Category Archives: Work

Alternatives to Clouds

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I’ve been toying around with a wonderful free utility from BitTorrent Labs called BTSync. You can find it here: http://www.bittorrent.com/sync.

What really drew my attention was the lack of centralized service that stands at the core of BitTorrent technology. It’s distributed, without any company or cloud provider dwelling in the background. All the hardware is owned by you, the “secret” code you use to share that identifies your sync experience also forms the encryption key so that the data that is flowing across the network is secure from prying eyes. Because you own all the hardware and encryption covers the data exchange, you can store whatever you like in your BTSync’ed folder and not have to worry about anyone else peeping over your shoulder or removing material from your storage without your knowledge or permission.

This free system has clients for workstations and mobile devices, so it really can be a drop-in replacement for services like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive. You can share the secret with anyone you like and anything you place on the folder set up with BTSync will synchronize across all the connected devices. You can also send “Read Only” secrets to sync your folders to people who you want to have your files but don’t want them deleting or changing your files and since this uses BitTorrent technology you won’t have to pay hosting fees and the more people share the data, the faster the system sends updates and changes and new data to all the subscribers.

I’ve created a Work folder, a Sync folder and have them set up on my work machine, my work laptop, my Mac Mini at home, and my iPhone and iPad. Since I own all the hardware, the maximum storage that I can store on this system is only limited by the smallest storage unit amongst all the shared machines. The folder lives on a 1TB USB HD at home, at work I have hundreds of GB’s available and the same as on the laptop. The storage in Mobile isn’t the same as a full workstation as the BTSync app doesn’t actually download data to store on the mobile devices directly but rather downloads a file list making it possible for you to pick and choose what you need on mobile when you need it. If you need security in the storage components you could leverage Encrypted Disk Images in Mac systems and TrueCrypt Encrypted Volumes on Windows machines. For Linux clients, you could likely use loop filesystems set with EncFS or something like that.

The applications for BTSync are amazing. Freed from middlemen companies I can store anything I like without having to worry about some company evaluating what I’m storing or even being able to respond to warrants to reveal what I’m storing on the service. Something like this could be a great benefit to companies that need to share files without having to worry about “buying into the Cloud” since everything is free. You can run a BTSync on a server, host a folder and share the secret out to all your employees and have a very handy share drive and even if your central server fails, copies of your data are stored on all the connected workstations so to recover the data all you would need to do is download the small BTSync client again, re-establish the shared secret code, identify a folder and watch as all your connected clients swarm and return all your data back to the “central depot” server.

Another wonderful option is to host a family shared folder, where you can store anything you like, securely and backed up amongst all the connected workstations. Alternatively, if you were an aspiring artist you could place a folder with all your work and establish a read-only secret and publish it on your social networks. Not only would all your fans be able to have your work, but you’d also be able to cleverly transform them into a swarm of willing backup sources for your work. If an artist has their secret code and a copy of BTSync client and they lose their primary system and all their data, they can just get a new system, re-establish the client and secret and smile as all their work comes back home as it was stored on all your fans computers. That’s amazing to me!

Getting started using this utility is a snap. Download the client and install it on your system. Then on whatever storage medium you like create a new folder. In the BTSync application itself you can create a new shared folder with a single click, there is a “Generate” button which creates the shared secret for you, you can then determine if you want it to be full-sync or read-only sync and then point the app to the folder you want to share, then minimize the app and you’re all set. Send the shared secret code to anyone you want to share with and your data will immediately be sent to their systems according to your preferences.

BTSync is the best of all worlds. You have a secure cloud infrastructure without anyone in your way, judging you or risking any intrusions from companies or governments.

The Graveyard of Good Ideas

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Earlier today I wrote an email to one of my recruiters who is helping me find gainful employment as best as he can. During this composition it occurred to me that there is definite value in some of these “Really Big Ideas” that I have from time to time. I’ve written about this subject before, but this time I started to consider if there was any way to sell this skill that I have, and that it would be a good thing to write about it and perhaps doing so would ‘seed the clouds’ and maybe help me somehow in the future.

