The Daemon's Advocate

Copyright © 2000 Wes Peters

Expanding on the Virtual Home

In my last column I wrote about universal presence and building a virtual home. When I sent the column to my regular reviewers, Greg Lehey responded ``Your vision of the future is ... only slightly in the future. I'd like to look even further forward, to where synchronization is automatic. Then you could talk about halfway steps like the ones you do. And don't underestimate the influence of wireless: I suspect that within a few years you won't put a PDA in a cradle any more.'' I reassured him that was my intention for the next column. From the columnist's point of view, milking two columns out of one topic just makes sense.

To start off, I'll expand on the two scenarios presented last month. I'll examine some of the gadgets you might expect to see pop up in your home or office in the next few years.

School Daze

In our first problem case, Ben's wife Irene needed to change his schedule on the fly. Rather than call Ben on the phone, in our home of the future, Irene simply updates the schedule on the family calendar running on the home server via her webpad on the fridge. Ben is in a meeting at work, but his palm computer uses low-power radio communications to stay in touch with his desktop computer whenever he is in the building at work. Ben's desktop calendar has been instructed to automagically merge changes from Ben's home schedule, and to update his palm computer. As Ben refers to his palm computer in his meeting, he sees an alert that his schedule has been updated. He reviews the change, notes there are no conflicts, and proceeds with his meeting.

Let's extend this a bit further and introduce some more equipment. Instead of being ``trapped'' in a meeting, let's put Ben on a plane over an ocean somewhere. When Irene updates his calendar, his communications and computing devices are switched off in the belly of the beast, er, aircraft. ^[1]

When Ben steps off the aircraft, he approaches a data kiosk and his palm computer or laptop synchronizes his schedule with his home server. To do this, his ``communicator'' queries the kiosk service provider, providing Ben's digital ID. If he has a service plan in place with this provider, the synchronization continues without interruption. If not, the communicator will provide a dialog notifying Ben of service capabilities and rates, allowing him to establish service if he wishes. If Ben has previously set limits on what rates and abilities he will accept, the communicator will notify him only if it finds one or more services that meet his needs.

While doing all this, his communicator can also update its internal clock, determine local currency exchange rates, and retrieve news items of interest to Ben: stock quotes, updated travel schedules, weather at his destination, a list of nearby restaurants serving food Ben prefers, and scores for his favorite football, cricket, or America's Cup team. It can download email, voice messages, and any other form of digital data Ben needs to remain connected to his family and friends. Given enough support from the airlines and other travel companies, it could even update Ben with directions to his next departure gate, his baggage carousel, or to ground transportation as needed.

Why Ben might want to approach a kiosk in the airport might not be obvious. Several airlines in the USA are now offering data services in their airport lounges, and many US airports have small nooks where you can plug into an ethernet port fed by a T-1 line. At least two air carriers have introduced wireless networking based on the IEEE 802.11 standard as well. As with so many pioneering implementations, these are probably not the services that will remain in the airports over the long run.

It appears that many of the wireless data services in the future will be based on the emerging Bluetooth^TM standard, which features low cost, high data rates, and a range of about 3 meters. Initially Bluetooth services in airports will be provided by data kiosks, but I predict they will migrate into the restaurants and bars pretty quickly, places where people already sit. Hopefully we'll be able to get the vendors to itemize the data access fees on the bar tab for our expense reports.

Bluetooth is an interesting technology, originally envisioned for creating personal ah-hoc networks, allowing a PDA to send a phone number to a mobile phone, for instance. Since then, it has expanded to encompass just about any form of networking that one might want to perform over a short distance, attempting to fulfill the promise that IrDA couldn't manage. It is an ideal technology for unconnected PDA synchronization, and probably adequate for quick email downloads as well. You can learn more about Bluetooth technology from the Bluetooth SIG web site.

Obviously, this scnario is beyond the capabilities of existing calendaring solutions, palm computers, and airports. The state of the art in this area is changing rapidly, though. The hardware required to accomplish this is mostly in place today, or soon to be released. Desktop computers have sufficient processing power and storage to manage large datasets with ease; calendaring for any relatively small group of people is not beyond their means. Palm computers do a fine job of storing small amounts of private data and displaying it wherever the user is at the moment; further developments in personal computing devices and mobile phones will extend this in many ways. The ability for desktop and palmtop platforms to share data wirelessly is literally weeks away.

A great example of the coming of age of wireless networks took place at BSDCon 2000 last month. An extensive wireless network was setup at the Convention facility, based on 802.11b equipment from several vendors. Interoperability was better than I expected. The show staff setup wireless networks operating in both ad hoc and infrastructure modes; the ad hoc network reached to the balcony of my hotel room but not into the room itself. I didn't try the infrastructure network because I never needed it, but I understand it covered even more of the large hotel complex. Several large tables with power strips were setup outside the traditional terminal room for laptop users with wireless cards, easing the congestion in the terminal room. This also offered unique opportunities for network sniffing parties and various subtle games.

