News

Some of you may know that I recently accepted a new position as the Network and Web Administrator for Generations Incorporated.  If you’ve read this blog for long, you know also that I’m currently working desktop support for Boston University.  It’s about 10:30 here in Boston and I was thinking about the transition in skills and knowledge of a job such as this.  Desktop support with Information Systems Planning and Support has been a really great experience where I’ve learned a great deal from the technical aspects to time management and relationship maintenance.  These are all skills that I’m able to apply to this new organization I’m working with.

Unfortunately, as a student employee and the nature of the desktop support position, I have not learned much in the way of server technology.  Sure, this means that Generations Inc (GI) took a bit of a gamble with me since their prior admin was basically a brain-child genius.  On the other hand, having worked in an environment where you don’t always see the whole picture or deal with users that honestly don’t know what happened, I have learned the ability to troubleshoot problems.  Perhaps this, the ability to systematically find problems and resolve them in an orderly fashion, has been the greatest benefit I’ve gained from my work with ISPS.

Troubleshooting skills aside, I face a large learning curve when it comes to specific technology such as Windows 2003 Server, Windows Small Business Server, Terminal Services Server, and Microsoft Exchange Server 2003.  These particular OS’s are my bread and butter - the daily grind if you will.  My primary tasks on a day to day basis are communicated via the task application of outlook and revolve around server maintenance and backup, desktop user support (similar to my position with ISPS), and longer term research and development projects.

I think I’ll mention a couple of the projects I’m working on right now.  The first, a full inventory and audit of computer assets, users, policies, and infrastructure.  This is a rather basic concept - figure out what we have, where it is, and who uses it, then make changes as necessary.  Since we’re such a small shop, it won’t be difficult to get any one bit of information but to do the updates and remediation that I think will be necessary, I expect that I’ll need some out of hours time.  The other big project I’m working on is to align mobile computing to our network where users with Blackberries will be able to sync with our servers or perhaps Windows Mobile devices will use the AirSync technology.  I’m still in the research phase for this project, gathering the raw numbers and information to then present to the directors in a report.

So what spurned all of this?  Well, I was bored for one.  I’m in the midst of a book that teaches the Windows 2003 Server information in a crash course sort of way.  I’ve been reading about installing, domain controllers, all sorts of bits about network infrastructure that I just needed a bit of a break and here I am.  In any case, I will bring this to a close.  I know I haven’t been writing often but I think that my more regimented schedule will do well for my publishing cycle.

Thank you to all that continue to read and support City Streets, my professional blog and website!

When you post messages to your friend’s wall, do you consider how an outsider might perceive your message?  Are there any items in your “interests” or “activities” sections of your profile that you wouldn’t want your mother, teacher, or future employer see?  If so, you need to keep reading.

Computer users my age have a false sense of privacy while they prowl through the pages of Facebook and Myspace.  They tend to believe that just because someone isn’t their “friend,” they can’t see what information you’ve posted.  This isn’t true.  There are a number of technologies out on the market and in development that facilitate the quest to gather more information about YOU.

Two new projects are leading the charge of indexing social networking as a method of profiling every user on the internet.  SPOCK is a search engine in private beta testing that browses and analyzes internet profiles of a few major social communities.  The fore-runner of the social indexing project is WIKIYOU.  This search engine launched last month and provides a robust interface delivering search results for close match names as well as exact match.  Both of these engines have the same mission but  operate in a different manners.

When searching for myself, SPOCK presented to me four pages of users with real names matching “James Connors” scattered all around the world.  My actual entry existed on the last page and contained a number of inaccurate items.  Spock prowls profiles looking for identifying information such as your zodiac sign, age, hometown, occupation, etc.  The engine then builds a tags for your entry into a profile that users can then “claim.” Similarly, WIKIYOU allows users to claim their profile for their engine as well.  Their method of indexing is to pull clippings, or small snippets, of your various profiles online and reproduce them in their search results matching keyword searches.