It’s an odd skill with an elusive name. What could it be called? It was something that I only started to understand myself late last year after my 38th birthday. There are a lot of things that go into this particular knack, there is brainstorming, mind-mapping, and extensive applications of imagination. I love the notion of a “Thought Palace” which I picked up from reading a lot of Sherlock Holmes stories and for me, it’s not as structural as it might have been for the protagonist of those stories but the metaphor really rings true for me. It all starts with a problem statement. As I look back on my life I find that this pattern has been with me for a very long time and it’s only recently that I’ve been able to put a finger on it and approach the task of devising what it actually is all about. These problems sometimes are very deep, and sometimes not; sometimes they are filled with deep personal importance and sometimes not. The procedure, if there could be something procedural to it tends to follow the same overall pattern, brainstorming leads to a froth of ideas, images, opening up like a sea of possibilities before me. My mental landscape is littered with all of this material, laying about in boxes and just resting on the metaphorical mental ground. This seems to work even if I don’t brainstorm first, but it seems to hasten the entire operation if I do. The key for me is to quite literally sleep on it. I keep the problem firmly in mind, I’ve got a field of mental raw material littered about my consciousness and then I turn my back on all of it. In a few days, and as oddly as it seems, during a relaxing hot shower or bath usually, the end product arrives in my mind. It is an unusual sensation, just standing under the flow of water and a tightly coiled spring appears in my mind and then uncoils. The problem stands solved before me, and all I have to do is write it all down. I know it will work, and there are indelible certainties that any rough spots couldn’t possibly be show-stoppers.

Examples of these great ideas then get written down. And here is the rub for me personally, that I’ve got what amounts to a rather full suburban graveyard filled with these marvelous and certain to be successful ideas. I have to write them out, and then bury them alive because they are too valuable to actually share. It comes down to idea ownership, to actually make good on all this work that I’ve done for people who never asked me to do the work in the first place. These ideas could be very lucrative to me personally and in my current stage of life, having any of these ideas get stolen and benefitting someone else chills me right to the core.

Some of these ideas I can characterize without having to expose them, because without copyright to protect all this work, I would be exposed, and I can’t stand that risk. The first one was the most elegant and most important to me personally. It took elements that I had picked up in the non-profit philanthropic space that I have been orbiting for the last fifteen years and synthesized a complete plan that could be put into action by any institution of higher learning which would have the effect of integrating admissions, student retention, development and advancement, and also directly harness young alumni engagement. During my time speaking to people in that sphere of influence in Austin Texas last November, I was asked many times especially about young alumni engagement, and it was all I could do to resist not sharing my great design. I can’t trust that my work would benefit me, so the only people I could share it with are my blood kin, who are the only people who would never betray me for greedy purposes. Once I did share my grand design with my kin, the response was very gratifying. It could be a really great way to “have your cake and eat it too” when it came to encouraging and keeping students in higher education and quite possibly also address the giant mountain of student debt that these students are accruing during their time studying in these institutions. The idea that a student could possibly walk away from their Bachelors of Arts and only have to pay $125 for the entire experience was something that took my breath away. The ability to start your life without being chained to a giant millstone of educational debt keeps this particular idea alive, deep underground in a coffin, but alive still.

Then most recently I had the opportunity to interview for a local “hypermarket” style company that has business throughout the region. Quite by accident while reading the background material I had assembled for this interview experience I accidentally began “priming the machine” and the day before my interview with the company I had another one of these spring-loaded epiphanies strike me square in the head. Again it came during a hot shower, and I found myself speed-talking through the entire package of work, as I find that sometimes self-talk helps me retain all the details, sometimes these ideas can evaporate like the memories of dreams. I discovered that I had everything, mental images of whiteboards, hardware lists, procedure binders, business plans, project visions, even so far as to create marketing and a jingle. It would have led the “Point Of Sale” experience to it’s most extreme limit in terms of speed and convenience. It could have been a Holy Grail for this particular company. Alas, the company did not want me for my baser skills and so the idea was boxed up and buried.

