Bytemarks

Along side the MAARS was another interesting robotic vehicle called GUSS, the Ground Unmanned Support Surrogate. The team shown included (from left to right) Jesse Hurdus, Torc; Alfred Wicks, Virginia Tech; and Capt. Tim Bove, Marine Corp. Warfighting Laboratory. On first appearances, GUSS looks like a Polaris jeep equipped with antennae and sensors.  The units are here for the Marines who are prepared to put GUSS through its paces as part of this month’s RIMPAC exercise. GUSS is primarily a support vehicle and is meant to carry gear or wounded personnel as a way to reduce the load from the ground troops. It can travel unmanned along rural unpaved roads, pre-programmed to follow a specified route,  at about the pace of a foot soldier. Talking to the team, it was clear GUSS was not meant to be  all things to all people. It is not an all terrain vehicle, it does not work well in heavy foliage and its not sophisticated like a Mars Rover (and it costs a lot less.) It is based on a modular design and the building blocks use off the shelf technologies which enabled rapid prototyping. The team then focuses on the integration challenges. The development cycle was less than a year and manufacturing of the units took about 6 months.  All four of the development models are here for the exercises.

I found it interesting how these entities, Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division, Marine Corp Warfighting Laboratory, Virginia Tech and Torc worked together to produce GUSS. Funding came through the Department of Defense (Dahlgren) to the Warfighting Lab which then developed the specification for the autonomous vehicle. Virginia Tech is  leveraged for their programming and mechanical engineering expertise. Finally Torc is hired to build the units.  Seems like a viable partnership between DOD, University and a commercial company. Keep in mind Torc is not a vendor providing this directly to the military. GUSS is still in prototype. If the military decides to deploy these units, they will then go out to bid for production. Any limitations in GUSS’ performance will be identified in these RIMPAC exercises and the team will qualify what needs to be done next.

In addition to the “big iron” being used in RIMPAC exercises, there are examples of “little iron” robots being field tested to protect and support the ground forces. I got a chance to see a couple of them this past weekend. Shown in the photo is the Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System (MAARS) unit manufactured by Qinetiq. This system packs a M240B medium machine gun along with a spotting scope, an infrared scope and viewing cameras for a 360 degree field of view. The model I saw demonstrated did not have a gun mounted to it. The unit also has rubberized tractor treads making it suitable for rocky terrain. Field engineer Rich Leemon did tell me that it wasn’t all-terrain. The MAARS robot is best suited for unpaved rural roads. MAARS is operated by remote control from a suitcase system or from a wearable controller, as modeled here by Jasmine Guevara, PACOM public affairs. The Bellows Marine Corp Training Area where the exercise took place was made up to appear like an Afghani village. You can see the flag on the building and the men in the foreground behind MAARS are role players brought in from San Francisco. Evaluators of the MAARS looked for system vulnerabilities and operational effectiveness by Marines controlling  the units in a free play exercise. The MAARS units run about $350K each and are still in the evaluation stage. In this video Rich Leemon explains the general operations of the MAARS as he guides it back onto the truck. Next up is GUSS.

Friday’s F-22 Arrival Ceremony was quite the event. In addition to the social media contingent, which included Marc Orbito, Ricky Li, David Lau, Gabriel Yanagihara, Lee J Hopkinson, Greg Yamane, Brian Dote, Ian Kitajima and me, there where a few hundred guests of the Air Force and joint services. Hula performance was done by Robert Cazimero’s dancers which was followed with speeches by dignitaries including Gov. Linda Lingle and Sen. Daniel Inouye. Finally, Kahu Kordell Kekoa did a traditional Hawaiian blessing of the planes. These are just 2 of the F-22′s that will call Hawaii home. By early next year that number will grow to 20. Each will be part of the Hawaii Air National Guard and operated under a joint agreement with the active duty U.S. Air Force.

The social media team did a great job capturing the event and you can view photos by Jasmine Deborah, Gabriel Yanagihara, Brian Dote, Lee Hopkinson and Marc Orbito. Ian Kitajima shot several live videos and posted then to his Dual Use site. Greg Yamane posted this video of the F-22 taxiing to the ceremony. Ricki Li took it a notch up with this video production. Here is a set of photos and a rather sedate video I shot of the F-22. Of course the best was this video courtesy of KHON2News

The USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) is just one of 32 vessels in Hawaii for the Rim of the Pacific exercises held every two years. My run on Sunday morning takes me along Pearl Harbor and the Arizona Memorial. I shot this photo from the Visitor Center area. It is pretty amazing how many ships are in the Pearl Harbor lochs. I’ve never seen air craft carriers double parked before.

