Category Archives: Technology

New Blogging Tool

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I’ve found a new blogging tool called Blogsy. I bought it from a recommendation from The GiveMeMind Blog.

The way the app is set up is a novel approach and it is taking a little getting used to. There are two sides to a blog post, a rich side and a write side. Establishing a link is a little cumbersome, but it’s better than having to schlep to an HTML reference to remember the vagaries of assembling an “a href” construct.

I’ve defined all my blogs that I use. Thats another small issue, as I write there isn’t any clear way to say which blog I’m writing to at this point. I suppose that when I get to publishing we’ll see how is all works out.

I figured out where the settings are, but they aren’t ordered logically. the blog you post to is at the bottom of the list, but it’s settings determine all the other fields above that one, urrrr? Also, while WordPress has a correct hierarchy of categories, Blogsy just squashes them all out into a linear list. Perhaps they’ll fix that in a later update. Let’s hope so.

The cost was $2.99 and so far I’ve seen about $0.99 value with this app.

Next Innovation Frontier

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I have identified the next innovation frontier! Multiple device presence synchronization.

Every innovation is born out of a tangle of issues that represent a problem. For this particular point, my problem is a maddening one. I have several streams of information that I regularly check on:

  1. Twitter
  2. Facebook
  3. Google Reader/RSS Aggregator
  4. FourSquare
  5. GetGlue
  6. Email

I use different access devices during my day depending on the setting and activity level present in that environment. I use my iMac while I’m active at work, I use my iPhone and iPad mixed when I’m traveling as a passenger. I use my iPhone while waiting for long durations in queues and I’ll eat private meals with either my iPhone or iPad running. My problem is one of annoyance and the possibility that I’ve missed information. When I move forward in any of these information streams on one device it can be a challenge to update all the other devices with “my bookmark” in each stream. If I’m catching up on tweets on my iPhone and I get to work, I want to switch my attention away from my iPhone and towards my iMac. What I want is for my last seen tweet to be updated on each device when I start it’s attendant application. The same goes for my Google Reader RSS Aggregator. I read news items while riding the bus from home to work and when I arrive at work I want to pick up on my iMac where I left off on my iPhone.

There are several applications that I use that have ways to address my needs, but they aren’t wholly reliable. Twitter has a “favorite” system that could be used for this, but that’s expecting one bit of the system (a square peg) to be pounded into shape to work as a solution for something else (a round hole). And Google Reader has a built-in capacity to do some of what I wish, but nobody has written the code to facilitate that requirement yet.

How could something like this best work? As with many other things the answer I believe lies in abstraction. The most convenient form of abstraction would be to have every client I use understand how to interface with Dropbox. Each app can connect to Dropbox and in the root folder of my Dropbox it can use file time and date stamps to determine when the latest updates were sent to my Dropbox, and the files themselves contain the positional information that I need to share between many systems. When I read tweets, the latest tweet that I’ve seen has its date stamp put in a file and sent to Dropbox. When I’m browsing Google Reader articles, the last-seen-article has it’s date stamp put in a file and sent to Dropbox. So on and so forth. Everything is transparent, the files are easily accessible from Dropbox and because the network is ubiquitous, I have no problems accessing Dropbox from wherever I am. Even if I didn’t have the network all the time, the syncing and updating functions of Dropbox would eventually guarantee that my position updates are always up in the cloud.

With this solution I could start reading tweets on one device, put it to sleep and continue reading on another device. I think this will become more and more relevant as time goes on and people start using multiple devices, computers, tablets, and handhelds. The only real challenge is encouraging every app vendor and system writer to hop on board with this idea.

Tech'now'ledgy Expo

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I attended for a little while the Tech’now’logy Expo that TotalTech puts on every year. In attendance was my friend Matt Merrill with CDW-G and Chris Doemel with Apple.

They are pretty much two out of maybe a handful of vendors that I do not want to pitch into a swirling abyssal vortex. The expo itself was a little lean on actual vendors, but HP and Dell were there, and my CDW-G vendor was flogging Lenovo pretty hard. I hadn’t the heart to really bust down Lenovo despite it being a cross between an IBM Stink-Pad and Cheap Chinese Plastic Crap. I can’t really get down on Lenovo too harshly, at least there wasn’t a Lexmark pusher there! Lexmark gets pitched into that aforementioned vortex.

