Beloit Post Mortem

[Terry Disz]

Hello all,

We had the very first AG 2.0 production event yesterday at Beloit College.
It was a demo for about 35 Biology teachers in a room about 20' x 30'.
Jennifer was here and was a big help. Roscoe was at BU, Trace center was
joining us and we had the FL library on, with Natalia.

Here's a summary of my experience:

Packaging and setup:
Given our past experience in hauling AG stuff around, this was a breeze. The
single dell box and the use of the polycom significantly reduce the
equipment requirements. Beloit provided the projectors - all different
brands, duct taped onto tables, and we projected onto a lavender wall. It
took less than a half hour to set up and it looked just fine. Pictures will
be on line later this week.

I used one usb cam and one pan tilt (we forgot the remote, so it wasn't very
cool). I discovered that we can only use one usb cam at a time :-(
I had a little trouble using the Osprey cards, not realizing that they were
configurable for either composite or svideo capture - Ti pointed me at the
Osprey software and I turned on Svideo and we were cool.

Beloit had little satellite mic's that plugged into the polycom and provided
very good room coverage.

I also ran a client on my laptop with a USB cam, and Jennifer ran a client
from the Bio-Cafe (lunchroom) with her laptop and a USB cam, which was a big
hit when it became Oreo cookie and snack-cam.

Network:
This was the first time Beloit had used multicast and early testing was ok.
During the meeting however, with a heavy multicast load, we saw periodic
total multicast loss. This was unfortunate and we could not debug it quickly
enough. The outage lasted about a minute or two, and then service came back
automagically.

If we had more time preparing, we could have bridged. The auto-bridge
fallback feature will be really useful.

Software:
Generally, the AG 2.0 client was ok,  the biggest problem was that the venue
server kept crashing. Coupled with the multicast outages, we were going off
line pretty frequently. (Today, as I listen to the townhall, my client keeps
disconnecting, dunno why, but I suspect the heartbeat timeout is wrong,
also, Jackie Kern says she sees others dropping once in a while). The other
problem is the relatively immature state of the shared PPT. We would lose
synch often, and I lost the command window entirely. I know this is tutorial
code, and pot seems mundane when we have more interesting things to do, but
running pot is a *critical* reqm't of AG meetings and we must address it
with a solid product.

One more pet peeve of mine, of which I am on record, is this vanity of ours
that everyone has to navigate through a slew of venues to arrive at their
desired destination. It was particularly annoying yesterday as I kept having
to restart and then click through the venues,scrolling in the mis-configured
venues pane (each entry is too big, scrolling is too slow), looking for the
next venue in the path,  waiting each time while all the video started,
uncovering the client window, etc, until I finally arrived, all the while
explaining the 35 waiting people how easy this recovery was. I really want
to see other, direct, venue access paths made available.

Shared browser was solid, everyone liked it.

Trace software completely froze the dell, had to power cycle it - we need to
look into that.


Summary:
This was the first AG exposure for most of these people, and generally,
despite the network problems, they liked it and they were able to see the
potential and how it could apply to their problems. I think we have made
some more converts and I expect to see some activity from people in this
group. One guy was from MSU, Missoula, I think, and he was wondering how
they would ever get AG stuff in Montana. Heh, I pointed him to Don Morton.

So, that's all for now. Thanks to everyone for your help. Pictures will be
posted later.

Terry