"Herbert!"

August 9, Microsoft Patch Motherlode

2011-08-04T11:24:00.000-07:00

Looks like a pretty huge batch of updates is coming from Microsoft next week.

There's a lot of shenanigans going on the internet right now and as usual Microsoft's products are the targets.

Looks like it's the usual suspects; Internet Explorer and Windows OS components. In my position I need to look carefully at every one of these to see what subsystems are going to be changed by these updates.

In the past, a number of business-critical functions have suffered as a result of poor patch testing by Microsoft, even against other Microsoft products. In particular a recent update disabled IE users from using the Explorer view for SharePoint Shared Document folders. That was a fine piece of misery to work through, I can tell you!

While I won't be surprised, I will still shake my head if I see more image and font exploits this month, as I have seen for the last year or so. It seems like they are constantly tweaking long-standing vulnerabilities in order to continue to support OS-integrated systems like music and image tagging.

So it looks like I'm due for a good 2-3 hours of reviewing these updates next Wednesday to see what's going to pass muster so I can continue to strike the balance between security and productivity.

Phishing, Spam, Fake Email, how to tell??

2011-08-01T20:33:00.000-07:00

For years I've had an email account on Hotmail which I use to sign up for contests, get whitepapers, register free software, and any number of odd, mostly unimportant things.

When I get mail on this account, it is 100% stuff I don't really care about. Usually someone sold that email address to someone else and they are now sending me some kind of nonsense I can completely ignore by virtue of the account it's received with.

The interesting thing about this is after years of use, I get a lot of mail. In fact that email address has been passed around by 3rd party marketers, scammers, hackers, phishers, the whole lot. What I am able to learn from this is how to tell the difference between a real message and a fake one.

I didn't sign up with Facebook or Twitter with this account. I also don't email my family or friends. I don't use it for anything important like banking, PayPal, or Ebay. So, everything I get on it which CLAIMS to be from any of those sources, I can say without reservation is FAKE.

I encourage EVERYONE I support to get these kinds of email accounts. They not only protect your personal, important email accounts, but can give you a look into what the fake mail looks like so when it arrives in your legitimate mailbox, you just might be able to tell the difference.

Support your local developers!

2011-07-12T11:25:00.001-07:00

We are seeing more and more widely-deployed applications change on a frequent basis. Microsoft's Office product changed significantly in 2007 and another big change came out just last year. For most users these changes were completely unnecessary, but in order to remain compatible with new document standards they were forced to upgrade.

Adobe Reader's product line had a similar change and worse still the installer opted you in to have an extra toolbar. Google product updates throw a browser on, so do Apple products.

These application updates frequently leave the user forced between a rock and a hard place; having to choose between 'keeping up' and being shut down due to rushed development bugs, insecure third-party applications and utilities, and a learning curve to find out where common commands were moved to.

Customized application development used to be the luxury of big business and their internal developer teams, or partnerships with the big IT companies out there like Microsoft, Lotus, Adobe and IBM.

Today, thanks to the growing open source movement, we have small development companies all over who are creating custom applications which are sustainable, safe, and deliver exactly what you need. You decide when it updates and how.

Over the life of a product forced upgrades can cost a lot in both hard and soft costs like retraining and lost productivity. In many cases a relationship with your local application developer can save you some real money.

FTC's Google Investigation

2011-06-25T11:05:00.000-07:00

This seems to be a big thing in the news right now. I shudder to think what this bit of news is distracting us from.

Why do I feel it's unimportant enough to worry about what I might be missing? Monopoly investigations in the tech industry have been little more than a money grab from courts and lawyers. Our rights as consumers aren't being protected.

Case in point; Microsoft. Once the target of a probe that was simply dropped in the U.S. after years of court battles. One of the key points was the forced distribution of the web browser in the operating system. This was a clearly egregious violation of antitrust laws, but somehow U.S. courts allowed themselves to be blinded to Microsoft's cavalcade of "experts" and allowed that point to simply fall by the wayside.

Not so in the EU; consider that Microsoft distributes the Windows operating system WITHOUT A BROWSER. It's completely separate from the OS and people can choose to run it or not.

Another case in point; Apple. Consider that you cannot install the OS on any non-Apple manufactured hardware. Consider that you cannot replace the battery in many of Apple's products and most of the software for it needs to be vetted through iTunes or Apple. Seems like Apple products are designed to promote trade and opportunity for only Apple and they are not interested in innovative partners (of course most of the truly innovative technologies are bought up by Microsoft since they can't seem to spell innovation much less create any).

One of the more recent arguments presented in an article is questioning the wisdom of launching an investigation into a high-profile member of the tech industry when it is that industry which is driving a significant part of the U.S. economic recovery.

Personally, I could care less if Google was making every dollar for the U.S. GDP right now; if they're breaking the law then they need to be punished. Punishing them for dominance of the search market? Uhm. No. Punish them for poisoning the way links are displayed in search results? Ok yeah get 'em.

