Slow down!

Do you get the feeling that the pace of life is accelerating too quickly for you? I do. I think it all started with instant coffee and TV dinners. In the tech world, there was email because we couldn't wait for telephone calls, or snail mail to be returned. (Don't you just love that term? Talk about slow!) But that wasn't fast enough, so we went to Instant Messages. But even those that take more than a few minutes to answer aren't acceptable, and so now people text each other from their cell phones because they can't wait until they are sitting in front of a computer.

We say that Web pages are called slow to load if they don't appear onscreen in 20 seconds or so before we hit the reload key. And it was too hard to build Web sites from scratch, so we have Wordpress et al. to make building blogs a snap. But even blogs are too much work, so we now have Twitter to send short bursts of information out to the world. Soon we will have nanoblogs, one-word missives that we can transmit to millions of people. Pity that we have become so pithy. The devil is in the details.

Videos that are longer than three minutes are too long to watch. We have Tivo and DVRs that can fast-forward automatically through commercials, because no one wants to watch them in real time anymore anyway – who has the time to wait for a program to start at the top of the hour? It seems so quaint now that was the only way we could all see "must-see TV" back in the day on our black and white sets that were encased in our cherrywood furniture.

We have video Skype calls for instant conferencing and impromptu meetings, even with people that are in the same office, because we can't spend the time to get up from our cubicles and walk down the hall. Software "builds" used to be created weekly, then daily, now they are done hourly, and even that isn't fast enough for the always-connected, hyper-broadband generation. It used to be enough to carry around a few megabytes on a flash drive, now we can take our entire digital repository and listen to music and videos too.

And don't even get me started about social networks, or online dating, or even online breakups (I don't need to know anything more about Jimmy Wales, puh-leeze!).

Maybe it is time to start slowing down. Take a few minutes to re-read that email before hitting the send key and regretting what you said in haste. Call someone on the phone in real time, and turn away from your screen when you are talking to him or her so they have your undivided, single-tasking attention. Interact with someone in your office by getting up out of your chair and visiting with them, not to waste time or shoot the breeze, but to get a reaction and some face-to-face feedback.

Have a nice holiday break, if you are reading this this week. And a great New Year's!

SecurePC may be too costly for what it delivers

Is $600 for a "netbook" too much to spend these days? Apparently so. I tried out the SecurePC from 01com.com and while a nice package, the price is a bit steep considering the competition.

The idea behind the SecurePC is a nifty one: put together a stripped-down version of Windows XP that just can connect to the Web and do nothing else. You do not have access to any local storage, so your PC can't get infected from malicious Web sites or emails. You can't download any programs. If it lives out on the Internet, you can run it – the usual Flash and Java add-ons come with the machine. Otherwise, forget it.

The notebook runs Intel's Atom processor, so it is quiet, cool, and compact. The screen is bright but isn't going to win an awards for size – it is a 10 inch diagonal and can run an external video monitor in the odd resolution of 1280x960 because of its form factor, I guess. And it comes with a solid state hard drive so there is one less moving part and heat source to worry about.

I liked the design and feel of the machine's hard plastic case and they way it boots up almost instantly – it takes longer to find your wireless network than it does to bring up the overall system. The keyboard is a bit cramped for me, particularly the comma and period keys that are somewhat squished together. And it comes with three USB ports, although I am not sure what you would connect to them other than an external mouse. If you try to plug in a thumb drive, you aren't going to get any files off it. The SecurePC does support USB 3G broadband modems, but I didn't test any.

You can access network shares via the wired or wireless interfaces, but again, I am not sure what you would do with the files when you see them, unless you could run a auto-executing virtual machine session across the network. To get an idea of how stripped-down this OS is, you open up a rather sparse Control Panel. There isn't much you can do, which I guess is good if you are getting this PC for grandma.

The disk storage is limited, and I had to play some games adjusting the virtual memory settings that would also allow enough room for temporary files: InTouch could spend some more time tweaking these setings. Another drawback is that you can't upgrade your OS when Microsoft issues the inevitable patches since you have to wait for InTouch to release a new image of the machine's innards.

If you are paranoid and can live without any applications – other than IE – than this is worth a look. It could be the perfect kitchen computer, or a second machine to do a lot of Web searching or Webmail on. The only real issue I have is the price. For $350, I can get a Dell, Acer, HP mini (or others here) that has a 10 inch screen and a full version of Windows and larger hard drives, and for the price of the Secure PC I can get a full-strength laptop with a 15 inch screen. And to make things more complicated, Radio Shack is selling netbooks for $99, plus the cost of a 3G broadband wireless plan from AT&T for $60 a month for a two-year contract.