This movement towards social indexing represents a major shift in the way the internet works.  Instead of categories or keywords, tags and social networking provides the basis for search results.  The most important bit about these programs is that you do go and claim your profiles because, as in my experience, there can be false information contained within your profile.  Claiming these profiles also allows you to build out the interface with your activities, other links, and aliases throughout the net thus providing potential employers or other checkers the accurate and correct information.

I’m planning another blog entry regarding this idea of claiming your identity on the net in the next few days because I think it’s a really important issue to remember as an internet user of the 21st century.  Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you… next time.

Friends, I am currently looking through a few new features and applications on my company MacBook Pro (possibly one of the best laptops ever).  In the next few days, I’m hoping to have functional reviews of a number of browsers, applications, and this platform.  Stay tuned!

A wired blog article broke news about the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) newest public project.  These little pals are robotic wireless access points, or more properly - autonomous, mesh networked, wireless extension units.  The agency sees the future of the glorified lego mindstorms robots as being expendable units for soldiers to deploy as they move, thereby extending the multitudinous information technologies available to field commandos.

Each robot must be less than $100 per unit on small production runs, must have a long service life of 7 - 14 days while on batteries (they won’t be recharged), and they must be intelligent.  Swarm technologies have been used in robot demonstrations where each unit is aware of each other and actually work together by passing information from unit to unit to achieve the objective.  These units would be able to heal the network, should an individual unit shutdown or be destroyed.

I found myself wondering about these technologies.  I feel that the most difficult requirement to satisfy will be the cost measure.  I’m sure that some University has been working on just such a project somewhere but otherwise, how could a corporation hope to make and $$ on this?  There won’t be any support because they’re throw away and self programming.  There won’t be any parts market for the same reason so all of their costs for production and development must be paid off within the sale price.  Of course, like every government contract, this project will be going to the lowest bidder.

The hardest part of the hardware will be designing a router that will interface with both the data and voice networks of the military (NIPRnet and SIPRnet plus many others that were not declassified at my time in the Air Force) while at the same time being able to communicate with the other units in the area.  The truss and chassis will probably be a lightweight metal with treads of some sort.  The battery unit will invariably be the largest portion of the entire unit since it will need to power both the propulsion unit and the router technology.  But these hardware issues can surely utilize market technologies without needing in house development.

Software will be a different issue all together.  Not only will the routers have to recognize where information is going and coming from, but they’ll need to know where the other units are such that they can cross route information without having to go back to the main servers in order to facilitate faster data transfers.  Each robot will need to have a broad understanding of the current network coverage as well as the holes in reception and be able to navigate to improve connection strength and safety.  Fortunately, DARPA is looking for these units to fit into the urban warfare environment where coverage must be robust with respect to structures and shorter distances rather than the more open distances of desert or wilderness environments.  Perhaps the military will integrate the GPS system into the unit providing waypoints for the robots to traverse but this would increase costs and incur further programming time for what was supposed to be a zero-configuration project.

In summary, I think that this particular project will be a new step for DARPA by showing their interest in disposable network technology (tolerance for it falling into enemy hands with no plan for recovery by US forces… can you say self destruct?) as well as their continued insurmountable cost positions.  Let’s get real… even if a company was going to get further gov’t contracts as a result of this, there is no way they’ll be able to fulfill the mission specs while simultaneously staying within the price point for each unit.

I am currently working on a project for ISPS that simply doesn’t want to work correctly. Sure, the project wasn’t commissioned by anyone in particular but rather, it was the manifestation of seeing a need and fitting a solution to that need. That need is of documentation.

So what is this project that you speak of, James? Well, our office administers somewhere in the neighborhood of 1700 computers and 2 data centers… that equates to about 50 - 100 support tickets per day… we’re a busy shop. Users break things, download programs they shouldn’t, contract viruses, or just flat our fry the computer at times. As a department, we have some unique ways of fixing these ailments but they aren’t set down anywhere.

For this reason, I have taken it upon my self to produce some sort of support repository that would be an easy place to update solutions to various computer problems. For example:

This week, our office has seen a number of cases where users, particularly laptop users, have contracted the notorious VUNDO or VIRTUMUNDO virus. This particularly nasty computer virus blocks anti-virus software, locks itself away with guard dog dll’s and even changes it’s name at logoff through a registry rewrite.

