The Jack Benny program transcribed and presented by Lucky Strike. Lucky, taste better. Lucky Strike means fine tobacco, Lucky Strike means fine tobacco cleaner, fresher, smoother. Lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky, Lucky Strike means fine tobacco, Lucky Strike means fine tobacco cleaner, fresher, smoother. Better get a cotton, better get a cotton, better get a cotton today. Hello friends, this is Don Wilson. You know that college cheer represents a lot of smoking cheer in campuses all over the country? Yes indeed. Because a nationwide survey based on actual student interviews in 80 leading colleges reveals that more smokers in these colleges prefer luckies than any other cigarette. But that's not all. The survey also shows luckies gained far more smokers than the nation's two other principal brands combined. More important still, the reason most often given by the students for smoking luckies was Lucky's better taste. Yes, luckies do taste better because LS, MFT, Lucky Strike means fine tobacco, fine, mild, good tasting tobacco. And luckies are made better, made round and firm and fully packed to taste cleaner, fresher, smoother. So make your next carton Lucky Strike and you'll agree Lucky's better taste is something to cheer about. Lucky Strike means fine tobacco, Lucky Strike means fine tobacco, cleaner, fresher, smoother. Better get a carton, better get a carton, better get a carton today. The Lucky Strike program starring Jack Benny with Barry Livingston Rochester, Dennis Day, Bob Crosby and yours truly, Don Wilson. Ladies and gentlemen, once every two weeks Jack Benny and Rochester make out a shopping list of household needs. As we look in on them today, they're preparing this week's list. Hey boss, the shelves are kind of empty. We need some baked beans. Baked beans, three cans. Some peas? Not so fast Rochester, I'm writing it down. Teas, two cans. Some mayonnaise. Oh Rochester, why buy mayonnaise? All it is is eggs, salad oil and vinegar mixed up. Oh yeah, I can make that. Well, we need some corned beef hang. You don't have to buy that either. All it is is potatoes, corned beef and onions. Yeah, I can make that too. Now let's see, we need some eggs. Eggs? Well Rochester. Oh boss, I'm not even going to try. I didn't mean that. I meant you can get the eggs from the milkman. Now let's get on with the list. Some bird seed for Polly. Bird seed? By the way, where is that parrot? I don't know, she climbed down from her purse this morning and disappeared. Well I hope you have all the windows and doors locked. She's been trying to run away from home ever since I bawled her out last week. Well boss, I think you yelled at her a little too much. Well she deserved it.  Silly bird. Now come on, let's finish this list. Okay, a bottle of cooking cherry. A bottle of, wait a minute Ryan, we just bought some wine last week. It's all gone boss. I've been meaning to talk to you about that. You've been using too much in the cooking lately. Why? Well last night you made some clam chowder with cherry, didn't you? Uh huh, what about it? Well I bit into a clam and it bit me back. Now don't use it in everything from now on. Yes sir. Well while I'm down at the market, shall I get anything at the butchers? Well... I think the only meat we have left is a chicken. Well let's not think, let's be sure. I'll look in the refrigerator and see. Rochester, look Polly's in the refrigerator. Come on out Polly, come on. Polly, stop crying. Polly, control yourself. It's only a chicken, you didn't even know her. How's Polly ever getting the refrigerator anyway? I don't know boss, she must have jumped in when I had it open. I think she's catching cold. Fix her an alka cell sir Rochester. Don't worry so much boss, Polly will be alright. I don't know. She's getting kind of old you know, even for a parrot. How old is he? Well when I bought her the pet shop gave me her pedigree. The paper said she was born in Algiers in 1894. 1894? Yeah that makes her 58 years old. I'm 39, 39. No, no Polly it says right here on your pedigree paper, you're 58. 39, 39. No Polly, Polly you're all mixed up, I'm 39. 58, 58. Rochester put her back on her perch. Yes sir. I'll answer the door, you finish the list. Okay. Ouch, it's the second time I hit my head against that chandelier. I better take some money out of my shoes. Yeah I'm lucky my... Coming, coming. Hello Mr. Benny. Oh hello Dennis, come on in. Mr. Benny can I miss the rehearsal tomorrow? Oh sure. Can I miss Saturday's rehearsal too? Saturday? Well I guess so. Can I miss the show on Sunday? Miss the show, why?   I'm not being silly, I already made out my will. Look Dennis...  I was gonna leave it to Harvard but they turned it down. If you're not going to commit suicide. If I don't the gamblers are going to take me for a ride. A ride? Yeah I lost a 50 cents on the World Series and I didn't pay off.  A lot of people say they'll do it for nothing. Dennis, Dennis, I'm tired of this silly talk. Now stop worrying and let me hear the song you're going to do on the show. What is it? Oh Vita's aint, that means goodbye forever. It does not! Now sing it and don't drive me crazy. That's very good. Now when you sing that number on the show, I want you to be sure that there's someone at the door. Don't answer it, don't answer it, they're coming after me. Oh be quiet. Nobody's coming after you. Come in. Hello Jack. Hi Jack.  Come on in. Say Jack, Bob and I are going out to play some golf. We thought maybe you'd like to join us. Gee I'd love to but I can't leave the house. I'm expecting a call about a very important picture deal. Who from? Daryl Zanik. Daryl Zanik, the head of 20th Century Fox. Uh huh. So didn't you make a picture at that studio? That's right Bob, I made a picture for Zanik in 1941. Gosh that's only 11 years, he got over it fast. Then it's quiet for heaven's sake. Jack, what's this deal with Zanik you were talking about? Well they're making so many pictures based on the lives of entertainers that I thought my biography would make a good movie. So I wrote it up and sent it to Mr. Zanik. You know Jack, that should make a wonderful story. You've led such an interesting life. More film, movies, radio, stage, television. Bob's right Jack, you intend to play the leading role yourself? No, no, that would be too hammy you know. We're going to get an actor who's a lot like me in personality, age, habits and physique. Who are you getting? Errol Flynn. And fellas, it's really going to be a... Gee I hate to admit it but I need one. You need what? A hearing aid, I thought you said Errol Flynn. Well come on Don, let's go play golf. Say Bob, Bob you play a lot of golf don't you? Yeah and last week I got the greatest thrill in the whole world. I made a hole in one. No kidding. On the third hole at Bel Air, guys I couldn't wait to get back to the clubhouse and buy drinks for everybody there. Oh yes, yes that's the tradition. When you make a hole in one, you're supposed to buy drinks for everybody. Have you ever made a hole in one? Yes, yes about two years ago at Hillcrest. Yeah it's wonderful. Anybody see you do it? Rochester but I gave him a dollar and he kept his mouth shut. It was worth it. You know Jack I'm sure glad that I came on your show. You are Bob White. Well I won't make much money but man what an education. What? Come on Don let's go. Okay so long Jack. Goodbye fellas. I wonder what he meant by... Oh boss, boss. Yes Rochester. Mr. Ronald Coleman just called and they're having a big dinner party tonight. Ronald Coleman? Oh did they invite me? No he asked us to return their garbage disposal. Oh my good. Do we still have their garbage disposal? Uh huh. You know it was kind of tough barring that wasn't it? Yeah I had to go to plumbing school for two months. Well let's try... Save. Maybe that's the phone call I'm waiting for. Hello. Jack Benny speaking. Hello Jack. This is Daryl Zanuck. I've been waiting for your call Mr. Zanuck. Look Jack I'm a busy man. You sent your script over last week. Bothered my secretary with dozens of phone calls. I promised to read it and I did. You did Mr. Zanuck? What did you think of it? Well Jack that is without a doubt the most awful thing I've read in all my 39 years. Mr. Zanuck are you 39? When you're the head of a big studio who's going to argue with you? Oh well Mr. Zanuck getting back to my biography I think it would be a tremendous success at the box office. I'm afraid you're wrong Jack. A biographical picture is much better after the person has passed on. But I'm in the prime of life. I'll be here a long time. We can wait. But I can't wait I want to make the picture now. Jack let's face it I vowed never to have any more business dealings with you since you made the horn blows at midnight. But what's that got to do with you I made that for Warner Brothers. That picture hurt every studio. What? I can't wait till it gets on television. But Mr. Zanuck I don't want to appear in the picture I just think my biography would make a great musical. Look at the novel opening when I'm being born in Waukegan. What other picture ever had a musical scene in a maternity hospital? I think it's corny. What? Imagine having the doctor sing feed up pat him on the popo. But Mr. Zanuck what about when I play my violin? Look Jack I don't want any more people from your program working in our studio. We've got Dennis Day over here and he drives me nuts. Well if I worked over there too I could keep an eye on Dennis. Jack I can't discuss this any longer I'm sending your script back and that's final. But Mr. Zanuck thinks he's a big shot because he runs a studio. He can be wrong too you know. I think my life story would make a great picture especially the scene where Did you call me boss? No no Rochester I was talking to myself. What's the matter are you upset about something? Yeah I sent my autobiography to Darrell Zanuck and he turned it down. Can't understand it. Well the story of my life would be very interesting. I think so too. The matter of fact I think it would be one of the most exciting pictures that ever hit the screen. You're right. I was going to get Errol Flynn to play Jack Benning. Oh boss calm down. Well I was. Anyway Rochester I'm going to lie down here on the couch for a while I don't want to be disturbed. I'm going to take my afternoon nap. Would you like something to eat first? No no no I'm not hungry. Cover me up with that blanket there would you Rochester? Yes sir. Thanks. You help him.  