surfing the EtHeR

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

2011-07-11T12:25:00.000-07:00

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!!!

2010-12-08T09:25:00.000-08:00

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.....

2010-10-14T22:31:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-28T21:58:00.001-07:00

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…

2010-06-10T17:22:00.001-07:00

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

2010-04-21T14:48:00.001-07:00

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.

2010-04-18T13:04:00.001-07:00

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.

Just Discovered my Telus V-Mail for E-mail

2010-01-13T12:40:00.001-08:00

I was just enquiring as to why my Telus bill wasn't getting fully paid up (Turned out I had put a restriction on the authorization amt - good to know that works, but cost me some interest!) and noticed a link under Message Center saying Listen to Voicemail! This was a concern when I moved from Vonage, but my spirits raised when I saw this and I was not dissapointed. Although the interface is a little klunky, I now get voicemail delivered to my Inbox.

A couple of key points to note. If you click on settings and the easy to miss alerts menu in the top right, you can add your e-mail address. By default everything will be e-mailed to you unless you create an alert even in the My message alerts screen accessed from the main screen.

A special moment online.

2009-12-29T11:45:00.001-08:00

Just wanted to capture a classic online moment for me via a couple of Tweets below:

@scobleizer:
Join @philashman by listening to the "TWiT of the Decade" netcast with @leolaporte @kevinrose and me: http://www.twit.tv/228

I'm not a significant contributor to the online community and am only slowly figuring out my social presence, so I don't see my name pop up in conversation too often. I know Robert RTs many people every day, but it was still a shock to see a Tweet with my name tagged pop up in his stream. However the classic tweet came afterwards:

@raptureimage
Listening to "TWiT of the Decade" netcast with @philashman @leolaporte @kevinrose @Scobleizer : http://www.twit.tv/228

Now that got me laughing! I wish! I'll never see my name posted next to the likes of these guys again, but it was awesome to see it.

Consumption with Facebook, Google Reader or Twitter

2009-12-28T15:38:00.001-08:00

While taking a break from prepping, well, sort of procrastinating, I decided to finally sort my Twitter contacts into their appropriate lists. It's something I've been meaning to do for a while, but never found the motivation. As I was contemplating what lists to use, it finally dawned on me that I was doing exactly what I have always done in Google Reader; except there I organized my RSS feeds into labels. So I just used the same high level categories. Then I moved on to facebook and became a fan of the facebook pages for a bunch of the site feeds I follow and organized my Facebook contacts and pages into the same lists.

So now I'm looking at this ridiculous duplication wondering why I can't simply use one damn application for it all. The problem of course is that they each have different strengths, and everyone I'm interested in following will use one or more of them independently.

Anyway, just thought I'd vent a little. Right now I'm stuck dipping my hand into all three rivers of information in addition to monitoring activity on Linkedin. It's definitely too much information with a low signal to noise ratio that impacts the core content I wish to view.

Weaning myself off FriendFeed

2009-12-18T02:10:00.001-08:00

I've been using Friendfeed as the central distribution point for all my social activity. Both my Twitter and Facebook streams were updated with all my Friendfeed activity; until now. Since Facebook's purchase of Friendfeed, the writing is on the wall and Friendfeed activity is slowly dwindling away; not that anyone every actively commented on any of my posts anyway. I believe that is one of the major downsides to Friendfeed. They just couldn't attract the average person's social community which left nobody to really comment on your links unless you put a lot of effort into spreading yourself around within the active Friendfeed circles. In end, Friendfeed conversation was centered around the popular few.

I also wasn't entirely happy with the Friendfeed solution as I would often get hiccups importing my Facebook activity. Since Facebook is the app I use primarily for status updates, it meant my twitter feed was missing out. I hear Facebook is coming out with a way to Tweet the live stream, which might have helped, but I want a ensure a flexible approach that won't force all people to go to Facebook first if I happen to post a 3rd party link. This can be the case with Posterous, and was always the way whenever I updated a status update to Facebook. When I posted an update to Facebook, and Friendfeed was working for me and configured to use the original link instead of stopping off at Friendfeed, the user would be bumped to my Facebook data stream, and not to that specific status update. So if the user wanted to comment, they would have to search through my stream to find the update. Not quite what I had in mind.

After I noticed that Facebook updates were no longer getting into Friendfeed this last time (probably after that last privacy update), I knew it was time to pull something together. So I've spent a chunk of this evening trying to figure out how best to set this up from now on. My solution was to use Ping.fm as the major distributor of my activity, with some minor auto-sharing between other services when as required. Here's my setup after the first cut at this with some highlights on some of the workflow and process.

Manual Bookmarklets: Greader/Diigo/Ping.fm
I don't have to do this often since most of my info gathering is done within GReader

Youtube -> Autosharing Twitter/FB/Greader

I find the built in Youtube aggregation within Facebook very poor.

Twitter -> Linked-in
Ping.fm could blast to Linked-in, but not all my activity goes to ping.fm, so this works best.

Ping.FM -> Posterous, Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, Gtalk
This is now my main distribution point that allows for quick blogging or status updates from a dashboard, e-mail, phone or desktop app. Had to study up a little on the syntax, but if this blog post came through fine, then all is well!

GReader -> Manual "Send To" Ping.fm/Diigo
I share interesting I find in GReader. One more click and Ping.FM will blast it out to designated services

Diigo -> Pre-defined Groups and Lists
I love the way Diigo highlights and caches articles. In an addition this provides me with a great way to feed articles straight into Linked-In groups via RSS. However I'm also considering just using a google reader folder since I have no collaboration happening on Diigo itself. However the caching is a useful option in case the link disappears in the future.

Everything -> Friendfeed
I'm still going to keep everything coming to Friendfeed for now. Mainly as just another way to backup my lifestream. In the end I want to pull all this into a homegrown WordPress install.with a lifestream plugin.

blogger -> twitter (via Twitterfeed)
Could send it to ping.fm, but ping.fm already takes care of Facebook & Posterous, so I have no other service to update about any post that I make.

Posterous
I started a Posterous thinking that it might be another way to back up my lifestream. The existing functionality doesn't quite cut it for what I want to do, but I figure I just throw my content on there as well as yet another way to diversify my stream. Ping.fm will blast all the content for me except for Youtube, so it's not much effort. For the Youtube videos I may just use the Posterous bookmarklet or figure out how to Share directly from within Youtube.

I'm sure I'll refine it as I start using this new workflow, but I think I like this a little better than what I had before. Naively, I feel like I have a little more control and flexibility with this solution.

Great article on OSPF and Frame Relay

2009-12-16T22:23:00.001-08:00

If you are in my NTEN217 class, this article is worth a read!

http://blog.ipexpert.com/2009/08/08/ospf-over-frame-relay-part-3-point-to-point/

A student was having problems after customizing a packet tracer solution I had assigned to practice for the final exam. He stumbled across the issue of OSPF using fast timers (Hello & Dead timer) for point-to-point interfaces and slow timers point-to-multipoint Frame Relay interfaces. OSPF requires the Hello timers to be synchronized and so the adjacencies weren’t coming up. Anyway, the article explains it all so I won’t regurgitate it all.

Windows 7

2009-10-01T16:08:00.001-07:00

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.

2009-08-13T15:32:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-01T13:00:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-01T12:22:00.001-07:00

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.

2009-01-30T23:48:00.001-08:00

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

2009-01-26T16:42:00.001-08:00

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.

2008-11-13T15:49:00.001-08:00

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

2008-11-13T14:16:00.001-08:00

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...

2008-11-13T14:01:00.001-08:00

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

2008-06-27T23:00:00.001-07:00

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.

Another quick Social Networking Optimization

2008-06-18T11:09:00.001-07:00

Made a quick foray into REDDIT. I thought it would be a great intermediate point to track articles I read, but not necessarily ones I want to share on GReader or bookmark on DIIGO. However I discovered I was limited to submitting articles every 9 mins. So I decided to forget that idea.

