AndreasB.Net

Today was the official opening of the conference. There were two tracklines, one about Gigacampus, and one about Feide, which is an adminstrative system and program for the higher education sector in Norway. Personally I chose to follow the track about GigaCampus, as that was the track closest to what I do at work.

In the beginning, Uninett was like most ISPs, their job was to deliver network connectivity up and until the last time, but nothing inside the campus. However, over time, it became clear that there was need for some centralized experience not only on delivering the network connectivity to the various campuses, but also when it came to maintaining the core systems of each system. Gigacampus is the name of the current program, which aims to have 1 gbps internally and between every campus site connected to Uninett, along with network and program monitoring, both traffic and to support the services such as e-mail, each institution needs to run. This program is uniquely Norwegian in style, and gives amongst other things, a centralized experience pool for instititutions to draw on when they move campus sites. As each institution seldom do that more than once in a decade.

Outside the two auditoriums there were several stands. Mostly it was vendors, such as Dell, HP, Microsoft, Netcom and a couple of others, along with a main Uninett stand, promoting amongst other things, eduroam, which lets you connect to the wireless network of any university or college in Norway using your local username and password.

We had been asked to showcase some of our development on the Uninett stand, and we used two large plasma screens and a 15″ laptop to do so. We showed off our embedding of video over IP in webbrowser system. Audun Vaaler got it working a few weeks ago, and it works brilliantly. We also showed off AccessGrid again, although the person in Halden which should have been on, elected to turn the camera to his goldfish instead. The goldfish had little to say, but the lighting became absolutely correct, so it was a pretty picture, perhaps prettier than the one originally planned.

The plasma screens were the usual TVs with a computer interface thrown on as an afterthought, and did not work well, (and had a tendency to burn the images into the screen itself within 30 minutes til an hour. I fear one screen running on Windows will never get rid of that ugly start menu again.

After dinner there was an meet the experts session, although none were interested in multimedia or SIP, which was our table along with one person from Uninett. It was not unexpected though, as there is mainly network people here, and not so many working with a broader view, although we got some questions to try the Remmen Streaming System from people who had attended yesterdays workshop.

During this session, a gang of male students arrived with their manschoir to sing four ironic, stupid and fun songs, which was probably the highlight, at least for us.

When I say I followed the Gigacampus track, it is correct, what I did not say, was that I never entered an auditorium to do so. NTNU is using a system which shows both the speaker, and his computer presentation in a webpage with two videofeeds, alowing one to follow something without being in the room. So I was at our stand during the whole day, and did not miss one session. However, if things got boring your could walk around or talk to the one next to you without disturbing anyone. It actually worked out quite well. The only problem is that the system is based on the closed and proprietary Windows Media Format, which means that used as is, the system is useless, as we only use systems based on open standards.

Over all I am quite pleased with this day, and I am looking forward to tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 22:53 and is filed under Thoughts from work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.