This post has multiple parts to it, so fair warning I’m guessing this one is going to be long.   Lately I’ve been more and more annoyed at traditional hard copy media.  It’s a pain in the butt to deal with and takes up way too much physical space (for those that know me you find that sentence greatly amusing).

Pictures

This started happening over the last year with photo albums.   Photo albums are terrible.   It means normally that one person has a copy of the image and you can’t share them.  It is essentially technology of the last generation.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a believer in having prints, but the pictures themselves.

I’ve made it my mission to start getting the family photos and scanning them in.   I’ve managed to get most of my father’s photos from the era he was with my mother.   The ones I’m missing are any he has of the kids hanging on the walls in his house.   My next run is going to be the pictures from his current family (so a good 15-16 years worth of pictures to go).

My grandmother on the other hand has been very tightfisted with her photos.  I can understand her being protective, but so far I’ve managed to get 59 photos out of her to scan (out of literally over a 1000-2000).   I have managed to scan my photo album, and more recently used the digital SLR and took pictures of my scrap book from high school.   So both of these can be tucked away in boxes that I don’t need to look at and take up physical space in my house.

All the photos I have are now uploaded to Flickr.   You can also read about my photo sharing issue with my mother over here.

Continued tomorrow in part 2

Someone I know came to me the other day about a consulting project that may or may not happen.   What essentially he wants done is an overhaul of IT infrastructure.   They want more automation to their operation and they deal with physical goods.  So from receiving to shipping, to everything in between they are looking to streamline.    They want to do more with less, less equipment if possible, less people if possible, less stress if possible.   In other words they want what every other company in the world wants.

Currently they have a software package that does some of this, but it doesn’t do everything they want it to be able to do.   I don’t have implicit knowledge of the package, other then I’ve created firewall rules when I was consulting with Symantec to pass the traffic.   So my first question is the scope of the project.   The person I was talking to didn’t exactly no what I meant by that.   They were more worried about the big picture ideal instead of what a consultant would need to work with.  A vision of the end goal is great, but without specific tasks to get there it definitely puts an implementer at a disadvantage.   He stated that we would have to do a sit down and discuss the issue and layout of the business process.   This is a good step, but part of why I’m writing this is to help others know the answer they should have when going into something of this magnitude.

Easy, Hard and Correct

The first question is why do you want to do this?  There are easy answers, there are hard answers, and there is correct answers to this question.    Some of the easy answers include – I want everything to work together better, we want to build to the future, and I have to spend my budget before the end of the fiscal cycle and want to try out this product.    Hard answers include we want something more manageable for our IT staff, we want it to run faster in our environment, we want something we can understand.

There are reasons that these are the easy answers and hard answers.  The first and foremost thought is to remember to sit down with a consultant or someone who understands the technology thoroughly enough before ever sitting down with a salesperson.   To sales people, these are all easy and correct answers.   They will tell you your toast can be used to transport computer network traffic with the right purchase, they are there to get your money.  It’s the one reason I can never be a salesperson.  I like people using the correct solution, not necessarily the solution that I am selling.   Even when I worked at Symantec, I knew Symantec products were not the best products for all customers.   Some customers only changed products because they had money to spend and ended up worse off for it.    Salespeople are tricky creatures that guard their bonuses like Disney guards it’s copyrights.

Easy answers are normally very vague,  they tell a salesperson of consultant that you haven’t really though to much about the problem.  You have a basic idea of what you want, but you don’t know any specifics.  The problem with the easy answers is that they are also the most expensive answers – this allows those that are implementing something to sell you what they think is best, regardless of how it will fit into your business six months down the road when they are gone.  You will have to make some decisions on your own, and this should not be listening to the best sales pitch from two competing vendors.  The best sales pitch does not necessarily equate into the best product.

Why are the hard answers difficult?  What that’s because everything is relative.   Going back to my examples can show you this.  We want something more manageable by our IT staff, well how trained is your IT staff?   Do your employees know alternative operating systems?  Does your staff only run Microsoft products?  Is this faster for your environment?  What about a year down the road and the nightmare efficient system breaks because of infrastructure changes you were forced to make?  Everything comes down to you knowing your environment and your plans for the future.   A consultant only gets a glimpse of time into your configuration and is not going to be the full time employee running this stuff.   They won’t know how your future plans could be effected if you don’t tell them your future plans.

The correct answer?  That include being as specific as possible.  Let’s say this is to implement an Exchange Server migrating from a Lotus Notes architecture.   Why would I want to do this?   Lotus Notes has been long in the process of being a headache for us.   The administrator that runs it is retiring in six months and we have other employees that could scale up quicker to learn  Exchange then Lotus Notes.   The collaborative features in exchange work in Outlook, which our company already loads on all the desktop since we have a full Microsoft Office License on all of the desktops.  About 30% of our users already use outlook to retrieve their e-mail, even though they all have the Notes client installed on their desktops also.   Being able to consolidate this would save us thousands a year since we would no longer need a support contract or license fees paid to IBM to support the old Lotus infrastructure.    The more complete and specific the answer, the better the consultant can answer your questions.

Do You Listen To Alternatives?

Even in the Exchange scenario seems complete.  How rigid are you to suggestions?  What if the consultant offers up other alternatives such as a web based e-mail solution that would still allow Exchange to connect and retrieve e-mail? While a Linux/Apache approach may be cheaper, you could also implement it on top of IIS.   Building with some other technologies you could gain all the collaborative powers of Exchange for thousands of dollars less.   Those who didn’t want to use Outlook could use a browser.  If you combine this with a secure remote access solution this would allow for a possible quicker and less bandwidth connection for telecommuters if that is where your company is going.

