Stephen J Burke

I remember when the iPhone 3G first came out, and I told my wife that she needed one.  There are typically no negotiations when talking about technology purchases in the household, but there is always a little resistance.  It is that resistance to change that we all don’t want to address, until it reaches a comfort level with us all.  At the time, I had my iPhone for about 6 months and I knew that my wife needed to have this. Away from a computer all day, I could see her frustrated with emails and communications as the world moved past while she entered her cave of communication solitude for 8 hours a day.

Today, she takes the phone out of the cradle first thing in the morning to check her schedule.  She listens to her podcasts on the way to work, and I can find her cuddled around the glowing screen at night now that the Kindle App has her addicted to reading on the device.

Trying to tell everybody that they just need an iPhone is the most painful part of the process.  You approach all of the change resistance scenarios while people approach the conversation with fear and sometime anger that you would suggest such a thing.

Will the Android phone, or even the Palm Pre upset the iPhone?  Probably not, now that all of the application development has gone into the iphone.  We will hope for the increased vigor in the industry to push the standards a little higher for all of the phone platforms, as before this phone they were getting off easy and producing cheap alternatives.  It won’t be until somebody creates a phone that will emulate or even virtualize  all of the applications from the iPhone will we see a real competitor.

That being said, the story is completely different outside of the United States.  While we have been sitting here with substandard phones, throughout Europe they have already evolved past this stage.  A few years ahead of us in mobile and cellular technology, they shake their heads at the thought of owning an iPhone. While the application development continues to grow, so will the worldwide adoption rates. Another release or two of the phone, increasing capacity and functionality and the world will begin to adopt the iPhone as well.

There are a few things you have to take into account when creating a password security policy.  You take care to make sure people can’t use normal dictionary words, you require more characters on the passwords, and you even require two passwords for really secure area.   If you make any part of the password experience too difficult, human nature will bypass your entire policy.  The human nature factor has become a valid model which we all recognize in security.  We know that the harder you make the password policy, the more likely people are to write that password on a sticky note.  I think you may be able to graph sales of sticky notes in correlation to password policies.

April 25th, 2009, I received the notice that GoDaddy has changed their terms of service for their password policy. They didn’t tell me what the policy change was, but said it was for passwords and account security and gave me a nice link back to the site.

I have to change my password and my pin number every 6 months? Really?  While this password approach is recommended for systems in a corporate environment accessing multiple resources on a DAILY basis, GoDaddy is an online account.  In the world of online accounts it is a move backwards in actual security to require this frequency of password changes.

For one, I don’t access my GoDaddy account every 6 months.  Now I am going to get a notice, explaining that I need to reset my password AND pin number for an account I haven’t even used.  I have to remember to go in and do it that before…how long exactly do I have to change this password GoDaddy?

Insert sticky note problem number one here.  Can I just ignore your request to change my password for another 6 months?  That is my first reaction of human nature.

What if the other 316 online accounts I have required me to change account information every 6 months?

Insert sticky note problem number two. Human nature would take over, and I would revolve all of my passwords to the same thing, all at the same time.  My password to go online and shop for car parts would be the same as my super secret GoDaddy account.

While this may help GoDaddy expunge themselves of some legal requirement to offload responsibility for account access, it punishes the end users and creates a larger security problem in the end. GoDaddy has started down a path that will fail if it becomes adopted elsewhere, possibly opening the door to the modern day sticky note of security problems.

I thought the April fools prank was rather fun, when Google announced that you could use their browser in 3D. I even poked fun of it in our corporate intranet, announcing our commitment to the entire CADIE project.

It turns out that Google wasn’t really joking. On a newly created blog for their 03D project, developers have created a plug-in that will enable 3D in most browsers. While it is a step away from needing to wear 3D glasses, the move is an interesting one, considering we are not done laughing at the thought of seeing the Internet in 3D.

While I haven’t been following the efforts, somewhere last month, Google announced it was working with the Khronos Group, an open standards group for Media Authoring and Acceleration. Sure enough they just released the API based off the open-source standard that will bring 3D rendering and graphics to major browsers.

While I always enjoy the projects underway in Google Labs, this one may be a little early to become excited over. The community of mainstream Internet users is not ready yet to use 3D to navigate the Internet. While we are not ready to live in a 3D browser, it certainly does offer up some opportunities for development of other applications.

This is attractive is in the eyes of the gaming community, or at least in my eyes as one person in the community. For years I have always ran ahead of some invisible curve of technology, trying to keep hardware up to spec, just so the game that I was playing would run as smooth as possible. That cost has been an expensive one.  Keeping behind the pricing curve of hardware, but ahead of the requirements curve of software requirements is a never ending race. For myself, the latest round of console development in the past couple years have been the only reprieve to allow me to ween off the yearly gaming budget, while satisfying my cravings.

Leveraging the graphics in the browser and being able to produce that level of rendering, once reserved for a localize application, Google has opened a door to moving computer gaming closer to a cloud environment. Take that game which you are already addicted to, and move it to a browser. You now make that game available anywhere, on almost any platform, in the same quality that you have at home now.  Want to see if you can install or play a particular game?  It might not matter what computer you are on, as long as you have a web browser.