The humor of all of this is not lost on me. What a foolish thing, to be struck with amazing work that was totally unbidden, unexpected, and not-asked-for. I seriously doubt there are ways to even approach unveiling these ideas because they come from so far afield that it’s doubtful they are even standing in the same ballpark. What sort of communication channel exists where you can chat up a company and lay all this out on them all at once? It’s impossible without sounding like you are a lunatic crank. Nobody volunteers such work out of the blue, it just isn’t done. It’s a small bit of entertainment imagining a world where this sort of thing is if not expected not ruled out before it can begin. What would such a world look like? People like me who have what amounts to having accidental revelations just wandering in off the street and changing entire market segments and entire industries, blowing up higher education affordability problems and revolutionizing POS systems willy-nilly.

So that leads to the graveyard of good ideas. I wonder how many other people are out there who have similar experiences. How many other life-changing, utterly disruptive epiphanies are buried in shallow graves? Then I get to wondering if all of this is a flash in the pan or if it is like I suspect, a new talent of mine that will be with me for the rest of my life. How many more holes will I have to dig?

PAD April 27 2013 – Your Time To Shine

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Early bird, or night owl?

Naturally I’m definitely a night owl. I can get started in the morning without difficulty but I do my best work in the afternoon and evenings. I tend to take nice hot relaxing showers before I go to bed, I find it helps me get to sleep easier and it is often during these relaxing times under the hot spray that my best thoughts arrive. I’m a huge fan, and I’ve written before about how useful it is to seed the subconscious mind with work and then reap the rewards when you are doing totally unrelated things. I like the idea that as I am relaxing under the warm water, which is my “home element” and it’s during these times that I have most of my epiphanies. There is more for me in the evening hours than ever in the morning hours. Too early and my mind isn’t running, honestly I’m usually besotted by dreamstuff that I drag into my waking life from my dreams to be useful for very much at all. I’ve found that I can dislodge a lot of the backed up dreamstuff if I journal it out. I used to muse that my mornings are occupied by dull setup procedures and that I don’t get seriously engaged until late morning bridging over to early afternoon and running into the night.

OSX Mavericks Possible Data Corruption Bug

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Over the past two weeks there has been much upheaval in my life. Involved with this upheaval has been one of the most unwanted activities any IT professional has to do as part of their professional lives and that is bowing out gracefully. Sometimes IT professionals can actually achieve this state of grace, however most of the time fear overwhelms grace and trust. The morality I will leave to another blog post to come.

In rescuing data from a computing device a few days ago I discovered that the act of using a USB external hard drive with a Macintosh MacBook Pro with OSX Mavericks may have a nasty bug lying in tall grass. I had about 212GB of data that needed to be moved to another medium, and I elected to use a Western Digital external hard drive using USB 2. This drive had never before shown any signs of failure however after copying the data onto the drive using OSX Mavericks, the HFS filesystem on the drive suffered some mystery damage that I’ve never witnessed before. Thankfully the volume was mountable and I could rescue the data from the errant drive and copy it to another drive and effectively save my bacon. The error concerned a failure in the node structure when fsck was asked to diagnose the HFS Journaled filesystem present on the suspect drive. Now I can’t say for sure that OSX Mavericks caused this failure, but the proximity of it and an earlier email from Western Digital stating that there might be drive problems with OSX Mavericks also rang in my mind as a potential problem that points to this particular possible bug. Now the Western Digital warning was just for their drives that used the extended WD software to mount the drives to the Macintosh file system, I suspect that the bug is indeed deeper than even WD knows, or Apple perhaps.

If you are using WD, or perhaps any other external hard drive or memory-stick technology with OSX Mavericks the smart money is on frequent backup and sync to multiple locations. Really smart administrators will backup over the network to some other computing platform with it’s own independent drive technology. If you are using Macintosh OSX Mavericks, I would say it’s better to be safe than sorry and for the love of all that is cute and fuzzy, make your backups!

RSVP – A Saving Grace

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There is a fantastic class of applications that are available for the iOS, Android, and Apple/IBM Computing platforms that really assist with speed reading. These applications are based on the same reading technique called RSVP, Rapid Serial Visual Presentation.

RSVP defeats subvocalization while reading. Many people subvocalize while they read and it becomes a habit. What most people don’t understand is that you do not need this subvocalization to actually comprehend what you read. The way to defeat this slow-reading habit is to fix the eyes in place and present the words too fast for you to vocalize them. Many of these applications start you off at around 300 words per minute, with sliders that let you adjust the speed up as you get used to the feeling of reading without subvocalization.