If I were the head of a studio I'd make that into a picture and show him how wrong he is. I had a chance to buy RKO a couple of weeks ago. Can't understand why Howard Hughes turned down my offer. After all he doesn't need money and he has to have his laundry done somewhere. I'd offer them the money.  Jack Benning executive producer. With my own biography. My own studio. My own studio. Good evening ladies and gentlemen this is George Fisher your CBS motion picture editor speaking to you from Hollywood. The snows of Kilimanjaro which is breaking all records at the Reveley Theater in New York is scheduled to open in the Los Angeles area next Thursday. Well here's a flash just handed to me. Howard Hughes sold RKO pictures today to Jack Benning. The purchase price was eight million dollars. Mr. Benning paid in cash. Now he won't bump his head on that chandelier anymore. Mr. Benning's first official ax was to appoint Robert Crosby as his assistant. They have started production on a new musical based on the life of Jack Benning. J.B. J.B. Yes R.C. You certainly have a busy day today J.B. I know really my schedule R.C. Well a tenor story conference with N.K. 10 30 meeting with L.B. 11 you look at the rushes with H.C. 11 30 you go to the cutting room with T.M. And at 12 you have lunch with Jack Warner. Who J.W. Oh yeah. I want you to send the following note to all producers. Starting today make sure the green and all your technicolor movies is made out of chlorophyll. We'll have no stinking pictures around here. Now who's handling the production on the picture based on my life? D.W. Oh yes I'll send for him. Ms. Jones send Don Wilson in immediately. Good to see you D.W. Close the door and come over here to my desk. It's a good thing you put your desk in the middle of the office. You want to see me J.B.? Yes D.W. Where have you been? I've been talking to L.S. L.S. M.F.T. L.S. M.F.T. Lucky strike means fine tobacco. I know what were you talking about D.W.? N.L.E. Who's that? No new sense. What about T.N.C.? T.N.C. Taren compare. L.N.F.A. N.H.S.T. B.H.A.D. L.N.F.A.N. H.S.T. B.H.A.D. Let's not forget about no hotspots that burn hearts and drives. You said it. Oh J.B.? Yes R.C.? I was just talking to C.T.S. C.T.S.? Who's that? Hamlet's Tomato Soup. How does he feel? Good. I love D.W. You know I select you to produce the biggest epic ever made.  I know and thank you. I want this picture to be perfect. I hope you've been very careful in the casting. Oh I am. In fact I've already selected the actress who will play the part of your mother. I'd like to see her. Where is she? Right behind me. Well move over so I can see her. Yes sir. Ms. Vaughn, this is Mr. Benny. Hello Mr. Benny. I'm so terribly happy to know you.  I sure am. I think I ran away from home. You'll do. And chief you'll never guess who I'm casting to play the part of your father. Never mind I'll play that part myself. Now D.W. I'd like to make some notes for you about this picture. This pencil needs sharpening. Where's my office boy? Here I am Mr. Benny. Good boy Daryl. I'll teach you the movie business yet. Well thank you. Thank you very much. Did you read the script on my live story? Yes sir. Did you like it? Yes sir. Especially the scene where you leave NBC and sing.  That's when you say I beg your pardon then I'll come back to you. Fine studio. That's a great scene. Now Daryl my boy I'm going to give you a break and let you see how a picture is actually made. Come on let's walk over to stage three where they're shooting my biography. Thank you sir. And Daryl this picture of mine is going to be as exciting as 20th Century Fox's snows of Kilimanjaro. Oh boss come now. Well I think it will. Here's stage three. Now don't make any noise when you're in there Daryl. The director is very temperamental. Who's directing the picture sir? A famous European director Dennis Von Schmierke. Come on let's go in. That's Von Schmierke over there waving his hand. Quiet on the set there. Achtung lieber. What's the snows here? Now stay quiet. It's me talking. I want quiet. I want it so quiet that you should hear a pin drop. Oh Mr. Von Schmierke. What's the snows? All these interruptions, interruptions. It's only me. I want to know how you're getting along with the picture. Fine fine. Who's this faker here with the pencil rider?  Yes my name is Daryl Zanuck. I'm trying to learn the movie business. Please Mr. Von Schmierke. The boy's only trying to learn the business. Yes tell me Mr. Von Schmierke. What was the name of the last picture you made in Germany? The trumpeter from Das Kinde und das haubraten batatsgedieb.  Die freudensregen. Die freudensregen. Die freudensregen. The freudensregen. That's the title of the picture? Yes. What does it mean in English? Lassi, come home. Oh Miss Von, come here. Here I am Mr. Von Schmierke. Good. Now in this next scene we are shooting you are checked by his mother. Your husband comes home, he rings the bell, you open a door and he kisses you like so.  You give him his newspaper and once more he kisses you. You don't get in his strippers, and again he kisses you. And for no reason at all he kisses you. And then you say thank you and he kisses you again. Wait a minute. Remember any scene like that in the script? Quiet, I'm Ed Libby. During the scene, quiet on the set. Who knocked over that lamp? I did, sir. No wonder you're only an office boy.  This is Von Schmierke talking and you are taking orders from me. Yes sir, you can ball me out now but remember when Benny's dream is over you'll take orders from me. Certainly you're dreaming. I'm not dreaming, I own the studio. I own it I tell you. This is my studio and I'm the boss. I paid eight million dollars for it. Eight million dollars. Look at me, I'm shorter. The studio's mine, do you hear? Mine, mine, mine. Mine, the studio's mine, mine. Boss, wake up. Huh? Come on, wake up, you're dreaming. Oh gosh, then it was a dream after all.  What do you mean?  Oh well Rochester, I'll have my dinner now. Ladies and gentlemen, here's an election announcement of special importance. All over everybody is saying, see you at the polls and you will be seeing your friends and neighbors at the polls on November 4th. For everybody wants to have his say in this important election, that's the American way. So learn all you can about the issues and the candidates. Listen to all the arguments, talk, think and then vote as you please, but vote. See you at the polls. That will be back in just a moment. The first... Lucky? Being spined, tobacco, lucky, struggling, spined, tobacco, cleaner. Fresher, smoother, lucky, lucky, lucky, struggling, spined, tobacco, lucky, struggling, spined, tobacco, cleaner. Fresher, smoother, better get a carton, better get a carton, better get a carton today. You may not cheer right out loud like that when you first try luckies. You may only whisper, ah, luckies do taste better. And I'd like to tell you why. Lucky's Better Taste begins with fine, mild, good tasting tobacco. LS, MFT, Lucky Strike means fine tobacco. Then too, luckies are made better. Round, firm, fully packed to taste cleaner, fresher, smoother. No wonder so many college students are cheering about Lucky's Better Taste. You see, a recent nationwide survey based on actual student interviews in 80 leading colleges reveals that more smokers in these colleges prefer luckies than any other cigarette, and by a wide margin. In addition, Lucky's gained far more smokers than the nation's two other principal brands combined. And the number one reason the students gave for smoking luckies was better taste. So enjoy Lucky's Better Taste yourself. Get a cleaner, fresher, smoother smoke. Yes, be happy, go lucky. Make your next carton Lucky Strike. Be happy, go lucky. Go lucky, strike today. Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank Mr. Daryl Ebsanic for appearing on my program tonight. And next week... Excuse me. Hello? Hello, Jack. This is Bob Crosby. Hello, Bob. How did you enjoy your game of golf? Well, I'm still not at the golf club, but a terrible thing happened to me. Can you lend me a dollar? You mean... Yeah, on the seventh hole in Don Wilson Well, tell him I'll give him the dollar later. Good night, folks. Jack, 24 Gram is written by Sam Perrin, Milk Josephsburg, George Balzer, John Packaberry and produced and transcribed by Hillard Marx. Jack, 24 Gram is brought to you by Lucky Strike, product of the American Tobacco Company, America's leading manufacturer of cigarettes. This is the CBS Radio Network. Copy, copy, copy, copy.


