Windows 7

I’ve just installed Windows 7 on my sever and have to jump on the bandwagon of critics applauding the upgrade from Vista. Although I tend to be one of the few who enjoyed some the advances made with Vista, Windows 7 has certainly added the spit and polish it required. I only encountered one driver problem, and that was the lack of support for my HP printer. However that was easily overcome with a driver for another printer.

One problem I noticed with Windows Vista, and still seems to have been held over into windows 7 is the inconsistent file transfer speed to external devices. I’ve noticed than when transferring large amounts of data to MP3 players or external hard drives I can get dramatically varying rates of transfer. It could be related to the priority assigned to the process, but if I navigate away from the folders involved in the transfer, both on the device and on the machine, and not run any other program or start any process, I watched my transfer rate drop form 19MB/s down to 9MB/s. I stopped the transfer, and started it again and then had reached a rate of 33MB/s before dropping to an average of 23MB/s. Obviously there are a number of variables that impact the rate, but I’ve encountered this issue on both Vista and Win7. Even when transferring to an MP3 player I see dramatically different rates that defy logic. It reminds of the days when I used to live in Lagos, Nigeria. When calling back to the U.K. we would sometimes get a bad connection and have to hang up and dial again to see if it cleared up. I’ll have dig into this in more detail to try and pinpoint where the congestion is occurring, but it can be a little annoying. Especially during those times when you are in a rush to get out the door, and want to quickly transfer something over to a portable device.

Nevertheless, the interface for Windows 7 is a definite improvement. I think I like the libraries idea,and the potential for federated search within the enterprise, but simple changes like the interface to disconnect and connect VPN connections from the network connection icon in to the notification area makes for a much more usable experience.

The battle between Google and Facebook is heating up.

The battle for your social attention has been kicked up a notch over the past month. You would have to be hiding under a rock not to read all the press about the ‘gaggle’ of new social features Google are pushing out with GReader and IGoogle, let alone their current development on Wave.  Meanwhile Facebook are reinventing themselves as they slowly ‘twittify’ their newsfeed and integrate the additional technology and skills from their purchase of FriendFeed.

Many Friendfeed purists are outraged over what they perceive is  Friendfeed selling out, but they must have had their blinders on if they thought Friendfeed was going to make it alone. Friendfeed is a great aggregator, but lets face it, the average person wasn’t going to use the incredible filtering and collaborative power of the interface. They obviously recognized the need to grab a bigger demographic, so what better way than to plug your technology into a network 300+ million strong. It really is a no brainer. Google are still dragging their heels getting into this game, but they have certainly turned things on with all the latest features embedded into GReader. However in my opinion, it is still the ‘techies’ playing around with the still somewhat awkward GReader features.

Right now GReader is still my number one source for info gathering, Facebook, where the bulk of my community reside, is my sole collaborative platform for personal contacts, but I share my professional collaboration between Linked-in, Facebook and Twitter. I’m still not the greatest fan of Twitter, but it certainly beats the rest when it comes to real time information. However the more I play around with linked-in, and the larger the community of people I’m connecting with on that platform, the more invaluable it is becoming. We have found it to be a much better platform to collaborate as a department with Students and industry than Facebook. However this goes back to the perceived culture of Facebook as being strictly personal and consumer based.

Anyway, it’s exciting times watching the almost daily changes in these apps. I love where it’s going and look forward to investigating further opportunities to integrate social media in the classroom.

Benefitting from Linked-in

I just had a technology recruiter contact me as a result of viewing my Linked-in profile. He was looking to hire someone with certain credentials for a client. After further discussion we may have opened up some future possibilities for our students. This is the first time I’ve seen a direct benefit for the college as a result  of some of my social media activity. Up to now the only benefit has been to expand my personal learning network.