How to stop leaking data

One of the great things about the Internets is that it provides universal connectivity between your desktop and the world. But that is also a tremendous weakness and security professionals often lose sleep over how easy it is for a rogue employee to email a friend – or even his private Webmail account – their entire customer list or other confidential information.

There have been a number of products to try to track or block leaking data, and this week I was testing one of them for my WebInformant.tv video screencast series -- TrueDLP from Code Green Networks. The idea is fairly simple: you install their appliance on your network, point out your most sensitive data, and then it watches over your packets and sees what is leaving the premises. It doesn't take that long to setup and install, once you figure out what it is doing and what you are doing.

The tricky part is figuring out exactly what is your most sensitive data, and being able to focus in on it in a way that the product can identify. It comes with dozens of various templates to be able to recognize social security numbers, or names and addresses, or stock symbols, or other kinds of well-formatted data. But the real plus is being able to handle unformatted data, such as a memo about a customer's preferences that is just a Word document, for example. Code Green can connect to a SQL database and directly handle the query syntax to select particular data types, and it can also connect via WebDAV to Sharepoint servers or other document repositories too. Once you find your data, you create protection policies and tell the appliance what to do – whether to just log the violation or actually block the activity.

You also need to make sure that you are matching everything properly, because the last thing you want to have on your hands is a series of false positives that you have to chase down. You can also set up fancier things, such as automatically requiring emails between two places (such as your office and a partner) to go out encrypted. Speaking of encryption, they work with the Blue Coat Web proxies so that even if someone is using SSL connections to talk to their Webmail accounts they can take those packets apart and see what someone is doing. That is pretty spooky, but hey, you have been warned!

There are other things that the product does, such as being able to detect content on removable USB thumb drives, or even block their usage entirely. This is the way of the world: as these drives get beyond 64 GB (yes, gigabytes), they are more of a threat for someone to just literally take an entire database out the door in their pocket. I recently ran up against this when I was in my bank trying to provide documentation for a loan. I had brought a CD, a USB thumb drive, and had saved the documents on my Google account just for good measure. Because of the bank's endpoint security lockdown policies, I was 0 for 3 and had to send them the old fashioned way, by making paper copies, once I got home. At least it was nice to know that they had protected their employee's PCs.

The interesting thing is what happens after customers get their hands on this Code Green product. Lawsuits typically ensue, so to speak, because often the network administrator finds someone is doing something that they aren't supposed to be doing. One of the product managers I was working with told me that this usually happens within the first week of the product being put into production. Given that the basic price of the product is ten grand, I figure that is as close to instant ROI as you are going to get these days, considering the cost of most litigation.

So take a gander over at WebInformant.tv and watch the four-minute video of the Code Green appliance. It is a very innovative way to detect and prevent data leaks and well worth a closer look.

Has TinyURL gotten too big?

If you use a service to shorten Web links such as TinyURL, you might want to rethink your strategy and perhaps look to another service provider. Why? Because lately, TinyURL has gotten too popular, thanks to Twitter using the service to condense long links into more manageable lengths that can fit into their 140 character limits, among other users. As with many things on the Interwebs, the price of popularity is outages, what some would call being Slashdotted, after the Web site that can direct thousands of readers towards an article in a click of a mouse. And apparently TinyURL has suffered from a regular series of outages, whether due to popularity or poor IT planning, I can’t say.

TinyURL isn’t the only URL shortener, but perhaps the oldest and most well known. In an informal survey of people on my LinkedIn group, it was by far the one of choice. Most people were not aware of any downtime with the service, which isn’t surprising because unlike IM or email services that we pretty much depend on throughout the day, URL shorteners don’t report their status immediately, and usually not to the people who have created and posted the shorter links. The only way someone would find out if they weren’t working was to click on all of their shortened links and make sure that they are directed to the appropriate page.

So there are several issues here. First is the usage of these services from a general sense: they can obscure malware or exploits and they create a dependency that can increase link rot if they break. One of my correspondents alternates his shortened links with two different services, to at least cover the possibility of a single point of failure.

But the second issue is that why should anyone continue using an unreliable service, and one that will continue to get more popular as more people get comfortable with Twitter and similar services? It seems like now is a good time to consider alternatives to TinyURL, which is the subject of an article last week in by Marshall Kirkpatrtick in the ReadWriteWeb. There are probably thousands of such services, and Chris Messina has screen shots of them here.

The service notlong has a list of others, along with a more detailed comparison of their own (at notlong.com/links). What is interesting about their service is that you can have a subdomain, such as webinformant.notlong.com, that will point to your link.