At the press conference on Monday, June 28, 2010, Vice Admiral Richard Hunt talked about how the first RIMPAC in 1971 was focused on “blue water” exercises. In 2010, the focus is on the littoral. (Wikipedia: The littoral zone refers to that part of a sea, lake or river that is close to the shore.) In this case the waters off the islands. I suspect Bellows will be a site of some of the littoral exercise during these coming weeks. The Navy has newly designed vessels specifically for littoral operations. The USS Freedom is one such vessel participating in RIMPAC 2010. Another is the RSS Supreme from Singapore. The RSS Supreme is part of the Formidable class stealth frigate. If you look at the surface of this vessel you can see the patchwork of radar absorbing panels. It almost looks like it is padded. The RSS Supreme was parked right next to the DDG Atago from Japan.

The Japanese brought two ships, the DDG 177 Atago and the DD 108 Akebono. These two ships were double parked right next to each other. I would have loved to be on the ship when they did that maneuver. The DDG Atago is based on the Arleigh-Burke (Aegis) destroyer design but manufactured by Mitsubishi of Japan. I find it interesting that the show Ryomaden, currently airing on KIKU-TV is a story about Ryoma Sakamoto told by Iwasaki Yataro, founder of Mitsubishi. The show goes into good detail about Yataro’s humble beginnings as a bird cage peddler and his ambitions as a businessman. I wonder what he would have thought if he knew someday his company would be furnishing the Japan Maritime Self Defense Force (JMSDF) with high tech destroyers based on a US design. I am sure it would have blown his mind. The tour of the DDG Atago was relatively quick but we did get to visit the bridge, deck and officers dining room. I did notice one thing, that ship was the cleanest ship I have every been on. Everything sparkled, even the propeller on the life boat. Today the DDG Atago participated in a anti-piracy inspection drill. If you are interested in more photos of the DDG Atago you can view this set.

Maybe I would have been a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon if summer sessions like this were available back in my day. Pacific Center for Environmental Studies (PaCES) is a six-week intensive course for high school juniors and seniors held at Windward Community College. This past Tuesday, I had a chance to spend an hour observing the class as they processed DNA samples. David Krupp and Rob Hutchison conduct the program that included field trips to Coconut Island, collecting water samples around coral reefs and studying genomics. The program is concludes with a symposium where students present their research findings. David and Rob explain that the course is not about lectures and book readings. It’s about problem solving and creative thinking. The exercise I saw had the students taking their DNA samples, sourced originally from water around healthy coral and stressed coral, and extracting key segments. The DNA was mixed with a marker solution to be then placed in a gel electrophoresis device. The photo above shows the DNA separated out in the gel, based on the relative weigh density of the DNA. Pretty cool stuff. The program consists of about 20-25 students along with mentors from previous years. Both David and Rob will be joining us on the radio (KIPO 89.3FM) this coming Wed. July 7th at which time we’ll get to talk to them in more detail about the program, what students learn from it and how in some cases is pivotal in setting a future course for these students. Hope you will join us in the conversation.

What better way to spend an afternoon than with friends sampling all manner of burgers. @Turkeyboy808 (aka Jason Kim) Chief Proprietor of Burgers on the Edge has this contest going to pick the best custom burger. Jason and his team ran this contest last year and based on its success are making it an annual event. They culled through several hundred submissions and ended up with these 7 burgers, 3 in the beef category, 2 in turkey and 2 in veggie. The number of burgers bought by June 30th will determine which custom burger will get added onto the menu. There will be one burger winner for each category. According to Jason, he updates that Burger track on the home page every day, manually. Our little tasting party consisted of @Neenz, @Nctrnlbst, @tweetpea @noe808 and @RodneyLee. We ordered each of the entries (Mr. Smarty Pants, Save the Chickens, Plan B, Garden Isle, Da Local Kine, Kung POW and Southern Belle) and sampled the creations. Here are my rankings on a scale of 1 to 5 where 5 is the best.

• Mr. Smarty Pants: 4 – Pepper Jack cheese and fried egg worked well with the turkey burger.
• Save the Chickens: 2 – Cream of mushroom didn’t quite do it for me. Sorry @ryankanno
• Plan B: 4 – The tonkatsu sauce and onions worked on this veggie burger. Nice job @starletshay
• Garden Isle: 2 – Too subtle for my tastes, it needed something.
• Da Local Kine: 3 – Kinda liked the spam and pineapple combo but novelty did not last.
• Kung POW: 1 – Wrong! Hoisin should not be used on a beef burger.
• Southern Belle: 5 – My favorite, the Ranch worked with sharp cheddar and fried tomato.

Now get out there and tell me what your favorite is.

