I must give credit for my productivity to an excellent team at Juicy Development (http://juicydevelopment.com) including creative, business, and technical genius from everyone, the Symfony Project first and foremost for creating an easy to use, easy to understand, uber-powerful programming framework, and for years of experience at the Space Center that have paid off in spades over the last few weeks, months, and years.

Okay, back to work.

Today was one of those days. I stumbled upon Mogulus after a friend told me he was having trouble with some of his students breaking copyright laws with it. Intrigued, I checked it out, and was blown away. It’s a free Web 2.0 “Beta” service (like most of the cool stuff on the ‘net) that allows anyone with a broadband connection and a webcam to publish a live video stream to the internet. It’s like YouTube, but instead of uploading a video you make, you produce the video content live, prepare cues for the next clip, can integrate transitions, splash screens, graphics, badges, and even multiple video streams from your webcam, a firewire DV camera or USB camera, mobile phone, OR from anyone with a video device ANYWHERE in the world. You just provision them as a member of your production team, and they’re hardware appears. So you could manage a program from your production office, have a field agent with a laptop and a broadband connection doing an interview, and patch them into your program LIVE. SOOOO COOOL!

Now, I’m not a communications professional, and I really don’t think I’ll be in the communications field, but this is waaaaay cool. The possibilities for providing streamed content are just incredible.

Oh, I didn’t mention HOW you get the streamed content you want in place. For banners, ticker boxes, etc. you type it in and can enable/disable it. When you set up your channel, you can provide a badge that goes in the corner of your stream (which can be turned on/off). To set up content in advance, you create “storyboards” which are preset video lists organized as you like. Now for the good part: video can come from many many sources. Video podcasts, RSS feeds, files on the internet, files on your hard drive, YouTube users OR YouTube searches. This means you can cue up a video clip on your channel and, while it’s playing, get more content ready if you don’t want to use stuff already in your media library. You get it cued up and you’re live! And, if you’re away from your studio but still want to run content, you just set up the “auto-pilot” which plays clips or storyboards in the order and configuration you like. Cue it up, hit the “go” button on autopilot, and your channel stays on the air 24/7 while you’re away.

The possibilities for providing streamed content live for events and different activities is overwhelmingly neat. One thing I’m especially looking forward to, however, are the possibilities of adopting it’s interface for the Space Center. We currently run on pre-built mission tapes. Wouldn’t it be neat if you could create a playlist for a mission, preload it into your system, have the autopilot configured for science screens/stars, be able to cue up video in advance and, if you really wanted a video clip you could just search and drag it into your system. It’s perfect!

In order to implement something like that, however, you’d need to implement a SAN and several streaming servers in a cluster with a load balancer or something. I’m not familiar enough with data services to be able to design it 100%, but I get the gist of it I think. You’d set up a server with the video files indexed by tags, a mission playlist API call, and you’d be able to stream files from the system over a media distribution network from your data center to your video clients. It’s perfect!

I’m going to bed now before I hurt myself…

Entrepreneurship

 
Also, if you get weird links from people, don’t click on them. When in doubt, meet the person or call them (yes, in real life) and ask them if they *really* sent you the link. There is a more comprehensive listing of Facebook security advisories at http://www.facebook.com/security that is updated regularly.

Cheers, Brent

My long term goals are basically find a workable job as a programmer or network administrator, work on the side trying to start a profitable and growing business, and then transition to that successful business. After growing said business to where I can sell, manage for a few hours a day, or simply hold stock and a board of directors position, I would start a new business and start going again. The objective here would be to develop a diverse business portfolio, one that would be sustainable in the event of significant failures, and also one with strong alliances between different companies. Although I lack the legal training, I’m inclined to think that there would be a large corporation that I would control that would own or acquire my business hobbies when they reached maturity. This could even function as a conglomerate, where there are software, web, mobile, infrastructure, and security related subsidiaries underneath the parent corporation. Heck, I could even roll my 501(c) business training foundation into this, however I’m inclined to keep it separate so as to give that organization some integrity in the event of a major failure.

Either way, tangents aside, I’m not sure if Computer Science is quite what I’m looking for. Knowing how to program lower-level technologies is important, but for me it may be more important to know how to integrate and develop systems that have concrete business applications. Additionally, I’d like to go on to get a JD/MBA and I think that ISys would be more supportive of those degrees anyway.

If anyone has an opinion on one or the other, drop me a comment.

In other news, I have some mockups I’d like to share with people. Below are some mashups for a staff calendar I want to write for the Space Center. It’s been on and off for years, but now I think I have enough tools and experience to pull this off.

We are commanded to have Charity. It is necessary for our salvation. But how can we achieve such an infinitely comprehensive state of Love for those around us? I believe this comes as a gift of the spirit, a blend of discernment, humility, and gratitude. When we see someone we’ve never even met, when we are blessed with the gift of Charity we mentally stop for a moment and realize that this person is a Child of the most powerful, most intelligent, and most wonderful being in the universe, God himself. Despite the flaws or failings that may be apparent in character or physical forms, we yet appreciate the wonder of this creation, this miracle of humanity that stands before us. We realize they have a complex and intricate story, woven by agency and divine influence and destiny. We realize that this destiny, if fulfilled, can lead to the exaltation of this creature before us. Indeed, as CS Lewis wrote,

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.

This respect of individual human dignity, appreciation for divine potential, and brief but intensely meaningful realization of the infinite worth of another’s existence is Charity. When we see a brother who is struggling temporally and experience this brief moment, it becomes an honor to serve him in whatever capacity we may. When we see a sister struggling in the depths of heartache, compassion is intuitively extended from the charitable person to this “[goddess] in the chrysalis.” Ultimately, any act of kindness or compassion falls in order when the proper perception of the reality of our existence is achieved.

It is important to note that Charity is not equatable with self-deprecation. It could be perverted as such very easily, in that one may create an artificial charity through self-deprecation in order to create a false contrast to identify others as greater beings than oneself. But, this is false in entirety. The relationship of charity between beings exists in a mutual sense, for we are all children of God. It is not through deprecation but through realization that we understand the divinity of those around us and ourselves. The Master himself taught that “he who is greatest among you shall be your servant” (Matt 23:11). Mosiah 2:17 informs us that “when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God.” Would it not be sensible to consider that if, when we serve others, we serve Him, then we ought to always have respect and honor for those around us, a sense of charity?

I firmly believe that charity is a key component to our individual salvation and to the maintenance of any unit of society, and I propose that if each of us were to step back to gain our bearings, to realize who we are, who others are, and how that relationship between us as children of God as well as the relationship between God and his children, that we would find more love, harmony, and a remarkable degree of self-satisfaction and support in our own lives from our fellows and our Savior. Go read Moroni 7 and consider what he has to say on Charity, for it is perhaps the most comprehensive discussion of charity in the standard works. We must understand charity in our own lives as it is a critical component to becoming a Christian, which is really what everything is all about.

Regarding lunchtime: I’m about to go eat a spinach-ceasar wrap. Maybe…unless Nate has a better idea for lunch.