Marshall recommends the bit.ly service, which was also mentioned by some of my correspondents. The only issue I have with it is the dot “ly” domain belongs to Libya, and while the relationship between any domain owner and the Libyan government is small to none, it still makes me somewhat uncomfortable. Another service that has come highly recommended is SNURL.com, which is also easy to remember and has some nice features. Google has a service call shortur that you can load on your own Web site, provided you have php support.

Good luck and let me know what your experience has been with these services.

Saving money inside your wiring closet

Here is a brief exercise in how to save some money for your company, and make yourself a hero at the same time. Do a quick census of the gear inside all of your wiring closets. You don’t have to be too anal here: just quickly estimate the number of ports, regardless of whether or not they are in use. Now use some fudge factors for the number of watts per port – if you have this information, fine, otherwise for the purposes of this tally, use 50 watts for unpowered Ethernet and 500 watts for powered ports, and add in the power consumption figures for anything else that is plugged into an electrical outlet.

Now add up the kilowatt hours and multiply by the cost of electricity in your area. If you don’t know, say 15 cents per kwh. Surprised at how big this is? Now here is where the hero part comes into play: suggest that you replace some of this gear with switches that can turn themselves off during off-hours.

Hunh? “Our networks have to operate 24x7” you say. “We can’t turn anything off. What about the people that come in on the weekends?”

Still, think about it. I got the idea after visiting Adtran this week, and they were showing me some of their switches that do just that. You can set up profiles for particular ports on the switch to shut off at certain times of the day, or to provide less power to those ports that are just running to ordinary PC endpoints. You wouldn’t think this would add up to a lot of saved juice, but if you have a lot of powered Ethernet ports – say supporting Wifi access points and VOIP phones – it can really add up quickly, into the tens of thousands of dollars a year. This could easily pay for part of the upgrade to your infrastructure.

Switches aren’t the only things that can cycle their power loads down these days. Intel’s latest multicore chips have the ability to turn off several of their cores to save on electricity, or to funnel processing to particular tasks to match their computing loads. There are virtualization provisioning products that will automatically spin up virtual servers to match increased loads, and then spin them down when the loads drop.

It is funny, when you think about it. Going green these days means getting a more powerful box and turning stuff off. Makes you stop and think, doesn’t it? Oh, and when you are done, ask your boss to give you at least a third of the savings as a bonus, and tell them I put you on to the idea. You can thank me later.

It takes a long-tailed village

You are by now no doubt familiar with the concept of the long tail, the ability of the Internet to support the most microcosmic segment, specifically targeting (say) yellow VW microbus owners or people that walk their cats on leashes or whatever oddities you can assemble. But I found myself in a conversation this week about a very different aspect of the long tail, with a deputy city manager of a small community outside of Columbus. As in Ohio.

I was in Columbus on behalf of their chamber of commerce, to visit with hi tech companies, old and new, big and small. I know, I get to go on some great junkets as a journalist. At least it wasn’t Yet Another Vegas Trip. And I actually had a good time, even got to visit a few data centers (and you know how much I love being on a raised floor, breathing in all that A/C) while I was there.

Columbus has a lot going for it as an IT destination. Cheap power, smart people, big college talent pool, and some high-profile companies that employ thousands of IT workers, including Nationwide, OCLC, and others. But it was my briefing with Dublin’s deputy city manager, Dana McDaniel, that stood out.

Dana was talking to us about how Dublin was trying to woo various hi tech companies there. It wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard before. Clean, white collar business, blah, blah, well educated, yada yada, high salaried this and that. But then he started talking about the long tail, and how he wasn’t focused on the Fortune 1000 or any other big-ticket company that could be wooed there with big tax breaks and other public give-backs. “I want the long tail,” he told us. “I want the two guys in their garage that will eventually expand and become the next big win.”

Those firms are a lot harder to find, and once you find them, they are a lot harder to keep in town. To demonstrate that what he was saying wasn’t just the usual politico hot air: he actually helped a 4-person firm stick around and now they are a 20-person firm, on the second floor above a Starbucks. (And they allow Starbucks in their town, too!)

You need to have a lot of different things that have to do with quality of life, such as a business district that has multiple eateries and bars (and with a town named Dublin, you can only imagine the choices), congestion-free travel to and from work, and mixed residential-business zones so people can live close by the office, once they move out of the garage and down the street.

Yes, you need great Internet infrastructure, and Dublin has their fiber rings, their connection to bandwidth hotels, and is even putting together muni WiFi that will cover not just the business parks but its subdivisions too. They even built a business “accelerator” that will rent out offices to up-and-coming businesses and has a full complement of services and IT support techs that are on premises. Those are the good things, the necessary things even, that today’s community needs if they are really going to make a go out of having IT people stick around, and attracting more of them from places that are high-cost, high-hassle like the coastal cities where we usually think all innovation happens in this country.