An Apple a Day, revisited

The change to this scenario is simple, but startling: Irene's medical records are stored not at the imaging center, and not at her doctor's office, but rather in her own private record store. Access to her medical records is granted only with her digital signature approving the request.

``Why in the world would you want to store your own medical records?'' you ask. If you live in a nation with a state-provided health care system and the records keeping that goes along with it, you many think this does not apply to you, but please read on. ^[2]

If you have some unexplained symptoms and your doctor wishes to review your complete health care records, can you provide them? If you live in a country where hospital records remain at the hospital, dental care records with the dentist, vision care records at the optometrist, and general medical records with your family practitioner, it might be impractical or impossible to gather all your medical records for review, especially if you've changed insurance companies or health care providers several times. Add a couple of moves about the country or world into the mix, then try to provide accurate medical information. ^[3]

Just to stretch this argument to its logical limit, imagine Ben in the scenario above, landing at a stopover and feeling ill. He decides to visit a physician before continuing to his destination. The physician needs to consult Ben's medical history, on another continent, to make an accurate diagnosis. The physician also needs the records to be accurate, free of copying and transmission errors, and available in a language she reads fluently, with medical terms correctly translated.

Reliable file storage, security and authentication, translation services, secure communications, and universal access. This certainly sounds like a problem set BSD will be applied to, doesn't it?

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch...

Any discussion about smart devices in the home invariably turns toward internet appliances, or appliances networked with each other. I've read, often with amusement, far-fetched justifications for why you may want your refrigerator, microwave oven, or other kitchen appliances internet enabled. These elaborate justifications are well-meaning, and I'm certain they appeal to a certain number of venture capitalists or marketing directors, but they fly in the face of reason. Let me polish my crystal ball a bit and point out the two most sensible appliances in your home to wire up to your network:

• Your clocks. Yes, it is ``fall back'' time for those of us inflicted with Daylight Savings Time and I forgot to set my clocks back. Again. I really hate getting up at 0630 on a Sunday morning, especially when it is a stupid accident.

  What I really want is an alarm clock that understands I have different wake up times for weekdays, Saturday, and Sunday, and that will not bleep or squawk if I'm not in bed. Occasionally checking with an NTP server and keeping accurate time would be a nice bonus. At least having the clocks in my house agree with each other is mandatory, including the one in the not-so-smart thermostat and the one on the water softener that lost track of the time in a power outage and started a regeneration cycle in the middle of my shower.

• Your garbage can. Yes, the wastebasket. All those arguments about having your refrigerator read the barcode on a product and send you email when the milk is about to go bad? Preposterous. Instead, I propose a wastebasket with a UPC scanner that will add each discarded item to a shopping list. The shopping list will be picked up when the family shopper next synchronizes his or her PDA. (If your home is like mine, this will happen immediately after returning from the current shopping trip.)

  This automatically generated shopping list will need intelligent intervention, of course. The bar code scanner probably won't be able to read the carrot peels and eggshells, and I probably don't need another Zip disk every time I toss the packaging from a new one. There are actually places (outside the USA) were food is sold without it's own weight in packaging material, too. An internet enabled waste basket might be of less use outside the land of the landfill.

Please note that I'm not arguing for the appliances mentioned above to be full-fledged internet hosts; one or two of those in the home are probably enough. It will be sufficient for each of the above to have just enough smarts to be able to fulfill it's own requirements and communicate with a box full of smarts (and storage) somewhere in the home. Stallion Technologies presented an interesting dicussion on their port of OpenBSD to the Motorla ColdFire architecture at BSDCon 2000. Their appliance boots from a small (2 or 4 MByte) flash image directly into RAM, and requires no disk storage and no swap or page space. BSD can be shoehorned into even these small devices, allowing developers to leverage the advantages of the BSD development and testing environment I've written about before.

In the Post-PC Era, everything will be a peripheral, perhaps even the garbage can.

[1]	What about internet access in the airplane? Sure, you can use the dataport on the AirPhone II now, if you're rich and not flying over an ocean. I'm certain we'll have some form of internet access in planes sometime soon, but I doubt it's going to be affordable anytime soon. The problems of retrofitting the service into existing aircraft are prohibitive, and governing bodies like the Federal Aviation Administration in the USA are unlikely to allow any form of wireless networking in commercial aircraft. The FAA has already involved itself in the Bluetooth wireless specifications, demanding the ability to turn off the transmitters of Bluetooth-enabled equipment inside commercial aircraft under their jurisdiction. return
[2]	The politics of health care and medical record privacy are not the realm of this column. For those of us who live with, or contend with, a private health care system, the issue of medical record portability and privacy are often portrayed as being at odds with each other, but they are exactly the same issue. If you own your medical records, you can control who has access to them. This warrants careful consideration. return
[3]	This is personal experience. I've lived in 14 of the United States as well as the Phillipines; I've received medical care the Phillipines and in 12 of those states, plus emergency care in 3 others. My medical records are literally scattered all over the world. return