In order to maintain some semblance of productivity, I'm trying to discipline my reading and information gathering time during a day. Friendfeed is a part of my personal learning network, but I find the noise a little too much right now. I went through a major hiding spree a while ago, and although it trimmed the feed down dramatically, I'm still finding a very high Signal to Noise ratio. As a result I'm likely going to cut back even more on who I subscribe to and whose friends of friends I see. I find that I still get a lot of what I need news wise from GReader. I find most of the usual A-list FFeeders just regurgitate information I would have come by anyway, and most of the comments are just fluff. I do wish there were more people I connect with in my real life community using Friendfeed. I would probably find the comments at that level to be much more fulfilling. Maybe I'll try using FriendFeed as part of one of my classes this fall. I'll have to think about it.

Municipal Fiber

2008-06-11T13:35:00.001-07:00

I thought I would write down a few points made at the BC Broadband conference on Municipal fiber while it is still fresh in my mind. I certainly don't need to redefine the idea of municipal fiber and the concept of Fiber to the Home (FTTH). There are so many resources on the topic that I couldn't possibly do it justice.

However one thing that came out loud and clear from the conference was that open access to the last mile is a recognized problem and something ISPs and CLECs are beginning to move into their agenda. Although I have been evangelizing the need for fiber to the home for the past decade, the options and designs on how to make this a reality are still viewed as being immature at this stage. However I feel that with some of the measures being taken by municipalities like Coquitlam and Kamloops, we may start seeing some solid movement on this front. Most municipalities I have dealt with still refuse to see the vision and grasp the necessity of why it is so important to initiate a municipal fiber infrastructure strategy for the community. If there is no champion to take on the charge within the city, then it is almost impossible to make anything happen.

Some of the points made at the conference were as follows:

More freedom is required to work around the Rights of way and building access within municipalities
Municipalities should not put themselves in the position of competing with service providers. That being said, provision of the layer 1 infrastructure is not classed as competing for services, but rather enables access to clients for ISPs & CLECs to offer competitive & advanced broadband services.
We need a more competitive network and telecom services market place.
It is not enough for a municipality to just provision the fiber with a 'build it and they will come' strategy. In order to be successful, there must service providers willing to commit to offering the advanced high speed services. In my opinion, High Speed broadband is not the ADSL & Cable Modem speeds we have today, but more along the lines of 100Mb/s to the home.
A Municipal fiber strategy is hard to justify if the business case focuses only on local businesses and schools. HIgh density multi-dwelling units are the easiest to start with. Nevertheless, there are a lot of tangible un-quantifiable benefits of a municipal fiber infrastructure strategy that a business case can't address.

A productive broadband conference

2008-06-11T13:27:00.001-07:00

I'm here at Vancouver airport having just spent the past couple of days attending the BC Broadband conference. I'll be honest, I hadn't really known about Open Source Solutions before this event and I must say it was well worth the visit to connect with some of the small ISPs in the province as well as the decision and policy makers of Network BC. As is always the case with these events, you end up hitting it off with peers you would never have had the opportunity of meeting otherwise.

On Tuesday morning I spoke on a panel for municipal fiber. I actually didn't realize I was supposed to present until the afternoon before which didn't leave a lot of time for prep; especially since I was busy 'networking' until the wee hours of the morning on Monday. Having attended a number of conferences in the past decade, I really can't emphasize enough the doors one can open at these post conference soirees. They are great opportunities to communicate in a more relaxed environment and sometimes off the record.

But back to the presentation. I definitely can't say it was the best spiel I gave, but I'm hoping I managed to cover most of what I was hoping to get across. Hindsight is always 20/20 and you always look back and think of additional points you would like to have made or had expressed more eloquently. One of downsides to not being prepared. Nevertheless I think the most important aspects were brought to light between the four of us on the panel. I'll save my thoughts and summary of the points made for another blog post. I'm looking forward to engaging some of the contacts made at the conference over the next month.

On a personal note, I ended the evening attending the Iron Maiden concert. I've, always enjoyed their music, but this was my first opportunity to see them live. Words can't really do the experience justice, Spectacular performance, effects and artwork! They are as tight as they ever were and Bruce's voice is still going strong.

BC Broadband Conference

2008-05-05T12:48:00.001-07:00

Just been invited to participate on a panel at the BC Broadband Conference in Vancouver on June 2nd/3rd. Any of you that know me have probably heard me rant on Network Neutrality, and now I may get a platform to throw some opinions out in a more public forum. Most of my opinions are based on information I receive from blogs and articles from the Bill St. Arnaud, Michael Geist, Benoit Felten, Pipe International and other national and international Muni-fiber initiatives. I'm humbled to be offered a position as a panel speaker at this event as I don't feel I have quite the credentials to stand up next to some of the others who have managed, or will be managing, their own fiber initiatives, but I will certainly contribute in any way I can. In fact I'll do whatever it takes to raise the awareness of just how lacking we are with high speed technology in this country.

Ok, can't help but rant. Last mile access needs to be managed by a neutral party or utility upon which service providers can deliver their services in a competitive environment. Besides the fact that we don't need the equivalent of two driveways coming into every home and business, service providers can not possibly deliver cheap high speed bandwidth if they have to bear the full financial burden of upgrading their infrastructures to support the next generation services. Therefore unless communities and carriers start working together, the incumbent carriers will have to leverage their existing infrastructures with band-aid technologies in the same way that ADSL leverages the use of their old copper POTS network. Either way it is the consumer who is going to lose out by being the recipient of a technologically inferior or really expensive service

Presentation at BCSCTA

2008-05-05T12:19:00.001-07:00

Last Friday I had the pleasure of presenting at the BC Science Teachers Association Catalyst Conference. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was in the block for the breakout session of the conference. I suppose you could argue it either way in terms of the audience expectations for the first session, but either way if there is going to be an organization problem with the setup and audio video it is going to be in the first session. But fortunately it all went very smoothly for me. I provided a handout to go along with the presentation since I learned from many past experiences not to try and jam all the information into the presentation and torture via Powerpoint. I spent a lot of time prepping for this presentation over the past couple of weeks.

A lot of my information I gleaned from sources such as Clarence Fisher, Will Richardson and Karl Fische. In fact if you read through my presentation you'll see many references to their blogs. I find these guys inspirational in their commitment to utilize technology to its fullest potential in the classroom. They are true pioneers in this industry. I also gathered awesome material from actively participating in the social networking world with applications such as FriendFeed, Twiiter, Last.FM, Youtube, Furl etc...

My goal was to try and open people up to the possibilities of social networking in education. These applications are certainly still not quite there yet for mainstream users, but I can finally see the seed of what will make this facet of the Internet more accessible. The presentation was well received, and I ended up talking and meeting with some very interesting folks.

All this has certainly consumed a fair amount of time, but I'm slowly figuring out how to streamline my use of the technology. As is always the case in this field, just when you think you have a system figured out, another shakedown of the field occurs and you have to re-adjust. Nevertheless, I'm now finding the technology in the social networking arena is spiraling on a saner course. Educators who utilize social networking technologies are certainly going to have to just jump in and adapt the technology to their style. Although there is no right or wrong way to do this, I believe there are enough resources out there to classify some best practices and learn from the successes and failures of others. There are many enthusiastic teachers who have led the way and are willing to share this information with the rest of us.

Facebook chat is online for me

2008-04-23T10:16:00.001-07:00

Just fired up Facebook (while not procrastinating..:)..) and noticed Facebook chat is now available for me. Most people are probably going, "oh yay! Yet another IM tool" However this is a bigger deal than you might realize and in my opinion will be a major draw for facebook.

Why is it I have accounts with Skype, MSN Messenger, Google Talk, Gizmo etc etc...?

Because I have different groups of friends in each.

So what is it that facebook has that none of these apps have?

My social network.

All those non-techy people who usually look at me with that quizzical smirk when I start talking twitter & RSS have, for whatever reason, been drawn to Facebook. Most are probably passive visitors. If someone posts something on their wall or sends them a message, then they receive an e-mail alert and consequently log in to Facebook to check it out. A few others are hooked on Scrabulous, Chess, some other weird app, or use it as their online photo album. Nevertheless, the fact that I can now chat with a lot of these people without having to poke them, message them or write on their wall is extremely attractive. Of course after the initial fad wears off many of these people will end up as someone who I just see online and never talk to, but the very fact that I now have the opportunity to engage in conversation with people who I haven't talked to in eons, and would never pick up the phone to chat with, is kind of cool. It will certainly add another dynamic to my procrastination!

If Facebook allows people to take advantage of the social demographic they have built within that environment they will have a very big future ahead of them. Unfortunately, I just haven't seen any strong indicators they are going to allow people and developers the flexibility they need to develop some truly exciting interactive and life streaming apps.