Apple was pleasant as usual. I really love the company, and AppleCare itself can’t be beat, but my previous run-ins with Apple Sales has left me feeling a little quixotic. They aren’t as hold-your-hand as the rest of Apple is, but they are attentive and the reflected glory from the mothership in Cupertino does them a lot of good, but while I’m seeking out the ARD Development Team for body-breaking hugs, the sales team has always left me feeling rather tepid. They respond very positively when you tell them you’re sending clients their way, but everything else isn’t really that exciting for them, which I totally understand, but it is a little surprising that sales isn’t as rabid as the rest of them are.

Something that is coming up is iOS management. I’ve got a new systems contact at Apple, a fellow by the name of David Seebaldt. Should be interesting to see what he is going to recommend for us. Currently we’ve got 6 iPads in play and 3 iPhones. I fully expect that level to rise with time. I think one of my first queries will be why iPhone, and no other iOS device displays a single-Library preference. iPod Touches, iPod Nanos, and even iPads can touch as many iTunes Libraries as they like, but iPhones? One central library, the first one they see, and that’s it. It’s as if the iPhone imprints on the first Library it sees and that’s it for life. Odd.

I certainly hope that they get more foot traffic, because the lunch-time period wasn’t so rah-rah-rah.

Playing through on the back nine…

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I wandered into the mailroom with a piece of paper in hand, with the design to scan it to my file server. I walked in and a student was busy tending to the very same copier pumping out duplicates of something. As I approached I noticed that the front half of the machine, where the ADF is, wasn’t actually doing anything. An errant thought struck me, that perhaps the copier, while busy making duplicates, might also be capable of making scans at the same time.

Certainly impossible.

Until I walked up, the student was looking worried, I pressed the scan button, put my page in the ADF, tapped my name as a destination and pressed the Big Friendly Green Button. The copier, a Savin 8065, didn’t even blink at my request. The copies never stopped or slowed down, the ADF fed my page in, scanned it and processed it, the whole while the copier was spitting out some other job.

I never thought the machine was capable like that! I’m still a little surprised and I’m impressed! I was sure it was going to blow apart and cover everyone with thick wads of melted plastic and toner.

Well, perhaps not that last part. 🙂

Historical

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Operation Historic Moment has come and gone. The big news, now that the cat is out of the bag and rubbing up against your leg is that WMU received the biggest cash gift in our state, ever. The total is $100 Million dollars. This unthinkably large gift is a godsend, but alas is just the start of what is needed to start training real Doctors. I was centrally involved with a group of coworkers to design this project and bring it off successfully. My role was to address the technology we’d need to make all of this work properly. There were ups and downs and I learned a surprising amount from the experience that I will detail here.

The project had quite a number of technical components to it. Technology served a role at nearly each step of the process and many of the tools that were used made everything faster, better, and easier. The old aphorism that “proper organization will set you free” couldn’t ring any louder for us all than it did for all of our meetings to arrange this entire project. For me it started with tools that before this event I could have only dreamed for in Sci-fi. Specifically I speak of my iPad. My iPad was the perfect device. It was a communications hub, everything from email, my blog, to Twitter and Facebook were available to me whenever I needed them. The single app on the iPad that really helped the most was iThoughts HD. For each meeting we had, and there were many, I used this app to take dynamic notes and record the minutes of the meetings in a beautiful and straightforward fashion that I could then email to our management and show them our progress on the project. All they had to do was sit back and watch as we progressed. It was a delight to use and by suppressing an endless trail of scribbled and crossed out paperwork made what we accomplished in our meetings very easy on the eyes to read.
We had laid out our design from the very start. The first was a series of mystery QR codes that were distributed throughout town. Supermarkets, Delis, and popular hotspots throughout Kalamazoo were dressed up in these QR coded pages. The QR codes loaded a series of photos that lead to hints for anyone together enough to know what a QR was and to scan it. If I could do this part over I would have encoded all the URL’s for the photos using bit.ly so I could track their clickthrough rates and measure if anyone actually scanned any of these codes or if they are, as I feared, a flash in the pan. Thankfully the QR part of the project was free to implement and the only expense were the staff running around town posting these up all over.

