Spent a lot of time sorting into circles and discovering G+

Spent I don't how much freakin' time and given up I don't know how many hours of sleep sorting and organizing profiles into G+ circles. Why you ask? Well I had done a lot of this when I was initially setting up Buzz, back when I was guessing that Google were going to use Contacts as the foundation for users to filter and sort out their streams. That of course never happened, but when I fired up G+ for the first time, most of those contacts were listed for me as well as (which I realized later) a great many more who had already added me to their circles. In my innocence (or ignorance in looking for an easy way out..;)..) I initially just selected all of them and added them to a single circle, seeing after the fact that there were 450 of them!

At that point I guess I could have just removed them all, but I made the fatal time sinking mistake of starting to sort them and then getting sucked right in! Although it has taken an insane amount of time, and something I know almost all my RL contacts and the average joe would never do, I've managed to go through over half of them now and sort them into interests.

Was this a waste of time? I don't think so. When these social networks open, we often do an initial scouring for contact frenzy, add a slew of contacts and gradually drift into a normalcy within the initial circles we discovered. It's not often we go on another discovery phase because it simply takes way too much time. So this move to Google+, and accidental addition of everyone in my initial contact & suggestion list allowed me to do another shake up of my contacts and discover a whole bunch of very interesting and dynamic profiles I would never have discovered otherwise.

However the following questions still remain:

• How am I going to fit this into my information gathering workflow along with GReader, Facebook & Twitter?
• How much noise and redundancy will quite likely exist between the posts I currently read on these other platforms and G+? As a start, I think I'd like to ditch Twitter, but there are a number of contacts I would need to see ported over to G+ before that happens; and G+ is still early early days.
• I really need Google to merge Buzz with G+ and get that API firing on all cylinders so some of my third party apps can bring G+ into the fold, along with some options for including GReader....although maybe that link needs some serious restructuring to avoid the obvious redundancy that will occur.
• Do I still keep a personal & professional google account for social interaction? I am an instructor and therefore need to be very conscious of my digital footprint. However, there are often very interesting posts that are of personal interest that I would love to interact with, but may not be quite appropriate (although not significantly damaging either) for some of my students or work colleagues to be privy to. Are circles enough to maintain this separation? I still don't think so.
• Of course can't leave out the very common complaint about having better control and managing posts with huge numbers of comments. It really would be awesome to have the option of limiting the view/notifications of future comments to just people in your circles.

Anyway, I'm gonna still be playing with this product significantly for the next few weeks and am looking forward to watching the constant evolution of this product over the next few months.

Finally figured out my QNAP problem!!!

I've been dealing with a sporadic boot problem with my QNAP 859 pro for about 6 mo now. I've been on and off with support as I've found time to try and address this problem. Even returned the unit and had the motherboard replaced. However I think we finally tracked down the problem with this last attempt! A memory problem!

I had to load up TeamViewer so the QNAP support team could access the NAS from my machine and emulate the problem where any type of sustained transfer of data caused the QNAP to reboot. The support guy ssh'd into the QNAP box and uploaded a utility called mem_stress. He then fired it up and voila!, the QNAP rebooted after 2 mins. I did it myself two more times and the box rebooted after 19s and then 6mins respectively. So it appears as though this is the culprit! Anyway, I'm in the process of returning the unit for a second tune. It'll be so good to have this unit actually functioning and in production.

On another note, TeamViewer worked really well! No port-forwarding or advanced setup required. Just install, enable full access and anyone with the session ID can connect to the machine. There are a multitude of settings to customize what can and can't be accessed as well as allowing a VPN connection. I'll have to play with this a little more as it may just work perfectly when I need to help out a friend in need.

Buzz ain't gonna fly.....

OK....I think I'm gonna have to admit it, Buzz just ain't gonna make it.

Twitter & Linked-in have taken the professional social circles of the masses by storm leaving Buzz a poor and almost still-born orphan . If you don't believe me just take a look at who has followed you (either through GReader or Buzz as they are joined at the hip) over the past little while and you'll get the idea: marketers and spammers from the backside of the Internet. Not that I've actually used Buzz to any effect, but it's still sad to have watched Google go nowhere with their social networking attempts. However I'm still gonna take full advantage of the great conversation layer it has brought to us niche Google Reader users!

I would kill my Buzz feed right now if I had another option for bringing a conversation layer to my twitter posts. As it stands I post from Buzz to Twitter, so if someone from Twitter wants a threaded conversation about one of my tweets then we can do it within Buzz. Well, that was the intention, but I bet in the 8 months that I've been doing this I can probably count on one hand how many times it has actually happened. The conversation has always occured on the cross-posts to Twitter, Linked-in or Facebook. Even though it's like pulling teeth, Tweeps comment on Tweets within Twitter. Since I'm a big user of GReader I've even got to the point where Twitter has enough interesting and unique content for me that GReader has become my Twitter reader interface.

I'm almost certain that the visionaries within Google have conceded defeat (or are in total denial) in building their own connected demographic for the masses. However they are a smart company and must recognize where they can still make an entrance. They have made some incredible gains in penetration with their individual apps and therefore adding a unified social layer to connect users of these apps may provide a sort of social "sharepoint" type of collaborative opportunity for apps users. If this is where they are going I look forward to seeing the result.

