I always figured there was a land mass under all of Antarctica that, give or take, was well above sea level. Turns out that isn’t the case at all. Take the ice cap off Antarctica and you end up with a land mass about half the size of what you would expect surrounded by a bunch of islands.

Drag the slider up and down and you can see just what parts of Antarctica are sitting on land and what parts are sitting on the sea floor.

This isn’t a prediction of what would happen if Antarctica melted. It’s just a map of what Antarctica would look like if you couldn’t see the ice.

Now I can see why scientists are so concerned about Western Antarctica. That’s the part they believe will go first and it could, according to some, go very quickly.

Lets talk code

From a code perspective I love this example Flex application because of it’s simplicity. It’s a great example of how powerful the Flex framework is because there is absolutely no Actionscript in the source code here. I didn’t have to write code to load the images, or to change the alpha of the top image when the slider changes. Nothing like that. All made possible through the magic of data binding.

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package com.polyGeek.patterns { 

    import flash.display.Sprite; 

    public class WavyCircle extends Sprite {

        public function WavyCircle( s:Sprite, radius:int, amplitude:int, period:int, rotation:Number ) {

            super();

            var step:Number = 0.01;

            var len:Number = 2 * Math.PI + step;

            for( var i:Number = -0.01; i < len; i+= step ) {

                var r:Number = radius + amplitude * ( Math.sin( period * i ) * Math.cos( period * i ) );

                if( i >= 0 ) {

                    s.graphics.lineTo( Math.sin( i + rotation ) * r, Math.cos( i + rotation ) * r ); 

                } else {

                    s.graphics.moveTo( Math.sin( i + rotation ) * r, Math.cos( i + rotation ) * r ); 

                }

            }

        }

    }

}

Adobe’s recent news about the Flash Player 10.1 ( FP101 ) being optimized for mobile phones got me to thinking about the mobile space. It seems to me that the thing that sucks the most about mobile devices are the networks. Their service plans are almost extortion. No, it is exactly extortion and we put up with it.

Right now we are caught in a suck-cycle of all these incompatible networks constantly upgrading to the latest and greatest coverage/speed they can manage. And we are paying huge amounts of money each month to support this massive amount of infrastructure that is continually being upgraded. It’s sort a never ending project like painting the Golden Gate Bridge.

And it just keeps getting worse because the demand for bandwidth/services and the advances in hardware are both growing exponentially. But the networks are physically so big and expansive that upgrading is becoming ever more challenging. There is a term used to describe systems that grow so large that they cannot evolve rapidly enough to keep pace with changes in the environment: extinction.

You may be thinking that’s all well and good but the networks are essential to keep our devices connected. But what if the devices themselves became the networks? As WiMax rolls out there will be more and more phones that are capable of broadcasting and receiving WiMax signals. Of course these phones will also have access to a cellular network where the owner has a subscription. Something like many phones today have with WiFi.

But at some point when the density of these devices reaches a critical level it seems like they would be capable of transmitting signals through each other to the end destination instead of using some central network. It would be a mashup of peer-2-peer with WiMax where each device performs the role of DNS server and router. And it’s not just cellphones that would be contributing to the network. Every device equipped with a WiMax receiver/transmitter could become a small network tower: cars, home networks, traffic cams, networked appliances, etc.

Note: I’m assuming that as technology evolves WiMax chips will become cheap enough to embed in anything from a toaster to a treadmill and that power consumptions will drop off while miniature batteries improve. Actually, that isn’t an assumption. It’s a given. It’s only a matter of how much and how fast.

This leads me back to the FP101 which has all of the components in place to make this happen. FP101 can write data to the local device and it has P2P capabilities that have already been used to create an edge network. ( read ars technica: CNN P2P video streaming tech raises questions. ) The Octoshape Grid Delivery – using the Flash Player – that CNN is using has put a big crunch on ISPs because it drastically increases the average users amount of uploaded data. But this same approach could be used for a network of devices communicating via a WiMax network with no physical infrastructure other than the devices themselves.