Linked-in seems to have exploded within my real world contacts over the past 4 months. Is Linked-in going to capture the professional profile share of the market? Facebook certainly hasn’t been able to pull it off despite trying to improve their Public Profiles/Pages. Although I personally feel like these applications have been around forever, social media applications are still very much the wild west. Loyalty is fairly fluid and there is still plenty of time for the tables to turn in all the social media circles. I would love to see a stat on the overlap for people with accounts across Windows Live, Facebook, Google, MySpace, Linked-in, Friendfeed & Twitter. I think that stat alone would demonstrate how any one of the big guns can make a strong comeback in any area of social media. I’m amazed at how slow google is moving in this space, but I may be a little biased in my perspective and have lost touch with the practical application of this technology for the average user. I think Google have the user base and culture to make huge strides in this area. Microsoft Live still seems to be unable to shake that MSN monkey off their back, but Facebook could be their saviour if handled correctly. I only hope the pair of them can escape the whole walled garden mentality.

Trip to Vineyard Networks

Yesterday I arranged a tour with Vineyard Networks for our 2nd year students. They did a great job of introducing the students to their upcoming product. The company is made up of friendly, enthusiastic and dynamic individuals who definitely have the makings of a successful startup. Although there wasn’t a lot to see, I think it’s important for students to experience environments outside of the college so they can relate it to their studies. It’s hard to fit these trips into an already very busy schedule, but the experience is certainly worth it.

Trials reorganizing a Social Media System.

I read a post from Chris Brogan outlining his Social Media System; the tools he uses and a breakdown of his workflow. Interestingly, he mentions how 40-60% of his opportunities come from Twitter (TW). Of course I’ve recently moved away from Twitter and focused more on Friendfeed (FF) and Facebook (FB). However this got me thinking about how I might tap into Twitter's vast wealth of information automatically and reduce the amount of noise I’ve always encountered. Most Twitter enthusiasts would counter with potential for word tracking. I knew it was there, but for some reason I've just never taken advantage of it. I think this was partly due to being comfortable with Twhirl, which won’t support tracking until the next release coming imminently according to Loic Le Meur. The main app people are buzzing about right now of course is Tweetdeck since it provides alot of flexibility with groups and lists. However I’m not in any immediate rush, so maybe I’ll wait for the next release of Twhirl since I'm enjoying how well it integrates with FF.

Nevertheless, I took pause, had a few deep thoughts, and consequently made a couple of slight adjustments to the usual set of social networking tools I use to gather information. I still find Google reader (GR) my ultimate source of knowledge with the highest signal to noise ratio for content. I had given up on twitter for a while since most of the information I read on twitter I gather through FF or Google reader anyway. However there are still a couple of people I follow on Twitter who don't use FF or FB so I need to keep twitter around. In addition, I think there are a few people that follow me on Twitter and not on FF or FB so I've just elected to employ a new'ish feature in FF that will allow me to throw any FF posts to my TW account. Obviously, since my TW activity is generally thrown back to FF, they had to make sure that when FF sent the information to TW, it wouldn't include that part of the TW activity in the FF stream. The only thing I don't like about it is that I set my status in FB which gets pushed to FF. Unfortunately FB adds your name in front of the status text so you'll see something like "Phil Here is a great link on why the US should let GM go bankrupt". Not exactly stellar.

So now that I'm engaging TW again, I thought maybe I'd reverse it and have TW send my status to FB again; the way I had it before I decided to centralize most of my activity on FB. However to make this work I knew I needed to remove the status updates going to FF. But, wait, I want to keep any posted items in FB coming to FF. Shutdown! Apparently you can't add FB posted items or notes without adding the status updates in FF. Then I also realized that if I were posting all my FF items to twitter, then all those items would come in as FF status pages and duplicate FB independently pulling down activity from the likes of GR, last.fm etc...OK! OK! ENOUGH ALREADY!

At this point my head started to hurt and I started wondering why am spending so much time trying to figure such a silly thing out! It’s driving me nuts. What I need is a damn application that holds my whole community, both public and professional, can lifestream any of my services, allow me to control what services are released, to independently assign which services go to whom in my community, and finally be able to comment on anything I or any in my community post. Essentially a combination of Friendfeed, FB & TW. But alas there is no such beast, so I decided to keep blasting FF stuff to TW, any new TWs back to FF, and Status updates and posts from FB back to FF. I have been playing around with using FB’s minimal lifestream capability, mainly because the FF application didn't seem to post all my FF activity to my profile, but maybe that’s because the app wasn’t authorized for offline access. I'll flip that back and try again. Although I did just learn that FB will only allow ups up to 10 posts a day on your wall. What a PITA. It’s that kind of stuff that always seems to limit FB. As well as the fact that there are too few people who use FB as a professional tool as opposed to their personal one.