Recently I had a business need to consume a lot of written work, and I would have been hopelessly slow if I had continued my habit of subvocalization while I read. With RSVP I’ve been able to increase my reading speed to about 520 words per minute. Instead of taking half a year to polish off a 250 page paperback book I can now liesurely read it on-and-off over a weekend and be done with it. The nice part about RSVP is the faster you read the better your comprehension is, which seems to defy common sense. I’ve found that sometimes 520 words per minute is too annoyingly slow, and I’ve been known to push it to almost 600 words per minute, and it’s a pleasure to read at that speed.

Here are some applications that I’ve found that feature RSVP:

iOS –

  • Velocity – This free app on the Apple App Store can connect to Pocket, as well as act as an Open In… target for other applications that handle text. Velocity can also detect web addresses and present the text on the page as RSVP quite well. The interface to Velocity has a lot of polish and is quite a pleasure to use.
  • Fastr Pro – This is another free/low-cost application on the Apple App Store which features RSVP. This application has something special as far as I’m concerned and that is an open data locker where you can upload your ePub files and synchronize your library and last-read bookmarks across your iOS devices. I’ve run into some bugs with the software, but upon later analysis it was purely operator error, not the fault of the software. I was too impatient for Fastr Pro, and because I wasn’t willing to wait, I caused my own headaches. This app is written well and the developers have a fantastic sense of humor and are exceedingly friendly to work with.

Android –

  • Speed Reader – I’ve only been using this app for a little while. It’s free and the software is quite good. I ran into a little bug where the end of my ePub files were being missed in the conversion, as the app converts ePub files to TXT files before processing them in it’s RSVP engine. Something causes the last chunk of data on the ePub to not appear in the TXT file, as far as I can tell.

Windows/Mac Computers –

  • Spreeder – This is a website that works well on browsers on these two platforms. The site, www.spreeder.com has links to the Java applet as well as a Bookmarklet that enables one-click access to their RSVP engine. The nice thing with Spreeder which I appreciate is there are more adjustable settings with its RSVP engine. You can elect to chunk words, so it speeds up around small words and slows down around large words, keeping your average reading speed set to your preferred speed as well as a host of other thoughtful adjustments. I encourage everyone to visit the site and investigate for a full view of this product.

Generally these programs can help you increase your reading speed, allowing you to chew through written works much faster, and with much less eye-strain than with other speed-reading techniques that I have tried. I find it works better than skimming, which sometimes leads you to miss small salient details, and after a while using my fingers to release eye-strain just pushes the strain into my hands. I encourage everyone to look into this technique. RSVP revolutionized my professional career and quickly enabled me to consume a lot of written text much faster than I ever thought possible. I’m sure if I really invested serious concentration I could increase my rate to ever higher numbers as RSVP becomes easier as you get used to it, almost like exercising a muscle.

If you liked this column, please comment. Now that I am an independent IT specialist I thrive on feedback!

Many Thanks!

OwnCloud

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At work I’ve been thinking about cloud sync services, something like Dropbox without actually using Dropbox, because it’s non-kosher around these parts. I thought about OwnCloud so I went investigating.

OwnCloud is neat, it’s a PHP script that will set itself up on a web host, and then provide you with a web interface like Dropbox and access to clients like Dropbox which mirror the function of Dropbox completely. This was a possible route to satisfy our legal people and maybe leverage cloud sync at work. As it turns out, it didn’t work. OwnCloud is a lost cause. I installed it on my iPage host and got it to work all up until I tried to connect the Mac desktop client to it. It got files perfectly well, but when I put a file in the owncloud folder to be synced back up to my host it all fell apart. The error was “errno 22” and ended up being shown to me as “Bad Request” – so that was a no-go. Then I thought maybe I could install OwnCloud on my Mac Pro server at work, keep it in house maybe. That also was a failure, the web side was fine, but the client just couldn’t connect no matter what I tried.