Welcome to another edition of RCE. Again, this is Brock Palin. You can find us online at rce-cast.com. You can find our entire back catalog there of over 100 episodes of all your favorite research, computing, and engineering topics. I have again here Jeff Squires from Cisco Systems and one of the authors of OpenMPI. Jeff, thanks again for your time. Hey Brock, happy new year. Welcome to 2017 here. And you know what? I was actually just wondering how many episodes have we done? Oh man, you had to ask this right here. I really did have to. Okay, I just pulled up 108. All right, that's not too bad. Yeah, okay. Yeah, doing okay. That's respectable. Continuing a strong tradition, we got a new episode today here. And we got some friends from out east. Yeah, so we have Terrell Russell and Jason Kopowski from iRod. So guys, why don't you take a moment to introduce yourself? All right, thank you. My name is Jason Kopowski. I'm the executive director here at the iRods consortium. I've been writing software about 20 years now and I've spent about a good solid six or seven years on this project. And I'm Terrell Russell. I'm serving as the chief technologist for the iRods consortium here at UNC Chapel Hill. And I've been working on iRods for a few years as well. So can you give us a quick overview of what exactly is iRods? Sure. So iRods is open source data management middleware. So you can think of it as a abstraction layer above your storage compute and other services and below a set of clients. So it provides a wireline protocol through which we have a number of client APIs. So in Python, C++ and so on and a number of clients that speak to it that are written in the wild by various users. iRods does four things well which we call the core competencies which are data virtualization. So it provides a distributed abstraction layer to your storage and a unified namespace on top of that. We provide data discovery. So that speaks to our capabilities of storing metadata and providing query interfaces to the metadata. We have an integrated rule engine in a domain specific language as well as other languages which will allow you to operate on the data. That can be driven by metadata and allow reaching to compute and various other services. And it provides secure collaboration. So since we have a unified namespace we have the ability to federate these unified namespaces and share resources across multiple instances of iRods. So now to the uninitiated there, i.e. me that sounds like a file system on steroids. Tell me why that's wrong and too simplistic. Absolutely. So first of all iRods does provide some positive semantics but it is not just a file system. This unified namespace, I'm sorry, this unified namespace reaches across both object, tape, standard, sand, NAS, whatever. And it's also distributed. So you can have iRod servers running anywhere in the world that serve this unified namespace to any number of users. On top of that we provide metadata as well as the integrated rule engine. So every operation in iRods has policy enforcement, hooks that are pre and post every operation that allow you to influence how those operations perform. So when you say a unified namespace, are you talking a file system like namespace or is it a URI type namespace or what? So this is Terrell, the namespace itself is yes, it's like a file system. It has a root so to speak, which is the zone name. And then from there you've got home directories but we call them collections because they're fake. They are themselves abstractions. The collections are pure virtual, they only live in the catalog. And then when it comes time to actually go get a file, what we call a data object because it's a logical abstraction as well, it can actually be in multiple places at the same time. There's a concept of a replica. So you can have your files in a collection either on the same computer or different types of storage all around the world but you still have that kind of logical view into that namespace and see those different data objects regardless of where they live physically in the grid. Now by the same token, you say that your collections I think was the word, those are virtual as well. So could I have a collection quote unquote folder that is comprised of files that come from storage in all different places but iRods makes it look like they're in one place? That is exactly correct. Okay, and then tell me a little bit about what are these rules things? You've talked about this rules engine or you've mentioned this rules engine a little bit. Tell me how does one use that? So data management policy itself is typically written down as a set of rules that users must abide. What iRods allows you to do is provide computer actionable implementations of those rules.  And there are various official sets of data management policy out there. What iRods also allows you to do with the rule engine is leverage that metadata. So we can automatically ingest data and metadata that is resident in that data and apply it to the data. So it's immediately discoverable. So if you have an instrument that is staging data in iRods, when it arrives in iRods we can extract the metadata and use that metadata to drive anything from data discovery for scientists to the fact that it needs to be taken out to computation for sequencing alignment and then capture the products and annotate it with a provenance. And so the metadata and the workflow engine allow us to provide a wide range of use cases each of which can be tailored to the particular deployment of iRods. So those examples of user were primarily when ingesting data that you're kicking off. It sounds like pipelines which can extract metadata or you actually even talked about kicking off compute. So this could be actually be a front end for drop data, do something. Does it only do actions on when a new data object comes in or can it do it other times? At many other times. So iRods is based on plugins and every operation within those plugins has its own policy enforcement point. So anytime the API is extended that API also has the policy enforcement point. So this is for network traffic authentication reaching out to our catalog in order to capture information or metadata and so on. Every operation has policy enforcement points. And so anytime a user touches data with an iRods policy may be enforced. So the policy for the ingest is basically on the operation named create, right? When the file is created on a disk somewhere or on a tape somewhere, the post API hook for that create operation can fire. And that's the one that would then start off the compute or the extraction of the metadata or whatever it is that your policy at your organization or university or company has laid down. Other operations can include I open that file or I delete that file or I make a replica of that file. Any of those operations can trigger any arbitrary code that you would want to run inside the zone. So that arbitrary code that I'm talking about is the policy. If your organization votes and says we should have three replicas across three continents and we should email the boss when this happens and this person should not touch this file, that is the policy for your organization. Now you can actually write rules to enforce that. And of course, since the rules are just text you can now keep those rules in version control, you can map them over time, you can track them and make sure that nothing surprising is happening inside your zone. You said something in there about somebody shouldn't access this but you're talking about this in terms of a rule. So do I actually have to write my own ACL access or is this more like a logging who accessed it? We have ACLs and you can manipulate those ACLs through the rules, which is what I was suggesting. You can limit, read, write, any of those kinds of things. In addition, you could move them to different physical pieces of hardware. If you've got certain human medical data that shouldn't be outside of a certain geo restricted place, your rule could say this should only be on this set of servers and never go to a different data center. Just as importantly, you can say, we definitely have to have two copies of this and they have to be in these two different data centers. And so you can, again, whatever the humans in charge decide the policy is for the organization, you can now write the policy to reflect those rules. And it doesn't depend on that one system administrator who remembers everything before they retire. Yeah, and rules can also run asynchronously. And so another typical use case, simplistically you consider as tiering. So you have object, tape, flash array, what have you. And we have users who will just tier data based on access patterns. And so if this file data object has not been touched in three months, they'll stage it to tape and trim the replica on the flash array and vice versa. And that's simply an asynchronous rule. Another popular one would be data retention. So in the UK, research data has to exist for 10 years after the last time of use. And so University College London runs IROTS and they have IROTS automatically manage all of this. And so they have, as I said, various levels of storage and as it ages out, you know, they keep increasing those counters and when it reaches 10 years, they trim that final replica. So you said, you keep giving me new things to ask. The, what you described there sounds like a classic HSM policy engine. Would you compare IROTS, like would you actually, if you just wanted to have an HSM, would you look at IROTS as an option for that? Or would there be reasons you wouldn't use IROTS for that, even though it has this functionality? So people show up to use IROTS for one or two of our four core competencies at any given point in time when they become new users. HSM is one that they show up for. Certainly they have lots of different flavors of storage, lots of different vendors of storage. And so the unified namespace we provide gives you the ability to get your arms around all of that different infrastructure and provide a layer on top of it that insulates your users from change. And so if you have three to four different kinds of storage, you can set up a tiering system across it. And then once a new storage shows up, you can add it under IROTS and then stage data out of whatever the old things are into the new things and then simply decommission the old things without anything changing above the layer of IROTS. And since it's open source, it provides, that insulates the users also against vendor lock-in and so on. IROTS provides you the ability to get out of vendor lock-in. So what kind of clients does IROTS support? I mean, does it support, like, are we talking desktop users? Are we talking server users or large data users? What's the target audience here? That's a wide-ranging answer. So in large part, people mostly show up first for the sysadmin parts. We've got installations around the world that have just service accounts that actually talk to IROTS. And then we have other installations where there are tens of thousands of humans, scientists, who have direct access through client tools into their IROTS namespace. But there are clients that range from command line interfaces to drag and drop things on the desktop. We've got web clients. We've got access through WebDAV, through NFS. There's a variety of different ways that you can get into the namespace through the IROTS protocol. And in the last year, I think we've had three new ones show up written by people who are not us, which is. That namespace, when you look at it through something that looks like POSIX, like NFS or FUSE or something like that, is that, does that have to be set up in advance or can the structure of the way that appears be driven by, say, metadata? So I could look at the same collection of data, but look at it by patient or by diagnosis or by comment trait or some form of metadata. Right, so the different clients are gonna have different capabilities. In the command line, you can do all of the things that the API provides, but you have to type a lot. In certain clients, web clients, there may be some forms that can do some metadata queries and then you can actually save those queries as virtual collections. That will allow you to have a slightly different slice through the catalog. By default, we all think in terms of these trees of files, but when everything is in a database, that's just a particular query. Please show me all the files that have this path as apparent, and that's what you're getting back out of the database that the catalog, you can just as easily ask it, show me all the files that have an attribute named this versus this, and you'll get a listing of results that look just like the listing that came out of the tree version. So yes, depending on the client, you can definitely tailor the views into this namespace. Now, with these rules and this whole metadata infrastructure