren't idle questions. When the iPad was introduced, I asked what apps you'd like to see Adobe build for it. Among the 300 or so replies were many, many requests for a mobile version of Lightroom. I think that such an app could be brilliant, and many photographers tell me that its existence would motivate them to buy iPads.

Would Apple let Lightroom for iPad ship? It's almost impossible to know. Sometimes they approve apps, then spontaneously remove them for "duplicat[ing] features that come with the iPhone." Other times they allow competitors (apps for Netflix, Kindle, etc.), or enable some apps (e.g. Playboy) while removing similar ones. Maybe they'd let Lightroom ship for a while, but if it started pulling too far ahead of Aperture--well, lights out.

If you are a RAW image user, of which I am for the past ten years, buying a Canon G1 in 2000, let me tell you the story of how Microsoft missed the RAW imaging opportunity, and doesn't have a RAW imaging application even though Microsoft hired Adobe's Lightroom architect Mark Hamburg.

Canon G1 Review, Phil Askey, September 2000

Adobe Lightroom is the one application I use most often with photos.

Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 2 offers powerful new and enhanced features across the entire program to help you streamline your digital photography workflow. Sort and find the photos you want faster, target specific photo areas for more precise adjustments, showcase your talent using more flexible printing templates, and more.

When you look at the history of Lightroom you see mention of Mark Hamburg who Microsoft hired/poached in April 2008.

History

In 2002, veteran Photoshop developer Mark Hamburg began a new project, code-named “Shadowland". Hamburg reached out to Andrei Herasimchuk, former interface designer for the Adobe Creative Suite, to get the project off the ground. ^[1] The new project was a deliberate departure from many of Adobe’s established conventions. 40% of Photoshop Lightroom is written using the Lua scripting language.

MARK HAMBURG LEAVES ADOBE

Posted by Martin Evening

News has been announced that Mark Hamburg has decided to leave Adobe after having worked at the company for over 17 years. Mark joined Adobe in the Fall of 1990, not long after Photoshop 1.0 was released and was instrumental in devising many of the ‘wow’ features we have all come to love and rely on daily when we work with Photoshop.

Mark left the Photoshop team after Photoshop 7 shipped and went to work developing a new paradigm in image processing which would finally ship as the product named Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

The irony of all this is back in 2000 I was working with a team of people at Microsoft who had a vision for RAW imaging use in Windows as a way to bring professional photography to Windows vs. the Mac. And, the person we had on our team was Mark Hamburg's boss's boss who worked for me. We had a bunch of other visionaries who understood the quality of images was a huge opportunity vs. JPEG. But, it was hard to justify the market in 2000-2001. Once Adobe and Apple shipped their RAW Imaging Applications, Lightroom and Aperture, there was now data to show the size of the market. So around 2006 Microsoft starts trying to build a RAW imaging application group.

To make this more ironic when Mark Hamburg joined Microsoft, the executives asked Mark who they should hire to add to their development team, and Mark named his previous boss's boss, and said oh BTW he used to work for Microsoft and Adobe, but he works for Google now. This the same guy who worked for me on RAW imaging in 2000, and likes to stay out of limelight, so you can't find him in a Google Search. So, Microsoft tries to hire the imaging expert to leave Google, and there is a small group of us hoping he makes the move, but he says no, deciding Microsoft is not for him. Shortly, after Mark Hamburg leaves Microsoft going back to Adobe.

Adobe's John Nack proudly blogged about Mark Hamburg's return to Adobe.

Mark Hamburg returns to Adobe

Well, that didn't take so long, did it? :-)

After 17 years on the Photoshop & Lightroom teams, Mark Hamburg left Adobe last year to join Microsoft and work on improving the Windows user experience (as he found it "really annoying"). I'm happy to say that after that brief sojourn, he'sreturning to the Adobe Digital Imaging team. Welcome back, Mark! [Via]

Oh, and to ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley, who wrote at the time of Mark's departure:

Microsoft's competitor to Adobe Lightroom gets another champion... My bet is Hamburg will be instrumental in helping Microsoft bring to market its Photoshop Lightroom competitor.

Er, not so much.

Why did I write this post?