Just don't forget, Microsoft's Bing uses Google search to give you your search results, so take heed Microsoft; you better get your lawyers over to Google to protect your... Innovative search engine...

FBI seizes servers: Reminds IT admins to have a back-up plan | TechRepublic

2011-06-23T16:47:00.000-07:00

FBI seizes servers: Reminds IT admins to have a back-up plan | TechRepublic: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"

I'm not big on the cloud; there are a LOT of points of failure which get introduced and I agree there is a way to mitigate them but it's hard to get the purse strings to understand the need to maintain a network just in case the wind blows your cloud away!

Another client in my cloud doing something illegal which happens to take my site down too is not something I would have put in my DR plan; but definitely worth considering.

The Official Lookout Blog | Security Alert: Android Trojan GGTracker Charges Premium Rate SMS Messages

2011-06-23T13:56:00.000-07:00

The Official Lookout Blog | Security Alert: Android Trojan GGTracker Charges Premium Rate SMS Messages: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Another good reason to use Lookout on your Android device. I have been using the free version for some time now. It's been nice to have a little comfort in knowing I have some protection against this sort of thing as well as the ability to restore my phone from backup in the event of a wipe.

Small Business Take Heed

2011-06-10T14:17:00.000-07:00

There's enough IT things working against small business; from predatory consultants to vague billing from subscription services like phone and internet use. Your relationship with your bank is one of those things that's relied upon for all your critical business needs.

Today's ruling spells out in clear terms that you are responsible for conducting your business with the bank in a safe and secure way. Failure to do so with simple bank passwords and secret questions can result in the lost of hundreds if not thousands of dollars.

Some advice from the security world in regards to online banking is still pretty sound and I would encourage everyone with a commitment to business security to use it.

- Use a dedicated computer for financial transactions. Don't use it for anything else than your banking. No web browsing, no games, no photos, no email, no music or videos; nothing but bank activity. When you aren't using that computer; turn it off. Update it with antivirus and security updates on a weekly basis.

- Change your password every 3 months. A moving target is much harder to hit than a stationary one.

- Do not, ever use a mobile phone for banking. There is just too much risk and too many chances for failure.

- Do your banking on a schedule. Tuesday for deposits, Thursday for bill paying. Be consistent. Ask your bank to contact you for any odd transactions outside of the norm.

- Check your bank activity weekly. Usually when you do a deposit or bill pay, you can check your recent transactions. Do so and verify that they're legitimate.

A little extra work on your part can save your business.

Open Letter to Vendors Posing as Harbingers of Industry Change

2011-04-28T11:56:00.001-07:00

Today's message said:

"Using switches for access is a thing of the past and your wiring closet is going the way of the public phone booth."

I know you are trying to make a buck in a down economy. I know you want to see new innovative products in the marketplace. I know that somehow a broad-based unsolicited email message is a cost-effective marketing tool.

What you don't know is my business, my client or my environment. The biggest turnoff to me as an IT Director is someone touting how the latest (i.e. NOT FREE) product will save me time and money. It's a bold-faced lie.

The fastest way to get your domain black-holed is to assume I need something because it's merely IT-related. Spend the 5 minutes to browse my website, 10 minutes to understand my client's business and customers, THEN throw me a sales pitch which acknowledges my needs.

Debriefing from the South Sound Technology Conference

2011-03-13T16:02:00.000-07:00

For about 3 years now I ahve been planning on attending the South Sound Technology Conference but haven't had much opportunity. This year I just put it on the calendar and pushed through to go and I'm quite glad I did.

I very much enjoyed the keynote by Congressman Adam Smith. I was particularly keen on his interpretation of what's wrong with education in WA today. Parent participation in the education experience. Some stories and supporting facts which followed really underscored a problem which presents, in some ways, more challenges to educating our kids than budget cuts.

The panel which followed gave me some insights into the Institute of Technology at UW:Tacoma that gave me encouragement for the future of high-tech in Tacoma.

I then attended a presentation by Dr. George Mobus on "Peak Oil and Society" which was pretty compelling. Dr. Mobus presented a different economic look (called Bio-Physical Economics) at energy supplies and the coming challenges we face. He demonstrated the relationship between money and energy; and how oil prices have a causal relationship to recessions. Something we might not know is that we seem to have peaked on oil production; which is the natural precursor to running out. In fact, oil production seems to have peaked in 1994 and in 2011 for the first time, it is declining.

One argument made for continuing to use oil is that we use it more efficiently; but there is Jevon's Paradox which says the higher the efficiency we develop with technology, the more resource we consume.

Some links:
http://netenergy.theoildrum.com/node/5304

Instead of sticking around for the following panel I jumped over to the panel formed after the Mobile Application Development presentation by Brian Forth @ Sitecrafting. 3 very different application developers gave some insights into the future of the mobile computing platform and by way of discussion gave a great insight into the proprietary, license-fee-heavy, and dominating position large companies have over the platform.