system that you've got here, is there actual computational power available to the end user there? Or is it really more intended to be just infrastructure, albeit a very flexible and powerful infrastructure, but it's not intended as an indirect computation engine as itself, right? Well, that is not really true anymore. So given the changes and the advancements that we've made in the last number of years here at the IRODS Consortium, IRODS has grown the ability to actually give you reach into your infrastructure in your compute infrastructure, and we actually have two computational models, the first of which we talk about taking data to the compute. So IRODS users, and this is a use case out in the wild, will stage data to parallel file systems from IRODS for computation, launch their jobs all driven by metadata, and then capture the resulting products back in IRODS at which point you can stage it out of the expensive parallel file system back into object or what have you and maintain provenance from front to back. And this is what gives us the ability to create reproducible science, which is really important to us here at the university. You have full provenance of the inputs, the outputs and the operations that have been performed on that data, and we have written all of that down for every time that data has gone to computation. So now you have the ability to page back through what has happened to that via auditing and see why did this run differentiate from that run. The flip side of that is taking the compute data. So what we describe as an absolute model, IRODS clients have the ability to package computation in Docker containers and ship that off to where the data is resident because you don't want to move your 20 terabytes of data around to perform your computation. And so we have very impressive IRODS servers out there that simply manage the compute on a scheduler resident with the data. So you're talking about capturing a lot of information over a lot of time, like an awful lot of metadata. And I'm thinking of some workflows where the amount of data stored would actually be less than the amount of metadata captured during the process. What back-ending system are you using to capture all this metadata? If I remember it was a SQL and a lot of times SQL doesn't scale to billions of entries, which I think you could hit very easily here, so. But what are you guys doing to scale? So the easiest thing possible, we're externalizing it. So we, as of IRODS 4.2, the rule engine itself has become part of the plugin framework. And one of those plugins sole purpose in life is to simply write down what has happened to the data and ship it off over an AMQP message bus. And we call this our audit plugin. And we plug that directly in as a reference implementation into the Elk stack. And so you can scale it at any direction you like. And you can also tune via regular expressions what parts of the workflows through IRODS that you wanna capture and get written down. And so for instance, if you're really only interested in things that have gone out to compute, you can capture those and you can filter out what you do and don't want. And then from there provide dashboards into what is actually happening with your data. But you are correct by default. We ship that with the asterisk regular expression. So every operation is being hit, gets recorded and shipped over that message bus. And I think for a simple listing of a directory, I think it was about 1200 API endpoints were hit inside of the IRODS software, which yeah, that adds up pretty quickly. Okay, so Elk stack, I mean that's Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. So we use Elasticsearch as the backend primarily. Okay, so we use Elasticsearch here. So like if I was using this in front of a massive tape library and I was doing millions of subjects and millions of jobs and was collecting billions of files and then billions times and pieces of metadata, this should have absolutely no problem managing that. As far as we know, that should work just fine. It's just now a question of scaling the rest of your infrastructure and network to support the load you're putting on it. Yeah, and as we said, that is very tunable. So you may know exactly what it is you wanna know and that may be just a few pieces of information per operation or job, so. You also can send different bits of your auditing to different locations. You don't have, you could shard them based on topic or based on namespace or based on type of operation. It's just a question of that regular expression being able to support what it is that you care about at that moment. Okay, so let's take a step back here for a second. We've been talking about iRods itself and how it works a little bit and what its capabilities are and things like that. But let's talk a little bit about your organization and the structure and things like that. For example, there's multiple organizations listed here. For example, there's UNC Chapel Hill, but your email addresses are renzi.org and then there's the iRods Consortium and so on. Can you explain the relationship between all of these? So the iRods Consortium is primarily driven by membership and so that entails a yearly fee and some benefits that go along with that yearly fee. So if you look at our members page, we have genomics institutes, we have storage vendors, we have other institutes, enterprise corporations like Bayer and so on that are all running iRods in production and feel the need to both sustain this software as well as be a member of the community. And this is my primary goal is growing this community providing this education and the suite of tools to help solve these problems. And the Consortium's job is to sustain the project as a piece of open source software. And then so the Consortium is inside of the Renaissance Computing Institute, renzi, which is one of, I don't know, 60, 70 research institutes at the university and so renzi is a research institute at UNC Chapel Hill here in North Carolina. And so we are all state employees and that's our job. Okay, so then is the iRods Consortium, do you guys define iRods? Cause you mentioned that I think you're up to version 4.2. Is there an associated standard that goes along with this that is defined by the membership? How does that all work? So yes, some of that. So the Consortium itself being member driven now, we have a very nice setup where we can simply ask them what the future should be and that's part of the reason they join is so that they can sit at the table and vote and yell at us and tell us what it should be. So we have a protocol which has not changed in a while and so has been backwards compatible for a long time. That's a wire line protocol. And that mostly is defined and being with regards to that federation that we talked about earlier. So our current version of iRods can talk to the last few versions of iRods. Once we get to the point where we want to change that, yes, the technical groups inside of the Consortium can vote and lay out a roadmap and decide when we want to change either the protocol itself as well as define the feature sets and kind of the timeline for fixing bugs and things like that for both the people in the room as well as the people who don't even know they're part of or having a bug afflict their day to day usage. So in terms of development, who's actually, is most of the work still being done there at Renzi or do you have a lot of external contributors? Who's doing the development? Right, so most of the work is still here done in one room. We've got a few people we keep in there. I think we're up to nine or 10 now. We do have a lot of input from other places but not a lot of pull requests. We have more now than we have ever had. We are getting some external pickup as, especially as these larger pharma groups with their own expertise show up and have opinions. But for the most part, they're happy and the things they're finding are pretty small. We're not finding too many problems in the sense that we have to fix things. It's mostly goals around the next sets of features and the abstraction layers we're providing through the plugins. Yeah, the plugins are important detail. So everything within iRods has a 4.2 is pluggable. And so we've had multiple storage vendors show up with their own plugins that are proprietary that work against the various versions of iRods. And so since we've externalized a lot of this, the core no longer has to change rapidly and that has really changed our development model entirely. We'll be able to release new suites of features that are simply plugins that can work for iRods 4.1, 4.2 and beyond. If I can add something else to that, I think another kind of a surprise feature is that when iRods is used inside the government and there are large reasons for keeping things secure and mandates with public dollars, in the past, if a new version of iRods came out and someone wanted to upgrade, it had to go through a full audit again because it was a new release. Now, since the surface area of new code can be reduced because we're talking about plugins, it's much quicker for an agency or for their security people to be happy because they can just audit the new stuff, the things inside the tiny box rather than the entire code base. So something I've been wondering about because I've been running across these different tools is how would you station tools like Hydra and Deespace and Fedora and tools in that space and iRods? iRods is what I like to consider an integration layer. And so iRods runs with Fedora and we have a Java API that directly integrates with Fedora 4 and so it works as a storage backend for Fedora and you can wire the various services through Fedora out to whatever client it is you wanted to use. And we've also had integrations with Deespace and I believe Hydra has also taken a look at iRods but I haven't been in contact with that group in a while. And so really it's a question at what layer you wanna use iRods, either as sort of the front end abstraction layer or more of a automatic storage management backend that abstracts you from the necessity of integrating with various other storage technologies. If you're keeping metadata at the Fedora layer and you're keeping metadata at the iRods layer you may have a problem. So now it's a coordination effort of keeping track of who's in charge. So in large part people who have done that have made a decision at the organization level where they're going to keep the truth. Some people have chosen to keep it above in the kind of portal layer and some people have decided to keep it at iRods and basically sync it up into the Fedora layer. It's just a matter of preference and a matter of use cases and matter of disaster planning I guess really. Now something we've kind of jumped around a little bit about kind of indirectly discussed but is iRods multi-tenant? I mean, can I have multiple different projects with different access requirements and different sets of rules from a single iRods installation? Absolutely, it can be achieved in a number of ways. And so something we haven't touched on yet is Federation Song going to blatantly use this as an excuse to talk about that. We have had organizations like the Wellcome Sanger Trust Institute that runs seven, eight grids, iRods, independent iRod zones internally. Each project runs its own iRod zone and they all federate through a single Federation hub of iRods at the user level and so they can hop between projects and collaborate across projects using our ability to federate at the unified namespace layer. Another way that this has been achieved is by having pools of iRod servers that all are members of the same namespace. Each server can have its own set of rules, its own rule base, as we call it, which define your policy and each user can be a member of a particular group that belongs to that pool. So if you are, say, a pharma company and you have certain users that have access rights to personally identifiable information or public health records, they can belong to a set of pools and have rights only to those pools or be the only users that have rights to those pools of servers that manage the storage underneath and so it can work both ways. So you said something very interesting in there that peaked a question to me, particularly throwing it back to earlier in the conversation. So if I'm a user that's supposed to have access to personally identifiable information within a data set, but then I'm another user who is not supposed to have personally identifiable information, but to the same data set, is this computation or filtering that can be done upon access of the data so that if I am a user with or without access to the personally identifiable information, that will either be stripped out or left in upon my access? Is that a use case? That is a use case. That is something that can be accomplished through our rule engine once again and it's a use case