The next big thing was the “Livestream” on the Internet. We had contacted a company and the original design was utterly fantastic. They would haul their own data over satellite service to their home office in Detroit and all we would have to do is cope with our network struggling under the strain of all the consumers pulling the live feed down from our vendor. For weeks we had this planned to the last item and then an unforeseen change of venue forced us to scrap the use of a satellite for data transmission. Suddenly we had to rely on our own network for both the upstream and downstream service. Several things from that point exploded in our faces, specifically a product from Cisco Services called CleanAccess was a problem. With the help of the venues IT manager we were able to get both the dry run and the main production signal off the ground and working properly. As some people have noticed, at showtime we suffered a rather embarrassing network failure at Western. Right now all we have are several competing theories, but they all describe the same problem – our event was so popular that our own network couldn’t cope. Personally I was beyond dismay, beyond embarrassment. I was logged into the Bernhard Center countdown clock hardware trying to display the livestream to everyone assembled there and the melted-down network wasn’t going to have any of it. As I sat there, thinking about all the upset people assembled for nothing in the Bernhard Center my mind raced with ways that I could have possibly addressed the situation. Some things did come immediately to mind and most of them involved not using any indigenous technology and relying instead on other Internet providers to ensure that things worked as designed. Like all other instances where something bad happens and you wish you could go backwards in time to fix it, there is no rescuing that mistake – only learning from it. I can’t say that I have much faith in our indigenous network provider, as it collapsed like a house of cards when our event started. I was afraid of network saturation and whatever the real cause was, I’d bet some real money that link saturation was at least a player in the drama. It stings when I have to admit that our successes are more dependent on non-indigenous resources than indigenous ones. It’s not that we actively selected against the indigenous systems, it’s just they never really even came up in our thoughts. I’m happy that much of what we attempted did work and upset that the one singular thing that we allowed to be handled indigenously was so embarrassingly fumbled. The only saving grace at the end is the notion that our message was so popular that it disabled a system designed to resist such things. The Internet really was never designed to resist popularity, only nuclear attack.

We also were responsible for the “Mystery Box” in Bernhard Center. This was a tease for the Countdown Clock Display that later on was constructed in the Mystery Boxes place. Our intent wasn’t to anger people by it’s placement, only to engage them and get them wondering what Western was up to. The clocks themselves were quite impressive and even still I’m amazed that we pulled it off as easily as we did. The clocks, all the guts, and the entire design came together so wonderfully that I still sit back and marvel at how it all played out. This build was rather involved for me and because of that fact, it was the place where most of my “little lessons” cluster. The displays themselves were investments, they cost a bit of money but we’re going to use the tarnation out of them and get every red cents worth out of them. The guts were repurposed technology from our own department and didn’t cost anything. Amongst the lessons I learned, when trying to force Firefox into a Kiosk you have to turn off updates, make sure screensavers and energy-saving features never get activated and to turn off Bluetooth. Because of the design we had to use two independent systems for the two displays, and this in itself created a rather embarrassing and inexplicable oddity to pop up. The two displays were almost perpetually out of time sync with one another. I really can’t explain it, both machines were in the same general space, there is nothing wrong with where they are, yet one machine counted time differently than the other. I have some theories that have to do with processor load and video processing issues and that is the only way I can explain it. The only other solution is that we had a temporal anomaly in the Bernhard Center. I’d expect a gaggle of dead students if we had a spatial anomaly, so it almost has to be my first theory that’s right. Anyhow, each night I would remote into the clocks and resync them. At worst they were about a minute off of each other but sync’ed well at night. The other lesson I learned was that WiFi is useful for many things, but you should never depend upon it. Drawing a network to the location was impossible but I do know what I would do differently next time. Next time I would acquire two free nearby wired network ports and I would set two 802.11N wifi access points on those lines and one machine per access point would be the rule, and the access points would have nothing at all to do with Tsunami, the default Western wifi SSID. Of course this would be a gross violation of network design and probably upset the indigenous service providers, but in some ways I can defend that approach because it would have likely not failed me. Alternatively I was considering acquiring two Verizon EVDO USB Network cards and using those as a wholly independent network sources for my display equipment.