Microsoft had great representation on this panel in the form of Mark Brown, CEO of IdentityMine, and how he pushed the Windows 7 Mobile Platform. The most heartening thing I came away with was the significant number of developers who continue to steer clear of the monopolistic position Microsoft takes in the industry. Seeing these developers embracing (cautiously, especially in a down economy and the financial pressures of supporting multiple platforms) diversity of technology and responsible development was not only encouraging but made me think about getting my CISSP so at some point I could have something to offer some of these other developers (because we know how well Microsoft has security covered).

After lunch I sat in on the IT in the South Sound breakout which was probably the most interactive one I experienced. I look forward to seeing some of the networking events which might come from this.

Here are some notes I took and some observations made during the conference.

If we had waited in 1999 and not created the Institute of Technology in Tacoma, we would be looking at a far different economic landscape in Tacoma today. There are many tech companies here in the south sound which might never have been here, and hundreds of jobs that certianly wouldn't be here.

The Institute has been doing great work; while doubling the students in the program, they cut staff by as much as 2/3. Truly they are providing a rich value to Tacoma and the south sound and should be supported by our local businesses to continue to promote jobs and businesses here.

A quote from the lunchtime keynote by Egils Milbergs, Executive Dir. of the Econ. Dev. Commission of WA State: "Recession is the incubator of innovation"

The software-as-a-service (or SAAS) concept is a lot like outsourcing. There are a number of factors which you take for granted when you have service in-house. One leading problem in SAAS I see is when the provider doesn't inform you of infrastructure changes or updates which can impact your business systems, schedules or deadlines.

A good way to present IT costs to non-IT managers is to break it down to a per-person model. In the past I have used a systems like one that simply measures year by year, another measures comparatively in terms of other products or ROI in terms of labor savings. I hope to have some time to spend in assessing our IT in terms of cost per person which might give management a better understanding.

Suggested media:
"Waiting for Superman" movie about education
"The boy who harnessed the wind" a book by William Kamkwamba & Bryan Mealer

Note: Ok with all that posting I'm good until September before I do another one!

Wayyyy overdue for a post...

2011-03-13T15:53:00.001-07:00

I had it on my to-do list to make a monthly post here but alas I have been way too busy.

What's going on? Well I can tell you that when you work for a small company in an economic downturn which lasts a couple years; some of the solutions you put in place which seem like a good idea become quite burdensome after a few years of being unable to invest any money into keeping them up to date.

I'm a huge advocate of disaster recovery and computing security. By neglecting to take an assessment of how you deliver services within the context of having to cut back at some point in the future; you seriously jeopardize your solutions. Just as you must consider a power outage part of your disaster recovery plan, you should also plan for economic downturns which will cut the funding for supporting complex business-critical solutions.

Luckily for my employer, I have only gotten better at delivering services on dwindling resources. Lucky for me, I have an employer that understands there are limits and we have reached limits in a couple different areas.

IT+ FUD = Profit

2010-04-13T10:02:00.000-07:00

Time for a new post! Actually, it's a bit overdue but I guess I needed something to get fired up about.

"The fact is, many – if not most – of the findings your vulnerability scanners spit out are not as big of a deal as they're made out to be. Be it a vendor marketing trick or people trying to justify their jobs, you have to take the findings of your vulnerability scanners with a big grain of salt." [From SearchWindowsServer.com]

I'm not saying that IT consultants out there are willing to exploit every vulnerability for profit, but I have no doubt it's tempting, and consultants are only human.

Small businesses are very vulnerable to these practices and more. Microsoft Partners are presented by Microsoft as technically-proficient, but a huge amount of the so-called "training" provided has much less to do with computing theory than it does having a mastery of product features.

Another great example of why you should look critically at your IT support as much as possible to ensure that the solutions you pay for are the ones you really need.

Windows 7 Update

2009-10-22T09:14:00.000-07:00

I'm spending a bit of free time exploring Windows 7, and the new features it brings over Vista.

One that caught my eye recently is "Libraries".

The concept is that you can link together, in a logical container, different sources of information which are inter-related so that you can conduct searches in one logical place which might search several physical places at the same time.

One application that came to my mind was the sometimes-diverse data locations for small businesses. Businesses that can't afford system-wide storage upgrades, or deploy solutions ad hoc (as resources and space allow), frequently have similar data sources in different places.

An example of this is a project manager who might have a folder of files on his desktop, a shared network drive for team members to share data from, and a in-house hosted FTP site. All three locations have relevant project data and would benefit from Libraries using Windows 7.

However, when I tried to test this out, I got an error stating that the network folders I wished to add were not indexed and couldn't be included. For performance reasons I have indexing off on the server share. Not an uncommon occurrence, especially with small business who might not be able to afford the high-speed hardware (and capacity) to support indexing.

From a user perspective, I noticed a link to a help file about "How can this folder be indexed?" What I found here caused me some serious concern.