The connected demographic and communities may have been snagged by Facebook, Linked-in and Twitter, however google still have lots of opportunity to plug into these feeds with their apps; we've seen this with the Twitter integration into Google News. In my opinion this is a brilliant move that has all kinds of potential.

OneNote Sync’ing on Office Live on Skydrive

Over the last year I’ve increasingly found myself working at multiple computers. Therefore I’ve been trying to find ways of utilizing the cloud or synchronization software to allow me to access my work from anywhere without losing the flexibility usually associated with local access to the data.

For the most part this has involved utilizing live mesh to synchronize important and commonly updated folders, MS Exchange for mail/tasks/calendar, and SyncBackPro for backing up my data files. However one of the my other tasks has been to manage my OneNote access and share notebooks between machines.

Up to now I’ve simply put a folder on a server and used OneNote to synchronize locally whenever it was in contact with the server. However that server is at home for my personal OneNote notebooks and at work for my professional notebooks. Unfortunately, I have machines at both work and home that need access to both.

The other option to access my OneNote folders across machines was to synchronize them across the cloud using LiveMesh. I didn’t try it and don’t really know if there is a disadvantage to this as opposed to relying on OneNote doing the synchronization.

Now that Wave 4 of Windows Live Essentials is upon us with Live Mesh being integrated with Live Sync, Officelive.com being integrated with Office on SkyDrive, and OneNote being offered as a WebApp, I thought I’d take a look at how best to utilize these tools to sync my OneNote Folders.

Once logged into Office Live I opened the New menu and noticed the option for creating a OneNote notebook directly within my SkyDrive.

After creating a OneNote notebook, I then saw the option in the top right hand corner for opening the notebook in OneNote on the local machine.

I clicked on this option and after a dialog box warned me of opening a potentially harmful document, the notebook opened locally and my local OneNote app appeared to cache a copy. It proceeded to synchronize it with the web in the same way as some of my other notebooks synchronize with my local servers, so any changes I made locally would appear on the SkyDrive as well.

I was then free to copy over an existing set of sections and pages from a local Notebook into my sync’d SkyDrive notebook. I had a small hiccup during the sync of a particularly large set of pages, but it sync’d without error the second time. I tried just copying a local notebook to my SkyDrive and opening up the notebook in the OneNote WebApp, but it wouldn’t recognize it, so I’m assuming that the notebook has to be created by the WebApp first.

I’m not sure if this will be a more or less stable option than just synchronizing the local notebook with Livesync, but the advantage of this approach is that I can now open the same OneNote workbook directly on the web, and avoid dipping into the 2GB limit of my livesync cloud capacity.

Getting ready for next year…

My June's usually aren't this busy, but taking over as Chair, dealing with accreditation, hiring a tech, organizing 8 years worth of clutter, and trying to make sure we are all ready for next year has kept me and the rest of the dept hopping all month. Can't wait to take a break, but we still have quite a few things that have to get done by the end of June.

Our dept has spent the last few weeks standardizing on Course Outcomes and outlines across the program, establishing a common file structure for all the courses, creating a team task list and team calendar, standardizing on a course calendar structure and organizing the labs. In between all the admin stuff we’ve been juggling, this has probably been one of the most productive post-semester periods we have ever had, but also busiest.

Our program is now full and the applications are piling up. Not sure if it is all the EI running out or our program getting a name for itself; maybe it’s a combination of the two! However it means we are going to be pushing out a very healthy number of graduates for the next couple of years. The low enrollment over the past couple of years has allowed most of our graduates to meet great success with their employment, so now those numbers are doubling it’ll be interesting to see how those stats play out.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to things calming down a little for the summer so I can focus on little on some PD. Unfortunately September has an uncanny way of creeping up on you extremely quickly!

Thoughts on Zuck’s F8 Keynote

A couple of notes about the @f8 keynote from Zuck. He's still a very awkward public speaker. I think if he were to simply acknowledge that fact to everyone and make a joke about it, he could probably relax a little.

• I like the integration of the open social graph Zuck referred to, but I don't like that it is on a non-standard platform...


• Facebook is going to have a an optional Social bar available to site administrators that goes at the bottom of any site--contains the chat popup, list of friends, activity stream, etc. Keeps the social system going while you are on the 3rd party site with the open graph protocol and api. ....a little frightening just how pervasive FB has become.


• Looks like FB are doing a pubsubhubub equivalent.....


• Integration with Docs.com and Facebook ….I guess socialites always wanted the social graph integrated across the web. The next question is how comfortable we all are with Facebook owning that graph.


• Felt weird watching Bret Taylor standing up on stage representing Facebook instead of Friendfeed. I don't think I had fully absorbed the fact that he had moved over to facebook until that moment....

So what to make of all these changes? I’m kind of stuck between awe and worry.

Awe, because Facebook really are on the cusp of embedding themselves in just about every major site on the net, allowing users to seemlessly connect with their social graph without actually leaving the site. They will become a middle layer.

