MicLoc – DIY acoustic triangulation

On the the East CAC Facebook page, some neighbors recently asked if the police department was using acoustic triangulation systems for tracking gunfire. I responded that systems like ShotSpotter were interesting but that the police department couldn’t afford the $300k cost.

Ah, the joys of open source! It turns out one enterprising hacker has built his own Arduino-based triangulation system using easy-to-obtain parts. This has me thinking that if a few neighbors here and there were willing to station these near their homes, the fixes that could be plotted would be extremely accurate. Even a small network of these would do wonders. In this way, neighbors could be helping to fight crime in their area without actually having to do anything. It sounds like a great solution!

MicLoc is an effort to develop a device capable of passively identifying a sound based event position on a given map, therefor pinpointing its location. The whole idea is to achieve this goal with everyday electronics and reduced development costs.With the event of small, affordable, powerful microprocessors and electronics in general, this technology now seems accessible to potential commercial applications and general public use.The main goals of this project are:

Develop a low cost, compact device capable of identifying a source source location on a map with sub-meter precision.

Develop, detail and open-source the hardware and plans used so anyone can build this device.

Develop, detail and open-source the software needed to interface the device with a computer.

via rural hacker: MicLoc.

Google Cloud and latency

Since I’ve been having so much fun with Amazon Web Services, I thought I would check out Google’s offering, called Google Cloud. I’ve only had a trial running with it for about 24 hours but so far it seems solid. The server I am using is fast and has good connectivity to Google’s servers, which is a good thing.

What is a bad thing, however, is that my hosted server has very poor connectivity to me. The round-trip ping time is about 55ms, whereas AWS with it’s Ashburn, VA datacenter gets me 25ms. Huge difference! Also, my AWS instance has 14 routers to navigate before it gets to me but my Google Cloud instance travels through a whopping 24 routers. Those packets bounce around like ping pong balls! I was hoping that with Google’s company-owned fiber network and datacenters located here in North Carolina I would get faster response times. No such luck … yet.

Why “yet?” Well, Google Fiber is coming to the Triangle, in case you’ve been under a rock. I’m hopeful once I’m on the Google Fiber network, my latency to Google Cloud will drop considerably, perhaps <1ms. This invites all sorts of innovations. Give clever developers fat resources located close (on the network, anyway) to their audience and some interesting things start to happen.

Google Fiber could be the fire that lights off Google Cloud. I figure it’s worth checking out the new landscape now so that I can get in on the game.

Up to speed on Amazon Web Services

I’ve been getting up to speed on Amazon Web Services over the past few weeks. With the end of the year bonus I got from my work I put down the money to get a 3-year reserved instance, gaining a hefty hosted server for a remarkably low price.

I’d had an Amazon instance for a few months just to kick the tires. However, when my reserved instance got purchased, it took me a while to figure out that Amazon had changed its virtualization techniques and in order to take advantage of the new instance I would have to convert my existing image to a completely new one. The blocker for this was that the CentOS-based AMI I used seemed locked and the root drive couldn’t be mounted to a new instance. I had to copy everything using the old instance.

My new instance was created completely by me, using a recipe that helped me build it from the ground up. Now that I have a good base to start from I can build some useful AMIs and share them with others. I hope to make a Rivendell Radio Automation AMI someday so that people can launch their own online radio station with a few clicks of a button.

I’ve also dug into the wonder that is S3, creating an s3fs “filesystem” on my Linux instance for serving up music for my Rivendell install. I will eventually do the same for the media included here on MT.net and push that to CloudFront.

The cool thing about the cloud is that it’s a geek’s ultimate laboratory. It’s incredibly easy and cheap to spin up computer sessions. I can play with technologies without having to commit to them long-term. I’m having a lot of fun with it.

I’m particularly proud that I was able to migrate the server that hosts my neighborhood email lists from a locally-hosted server over to AWS without any of my neighbors knowing I’d done it. I guess twenty years of sysadmin experience pays off every now and then!

RALEIGH: Senate plan would cut NC gas tax | State Politics | NewsObserver.com

Our state legislature is considering cutting our state gasoline tax when we should be doubling it. How unfortunate.

Also, I’m not happy with Bruce Sieceloff’s story about it as he doesn’t explain why our state’s gasoline tax is so high. North Carolina has the largest state-maintained highway system in the country, bigger than Texas and even California. That’s why North Carolina’s gas taxes are higher than neighboring states. Shame on you, Bruce, for failing to mention this fact.

The legislature has moved twice over the past decade to put an upper limit on rising gas tax rates. But in 2009, a tax ceiling that had been enacted two years earlier was converted to a floor to close a gap in the DOT budget. Without that action in 2009, the tax rate would have dropped from 29.9 to 27.9 cents.

North Carolina’s gas tax is one of the highest in the nation. The highway use tax collected at the time of car sales, another major source of road money, is lower in North Carolina than in neighboring states.

via RALEIGH: Senate plan would cut NC gas tax | State Politics | NewsObserver.com.

Update: As I noted then, the N&O’s editorial board mentioned this back in May 2012:

“There’s a good reason why our gas tax is so hefty. State government here, due to a policy with roots in the Depression, bears a much greater share of local road expenses than in most states. North Carolina ranks second only to Texas in miles of state-maintained roadways. This policy serves to lighten the load on county governments and is reflected in their relatively low tax rates.”

I feel it is only fair that when our state’s high gas tax is mentioned, our state’s gigantic, state-owned highway system should be mentioned, too.