However, I'm reminded of the reach of my Facebook social network daily even among those I interact with on a regular basis. I often post a message to my personal twitter account, which automatically updates my Facebook status, and is usually about something that probably wouldn't come up in regular discussion with most of the people with whom I associate. Nevertheless, I almost always get some comment during the day referencing that message. Just today I had someone say: "so how ya feeling? Saw you had a couple of late nights marking there?". See how the language has changed? It is is no longer "I heard", but "I saw". As social networking moves beyond the techies and the youth and into the mainstream crowd who, when asked, would never have time for that techie stuff, even this asynchronous form of communication via twitter and micro blogging will allow for an unprecedented awareness of those around us.

I like to take the optimistic perspective of the socially interactive web (hey I didn't say social networking!) and truly believe in the potential of this technology to enrich our lives in both work and play.

OSTEC Silicon Vinyard Awards

2008-04-10T23:38:00.001-07:00

Went to the silicon vinyard awards tonight and saw a keynote from Paul Kedrowski. The common thread that I've noticed between many of these VC's, from keynote speeches to podcasts with the likes of Robert Cringley, is that these guys have an incredible ability to simplify the complex.

Paul talked about the qualities that make up the entrepreneur. The importance of optimism and the ability to pursue the quest for a questionable answer to the right question as opposed the definite answer to the wrong question. It kind of messes with your mind when you first hear it, but the more you think about it the more it begins to make sense. To be successful as a start up you must have the ability to look at things from a different angle as opposed to following the 'herd'. I heard this great joke today that illustrates this point perfectly:

"When my husband and I arrived at an automobile dealership to pick up our car, we were told the keys had been locked in it. We went to the service department and found a mechanic working feverishly to unlock the drivers side door. As I watched from the passenger side, I instinctively tried the door handle and discovered that it was unlocked. 'Hey,' I announced to the technician, 'its open!' His reply, 'I know. I already got that side.'"

Sometimes the most obvious solutions are just a small step away.

I'm also on the board of ORIC and would certainly be doing an injustice if I didn't congratulate Peter Haubrich for the Member of the year Award tonight at the OSTEC Silicon Vinyard Innovation Awards. He has worked tirelessly to make ORIC what it is today and the future is certainly looking very bright. I'm excited to be part of a such an young and innovative group.

Friendfeed, Twitter & Pipes

2008-04-01T01:28:00.001-07:00

It looks like FriendFeed is really taking off. Just saw a video by Scoble interviewing the founders and got a good feeling about the company. The management of our personal social networking environments is a little hard to manage and Friendfeed is a great way to help keep on top of what your own personal network is up to. I'm still using google reader for the most part to sift through the big news articles of the day, but use Friendfeed to monitor the social networking activity of a few specific individuals and contribute to the comments and discussion surrounding that activity. That is the true power of social networking and Friendfeed is currently the best way to centralize the discussion of all one's activities. I read a blog on allfacebook by Nick O'Neill mentioning how Facebook could incorporate this into their minifeed very easily, but they have kind of fallen off there. They really need to open up the MiniFeed.

Anyway, back to my original point. One of the issues I have with Friendfeed is trying to filter out the noise generated by items such as twitter. I don't believe there is a soln currently available on Friendfeed, so I found a great post by Mike Sansone through some other blog post I was reading on how to use Yahoo pipes to filter this information. I had heard about this app, but never really took the time to take a look at it. Now that I have, all I can say is that it rocks! You can use all kinds of filtering capabilities to customize what you want to see in an existing RSS feed, then re-publish the feed with your custom filters applied. So I've now created My Pipes with filters that allow me to see friendfeed without twitters and with twitters and then simply subscribed to those feeds in google reader. The number of filter and fetch modules likely allow you to customize for almost anything.

Another social networking discovery session

2008-03-20T22:57:00.001-07:00

It's about that time of year where I have enough to do that I need to do some serious procrastinating and try all those little applications and view all those sites I've been reading and hearing about for the past few months.

Although I call it procrastination, it is in fact just my prioritizing things I should do now with after things I could do later; like marking! I've been a little under the weather so I'll use that as an excuse for the task shuffle.

Just before Christmas I applied to be a presenter at the BC Science and Teachers Association to talk about Utilizing Social Networking in Professional and Personal Context. It has always been something I tinker with as I blogged about last October. Well that "social networking system", or eco-system as I call it, has worked quite well. I haven't really been confident enough to shout from the roof tops that I have all these profiles, but I'm getting closer to advertising it more publicly. Many of the people I'm surrounded by haven't really caught on to the whole social networking thing. They think it's cool, but haven't worked it into their daily schedule. Of course if you don't have a community of people sharing these tools with you then the house of cards comes crashing down. Anyway I'm looking forward to presenting. It's Session A on April 25th from 10:30 to 11:30 at the Grand Okanagan Resort.

Over the past couple of days I've done some playing around with Twitter, FriendFeed, a Twitter client TWhirl, and then integrating all these so my online activities can viewed in my Facebook profile. Friendfeed was great find since it allows you to see a user's activity from 28 different social networking sites. If they don't have a friendfeed account then you can create an imaginary one. Very cool. The Twitter thing...well...as they say, it is one of those things that sounds useless, but once you start using it and build up some followers, could be highly addictive. I'm finding I'm gaining some information that I wouldn't otherwise have obtained via my usual RSS feeds. However it is a trick to figure out the best platform or method to view and collect the information in one's personal network. For instance, do you want to see it summarized in an e-mail, view it from within facebook, or within your RSS Aggregator? I have all three going right now and will monitor to see which one works best for me. By the same token, if friendfeed is aggregating all the activity for you then you probably don't need to monitor the individual sources. Aggregating, aggregating and more aggregating. The next step I would love to see is an intelligent way of minimizing duplicity of content.

Microsoft have some incredible programmers & staff

2007-11-02T11:55:00.001-07:00

Well, since I'm on a role with my blogging, I may as well keep it up. Now this is a cool story. So as I posted previously, I was having a problem getting the error:

"Error Accessing Local Post - Unexpected error occurred while accessing local post (TargetInvocationException)"

I did a few searches and found a couple of responses on some forums from one of the developers, Joe, at Microsoft who responded to the posts asking them to email him the "Windows Live Writer.log" file. So I thought what the heck, I'll try the same.

About 5mins later I get a response asking about whether it was a particular post that I had done. I responded saying it was for any post when I published or saved to drafts. He sent me a debugging version to try and then I resent the newly generated log with the same error back to him. Well about 15mins later he responded with the answer referencing an MSDN blog entry that refers to possible problems from setting the FIPS compliant security policy. It turned out that this setting happened to be one I set and obviously forgot to turn back to the default after a lecture to my NTEN111 group! (I usually use a VPC!!!) I must have set it over a month ago, but have had no other issues since. It would have taken me forever, if at all, to solve this one! Anyway, it is something they hadn't considered and he is adding it to the bug database.

So, in about 2.5 hours from when I sent the first e-mail message to this guy I am again up and running with with Live Writer. If Microsoft have guys like this on their team, and I suspect they have many, they will continue to be successful. Some of their business practices may be a little suspect (no more than any other large corporation though), but that should be no reflection on the techy guys in there! My next drink will be to Joe!

Vista bugs and more bugs.

2007-11-02T09:18:00.001-07:00

I don't know if this is bug week for me or what, but I hit another two bugs yesterday and today. First of all, I keep getting these long delays when trying to access the Documents folder on my Vista Business machine. I did some checking and after a few minutes came across a great post on Toms Hardware forums that has confirmed through Mark Russinovich's blog of a bug in Vista concerning this time out. It happens after 30mins of being logged in and if you have a machine that is part of a domain and offline. My machine is not part of a domain, but I'm sure I am suffering from some variant of this bug. Apparently the only fix is wait until Vista SP1. This is a pretty horrific bug!

As if this wasn't enough after my RAID fiasco I was also having a problem with an "Error Accessing Local Post" message coming up every time I tried to use Windows Live Writer on my laptop. So I can't even use the damn program to post to my blog. After some checking I found that this is also a bug in Beta 3.0. OMG! Is it a full moon or what? What is weird is that I don't have that problem on my workstation. I sent off an e-mail to the developer at microsoft, but more than likely I'll have to wait until the final release comes out to fix it.