Beyond the livestream and the clocks, the other bits of technology that we used were more bent towards helping us keep coordinated and organized. We made rather good use, even though it’s development was very late in the game, of WordPress.com itself. About 80% of the way through our project I started investigating WordPress.com’s P2 theme. The minute I started to play around with it I fell in love. P2 was perfect for so many things that were on my mind, a way to solve many workplace problems and the fact that WordPress.com was free, easy, so wonderfully supported, and quite robust was all just sauce for this goose. I created a private blog, added the P2 theme to it and rolled it out to everyone on our team. Of course since the blog came online about 80% too late, only a small amount of real work ended up being done with it, however even still, it served as a proof of concept and both P2 and WordPress.com have continuously proven to me just how good they are as a collaboration and communications platform, absolutely worthy of a “Bravo!”. The other system we used was more for coordination and that was GroupMe. I created a GroupMe account and group and populated it with my teammates who had SMS-capable cellular telephones, which was nearly all of them. GroupMe worked very well, and the only hesitation I have for really raving about them comes down to a misfired politeness feature in their core product. If you add a group of people to your GroupMe group and start using the product and some people don’t respond or actively join GroupMe declares that they aren’t in the group any longer out of politeness. Well, you can’t add them back in afterwards no matter how hard you try and some people aren’t supposed to reply, they are just supposed to witness and obtain an survey of the action, especially some in management. The GroupMe service would be better if there was a way to defeat the “politeness” feature and establish a hard-and-fast fixed group to receive text messages irrespective of whether they do or do not reply to any of those messages.
Now that the entire project is over, we are riding high on a wave of a job well done and looking at what failed and what we could have done to address those failures. Every mistake carries within it the seeds needed to avoid them in the future. We pulled off a massive and multifaceted campaign with six primary sectors and each one had fantastic leadership and an utterly delightful minimum of process-clogging bullshit. What lead to our successes? Empowerment, a lack of micromanagement, and utterly shocking levels of interdepartmental cooperation. Almost at every turn when we were afraid we would run into an intractable opponent we discovered to our dazzled chagrin that at each step we could find no enemies laying in wait for us with bear-traps, all we had were instant converts and cheerleaders. I’ve thanked our team many times in the past and once in a previous metablog post about the Western Express engagement platform, but there are some  other people who bear thanking now that I have a place to publicly do so:

  • Our own “Sensational Seven,” which I was a part. If people work this well together for other projects, beware. 🙂
  • Our Gold People. They remain anonymous but they know who they are and one or two may read this. Nothing like the magic of a mystery figure to goose a campaign right where it counts.
  • John Stanford at the College of Health and Human Services at WMU. Thank you for on-the-spot help and use of your Category 6 cabling.
  • Bernhard Center Management were stellar for this entire campaign. Kept what secrets you had to, asked no awkward questions, and went above and beyond with material and resource support. Knowing we had the staff of the Bernhard Center was absolutely instrumental in our Countdown Clocks working as well as they did.
  • All the Building Coordinators, especially CHHS and Fetzer Center, for being so wonderfully understanding and willing to facilitate our project.
  • Everyone else, I’m sure I’ve left someone out of this list, but if you were ‘in on it’ even if only a little bit, I thank you here and now.

What’s next? Well, it’s a great start for the Medical School, but in no way are we finished. The need is still very strong and this incredible gift is such a great start. There are more surprises yet to come and more engaging things that the University will see from us here in Development and Alumni Relations. We’ve only scratched the surface of what we can accomplish. As I told the powers that be when they took the reins back in October 2010, “All you need to do is press the Big Red Button.”

Zoom Zoom. 🙂

Auto Accident Repairs

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I got something surprising in my email just a wee bit ago. Ryan Martin at Hansen Collision, Inc. sent me an email. This was something I really wasn’t honestly expecting even though they asked for my email address. What I got was great!

Good Afternoon!

Attached is your estimate for the Santa Fe. We found the high and low note horns to be damaged after tear down. We also found the condenser to be damaged and a small crease on the left fender.

I have all the parts on order and we are targeting completion for 3/22.

Thanks and have a safe trip

Ryan Martin
Hansen Collision Kalamazoo
p 269.383.4450
f 269.383.0320

And then the pictures! For some reason this is what totally wowed me and pushed me over the edge with surprise. That a repair shop would show everything. Here they are:

So there we are. The masters of “Stupidity Erasers” are going to undo my mistake. I can’t recommend this company enough, they have shops throughout SW Michigan and if you ever need body work or collision repair service, this is THE company to bring your car to!