Brian Williams and lies about Iraq

There’s a lot being made about NBC News anchor Brian Williams having claimed he was in a helicopter in Iraq that made an emergency landing after being hit by enemy fire. I give Williams a pass. He had made a living telling other people’s stories, stories he did not write. After reading thousands of these over the years, it must become difficult keeping straight what one did and what one only read or saw. It does not diminish my perception of Williams if his helicopter wasn’t hit as he claimed. In the heat of it all it becomes difficult to piece together what’s what.

As the photo above attests, it would be a shame if Williams were the only one punished for lying about Iraq. There are presidents, vice-presidents, cabinet officials, – and, yes, news media – that buried everyone under lie upon lie about Iraq. Williams’s faux pas is tame by comparison.

Hanging Brian Williams out to dry for Iraq lies is like making Martha Stewart the fall guy for insider trading. The worst offenders get away.

Dean Smith passes away

Dean Smith speaks with Erskine Bowles

Dean Smith, legendary basketball coach of the team I love to beat (the Tar Heels), passed away last night at the age of 83. Though I’m a Wolfpack fan, I had a lot of respect for Coach Smith. You knew when your team beat his it was something special because he always had his teams prepared.

I was fortunate to stand behind him at the Kerry-Edwards rally at N.C. State on July 10, 2004. It was unbearably hot and he was sweating through his dress shirt. I asked him if the heat bothered him and he smiled and said it was actually his bad knees that bothered him. We were on risers with no seats and at that moment I wanted to flag down and organizer and demand a seat be provided to Coach Smith.

How RadioShack Helped Build Silicon Valley | WIRED

My friend Laura Leslie posted a classic advertisement for the RadioShack TRS-80, complete with absurdly-high price tags. It reminded me of RadioShack’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing on Thursday, and of how different I’d be if it weren’t for RadioShack.

RadioShack was once every geek’s Mecca for electronics. Much of our digital world would not exist if it weren’t for RadioShack’s inspiration on a generation of geeks and tinkerers. Wired.com takes a fond look back at how many of our modern-day tech giants spent their formative years browsing the aisles at their local RadioShack.

Today, RadioShack filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Part of a coming reorganization will involve co-branding as many as 1,750 stores with Sprint, one of the company’s largest creditors, and will almost certainly result in the closing of many others. While the RadioShack name may live on, its original spirit is probably gone for good. As it goes, so goes one of the unsung heroes of a generation of tinkerers and builders, a key piece of the Silicon Valley tech-boom puzzle.

via How RadioShack Helped Build Silicon Valley | WIRED.

Street closing hints of Google Fiber disruption

Traffic backs up on Edmund St.

Tuesday night, street crews began blocking off Glascock Street and side streets in preparation for a traffic calming and sewer line replacement project. Glascock’s traffic was detoured down the normally serene side street of Edmund, where traffic now roared down the 25MPH road. Understandably, the neighbors were livid with this gigantic disruption, especially in light of no notice being given to the community outside of the few neighbors who live on Glascock itself. Hopefully in the future, the city will choose to notify the neighbors on the detour street, too, as they get impacted just as strongly as those on the street getting the construction.

The whole mess got me thinking of what it might be like in the next few years when Google Fiber gets started here in earnest. Tuesday’s closure affected just one block whereas Google likely will be tearing things up everywhere. How will people react to this kind of disruption happening all over town?

Google Fiber and an FCC decision could give more people cheaper access to the Internet | News Feature | Indy Week

Indyweek talked with Erica Swanson, head of Google Fiber’s Community Impact programs, about bringing broadband to all income levels.

The bad news about Google Fiber coming to seven cities in the Triangle is that the high-speed Internet service won’t be installed in your neighborhood by the next season of House of Cards.

The good news is that Google Fiber says it will seek out traditionally underserved communities—low-income, minority, non-English speaking areas, where some residents don’t have home Internet at all.

About 60 million people in the U.S. don’t have Internet at home, according to the Pew Research Center. In cities, that number is 1 in 4. For some, a computer and a connection are too expensive; others say they don’t need it—the Internet has no place in their lives.

That might change, hinging on Google’s expansion plans, along with a pending decision by the FCC, that could give more people cheaper access to the Internet.

"Affordable connectivity, that’s the piece we can address," says Erica Swanson, Google’s head of Community Impact Programs.

via Google Fiber and an FCC decision could give more people cheaper access to the Internet | News Feature | Indy Week.

R-Line envy

Speaking of transit, I see that the marketing director for Cameron Village is trying to drum up support for diverting the R-Line buses from the original mission of serving downtown Raleigh. I’m all for improved transportation around Cameron Village because trying to drive anywhere around there is a nightmare. That said, I’m not sure extending the R-Line is the answer.

The R-Line buses came about through a joint effort of the Raleigh Transit Authority, the Downtown Raleigh Alliance (DRA), and the Greater Raleigh Convention and Visitors Bureau (GRCVB). All three groups helped make the R-Line possible. Cameron Village is not part of DRA and I don’t see that they do much with the GRCVB. Is the shopping center proposing to help pay for this extended service the way these other groups have? If so, I haven’t heard it. It would be great to get everything for free, but someone has to pick up the tab.

Cameron Village already has city bus service (two routes, 12 and 16). It makes sense to improve this existing service and leave the R-Line to do what it’s been doing: giving visitors an easy way to get around downtown Raleigh. That’s why downtown businesses subsidize it.