Nobody can predict the exact direction Google will take this development, or if there focus is even on the gaming industry. I do know that I am frustrated walking into a store at all after doing all my shopping online. I do not want to re-live that experience in a web browser, so I hope something fun comes out of this development.

There are so many modern day ways to transfer large files, that it still saddens me that the only method anybody can conceive of using is by sending attachments in emails.  It does not surprise me when people continue to ask for larger message transfer sizes.  I work for a manufacturing company whose only resource to move information around has become email.  While FTP and other transfer methods have existed for years, without exposure to these technologies, the mainstream office worker only knows email.

This week I found myself defending the restriction on message size limit against our organization itself.   When people stop trusting the restrictions I put in place, it tells me I need to pause enough to listen to what real problems might be happening.

The administrator who tells you that they don’t have any problems running higher or no limits in place, doesn’t have a grasp on his/her own resources or network.  While it is technically possible to open the limits up, there are reasons why it is just not done.

Why does there have to be a limit?

It is important to understand why we need to have limits in place. The first obvious one is that you make yourself more susceptible to Denial of Service attacks.  Now when I say “attacks”, people immediately jump to thinking about hackers and scary 8 year olds with hoodies on, trying to take down our network.  In reality you could inadvertently trigger a denial of service onto yourself, crippling your own network.

Large email sizes will directly impact network performance, as people transfer these larfe files around. If your office is running a T1 line for internet connectivity and you send or receive a 30MB file over that connection it doesn’t take much to see you could stop your network. If it was even possible to max out that T1 line at 1.544Mb, that would consume all of the bandwidth for 3 Minutes and 17.01 Seconds to make it happen.  You don’t actually have that full bandwidth available so it is easy to see how crippling this could be for smaller office.

A larger message size will also put an enormous strain on the client and the client antivirus software.  Most anti-virus programs scan messages within the mailbox and the large files may appear to lock up or stall the entire application.

I have a large pet peeve when people respond back with my requirements with “storage is cheap”.  You can certainly go buy another 5400 RPM hard drive able to store a terabyte of information for cheap.  Now multiply the number of people on a corporate network, expect to buy some enterprise level storage increases on you SAN network, and you will start to think differently.

What is a good limit?

Certainly necessity is the first rule.  If you NEED a larger limit, then everything else must adapt to keep up with what you need.  If you live and die by Microsoft best practices, you start with 10MB as the default setting on any Exchange mailbox.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124345.aspx

Depending on the size of your organization, you will need to be proactive in determining how much of an impact increasing email size limits will have on your network, your clients, your servers and your storage.

What are my alternatives?

Most people in the organization don’t need to have this large limit in place.  Consider setting up a small group of people who might need a higher limit, and educate them on the dangers of sending and receiving the large files.

Make the files smaller.  I know that sounds simple, but it is.  The number one complaint from people getting blocked has to be powerpoint presentations gone to the extreme.  For some reason people aren’t very efficient at making powerpoint documents, using properly scaled images and going back later to compress the files size down.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint/HA011168821033.aspx

There are hundreds of online storage services are available like putfile.com, filesavr.com or filefactory.com who allow you to transfer large files.  You will want to make sure you are not copying company sensitive information before using a service like this, but they can be very easy to use and setup.

If your company doesn’t have a secure channel for transferring files to customers, then push to make it happen.  The push for this doesn’t go to the IT department, but rather through management to identify the business need to make this happen.  While stretching the capabilities of your email system is not an option, it helps the company to identify why you are having problems in the first place.

For reasons I am not exactly clear about myself, I was able to obtain the new Sony MHS-PM1 “Webbie” HD camcorder, apparently before most people on the planet. Being a late adopter of most technology out there, I find more appreciation in people reviewing hardware from their own perspective over any public media review.   All those reviews for all of those years, I find myself with a sense of duty to return the favor. 

I am going to have to have a series of posts related to this camera, as I have no formal method of sitting down and comparing it to the rest of the options out there.  I am also mildly terrible at remembering to shoot video, so I am going to need to force the issue.

I bought this camera for a purpose.  In May 2009, I am taking an 8 day road trip of sorts around the country with two friends as we travel from race track to race track, as part of the One Lap of America.  The trip is a dream come true, and I want to document every possible moment to re-live for years to come.   I will certainly have some follow up reports after that trip to see how this camera survives. This trip however, redefined what I wanted out of a camcorder.

While traveling, I don’t want to run out of recordable space, and I want to be able to swap a battery to continue using the camera.  I wanted to have swappable media cards and a swappable battery.   I also wanted to have the camera record in the car for long track sessions, or even part of the road trip, without me thinking.  Here is where the camera has already failed.

The online reference to this was poor, so let me get it out in the open. This camera will not record video continuously, for more than 25 minutes.  It did reference this time scale under the memory card sizing for still photos.  Not until you get the user manual did it actually read the noted 25 minute restriction also applied to recorded time for video.