Since most of the world seem to have either a FB account or a Google account, would one of you guys please make this all work for me! I think it would almost all work if FF would allow me to send status updates to Facebook like they do TW. But that doesn’t appear to be on their horizon just yet.

University of the People

Just read a Tweet from @karlfisch referring to the University of the People (UoP). I’ve had a number of discussions over the past week where I’ve thrown out my opinion, wanted or not (as usual), on the incredibly disruptive influence the educational potential of global learning resources on the Internet will have on traditional University and College systems. Will Richardson has some great posts on the tread mill approach most of our educational institutions currently  follow.

Every institution has pockets of dynamic or motivating individuals taking advantage of the many interactive learning tools technology has made available, and the incredible collaborative resources available on the Internet, but they often do this with very little institutional support. At some point I can see students looking to learn from specific instructors instead of institutions, and these instructors slowly migrating toward a community where they can feed off others who share their same passion for learning and teaching; maybe UoP is the beginning of just such a shift.

After a quick glance at the UoP website, I think there will be some definite challenges in their education gaining a fraction of the credibility of a prestigious institution, but maybe that will come as these students demonstrate their skills in the work force. In addition, if they are taught in fluid interactive environments, much of their time in this education medium could be spent building a portfolio of educational accomplishments that any employer could verify through their online footprint. Lifestream maybe? It is going to be a fascinating era.

My Media Center Solution...finally.

I know I'm going nuts with the blogging today, but it has been a long time since I put pen to paper so to speak and so a lot of things have happened or have been mulling around in my head for the past little while. Things have been very busy so I just didn't have the desire or the energy to blog about anything.

One of the things that I finally managed to accomplish was the wiring of my house with about 500ft of cable so that my office could have more connections and each of my TV's would have a couple of data connections behind it. I've been procrastinating over this for about four years now, in between trying to figure out the best approach for a media center solution. There are so many way to provide a media center solution, but when you start wanting PVR for live TV as well as the ability to distribute this amongst multiple TV's in the home, you choices narrow down quite quickly. The other limiting factor that many solutions present are the video formats they support. After humming and harring I ended up on the Windows media center and Xbox Media Center extended solution. It is certainly costly between getting a copy of Vista Home Premium or Ultimate, a Tuner Card and a couple of Xbox's, but it definitely works, albeit with a few quirks that I find a little bothersome.

The biggest stumbling block has been trying to figure out why some TV channels aren't de-interlacing properly during the encoding process. I called Hauppauge about my HVR2250 tuner card, and they pointed me to MS's DECCHECK as a way to change to a new codec; the one that comes with PowerDVD for example. The app allowed me to change it, however, that hasn't really seemed to work. Supposedly VMCD is one that is designed for Vista, so I'll have to try that instead when I get a spare moment.

Another bone of contention I have with Windows Media Center is the interface. They've made the classic mistake of compromising usability in preference for a prettier interface. There is no easier way to select a choice from a group than in lists that can be grouped in different ways. The crucial error they made was in limiting the view to just a thumbnails view. Not only does it require resources to view the small pictures, but it adds absolutely no functionality, slows down the listing process and takes away from the productivity. Why is there no option to view it as a simple list? I'm sure there is a plugin I can find that will do the trick. Which of course is one of the bonuses of this product. There is a large number of plugins for the software. Strike that last statement, I just had a student say that you can change the listing view. I honestly haven't had the time to play too much with it, so I'll have to investigate.

The wrinkle in the whole affair is that you Media Center Extenders can't play Xvid/Divx. Oh I can play it locally on the Xbox from the Media Blade, but Media Center won't transcode the Divx or Xvid to the Extender! I find this a little negligent on MS's part, but I've got to think there has been some political pressure from somewhere to have prevented that. Either that or they are planning to kill the media extender idea and focus more on making the xbox a native HTPC device. This  certainly looks plausible based on some of the peaks I've had of the new XBE coming on Nov 19th.