Knowing what your plans and how rigid they need to be help a consultant decide what avenues may be the best approach for you.  While I offered up a free solution, another consultant may offer ways to augment your current Notes infrastructure to fit your needs.  The best consultants will offer alternatives to your current line of thinking.   You do not have to listen to them, you can stay focused, but hearing how open you are is important.

Timeline

A timeline is something you should have in mind sitting down with the consultant.  He needs to know deadlines and what your expectations are.   Does this need to be done in a week or a year?  How are your current employees going to ramp up on the new solution?  While a consultant may reset your timelines to something more realistic, knowing what type of time frame you are trying to achieve is important to the success of the project.   It also tells the consultant if they are going ot need to bring in more outside help.

Breakdown of Tasks

Have you compartmentalized your tasks?  The person that contacted me was looking for a complete end to end solution, is this what best?   In a solution like that how are you going to handle the transition time?   You don’t want to migrate the whole solution at the touch of a button, since any big architecture change can effect your business continuity.  For some businesses any downtime at all is lost revenue.   A consultant wants to make this impact as minimal as possible.   Even when you do the best planning and compartmentalizing sometimes you will get stuck on a twenty-three hour conference call working through the issues of down time.   When this happens I can tell you it’s not fun.  That was also with a staged migration.

What segments of your business can be down for hours at a time?   When you can answer that you can start staging your tasks.  The tasks that can be down the longest generally should be the first ones migrated, since they should give you expectations for later tasks, and allow you to plan accordingly.   Do not re-architect the design so the whole system (no matter how small) to be done in one night if there are multiple groups effected in the transition.   Design the impact to be as small as possible.   Yes, this may increase time – which in turn increases expense, but without proper planning it may cost you more in the long run.

Cost

The question that no likes asking or giving, what is your budget for this task.  You can wait for the consultant to make a cost estimate pitch first if you like – but at some point in the conversation cost is going to come up.   Do your homework ahead of time to see how much you expect it to cost and budget accordingly.   What are you going to do if things go over budget?  If your three quarters way through a project and haev no more money to finish it, how is that going to impact you?

In Closing

This may seem like a list of things that I want as a consultant.   These are however fairly common truths on what a consultant needs to start a project properly instead of spinning their wheels.   In the next week or so I’m going to follow this up with how to spot a good consultant versus a bad one.

]]> http://creeva.com/2009/02/10/things-you-should-be-able-before-to-answer-contacting-a-consultant/feed/ 3 http://creeva.com/2009/02/09/is-a-cash-based-society-more-anonymous-then-a-cashless-one/ http://creeva.com/2009/02/09/is-a-cash-based-society-more-anonymous-then-a-cashless-one/#comments Mon, 09 Feb 2009 18:52:19 +0000 Creeva http://creeva.com/?p=4190

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A little over ten years ago, before debit cards became ubiquitous and people cared more about having actual bits of paper for the monetary worth, I had a discussion with a friend about how the world would  eventually move to a cashless society.   I argued over the cost and extent of such a venture going forward.   He did have one good point in his argument – anonymity.

He believed due to corruption (or anything else you wish to argue for) that there would always be cash money to allow for citizens to have an anonymous usage of money in society.   I had several more arguments going against this back then, but I couldn’t truly get around the anonymity factor, especially with small unmarked bills.  I don’t believe the anonymity factor is going to last too much longer though.

Enter in RFID dust, this effectively will destroy anonymity in a cash based society.   The technology was developed as an anti-counterfeiting method.   With this knowledge in hand we can make some assumptions.  The first is that the dust can be used to verify the authenticity of the bills.   The second, when it is truly embedded in the bills and not sprinkled into batches of money – that the RFID will contain a serial that will match the serial number on the bill itself.

If the dollar can “beacon” the serial number, then how does it become anonymous.   In theory before you use any paper money you could microwave it, but eventually that will no longer work either.  The next argument would be that only the government has the readers – this would be a “for how long argument”.   Think of the theft and tracking of the flow of money analysis that could be gained solely on a research perspective.  I can see in 20-30 years as the technology becomes cheaper and centralized databases are more available – that this type of tracking could be the norm.

I’ve written about software currently that can track the flow of money, there is no reason we wouldn’t be able to see real time tracking of every single penny in circulation by utilizing this technology.   The only thing stopping it right now is cost, which will drop.

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A couple news sources are reporting today (here, here, and here) that the LA Times is suspending their program of using a wiki for editorials.   Now in a controlled environment like Wikipedia where they have the volunteers to handle un-authorized edits, wiki’s can be a great thing.   In the hands of exposing your edits to the audience of a major newspaper – I wouldn’t have gone that route.

What they were finding is that people would make their own slant on the editorials – such as changing the word abortion ot the word murder.  They also were inundated with spam and porn ads.   Sounds like they didn’t have the best idea on the onset of setting up a wiki or properly staffing what would be a high profile use of the technology.   This is technology that is meant to be changed and updated.   That ability alone has made some people suspect of Wikipedia.   Newspapers are dying out in America – but this example shows why such high profile companies can not hand the keys to the car to just everyone asking.   Citizen media has it’s place, but old media shouldn’t be attempting to tag it on without understanding hte consequences or the work involved in maintaining it.

I wonder if anyone got fired?

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Wired is reporting that Steve Job’s weight loss is due to a hormone issue.   Over the last week I’ve heard that Job’s  was going to be appointed by Obama.  I’ve heard Job’s was dead.  I’ve heard that apple won’t survive without him.   Really people, I appreciate what Job’s has done for the Industry.  I don’t care about breaking reports that the yogurt place he frequents has seen him recently.  I also think worrying about Job’s health is not a reason to sell your stock, since it would rebound even after his death.

/sigh

I’m into Mac rumors, but the this Job’s rumoring is just getting ridiculous.

