CCF is a software system that supports collaborative, distributed, computer-based problem solving in the natural sciences, business, government, and in educational environments. The goal is to evolve a virtual environment for distributed computation that supports integrated human AV communication, high performance heterogeneous computing and distributed data management facilities. CCF is a research project at Emory University involving the Math/Computer Science and Chemistry departments.
This is alpha release 0.99 of CCF -- Collaborative Computing Frameworks.
This software is provided as is with no warranty expressed or implied. We hope you find it useful, but we won't be held responsible for any damage that may occur from reading, compiling, installing, using, or even thinking about it.
CCF is Copyright (C) 1996 by Emory University except for the code in directories GSM, LPC, LPC10 in the CCFaudio directory and is distributed under the terms of GNU General Public License (GPL) and the GNU Library General Public License (LPGL). The files COPYING and COPYING.LIB in each directory will tell exact licensing restrictions.
This package is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the license, or (at your option) any later version.
CCF was created by Vaidy Sunderam, Injong Rhee, Alan Krantz, Shun Yan Cheung, Julie Sult, Soeren Olesen, Paul Gray, Phil Hutto, Sarah Chodrow, Michael Hirsch, Ted Goddard, Mic Grigni, N. Balaguru, Jim Nettles, Luigi Marzilli, Sue Onuschak, Scott Childs, Kevin Williams.
The CCF project is sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation under the multidisciplinary challenges initiative.
CCF currently supports three platforms: IRIX-6.2, SunOS-5.6, and SunOS-5.5.1. The SunOS-5.6 version is the most thoroughly tested.
The audio tool allows multi-party, full duplexed verbal communication. The audio tool can be launched from the Tools menu in the ccsm (see the ccsm README for more details). Headphones are strongly recommended for ease and quality of communication but are not required.
To successfully compile the audio tool under IRIX-6.2, you must install the subsystem "IRIS Digital Media Development Environment."
The first three icons (starting from the left) in the ccsm toolbar are for audio tool control. The second (speaker) and third (microphone) icons, when clicked, turn red and mute your sound output and mike input, respectively. Click them again (icons turn green) to enable the features.
The first icon allows you to view the audio tool participant window (an easy way to determine who is in a session) and to access audio tool settings.
When opened, the participant window contains a list of audio tool participants. A participant's name is black if you have chosen to hear that person's audio transmissions and red if you have not; to toggle between the two states, left-click on the person's name. Right-clicking on a name calls up usage statistics for that participant during the current session.
The circle to the left of each name will be red unless the person is transmitting audio (in which case it will be green).
To change the audio settings, click on the Settings button. A new window will appear containing five different submenus: Volume, Sources, Encode, Fine Tuning, and Recording. To select a new submenu, click on its name.
The volume submenu allows you to change your input and output volume levels. The correct values will vary depending on the user and the type of input/output devices. To change the values, click and hold the left mouse button on the sliding bars and drag them to the desired level. The input or output can be muted from this menu by clicking on the microphone or speaker icons, respectively; the icons will be red when muted. Icons which are identical in appearance and functionality are also located on the ccsm toolbar.
The Sources menu allows users to select the input and output devices and duplex mode. The appropriate audio devices are enabled for each type of supported hardware. Full duplex mode allows a participant to speak and listen at the same time. Half duplex mode allows a participant to either speak or listen. When half duplex mode is enabled, a press to talk button appears on the participant window. Selected options are green.
The encode submenu allows you to toggle between the uLaw and GSM compression algorithms. uLaw (Mu-law) compression provides a high quality, high bandwidth encoding. GSM compression is comparable in quality to cellular phone transmissions. It is less bandwidth-intensive than uLaw, and should be used under most circumstances.
The fine tuning submenu allows you to adjust various options affecting the quality of the audio transmission. Playback delay should be increased if all the sounds are coming through but the playback sounds bad. The Preclip and Postclip Delays should be increased if your transmissions are missing the beginnings (preclip) or endings (postclip) of words. The input sensitivity should be increased if the green light next to your name in the participants window does not light up when you talk.
Increasing the playback delay will increase the delay before you hear others speak. Increasing preclip will increase the delay before others hear you speak. (Increasing postclip has no side effect other than a slight increase in bandwidth usage.) Accordingly, if you have transmission or reception problems, first see if they can be fixed by the speaker turning up input sensitivity and/or input volume. If that fails you should start experimenting with preclip and playback delay.
The recording submenu lets you record and/or play audio transmissions to/from a file.
While a participant records a session, his/her light button in the participants list is ringed in blue to notify other participants that the session is being recorded.