Special Guests

Through a personal 6 degrees of separation thing I ended up hearing about a gentleman, Kevin Ripa, who was coming into town and who had an extensive background in computer forensics. After some introductions and a few e-mails I arranged for him to come in and give a presentation to my first and second years. The presentation was extremely well received and everyone raved about just how much they learned in that brief period of time. He provided some excellent insights as to how many IT people need to get that chip off their shoulder and be honest about what they don't know, or as he put it, "You need to know what you don't know!" He said he couldn't begin to count the number of times he has had to deal with situations where the IT staff, either in their pride, ignorance or both, made his job very difficult or damn near impossible. It was a great lesson for the students. One of the interesting points I took away from the presentation was how hard drives store Adaptives about their individual pattern for reading the platters and tracks as well the negative cylinders or sectors used by the drive to store this information and information from the HD ROM. He also mentioned that the software the hard drives use varies substantially from manufacturer to manufacturer and that some of the bigger companies will have a person who specializes on data recovery for each manufacturer. Considering how often these drives change, I have a feeling this field could have a disastrous affect on one's personal quality of life!

As a result of this talk, and the fact that we discovered the new machines in the computer labs no longer have serial ports, I changed the lab from studying about serial port communication to analyzing the Master Boot Record, Boot Sector and MFT in NTFS. Although I think there are still some essential skills and transferable knowledge to be gained from playing with serial communication, I may finally have to put this technology to bed on a practical side.

Be careful what you wish for...

I'm surprised I even remember how to blog it's been so long. This term has been one of the busiest since my first year although I think I'm over the hump now that the midterms have come, gone and been marked. Fortunately I don't have too many students in my second year class and I made a small change that has eased my stress considerably. About a three weeks ago I was giving them a lecture and noticed than almost none of them were listening. When you have a small class it becomes especially apparent when a few have phased out. All my classes are contained in labs with computers, which, along with their laptops, provide a limitless opportunity for distraction. I considered going hard core, making them switch off their machines and forcing them to pay attention to what I had to say, but opted to give them what they wished for; a self directed approach to the lectures. The course is laid out such that moving it into more of a blended distance learning paradigm wouldn't be that difficult, so I thought what the heck. I gave them all the choice of my either lecturing or leaving them to do the reading, assessments and questions and coming to me when they have questions. I said I would commit to being in the classroom and online for the lecture and lab times, and available to answer any questions they might have or for doing a whiteboard session. They chose this route unanimously.

So now I don't have to actually give a traditional lecture to my second years. I'm not too sure how I feel about it all as I really only get a couple of them coming to me for questions. However I don't think that under the circumstances that is unreasonable since only half of them ever paid any attention anyway.  In the past I might have taken offense to this, but having been teaching this group for the past couple of years now, I know it is just the way they are. Nothing I do now will help them become auditory learners or increase their attention span. However this has eased my workload considerably and probably my frustration as well. It's incredibly deflating when you've spent a bunch of time preparing a lecture, demo and slides only to have half the class pay attention. To put it in perspective, some of this group aren't even able to follow along when going over the solutions to a midterm they  bombed. Nevertheless, they are all good natured and like to have fun, so I'm just here for them when they want it.

The interesting aspect to this little experiment is watching to see if they have the discipline to keep up the work without my whipping their behinds into it. I've established a fairly rigorous & structure schedule for them, so the framework is certainly there for them. I'm also looking to see how introducing this hands-off approach  will affect will affect my reviews and their ability to stay on track. Do they have the discipline to keep this up? I thought long and hard about it, but think that in the end it will probably be much easier for them since they now have the lecture time to focus on the coursework that is due. As it is I keep hearing about the ridiculous number of projects they have due in the next couple of weeks and how they are not sure if they are going to be able to do any of my coursework! What I find really sad about that statement is that my course is the one with the most relevance to their field and career.