The suggested workaround is for the user to make the network folder available offline and then that offline folder can be locally-indexed. This can cause some real problems, especially again considering the small business. Workstations are frequently just fast enough and have just enough capacity to get the work done. Not to mention network bandwidth. Take a significantly-sized network folder (say 2-8 GB) and that user might find themselves in a bit of trouble. Yes, offline folders are limited to a percentage of available disk space but most users might not be aware of that.

I think Libraries are a great idea, but as with anything; should be approached with caution. I think that Microsoft's help article should have included a note to check with your network or system administrator before following the advice to do Offline folders.

Disaster Recovery: Success is better failure.

2009-10-18T14:02:00.000-07:00

Back again with the second post of the month!

Users of the Sidekick and Bing have come to learn the importance of Disaster Recovery. Bing users were definitely inconvenienced by the power outage at the sole location of Bing service resources. Sidekick users had it a bit worse; losing all contacts and other information from their devices.

FBI Director Robert Mueller was nearly duped by a phishing scheme when he received a bank email faked by a scammer.

Downeast Energy wasn't so lucky, and lost about $150,000.00 when an employee fell for a phishing scam email.

This year seems to have a nasty trend of some of the biggest and most powerful technology companies in the world failing to do the most simple of proactive steps. Backup. Redundant power, network and storage systems. Training users to identify phishing attacks.

You evaluate each system you use in your business for effectiveness to your profitability against it's cost. It's important that everything you use brings the best of both worlds.

Unfortunately, we have to cut corners during these hard times and we have to risk those costs by not doing complete backups every day, choosing not to have redundant power systems or mirroring data between live servers far removed from your business.

There are lower-cost ways to address these issues and get a better return on your Disaster Recovery dollar. The trouble is that DR is a booming business right now and there aren't too many options out there which are gentle to your bottom line. Another approach is needed when we can't use technology to hand-hold us through a problem.

Technology alone won't solve Management & Training problems.

In the 90's we had a great time solving all our problems with money. If you had a problem and a piece of technology would solve it, we would buy it right up. No assessments needed; and if it didn't do what it said it would, someone's product would.

I don't know a single part of our economy today which can afford such practices today. Despite that, there is still that prevailing attitude. One needs to take a step back and really analyze the problem, and critically review every part of it.

You are running out of space on the file server? What's being stored there? Who is storing it? How many copies of each file do you have? Is there data which is only read and not changed or added to?

Maybe you just need to have your users stop putting MP3's on the server. Perhaps you have 3 project team members saving all the same email to the same folder but never knew they were all copied on the messages. Maybe there's data there which you only want to review for historical purposes and it could be placed onto a low-cost NAS instead of your live file server. You might just eliminate enough redundant data to prolong your storage solution until the next FY!

How much did that cost? Probably nothing but the time for you IT person (and/or a qualified and vendor-independent consultant) to sit down with you and have a quick look at your infrastructure.

Much cheaper than a $10,000 data deduplication server and some additional management software on a yearly subscription!

Get back to basics.

Do a scan of your disks. Run defrag. Clean up temp files. Test your backups monthly. Schedule some downtime to clean the dust out. Maintenance is pretty cheap when you think about it, and it really reduces your risk. If you aren't taking the time to be proactive your risk factor goes up tremendously.

Training, training and more training!

If you have been working with computers for more than 5 years you know that everything about technology becomes obsolete about the same time as you finally feel you have been able to master it. The next version of office productivity software, graphics application or gadget comes out and you are back to square one.

Changing even faster is the IT security industry. It changes and conforms to how hackers, spammers and scammers attack IT infrastructure. Unless you are spending as much time keeping up with security as you are productivity & gadgets, you can now be dangerously behind the curve.

While security suites which monitor your activity can be effective, many times the methods they use can actually reduce your productivity by throwing up roadblocks and 'yes I'm sure' dialog boxes. You can go a long way to protect your business by training your employees to properly identify and protect themselves about these kinds of threats. Even just making them aware that there's a new phishing email out there from Acme Bank could probably save you and your employees a lot of grief.

You can even encourage your users to subscribe to security newsletters like Ouch! which are written with the common user's skillset in mind; without a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo.

You really are on your own.

Microsoft, Adobe, Google, and other large companies might claim to have a vested interest in keeping your data safe and secure, but consider it a value-added service which is vulnerable to budget cuts like everything else.

Spend the time researching the products you come to rely on before you are in a situation where you could be more than disappointed. Preparation for disaster is a not a one-time job. It requires constant update and review in order to make sure that anything you add, change or remove from your environment is properly addressed.

In closing, it's really not as bleak as it might seem. Sure, we don't like thinking about disasters; we've had a fair share of them over the last few years. The investment of time and effort is worth it. There is a lot of comfort knowing that you are prepared, and you might at least be able to read this article again without sweating.

Windows 7... Wasn't really worth waiting for.

2009-10-01T09:32:00.000-07:00

I watched the Windows Vista release very closely because I was aware of a great many bad things about it. Microsoft's ignorance to address these key problems pre-release led me to take the approach that it was a release to be avoided. This was going to be another Windows ME.

