surfing the EtHeR

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 Twiiter vast wealth of information automatically and reduce the amount of noise I’ve always encountered. Most TW enthusiasts would shoot right back at me with word tracking. I knew it was there, but for some reason just never took advantage of it. I think some of that might have been because I was using 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, which does provide ultimate flexibility with this type of thing. I’m not in any immediate rush, so maybe I’ll wait fort the next Twhirl since it combines so nicely with FF right now.

As a result, 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