Because it reminds me of the difficulties of being innovative when people look at you as if you are crazy. "Where is the data and market research to support what you are proposing?" My response would like to be "By the time the marketing data exists, you'll have the information to build an obsolete solution. Get out of the way."

Which reminds me the biggest reason we couldn't get RAW Imaging applications going is the lack of an established market and other groups saying they were the ones responsible for imaging applications.

Also, I should write a post on being innovative and lessons learned from friends like Gary Starkweather.

In 1969, Starkweather invented the laser printer at Xerox's Webster research center. He collaborated on the first fully functional laser printing system at Xerox PARC in 1971.^[1]^[2]

At Apple Computer in the 1990s, Starkweather invented color management technology,^[3] and led the development of Colorsync 1.0. Starkweather joined Microsoft Research in 1997, where he works on display technology.^[4]

Shouldn't Helmet Cams be used to document Data Center action?

May 16, 2010 Dave Ohara

I've had this idea for a while, and haven't heard of any doing this yet. Why aren't data center events like maintenance and emergency trouble shooting documented with Helmet Cams?

I saw this article in PopSci that shows a helmet cam on a Dutch Marine boarding a German ship occupied by Somali Pirates.

Video: Dutch Marine's Helmetcam Delivers Thrilling First-Person-Shooter View of Raid on Pirate-Seized Ship

Does this herald a future where commanders get real-time intel from their warfighters' helmets?

By Jeremy HsuPosted 04.30.2010 at 11:50 am7 Comments

Video gamers and warfighters alike will appreciate this stunning first-person-shooter view of a Dutch marine boarding team taking back a German merchant ship from Somali pirates. It's not hard to imagine many more soldiers of the future equipped with cameras so that commanders can have multiple on-the-ground views of rapid response operations carried out in real-time.

The marines were tasked with liberating 15 crewmen aboard the German merchant ship Taipan, which had been hijacked by 10 Somali pirates. The crew locked themselves securely within a safe room and called for assistance, according to a reader translation provided by the blogSNAFU.

If you don't want to put it on safety helmet, you can get one for your wrist for $99.

I'll take this blog entry and send it on to a few people I know and maybe we can see if some one in the data center industry will give this idea a try.

Imagine what a remote team could do to help troubleshoot a data center problem.

commanders can have multiple on-the-ground views of rapid response operations carried out in real-time.

Makes so much sense, but I can think of many reasons why this is not a bottom up approach as there are few data center operators who want their work documented. So, it will take an executive who doesn't actually go into data centers to give the order to document mission critical work.

A Losing Strategy in the Data Center Wars, choosing a defensive only strategy, who is on the offensive?

May 16, 2010 Dave Ohara

The data center industry is highly competitive as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo, and others fight for market share. In a conversation with a data center executive he made a point about the infamous attacks on Google and others that few have an offensive strategy with almost all the effort spent on defense.

Researchers identify command servers behind Google attack

By Ryan Paul | Last updated January 14, 2010 8:45 AM

VeriSign's iDefense security lab has published a report with technical details about the recent cyberattack that hit Google and over 30 other companies. The iDefense researchers traced the attack back to its origin and also identified the command-and-control servers that were used to manage the malware.

The cyber-assault came to light on Tuesday when Google disclosed to the public that the Gmail Web service was targeted in a highly-organized attack in late December. Google said that the intrusion attempt originated from China and was executed with the goal of obtaining information about political dissidents, but the company declined to speculate about the identity of the perpetrator.

The defensive move by Google is good.

Hours after announcing the intrusions, Google said it would activate a new layer of encryption for Gmail service. The company also tightened the security of its data centers and further secured the communications links between its services and the computers of its users.

The point the data center executive made was "How can you win when you have no offense?"

Data Centers are currently designed mostly with defense capabilities for cyberattacks. What are the offensive capabilities that should be designed in?

Sun Tzu's Art of War may help give you some ideas on how you could take offensive positions.

The Art of War is one of the oldest and most successful books on military strategy. It has had an influence on Eastern military thinking, business tactics, and beyond. Sun Tzu suggested the importance of positioning in strategy and that position is affected both by objective conditions in the physical environment and the subjective opinions of competitive actors in that environment. He thought that strategy was not planning in the sense of working through an established list, but rather that it requires quick and appropriate responses to changing conditions. Planning works in a controlled environment, but in a changing environment, competing plans collide, creating unexpected situations.