So I’m going to abandon the pursuit of OwnCloud. I’ve tried it and found that it just won’t work on what I’ve got. It was something that could have possibly worked and been great, but it’s got too many moving parts and it was a total failure when you tried to get all the parts to spin up and run. Oh well, at least now I know I can abandon OwnCloud and move forward.

iOS 7 and iMessage

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After I upgraded to iOS 7 on my iPhone 5 I ran into a really annoying problem. Whenever I would send iMessage messages to friends and family the message would look like it’s sending and then the progress bar along the top would stop about 1/4 inch from the end and just stay there for hours. Never sending the message. I tried the Kung-Fu Grip to only partial avail. The solution is to reset the network settings on the iPhone:

Tap Settings
Tap General
Tap Reset
Tap Reset Network Settings

Once the phone resets, and you reset your Wifi and turn on all the cellular bits, like voice and data roaming (at least for me) then after that, everything works as it should.

If this helps you, please let me know. 🙂

Did You Get That Thing I Sent Ya?

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Museum of Communications

This video, adapted from a character on Cartoon Network’s Harvey Birdman animated series. Asks the most fundamental question that exists and is at the center of my issues with workplace communications.

“Did you get that thing, that thing, THAT THING, … that… I sent ya?”

It happens a lot, I do it, and a lot of other people do it too and it’s so annoying, irritating, and upsetting. You send a message to someone else and if it’s email, it can be like it flew into a black hole. You don’t know if they got it, if they read it, if they don’t care. Did they file it? Did they laugh when they got it? Dunno. When will whatever it is get attention? Dunno.

It’s the not knowing that irks me. We used to use GroupWise which made this particular issue somewhat of a non-event because it would record the fate of the message and you could get read receipts automatically sent back to you. Generally, this isn’t a problem either with SupportPress as we get emailed when a ticket comes in and the system enforces a receipt structure whenever we get tickets and manipulate them. It’s just, well, everything else. And it’s not something you want to include with every email because it should be a matter of common courtesy to acknowledge that you got a message and that you are working on it, or whatever is really going on with it.

Then again, my experience is that much like verbal arguments, nobody is really listening. In email, nobody is really reading. Time and time again I notice people who only pick out keywords from a cursory scan of what I send and reply to the things they feel they want to reply with, ignoring the actual message itself.

When asked, “What is the biggest stumbling block for you professionally?” The answer can be only this: Basic human communication and the lack of it. How can anyone get anything accomplished if we aren’t listening or reading or even paying attention to each other? Thank god for cognitive dissonance. It’s an absurd life if it is this way and obviously it isn’t because things get done, somehow, so it can’t be that bad, not really. But I think it is bad and I fear that it’s just getting worse.

If you get an email, maybe it’s a good idea to form a new habit and immediately reply telling the other party that you got it. At least when everyone knows, it’s one less little chunk of mystery floating out there.

photo by: Cargo Cult

Encrypt Everything

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Lavabit and Silent Circle have given up when it comes to providing encrypted email communications. Mega plans on providing something to cover the gap and in general the only real way to deal with privacy-in-email is end-to-end encryption. There was talk that at some point email might give way to writing letters and using the US Postal Service but there as well you’ve got Postmasters writing commands taped to mail about how everything has to be photocopied and stored – so even the US Postal Service is full of spies, the only thing the US Postal Service can be trusted to carry is junk mail.

What is the answer? Pretty Good Privacy. PGP, or rather, the non-Symantec version of it which is the GNU one, the GPG. If you really want to keep what you write private when you send it to someone else, the only way to do that is for everyone to have GPG installed on their email system so you can write email using their public key, which converts your email to cyphertext, secure from even the NSA’s prying eyes, and requires your recipient to unlock the message using their secret key, which they have.

I’ve been playing with PGP and GPG now for a very long time and I decided I would at least make a route available if anyone wanted to contact me with privacy intact – my public keys are on my blog, they are also on all the keyservers including the one hosted and run by MIT and the GPG Keyserver as well. To send me a private message via email all you need to do is get GPG, set it up, create your secret and public key, get my public key, use it to write me an email and only I’ll be able to read it. The NSA will just flag the encrypted contents for later analysis and thanks to AES–256, they’ll be hard pressed to get to the plaintext in your message.

That’s the way around all of this. GPG for everything. GPG public keys for email, for chat, for VPN, for files, and HTTP-in-GPG. Everything pumped through GPG. Since the government won’t stop spying on us, it’s our duty as citizens to secure our own effects against illegal search and siezure, and technology exists to do so.

Encrypt everything.