As they say, "You can bring a horse to water........."

Cisco Cert Exams need to be revamped

After a week of reading, taking notes, lab work, I wrote the cisco academy exams and hands-on skills, followed by the CCNP ISCW cert exam. I've been doing these certifications and exams for quite a long time now and thought while sitting here at the Calgary airport I may as well jot down a few observations and thoughts I've been mulling around as a result.

I just took a look at a  mock testing exam someone sent my way from Pass4Sure. Having just written the ISCW I was able to note that almost every question on this mock test was identical to what was on the certification. I was amazed! Someone, I think from China judging by the language on parts of the screenshots, had actually screen captured all the exam questions including parts of the testlets. I went through the exam to see how their answers matched to mine, and noticed a couple of the testlets were way off, but for the most part, the answers were fairly accurate. So, what does this mean? Well for starters, it definitely lowers the credibility of the cisco exams at the CCNA & CCNP level. The CCIE still holds its value due to the lab exam, but the written only parts for the rest of the cert exams have now been relegated to nothing more than a formality.

Although the cheat exams are not a new concern, I really haven't spent a any time thinking or caring about it until recently. As an instructor at a cisco academy, I think certificates and diplomas from accredited cisco academies are now almost a must have for students without previous networking experience. I believe this provides an employer with some substantiation as to the credibility of the certification designation for a potential employee. Obviously, if you have 5+ years of experience in the networking field, that will speak for itself, but for younger up and coming network engineers, the lab work and hands-on skill testing at an academy is invaluable. I discussed this point with a colleague who mentioned that in his CCNP classes, it is often painfully obvious the difference between students that obtained their CCNA after going through an academy program and those that followed a quick and easy do-it-yourself approach. Now this by no means means that you can't do it at home if you are a motivated individual with a good study plan and access to the hardware, but at the intro level this doesn't seem to be the norm.

So, lets focus on this for a moment. Most academies that I have talked weight their hands on skills much more heavily than the chapter and final assessments that are part of the cisco academy. As instructors, we are all aware that these assessments are readily available on the Internet if you know where to search, so we have to find ways of assessing the true knowledge of our students. Hence why we turn to hands-on practical scenarios that test concepts as opposed to the silly process of memorizing the default options or menu items in the cisco graphical configuration manager.  I found the ISCW exam to be riddled with very questionable pedagogical value. If cisco do not improve this, then their certifications will, and some would argue already have, relegate their intro and intermediate certifications to a laughing stock.

Now please don't confuse what I think about the cert exam questions with the material and skills you are expected to learn and master as part of the requirement for a cert such as the CCNP/CCVP. My issue and opinion is that the cert exams do not fairly assess proficiency. I have studied much of the CCNP curriculum backwards and forwards from having to teach it, but when I come out of the cert exams I almost feel ripped off in how little opportunity I had to demonstrate my grasp of the material.

I'm sure cisco have recognized these issues and are working on solutions, but here is my 2c. DYNAMIPS!  Building on the fact that the testlets appeared to be where the Pass4Sure exam was weakest, more simulation certainly appears to be attractive. I must also confess that I enjoyed the testlets. Granted they were fairly simple for the most part, but they were the questions I felt assessed my skills more fairly. The config type questions were probably the next best, but I think simulations could achieve the same assessment objective. So why not shorten the written section to about 20 or 30 GOOD individual questions or ones based on testlets/scenarios, and then tack on a 2/3 hour practical simulation? I realize the marking now becomes an issue, but I'm sure an assessment tool, similar to an improved version of what is available in packet tracer, could be developed. I suppose some would argue that this would increase the cost, but then and again my daughter's Royal Conservatory Grade 1 Music theory exam cost about $125 and that is manually marked! However, more importantly, I believe this would dramatically improve the credibility of the cert exams. Look at the respect the CCIE still garners! Although it is partly due to the shear quantity of knowledge and understanding one has to attain, I believe the prestige still comes from the fact that you have had to demonstrate your skills in a complex and challenging proctored hands-on skills assessment.

Well the plane is about to board so I'll end it there. Certainly some food for thought.