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Digital Signage

24 Feb 2011

Signage display on the 2nd floor entrance.

2nd floor entrance display

One of the first tasks assigned to me at my new job, was to build a digital signage system for the main library on campus. They had already secured and spent their funding on several Mac minis, some Apple 30″ Cinema Displays and a 55″ Samsung TV. They had found a software solution that they wanted to use, Billboard CE, an offshoot of Billboard which is NC State’s digital signage system. The one problem though, was that Billboard CE was mostly an unfinished port from their source and wasn’t really ready for us to deploy, so my job now became to either find an alternative, or to build some software glue to tie this all together.

Some caveats. First, this was about a year ago, and the money had been spent much earlier, so the Mac minis were of the previous generation, which for our purposes means that they lack the graphics power of the most recent minis. We didn’t have much more money to spend. We didn’t want to BootCamp all of these to run an off-the-shelf solution, and this needed to be done quickly. More

By: jagreda Category: Design, Development, Featured Tags: , ,

Product

28 Oct 2008

This is entirely random. But the more I think about it, and evaluate my employment options come May, the more I get the feeling that I’m a Product Person.

First, a few counter-points.

I love/hate math. Really, I love logic, which is why I am repeatedly drawn back in computer science and engineering stuff in general. Nothing beats pouring through tech specs on a new device or technology. And I do love the thrill of squashing that bug and troubleshooting something into oblivion. But when it comes down to algorithm design or optimization, I start to glaze over and I get bored. It’s not that it’s hard, it’s that after a while, something so deeply mathematic starts to bore me and I look for something more broadly complex. Something larger.

I understand networking. Well. Not only that, but the history of the stuff is fascinating as well. But I can explain TCP/IP, and “how routing protocols help route routed protocols” (Cisco CCNA 3.0). Routers, switches, and big telco metal are tons of fun and do present the kind of troubleshooting and design challenges that I revel in on a technical level. Elegance in network design and the knowledge that our fiber link isn’t going to collapse upon itself like so many dying stars is tremendously rewarding. But here again, I eventually get bored. Things are always exciting yes, but they do start to fall into patterns for me, and things can become so process oriented and slow (for good reason) that creativity is often stifled and the new and dangerous don’t really have a chance to flourish.

Then, there’s Product and Design.

More

By: jagreda Category: Featured, General, Web Tags: , , ,

The Blogging Cake

4 Mar 2008

When I think about blogging, and all the tools we have to make the task simply easier or possible at all, I can’t help but think of a layer cake. I’m going to dive into a bit of an analogy ride here (I am a big fan of analogies) partly to help explain the concept of a blog to my peers and friends who keep asking me to try and explain it to them. If this is simple stuff for you, just move along, this will get interesting in a later post.

To define a “blog” in the terms of a dictionary, we would start with something like “a Web site on which an individual or group of users produces and ongoing narrative”. In other words, a site that is regularly updated, can also suffice. The use of the word has become so broad that it requires some hands-on use and some refinement.

On with the cake. More

By: jagreda Category: Featured, Web Tags: , , ,