that is being worked on actively right now by a couple of groups. And so the idea there is, is that user rights or roles can be tagged as metadata and based on that you can get a replica of the data that has been previously anonymized and so you are only allowed access to a particular replica or it can be done automatically on the fly and that's a question of whether or not you trust your software and whether it's past audit. Have people integrated this into like IRB processes and stuff like that where a given person has access to a set of data for a limited period of time? That is certainly a use case that can be implemented. I can't say that that has been done in the wild as of yet, but I mean that's a use case that can be extended to a various other range of utilities. You can simply flip that flag based on the metadata or remove them from a particular group within the IROTS namespace. So then what about a speed and size? Can you, you mentioned federation, a few other things. Can any of those be used to leverage, total data throughput performance or like large data operations or anything like that? So yes, we've got, as soon as you span large physical networks, you're going to have a latency. So you can chop into that a couple of different ways. One is by having replicas that are close to the users. Another is to have the database itself, the catalog in different places by having different zones and just using the namespace federation capabilities. In terms of size, largely that's independent because that's gonna be a function of your storage kind of footprint, so to speak, through different vendors or physical locations as well. And if you're talking about just throughput, we have had a wide number of IROTS servers stood up in front of parallel file systems and that is one way to tackle that problem simply by just round robbing through the various IROTS servers to get aggregate throughput. Now along those lines, you mentioned the hardware vendor and we've talked about replicas a little bit and whatnot. Do you also handle hardware failure or is that kind of a side effect? You can look at it both ways, which is a feature or a challenge with IROTS. So given our replica model, if a server goes down and is marked down in the catalog, IROTS will simply just give you one of the other replicas. And so we've set up monitoring the inaugural and other systems that simply heartbeat the servers and if something goes wrong, they'll mark a particular storage resource down at which point you can send an email or a page somebody or what have you and then the other servers will pick up the slack. And that is hardware agnostic, which is the important part there. So you've mentioned parallel file system, object, tape. Do you wanna kind of go through a list of backends that IROTS supports out of the box or is that probably overly verbose? We can tighten it up. So IROTS will talk to anything that is a mount point, primarily, so that's where people like to start. And that of course can reach out to many numbers of things. We have native connectors or plugins for S3, DDNs, WAS, HPSS, TABE, TSM. And that has been the, I know that there is an ISLON plugin out there that is proprietary, that has just been open sourced by Dell EMC and Cleversafe has a plugin that is out there. And I know of at least two other storage vendors I can't mention that are also working on plugins of their own. All right, so you've named out a couple of corporate types of users and environments for using IROTS, but who else uses IROTS? Give me a general classification of maybe a couple of different buckets of types of users that are out there. So we've got a few different domains. IROTS probably got its start mostly in the library kind of archives and records management world. The metadata was a big deal at the time and very hard to do. It was originally conceived by a plasma physicist. They had a lot of data back in the day when it was all simulations and too big to write down. In the recent times we really have seen an explosion in the genomic space mostly because of the sequencers and the kind of volumes of data coming with that. We expect very soon to see a relative explosion in the medical space because of the new different types of optical things that can happen, taking pictures of very small things and very high resolution. But for the most part we've also seen pick up in some of the media and entertainment spaces and we've had trickles of interest from oil and gas. They have a lot of data in large part. They have a lot of money as well. So they have not necessarily focused their beam of attention yet but we expect that to happen pretty soon as well. So what language is the IRODS itself actually developed in? IRODS itself is entirely written in C++ and on the client side we have Python clients, Go clients, Java clients and of course the native C++ client libraries. On top of that there are a number of GUIs out there as well as plugins for FTP clients and so on. We also have a NFS front end as well as a web dev front end. This might be my own ignorance. Can I actually make a request to IRODS via simple arrest calls or anything like that?  Okay, and then the plugins. You mentioned the plugins for the rules themselves has a domain specific language but then also could be developed in other things. Can you elaborate on that? Sure, so as a 4.2 the last part of IRODS that hasn't been broken out and put it into its own tiny box as we like to say was the rule engine itself because it was so tightly integrated with the original IRODS code base and so we went through that heavy lift and pulled it out into its own plugin. So the native domain specific language is a plugin as well as a Python plugin that we're gonna be shipping shortly any day now. And I know that at least there's one other rule engine plugin out there that is being written for go. I think that is it. We have written some other rule engine plugins for JavaScript and Haskell and some other things just for fun but I don't think we're gonna roll them out to production. So by having a rule engine that, so the rule engines themselves are written in C++. The plugins themselves are written in C++ but they provide the ability for an interpreter of another language to interpret rules written in that language. So when we say a Python rule language plugin it's written in C++ but provides the ability for scientists or non-administrators necessarily who already know Python to be able to write their own logic in a language they understand and are familiar with which is a big deal. We've gotten a lot of feedback around the Python which is why it's the first external, first other language that we're going to release. The other thing to know about these plugins is that they can actually be run concurrently in the IROD server. So a particular IROD server can actually run multiple rule engines at the same time and support rules written in different languages at the same time including the ability for those rule engines to call rules from each other. So you can actually call some of the legacy functionality in the original rule language from Python and vice versa. For some of the stuff you talked about though for extracting metadata and things can I just invoke a shell and use something like image magic to capture like the dimensions of the image? Can I do something like that? Or do I have to implement it in this language? Yes, yes to both. So part of our training that is out there in the world right now is extracting metadata out of images using image magic. And I went through their API but you can also just shell out and call convert or what have you. That's mostly a question of speed and implementation detail. If we've now seen people part of the rest of our training is to show that you can prototype in one of these scripting languages be it the DSL that we have called the IRODS rule language or Python.  Well that might indirectly answer my question. I was gonna ask if you have these language rule engine plugins that you said are all written in C++ but they support the various different languages and things like that. Are you actually compiling the rules that people write and say Python so that it's in some kind of byte code in an LLVM kind of sense or are you actually interpreting the language on the fly every time the rule is fired? So right now the Python rule engine plugin is written using boost Python and so that gives along with all of what that means. One thing we haven't touched on are microservices and we've been using that word a long time it means something different now but they're basically compiled C++ shared objects that give you the ability to effectively expose a function and bind that microservice into the rule language itself. And so through other domain specific language Python or one of the other rule engines that are supported we can do things like write a microservice function object that will extract the metadata from the data at rest for you using image magic at which point you can use the rule language to simply apply that to the data object at rest in the catalog. And so that was used historically for things that allow you to reach out to other libraries that the rule language wouldn't support which is no longer as important now that we can use other languages or do things that are computationally expensive. If you're doing that work in Python now yes you would be using the interpreter but you wouldn't have to write microservices necessarily you're just be writing Python functions. So some of the nomenclature gets collapsed once you start to put them in tiny boxes which is good because that word now means different things to different people microservices. So you mentioned I rods open source what licenses I rods distributed under? So I rods is and has always been a BSD three three clause pieces software so people can use it they can put it in a box and call it well I don't think they can call it something else I guess they can. It would be pretty obvious that it's I rods but yes it is BSD three. So what's the largest I rods installation that you've seen in terms of pick your favorite metric right total data total number of objects total number of users, whatever. So they're the Cybers project out of Arizona has probably over 50,000 users at this point so that is the largest user base that we know of as far as data there are tens and tens of petabytes out there. I don't know that we've hit a hundred yet it's hard to say since it's open source these are just the things that people have shown up and told us about and we're looking at hundreds of millions of objects as far as total size in that direction. We know that the Sanger Institute for every data object in their system coming off the sequencers we think they've told us they have over a thousand metadata attributes for every data object. So they do a lot of work based on the metadata and they are actually using an Oracle RAC database to hold the catalog. The other two that we support out of the box are Postgres and MySQL both all three are relational because we need that big C for consistency across our namespace. And then what was your most unexpected use? What was the thing you've reigned into that you're like I'm surprised someone's doing that but it works. So my favorite answer to that is that a Health Science Institute used IRODs to automate a real world workflow in a lab and we actually helped implement that. So this was a lab that was synthesizing viruses which is scary enough as it is. And they used IRODs in the metadata as well as the asynchronous rule engine calls to at every stage of the workflow they would put IRODs with an associated metadata into the system. IRODs would then run some rules that would generate the next steps and then so on and so forth. So we helped them take something that was very hard to teach in a lab that had a lot of high turnover and the people that worked in the lab which meant they're always teaching somebody and normalize that from how the forms were generated and how the ingest of the initial requests came in and we also provided them the ability to do queries for billing and so they became much more efficient and it was interesting to me because we're always implementing computational workflows. Okay, well, thank you very much, Terrell and Jason. Where can people, I'll find out, download a copy of IRODs, get involved with the community. Well, so IRODs.org is the main hub. That's where everything lives and it points to lots of other stuff. Our GitHub account, everything we do is public. So github.com slash IRODs. And then of course, you know, we are on the Twitter so also name IRODs. And that about does it. We've got a discussion group that's a Google group that's easily findable. A lot of people show up there first and if they're brave, they'll ask a dumb question but after that, it's a lot of email. Okay, thanks a lot for your time. Thank you gentlemen. All right, thank you. Take care.