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First of all this is just a thought on where things are headed.   As far as I know for the moment none of the loyalty cards I use have an RFID chip embedded in them.  I did sit and imagine what the stores could do with this information.   Currently the stores do take your loyalty card information and track what you purchase, give you targetted coupons, and create specials in towns to raise sales on certain objects within those towns.   We all like these cards, we all like to save a buck.   There are whole websites devoted to getting the most out of your income using loyalty cards.   What about when they take it to the next level. 

Currently companies (such as walmart) have been deploying RFID chips into their items to control shrinkage, allow better inventory control, and reduce stocking fees.   In the future I’m sure that there will be RFID sensors in every store shelf to allow quick notice when something needs to be restocked.   Only 2 canned peaches left onthe shelf, send out a stock boy to aisle 4.   Doritos are being sold at a rate of 6 per 15 minute interval – under current conditions they will need restocking in 38 minutes.   This kind of technology is possible and when the price drops it will become pratical. 

So a store as RFID trackers through out their whole store how else could they leverage these to increase profit margins?  Why tracking the customers of course.   By knowing what you don’t pick up, but you stop and consider, this could be invaluable.   Do you always stop and look at the same item and pass it up?  Do you buy it 10% of the time?  What price point do you commit to the item versus passing it up.   Currently they map optimum routes through the store and place sale items accordingly.   What if certain shoppers take non-optimum routes?  What items can we target to them?   What if this is you?   How much money are you willing to save by giving up the ability for corporations to intimately track you. 

This is just something I was thinking about and thought I would share.

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I thought the teens and pre-teens were the sounding board for tomorrows technology.   Well this isn’t always the case.   I previously mentioned talking with my brother over the weekend.   Well there is more to it then just the security post that came out of it.   He complained that he wasn’t getting confirmation e-mails for some of the web services he was using and he thought they may be getting caught by his spam filter.   I asked him which e-mail provider he was using.  He’s using his ISP…………..

I may be 32, but I have two brothers that are twins that are thirteen years old.   They have the fear of sharing their name online and everything else they will get over as they get older (or become completely paranoid and withdraw from the Internet entirely by the time they are 20).   They don’t however use web based e-mail.  I understand that they should be showing me what is new and interesting, so I expected Myspace or some such service for sending e-mails to friends.  Well they don’t, but part of that is that my 26 year old brother who sets up the web filtering for my dad frowns upon Myspace for that age group because of worrying about pedophiles I suppose (though a child is 99.9 more likely to be molested by a relative or immediate friend of the family instead of being attacked by an online predator).   My father and step-mother aren’t too hot on it either – they believe in the sunshine and dirt makes strong boys.   I’m more of the give me a book and a bed to lay on, or a laptop and a Gameboy with a bed to lay on type of guy.

They don’t however use web based e-mail – I haven’t used a strictly POP3 mail solution since college – so 14 years of using web based e-mail.  With the exception of corporate mail I can’t understand using it any other way.   Spam control is easier, you can access your e-mail from anywhere, you can archive your mail online without ever losing anything.  I started a series about computing in the clouds and even did one subject on web based e-mail.  The generation that comes after us (and the age difference is pretty much a generation) should have a more refined method of handling data.   It’s seems they choose to hamstring themselves then to learn and be more interactive.   That is not the case.

I have a sister that is pretty much from the mind set of using the computer as a utility or appliance.   It’s something that’s only slightly more interactive then a game system or television set.   I understand that mentality.   I figured however it was something that would end with my generation.  It seems not, the next generation at least in my family is not grasping and making tech work for them they are working for their technology.  What I mean by that is they put more effort into the computer then they need to, the computer should be a tool to make things faster and easier.   Not using it to the fullest extent you can and streamlining what you do is almost a shame.

My 26 year old brother and myself when we had our own computers kept pushing the line and seeing what we can do next.  He was twelve/thirteen when I went to college and he was running his own BBS.   He went the design and programming route.  I went the security and architecture route.   Both of us are very good at what we do in our own fields – at least we think so.  Though we have very little overlap since both of us view the other person as focusing on the wrong things.  The thirteen year olds don’t have the same in depth interaction with their computers.   Maybe this is a problem with growing up with computers their whole lives.   It’s not viewed with the same regard as it was for me and my next youngest brother.

It does give me some slight hope that the current twenty something and young thirty somethings are the height of the internet users while the rest of them stagnate and fully pushed the line.   But the youngest brothers have a few years to catch up and may do something with it yet, so I can’t fully discount them until the future arrives.

Now if they are reading this – go get a Gmail address and learn how to use it.   My father-in-law and mother-in-law have even moved to Gmail and it only took them a few minutes to learn it.

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I was wondering today what the car market will be like in 10 years once hybrids as used cars become more common then they are today.  I’m sure by that time the foundation technology that hybrids are built on will be rock solid, but what about from the used car perspective?

We are used to checking the brakes, transmission, and even how the engine sounds (I’m assuming if an all electric car is making any noise that’s a bad sign), but hybrids have some unique issues that need to be addressed.   The first being the computer.  The computer in a hybrid is much more complex then even the most advanced consumer sports car.  Regulating battery charges with the use of gasoline isn’t rocket science, but you can’t figure it out on an abacus either.   What sort of diagnostic tools will the average consumer need to check out the hybrid the guy is selling on the side of the road?

The other issue that is a larger problem then the computer that the consumer may or may not have input into, it’s the problem of the batteries.   How will consumers be able to verify the battery age?  How will they be able to verify that the battery are actually completely operational?  What if the batteries take charge but your total usage of them is about 10 miles per tank of gas?  If you are getting poor mileage because of the latter scenario would it even be a savings in gas?   Hybrids running off a gasoline only aren’t necessarily the efficient side of the equation, they receive their benefits from the batteries, the batteries aren’t up to snuff you will be using more gasoline then buying a normal gasoline powered small car (batteries aren’t light…yet).

