To say that I live a double life is an understatement. Part of the time I work with the editorial staff of InfoWorld to do big iron reviews of emerging enterprise gear. The rest of the time I work at the University of Hawaii School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology (SOEST) as a researcher. One of the cooler projects has nearly a 20 year history of visiting the same spot in the ocean to sample the ecolog To say that I live a double life is an understatement. Part of the time I work with the editorial staff of InfoWorld to do big iron reviews of emerging enterprise gear. The rest of the time I work at the University of Hawaii School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology (SOEST) as a researcher. One of the cooler projects has nearly a 20 year history of visiting the same spot in the ocean to sample the ecology. However, at roughly $15k/day to run a modern research vessel, this starts adding up. The long term answer was to reuse an old fiber optic cable that was pulled up from the ocean floor (recycling at it’s best!) and to that end we now have the Aloha Observatory, cabled version. The Station Aloha Cabled Observatory is the latest in experiments at this particular spot in the ocean. To get the whole story, check out the Station Aloha web page. What I’ve done is taken the raw audio feed coming off the undersea equipment whose cable lands at Makaha on the Hawaiian Island of Oahu and providing that live feed via an open source streaming audio server called Icecast.(Kudos to the folks at the UH SOEST Engineering Support Facility for modifying the older telephony repeater system for scientific purposes) So while this is live, we’re purposely leaving it in its native format of Vorbis OGG to avoid adding any artifacts in the conversion process. This stream from a broadband hydrophone is being used for real science, but it’s still pretty cool to be able to listen to whale song live from the middle of the pacific ocean, 5 kilometers down.So to finally tie this back to the enterprise, the Icecast server is available on both the Linux and Windows platform and can provide both audio on demand and livecasting of events. It also has the ability to have rebroadcasting servers that could be setup for load balancing. You would actually use a minimally configured Icecast server to digitize through your PC sound card, and then stream that to a rebroadcast server configured to handle a larger load. Since you can digitize using different codecs (mp3, quicktime, etc) and at different sampling rates, it would conceivably be possible to stream over an EvD0 or EDGE cellular card on a laptop. (NOTE: doing such a thing at a live concert is NOT a good idea and is illegal…end disclaimer) The client end of this equation could be a free or commercial copy of Winamp or even the Windows Media Player. (NOTE: ogg requires a special .ogg codec from Vorbis OR you can just use Winamp’s native ogg support.) Instructions for installing either a client or a codec is at the Station-Aloha server page.So when you ask what your tax dollars are funding, this is an example of the collaborative science being done at the School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology (SOEST) at the University of Hawaii. by Brian Chee of the Advanced Network Computing Laboratory and a Senior Contributing Editor for InfoWorld Magazine. Technology Industry