Welcome to Think Tech. I'm Crystal here. Long time no see. I'm back today for a special episode highlighting the International Film Festival here in Hawaii HIF with a particular emphasis on VR. What's VR? Virtual reality. Well, it's apparently a huge kind of up and coming thing and Taiwan has become the forefront of this and so I have a really special guest here today who flew in literally yesterday last night to present her work and to present this VR world here at the festival. So, with no further ado, let me welcome our guest, Estella, I'm going to do it right, Estella Valdiviso, I did it wrong, Valdiviso Chen, sorry, so Estella, you are part Bolivian, part Taiwanese. What an interesting combination. I'm sure you get it a lot, but not to dilute that idea of cross-cultural mixing and how that's influenced you. Can we start there? Like, what's your upbringing and yeah, what's your all about? My late father's Bolivian, my mom is Taiwanese and I'm born and raised in Taiwan, but with a Latino dad, you kind of have that really outgoing personality that kind of make me a little bit, just a little bit different for me, just a little bit different. I think a lot different, you come across as being, yes, very, very, yep. So tell me about your dad, like what did he end up in Taiwan for any particular reason? How did they meet? I used to work for Bolivian government at the time, like when he and my mom met, he came to Taiwan, he was like doing like a delegation for this country and there were like still diplomatic connection between the two countries at the time, so like that visit was quite often and that's how he met my mom in Taiwan. What was your mom doing? My mom was a college girl. Oh, cute. Okay. Yeah, she was studying, she was a major in English, so she was like, you know, very keen to be helpful to foreigners, you know, so, you know, it's just like one of those women's story that happened on a bus. Oh wow, sounds like a film itself. I know. Have you not done anything, a story on your kind of background? No, but I love talking about it, I love finding out little clues about it, there's the mom's version, the dad's version, and then my cousin's version from all the way in Bolivia, when I visit them, they tell me a whole different version of how the romance continues, so it's really interesting to have learned about your parent's story from a different place, from a different angle. You should do something with that. I mean, we're talking about cinema and the art form of framing and what you just said, it brings these kind of interesting concepts of like interpretations and storytelling and whose version do you listen to and how do you frame it, right? Exactly. Yeah, and you kind of embody this multicultural space, so do you use that in your work? Tell us about your work. So, I come from a feature film background, I study film and also my company also develops like a TV series and now virtual reality. The way that we select projects or the projects that we want to do are mostly projects that can speak to audiences from different places, but with that strong Asian identity, we want to kind of explore what Asian identity nowadays means because there is a lot of like a stereotypical way of thinking what Asians are, what Taiwanese are, and I think that with the stories nowadays, we can be much more and we can realize that even though certain stories come from, maybe come from Taiwan, maybe some ritual from Taiwan, but the essence of it is very similar and can connect you anywhere in the world. Like when you come into like your spiritual tempo sucks, the spiritual aspect, how does that reflect in different culture and how do they connect to it? That's kind of how we select projects that we are interested in producing, like finding that essence in it. Yeah. Essence is a good word. And it kind of links to your idea of exploring spirituality in VR because VR space is a very spiritual space. It's a very dystopian space, right? Like you have to put on these goggles and you go into this different world. Do you think there's a trend for this because people are searching for out of reality kind of experiences or to go outside of their own normal lives to live something a little bit more interesting? I think that how media has developed is very much that, you know, with cinema, with wanting to go to a movie on the weekends, like once a week or every other week with your boyfriend or your family. That's to get you out of your usual routines and then with now people are streaming all the time binge watching and all this is you trying to get out of that, like the reality that you have and creating another version of reality for yourself. And that's kind of how we proceed, like thinking that maybe virtual reality will have its place for the future narrative as well because that's how we have that habit and that kind of interest of exploring what's the alternative version of yourself. Alternative version of yourself. Wow. So for people who aren't really familiar with this VR world, how would you explain it to them? How are you supposed to approach it or experience this? My favorite way to explain it is always memory. So I like to say virtual reality is like creating a version of memory that you will have because you are putting on a headset, you are seeing a world, a creator, a storyteller create for you. It could be game or it could be narrative, it's a very wide spectrum, but you are in there with a headset, exploring it. Like you're in that realm with those characters. You feel like you are in a different space. And if it's game, you have more interactivity, you have more choice, but then the spectrum goes to even just a 360 video, then maybe you don't have that interactivity, but you still have the choice of being attracted by certain performance and you look into different direction. That all creates a level of memory. So your version of watching, for example, your spiritual temple size in my version will be different because we'll probably be seeing different information that the story world has. But doesn't that story guide you to look for certain things? Well, I think that a lot of storytellers in virtual reality create a space that you don't have to see every single thing. Okay. You put in a lot of Easter eggs, you put in basically building a story world, so for the audience to have the space to explore it and maybe even revisit sometimes. This time watching it, you see this and you feel this way. Maybe the next time you watch it, you will find different things. There will be a level of guidance, but that guidance is not strict. It's not like in films that you've got the storyboard, you've got the frame to frame that we are very systematic of how we want you to receive the information. Interesting. Why that title? Why that title? Well, I think it matches the attitude because we actually had a very serious title at the beginning and then after the very first draft, we were like, oh, we should have something that's a little bit more challenging in the audience because the narrative itself, we're aiming for comedy, we want people to laugh with it, we want people to kind of imagine that they go to this virtual reality, spiritual world and thinking that they can fix something at a beginning, but then everything starts falling apart while you fix it. So that's why we get, you know, that's why it's called, you know, it's very funky and you can see the pace of it and the music and everything just escalates into this very kind of fun, crazy world, unrealistic, but perhaps there are things that people can pull out that can apply to them. Is that what you can say about that? Yeah, that's what we're aiming for. So like, I'm not sure if you know of this ritual. It's like a Taoist ritual. It's called a blind folding ritual. So it's a very famous ritual in Taiwan that people get blind folded with this red clothes and then there will be a Taoist monk guiding you to go to the spiritual world to either visit your lost family, people that you want to see, or you want to say goodbye to, or go to your spiritual temple so you can remodel it and you can change it and make your real life a better place. So if you have a problem like in career, in marriage or anything, you can go to your spiritual temple. You take it to your bedroom and fix it and...  Yeah, yeah, exactly.  Oh, it's like a feng shui thing.  Okay, okay. So that's what we learned about it and we found it very fascinating because it has that same feeling like it's like virtual reality, right? Exactly. You're putting on something and taking you somewhere else. That's exact same ritual of virtual reality. That's very cool. Your spiritual temple sucks was our very first VR work and we wanted to find something that we have fun with and something that we can connect to and that's where we approach with it. But then at the same time, even though that ritual only exists probably, I think only in Taiwan. I asked a lot of people, different places in Asia, they don't know about the ritual. So I think it's a very Taiwanese ritual. It doesn't matter because it's very much something that people from everywhere in the world have that imagination. I say, I wish I can go somewhere and fix my trouble. And everything can be managed just by remodeling. It's interesting you say that because just glancing through the different selections of the VR films that are presented at HIF this year, there are a lot of things that do deal with memory. One of them called After Image for Tomorrow also explores choosing three memories that you can preserve, but then you have to question whether you can trust them. So that's kind of like going into a very more abstract and deeper tangent. There's one by the US called Asteroids, which is a comedy of deep space. It's a different kind of virtuality. Body List is also by Taiwan. I don't know if you're familiar with that one, Lending Digital Storytelling by following an elderly political prisoner who's past and where he goes from there and it turns digital. So the abstractness of that reality, of that after world being kind of synonymous with this digital kind of virtual space. Really fascinating stuff. So I think you know, as we dwell or as people can slowly absorb the concept of this, do we have things that can kind of hook them into wanting to try this experience? Is it for young people? Is it for like, is there like a target audience? I think it's very broad, because the fact that virtual reality, the way the storytellers in virtual reality have different backgrounds. You know, we have like your spiritual temple is from a film director. But at the same time, you've got digital artists, you've got people from theater, space, performance. Oh yeah, there's a dance one from Australia. So there is it's a it's a media that so many artists from different space are coming into it. So people as you know, if you have different interests, you will gather all of them into this space and then age wise as well. Every idea for your spiritual temple sucks is obviously comedy is very funny. But then I've shown it to my grandmother. But also I have an audience of like 30 high school kids watching and laughing. So this includes all of you out there. So if you're interested, we're going to take a short break, but we come back and we're going to talk more about this virtual reality world and how hip is offering all this opportunity to go and watch it. So stay tuned. Thanks to our think tech underwriters and grand tours, the Atherton Family Foundation, Carol Mun Lee and the Friends of Think Tech, the Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education, collateral analytics, the Cook Foundation, Dwayne Kurisu, the Hawaii Community Foundation, the Hawaii Council of Associations of Abarbon Owners, Hawaii Energy, the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, Hawaiian Electric Company, Integrated Security Technologies, Galen Ho of BAE Systems, Kamehameha Schools, MW Group, the Shidler Family Foundation, the Sydney Stern Memorial Trust, VOLO Foundation, Yuriko J. Sugimura. Thanks so much to you all. Back to QoqTalk here on Think Tech. I'm Crystal and we're talking to Estella about the virtual reality world, the beauty, the abstractness, the concepts of memory that you can play within VR. So we just saw a clip of your film and that's just one of many projects that you do. And let's talk a little bit about kind of the production because people don't know like how you distinguish VR with regular cinema. Is the budget kind of much smaller? Are concepts of lighting and storytelling, you know, how is it differentiated? I think that VR, there's so many different genre or let's say a way of approaching it.  