When you look back at such things, it's easy to see how badly something was because you can see how much better things got after it.

I think Windows 7 is going to underwhelm. In fact, it's probably what Vista should have been, with a few notable exceptions like a journalling file system, and the complete exclusion of Internet Explorer from the OS install.

Windows 7 brings a few things new to the table such as "Problem Steps Recorder" which allow you to record what it is you are doing to screw your computer up. This is certainly valuable to me, as someone who supports it, but I know a few end users who aren't going to care about it. In fact, I'll probably hear "Well if Windows 7 is supposed to be better,then why would they need this at all?"

Good question. I suppose the only real innovation coming out of Redmond anymore isn't new technologies, but rather the innovation in fixing the stuff they customize after buying up the smaller companies' real innovations.

Granted I haven't worked with Windows 7 for more than about 10 hours or so and there's a lot more to explore; my approach in testing OS's is more from the end user perspective.

Time for an update!

2009-09-21T19:53:00.000-07:00

It's been an incredibly busy year. Since January, the big office move consumed more and more of my time culminating in what I can say is nothing less than a 100% success in terms of smoothness of transition and invisible downtime despite some significant challenges.

This was a new space being built and some serious delays in the construction schedule pushed our move in date closer and closer to our lease termination. Something had to give, and that had to be proper planning.

No amount of contingency can accommodate a shrinking schedule. Sure you can mitigate a lot by re-evaluating your plans to get as much pre-configured as possible, but in the end the only thing you can do is lower expectations. Given my challenges, between the schedule and the loss of my assistant, lowering expectations is what made a prominent entry in my contingencies.

No less daunting was the fact I was transitioning to a new ISP, a new type of ethernet-over-copper circuit, a new dial tone provider, a new phone system, a gigabit ethernet network including all new switch equipment.

So much new, one would think that we'd have new servers and be able to take advantage of the change for new equipment. No such luck. I brought over the old DC's, the Firebox; file, web and application servers. The only new server was to move the print services off of a DC and onto it's own box (which will ultimately do some file serving later on).

I'm very happy to report that the cut-over resulted in just 4 hours of mail and web server downtime which occurred after-hours late on a Friday night. When the users came back to the office on Sunday, they had full internet, file and print access ready to go.

My work was far from over, with 3 new ceiling projectors, 3 new HDTV's (lobby display, lounge television and a conference room display), 3 new copiers and a new plotter. The phone system was being adapted into an electronic check in-out board, so several kiosk computers had to be deployed and built.

In the end, long hours and a bit of luck carried the day and added so much more to the sense of accomplishment for such a huge job.

Next up; a complete refresh and review of my SharePoint Construction Management site.

What a slacker I am...

2009-01-23T12:29:00.000-08:00

Yes, well I have been busy. Well no, I haven't. I have been slacking off.

It's a really good thing I work for someone else, because if I were to wholly rely upon myself for creating things out of the blue, I'd be up a creek.

So far January has been repair-month. A whole lot of fixing and workarounding (well it reads better than workingaround). For the most part it's been successful.

The DC at home is barely holding together. I REALLY need to get into the research to figure out if/how to make a Linux-based domain to replace this POS W2K Advanced Server box.

Network authentication is important at home since we have a few single-use computers around, it's easier to control my son's access when we aren't home, we have 2 network file shares, and I'm just addicted to single-sign-on in general.

I'm not very motivated to do this however. I ought not wait until the DC to fail though. Setting up another domain from scratch will undoubtedly cause much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

So Long Castle Cops!

2008-12-30T11:29:00.000-08:00

Security Board CastleCops Closes Operations - After serving the IT community for nearly seven years - Softpedia:

"For hundreds of CastleCops volunteers, Christmas has not brought good news this year, as reports about their beloved website closing down have surfaced. The community behind the project directed their efforts over the years towards tracking phishing campaigns, analyzing malware, training users and offering free assistance with cleaning systems."

Castle Cops was the #2 destination for me when I'm investigating security issues. Sharp folks were there and very good advice was given constantly.

This is a terrible loss to the IT community and an even worse loss to thousands of PC enthusiasts who desperately needed help with crippling malware. When software developers regularly enabled and ignored the obvious security issues with their software, Castle Cops was one of VERY few legitimate places to get assistance.

Ironic that the biggest purveyor of insecure software should hire away the man whose absence led to the demise of the site.

I know just enough to make things take too long.

2008-11-20T16:23:00.000-08:00

I decided it'd be cool to make my computer as complicated as possible.

Well if I'm going to be supporting people again I need to really get comfy in Vista. What better way than to start using it at home.

Of course that means either wiping my XP partition or...

Resizing my XP partition so I can triple boot between Ubuntu, XP and Vista. Needless to say, it's been an undertaking.

Unbeknown to me, repartitioning caused my partition numbering scheme to change. And of course any Windows OS means the MBR gets rewritten, thus hosing my boot loader.

Long story short; here's what I SHOULD have done.