This could be similar to the Flash Player adding video playback capabilities in version 6 back in 2002. Nothing much was made of it for about 3 years. Then this site called youTube.com came along and all the sudden video playback in the Flash Player became a game changer. Could it happen again with P2P?

The not so distant future
You walk into a store and purchase a net book, or it could be a mobile phone, desktop PC, whatever. You’re online the moment you turn it on. No ISP. No Sprint/AT&T/Verizon. You pay zero for your network access. You open up your browser – built with Adobe AIR – and search for the nearest coffee shop. Not because you want to sit down somewhere with network access, because that’s everywhere, but because you actually want a cup of coffee. Along the way you call up your friend on the new version of Skype built with, wait for it . . . AIR, to see if they would like to join you. When you get to the coffee shop you open up Buzzword and start working on a presentation you’re giving.

Notice that everything you do is using some version of Flash. That’s because it’s the capabilities of the Flash Player and it’s ubiquity coupled with WiMax that are providing your access to the network. Few other apps would have the density needed to bootstrap a network out of thin air.

Aside: I wonder if the code name for Flash Player 10.1 was Asteroid?

The biggest problem that I foresee is how to connect islands of devices that are cut off from the main body. Suppose something like this does happen and the current network carriers go out of business or evolve into something unrecognizable. That would leave isolated communities disconnected from the main body of the network. Therefore some dedicated infrastructure would be needed to keep them connected. This would also apply to entire continents like Australia, or even communications between Europe and the Americas. Clearly some dedicated infrastructure will be required. But it’s likely that this would be more of a governmental/international undertaking as is most of the current Internet backbone.

Whether I’m on target or not with this analysis I’ll bet you would agree that the current model of network access providers isn’t going to last another decade. This space is rip for drastic changes.

I am by no means a network expert. This is all just supposition based on snippets that I’ve read and culled together. For all I know this is impossible. I’d like to hear what you think.

[ The following is a public service announcement ]

If you’re like me you spend more time in front of computer monitors than you would like to admit. And if I’m not in front of computer monitors I’m watching a movie or TV show, or playing games on the XBox. All of this adds up to not a lot of time in the sun.

If you’re thinking, “So I don’t get out in the sun enough. What’s the big deal?”  The big deal is that without exposure to direct sunlight our bodies cannot produce Vitamin-D. You ever see someone with a Vitamin-D deficiency? It aint pretty.

The main role that Vitamin-D plays in our bodies is to help absorb calcium which we need for strong healthy bones. Since many of us geeks are indoors much of the time it’s a good idea to take a Vitamin-D supplement. And since we geeks – yes, I’m talking to you – are particularly susceptible to Vitamin-D deficiency I move that we rename it to Vitamin-Geek, or Vitamin-G for short.

And if you live in the more northern latitudes, like Seattle or Boston, then you are even more at risk. Even when you are outdoors there isn’t a lot of direct sunlight to be had. It’s just to bad there isn’t Vitamin-D in beer. Then most of us would be safe. :)

During my first two years of college I majored in astronomy, and physics. But most of my classes were in mathematics and I determined that I liked them a much more than anything else. Then I dropped out of college for a while to work at the US Space Academy in Huntsville, AL. When I went back to school it was only as a mathematics major.

One thing led to another and I ended up with philosophy and history – after taking a short break to get a degree in massage therapy. So it seems that I majored in just about everything I was interested in other than computer science.

In many ways I’m very glad that I didn’t do CS. Because I learned a great deal in my philosophy classes that I would really miss today. And as it turns out I spent a lot of time playing around with HTML/CSS/Javascript and Photoshop. So my time in college was well spent.

These days when someone asks me for advise on becoming a software developer I tell them to pick up a few books and work on some projects that might interest them. A formal education is great but it’s expensive and time consuming. I think a person can learn much faster on their own. And if they don’t have what it takes to be self taught in this field then they probably don’t want to be in it in the first place.

How about you? What was your experience with school and getting into software development?