Some people may be scratching their heads at all of that, but if you’re still with me, then you’ll realize how nasty such a program is. In fact, there isn’t an anti-virus product out there that takes care of everything related to VUNDO, therefore 3rd party programmers have made effective programs freely available. But where are they?!

This was what I faced this week - a learning curve on how to attack such a problem as a computer virus that did not tell me where it was laying. Rather, it hid from me with all it’s heuristic intelligence. If we had at hand the necessary documentation to deal with the problem, I would have been able to resolve the infection in a matter of hours (time for the computers to run the various cleaning utilities) rather than having the issues drag on over night.

To this end, I am building a support wiki that will rule the world!… or just our department (with a little luck and some group buy-in). For privacy purposes, I will not disclose the URL to this website but anyone interested is welcome to email me for more details.

Premise
Today was the first time that Redmond has reached out to put money into my pocket. About a week ago, I received a phone call asking me to work with a market research firm to speak about their product - Microsoft Office Live. The whole program is software as a service - in other words, you pay for programs as if they were a subscription with varying levels of functionality and support for different price points. I think the whole concept is ok in form but Microsoft’s implementation has been horrific at best - they seem to get that, hence the focus groups targeting users that signed up but then almost never went back.

Body
Upon arrival at a rather interesting office building, I was asked once again to screen and answer questions that pertained to the study. It’s ok… I guess, but it was the third time that I was screened (the first at the initial interview request and the second upon the confirmation of the appointment). I understand the need to be thorough but I think it’s a bit much to answer the same questions three times over. The desk attendants showed me to a waiting area with some warm sandwiches and soda. As more people arrived, it became clear that they weren’t going to take everyone and lo and behold they took only three of the crowd that had assembled.

I didn’t hear what became of the others because I was called into the room for the focus group. There was the stereotypical mirrored glass behind which researchers were scrutinizing our every move and phrase. This is normal to me now since I have completed a number of different focus groups around the Boston area. The warmup questions were similar and always landed just short of what we were there to discuss. I think that it was an interesting contrast between we three chosen ones - one artist lady that didn’t know anything about computers that AOL didn’t tell her - one would be start-up guy that thought he knew everything about computers but had a financial advisor’s background - and then me, the college kid that works in IT working towards a degree in MIS. It was clear that I had the most technical knowledge of the bunch. I’m not making that distinction because I’m “better” so to speak but rather because they drew a good diverse background - a fair cross section of the possible future users.

An hour later we had decided that the program wasn’t useful because it was too hard to navigate and wasn’t giving the user what it needed when it needed it. In other words it wasn’t user friendly or intuitive. As a group we had given the researchers some targeted feedback that I think was worth our $130 honoraria… If I do say so myself. It will be interesting to watch over the next few months to see if anything from our small panel actually makes it to the end product at Microsoft.

With that, I bid you adue - I’m hoping that these will come more often now that final exams are over for me. I definitely appreciate your readership and hope that you stay tuned!

What is it? I think that Web 2.0 is more than just a name, more than a simple idea of sharing. No, Web 2.0 is the future of technology. Think about it - what websites have become some of the biggest money makers in the near history? Mark Zuckerberg, the 20 something founder and CEO of Facebook.com, was offered 1 billion dollars for his social networking website and now supposedly waits for a $2 Billion Offer. There’s big business where people can come together and create something for almost nothing.

I don’t think that we should be afraid of this move though - rather I feel energized by these developments. A fellow blogger hit the nail right on the head on his personal blog. People no longer wait for mail from the postal service, nor do individuals require years of experience in order to have their part in the information super highway. I’m just a college student that enjoys sharing his perspective on the world, especially where it comes to computers and technology but that doesn’t discount my contributions.

The internet has become much more than a way to post or find information; it has become a tool for everyone to use. No one is kept out, no certifications or resume required - just an interest and a dream. I hope that anyone reading these posts are enjoying the time that I spend here because I enjoy it and that’s why I do this. The ability to teach, share, or even argue is a freedom I enjoy and wish to bring to everyone that wants to listen and participate.