Once Vista was installed, boot to the Ubuntu Live CD. Drop to terminal, and do the following:

sudo grub
find /boot/grub/stage1
(that should tell you the new arrangement of your partitions, take notes of where things are!)
root (hd?,?)
(where ?,? is the partition of the Linux kernels)
setup (hd0)
quit

Then create a mount point, since I need to edit the Grub menu.lst

sudo mkdir /mnt/grubedit
mount /dev/sda2 (or whatever drive has your root partition) /mnt/grubedit
sudo gedit /mnt/grubedit/boot/grub/menu.lst

Now edit the bootload sections appropriately.

/happy

ONE more thing.

[gripe]

When selecting your time zone in the initial Ubuntu setup, just because you are close to Vancouver, BC Canada does not mean you should choose it. If you do, Ubuntu gets it in it's head you are IN Canada and all your file repository mirrors are setup for slowass Canadian servers (no offense, they're slow because of some latency-inducing NSA file scanning I'm sure). Choose LA, my West coast friends.

[/gripe]

Windows XP, Vista, Seven.... What to do?

2008-11-14T13:11:00.000-08:00

Brien Posey is one of my favorite authors and I will go out of my way to read his articles.

Not necessarily because I agree with him, but rather because he's not a Microsoft stooge. If M$ is wrong, he won't try and gloss it over. That earns my respect.

I caught his article on "Windows XP is Here to Stay (at least for now)", and of course I don't agree with his XP/Vista comparison for small businesses or home users. I think only well-funded large corporate IT departments can deploy Vista with the best chance of success from a productivity standpoint.

Everyone else is going to come out worse for the wear. Not only in terms of productivity, but in dollars lost through training, support or 3rd party replacement tools.

My unposted comment (since the Linux & M$ fanatics tend to romp right on top of these kinds of comments) went something like this:

The questions I'm getting from small businesses faced with new purchases is not only advice on Vista but from a workstation perspective; Office 2007. 2007 is the only currently-selling Office Suite from Microsoft today.

The two create a perfect storm of computer user learning curve in a time when productivity maximization is critical.

Linux + Open Office during this economic downturn is a very viable alternative when you consider the compatibility with the MS Office suite, the learning curve in either product (and it's arguable that 2007's is more steep than OO on the UI alone), and the most critical aspect facing everyone today: Price.

I do agree with one point of Brien's. If you have XP, don't feel compelled to move on to Vista. The more time spent studying your current productivity the more sense one choice or another makes for you.

All that glitters (or is Web 2.0ish) ain't gold!

Putting out my shingle again!

2008-11-04T09:27:00.000-08:00

What better day to restart a small business than election day?!

I didn't really think about that. Maybe there's just too much optimism and hope in the air, I don't know, but River's Edge Enterprises is back.

REE is the business name I chose years and years ago to be the umbrella name of all the crazy crap I like to do and hope to get paid for it.

Presently, REE is all about computer consulting and repair again. The focus being in providing a great value to small business and home computer users. The value not only being my 17+ years of experience, but also in someone who knows how to translate geek-speak into something just about anyone can understand.

I'm just advertising in Craigslist for the moment, since I'm just going to do this part time (evenings and weekends).

One element I don't see in the Linux/Windows Debate

2008-10-28T08:14:00.000-07:00

One thing I have noticed that is missing from the Linux & Windows discussions today is about the most important compatibility of all, and that's human compatibility.

Time and time again, Microsoft product versions have become more difficult to adapt to. There's always a learning curve with every new release. This curve belies some serious dollars in productivity and to our small businesses today; every dollar is critical.

Let's look at the last 3 years or so and imagine the dramatic impacts of this on business.

First of all, Exchange Server 2007 (to include Outlook 2007) is a significant departure in the standard for the Exchange line. Where once we had GUI interfaces to do the management of critical business functions, we now had to learn a whole new cryptic system for making these changes in a command shell.

Outlook 2003 was enough of a departure from the status quo, taking the always-present and highly-configurable Outlook Bar away and hiding it behind everything and calling it Shortcuts. I won't even go into how many gripes I've heard about the default grouping for message display.

Microsoft Office 2007 brought another dramatic change, which left users bewildered and I daresay on the precipice of madness. In fact I know of at least two small businesses that felt the investment in the software THEY ALREADY MADE IN 2007 did not justify the crippling blow to productivity that deploying it would cause. They trusted Microsoft enough to buy the software, but when they saw it in pre-deployment testing, they pulled the plug on the project.

Vista... Ok I'll let that horse rest in peace.

Ok so what has the Open Source community been doing?

They are making window managers more compatible with how people are USED to working.

Operating system installers have not only achieved ease-of-install parity with Windows XP, but in Ubuntu's case it's been surpassed.

Even office productivity suites like Open Office have been working hard to become fully compatible with Microsoft Office; and can with near transparency, work with MS Office software without losing a beat.

Microsoft has made great strides in trying to get people to BUY and adapt to their products, while the Open Source community is succeeding in adapting the FREE products to the people who use them.