On my return trip from Lihue, Kauai to Honolulu, I was treated to the new TSA full-body scanner. I am not a frequent traveler by any means so I was surprised to find out I was one of the first (within the first week) to experience this new security technology. The new scanner is manufactured by California-based Rapiscan Systems and uses low-level x-rays to view objects beneath the clothing of the subjects. I’ve seen recent news stories about the Lihue scanner on KITV and the Garden Island. According to TSA, the scanner cost about $170K and plans are in place to deploy about 100 scanners in 32 airports across the country. Lihue Airport was one of the first installations in the country not because of the threat level but because of the relative ease of implementation. Lihue Airport has only one security checkpoint.

As I approached the scanner the thought did run through my mind to opt out but I did not want to risk the alternative full-body pat down. Curiously as I exited the scanner, the TSA agent gave me a pat down anyway. Not a full-body version but just down the legs. The news articles I read referred to walled off areas where the naked scans were viewed but at the Lihue Airport I could clearly see the women behind the viewing monitor adjacent to the scanner. She looked at me, then looked back at the monitor. Another TSA agent was standing next to her and could view the images quite easily. I will admit that I did not make a visual confirmation of images since it was out of my line of sight. But I did not see any other walled off area for viewing.

The TSA claims that passenger privacy is maintained and scanned images are not stored, copied or transferred. They also claim that the amount of x-ray used is about 10,000 times less than that of a cell phone. The amount of time I spent going through the scanner seemed longer than the traditional metal detector. I am curious to see if checkpoint lines at the Honolulu International Airport will be longer as a result. The new scanners will be installed there at the end of this year.

If you go to enough raku events, like this annual Raku Ho`olaulea, you begin to appreciate the incredible diversity in ceramic firing techniques. I haven’t even started to scratch the surface of the art of raku firing but I wanted to share this one with you. Philip Markwart, shown in photo, is a long time ceramicist who specializes in Japanese sake cups and related implements. He is also a fan of the old style wood kiln called anagama. This is usually a large kiln built to have a tunnel effect where wood is stoked in one end and as the heat travels through the chamber the ceramics gets fired. These wood kilns take a long time to heat up and require stoking for several days to reach the proper temperature. Normally these kilns are build into the land and not easily transportable. The beauty of Raku Ho`olaulea is that you get to bear witness to human ingenuity. Phil built this portable wood fire kiln, which he calls Henagama or Strange Kiln, out of ironically enough a propane tank. The irony is that most modern day raku firings are done with propane gas. In this design Phil stokes the kiln with wood from the shoot. The wood burns inside the chamber and as you can see, the flame is released out the top. The ceramic pieces are in the chamber and gets fired in the process. Amazingly, there is no glaze on any of the pieces so any resulting finish is from the wood ash fusing to the ceramic surface. Phil got some beautiful pieces as a result of the firing. Keep in mind this is a long process which as started at 7:30pm Friday and finished at 7:30am the next morning. There is quite a bit of ingenuity built into this kiln. But a key element not shown in this photo is the fan system that blows air into the bottom of the kiln chamber. When you think of it, this is quite a technological marvel built from a recycled propane tank. If you are interested in more photos from this year’s Raku Ho`olaulea you can find them posted here. I should also mention that guest artist Eduardo shared a process involving Stannous Chloride which transformed a metallic finish to a rainbow of colors. All in all, for the geek who enjoys novel kiln designs, chemistry, artistry and best of all FIRE, Raku Ho`olaulea is an event to experience.

These Android phones are coming out fast and furious. Late last year I got to touch a Motorola Droid. It was a little heavy compared to the iPhone and it had a built in keyboard that nobody liked. Next up, the Nexus One was sold by Google early this year with quite a bit of fanfare as the tech pundits predicted how Google was going to disrupt the cell carriers distribution model. Less than four months later Google pulls the plug on their online sales strategy. Despite all these fits and starts the Android phone, independent of manufacturer, is gaining fast on the iPhone. Obviously people are looking for an alternative and the competition is good for the smartphone marketplace. What I like about Android is how Google and the carriers are willing to try new models and offerings. Some things work, others don’t, but innovation continues. In spite of its clunky keyboard, Verizon Wireless and Motorola are now pitching Droids for a special two for one sale.

Over the past two weeks, Verizon Wireless loaned me a demo HTC Incredible to play around with. I will admit, I am a staunch iPhone fanboy but am a little infatuated with the Android operating system. Its Google app (Voice, Goggles, Maps, Gmail) integration and open architecture are enticing. And now, with HTC’s streamline design I am about to come out of the closet. The HTC Incredible does not have a hardware keyboard making it a very light unit. Lighter in fact than the iPhone. Anybody used to typing on the screen will easily adapt to the Incredible. The 480×800 touch screen is very sharp. Some of my geek friends complaint about HTC Sense, the overlay UI (user interface) that connects you to Android, but I found it quite responsive. The power/lock button on the top of the unit is slight to the touch (compared to the iPhone) and I found myself putting the device in sleep mode inadvertently.