I also would like to see batteries at Auto Zone or some such store so we can actually do maintenance and change the batteries ourselves.   Once this becomes the norm, maybe we’ll see User settings such as change the batteries every 60000 miles for optimum performance.   Until all the things are in place and the tools exist for a user to do a complete diagnostic (we need something similar to a checksum to verify that there has been no tampering or custom mods done to the car which may or may not cause issues) I’m not going to trust used hybrids.

Aren’t we suppose to make new technology more reliable and efficient?   There is still some gaping holes in the hybid deployment.

I’ve been working diligently like a good Google zealot and have slowly over the last couple months started migrating over to Google Docs.   The one thing that keeps tripping me up is the space they offer each document.  The space given is as follows:

So far I’m not hitting a barrier issue with Spreadsheets or Presentations (though I see hitting the presentation limit very soon) what I do have an issue with is the documents size and the PDF size.

The PDF support has just been added so I’ll give them a little slack on that, I think a good size in this web era would be 50 MB for PDF’s this should get you most any PDF around into your Google Docs size.  I have a couple PDF’s on my desktop that are close to 30 MB and being able to store them here would be a god send.   Until they do this won’t be my central PDF repository.

The document size though is really killing me, I have a ton of documents that are over 500k.  I have one detailing my home network that is almost 6 MB.   I think the documents need to be upped to 10MB.   that way the crazy bastards like me who use graphics and diagrams in their documents won’t have to worry about hitting this cap.

While we are on the subject though of Google Docs, why can’t there be better integration with G-Mail.  Theoretically it should be able to search through all my e-mail during a search and prompt me if I want to import this or that document into my Google Docs cache.

While Google has been great at adding new products over the years.  Even the ones that take off are nor properly maintained nor are they integrated with other related service soon enough.  Some of these products are around for years before proper integration takes place, when are they going ot be moving a little more away from 20% time for projects and focus whole teams on the integration side of the coin.

Anyways – /rant off.

]]> http://creeva.com/2008/06/19/google-docs-needs-to-up-the-size-limits/feed/ 7 http://creeva.com/2008/06/16/iron-key-product-review/ http://creeva.com/2008/06/16/iron-key-product-review/#comments Mon, 16 Jun 2008 14:19:55 +0000 Creeva http://creeva.com/?p=2868

I received an Iron Key unit to see evaluate and see how it would integrate into our environment.   I can say I was skeptical and didn’t think it would have amounted to much, encrypted flash drive that we’ve all seen from a dozen vendors.   I was not too worried about if there was an actual encryption chip on the device as much as functionality.  I had expected this device to perform as well as all the other devices in the same vein.  I was however, pleasantly surprised.

While I can say that for the most part this will work identically to other devices you may use that support encryption, the one thing that allows this to stand out is how it acts for user privileged access.  For a custom desktop setup we are working on it would not allow a user to have administrative access to the computer.  The lack of administrative access caused the software that came with our standard Lexar thumbdrives to not be able to work in encrypted software vault mode.   It code still do standard file encryption, but you wouldn’t be able to have an encrypted partition.

The Ironkey however worked just fine in this configuration.  It was able to decompress the data and look at the data as it was a normal partition.  Since this functionality is a must have it exceeded expectations.

Let’s take a look at the packaged software:

When you first insert the drive this is what you see.   You can notice that it creates two drive letters (E and F on my computer).  The first drive letter is unencrypted and only has the software unlocking program on it.   If you click on the second partition Windows asks you to put a disk in the drive.   So it’s not truly mounted nor readable.

After you run the software on the first partition, you can notice the second drive now states “IronKey Secure Files”.  At this point the partition is unencrytped and ready to read.

This is the first screen you see when you put in the flash drive (and you have auto-run enabled).   If you do not have auto-run enabled you can start this from the first partition.   The interface is straight forward and unassuming, perfect for someone like me.

After two wrong passwords this is the error message that pops up.  If the password is entered in ten times incorrectly the drive will be permenantly locked and the data will no longer be able to be retreived.

When you are successful with entering in your passphrase this is the interface the software presents.  You have four options from this screen.  The secure files option just brings up the encrypted partition, which is the same thing you can do by going to “My Computer”.   The secure backup allows you to make back-ups of your encrypted partition.   The settings option allows you to amek device changes.  Finally the lock drive option re-encrypts the contents and logs you out of the software taking you back to the first screen.

The first screen of the secure backup utility prompts you for the location of your Ironkey you wish to backup (I’m assuming this is in case you are using multiple Ironkey’s at once).   It also allows you choose the location to save teh backup to.

The second secure backup screen is as unassuming as the first.   It allows you to browse to the back-up and restore it directly to your IronKey that you have plugged in.

I can say, when I open a settings screen I would have thought there would have been more options then this.  The first preference on give you the option reformat the drive.

The lost and found screen allows you to display a simple message that pops up on the unecrypted login.  If some soul find your drive they can then send it back to you.  The real question is if they will burn through the ten password attempts before they do.

The last option is solely for changing the passphrase that you use to unlock your Ironkey stick.  It is simple and precise.

If you need a device that allows full encryption and that is functional when you do not have administrative access to the computer it’s used on this is it.   I will say I’m not too happy that they haven’t the OSX or Linux clients that they have been working on, but they state on their site that they will be forthcoming.

If your interested in picking one up from Amazon here are some links for you:

IronKey 1GB Secure Hardware-Encrypted Flash Drive

IronKey 2GB Secure Hardware-Encrypted Flash Drive

IronKey 4GB Secure Hardware-Encrypted Flash Drive

Picture taken from here

Introduction

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E-mail in the clouds.   Essentially back in 1996 when Hotmail was first released (in the pre-purchased by Microsoft era) the dawn of popular cloud computing for e-mail began.   The main issue was storage space.  I believe that Hotmail launched with 5 megs of storage space for all of your e-mail.   It is frustrating to know all the e-mail that’s been lost over the years due to inadequate storage space.   I now have single pictures in my email archive that are larger then 5 megs.   Times change and space get’s cheap.