The price to repair is about $1700 with parts and labor. I’ll be out $500. That’s a lesson. A lesson I won’t ever forget!

Bravo!

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There is a new startup site called Bouncr.com. This web service allows you to link your real email address, such as mine, bluedepth@gmail.com with a wholly new named account hosted at bouncr.com. The service just auto-redirects all mail inbound to your Bouncr account on to your “real account” and if someone steals or misuses your address you can log in to Bouncr.com and just generate a new address and use that one instead. I love this idea and effectively renders having to create and maintain ‘shield accounts’ meaningless. Everyone really should head over to Bouncr.com and set up their service and use it!

 

The Flow of Time

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I have a setup where time is very important and I’ve discovered that two computers that are sitting right next to each other have a time sync anomaly. In just 12 hours the machines begin to diverge. The fix is very simple, just connect to them remotely and refresh their primary displays. This refresh brings them back into sync however the problem remains. It’s not something that is going to keep me up at night, since the application of these timers is not life-or-death critical, but it is remarkable.

There are a lot of “extenuating factors” in this particular anomaly however the part of me that is snarky and built on a foundation of sci-fi movies really loves the idea that there is a temporal anomaly in a very public space. After a power-push watching Primeval I can’t help but daydream about an anomaly opening up in this public space and velociraptors chasing students. I chuckle softly to myself. 🙂

Worst Case Scenario / Sleepless in Kalamazoo

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My night was going very well. I was very pleased with how practically flawless my afternoon progressed. At work I have two very small computers in a very public setting and they are performing as usual, wonderfully. Around 2am I woke up with a start because a nagging feeling that I was forgetting something hit me square between the eyes in that fuzzy zone between being awake and just falling to sleep. I had exposed two of my machines into the cold dangerous world without getting their MAC Addresses or Serial Numbers!

In many ways my work computers feel a lot like beloved pets. I care about them and look after them, and in this case worry about their safety. They were rather far away and in a particularly exposed condition where it’s terribly infeasible to go to them, flip them over, and get the information off their cases.

ARD to the rescue! Once again Apple Remote Desktop saves the day and quiets my worried mind. I opened my MacBook, connected to my workplace VPN, opened ARD, found my two little ones happily chugging along and remembered that ARD has some rather good reporting features baked-in to the software. I clicked on the first machine’s icon and went to Reports. I asked for Serial Number and the MAC Addresses for both the Airport wireless network adapter and the wired Ethernet adapter. I did this for both machines and printed the results as ‘PDF To Evernote’. Now I have all the information I forgot to get earlier stuffed into my Evernote archive.

Now, if, light-forbid my two exposed machines get stolen I won’t be sitting there facing the police with my pants around my professional I.T. ankles utterly unable to conjure on the spot Serial Numbers and MAC Addresses.

Now perhaps I can get some sleep!

P2 or Not P2

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Today has been an odd silly day. It started out with an odd fanciful notion to investigate WordPress.org and possibly host it on a Mac Mini. My design was to create a workplace blog, theme it with P2 and whip it out on my coworkers and see how it worked for them. It’s not really a Wiki, we have that, and the Wiki software we use is Apple’s own that comes with their Server OSes, but the blogging component leaves something to be desired.

I saw WordPress.com pushing P2, a theme that fits into WordPress.com or WordPress.org and enables Automattic, the company behind WordPress to communicate more efficiently. My interest was piqued.