I love the 8 megapixel camera that comes equipped with a flash. The addition of an FM tuner was also a nice treat. What I did not like about the HTC Incredible was the lack of Mac support for syncing. I connected the USB cable to my Mac Mini and the unit indicated it was recharging. Outside of that there, was no recognition by my Mac of the device. Others on the HTC Forums seem to have similar problems. One person suggested a third party application for syncing to the Mac but paying for an app that I think should be a basic feature with the phone goes against everything I believe in. All in all a nice job engineering the HTC Incredible in to a compact package but still lacking elements that make it ready for prime time. If HTC/Google fixes the syncing problem I might reconsider, but for now I am sticking with my iPhone.

Update: 6/1/10 – I got a chance to talk to Verizon Wireless today and found a way to connect to the phone’s disk drive. Forget what they say in the Quick Tips Guide. To get to the drive you need to plug the USB in and watch the top menu bar on the phone. You can drag that bar down to reveal additional options. One option is “Disk Drive”. Once selected you can see the unit in Finder and it also automatically launchs iPhoto for picture downloads. Not too intuitive but it does work. My appreciation for this phone just went up a notch.

About a week ago, friends over at Archinoetics asked if I wanted to be a beta tester for their new iPhone app called Epic Tracker. I had heard about Epic Tracker from following Roz Savage’s row across the Pacific on her “epic” solo row. The program’s first iteration was called Roz Tracker and on her recent leg from Kiribati to Australia, I noticed it had evolved to Epic Tracker. Now, I am not about to row across the Pacific or scale the heights of Mt. Everest and chances are the only epic treks I will go on are those in my own mind. Nevertheless, I love the idea that you can embark on a journey and mark your course along the way.

As it turns out, I had the perfect excursion to field test out Epic Tracker. On the day of the LOST series finale, my friend Ryan Ozawa organized an outing at Kualoa Ranch to visit some of the notable filming spots. It was great timing and the perfect epic trek I can handle. With iPhone in hand, it was quite simple to capture a spot with a photo and sending to to Epic Tracker. The input screen allows you to title, provide a description, tag and select your multimedia content of choice, photo, video or audio. Since I like the point and shoot immediacy of photos that’s the route I took. As for GPS, I selected automatic GPS since I was not prepared to manually input GPS coordinates. Once you’ve assembled all your content, you click Submit Post and away it goes. I felt there should be some validation before hitting send but that might be due to the newness of the application and my not wanting to lose data. I’ve noticed with the iPhone GPS, you can never be too sure about your location accuracy. This is the result of cell phone tower triangulation which is problematic in remote locations, but then again, I have been in urban Honolulu locations with sketchy results. Once I completed my trek submissions, it wasn’t until I got back on my desktop computer that I could see my completed trip. Not surprisingly several locations were way off. It was a bit of a challenge to relocate those spots since the Epic Tracker did not provide a way to move your map point. I ended up going into Google Maps and approximating where the location was and got lats and longs from there. That got edited back into Epic Tracker for a more accurate display of the LOST sites we visited. I later found out that by tapping the GPS Signal indicator on the screen, you would get a display of your map location. But you still couldn’t adjust it. I suppose if you were on a real epic journey you would have a GPS device that you could manually input coordinates into Epic Tracker.

The social media features allow you to send out your posts to Twitter and/or Facebook. I was blasting my ET posts to Twitter and getting updates from Ryan when he saw them. As you can see, the message starts off with a hashtag for EpicTracker. The title is the only user generated message. I could have probably been more informative but at the time I thought my description was also going to be included. The rest of the tweet is an Epictracker url. An obvious suggestion would be to use a url shortener. Maybe they can work something out with Turkey and get Epic.tr.

Back on the website, more work needs to be done to add a social element. I can see a lot of my friends using this service and I would like to follow their  travels. Right now there doesn’t seem be that feature. The website also seems to be split into two parallel views, one HTML and the other Flash. Once in the Flash view you aren’t able to one-click back into HTML view. You need to type the entire url. There are other idiosyncrasies but I will chock it up to being early beta. In all fairness, I can’t be too critical since this version of Epic Tracker is not publicly available. My role at this time is to kick the tires and report back. So far I like what I see and if some of these improvements are made for the public release I am sure you will like it to. I’ll keep you posted.