Problem with WD drive dropping out of RAID set

2007-11-01T23:10:00.001-07:00

I have four WD5000 drives in a RAID configuration using the ICH7R chipset. Generally these drives have been performing fairly well, but occasionally I've had the odd one just drop out of the RAID set. The first time it happened of course, I was thinking I've landed my self a bum drive, but I was simply able to bring it back into the set with a simple reboot or just marking it as normal in the Intel Storage Matrix manager. Then I would have to wait 12 hours for the set to rebuild while it operated with degraded performance. After this happened for the third time I started getting a little worried, and then last night I have two of the drives drop off. If you know anything about RAID5 you know this means you have now lost access to your data! Arrhhhhhggggg! Fortunately I have been fairly diligent about backing this machine up so everything is safe. Although this could have wasted many hours this weekend.

Anyway when I went into the Storage manager on boot up, I was able to recover one of the drives, and then was able to bring the other one back in the windows intel storage manager. However as I was looking at the specs of the drive in the storage manager, I noticed that the firmware versions were different. So I did a search for my model of drive, and wham! The first hit was a technical bulletin from intel talking about how WD5000 drives can spontaneously drop out of a raid set on an Intel NAS. Interesting I thought. I then linked to the WD site and low and behold this is a problem. The fix is to update the firmware to the version that only half my drives have.

So I took the drives out of the RAID set in the BIOS and then booted up using UBCD. I ran the wd5000ys.exe utility as recommended and waited for the response saying the firmware had been upgraded. I waited....and waited.....and waited.....and realizing that even with 4 drives 20 min wait was more than enough time to give it. In fact it shouldn't take more than about 2mins per drive. I rebooted and tried it again, running in the 32bit command shell and the 16 bit windows dos command shell (run using command.com). Still no success. So rebooted and popped by drives back into the RAID set. Everything came back up, but of course my drives are still using the old firmware. So my next step is to maybe try a bootable DOS disk. If this is the case, then I can't believe that in this day and age WD are still requiring the use of damn bootable DOS diskette!

A ROM Update Scare

2007-10-26T10:11:00.001-07:00

I was just procrastinating from marking once again and thought I would update the drivers on my ASUS P5B Deluxe system, including the ROM update. I haven't updated it in about 7 months, and since this board was fairly new when I bought it I assumed there would be have been a significant revision to the chipset and possibly the ROM. I headed over to the Asus website (which as a side note is a lousy interface) downloaded some updates and proceeded to install them. Of course I always get a little spidey sense when upgrading the ROM, but went ahead anyway. Right after I clicked on the FLASH action button, I noticed a check box indicating to set the CMOS back to it's default settings. What sent up the warning bells was that the default settings meant changing the HD configuration back to normal and out of the RAID configuration I had them set up for. My technical instinct of course told me that even if the settings in the CMOS changed the MBR and RAID configuration on the drives was untouched and therefore switching the settings back shouldn't be a big deal, but of course you still worry that you might have just trashed your system. Well the system boots up and wham I get a ROM checksum error. Not entirely unexpected, and after I got over the 5 sec thrill of the keyboard not responding and pressing on the damn FCN Lock key to activate the Fcn keys, I pressed F2 (I should have pressed F1) and reset the CMOS. I then had to reboot and go back into the CMOS to adjust the settings back to RAID. Made the change and my system booted. Unfortunately it had an issue with the video not displaying, but I have experienced this in the past and a simple reboot fixed it. For some reason my system also lost it's video drivers, but that could also have been because I updated the chipset drivers as well.

Anyway all's well that end's well, but as usual a case of simply updating a system wasn't as relaxed as I would have liked, but definitely a good procrastination chore to get the technical juices flowing.

SolarWinds Free tools

2007-10-17T12:52:00.000-07:00

Just received an e-mail outlining the free tools offered by Solar Winds. I don't know how many net admins actually use the Solar Winds Suite. I know I find the cost of the tools (most of which you can find opensource equivalents for) to be exorbitant. However they do have a couple of utilities they offer for free:

NetFlow Configurator v1.0
Remote configuration utility for collecting Cisco® NetFlow traffic data
SolarWinds TFTP Server v9.1
SolarWinds Advanced Subnet Calculator v9.1

My Social Networking system

2007-10-08T01:05:00.001-07:00

I spent a bit of time procrastinating from marking last week by trying to figure out a productive system for using all the social networking sites such as FURL, Del.icio.us, MSN Live, Stumbleupon, Linked-In, RSS feeds, facebook. One objective out of this system was to ensure that I separated work from personal; especially when it comes to the facebook side. I now have a facebook profile I use for work related contacts and another I use for more personal communication. As social networking becomes more common in the workplace and IT departments become more accepting of the technology as a tool as opposed to treating it like the anti-christ, then people are going to have to look into separating their personal and business world with these tools. Many people don't realize just how intertwined their online personal and business worlds have become. Just take e-mail for instance...how many people have personal e-mail in the sent and deleted items of their work electronic mailboxes? I try and send personal e-mail with my personal account, but if I don't, or if I receive personal e-mail to my work account, then I dump all personal communication into a single folder and regularly archive it out of my work mailbox.

Facebook is trying to become the operating system of social networking sites, and we are seeing that with all these applications that link and tie into many of these social networking sites. For instance if you go to my facebook profile you will see that I have applications that display my regularly shared RSS articles from Google Reader, articles & sites that I have dugg through DIGG, articles & sites that I have archived with FURL, and finally sites that I have stumbled-upon . And of course if this is my business facebook profile, then these would all be done with a consistent account name that I use to share work related, ie technology related information. If it is my personal facebook profile, then you'll see stuff that I have dugg, furled, stumbled or G-Read for personal interest with a consistent account name I use for personal stuff. Most people would look at that and go...OMG! Where the hell do you get the time! Well...yes it does take a while to set up, understand, and fit it into your daily workflow. In addition you do have to be disciplined and not let it take over your life. However once it is set up, you really just use it as much as you have time for. It really is amazing how many cool sites you can stumbleupon or information you pick up from multiple RSS sources in a fairly short period of time. As far as my bookmarks are concerned, I'm still synchronizing with MSN Live Favorites, and haven't really cosied up to Del.icio.us. Something had to give with all the information I get nailed with, and social bookmarking was it. I wanted a way of synchronizing my local bookmarks with my social bookmarks on an ongoing basis, but nothing really seems to fit the bill. Live favorites works intermittently, and even then it doesn't allow for the depth of sharing del.icio.us does So I've kind of left del.icio.us alone. I hear they are revamping their site, so hopefully this feature will be available. Once again I would share one as a personal set of bookmarks and another as my technology/business related bookmarks, where the tags would simply be my folder names. As it is del.icio.us made me go through all of my bookmarks manually when it imported them, and their certainly wasn't any synchronization. Plus I don't see any del.icio.us plug-ins that work as well as the local bookmarks. Although maybe I haven't searched hard enough.

Finally of course there is blogging. If you are reading this then you know that this is my professional blog. Consequently then you would expect me to have a personal blog...well...I do, but it's not something I post on the web. As a college instructor I do have to be a little careful of the personal information I expose publicly..;)..I use The Journal for personal notes and updates and store that on my local server. Again I haven't found a good blogging tool for local standalone blog management that a client such as Windows Live Writer would work well with. However that is a whole other quest I am on. I am trying to find the magic way of journal a blend of all my pictures, movies and blogs. I haven't quite figured out a good system there yet. At some point I'll figure it out.

The key with all this technology is just to make it easy and accessible from anywhere. Too much effort to use any one of these tools and you just won't bother! Therefore in order to make this happen you have to invest the time to investigate and build a workflow. The pay off is the amazing stuff you now become aware of that before you had no idea existed. If nothing else you can become a great source of facts and entertainment at the dinner table!.