So I started with that original idea, then my assistant reminded me that I have a huge monster HP 1U server that I never use and it has Ubuntu on it. I had a little Eureka moment and decided I could work with that. I downloaded the WordPress.org software and went over the installation manual. I got everything edited and in-place and looking nice in the terminal window but couldn’t get the wp-admin/install.php screen to appear so I could finish the WordPress.org installation. I futzed and putzed and figured out I was missing some things, like a different kind of PHP, as well as PHPmyadmin. Once I added all of those various bits I tried it again. No dice. I finally figured out that when I created the “wordpress” MySQL database and user that I botched up the name and host information and didn’t see it until I blundered my way into PHPmyadmin. With that tool I fixed the problem and then everything was fine. I installed JetPack Plug-in, which promptly exploded in my face. JetPack needs to chat back and forth between WordPress.com and whatever machine you are installing WordPress.org on. This server here is firewalled on the wire and can’t be seen by any outside-to-WMU system, so that put the kibosh on JetPack. I still wanted to try P2, so I installed it and it worked like a charm. Then I ran into the same headache I always run into with these systems: SMTP. Here at WMU there is a huge barrier to access any network services, especially SMTP. So how could a WordPress.org P2 blog ever really work right if the server it’s running on can’t ever send out email properly? Oh, I tried to be clever and I failed. I tried to forge a CA, I tried lots of hints to try to masquerade into smtp.gmail.com using TLS, and I tried sendmail and postfix. Bloody hell. I would rather eat glass than have to see sendmail.cf again. I’d rather massage the tongue of a rabid wolverine than futz with postfixes main.cf file again! I mashed my head up against that brick wall until I took a step back and asked myself why the hell I was going to these lengths for something so tangential.

So then it struck me, if we’re using WordPress.com for the heavy lifting for most of our content management, why couldn’t I just create a new blog for our workgroup, slap P2 on it and carry on? That had its own problems. In the beginning I set everything up with Western Express and set my “Gravatar” to be associated with my work email address of andy.mchugh@wmich.edu. All fine and good until you try to use that address anywhere else! WordPress is picky. So I logged into WordPress.com thinking I could change my accounts email address in WordPress, as it turns out, you can’t. You have to go to Gravatar and change it there. It’s not so much change as put in a new address, switch it to primary, then rip out the old address. A lot of work for something that was supposed to be easy. Blargh!

So I got everything switched around and freed my work email address then re-approached WordPress as if I was a new user. I logged in using my work address (which is the most appropriate address for this pursuit) and created an account. I got the automated email verification message and clicked on it. WordPress refused with the error: “Could not create user” and so I emailed support at WordPress for help. Still waiting to get some TLC from the support people as of the writing of this blog-post.

Along with all of this I’m wondering if P2 will be well received? Will my coworkers see this as one more silly thing that I’m making them all use? I’ve pounded Wiki use into their heads, I’ve done a lot of things behind the scenes that none of them see now but will that will also radically change their working lives (for the better I assure you) and then I sit and wonder. I wonder if P2 is a solution that could work for us? If it works for Automattic, shouldn’t it work for us as well? I’m on the fence on this. I’ve whipped out so much new technology on these people, will they accept another massive change to how they communicate or will I be facing open revolt? I see this idea of mine shaped this way:

A private group blog that everyone can log into anywhere they are in the world, obviating the need to use any kind of VPN system as WordPress.com is available ubiquitously. It would enable people to hold online communications, post instantly like Twitter, post without limit to text (unlike Twitter), include rich content such as YouTube embeds and such all the while managing the conversations and using categories and tags to track different sections of our communication infrastructure. I imagine using P2 as I would have maybe used Google Wave if it was matured properly and supported by Google and not killed in its infancy. That we’d use several big tags such as “Donors” and “Help Desk” along with a constellation of other tags and not have to struggle with email distribution lists and missing information and delayed communications, all of that could be eliminated. On the flip side of that argument is “This is one more thing that you are forcing on us and making us learn.” I’m struggling with how P2 could fit in with our lives and whether this is a valid pursuit or just so much “chasing after the shiny”.

There are several of my coworkers that I’m nearly certain would go stark raving mad if I whipped just one more thing out on them. I just can’t deny the allure of all of these services, WordPress, DropBox, 1Password, Evernote… that their ubiquity online and their omnipresence in the mobile computing sphere is terribly attractive to me. That a workforce that I deeply suspect will be forced to become more mobile and nimble almost demands that I continue this breathless rush towards the bleeding edge.

So what I really would like is to find anyone other than Automattic who found P2 to be useful. It would gratify me immensely to know that P2 was a ‘game-changer’ and serve also as confirmation that I am on the right path and that this whole charge towards shiny actually serves a true and honest business purpose beyond my wanderlust for novelty.

As always, I would really love people to comment, I’m looking for evaluations, opinions, you name it, every bit helps. I thank you all in advance. 🙂