But there are more subtle things happening too. And this is where that whole long tail mumbo jumbo starts to be more meaningful. Dublin can piggy-back on the larger Columbus metro area that can fill in the gaps with people who have the right specialized knowledge that can help run companies. The area has begun a series of informal meetups and unconferences to bring together nerds of all walks of life. There is the benefit of having a big college and a federal research lab nearby but not too close, so that Dublin canpick up some of the crumbs of the attention, federal grants, and research projects that come into Columbus but not get bogged down into chasing the big ticket science that OSU and Battelle need to keep their lights on. And it helps to have a solid series of IT training classes, that are offered by TechColumbus, the downtown incubator and entrepreneurial engine that has established a branch office in Dublin.

So yes, it does take a village, to coin a phrase, one person at a time. But the next time you hear an economic development guy praise the long tail, stop and listen, because they so get what the next decade of employment opportunities is going to be.

The new real-time researcher

So hopefully you got some sleep last night after you voted, for those of you that live in America. But apart from the obvious result, our election had some other radical changes in how we consume information, and I wanted to share some thoughts. It was a historic night for these reasons, too.

The Internets have transformed those of us that are information junkies in a new way, to be our own real-time researchers, trend spotters and fact checkers. A combination of better search analytics, new technologies such as Twitter and live feeds, and even the relatively innocuous Facebook “I’ve voted” counter have put some very powerful tools in the hands of ordinary citizens.

It also helps that we had three relative rookies for our election-night network news anchors: while their talents (and take-home pay) are considerable, many of us haven’t had the relationship with Katie, Brian, and Charlie that we once had with Tom, Peter and Dan -- or even Walter, Chet and David. Part of this is the waning influence of network TV, part of it is the movement away from newspapers and newsmagazines. (US News and World Report going monthly? Who would have thought?)

But the real reason has to do with the fact that the technologies to enable our own exploration of the world have become easier and more powerful to use, and within our grasp, even if we don’t have exceptional search skills. Let’s examine each of the technologies that have contributed to this state of affairs.

First is the ability to keep on top of what people are Googling. In a post last month in the ReadWriteWeb.com, Marshall Kirkpatrick writes how listeners were doing their own fact checking by Googling certain terms during the VP debates. By looking at the aggregated searches, we see that many people learned exactly which article of the Constitution covers the powers of the Vice President and that Biden got it wrong.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_has_changed_political_d.php

From the Google stats, we also see that Tina Fey has become a political personality, and indeed even more popular among searchers than Mr. Biden himself. Having watched many of the SNL skits, I found myself getting confused over who was the real Palin, and indeed didn’t do well on the Chicago Tribune’s photo quiz to distinguish the two women:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-palin-fey-quiz,0,5534058.triviaquiz

Speaking of those SNL skits, how many of you first watched them online versus on your living room TV? What was curious for me was that I first went to YouTube to find the videos, only to realize that NBC.com was posting them for the next-day audience on their own site. About time they figured out. How long did it take you to realize that as well? Maybe the networks finally understand the word-of-mouth day-after effects and can capture some of those page views for themselves. Do we really need an HD TV picture to see these videos when the postage-stamp a 320x240 portion of a Web browser can be just as satisfying?

In past elections, I was online most of the night, looking at the major network news Web sites, tracking the exit polls and ballots. Last night, I still did this, but there were other sites, such as Mahalo.com, that aggregated historical information so I could put this into context, and see how voting patterns from previous elections have compared with this year’s. As deep as I wanted to dive, I could easily find it with a few mouse clicks. It made the broadcast blather from the major networks even more irrelevant to me.

Having waited in line for about 70 minutes to vote yesterday morning, I was curious to see how many people voted early in the day by watching Facebook’s real-time vote counter, which passed a million votes early in the day and topped out at somewhere around 4 million by the time the polls closed in the West. Granted, this counter was more of a stunt than any analytical tool, but it gave me a very real indication that yes, we as Americans (or at least the Americans that are Facebook active users who are registered) are voting – to the rate of several hundred every second, all day long.

What about Twitter and other live feeds? We could actually follow “reports” from various self-styled correspondents and what they found during the day. The local St. Louis paper hired a few students to do just that and you could read their Tweets here:
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/politics/story/5D9ADBEA5D93CCE6862574F70054E1B6?OpenDocument

One of the students, Ian Darnell, summed it up this way: “This is it. This is our time. This is how history has unfolded before us.” He could have said historicity, which was one of the hot search terms for yesterday.