More social networking

2007-10-08T00:26:00.001-07:00

A really interesting issue that is beginning to hit the headlines, and will continue to as social networking becomes more pervasive, is the use of social networking during work hours. My theory on it all and a message I would pass on to all those network managers packetshaping, websensing and monitoring all the traffic is to just relax! Is it really a big deal if someone nips into facebook for a few minutes, an hour or a even blows off the whole day? In reality who is it that has to deal with the lack of productivity of that individual? Well first of all if the employee has a regular job's worth of work, then they are going to have to pull in some late nights and long hours to make up for blowing the time off. If they don't then their supervisor should be taking note of the lack of productivity and questioning the employee. As a very last resort, if for example we are talking about a very well protected union worker who is doing nothing and the supervisor has no authority to make that person do the work, THEN it might be suitable to get the IT department to track that employees surfing habits. But this whole big brother thing just puts people into the mindset of trying to dodge THE MAN....the evil empire called the IT department. This is not the image we are trying to project. When did the IT department become the cops for peoples work habits? Just because the technology allows them to do it, it doesn't mean they have to. They need due diligence, and maybe the logs to allow them to go back, but it's not something I believe they should be actively monitoring and taking action on. But then and again, this is my "we are all one big happy family side" talking.

Why being able to script is important

2007-09-19T13:27:00.001-07:00

Many of our students always ask why it is important for them to learn how to program. Our usual response revolves benefits and power of utilizing scripting in network management. A colleague of mine just referred me to a funny story where a guy realized a neighbor was using his wireless Internet connection and as a result segmented his network into a trusted and un-trusted subnet and proceeded to alter how the user's web pages were displayed (flipping the graphics upside down or blurring the images!!!).

Although this was a great example of someone's creativity, I think it is a great example of why encryption is important and the incredible flexibility available to a network administrator when they know how to script. In this case the guy just played around the the graphics of all web pages, but it is easy to extrapolate and imagine the possibilities in terms of application and network monitoring and manipulation.

Upside-Down-Ternet

Online criminals target Facebook and virtual worlds

2007-09-19T08:09:00.002-07:00

This has always been a major issue with social networking platforms and nothing really outrageous if you are still careful with your privacy settings. For instance with Facebook you should have your privacy set to disallow anyone but friends for everything. It doesn't eliminate all the data mining that can occur from the third party applications that people install, but that can be addressed by limiting the personal information you post on Facebook. The most personal information I have on Facebook is my e-mail address which opens me up for spam....but then that's what a spam filter is for.

However I think we are going to see an explosion of exploits from social networking sites. I just had a friend who just just down her facebook account after some of her students (she works with juvenile delinquents) managed to get some information off of her account. I believe it might have been a picture or something of that nature. These will likely be the most common types of incidents. As a result I think the teenage generation of today are going to need much thicker skin and will have to be more accepting about people's faults when voting in politicians and people in authoritative positions. It is going to be extremely hard to extinguish one's internet trail.

Online criminals target Facebook and virtual worlds (Times Online)

Rockanagan ’07

2007-09-10T13:00:00.001-07:00

I've been listening to a lot of music acts in Second Life lately. This is really an area that I hadn't foreseen as being a major part of my Second Life experience, but it's one of the primary reasons why I start it up now. Every few hours there is always someone shoutcasting a stream to an SL sim. I just learned though that the okanagan is going to be the venue of a little music festival called Rockanagan ’07. It happens to coincide with the last night of the Willow Hotel. Definitely the end of an era :).

Made it through the first week again...

2007-09-10T10:46:00.001-07:00

As is always the case, the first week is always a little hectic as we build on last year and make last minute changes. Each year we become better organized and better prepared. In addition the students are coming in with a better and better understanding of technology and how to use it.

When we first standardized on all our course materials being offered through WebCT, all our e-mails going to MyOkanagan (Pipeline back then) and all the online curriculum through the cisco networking I remember a colleague (who is no longer with the college) saying we were piling way to much on them. I didn't really understand where he was coming from since it was the only way for us to provide a single respository for the class resources and ensure we were able to contact all the students. Each year we have refined the orientation document, and each year the students have made their way through with more ease. This year went seemed also went really well. Of course the real question is how many students are going to come back to us a couple of weeks from now and say they have never been able to get onto the academy website, or didn't know my detailed lecture notes existed. In order to curb those type of issues I elected to print and hand out a conduct and info document the first class. It was a bit of a riot act, but instead of my just telling them about it all, I was able to really to put it to them in writing as well. Again we'll have to see how effective it was next week.

I'm probably going to do a little group based learning again. It was a hit and miss last year, but unfortunately last year was a strange group dynamic. I'm hoping this year the students have a better sense of my expectations and really use it as an alternative method of learning. Of course there will be those who kick back do nothing, but I can only do so much them. At some point they have to be the ones to realize it is their money and time they are wasting. As long as it doesn't interfere with those who are trying to learn they are free to do what they want. I think I've laid out my expectations a little better this year and am better prepared with the labs and the slides. Last year involved a massive rewrite for the NTEN111 course so I had a harder time ensuring the slides were up in time for them to reader them, but this year I managed to get them all up a few weeks in advance. Although I had to realign my slides with the new ITE V4.0 curriculum which took a fair number of hours. However the new curriculum is better organized, and it is always good for the students to have some sort of text they can reference.

IODA Conference a Success

2007-09-10T10:11:00.001-07:00

Life has been way to busy lately to get anything down but I thought I should finish up the post on how the whole IODA conference went. As the heading suggests I can humbly say we 'kicked butt'. We put in long hours, but everyone pulled through and for the most part everything went without a hitch....almost. As is usual with anything technological there are so many variables that it would be an absolute miracle were nothing to go wrong. Of course when something decide to decide to pack it in, it will undoubtedly be at the worst possible time. In our case it was Wed evening. Ron and I decided that we would head back to the youth hostel to get ready for the evening and leave Frank and Matt to hold down the Fort for a couple of hours. Unfortunately half an hour later everything stops working and they are left dealing with a room full of people trying to get on the net. We arrived about an hour later to help with the problem and after plugging, unplugging and swapping components and cables we narrowed it down to the little d-link switch. Essentially we were seeing the link flash amber. After swapping it out everything worked fin. To their credit Matt & Frank did find the problem but forgot one little detail which held them back...when going from a switch to a switch you need a crossover cable. The D-links have an automatic cross over port but the cisco switch they replaced it with does not. Just one of those well learned lessons. It was an awsome experience for all the students and a lesson you just couldn't reproduce in the classroom.

That was basically the only problem we had the whole week. Amazing really. I've never really heard of IODA or the field of organizational development, but this conference really opened my eyes to what they are all about. In a nutshell their goal is open communication channels and form better relationships within a company or community in order to make a happier and more productive work environment. A very honourable field and one that I whole heartedly support. In most conferences the IT department is seen but not heard, and when the conference hours are over they just disappear back into their holes. However these guys really walked the walk and included us in the whole conference. We were invited to all the events and enjoyed the French Canadian Night where we were welcomed as the official sponsors, the Western night on thursday and the final wind up on Friday. We met a lot of amazing people and were approached by numerous groups raving about the service we had provided. We really did do OC proud. Hopefully we'll be able to get this into the OC journal so people can really appreciate what we did. I also made some really good contacts with some Hungarians, Belgiums and a lady from Schlumbeger who were either consultants and trainers in OD or part of Human Resources. In fact our networking went well into the wee hours of the morning. Two nights of that and I can tell you that by Saturday and Sunday I was well and truly done for. The awesome outcome from this little party, and some later e-mail discussion, is that we are now all part of an IODA Practitioners Facebook group. I'm really looking forward to the future discussions as they are all a very enthusiastic group.

By Saturday morning it was just Trevor and Christiane left to Help Ron, Clinton and I. We stripped everything down in about 40mins and were on the road by about 10:30am. As is always the case after all these things it is a little surreal when it all ends. We must have run into the Belgium guys three difference times as we were leaving and each time involved a hug and a goodbye. I personally didn't go for the third one, but it was entertaining.

Clinton, Trevor and I unpacked everything and then made it home for some much needed rest! What a week.

IODA Conference begins...

2007-08-21T14:57:00.001-07:00

9:00am Monday morning Ron and I met all the participating students at Okanagan College to help load up the cube van we rented with all the laptops, switches, servers etc. Clinton went and picked it up that morning but will be driving back mid week to hold down the fort at OC.

