Webawocky

For those of you living in Hawaii (or just visiting), mark your calendars:

Hawaiian Homeless Companion is an all-original, radio-style live musical variety show very much in the spirit of Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion.

• When: Saturday Feb. 16, grinds and cash bar by BluWater Grill starting at 5:30P, curtain time, 6P.
• Where: Calvary By The Sea Lutheran Church in Aina Haina.

A benefit for the Angel Network, it's hosted by Dr. Jonathon Osorio, noted musician (Hawaiian Eyes, Hawaiian Soul,), author (Dismembering Lahui), and current Director of the Kamakakuokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies at UH Manoa.

You won’t want to miss the Midwesterners Kama‘aina Guide to Hawai‘i, Lives of the Paniolo, fictional talk-radio gasbag Da Hammah, or the Adventures of Guy Niele, PI -- all brought to you by the show's “sponsors”: the Shoyu Advisory Board and Mapuana’s Mapunapuna Manapua.

Tickets: $10 for adults, $5 for kids. Available in advance through Honolulu Box Office at (808) 550 -8457 or online at honoluluboxoffice.com. Also available at the door.

Contact: Christiane Lucas, christiane at kaulana dot net.

Here's a different take on virtualizing the desktop: Instead of a desktop or laptop computer, the Pano from Pano Logic is a small cube (3.5 x 3.5 x 2 inches) to which you attach a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and USB peripherals. There is no software. The operating system (Microsoft Windows XP or Vista) and applications run in VMWare virtualized servers housed in a data center.

I found this interesting from a New York Times article commenting on a recent speech by Bill Gates:

"His new effort is based on a public challenge he issued during his evening address to corporate executives, in which he urged them to pair the self-interest that is the hallmark of capitalism with interest in the welfare of others, which he asserted was a second important force of human nature."

I know I'm cynical, but I never heard any of this stuff while he was driving Microsoft to world domination for the last couple of decades. Better late than never, I guess.

Bill Gates: Social Philosopher

Smart-Watt is a device that measures consumed energy in 0.1 watt-hour increments. It appears to be relatively simple to use: plug it into the power source then connect your equipment to it. Smart-Watt devices can be daisy-chained and for monitoring, they support IP connections to a network.

Years ago, IBM tried going head-to-head with Microsoft in a battle for the desktop (it lost). But that was then and this is now. This time around, it's enlisted Open Source via what it calls the "Open Collaboration Client":  Lotus Notes 8 and Symphony sitting on Ubuntu. Note that Symphony is built on OpenOffice.

IBM Turns To Linux in Desktop Campaign Against Microsoft.

And I quote:

The 6720t mobile PC features a 15.4-inch display and is powered by a 1.06-GHz Intel (NSDQ: INTC) Celeron M Processor 423. The machine also has 1 GB of memory, a 1-GB solid-state flash drive, and three USB 2.0 ports. For graphics processing, the PC uses the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950.

The mobile thin client has no hard-disk drive, since all storage is hosted on a server, which also handles processing for all business applications, such as Microsoft Office. The system supports Wi-Fi and has a PC memory card slot for connecting to 3G broadband wireless networks.

Answer: The Think. It's an electric car built in Norway that according  to Meet Google's Think Car:

• can only be bought online,
• is Internet and Wi-Fi enabled,
• emails you when it's time for service,
• and you text message to check the battery charge.

Apparently, Sergey Brin was an owner of an earlier version.

Microsoft has issued a world-wide RFP for Power Aware Computing. Total amount available: $500K with $150K max for any single award. The RFP indicates that data centers alone consume 1.5% of all power produced in the USA! Projected: 4.5% within 5 years. Microsoft finds the following to be fundamental principals upon which to focus work:

1. Pay for Play: power consumed should be proportional to demand.
2. Treat power or energy as a first class resource.

Anybody remember Chandler? Anybody? It made kind of a splash when it started in 2001. Backed by Mitch Kapor, it was supposed to be the open source PIM (Personal Information Manager) alternative to Outlook and Exchange. Six years later, it's at version 0.7.3. Guess Kapor had enough and has pulled himself, and perhaps more importantly his money, out of the project.

Mitch Kapor bails on the Chandler project.

There was an interesting research project in Washington state that allowed people to monitor and adjust home electricity use via the Web. The participating households saved an average of 10% on their monthly utility bills. The project suggested that peak loads on utility grids could be trimmed by as much as 15% per year.

There was a cautionary note: "One big hurdle is that in most states, utilities are still granted rates of return that depend mainly on the power plants and equipment they own and operate instead of how much energy they save."