So you have your actor in a space and then you add graphics to it so that you created a virtual space. But in that sense, the production mainly is focusing on shooting, right? So it's very much kind of like traditional filmmaking. How do you organize your production in that sense? But then the difficult part is probably to avoid too many things that you have to stitch together because you're having 360 cameras. How do you shoot it and still be able to set up the lighting? Like basically all the tools that you use to know not necessarily exist or will be there. So how do you solve that problem in post-production or even in production? That's the part one is difficult for live action. But with live action, there is still a limitation because it's still a free degree of freedom experience. You can only see like 360 and up and down. There are also the spectrum of creating more freedom for your audiences that you can provide them a 60 degree of freedom so you can walk in and really get closer to the character. So a lot of animation works are done that way. Another animation virtual reality. And actually we are working on that right now and realize that there are even more technical things that you need to figure out along the way. It's not completely just using the animation production pipeline. You actually also have to think about the interactivity before the animation. How do you create and draw a map of interactivity to make sure that your audience really can get what you are guiding them to do. And you're working with different dimensions, right? You're talking live action, animation, graphics and yeah. It's a lot in every project. The projects that we do, we try different things in every project. We just want to see how the media can do in different fields with different kind of artists. But they are more and more mixed genre as well like some documentary work that mixes live action and animation to tell the narrative that they want to tell. So that is a field with different possibilities. Yeah, it sounds really endless the way you're saying it. But in terms of production, is it more expensive, less expensive? I would say it's relatively, but you definitely have to consider the part of because it's a new technology. So there is a lot of R&D that you got to do. You got to research.  They tend to be shorter, shorter films, right? Yeah. Is it because of our attention with something that's just so highly stimulating or is it just because of the budgets often? I think it's all this. You got the budget, you can't do something that's really high production value but super long, but at the same time. We also notice that a lot of audience, most of them around 20 to 30 minutes a lot of times they want to breathe also the hardware is still not as light as we hope yet and that we're getting there. It's a physical issue. Having your headset here and heavy, but then at the same time. You know, sometimes you lose track of time for me. I'm like losing track of time because I'm in love with the medium now. So I get to be in there longer. But for, you know, new audience, young audience, they're still trying to figure out how they use the device and how long time they can be there. Is there a danger in over immersing yourself in VR world? No, I don't think so, unless you are putting on a headset in public space and walking through the traffic. You know, it's like kids who do gaming and then they lose touch with what their real world should be. You know, in that way, do you think that some people might just go so deep into this other world that they don't really have a grasp on their own that they can't pull back and have the simplicity of what's natural? Well, that's why we do storytelling, because when you are using storytelling to using this media to do storytelling, you're also reflecting on it. And a lot of the work that you've you probably see even in his is that they are work that's also trying to understand what virtual reality means and what's your relationship with virtual reality. And I think that storytelling helps people understand how to cope with it. And you have to be participating and actually be part of it in order to know how much you use is healthy. It's the same thing like Internet or gaming when it came out of online gaming that a lot of kids are spending a lot of time with. But we only learn by actually participating. That's why. And is there an engaging aspect of this presentation? I think there is. So there's a hip has a VR lounge, right? And it starts when the ninth insult. It starts on the eighth, actually, from the eighth to the 12th. And then there's an entrepreneur sandbox, which is a very new space also installed in Kakaako from the ninth to the 12th. And I think the setup, as I understand, is that there are a lot of different not booths, but just spaces for people to put on the glasses and you can watch whatever you want to watch. Is that right? And then are there panel discussions and people being able to talk to Microsoft yourself? Yeah. So I think one of the cool part about virtual reality is because everybody has their own individual experience. And the first thing that people want to do when it comes to you have a good memory, you want to share that good memory, you want to share what you experience. So that's why the launch is there when people after they watch it. And, you know, if you have that space, people can get to meet each other. You can you can talk and some of the work is interactive, maybe even with more than one person at a time. You actually get to meet interesting people or good friends in those kind of environment as well. It's very sociable, more sociable than a lot of people imagine when they say, oh, you just put it on a headset for yourself. I think creating a virtual space definitely create a social possibility. And also the panel is great. They're bringing a lot of people with different experience. I'm very much interested myself to listen to other people's experience to see how we can bring this media, this new media storytelling to another another stage, right? And another way of bringing this to another stage is you mentioned before off camera is co-productions, the concept of bringing different countries and different places and cultures together. So let's talk a little bit about that. How are you doing that? And why is that important? So for the second project idea is called Mechanical Souls. It's a Taiwan and French co-production project. And the reason that we aim for a co-production for our second VR is we want to bring the conversation of sharing resources. I'm all the way in Taiwan and they are the French French ecosystem for VR has been developed for five years. How do we work together to fill the gap of experience, right? So and also resources also approaching that different territory and reaching out to those audience that you usually don't get to reach. So you when you have co-producers that's creatively participating, then they will be able to provide you that information from that different territory audience to know that when we're talking about earlier saying like we want to do work, maybe it has cultural identity in it. But how do we still do work that not only have that cultural identity but also connect to people from different place? So we need to know how people understand the story as well. When you have co-producer, there is that. And of course last and not the least is financing. So it's always difficult to only finance winning your own territory. And there's limitation of public grants even in Taiwan. And there is public grants in France or different places in Canada as well. How do we bring this financial resources together to create something also with the fact that we are already we have our own access to our own audience. Then that means it's a project that can be distributed to different territory. That's kind of why that we kind of shifted from your spiritual temple sucks that's all made in Taiwan slowly shiven into more international co-production aspects. Yeah. And like you said, you're bringing in not just the support from both sides is the cultural context that you can bring on to the table. And that's important because I think like in our world, even though social media has kind of broken down all the so-called boundaries of how we connect, there's still lots of pockets of misunderstandings and ignorance. And by doing co-productions, you open up that space and learn to have context to everything we look at. And you talked about being actively participating in something like that. VR is an active thing. You don't just sit back and watch it with some popcorn. I guess you can't really eat popcorn when you're watching VR, can you? It's not like that kind of thing. I have seen people with a bottle of beer and watching it. I'm not recommended because I actually, like when I got my first headset, I had a cup of tea by my table. I splash it on my computer. So not recommended because you're in a different world. You can't like, you know, yeah. So it's crazy because it really just opens up a whole different dimension. And a few days in a few years ago, it was like, what VR? And now it's here. It's very exciting every year, twice a year, actually. HIF has these amazing films that we can see here. You know, I miss seeing Asian films and being in Hawaii, I see more Asian films than I had when I lived previously in Hong Kong.  I hope you all go on the HIF website, hiff.org, because it has all it's very clearly mapped out the different films, the different categories. There's a highlight on Japanese films, Chinese films, VR. And it's just like it's very workable. And so please support it and go and see films and fulfill yourself and enrich yourself. Is there anything else like your kind of takeaways for audience to kind of leave lingering about this virtual world or? No, explore, have fun. Yeah, what are you going to explore?  Yeah, I'm going to be binge-watching as a VR, right? Binge VR. What about just a plug for women? Like how do we increase the space for women in the film industry? Well, actually, in virtual world, there is a lot of female storytellers and creators. And it's such a new space. So it's very welcoming. And so I've been having a great fun working with a lot of talents. Well, you are that embodying talent and international and virtual space. So thank you so much for sharing all your work. Good luck with the festival screenings. And go watch their films. Thank you.


You're good. You're very warm. You're the Swedish ambassador. Thank you. Congratulations from my Prime Minister. I think that's still a national trauma for us. Because we need a freedom to dissolve. He was walking in society in Sweden. Yes. And a very open society. So I think that is part of the trauma that we lost. Some of the innocence we had, but we're working hard to keep that openness. We sure are. Yes, and welcome to Sweden. Stofa. Stofa. Yes, correct. Thank you. It's easier to get to Stofa. To be beautiful as a place is. Yes. You're with me. Yes. Is it right? Is it right?


