Kamo High School has endorsed the engineering and educational approaches applied by Compucon New Zealand for years.  The endorsements include hosting technology forums for schools and extra-curriculum lectures for students every 6 months.  The outline below is for the lecture scheduled for 5 November 2009.

This session will explain what constitute Internet Video and where we are on the path from TV, DVD and You Tube to Internet Video.  Why some videos cannot use the Internet and when can they do so?  What do we do in order to squeeze more video through the Internet? 

This session will present many fundamental scientific findings such as how our eyes see and sometimes mislead us. Students will be able to relate learning over the years from various sources to this central theme of Internet Video.  Students will learn about illusion, standardisation of videos, how the Internet works to distribute video to our desktops, and put TV and various broadcasts into perspective.  As a practical application of Internet Video technologies, this session will give some examples of Internet Protocol Video Surveillance (IPVS) and visit a few scenic places in Taiwan through Internet Cameras live. 

Apart from learning, we would like to encourage students to take a proactive role from now on in the development of technologies so that New Zealand is not just a down under destination for tourists but a land that breeds more Ernst Rutherford, William Pickering, and Beatrice Tinsley etc.

Douglas from the Ministry of Education revealed a plan to help finance the connection of fibre optics at the school gate to the school network in conjunction with the 1.5 billion broadband agenda announced by the Government and undertaken by the Ministry of Economic Development.  100 schools will be offered this help in the first phase in 2010.

Albert from Northland Polytechnic proposed a few open source software packages for teaching purposes and pointed out that any skills picked up by students should be transferrable and not limited to any commercial product.  This is a valuable guideline for schools to design Open Source teaching.

TN provided a perspective of cloud computing as out-sourcing of hardware assets and human resources and suggested an attitude borrowed from rainforests.  PC platform is at its 3rd stage of evolution and the codes for storage systems have now been deciphered (by Compucon).  Once we understand the architecture, IT managers will be able to manage hardware assets as leisurely as rangers of rainforest.

The 3 presentations above are password protected.  Please email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it for the password stating your school name and your personal role. http://www.compucon.co.nz/content/category/7/31/47/

Some organisations may feel uncomfortable using free software, on the argument that they may want support of the software. Sun Microsystems offers corporate support for StarOffice, and recently IBM has announced offer of support to end users and companies through a Business Partner Programme on Lotus Symphony (http://symphony.lotus.com).

So what is Symphony? Based on the OpenOffice 1.2 code base, it is a complete revamp and update. The user interface is definitely more modern than OpenOffice, and a huge number of plug-ins, templates and galleries are available directly from the main start up screen. IBM has also created a very comprehensive online help facility on just about any question a user might have. The software is aimed squarely at the corporate, collaborative user, and it is easy to see why IBM could standardise on this.

Symphony offers three components: a word processor, a spreadsheet generator and a presentation manager. The UI is easy to learn for somebody with a Microsoft Office background, and probably not as confusing as the Ribbon interface for new users. It installs easy and runs on Windows XP/Vista/7 and Ubuntu Linux.  As usual, the price is $0. Download it (around 200MB) and give it a whirl - you might like it!

Do not hesitate to contact me with questions

In addition to PC and computer servers, storage systems have emerged as the 3rd type of major devices in our data network recently.  This situation is caused by the uptake of digitization of data in lieu of pen and paper.  Hard disks have also taken over tapes as the preferred medium. 

Network Attached Storage (NAS) has thus started its foray into our hardware asset line up.  As of today, we are able to buy some NAS appliances (boxes) of SOHO grade or rack mount NAS systems for a lot of money.  We have wondered why they are appliances or expensive and not something more modular or open as how PC has evolved over the year. 

Compucon has researched into the issue and achieved a breakthrough.  We will be able to announce a new line of NAS systems that conform to open or de facto standards and are reasonably priced soon.   Customers will have more choices.