A few comments for a Sunday and then I'll shut the computer down and unplug from the matrix.
We had a good week at the Center. Of course, working with the finest students in Utah both as volunteers / staff and as attendees is what makes it a joy to come to work every day. Here are a few news worthy items:
- The Center's programmers, led by Guild Master Matt Long, known to us at the Center as The Ever Fearless Master of Computations, spent a few hours last night after we all went home from the Overnight Camp installing and testing the new Cocoa controls for the Galileo. We hope to have the new controls running for our patrons in January.
- I instructed the Programmers to investigate the use of IPad's to replace the Voyager's Bridge computers. The Voyager is due for a computer upgrade at the end of this school year and I seem to be feeling a yearning for IPads instead of the Mac Mini's we were planning to use. Call it a hunch, but I'm thinking the coolness factor of the Voyager would skyrocket with new chairs with IPads installed in the armrests. What do you think?
- Congratulations to Dave Daymont for taking the trophy for Best Overnight Mission. The weekly award goes to the ship and Flight Director that receives the highest evaluations from the campers as written in their post camp surveys.
- Emily Paxman was awarded the Plural Person of the Week Award at the Post Overnight Camp Meeting on Saturday. This highly coveted award goes to the person or persons classified as 'Plural' by our campers in their post camp surveys. One camper wrote of Emily, "Emily gets my first place vote. They were fantastic!". Emily, Emily and Emily all voiced appreciation for this young camper's nomination. They were proud to accept the honor.
Our quote of the week goes to Alex Anderson, Set Director of the Phoenix.
Alex: "Mason, you almost got your Phoenix 2nd Chair Pass. There was one thing you didn't do that you need to do to get a pass.
Mason: "What?"
Alex: "This is going to sound a bit strange but I'll say it anyway and then explain."
This conversation was so interesting I stopped what I was doing at my desk to listen in.
Alex: "You didn't read my mind and do what I wanted you to do during the mission."
Yes my friends, we expect everyone that volunteers at the Space Center to have super human powers. Secretly, we are hoping to attract only Jedi Knights but they are very few and have full agenda's, leaving very little time for volunteering at the Space Center.
In Alex's defense, he did elaborate and explain what he meant, and in a way, it all made some sense. But regardless, Alex gave us the quote of the week. Thanks Alex.
A Few Sunday Sanitized Chuckles
This picture is for all our volunteers and staff that recently took the ACT test this weekend. Its another one of those hoops one must jump through to move ahead in life. Call me old fashioned, but requiring students to demonstrate they actually learned something in school is a good thing.
I'm hoping you are all over the horror of the event and are recuperating well. Here's hoping all of you score well enough to get you where you want to go after high school. Warning, anyone found scoring below a 10 will be fired immediately. My worry isn't over your grades. My worry is your ability to walk, think and breath at the same time - all required to work at the Space Center.
OK, how cool is this? A sunset on Mars as the human eye would see it. Imagine an entire planet without one living thing on its surface to enjoy it. It's like Mars is challenging us to travel the ocean of space between us and conquer its harsh environment. Anyone out there think we are up to the challenge?
The good guys or the bad guys? Hmmmmm.......
And finally, I'd like to purchase several of these posters to put up and down the hallways of Central School. They will match that part of my Bridge Speech where I tell the children "You are always on camera. Big Brother IS watching you!"
Are we ready to get back into the trenches? Another week is starting and Ignorance is preparing another offensive.
Mr. Williamson
4 comments:
The only thing I'd worry about with using iPads, is the fact that they're wi-fi only and wireless networking can get extremely chatty. If you've got 15 or so bridge stations all trying to use one consumer-grade access point you'll see some slow down. Some manufacturers will say that you can have anywhere from 50-100 clients on a single access point, but the problem is that the speed really takes a dive. In a situation like the Voyager, I wouldn't have more than 8 iPads connecting to a single wireless access point (and if the app itself is really "chatty" then you may want to cut that back to 5).
Another issue is going to be power. If the chairs are bolted down, then great, but it will be difficult to keep them charged at times. I'd also make sure that it's easy for the staff to get to the iPads in case the app crashes and/or the iPad needs to be rebooted. In designing the enclosures for them you'll also want to make sure that there is no way for the campers to get to the home button, otherwise there will be nothing to stop them from quitting out of the application.
The only other problem I can think of is that iPads are not meant to be banged on, and you know how tough campers can be on equipment. You can get accidental breakage warranties through companies like Squaretrade, but I think the warranty plus deductible is about half the cost of a replacement unit.
