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I saw a news recently that talk about the national policy on electronics 2012 of India. Kapil Sibal, the Minister for Communications and Information Technology says the government approve the policy and plan to invest 100 billion for electronics industry fostering before 2020. It’s natural trend for India to extend from their famous software industrial to hardware. Kapil visit Japan’s recently and says it’s very important to have strategy cooperation with Japan electronics company. The most important one is to build first semiconductor factory. The plan will kick-off before October 2013 and start to production around 2015~2016. Then based on the plenty of software engineer, Japan company can have much progress in India on embedded system. ...

After I wrote the Vuzix Smart glasses for just hours, Google launched their glass and built a new web site for this product. Maybe google do not want to be left behind when Vuzix award from CES. http://www.google.com/glass/start/ The page is simple and clear. We could see a video in the link to sense how it feels. All the functions that describe in what it does are totally from audio, video and gesture recognition. We can take the photo, record the video, translation, search the information, navigation…etc in real-time. All of the recognition technology have to link with the requirements of people and that’s why google raise a competition for people to write down “what would you do if you had Glass”. Once the idea is adopted, we could become the Glass Explorer and buy Glass with USD $1500. ...

I like to play basketball since I was a high school student and I still play around one to twice a week now. Although I love this sport, I do not have too much passion to see the games like NBA after MJ retired. In past year, I started to pay attention on it. One reason is Jeremy Lin and the other is the CEO of my company bought Memphis Grizzlies last year. I start to realize this is not just only a game but also contain a lot of things in it. ...

I saw a news that about the Vuzix Smart Glasses M100 and it get a recipient of the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) Innovations 2013 Design and Engineering Award BEST OF INNOVATIONS, and selected as Best Technology in the Wireless Handset Accessory category. More information in following link. http://www.vuzix.com/consumer/products_browse.html#video-eyewear It’s an interesting device but there are still challenges behind. Since Google launch their project glass, Vuzix is the 2nd company to make the similar product. So M100 get a lot of discussion even google guys go their booth to have it a look. According to the hardware specification from Vuzix web sites. It’s totally an android based smart phone and the difference is the glasses appearance only. It’s not special by just hardware specification only. ...

Before the Chinese Lunar New Year, I got the latest alpha version of the AirVision2. It does not only inherit the pros from previous version but more quick and stable also. I just have some preview here about the installation and main pages showing. After double clicking the windows installer, following the step of installation. When executing the airVision2, there is a windows security information pop up, please make sure the firewall does not block your application. ...

Weeks ago, the supplier demo the Miracast function to us and my colleague told me maybe we can think if there are applications for surveillance system. At first I saw nothing special for surveillance application but I may find there is now. Here is a capture picture from the whitepaper of WiFi alliance. Basically, Miracast is a protocol and this means Miracast can be over any kind of infrastructure. However, Miracast connections are expected to be predominantly established between Wi-Fi devices connected with each other directly, without an AP acting as an intermediary. According to the topology, what we can see is a source to a sink and it is a peer-to-peer connection. Go back to the topic we want to talk for surveillance. I plot a picture as follow, and this is just like a traditional surveillance system with cameras, recorder and monitor. ...

The pure public cloud is no doubt that we build the web services on public and the hybrid combine the private part. According to the information on wiki, the public cloud aka external cloud is related to the service is provided by third party. There is a picture on wiki can describe exactly what we talk about. Basically, there are four deployment models on wiki. The private cloud can’t satisfy the requirements of the surveillance system. We do not talk about the community cloud also because it’s not real on surveillance system. There is a famous network camera company named Dropcam that deployment as pure public cloud system. When we install the the devices, we have to create an account and register them. As I know, Dropcam use the Amazon Web Service as the infrastructure. I just plot some simple block diagrams to describe it. ...

純公有雲 (Public Cloud) 毫無疑問是在大眾網路上建構服務，而混合雲 (Hybrid Cloud) 則結合了私有雲 (Private) 部分。根據維基百科的說明，公有雲又稱「外部雲」，是指由第三方提供的服務。維基百科上的圖示能精準地描述我們所談論的概念。 基本上，維基百科列出了四種部署模型。私有雲無法滿足監控系統的各項需求。我們也不探討社群雲 (Community Cloud)，因為那在監控實務中並不常見。 有一家著名的網路攝錄影機公司名為 Dropcam，它是採用純公有雲模型的典型案例。安裝設備時，我們必須建立帳號並註冊。據我所知，Dropcam 使用 Amazon Web Service (AWS) 作為基礎設施。我畫了一些簡單的方塊圖來描述這個架構。 Dropcam 的模式（圖左下）中，所有服務皆由 Dropcam 提供並託管於 AWS。Dropcam 的角色不再僅是設備製造商，更是服務提供者。這種方式使整體系統變得最簡單且直觀。 而其他三種方塊圖則越來越複雜。一些監控公司仍希望基於傳統模式擴展系統，這可能導致整體架構變得像圖片上方那樣極其複雜，他們很快就會陷入泥淖。 不過，仍有一個大哉問：並非所有人都喜歡將私有影像內容餵給服務提供者。這也是為什麼傳統監控系統依然存在並掌握大部分市場佔有率的原因。但我認為這種情況在近幾年將會發生巨變。 經過研究與學習，我傾向將部署簡化為兩種。一種是 Dropcam 的模式，優點如前文所述。另一種則是因為目前純公有雲仍有部分弱點尚無法克服。 究竟是左邊還是右邊比較好？讓我們拭目以待。

Today is the end of the Dragon year and we use to have a good supper on this day. It’s brand new lunar year tomorrow and we call it Snake year. Sometimes, we’d call it Small Dragon year rather than Snake year because because Dragon is much more significant in traditional. Hope my family and friends have a brand new good Small Dragon Year.

My colleague did some experiments on gstreamer alsasrc and osssrc plugins and he found that alsasrc consume lots of cpu resource(around 16% on the chip we use). He asked me why the test tool that provided from chip vendor is quite efficient(around 1~2%). It was a big gap to me and I started to find why is that. After hours checking, I found that the plugin may cause a busy wait in a while loop when the parameters set to non-blocking mode. I do a simple code modification and execute again but the cpu rate just lower to 12%. I’m a little frustrated about it but still had some enhancement. So I started to try different parameters combination because he told that he found three differences from alsasrc plugin and the test code. 1. The setting of alsasrc is non-block mode but the test code is set to block mode. 2. The channels setting of alsasrc is 1 but the test code is set to 2. 3. The buffer size is limit in test code but alsasrc do not have that limit. For 1: I thought the non-block mode should be much more efficient but the busy wait should change. For 2: This is really weird because when I set the channels to be 2 in alsasrc plugin, the cpu rate become quite low. So I start to wondering if this is the characteristics of the I2S bus. I googled on the internet but did not find any information to describe that we have to set the channels parameter to be 2 in alsasrc plugin of gstreamer when the audio data bus is I2S. So I’ll confirm it later. For 3: I think it’s reasonable to limit the buffer size.