One interesting strategy is what is discussed by Moeletsi Mbeki talking to Africom

'If I were the head of AFRICOM, I would identify the critical countries in Africa that have regional influence, which can influence their neighbours and then try and find a way to stabilise those countries, so that they can exercise hopefully a more positive influence on their neighbours, which will then mean that AFRICOM itself doesn't have to be involved in each and every country. We have 54 countries in Africa. You can't possibly be involved in all 54 countries. So you have to identify the countries, which make a difference to other countries,' Mbeki said.

What would happen if the top data centers operated collaboratively to take the offensive in cyber attacks?

Nintendo's New Redmond Green Headquarters also has an energy efficient data center

May 13, 2010 Dave Ohara

Seattletimes has an article on Nintendo's new Green HQ in Redmond.

Nintendo celebrates opening of new headquarters in Redmond

Nintendo of America opened the new headquarters of its North American operations in Redmond Thursday — a gleaming, modern facility...

By Katherine Long

Seattle Times Eastside reporter

BENJAMIN BENSCHNEIDER

The new Nintendo headquarters in Redmond. The 300,000-square-foot-building is a low-slung, four-story building that replaces one of the company's other three buildings.

Nintendo of America opened the new headquarters of its North American operations in Redmond Thursday — a gleaming, modern facility with all kinds of environmentally friendly touches throughout.

The 300,000-square-foot-building, which houses about 650 employees — roughly half the company's Washington staff — is a low-slung, four-story structure that replaces one of the company's other three buildings constructed in the early 1980s. It's on a 10-acre site on the Nintendo campus, just west of State Route 520.

I found it interesting that Nintendo's President Satoru Iwata thought BIM was unique. Maybe BIM is unique in office space, but everyone has BIM capabilities in data centers.

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata flew in from Japan just to celebrate the opening, and talked of the importance and symbolism of the building to his company and to the Redmond community. Gov. Chris Gregoire helped in the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Iwata said the building is unusual because the contractor, Turner Construction of Seattle, modeled "every pipe, wire, duct and beam" by computer beforehand. That allowed workers to shave months off the time to construct it.

The Green features called out were.

The 75,000-square-foot roof is literally green — it's planted with a low-growing ground cover called sedum. The plants help moderate the temperature inside and absorb rainwater.

Inside, the floors' central corridors are made of bamboo, considered a "green" material because it grows to maturity quickly. The lights are on motion-detecting sensors and automatically dim when there is an abundance of natural light.

And, air-side economizers for the data center.

The headquarters is home to all of the company's high-powered computers that serve Nintendo's online gaming system and other corporate computer needs. It's cooled primarily by air from out-of-doors, and that is expected to cut the cost of cooling — a major source of energy consumption for computer servers — by as much as 80 percent.

Here is the story of Nintendo being Redmond's first high tech company, not Microsoft.

Redmond Mayor John Marchione was just 17 years old in 1982 when his mother, Doreen, then a member of the Redmond City Council, told him a game company called Nintendo was thinking of relocating to Redmond.

Her teenage son had never heard of it. But then she mentioned Donkey Kong, and the light bulb went on; he'd played the video game at a pizzeria.

"Nintendo gave Redmond its first famous technology company, because at the time Microsoft was in Bellevue," said Marchione. "It's been a great fit, because we're a great community to live in."

There is also electric charging stations getting ready for the release of the Nissan Leaf.

seven electric-vehicle recharging stations in the parking garage, to name a few.

I live in Redmond, drive by Nintendo all the time, and know a few folks at Turner Construction. But, I am not going to keep any hopes up for getting any inside details. As TechFlash reports on the security.

I toured the new headquarters along with other attendees after the ceremony, but the company wouldn't allow photos or video inside, citing security concerns. The exterior shots below are from Nintendo.

Being Green isn't just for the environment, it is good for the morale of the employees who work there.

"Hopefully this new building will help (employees) to be even more creative and productive, and continue to put smiles on the faces of our consumers," said Satoru Iwata, Nintendo's president, who flew in from Japan for the opening ceremony, attended by Gov. Chris Gregoire and other dignitaries, including Mario and Luigi.