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When Google released Gmail into the wild it was a game changer.  By offering 1GB of storage space it made it seem that you literally could keep your e-mail forever.   Other providers such as Hotmail and Yahoo were maxing out at 25 MB at the time, this seemed ridiculous in comparison.

Currently Gmail supports almost 7 GB of storage space and Hotmail and Yahoo went to “unlimited”.  I consolidate almost all of my e-mail to Gmail.

Data Types

To utilize e-mail storage you can attach any (supported) file and keep it in your mailbox.

Data Security

While you have to rely on a username and password to access your e-mail as the security barrier entry, if you want true protection from snooping it is suggested that you either get a web plugin that allows you to do encryption with Gmail, or keep your private messages encrypted and use them with an offline client.

Data Redundancy

Since you can forward e-mail from Gmail, I have it configured to forward all incoming mail to both my Yahoo Mail account and my Hotmail account.  If for some reason GMail loses my data or in the unlikely event Google goes out of business I’ll still be able to access my e-mail messages.

It is recommended that you keep an offline backup of your mail messages so they can be accessible while being off the grid.

Data Accessibility

With Gmail offering accessing via a rich web interface, a basic web interface, a mobile web interface, POP3, SMTP, and IMAP; it seems unlikely that you are going to find an Internet device that can not access it in some way or fashion.

Conclusion

This is the e-mail scenario that works for me.  Since encryption really isn’t ubiquitous across the board I don’t use it like I should.   Beyond that this scenario is highly redundant and should allow you operate from anywhere with a network connection without worrying about losing your data.

Previous entries in the Living in the Clouds Series:

Living In The Clouds Part 1 – Introduction To Cloud Computing

]]> http://creeva.com/2008/06/11/living-in-the-clouds-part-2-e-mail/feed/ 0 http://creeva.com/2008/06/09/rss-crosspost/ http://creeva.com/2008/06/09/rss-crosspost/#comments Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:18:36 +0000 Creeva http://creeva.com/?p=2829

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RSS, I love RSS.   RSS makes crossposting easy.   It also allows me to read all of my news in Google Reader instead of jumping to 50 different sites that I used to visit once a day.  RSS allows users to subscribe to your site and read them where they want to, this may be good or bad based on your advertising style.  If you are like me and don’t really make a dime on your blog, then it doesn’t really matter.

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I use feedburner as a choke point for every web service that has an RSS feed (and I’m a member).   This allows me a couple things, the first is I can easily remember all the web services I sign up for.  The second thing is I have feeds that I can automatically plugin to lifestreaming services that don’t support the sites I use natively.

Through RSS I cross post my blog to Tumblr, Profilactic, Friendfeed, Suprglu, and any other life service I come across (just search for Creeva as the username).   Now At this point I’ve made feedburner to do all the heavy lifting and bandwidth intensive work for feed readers.  I even use my feed (a filtered version) to post notifications to Twitter when I have a new story published using the Twitterfeed service.

The other key thing to remember with RSS is when we get to the widget space.   Some sites don’t have an option for crossposting, they are completely locked.   You can however (in some cases) place a widget in your profile on these sites.  More times then not you can manage to place an RSS widget.  An RSS widget shows your current RSS feed items and allows you to place them on these profiles that otherwise have locked data.

With wordpress there is a plugin called feedwordpress that aggregates feeds and publishes them as items on your blog.   They keep trying to make this plugin better, but I can tell you it doesn’t seem ready for prime time yet.  I’ve tried every trick imaginable and I always end up receiving duplicate entries in my main blog.   Because of that I don’t use feedwordpress anymore, I may try in the future.  This would lead to the ultimate life caching solution, by allowing my blog to pull in all the data I generate everywhere else, and then crosspost it to all my friends across the web.  Unfortunately it’s a pipedream at this moment.

Now click the logo to subscribe to Creeva’s World 2.0:

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In the next part of our crossposting god series we are going to cover services that allow you to publish by e-mail.

Previous Entries in The Crossposting God Series:

The Crossposting God Series Part 1 – The Introduction

The Crossposting God Series Part 2 – Vox

The Crossposting God Series Part 3 – Live Journal and Derivative Sites

The Crossposting God Series Part 4 – Entry, Distribution, and End Points

The Crossposting God Series Part 5 – Myspace

Picture from here by Pablo Defendi

Thursday I started and finished Cory Doctorow‘s latest novel “Little Brother“.  I had been meaning to read this since it came out, I had it downloaded from his site (he gives it away for free in digital form) shortly after it was released but had put off actually reading it.   Ironically I had managed to score a print of the above artwork from Pablo Defendi a little over a week ago.  So this helped up the ante of time before I was going ot read the novel.

If you had read Cory Doctorow in the past (my previous favorite being “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom“), you should know a little bit about him.  He is big on personal rights, anti DRM, and huge on technology.   This comes out massively in this novel.   The idea is that the world has faced another terrorist attack and everyone is suspect, a group of teenagers start sticking it to the department of homeland security which has overstepped it’s bounds.   While the ubuiquitous use of the technology in the novel is not yet a reality, from anything that he did in within in the novel, nothing was out of the realm of 2-5 years.

