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Sun Microsystems Laboratories Blogs

December 8, 2009

Katy Dickinson's Blog

Freezing Flowers

It has been raining and hailing and there is a freeze warning in effect now for our area (the Santa Clara Valley Including San Jose), saying that a "very cold air mass over the region combined with mostly clear skies and light winds will allow overnight lows to drop into the 20s tonight. Several hours of sub-freezing temperatures are likely. Temperatures may fall into the teens in the coldest valleys." John and I spent part of this afternoon putting tarps and sheets over our citrus bushes, bougainvillea vine, and young avocado tree. He welded standing frames so that the wet tarps will not crush the plants. Our front porch now has a rough curtain around it with the birds of paradise - Strelitzia - and potted plants inside.

The San Francisco Bay Area weather confuses plants. We still see flaming Fall colors in the Chinese Pistache - Pistacia chinensis - trees, while the early Spring flowers like Narcissus are starting to bloom, at the same time that there is snow on Mount Hamilton and the surrounding hills.

DSCN7574 DSCN7609 DSCN7189 DSCN7164
DSCN7167 DSCN7177 DSCN7190 DSCN7191

Images Copyright 2009 Katy Dickinson

by katysblog on December 8, 2009

December 5, 2009

Derek White's Blog

Java SDK for FIRST Robotics Competition Released!

Over the last few months we've been working with WPI and 20 high school robotics teams getting the Java SDK for the FIRST Robotics Competition ready for the 2010 season. We've been getting great feedback from the teams including bugs and questions. We've also seen confirmation of the value that Java brings to some teams. One mentor said that they can usually only find a couple of student C++ programmers for the team, but for 2010 they have 10 Java programmers! Or was it 15?

This week FIRST announced a public release of the Java SDK. Here's the official word from Bill's Blog (the official FRC blog):

In addition, I’m very pleased to let you know that an early version of the FRC Java software is now available for download at http://first.wpi.edu/FRC/frcjava.html . I know we promised this for November, and I apologize for being a few days late, but I think you will be very happy with the results. Our hats off to the extraordinarily dedicated Java beta test teams and the developers for all their hard work! Veteran teams, I encourage you to open your doors to rookies in your area interested in getting an early look at Java and how it works with the robot. Remember they don’t have the advantage of having last year’s control system to experiment with.


This early-release SDK is only fully usable by FRC teams that have the cRIO hardware (veteran teams). Check the FIRST forums to read or request more information.

This Java SDK is based on the Squawk JVM and the Sun SPOT SDK. Rookie teams can get experience with the Netbeans IDE and Java ME APIs by using the Sun SPOT Emulator. See http://sunspotworld.com/frc for more information.

BTW, if you're an experienced Java programmer, don't sit around pouting about how you never get to program dangerous, high-speed, 120 pound robots. Consider being a programming mentor to a local FRC team! See our mentoring tips wiki as well as usfirst.org.


by Derek White on December 5, 2009

December 4, 2009

Katy Dickinson's Blog

Caboose Stairs Finished

I have not written anything for a while about WP668, our 1916 backyard caboose, but we continue to work on it. John got the stair railings finished and coated. He also added lights to the stair risers to make night access safer. It was easier to add the lights while the railings were removed. The stair rail coating is gray to distinguish it from the yellow grab bars of the original caboose. It is smooth to the touch and will protect against rust.

We worked with a master welder in October 2008 to construct the railing from pipe.

Welding WP668 caboose stair rail
photo: copyright 2008 Katy Dickinson Welding WP668 caboose stair rail
photo: copyright 2008 Katy Dickinson DSCN7129 DSCN7222
DSCN7224 DSCN7226 DSCN7227

Photos copyright 2008-2009 Katy Dickinson

by katysblog on December 4, 2009

December 3, 2009

Poorna Udupi's Blog

Track me using Sensor.Network live plots!

I am out and about using an application developed by Vodafone and Sun Labs on my cell phone that pinpoints my location at anytime. My location gets updated every 60 seconds and you can visualize that using the LivePlots from Sensor.Network!

Visualization powered by sensor.network.com

by poorna on December 3, 2009

Sensor.Network Live plots using EtherWatt

Live plots up to the last minute, of temperature and active power plotted as measured by an EtherWatt device from a conference room on the Sun campus in Menlo Park, California. The first two are simple line charts for temperature and active power and the third one is a combined annotated line chart (all provided by Google javascript API).

#sn_link {display:block; padding:0 10px 0 10px !important; font: 11px Arial, Helvetica, Sans serif !important; color:#117ba2 !important;}#sn_viz_wrapper a:hover,#sn_viz_wrapper a:link,#sn_viz_wrapper a:active,#sn_viz_wrapper a:visited {text-decoration:none !important; background:inherit !important;color:#117ba2;}

Visualization powered by sensor.network.com

#sn_link {display:block; padding:0 10px 0 10px !important; font: 11px Arial, Helvetica, Sans serif !important; color:#117ba2 !important;}#sn_viz_wrapper a:hover,#sn_viz_wrapper a:link,#sn_viz_wrapper a:active,#sn_viz_wrapper a:visited {text-decoration:none !important; background:inherit !important;color:#117ba2;}

Visualization powered by sensor.network.com

#sn_link {display:block; padding:0 10px 0 10px !important; font: 11px Arial, Helvetica, Sans serif !important; color:#117ba2 !important;}#sn_viz_wrapper a:hover,#sn_viz_wrapper a:link,#sn_viz_wrapper a:active,#sn_viz_wrapper a:visited {text-decoration:none !important; background:inherit !important;color:#117ba2;}

Visualization powered by sensor.network.com

by poorna on December 3, 2009

Katy Dickinson's Blog

Daughter News - Engaged, Learning Arabic...