However I’m worried because the social graph is being centralized on facebook. The social graph should be a decentralized structure. I should be able to cut facebook out of my social circle but not loose my social graph. I know that seems impossible, but it really shouldn’t be. Not sure how this would be implemented, as there still needs to be some sort of central repository for our connected graph. But what I want is the ability to control where that repository is stored.

Could some sort of universal social id that is registered like a domain name or phone number work? Is that too Big Brotherish? There could be a way to update your social id record with the list of social ids you’d wish to follow like we do on Twitter, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft or any social network. Really it’s about standardizing the friendlist and giving us ownership over that list instead of depending on one particular company; in this case Facebook.

I would say the majority of users on the internet currently have an account with either Google, Facebook, or Microsoft. These guys need to get together and find some sort of federated control of who you follow across all the networks and allow you the granularity to control who gets what information based on interest, personal, business etc.. If that weren’t difficult enough, it also has be simple enough so you don’t have to be a programmer to control your privacy settings and accidentally publish a picture from a party to all your professional contacts.

Unfortunately when you take a step back you realize this is asking facebook the equivalent of asking the telco carriers to give up the last mile into everyone’s home and simply share it with the competition so us users can benefit from a more competitive environment. …pffff….that won’t be happening any time soon.

At the moment, I think the only other company that has a hope of competing for that same social graph is Google; unfortunately they are way way behind; maybe too far behind.

Installing a new QNAP TS559 PRO NAS – An Unpleasant Experience.

On Friday night, I threw 6 2TB drives into a QNAP NAS configured as RAID 6. Since then I've lost connectivity to the box a couple of times (which may have been caused by some load balancing and jumbo frame settings I played around with) and reset the unit twice. I reset the box cause I had no way of knowing exactly what it was doing until I could get access to it again, and after leaving it for 8 or 9 hours on both occasions, things just didn't look right. I managed to get to the web interface each time the box was rebooted and although the RAID 6 Volume was still there it was usually trying to simply re-build or re-synchronize. I had plugged in a console and saw the bootup process squawk about not having access to a formatted volume to start a couple of the services, so after the third reset I went straight in and formatted the volume, even though it was in the process of rebuilding. I couldn't see how this would make a difference, but it couldn't hurt. That was last night around 11:30pm. It's now midday and I still have access to the box and the lights are all flashing at a reasonable rate (as opposed to one occasion where four stayed lit, and the other two were flashing extremely quickly. The Disk volume manager says it is in the process of rebuilding and is at 13%, with a percentage increase every 10 minutes or so. That means it's probably been rebuilding for a couple of hours. I have no idea what was going on for the previous 10 hours. Maybe the formatting took a an hour or so followed by a resynchronization of some sort.

So this really had me hesitating on whether going with RAID 6 was a good choice, as my initial choice was a RAID10. I had stumbled across a very detailed testing of the QNAP TS509 using the Intel NAS Performance Kit. From what I could see, the performance hit of RAID5 over RAID0 didn't seem that bad, and the same from RAID5 to RAID6, so I thought I may as well benefit from the extra 2TB of storage I would save by going with RAID6 plus the safety net of supporting 2 failed drives. I've always found the performance of RAID5 very poor on Motherboards with build in RAID controllers, but the QNAP is a high quality NAS and all performance tests indicate it is able to handle the load placed on it by RAID6 with a relatively small performance penalty. Nevertheless, the whole rebuilding process with RAID was even more time consuming than I expected, after this whole process I still don't have a lot of faith in the whole hot swappable automatic rebuild process, hence why a full backup strategy is also very important. The only problem  is that I need an equivalent amount disk storage for the back-up process!

Therefore, as of about 20 minutes ago I cancelled the RAID6 build and decided to go with a RAID0 on four drives, and use the other two drives, along with some 500MB drives I have lying around as part of my backup solution. In ten minutes, I had removed the RAID6 set, created, initialized and formatted the stripe set. It does mean my backup strategy becomes even more important factor, but I have a much better feeling about it all. My backup drives will all be used individually so I don't depend on another striped set and the backup set will be synchronized instead of a using a compressed backup image So hopefully this works all works out much better!

**Update 2010.04.19 8:12am

Well everything looked like it was going well, but after leaving the box for a few hours, all the lights turned read, the console mentioned something about a Kernel Panic and was frozen. I rebooted, but then the box just froze after another kernel panic. I rebooted again and the console didn't even come up. I waited an hour or so and tried it once more. It started up again, but as soon as the GRUB loader came up I went in and selected the backup option. Everything booted up fine, so I went in and set everything to factory defaults. I rebooted, selected the other option and everything seemed to come up ok. I went the through the initial configuration wizard, pulling out two of the drives so only the four I wanted to stripe were left, and was able to reconfigured the settings and re-create the stripe set. After this I was once again able to access the web interface, and even got so far as creating new shares and copying some files over to the unit. Unfortunately half way through the copying of about 25GB, windows lost its connectivity to the QNAP, and the QNAP rebooted itself and froze. So my next step is to start working with support, although I'm pretty damn close to returning this unit.