The announcement of Windows 7 and other upcoming Microsoft products indicates that is a trend not likely to change anytime soon, but Open Source has some fantastic momentum and in an economic downturn; a great opportunity.

Website update

2008-10-21T18:18:00.000-07:00

It's been WAYYY overdue, but I have finally done a complete refresh on the old River's Edge website.

I've been known to do my HTML in Notepad, and I'm not averse to it, but there is something about using a fairly decent editor that makes you spend a little more time being creative and a little less time trying to remember what tag does horizontal lines.

Anywho, if you haven't been there, I invite you to my server room located behind www.riversedge.cc

Hello LinkedIn

2008-09-02T18:58:00.001-07:00

I belonged to a professional internet community years and years ago which I just thought was the greatest.

In the big bust, that site went the way of the dodo, and pretty wickedly too since I don't even remember it anymore (I last logged into it in 1996...).

Anyway, my wife joined LinkedIn and immediately was connected to tons of people in her company and of course this has the potential to link outside of that even.

I did go ahead and link my blog here, which I hope will encourage me to make a few more entries.

Open Sourcing Small Business

2008-08-27T08:14:00.000-07:00

One of the big things I wanted to use this blog for was telling a story about Open Source in small to mid-size business.

I've specialized in IT for small and mid-sized business for some time now, both in an administrative and consulting roles. In my spare time I try and find/test open source solutions to needs which are met by prohibitively (and in many cases unethically) priced products.

I know it's the enthusiasm in the Open Source Movement that tends to turn a blind eye to some "minor" features when presenting the latest and greatest of products. I really can't blame them, the movement is getting more attention now than ever and with this excitement comes the desire for fast-track development. Some details get missed, but that's ok, the products are getting out there.

A new article I read today "Can Open Source replace Microsoft Exchange" is something I've been very interested in since before I advised the purchase of Exchange 2007 here where I work. It reminded me about all the same old questions that I was trying to answer over a year ago, and I am a bit disappointed that despite all this time and enthusiasm, nothing has changed.

From a small business perspective, they would readily jump if the solution simply had email, calendar, contacts, tasks and the potential to share a calendar and/or contacts. Make it so you can drop an email onto the calendar and get a new event dialog to pop up. It doesn't need the fancy unified messaging, the woefully inadequate junk mail folder system, or the other painful bloat that Exchange comes with (not to mention Outlook).

They have progressed much farther however so it is looking up.

Sometimes it seems IT is like the fashion industry.

2008-06-12T08:30:00.000-07:00

You read about all these wonderful technological advances or some harebrained scheme like "Web 2.0" or "Software-As-A-Service", and the industry is just abuzz with activity about the next new fad, but in reality these things rarely make it to market and wind up on some "Top 10 ideas that never had a chance" lists.

Have you seen those wild fashion shows, where the models are wearing clothes that go way beyond unpractical? A skirt that has a 80" circumference on a 24" waist, or a bra made from traffic pylons? People in the fashion industry frequently herald some of this as the next wave in fashion, but to this day the only pylons I see are the ones around construction sites.

The best things about technology are rarely the shockers. Stable, well-written code. Secure communications. Practical and well thought-out purpose which has meaning to the greatest demographic of users.

Show me one person who demands interoperability between mobile, PC, television, PVR, microwave and their friggin' toaster, and I will show you 1,000 people who want nothing more than to print a web page on letter-sized paper.

In the end, both come away disappointed. Oh well, it sure looked fetching on the runway.

Linux and Blog Catch-Up

2008-06-05T12:42:00.000-07:00

Things slowed down a bit since my first post.

Since then, Ubuntu 8.04 was released and it is truly an enjoyable upgrade. Well, so long as you have some relatively stock (see: cheap/low performance/OEM-built) equipment.

My Acer laptop took 8.04 like a duck to water. My old Gateway P3/800 hums happily away...

My powerhouse dual-core, X-fi gamer, megajigawatt video machine still suffers from an assortment of bugs and problems. To be fair, recent updates have improved things.

I hope to have more posts in the near future. I also endeavor to join a local user group in the near future to help me broaden my Linux horizons a bit more.

The Linux Journey Begins Anew

2008-02-04T14:27:00.000-08:00

My requirements for a computer aren't easily met by any particular OS. In fact, the one that comes closest (Windows XP) is soon to go the way of the dinosaur and be replaced with the Ice Age.

I have had stumbling blocks to moving on for some time. I wanted it easy to use, and capable of doing what I feel is important: playing music, playing MY games, working with images, browsing the network, looking at web pages with unlimited content types, recognize my flash sticks, usb input devices and all the buttons on my mouse just to name a few...

Since I stopped playing DAoC, the one major stumbling block is now cleared, so I can once again take my foray into Ubuntu.

7.10 Ubuntu is out now, and has support for a program called Compiz. This is just an example of what that means. It's a way of working with your operating system like no other. It just kinda makes things fun without a drain on system resources. Enabling Compiz made absolutely no difference in the performance of my machine.