While I’m not going to give you a full review of the novel (cause I’m just a guy with a blog), what I am going to relate is what this has accomplished.  First and foremost “Little Brother” is the first novel to to make it on the New York Times bestseller list that has also been released with a creative commons license.  This means anyone can publish the book on their site and give it away, completely free and completley legal.  The second thing is this novel has secured a sale to me.  This week I plan on ordering 2-3 copies of “Little Brother” from Amazon.com; one to keep (and try to get signed), one to give as a gift, and one that I will use as my loaner novel.  The third and final thing is that I have my mother-in-law agreed to read it (though the print version is going to be easier to navigate for her then a digital copy).

After reading the novel I had a discussion about the novel with my mother in law.  Part of the problem that’s she has always had is that she never understood the legal system and governments powers that have been given in the last seven years and how they pertain to her.  She’s been one of those people that state they have done nothing wrong, so the government would never peer into her life.  I explained how this is wrong and how this book can show what soon would be possible.   She thought using cash would keep her anonymous, I explained that with trend tracking stores like wal-mart can tell their customers apart by the items they purchase, even if they are using cash.  People like my in-laws do all their shopping on one day a week, they go to the same stores in the same order in about the same times every week.   Once at these stores they buy certain things every week.   I explained how if the stores were plugged into a government agency that even using cash would not keep them anonymous.   The stores could aggregate the data, get customer profiles, go over weeks of data and see certain flags that identify the person, and one video camera which goes through facial recognition software would put them forever into a database.  She thought that this was fantasy until I started mentioning Wal-Mart’s trend analysis that they do, and how this is pretty accurate portrayal of who you are and what you are likely to buy.   This allowed me to convince her to give this book a chance.

To pick up your own copy of “Little Brother” you can get it here from Amazon.com or download it from this site.

I would also recommend to watch Pablo Defendi’s site to purchase the above print when he finishes his full run.

Finally check out the ParanoidLinux Distribution inspired by the book.

Picture taken from here

Yesterday I couldn’t find my N810.  The hunt started on Sunday night and was reinitiated yesterday morning.   No N810, nowhere in sight.   As the night waned on yesterday I renew the hunt.  It was like I was looking for the great pumpkin Charlie Brown. Eventually it was found where you always expect ot find these things, behind a cushion on the couch.

This device (even when I don’t use it) has become so integral to my daily life that I flipped out more over that missing then I have or missing a wallet or cell phone for an extended period.   It may be the cost of the device, but I think it’s more the functionality and freedom it gives me (I’m sure it didn’t help that I was in the middle of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother E-Book).

It’s strange since i could go for weeks without seeing my ipod or my Palm TX, two things that this has replaced.   Now it’s working on becoming the extension of myself that fills the gap when I’m away from a laptop or computer.

I’m quite happy with it.

Picture from here

Myspace.

Myspace.

OK, I’ve repeated it a couple times I think I’m ready to actually talk about it.  Unlike some other services where I explain the community and the functions, I’m going to refrain from doing that for Myspace.  While I do have a myspace account, I won’t say that I truly like Myspace.   I haven’t even bothered to give myself the uber l33t cool profile page.   It’s a thing, not a good thing, not really a cool thing, just a thing.

So if I’m so “meh” towards Myspace why do I post there?  Because unfortunately some of my friends haven’t seen the light and still utilize the server.   I keep in touch with old gaming friends there especially, so I feel I want to broadcast my information there as much as I do anywhere else.   I’ll tell you what though, it isn’t easy.   Myspace may proclaim new found openness, yet getting information into Myspace without using their tools is a pain in the butt.

There are three things you can do remotely to update Myspace and keep your friends up to date on you.

• RSS Widget
• Status Updates
• Blog Posts

RSS Widgets:

For any site that allows you to place a widget into your profile, and does not allow you any remote options to any other functions, RSS widgets allow you to bypass the whole “you can’t put our data in our service unless you use our tools” wall.   While Myspace is getting better, it still wants you to play with it’s tools.

If you do a search for RSS widget “Service Name” in Google you shuold be able to pick and choose the one that is right for you.   By editing your Myspace profile and putting your embed code into your profile, you should be able to display the news feed you want right there on your profile page.

While this is all fine and dandy it doesn’t really cover what a crossposting god wants to accomplish, so let’s move onto some of the other options.

Status Updates:

Your status updates, the “I’m in my room crying cause Kurt Cobain is still dead” status updates that you use on Myspace if your an aging emo kid, these can be done remotely.   By utilizing service such as Ping.fm and Hellotxt you can update this via instant messenger or my choice, my Twitter account, without ever logging in.

You can do this by creating an account on Hellotxt or Ping.fm and they will give you an email address in which you can notify them of your current status.   We’ve discussed on ways to utilize e-mail notifications for use with other services, now you know the gateway to updating your Myspace status message.

Blog Posts:

Blog posts are the final achievement of the crossposting god when it comes to Myspace, unfortunately I only have a solution for WordPress users.  There is a plugin called MySpace Crossposter that will send your post over to your Myspace blog when it receives a publish event notification.  To get some of the information in configuring this plugin (it’s one of the most pain in the butt) you will have to open up your wp-config.php file to get the accurate information.

The options to program this plugin are as follows:

Database Settings:

These options will be automatically configured in future versions of the plugin. Most of the data is available in your wp-config.php file if you need to reference it.

• DATABASE HOSTNAME: URL of your database host. NOTE: there is no “http://” before this server name
• DATABASE NAME: Name of your WordPress database
• “POST” TABLE NAME: Only change if your wp_posts table has a different name… Most users need not change this variable.
• “META” TABLE NAME: Only change if your wp_postmeta table has a different name… Most users need not change this variable.
• DB USERNAME: Username for the database
• DB PASSWORD:Password for the database

Blog Information:

These options will be automatically configured in future versions of the plugin.

• BLOG URL:URL for your blog, complete with http://
• BLOG NAME: Name of your blog, as you’d like it to appear on your MySpace post.  Please note that it seems to have a problem with non alphanumeric characters, using them can cause some strange results.  I had to configure it to be “Creevas World” instead of “Creeva’s World 2.0″, your mileage may vary.