It's not my usual Tim's, we're in a different one today. Because the usual one is all surrounded by construction and I can't get to it without going way around. So it's just quicker to go to the other one. Good thing we got a backup. Holy smokes, buddy. You have a brand new massive 2500 and your, are those high beams? I have no idea. You never know with the new headlights, everything looks like high beams with these new HID LED headlights. So bright. So we got our Tim's, I'm gonna have a granola bar for breakfast and we're rushing to the truck. We're already hooked up to that step deck if you guys remember from yesterday. I just gotta get those risers off of there and I'm not gonna need them today. It is still super smoky. It's actually more smoky in Steinbach today than it was yesterday. A lot more smoky. This is almost how smoky it was in Canora. I figured that weather was coming this way. Usually our weather comes from the west but every once in a while it does come from the east and the north, it comes from all directions but usually it comes from the west, right? We're facing west right now. And the sun is up in the sky already. I don't know if you could tell. But that's not cloud cover, that's smoke. Well then again, that's raining. So it's probably smoke and cloud cover together. It's crazy. All right, there's Southland Church. You can barely see it over there. It's gonna be one of those days and we're picking up a load in Winnipeg. I'm guessing it's gonna be just a smoky in Winnipeg if it's the smoky here. And we're headed up two and a half hours north. I don't know if that's gonna clear things up or make it worse. I don't know where these fires are exactly. I heard that there's some fires by the Saskatchewan border out west that way. There's also some fires east of us near Canora or a little ways north of Canora. So it's, who knows where this smoke is coming from. But apparently we're on fire and that's no good. Like I was telling you yesterday and like I've said it a million times, I don't remember this many fires when I was a kid, like 20 years ago. I just don't remember this every summer already. Every summer, at least a few weeks of our summer is ruined by a whole pile of smoke rolling in from the fires. And I don't know if it's a good thing because you know when there's fires that means that the forest gets to renew itself, right? Fire usually is very good for the forests. The smoke isn't good for the atmosphere, but I don't know. Maybe we've been trying to prevent them for so long that now everything is just so built up that every little spark starts a fire, you know? I have no idea. I'm not an expert on fires. Don't listen to me. I can tell you how to tie down a load and move it across the continent. Okay, that's what I'm a professional in. When it comes to like environment stuff and health stuff, I'm not a professional. There she was. Okay, wait. Okay, now I'm ready for the day. Boop, my thinking cap on. Gonna grab all my stuff. I'm gonna throw it in the truck. We're already hooked up, like I showed you there. And we're gonna run into one bag. We gotta pick up a load of, I don't know if there are trusses. It's some kind of lumber. I'm gonna pick it up. We're gonna bring it all the way up to Fisher River, Manitoba. I think it's a first station, Fisher River First Nation. But we will, we'll check that out in a bit for now. Let's just get the day going. So this is what we're working with today. This trailer is a special trailer. It's got rollers. And it's good that none of them are rolling right now because we don't want our freight to roll off. There's all tied down. Bringing this trailer up to Fisher River, like I said.  There we go. So let's go get our paperwork. Start meandering our way up north and unload this stuff. This is one of those highways where there's a shoulder, but you better not touch it.  That looks pretty soft and very steep. Best just to stay on the road. But hey, at least they have shoulders. Last time I was on this road, there wasn't even a shoulder. Now they have a shoulder. It's useless. You can't even park on it because you'll just tip over and get stuck, sink right in, but there's a shoulder there now. They put gravel there. Someone put money into it. For no good reason. That's good. Way to go, Manitoba. We're on Highway 17, Manitoba Highway 17. Headed up north. We went to Toulon. We've been there quite a bit recently. Went west from Toulon and then north of Highway 17. This is going to take us up to Hodgson. And there we turn, it's gonna turn east. We're gonna turn north again up towards Pegwis First Nation. We're gonna go through Pegwis First Nation. It's a little town there called Dallas between Pegwis and Fisher River First Nations, Fisher River. And then there's a building store there that needs this lumber. And we're just gonna unload it right off the back with the rollers. It's gonna be very, very interesting. The trailer tilts backwards, right? And then all the rollers are locked. And then when you unlock the rollers, whoosh, all the freight just slides right off onto the ground and you gun it forward at the same time. And the way it was explained to me was it's sort of like pulling the tablecloth out, off the table from underneath all the cutlery and leaving the cutlery there, you know? So you get someone to release the rollers and at the same time, you gun it forward and all the freight rolls off the back and just falls nicely onto the ground. At least that's how it's supposed to work in theory. We'll see what happens. Oh, I hope nothing bad happens. I'm at the remote area of Manitoba, which is just pretty much when I say a remote area of Manitoba, I mean, I just mean Manitoba, because Manitoba is remote. I live in the populated part in the south. Anywhere north like this, it's probably more moose than people. It's from Dallas, from Manitoba. Straight between, like I said, Red Twin Pagos and Fisher River. So this is Fisher River coming up here. Remember, Cree Nation. I wonder why they're not just one big one. I wonder if they historically two separate Arupas that were living separately, two separate Fisher River Reserve. Legally speaking, it's called Fisher River Indian Reserve, but you know, in 2021, we're confusing, especially to people not from here. It's First Nations land or indigenous land. Whatever the, there's two reserves right close to each other here. I guess they both have two different governments. What if they're historically like separate and they just live that close to each other? Or if they're like, if they were adversaries in the past, enemies at one point close to each other, but yet they're separate. I always wondered that. Why don't they just connect the two, make it one big one, right? Must be a reason for that. It's a lot better when it's not covered in smoke. All right, we're coming up to downtown Fisher River Cree Nation. I just saw a Chinese restaurant. See, even way on here in the middle of nowhere on the reserve, you get Chinese food. Good old, they're everywhere, man. There's the arena, the multiplex. Oh yeah, this is downtown. This is where you get all the buildings, the community center, the ice rink. Look, I've got a lot of firewood. Wow, a lot of wood sitting there though. It's supposed to be their government buildings and band office, tribal office. It's their grocery store. I remember delivering Pepsi to that grocery store down over here, I remember that. You gotta be very careful with the dock there.  I remember that. They built the building and they forgot to put supports in where the truck's back into the dock. Oh, 300 meters, there we are right there. The big blue buildings. Oh, the front gate. How about that? We'll just go in the front gate. Sounds good. Hey, I've got your stuff. Where do you want it? I'm gonna dump it right off the back of my trailer. We are a building supply center. Where do these guys come up? Would you guys know where you'd like this? Straight in the back there? Oh, all right, no problem. Right on past the keys. There's your small first step. I'll go get ready for you over there and wait for you there. Okay, I see where they want it. You see all those off to the left over there? That's what ours is gonna look like once we dump it off if we unload it correctly. And hopefully we get this right. All right, so what I've done is I've flipped up the rear bumper so that that doesn't dig into the ground. I've moved these axles to almost the center of the trailer. Then I'm gonna lift up the front and hold it there. Then take the straps off, those rollers are locked so the freight will stay there at an angle. And then when we're ready, one of them is gonna flip a switch on the other side of the trailer. That's gonna unlock all of these rollers at once. And all this is gonna come rolling off to the back. And I'm gonna drive forward at the same time. So it's gonna roll back and I'm gonna drive forward and we're gonna try to lay it down pretty much right here. Hopefully this goes according to plan. First they're gonna unload this stuff up here with the forklift so that doesn't have to come rolling down to it's just this stack that's gonna come rolling down. And it should land just perfectly like that stack there. See that stack was unloaded the same way. I know when you first see the way this is done it seems kind of sketchy, right? Not gonna lie, it feels kind of sketchy too. I feel like there must be a better way but this is how this stuff is unloaded. This is how we do this. So this is a first time for all of us. We get to see something new today. Hopefully I can lay it down right up here. Oh yeah, he's taking that stuff off the front now there, the skid steer. I'm gonna put you guys in the back of the truck as I drive forward and you can just watch the stuff just slide right on down. Not gonna lie, I'm a little nervous about it but this is how they do it. This is how they do it. So the ground here was not packed very well. I really hope I don't get stuck while I'm trying to pull out from underneath that. That wouldn't be the first one. So we lift it up. The rollers aren't released yet. That's why it's not rolling off. We're gonna get all these straps out of the way then release the rollers. Let us slide off and drive out at the same time. Trying to get these rollers to lock again. Seemed like the valve was sticking a little bit. I moved the axles back to a normal position. I'm just gonna double check that as well. Yeah, there where they should be. The pins are locked in here. I'm just on the road. Just got out of the way there in the yard. And you see now these rollers still roll and they're supposed to be locked. The lock is right here. You hear that? Something, something's not locking. So I gotta get up on there and kick each one of them and see which one is holding the pin in. There we are, see that one's locked? Oh, these are the front ones. These have a different lock. That's right. Exh. Exh. I don't know what's, one of these. Maybe the pin is stuck. I was supposed to come up here and kick these all. Figure out which one. It seems like they're all, okay. So this isn't our regular trailer. Second, let me jump off of here. I don't know why this valve is sticking then. See. Oh, you hear that? I get it. It's supposed to be this thing right here moving. Maybe we gotta tap it with the hammer a little bit. Just give it a little tap, tap, tap-a-roo. It's supposed to be that in there. Pulse thing moving in. Why aren't they going in? None of them. The engine fan on my brain soon. It's getting kind of warm doing all this thinking. Seems like maybe it's touching. Huh. Well, I'm gonna figure this out and I'll get back to you shortly. I'm gonna take a short break. Technical difficulties. All I had to do was threaten it. Honestly, that's all I did. It wasn't locking in. I walked over there. I said technical difficulties. I walked over there to my headache rack, grabbed my bar, and I looked back and I started walking back towards the trailer and somebody's gonna get hurt. And it locked. It happened just like that. I don't know why. Man, I just kept filming. That was funny. That was funny. Okay, well, all of these pins are locked in. Ah, you see this? This is what they mean by I gotta spin them. See this hole here? This pin has to go into those holes on each one. See, I'm gonna turn it this way. See that? Now it's gonna come around to here. Come on, come on. I'm gonna turn this thing. Don't wanna pinch my fingers either. Come on. Right? It's supposed to go in that hole. There. See, now they're locked. Hashtag new guy. We got it. I didn't break anything and I figured it out. Which is more than you can say for some drivers. I'm just saying. I'm saying. There's worse. I figured it out. Now I gotta go along here, make sure that they're all locked in like that. That's what they meant. Okay. Okay, climb back up on the trailer. Okay, now all of those. I guess these ones don't lock because this is actually a stretch trailer as well. So we're just gonna glide our way over these. These ones here. Locks, you see that? Locks. Locks. Much easier to do it from up here. Oh, there's the hole. There you see it? There. Is this one? I'm getting better at this. See? Oh no, there's no lock on this last one. Okay. All these are now locked. You can walk on them. Look at me. Trucker Josh learning new skills every day. I just think you guys wanted me to go back to the same old, same old doing the same thing every day. No, no. I wanna do new things. Like this. Now I gotta try to get down here. They're breaking my leg or my face. I like this long catwalk. Walks very handy to have. We mastered another art of trucking today. Scratch that one off the bucket list. Well, I don't know about you guys, but I had fun. That was fun. 15 years of trucking. There's still always something new to learn.