Trevor & Matt had completed the configurations as part of their 299 project and had spent most of Saturday familiarizing themselves with the configuration again. They are now both working at Telus and so they had to clear out the cobwebs and dig deep to remember how all this stuff works. Anyway they had tested a client and everything seemed to be working. Then Matt was to have the assistance of a couple of students to help configure the rest of the laptops generously donated by OC in the same way. We had planned on leaving at 11am, but for whatever reason Matt only had 1 1/2 of them done. We left anyway, stopping to pick up some food and supplies and made it to the Delta Sun Peaks by about 3:30pm. We then spent the following 7 hours configuring and installing all the equipment, breaking for pizza around 6:30pm. The install actually went fairly smoothly, although there were a couple of unexpected hiccups. Turned out the wireless authentication was still required from Sun Peaks, so we decided to remove our authentication. In addition we had a DNS problem and a routing problem connecting our network to the Delta Sun peaks network. Of course that was routing 101 and after a few minutes thought we turned on NAT on our router. After that everything seemed to work beautifully. So we headed back to the hostel around 11pm and had a nightcap.

Today we made it back to the hotel for 10am. Ron had been up since 6am to say goodbye to his kids who had come up with yesterday to help out. He then managed to fit in a bike ride since he has to maintain that buff body he has been working on for the past year. However all the students left Ron and I stranded at the hotel and we had to have Elker, the guy looking after the hostel, drive us up to the hotel. Anyway, the only thing left was ensure that the Logon VBScript Matt and I were working on added the printer to all clients. It took a couple of tries, but after some help from 'the scripting guys' we managed to get it to take.

Ron and I then put up a schedule for the students and now here I am, sitting in the computer lab doing my turn at the support. The IODA members have made us extremely welcome and are absolutely thrilled with what we have accomplished and providing for them. As a result they named us the official sponsor of the French Canadian night tomorrow night. Should be a lot of fun. There were times where Ron and I were wondering if having a project outside of classes was such a good idea, but the enthusiasm and professionalism shown by our students have demonstrated the value we can bring to an event and certainly something our department and Okanagan college can be proud of.

We've run into a couple of people from Thompson Rivers University who have wondered why we are doing this event and not TRU. The main reason is of course that we are the only department in the region that specialize in networking and telecommunications. However it was also a testament to the benefit of the conferences and trade shows we attend, since Ron made this connection while at a Science education conference in whistler.

IODA Conference Coming up

2007-08-17T23:40:00.001-07:00

Next week our department is going to be looking after the IT Services for the IODA conference; a conference about organizational development and the global ecology. Some of the breakout sessions really look quite interesting, but we'll be spending the better part of the first day ensuring all the systems are stable. We have a couple of students coming in tomorrow and sunday to make sure the client server side is ready to go. The did it as a project in their NTEN299 class and have had honoured their commitment to stick with it and see it through to the end, even though they both have full time jobs with Telus. I'm very impressed and proud of them for making doing this. We obviously chose the right guys to take on this project. Although they may have just chosen it on their own.

Our department and 5 other students are all heading up on monday and most of us are staying until saturday. Food and lodging is provided so it should be a blast. Although I should really be heads down prepping for my 218 class which starts for the first time this fall. We are going to be doing the MCSE course on securing Win2K3 server networks. Definitely a good thing for the students to take.

Networkers 2007

2007-08-17T00:41:00.001-07:00

Spent the week of July 21st in Anaheim for Networkers 2007. I didn't get to all the breakout sessions I would have liked, but of course the beautiful thing about networkers is that they record all the sessions and allow you to download the slides and presentations afterward.

I spent some time in the World Expo area talking to a few vendors, picking up some freebies and trying to win some prizes. I also spend some time talking to a lady who is working with the second life group within cisco. We had a great chat. SL is definitely an example of the interfaces to come. The Cisco academy had a lounge I was able to hang out in and chat with some other instructors. Made some good contacts and got some great information. In between I still managed to get to sessions on Wireless Mesh technologies, 802.1x, Data Center design and CCIE security.

The CCIE security was a techtutorial I did for 8hrs on the Monday. The instructor was none other than the guy that decides what does and doesn't go into the CCIE exam. Needless to say it was a very valuable session. The cool thing about it was that I realized I'm really not that far off from writing the exam and having a chance, but it would still require a massive studyfest to get myself to the point where I live and breathe cisco's security solutions. Anyway the instructor provided some interesting hints on what to focus on for the exam.

Another interesting session was on 802.1x and what it takes to get an enterprise into identity based networking. Lets just say that at the end of that session I realized you have to REALLY REALLY want this stuff to implement it. There are so many variables out of one vendors control that the last half of the presentations seemed like band-aid solutions on how to work around the issues. Anyway, it was enlightening as well.

My CCNP exams all expired a long time ago so took the CCNP Routing and switching composite certification exam. Man was that a long exam! Plus since this was my first time doing these testlets missed the four out of the first five questions by clicking on next instead of the 1,2,3,4,5 on the side. I asked one of the proctors if I could start again, but got shutdown. At this point I was thinking I'm done for since there are only 57 questions and you need 80% to pass. Anyway, I battled my through it and ran out of time as I was about to click on the last question so that was five questions I had lost. Well I was totally shocked to see the congratulations come up on the screen. I must have nailed all those question that I really had to think on, but wasn't sure. What a relief! 2 down and 2 to go. Although I'm not too worried about the security exam.

Although there was free food and booze, I only really got into it on one night, the first night. Happened to hook up with a cisco rep and his clients as well as some ladies from global knowledge. Well, they must have had some preauthorization for spending because we they just handed over their credit cards and said let it rip! I was introduced to my first "soco". I had no idea that's the shortened name for Southern Comfort, but hey it tasted good. However the night was still quite tame and everyone was well behaved.

The highlight of the week as always was the customer appreciation event. The brought in a bunch of female tribute bands, AC/DShe, Led Zepella and The Iron Maidens. All were excellent especially considering I'm big Maiden fan. Then, believe it or not, they brought in KISS all painted up and singing their greats. They had face painters on hand so I even had my face painted up as Gene Simmons. There were over 9000 people at this conference and they must have had about 60 busses to transport us from the hotel to where the even was located. Took about 40mins just to get there. The only down side to it all was that it was over by 11:00pm. However Kiss put on a great show.

Presentation to Software Developers Group

2006-11-24T10:16:00.001-08:00

Gave a presentation to the Okangan Software Developers group last night. My title was Internetworking and media technology in the digital age.... Of course as is the case with all these types of presentations, it is hard to know just how much detail to cover and how broad a scope. So I created this 135 slide presentation that I thought could act as a reference for them, and based on a survey I gave them at the beginning of the presentation I would narrow down exactly what I was going to talk about.

Well the survey came back with a unanimous yes for Web 2.0 and the digital home. So of course all the more detailed slides I had on networking and protocols were out the window right off the bat. However I still talked about cabling and basic network topology. The topic I always like to talk about is how twisted pair and fiber optic cable work. After that of course I focused on Web 2.0 where I demo'd my Del.Icio.Us bookmarks, blog and Flickr pictures.

All in all everyone was very receptive and I didn't put them all to sleep, which for me is a mark of success! I was going to play the George Carlin skit about a modern man, but time got the better of me and decided to leave it off the plate. However I do have to make mention of where I got some of my material from. For the Web2.0 stuff I pulled it from David Leeking's site, the IT director of the Kansas city library. Gotta love google! He had an awsome intro to Web 2.0, which I partially borrowed and enhanced with my own examples. I also pulled some information from some of the tech training presentations at stanford. That IT department really seems to have it together. I'm sure they have the same issues as most IT departments I've worked in, but these Friday afternoon tech briefings they seem to do really demonstrate a strong will on the part of their IT service group to reach out to their customers and further educate them as to how become more productive with the technology. With everybody just kicking in a little here and there and sharing their knowledge and content we can all be that much richer.

Windows Live Writer

2006-08-30T23:36:00.001-07:00

Summer holidays are over, so it is time to get back down to business and catch up on what has been going on in the tech business. I kept half an ear open to the news, but spent tonight going through the last couple of months of posts from my RSS feeds. As always i came a away with a couple of awsome little tidbits. The coolest discovery is the new Blog publishing tool from microsoft, Windows live writer. It is by the same guy that wrote coldfusion and I have to say I'm impressed. Although MS Spaces gets a bit of mention it works seemlessly with Typepad and Blogger as well. You just specify the Blog URL and your username and password and live writer does the rest. You now get to see a WYSIWYG view of your style template as you enter your post and post it to your blog with a click of the button. There are of course lots of tools that have allowed remote posting, but the WYSIWYG approach is the new thing now.