Myspace Login Credentials:

Without these, you won’t be able to crosspost.

• MYSPACE USERNAME:Your MySpace username – usually your email address.
• MYSPACE PASSWORD:Your MySpace password.

Post style:

Choose “notification” or “full story”.

• POST STYLE: n = Notification Style *recommended* (will drive traffic to your external blog) w = Whole Blog Entry (formatting may be lost in translation)

Because of longer posts like this one won’t show up in the myspace blog I just have it setup to post a notification of a new blog post, this also allows me to see how often I get hits from my Myspace blog (not often I’ve either unloved or uninteresting).

If you have further questions on making this all work together, please drop a comment below.  The next chapter in the crossposting god series is going to be on RSS feeds and making them work for you in broadcasting your information across the blogosphere in a controlled manner.

Picture from here

Previous Entries in The Crossposting God Series:

The Crossposting God Series Part 1 – The Introduction

The Crossposting God Series Part 2 – Vox

The Crossposting God Series Part 3 – Live Journal and Derivative Sites

The Crossposting God Series Part 4 – Entry, Distribution, and End Points

So most you know that I was running Ubuntu Hardy Heron, but during some patching I hit some data corruption that caused my laptop to go all screwy.  The first thing I noticed was the touchpad stopped working.   Um….ok.   Then I was getting errors on boot up, more or less when I logged in some packages kept crashing and wouldn’t restart.   Upon trying to fix and reinstall packages I managed to loose gnome and then I couldn’t do anything.

I did manage to get into the laptop last night with a Hardy Heron live DVD, after getting i I setup an FTP server and managed to save everything I cared about in my home directory.  With this migration and the thought that I’m going to have to reinstall Linux anyways (yes I could sit down for more hours and repair the ubuntu installation, but I’m originally a windows guy I’ve saved my data it’s quicker at this point to format/reinstall),  that I would try to get OSX working on my laptop.   I have heard with the Intel GMA video driver there is some mouse artifact issues, but I didn’t notice any problems when I booted up the install DVD (this was when I was trying to decide my course of action and before I saved the data).  Since I’ve read that the wifi works now, and the toushpad and audio should work, I don’t really give a care to the fact that the built in web cam might not work.

I’ve been using my work Mac Air most the time at home and figured it is time to take a plunge to try to go more OSX based.  I’m going to try to dual boot between OSX and Ubuntu, but I think that’s mostly to stick around for gnome conduit since that’s the only unique app worth me sticking around for.   I do have it running on my n810 and I’ll still have linux on there, so I’m it’s not like I’m running.  It’s like I’m experimenting around.

So after I’m done I’ll let you know how successful I am.

A friend and I had a discussion about old technology disappearing and what gets lost in the migration.   He put forth of the example of the CD single.   I stated that the CD single was still around, he stated that it had completely disappeared.   We were both right and wrong.

He wanted to take me up to the challenge on if they still existed.   My problem is that I chose the wrong store.   We were at the mall following this discussion and went into a Fye Store.   After browsing (and I had almost forgotten about the previous discussion) my friend asked the sales lady if they had any CD singles.   She stated they were no longer made since the Internet destroyed that market.   I pointed out some recent bands that released singles and she just kind of shrugged and wandered away.

Score one for him.

What I should have done is gone to the record exchange which deals more in specialized markets and not bulk selling fluff.    I’ll concede greatly that the CD single is no longer a mass purchased item (I never purchased one in my life since singles back in the day were half the cost of a full CD).  I won’t concede that they are disappearing just yet.   I have argued with others before that media will all become digitally distributed.   Physical media will disappear as the main stream item and move into the arena of niche collectors.  Digital media will become the de facto standard once broadband is ubiquitous across the nation.

The problem with the previous statement is that we currently live in a society that has niche collectors and broadband is not ubiquitous.  The people in middle america that has last mile broadband issues do not buy their music on itunes any more then they stream their video on hulu.  If I’m a huge Weezer fan, I want that b-side track.   These things will drive the single market steadily for at leas the next few years.

Searching Amazon there are a ton of CD singles announced and not yet released.   This covers those markets, granted it’s more for the specialized collectors at that point over the itunes barrier, but plenty of people will still purchase them at their local store.  I do wonder if the price has dropped though?

CD singles won’t exist forever, but I’m fairly positive they will hang on as long as CD’s do.   The question is which will disappear first, the compact disc or the modem?  That is an interesting technological discussion.  If you ask me though, I think the compact disc will die first.

At work I just overheard one lady telling another guy to get in the twenty-first century and get cable.   Now it just maybe me, but in my mind cable is very twentieth century technology.   Sure they can gussy it up and take it out to the party by saying “BUT IT’S NOW IN HD!!!!” but cable is still showing it’s age.

If I had to choose what is solidly 21st century technology I wuold say Internet streaming, barring that for mainstream america that doesn’t have access to broadband, satelite technology.   When the last mile issue with broadband is finally addressed and teaken care of streaming media will definetly come to be the norm.    Satelite and cable companies are already overly compressing HD signals to try to squeeze more information into the pipes (air waves) that they distribute across.   People don’t like this as is, so on demand streaming is the solution for this.   You are not going ot be using the same bandwidth, because you’ll stream 1-2 stations into your hous, unlike cable where they are blasting every channel at once and you choose which to watch.   Though streaming is more efficeint and technically uses last bandwdith, it is also take more technology and effort to implement – the old catch 22.

Regardless of what you believe on how media distribution will occur going forward, you have to agree that subscribing to cable can not be considered “getting in the twenty-first century”

Going further into my reviews of kiosk systems we acquired the Surferquest system here at work.   Unlike my piece on SteadyState I’m not going to have a bunch of screen shots to show you this time.   However I will give you my analysis and what I’ve found out.