My clever and generally wonderful daughter Jessica just announced her engagement to be married to long-time boyfriend Matt Holmes (also a Junior, Matt studies at the College of William and Mary). Jessica is learning Arabic because she will be a student at CMU-Q (Carnegie Mellon University Quatar, in Doha) next semester. She will be home in about two weeks but then she is off on a family ski trip with the Holmes family. Jessica will be back from skiing just before Christmas and leaving for Doha during the 2nd week of the new year. Somewhere in there we need to hold her engagement party and celebrate her 21st birthday. Matt's Mom and I are trying to work out party dates and arrangements now...

This will be a busy holiday season for our families!

Jessica Dickinson Goodman in her Presidential Inauguration ball gown
photo: copyright 2009 Katy Dickinson Matt Holmes, Jessica Dickinson Goodman, Paul Dickinson Goodman at the Lair of the Golden Bear
photo: copyright 2009 Katy Dickinson Jessica Dickinson Goodman at the Lair of the Golden Bear
photo: copyright 2009 Katy Dickinson Jessica Dickinson Goodman and Matt Holmes at the Lair of the Golden Bear
photo: copyright 2007 Katy Dickinson

Images Copyright 2007-2009 by Katy Dickinson and John Plocher

by katysblog on December 3, 2009

Poorna Udupi's Blog

Testing Live plots from Sensor.Network!

Here is a live plot of temperature plotted against pressure for a Nortek Aquadopp sensor. You are NOT looking at a static image file but, visualizing AN UP TO THE LAST SAMPLE data from the sensor using LivePlots from Sensor.Network

Visualization powered by sensor.network.com

by poorna on December 3, 2009

December 1, 2009

Vipul Gupta's Blog

Update: Next-Generation Security for the Apache Web Server

One of my previous blog posts talked about Elliptic Curve Cryptography, why it is being endorsed by the National Security Agency and how a small team of researchers at Sun Labs has had a big hand in promoting its wide-spread industry adoption.

A few days ago, I received notification that the development team behind Apache has finally integrated the patch that makes this next-generation security technology available to the users and administrators of the world's most popular web server. It has been a long, slow journey -- we demonstrated the first version of ECC-enabled Apache at a Sun Labs Open House in 2004 (and you thought high tech moves fast!) -- but I'm excited to see this final chip fall in place. It is a significant milestone in overhauling the cryptographic underpinnings of the World Wide Web.

The timing couldn't be better. NIST guidelines (see pages 63, 66) recommend that key sizes used with RSA (the currently popular incumbent technology) be doubled from 1024- to 2048-bits after 2010 to guarantee adequate protection of sensitive information -- think online banking and e-commerce. The big advantage of ECC is it can provide equivalent security using much smaller keys. More specifically, corresponding ECC key sizes only need to increase from 160- to 224-bits. Since the computational cost of public-key operations grows roughly as the cube of the key-size, the performance advantage of ECC over RSA increases as security needs increase over time:

Security
lifetime
RSAECCSpeed-up with
ECC
keysizeops/s keysizeops/s
Through 20101024738.91601783.62.41
(i.e. 1783.6/738.9)
Through 20302048113.4224711.4 6.27
(i.e. 711.4/113.4)

Table 1: Comparison of server-side cryptographic operations needed to establish a secure connection. These numbers were obtained with OpenSSL 1.0.0-beta2 on a MacBook Pro laptop with a 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 4GB of SDRAM using the command "openssl speed rsa1024 rsa2048 ecdhp160 ecdhp224".

Table 1 compares the speed of doing an RSA decryption against the speed of an ECDH computation. These are the main cryptographic operations a web server needs to perform for establishing an HTTPS connection. As shown, ECC operations are faster by a factor of more than six for key sizes needed beyond 2010. I wouldn't expect an ECC-based HTTPS server to perform six times better than an RSA-based server because there are other operations in processing an HTTPS request that are common to both. One needs HTTPS-level testing with a tool like httpperf to determine the actual speedup. We did such a study back in 2004 and found that an ECC-based HTTPS server can handle between two to four times as many connections as an RSA-based server (for key sizes needed beyond 2010). I'd love to repeat that experiment with the latest software running on contemporary hardware when I can find some time. Stay tuned.

"More times than we can count, we've made history, without history even knowing we were there."
- Keith Alexander, Director NSA/Chief CSS, speaking at the NSA's 55th Anniversary.
  (For many years, the U.S. government did not acknowledge the existence of the
  NSA earning it the nickname "No Such Agency")

by vipul on December 1, 2009