Sony DRM Rootkit?

2005-11-01T10:08:00.001-08:00

Mark Russinovich is one of those people you can really call a Windows guru. The way this guy disects the internals of an OS are amazing. He has built a number of tools that aid him in figuring out exactly what is going on under the hood and makes them publicly available on http://www.sysinternals.com. He often writes articles about his experiences and has one such experience with Sony's DRM software that is installed with their copy protected CD's.

Check it out.

Good Googling

2005-10-11T16:05:00.001-07:00

Take a look at some of these cool search features that Google offers. I think you'll be amazed at some of things you can do now. In addition the Google Guide provides some incredible information on just how to use google effectively. I've seen way too many people not find what they are looking for with Google because they just don't know how to search correctly.

MS updates MSConfig

2005-10-11T15:52:00.001-07:00

Microsoft have just updated their System Configuration utility as posted on ITToolbox Blogs
MSCONFIG adds new functionality

MSCONFIG is the Windows XP utility that if you use it you tend to use it a lot. The program has been the same since the XP launch and adds many diagnostic tools that can be used for troubleshooting a problem XP installation. One of the most useful tools it provides is the startup process utility that lets you turn off those unwanted processes that slow boot time.

Microsoft has quietly released an update called the Configuration Utility Update that adds a TOOLS tab that is a launcher for a bunch of system utilities, providing one click access for things like the Task Manager, Internet Explorer Options and System Restore, among others. It's a great addition to the XP toolkit and makes maintaining your installation just a little bit easier.

Teaching with RSS and a good news site

2005-09-10T23:27:00.001-07:00

Well I see it has been a while since I've done my last tech post. I guess with summer holidays, finally finishing off my masters, and finally getting our department's accreditation stuff out of the way, I really haven't spent a lot time on things tech.

However, I decided to experiment with distributing updated class material and lectures via RSS enclosures. I'm kind of excited about being able to use this technology and look forward to some feedback from my students. RSS is definitely the way of the future. I think I heard someone mention that Microsoft is going to be betting heavily on RSS in the next revision of Windows, now called windows vista, which is a real vindication of the technology. I think the key point here is that RSS is not about news, blogs and podcasting, but about distributing and subscribing to content.

As result you are seeing RSS aggregators move out of the world of just news aggregators or podcast catchers, and into becoming full boar multimedia RSS clients. Two applications I'm currently playing with are IpodderX and FireAnt, both of which provide an OK interface to Audio/Video/Text RSS content. They aren't designed for any particular type of content and so allow you to see any type of attachment a feed might have; ie. not just audio or text. Although when designing the web page for my class I thought I would use feedburner to take the ATOM feed generated by Blogger and convert it to RSS2.0. However, after reading the support forum at feedburner it looked as though they really only supported audio content. But I did a bit more reading and discovered that you can simply insert the "rel" reference in the "a" tag of your post and feedburner will create an enclosure out of any type of file. Of course any subscription to your feed will therefore use the feedburner feed. The other cool thing about using feedburner is that I can check out stats for the feed and see just how many people are actually using it.

Another site, or I guess RSS feed, that I monitor quite heavily is Digg. It seems to have just an awesome amount of cool tidbits about all types of technology. In fact I think it is fast outdoing Slashdot as a major source of interesting links and information.

Podcasting, DYNDNS and Yahoo! Music

2005-05-27T23:33:00.001-07:00

I've been listening to usual plethora of podcasts from Podcast Alley. I find some of them very interesting, but quite often rather than just not putting out a show when they have nothing to say, they just waffle for an hour about this that and the other. I guess some people find it interesting hearing about the day to day events of all these different people, but personally I feel there are just too many other factual podcasts to bother listening to someone give me a rendition of their walk outside, or what the inside of a hotel room they are staying in looks like. However the awesome thing about this of course is that you can just flip between different podcasts or fast forward though the waffle. I think what I like about the technology is just the live and raw feel to it. Most of them don't have the polished often over produced babble we sometimes here on the radio, but people just being themselves.

I was listening to the Mike Tech Show yesterday and heard him talking about DYNDNS.ORG . Beside being a host provider for DNS services, they also provide you with a way of assigning a static name to a dynamic address. If you are running a host then you can download a client to update their site with your dynamic address, but if you have a firewall such as some of the higher end Dlink consumer models, they inherently support this feature. It works great. You can simply refer to the "hostname.gotdns.org" and you'll be forwarded on to your home's external network interface.

Another bit of news which I'm a little stoked about is the introduction of Yahoo! Music for US$4.95 a month. It's only for sites in the US right now, but man, FINALLY there is someone offering a reasonable price for subscription based music. I hear a lot of debate over how you really don't own the music, but come on, do you really want to own 150,000 songs, or do you just want access to them whenever you want. Granted this means they can raise the price on you and have you by short and curlies, but honestly the competition on this arena is only going to increase, and so the prices shouldn't go up too much. Either way I'm quite happy to spend $75 a year and have access to any song I want on my PC or MP3 player.

Broadcast Flag Shutdown

2005-05-16T23:33:00.001-07:00

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts lately and have found the most productive sessions to be those with discussions involving individuals with great insights into the industry. I just listened to a podcast from MAKE magazine where Cory Doctorow (an accomplished blogger, author and more recently advocate for consumer rights with the EFF ) gave a very entertaining account of the recent demise of the broadcast flag in the U.S. I'm not going to go into a lot detail about it since I really couldn't do the flagrant attempt at inhibiting and controlling competition and innovation with DTV by the National Broadcasters Association and the MPAA justice.

The battle of the network giants and a good business idea.

2005-04-14T23:19:00.001-07:00

Went on a road trip with some colleagues on Monday and Tuesday. I was actually thinking that it was going to be a little light on content, but it was surprisingly successful. We met with Nortel on Monday afternoon, went to a Cisco VOIP demonstration on Tuesday morning, I think Nortel once again demonstrated that they just don't have the marketing panache of CISCO. Everything CISCO do appears to be much more polished, right from their slides to their homogeneous product line. They just bought out a company called Airspace that Nortel had invested a considerable amount of time and money in developing a partnership and reselling to customers. Now that Cisco have bought the company, they have had to find another partner. Can you imagine being the Sales guy that has to go back to your clients and say hey "remember that wireless solution we sold you? Er, well, we have a different one now and want you to move in that direction" It was that kind of crumbling vision that led me to dump Nortel back at UNBC. Nevertheless, they are friendly and knowledgeable guys and always give us plenty of their time even though they are likely run off their feet. Plus from a technical perspective I still greatly respect each of them.

Nortel were also telling us about a VOIP demo they had done for a client where one of their engineers was working in the same lab and unplugged their connection. OMG! Of all technologies to have to say, well really this works. The biggest argument of every old timer telecommunications manager fighting the shift to an all out VOIP infrastructure has been the reliability. Of course all us data guys know the technology works, but it certainly needs some special attention. But try swaying an old telecomm guy after demo where the technology failed! Funny thing was, Cisco were demo'ing some of the Contact and Relation Management integration they offer, and that demo failed as well! I understand this is a complex scenario to set up, and I really understand how difficult live demos can be. But for goodness sakes, if you are trying to sell people on the stability of a technology, keep it friggin' simple and stick to something that will work for sure. It actually took away from all the cool stuff that did work during the seminar.

On our way home we then had a big discussion on smart homes and how the housing industry here in Kelowna, and probably in many other cities, is really missing that key integrating component. We came up with a cool solution for centralizing a couple of clustered servers with massive mirrored disks that would handle all the Voice/Data/Video/HVAC for the house along with different options for a new install and a retro fit. I'm going to have to start working on this and coming up with some practical solutions from a personal interest perspective rather than a business objective. However I think this is definitely something that would take off were the right marketing applied to it.

On another tech note, my Laptop Ethernet controller has decided to bite the big one. Of course I don't really have time to spend fixing it and have found a work around in the mean time. Occasionally the machine hangs during POST, but I can usually get it booted up eventually. This is a very dangerous game of course, especially around Exam time. One of my colleagues has also had the same problem and had the motherboard replaced. These IBM laptops have not had a good track record so far! I would likely go for a Toshiba or a Dell if I had a choice.