The Surferquest system is an off the shelf software with minimal customization.  We ordered an evaluation unit and I was tasked to try it out.   I can say for our needs as a company that requires centralized management and control of machines in our environment that the Surferquest system was not quite a correct fit for us.

In our environment we don’t normally place a machine on our network until it is fully tested and verified secure, but this product is pretty much useless until it has a network connection.   I had to contact support and they gave me an unlock code that would allow me to make changes to installed software.  The unlock code lasted only 24 hours, but they sent me a utility later on that would allow me generate unlock codes for myself.

Almost all of the customization that can be done is performed remotely by Surferquest.  This means if there is a major application change that needs to be completed you need to contact them.   Do you wish to customization your login screen?  You must contact them or upload the images to their server.    You can not perform these changes locally on the box or locally within your environment.  Wish to change the active desktop they used?  Same steps apply as changing the login screen.

Restrictions applied to the software:

Disable Windows Updates
Remove from Start Menu:
My Music
My Pictures
Favorites
Recent Documents
Frequently Used Programs
Recent Network Docs
Network Places
Help
Run
My Documents
Configure Programs
Disable Windows Keys
Lock Taskbar
Disable Control Panel
Disable Balloon Tips
Remove OEM Link
Disable Task Manager
Disable Registry
Disable Find Files with F3 in Explorer
Prevents Control Panel, Printers, and Network and Dial-up Connections from running, and removes the corresponding menu items.
Removes Shut Down from the Start menu and disables the Shut Down button in the Windows Security dialog box.
Disable System Restore
Clears Recent Documents on Exit
Disable access to Recent Network Documents
CTRL key disabled

As you can see, though they use a different product to achieve the same goal, it has similar technology to the Microsoft Steadystate product I reviewed in part 3.

You can put the software within you domain, but the software will still be phoning home to the Surferquest company. While I’m positive that there is nothing sensitive being pushed across, like any company that you would have do remote assistance make sure you trust them in case of any possible data leakage.  The official answer is that it only sends out IP address information and the last time connected.  You can view this information on the stat web page they provide you

If the drive in the unit should fail or there is a hardware issue in need of support, no software is supplied.   You must receive new hardware from the vendor and return your old unit.  They state that turn around time is usually 24 hours.   Any remote management or patching must be performed by the vendor and is done via remote monitoring software that they have access to.    The software is caused Netsupport and it sneaks out your firewall on port 22 – now all you admins that left it open for SSH can feel silly (actually that’s how the firewall support team snuck out the corporate firewall there and back to their home computers when I worked at Symantec on that team).

Quick Notes

• Idle timeouts can be configured, but they default at 10 minutes.
• They use the Deep Freeze product to maintain their disk image
• When we received the unit PXE booting was enabled (and we didn’t have a BIOS password – they stated this was a mistake)
• The unit we received had PowerDVD installed, ironically no DVD drive (another oversight they admit)
• Unlock Steadystate there is no method for restricting USB drive usage

Box the unit shipped in

Front of the unit

Top of the unit

Rear of the unit

If you deploying this in your environment you need to make certain you can accept the security and loss of control you have over this unit compared to other machine in your environment.   I see this fitting more in the public space kiosk scenarios suchs as libraries or hotels.   Because they do lack the centralized control that you would normally deploy in corporate environments I say give this one a pass or at least look hard at what you are trying to accomplish.   For the public space this is a great product, extremely low maintenance, the ability to monetize but charging a fee (customized through the stat page),  and extremely well versed and fast techinical support.   If you want to deploy an Internet Cafe in your area this is the product for you.

The Kiosk Series:

The Kiosk Series – Part One – Choices For Your Environment

The Kiosk Series – Part Two – Management Considerations For Your Environment

The Kiosk Series – Part Three – Microsoft SteadyState vs Group Policies

I would like to preface that I work at a place which is known for it’s high technology.    This brings up the irony of what is happening.    I logged in and found a site that I wanted to bookmark, since I’m at my work computer and may actually want to look at it outside of work I attempted to save it to my del.icio.us account.   I hit the bookmarklet and BAM – you are not authorized to view this page, this is a social network / dating site.   What the hell?  It worked last week.

I grunted and figured if I really must I could use the google firefox plugin to replicate my bookmarks.   It’s not really that important to me, and I can just email myself the link and save it later.   It doesn’t change the functionality that is missing.   I agree that del.icio.us is a social network, but not in the same vein that myspace is.   I use del.icio.us to actually do work and search tags.  If I was just going to browse something to waste time I would just go to wikipedia.

Later in the day I was using google reader to go through my RSS items and there was a digg story I was curious on.   I clicked the link and BAM – again YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED SOCIAL NETWORK/DATING SITE.  Now someone most really have their panties in a bunch today.   A couple times a week I’ll run up against a blog or something that triggers the filter, but not del.icio.us or digg.    From a social standpoint, other then your friends can see what stories you are “digging” it isn’t a really social place.   at least not so much more then the slashdot forums.

Ironically I didn’t try reddit or stumble upon today.   I wonder if those get tagged under the same heading digg does?   I would say I would be screwed if they blocked gmail at work, but I could just tether a PDA or N810 to my cell phone and problem solved.   I use gmail for twitter, my rare IM conversation, and of course email.    As long as I have a method to send out email I can still blog and tweet (though I think IM would be dead – but i think I use it less then anyone else at work).

So to all your overzealous web filters out there – a very very small percentage of users are actually hanging out and wasting time socializing with their friends on digg or del.icio.us, we are not chatting the day away.   We are reading and researching.   To those blockers I have one thing to say – I hate you.