This journey was not without difficulty. A number of incompatibilities presented some serious challenges to achieving my goals without compromising.

I put the CD in and... Nothing. As near as I can tell, the very fast SATA 3 I use isn't well-supported and had problems with being seen properly by Linux. After a good bit of research, I found that just putting "irqpoll" in the startup command line fixed the issue. It could be that I might want to make a change to the BIOS so that the computer is allowed to control Plug-And-Play rather than the OS (I think I have OS-Controlled PnP now).

The sound card simply isn't supported. For my new system, I bought a pretty special Creative Labs X-Fi Extreme Gamer soundcard. It's performed very decent under Windows, but CL hasn't been very forthcoming with assistance for those out there trying to write drivers for this card, so there's really not any availability. There was a 64-bit version out there, but I had many more problems trying to get the 64-bit version of Ubuntu working. I was getting tired of troubleshooting and just wanted something to work, so I ended up doing something unique.

My system has a built-in soundcard on the motherboard. I had disabled it some time ago in an effort to stabilize my system under Windows. Just for giggles, I enabled it, and voila! Linux saw it and I have sound. Not what I want exactly, but sound was a Must-Have, and I'm good to go.

Multi-button mice are not easily supported. I have a Logitech MX518 and I'm addicted to forward-back buttons on my mouse. I MUST HAVE THEM. Well one of the long-standing problems with seemingly EVERY Linux distribution is no out-of-the-box mouse support. You have to go into the xorg.conf and create your own settings. This wasn't hard, but after some 8 years of there being 4+ buttons on mice, you'd think there could be something to interface.

Steam was a challenge, but had some VERY surprising results. Steam is a gaming interface created by the makers of Half Life. Steam has some very odd hooks into the computer. It is a windows-based game, so I had to run Wine for Windows ~~emulation~~... oh I mean... compatibility... Hehe Anyway, Steam uses some code called Gecko within their IE-linked browsers, which is very hard to find. The website which had it happened to be down last night when I was working on this so I found an alternate site. It even took some Wine registry editing to pull off, but I did get it working.

Then work it did! Launching CounterStrike this morning was pretty surprising. Under Windows, using my speedy disk management, advanced controllers and all that nonsense, I could usually be in and playing within about 12-15 seconds if I hadn't run the software before. With Wine & Ubuntu it reduced that delay to a mere 5 seconds. Very impressive, considering I have a compatibility layer working to translate the code. I'm looking forward to trying my new racing game next.

Another surprise is that through trying to get Steam working, I picked up Wine Doors, which is a Windows Application Management tool. It's incredibly easy to use and offers pre-made configurations for many popular Windows titles, not to mention some help in supporting those that aren't included. Wine Doors didn't get Steam working for me, but it helped a lot.

Of all things, Adobe Flash support was a PITA. Flash is behind just about every animated bit of stuff on the 'net today and not having it makes you feel like a damn caveman. The odd thing is that Flash just seems to be the video of a particular movie. The audio is processed separately from what I can see. The reason I say that is when I installed the Adobe Flash software, videos from You Tube still indicated I had no Flash installed. I had to get an audio codec in order to see the Flash video. Strange, but I needed this codec anyway, for MP3's (also not supported out-of-the-box due to proprietary licensing of the codec) so not really a big deal. I did expect it to be easier.

Network access locally has been problematic as well. I have a domain set up at home and an old box with a bunch of disk space which acts as a repository for MP3's, movies and other large-file data. Connecting to this box from Linux has always required a little bit of monkey business, but generally not too difficult. That's no different today; in fact it was even easier!

However, we added a Yellow Box NAS device in the last year. This thing has a terabyte of space (that's 1,000 GB) and we've half-filled it already!! This device has only a web page for an interface so most configuration of it is pretty simple. It's no Windows box, but it will connect to the domain like a workstation share. It doesn't connect like one though. In fact, I can't connect to it at all from Ubuntu. I am completely stopped on any kind of tweaks I make to connect. Unfortunately there is no configuration on the Yellow Box to support more than one network protocol, so to maintain connectivity to the Windows machines, I have to leave it as-is. BAH! So my workaround for now is to remote console into a Windows machine from my Linux box, put the content I want on that machine and access it that way.

All in all this experience highlights how much non-free, proprietary, and exclusive technology is out there, and how little we really 'own' the computers and software we use today. It's a shame really, and it's rather foreboding to have had this experience on the heels of the Microsoft-Yahoo news. More corporate mergers mean more propriety and exclusive content & products, IMO.

My internet surfboard...err computer.

2008-02-01T20:36:00.000-08:00

Here's the specs, so you know a little bit about what I'm basing my ridiculous claims on...

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4 Ghz
Abit IP35 Pro P35
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS SATA 3.0Gb/s
Creative SB X-Fi XtremeGamer
OCZ Platinum 2GB DDR2 800
GeForce 8800GTS 640MB 320-bit GDDR3 PCI EX x16