Podcasting and MSN Video

2005-04-06T00:43:00.001-07:00

I've been using RSS aggregation for the past several months somewhat effectively, but although I had always heard about PodCasting I have never actually looked into it. Well yesterday I read an article referencing it and thought I would procrastinate on doing some prep by reading up on it. Turns out this is just an RSS feed with attachments, or enclosures as they like to call them, the attachments being mostly media file like MP3's and WMA files. I can always read faster than these guys can podcast the news items at me, but it's a great way of catching up while driving or allowing you to do some mindless grunt work while still catching up on the news. Although I download it to my PC right now, I'm going to use Ipodder to get them to my PDA and listen to them on the way to work or waiting around throughout the day. Cool stuff! Although this is all audio stuff, you know the video is just around the corner, especially with Microsoft getting into the game with MSN Video to the desktop or PDA.

CBAC and NAT on a Cisco Router

2005-01-26T20:45:00.001-08:00

I was teaching a lab on Context Based Access Control on a cisco 2600 and experimented using NAT and CBAC. Here are some very interesting facts concerning CBAC:

1) No matter on what interface the ip inspection rule is applied, the return temporary access control list entry to allow the traffic back into the router based on the protocol being inspected is applied to all acls the traffic will encounter on the way back to the source. ie. if ip inspect FWRULE in is applied to the inside interface, and there is an ACL applied outbound on the inside interface and inbound on the out outside interface, then a temporary ACL entry will be applied to both lists.

2) If you are using NAT and you are inspecting traffic inbound on the internal interface, and you have an inbound ACL on the external interface, then CBAC is smart enough to add the temporary ACL entry to the inbound ACL using the inside global address. I must say I'm quite impressed.

What You'll Wish You'd Known in High School....

2005-01-21T13:42:00.001-08:00

Read about this article on Slashdot. It's a speech Paul Graham was going to give to a high school class, but was vetoed by school authorities. However I feel the concepts here are not restricted to High School students. They apply to college students and many adults. I think even now few people have figured this out.

What You'll Wish You'd Known

Schneier on Security: The Legacy of DES

2005-01-18T23:28:00.001-08:00

I had a student post a great link to an Essay, Schneier on Security: The Legacy of DES.

Schneier is a security god with this stuff. This is just one of the great papers he has written! It's so cool to read about people who try and blow the lid off of flawed algorithms used by big industry players, as well as keeping a close eye on government intelligence organizations and actions they might take to limit the public's ability to maintain privacy.

It gets back to the age old debate on privacy versus national security. Obviously terrorist cells and criminals will try to take advantage of a technology that protects them from prying eyes, but does the giving up of some of our civil liberties really mean our security forces get that much closer to these guys? As the years go by I'm becoming more and more cynical about just how some of this information that the government has access to can be misused. It would just take one dark character to access a national database of personal information and we are all in danger of being taken advantage of. A very careful balance has to be struck between convenience and security. I've no idea what the solution is or where that line should be drawn, but it strikes me that people need to keep a very close eye on just how vulnerable they are to identity theft and distribution of private information.

Neptune

2005-01-14T15:06:00.001-08:00

Read about an awsome project going on with CANARIE. This is just an example of why we this regional initiative to connect all educational institutions in the Okanagan to the research networks should happen. It would present all kinds of opportunities. Here is an excerpt.....

*************************************************************************
Monday, December 20, 2004

With Neptune -- an acronym for North-East Pacific Time-Series Networked Experiment -- complete in Canada and the U.S., 3,000 kilometres of fibre-optic cable and power lines will be buried three kilometres under the ocean floor to monitor the entire Juan de Fuca plate running from Vancouver to Oregon.

Sensors and instruments will measure everything from currents to fluids in the seabed to tremors on the sea floor. Robotic submersibles will shuttle the area to perform experiments on command, docking themselves at underwater power stations when they are done.
Television cameras will pan, tilt and survey the area, controlled remotely through the Internet so researchers can manipulate their view from their desks and school children will capture live footage of sea life.

The unparalleled look into the deep will run 24 hours a day, seven days a week for 30 years. Its tasks will be many: tracking whales and other marine mammals, monitoring fish stocks, investigating undersea gas deposits, examining how tectonic plates work, running experiments to monitor climate change, measuring underwater earthquakes, recording underwater volcanic activities and providing new insights into tsunamis.

Another concept is to have a specific instrument on the sea floor dedicated to a specific high school for a semester. It is their instrument, they can do whatever they want with it.
Chris Barnes is the project director for Neptune Canada. Mr. Barnes says such systems could save governments money by providing them with a rich data source to make better decisions. He points to the collapse of the cod stocks off Newfoundland.

Canarie's job is to come up with the tools that will allow schoolchildren and researchers to tap into the observatory through the Internet.

"When you have an instrument on the ocean floor 3,000 metres down, how do you provide a researcher who may be located in the other coast of the country access to that instrument, to control it, to change its parameters -- to 'turn the knobs' -- and also get the data from the instruments to the researcher's desktop?" says Mr. St. Arnaud.

"And so we have to develop the technologies to allow them to remotely control that instrument. So we are working in partnership with the National Research Council and Neptune Canada to develop what are called web service tools to allow them to control the instrument."
Mr. St. Arnaud believes similar technology could be used to run offshore oil operations without the need for pricey oil rigs or to operate mines without putting humans down the shafts.

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Read the Specs...

2005-01-06T23:14:00.001-08:00

I just installed a relative's voice and data communciations in their new house and encountered a class blunder on my part. I ordered the usual NORDX Bix Rails, slots, RJ45 to BIX rails to be used to terminate the connections. A couple of us punched down the telecommunications side of things on to the Bix and I punched down one quick data connection before I left. I plugged it directly in to the cable modem, and wham everything came up. So I thought I would leave it at that and come back to the rest when I had more time.

Later that week I purchased a Wireless Linksys router and plugged everything in for them. However low and behold their connection on the to the PC starts flapping on and off! I got out the tester and started checking it out and got the following wiring layout:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
2 7 3 4 5 6 1 8

I thought what the hell is this? Why the heck was it working on the Cable modem? With this kind of wiring mismatch nothing should have worked? I checked all the terminations again, which looked fine and then second guessed myself a few times before talking to a colleague very knowledgeable in this area. He said mmmmmm, this looks like a USOC set up but I've never heard of an RJ45 to BIX USOC rail. Well guess what!!!! There is! The mistake I made was that I sent in the spec sheet for a quote and it contained both the EIA/TIA 568A rail and the USOC rail. The account manager quoted me on the USOC rail and I didn't notice!

It is easily fixed with some simple repunching, but what a classic mistake!

Hyperterminal Woes

2004-12-23T23:30:00.001-08:00

I spent a bit of time at work the past couple of days installing an upgraded flash into the Pix's. I used my PDA the first time and found that it was a little slow, but did the job. Didn't seem to work that great when connecting and disconnecting between different connections. I even thought I had a PIX that had a problem after I upgraded the flash. However after reseating the card and resetting my hyperterminal session I managed to finally get the thing to boot up. Now of course I don't know whether it was just the terminal session or the actual card. The weird thing about hyperterminal is that sometimes if you close hyperterminal down without doing a disconnect it can sometimes leave the port tied up. Although there is probably an SVCHOST or some other I/O process that can be reset, the easiest thing to do is just unplug the USB to serial cable and plug it back in.

I'm going to have the students hook everything up this year so that all they really understand the layout of the equipment. Last year it took them half the term before they understood the topology, and even then some of them still didn't really figure it out. It makes troubleshooting especially hard when troubleshooting during the labs. It seemed they had a hard time with a simple pinging process or checking routing table topologies.

and so it starts....

2004-12-23T23:04:00.001-08:00

With all the press going on about blogging I always wondered at what point I would start posting a blog. I've always kept journals, but I thought it insane to publish one's personal affairs for the world to see. Imagine a politician that had gone through a rough time early on their carreer and blogged the whole thing for the world to see later!

So what to do.....after some deliberation tonight, I thought I take the leap and join the realm of technical blogs by providing little tidbits of information I discover in the networking and telecommunications realm that I find interesting. Between instructing and consulting I'm sure I'll find something. In fact I am just about to embark on a project involving a regional high speed broadband initiative in the okanagan that should provide some material for this thing.