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.