Great points, completely true but just to be the other side of the argument I'll throw out some pro's.
1. A chance to write everything from scratch
2. Faster networking
3. Can have keyboard
4. Faster development
5. Simpler Stations
6. No Resizing
7. Core Graphics
8. Multi-touch
9. Multi-threading
10. Nicer Crashing
11. Interface Builder would make things nice also.
Also some other cons:
Cons
1. Memory Management
2. System Limitations
3. No 3D
4. Rewrite from scratch -> Networking
5. Has to be wifi
6. No widgets
7. Appearance
8. Pay for company license
9. Not utilizing pre-existing widgets
10. Learning new code
11. Core/server with Memory management
I think this would be a fun discussion to have with all of the readers of this site, so any added ideas would be appreciated.
Thanks!
John R.
Some good points there John. Just a few comments to add to yours.
The iPad does do 3D - just not to the same degree as a desktop/laptop computer. The iPhone 4 does fantastic 3D and the only real difference between the iPhone 4 and the iPad is the iPhone has double the system RAM. I've seen some pretty amazing first person shooters running on iPad.
One serious advantage is the simpler networking. No having to try and replace cables, or figure out where to run them. Just hide a couple of access points on the bridge and you're golden.
You CAN use keyboards with the iPads, but if they're mounted in chairs (like Vic suggested) they'd have to get Bluetooth keyboards to be able to use them. Then you run into issues with batteries and with that many bluetooth/wi-fi clients in a room there may be some spectrum issues.
*GEEK ALERT*
Wi-fi and bluetooth both run on 2.4 Ghz. In the United States the 2.4 Ghz band is divided into 11 channels that are 20 Mhz "wide." These channels actually have a small amount of overlap for adjoining channels (1->2 for example). You have to get about 4 channels apart to have no overlap. So if you were going to be running three wireless access points that are within range of each other you'd want them on channels 1, 5, and 11 so they don't overlap and cause interference. Now add 15 bluetooth keyboards that just kind of arbitrarily pick a channel and sit on it like a petulant child. In the case of bluetooth, devices are "paired" so there's no risk of one keyboard typing on the wrong device's screen, but the spectrum limitation could result in enough interference to cause performance issues. If Vic really wants to proceed in this vein and look at Bluetooth keyboards I can bring the question up with my dad who was one of the original designers of the Bluetooth spec - I can also talk to him about the wifi stuff as he sits on the board of the wi-fi alliance. Plus those keyboards need new batteries every few months.
*MORE GEEK STUFF*
The main issue with having too many clients on wifi deals with the way the clients "talk" to the base station. In order to prevent collisions and lost packets when a client wants to send a packet it first broadcasts a "request to send" and then waits for a response. If it doesn't get a response it sleeps for a small amount of time (less than 10 milliseconds) and asks again. This continues until the access point broadcasts a "clear to send" response directed at that client. Then the client can send ONE packet of data (packets are pretty small too). It then has to ask again to send the next packet. If you've only got a couple of people on an AP doing some web browsing they'll never notice a slowdown. But if you've got a lot of network chatter going over that one access point those "request to send" and "clear to send" packets take up a LOT of broadcast time.
*OKAY THE SCARY GEEKY STUFF IS OVER*
So my post is too long. Part 2 will immediately follow.
Here's part 2:
The iPads would definitely be less problematic in some ways - especially where crashing is concerned. Apps die a lot more gracefully than they do in OS X.
As far as memory management goes I don't think it's that big of a problem as long as images/textures used in the app aren't too large (file size). If videos or other high-bandwidth content are going to be used I believe the developer APIs allow for dynamically loading and unloading content into/out of system memory. So as long as the programming guild is careful it shouldn't be a big deal.
The server/core architecture also shouldn't be too much of a big deal. If you think about it the ships almost run that way now with the flight director's computer (and others depending on the ship) aggregating everything that the campers are doing. If you've got a halfway decent core machine for the flight director and all of the clients just go back to that machine for their information instead of talking to each other that can help cut down on network chatter quite a bit. You end up with a bunch of bi-directional connections all with the same end instead of all of the clients (iPads) trying to talk to each other over wifi.
I think a small-scale test would be in order with some existing machines before going wholesale with iPads. Have some sort of basic setup with 5-10 wi-fi clients (laptops preferably) running some really "chatty" app like the current stacks, have them talking to the core and see how the whole thing performs. That way the CMSEC doesn't drop $7,500 on iPads only to find the performance to be unacceptable.
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