25 minutes, really?   The fact that I can put a 16GB card in the camera and get over 8 hours of 720p recording is absolutely useless.  The fact that they tout having over 100 minutes of record time on the battery is also crap, because every 25 minutes my video will stop.  

Will it still be good for vacations and trip? Absolutely. I will however curse this camera to no end, if I start a track session in the car and the recording time stops before I get back to the garage.  

Physical Overview

I like the design of the camera.  I like the ability to flip the lens closed, which acts as a switch to turn on or off the camera.  Knowing that I will throw it in my pocket, having it closed gives me a sense that I am somehow protecting the lens itself.

The camera is light, and I am convinced that the only thing that adds any weight to it is the battery.  Of course my universal comparison is size is the iPhone, and while it is certainly thicker than the phone, the outside measurements are smaller. The plastic case makes it feel lighter, though I need to put it on a scale to be sure. 

The slide compartment on the bottom of the phone feel solidly built and has a nice hinge system that opens up to reveal the memory card and battery compartment.  The battery has a securing clip, so opening the cover itself does not send your battery bouncing across the floor. 

The “port” cover however on the side is a “pry it open” operation, and hopes to rely on the rubber tether to keep it from flying off into oblivion.  While it is functional, I would be concerned over continuous use, as I have already found myself giving it a good thumb mashing to get it to re-seat correctly. 

You will of course need to carry a USB cable to get the pictures off, unless you have a Sony Memory Stick Pro card reader to move to.

There is a traditional sized threaded tripod hole on the bottom, which will come in handy, when trying to secure the camera down, or keep it one place with an actual tripod.

They knew I drop everything and put a mounting slot on the bottom to mount an included wrist sized fabric string strap.

 The front of the camera has no indication you are recording, and the small hole

 perforation is the microphone to the camera.  There is a blinky green light on the back side of the camera, so you can do you self recording. 

The opposite side of the port access, or right side of the camera while in your hand

 are the power, menu and options/delete button.  You only actually push the power button when you want to connect the USB or for pure playback, as you get spoiled by rotating the lens to turn it on the rest of the time. 

I know the camera uses the Memory Stick Pro card and doesn’t use a standard SD card.  It isn’t surprising, as it is Sony, but hearing everybody use that as a complaint point gets mildly annoying. There are so few cameras offering any flash based additional memory that I am grateful for anything. 

While I am not typically a video person, I hope to go over some of the controls and post some video clips soon for comparison.  I am excited to be able to record video and keep this on my person at all time, but still having concerns of how to circumvent the 25 minute recording restriction to really make me enjoy the camera.

Today Google finally made the move I have been waiting for by bringing Google Voice into realm of google apps to organize my life.  I am the first to admit I have become a google fan boy and even enjoy teaching classes on how to use the Google to organize other people’s lives.  I am like a born again googler, trying to spread the word. Ever since a co-worker invited me to sign up for Grand Central in 2007, I knew Google was onto something. 

If you have never heard of Grand Central, or only knew it was a NYC metro station, then here are the basics.  You sign up for Grand Central and they give you a local number in your area code, which you can use as you new phone number.  You are given a login to the website and can program that new number to do a multitude of cool things to route your voice calls.  You can set it up to ring your cell phone, home phone, and work phone at the same time.  You can set it up so when your mother in law calls, it never rings your phone, but rings your wife’s phone.  You can get pretty granular with the controls, even setting the time of day preferences to make sure the calls can get to you quicker.  

I have been using Grand Central for a couple years.  For myself, I use it least of which is to actually receive calls.  For the most part I use Grand Central for the most elliquent filtering system available to screen my calls.  It is the main number that I put on everything.  When I fill in any application form or am asked to provide a number that will go into a database somewhere, they get the Grand Central number.  

I am not going to run down all of the features that Grand Central provides, but I want to highlight the new features that Google Voice wil bring. 

Call Record

Ok, I lied about not talking about the old features.  You could do this one on Grand Central, but I never really thought of connecting through Grand Central when placing the call. With the interaction into your contacts and the ability to “Place Calls” I may think twice before pressing the call button.  

SMS

Integrating with TEXT messaging is a natural progression that needs to happen with anything with voice. Already getting text message for my calendar appointments and everything else in google, they would have been numb if they missed it here. 

Voicemail Transcripts

Out of the box Google Voice will attempt to create transcripts of your voicemail and let you read what the voicemail is before having to listen to it. While you will have this information online, you can also opt to have it send to SMS or to EMAIL.  For people who find that valuable text message in a meeting or noisy place where you can’t answer the phone, this is perfect. 

Placing Calls

Not directly a feature of Grand Central, but obtainable from a multitude of options, this one may be valuable for people who are running a small business with google apps.  The contact is there in front of you and when you click on the number your phone rings and connects you to the person. 

Google Integration

Let’s face it, the closer you live in a Google world, the easier it makes your life.  If it doesn’t then we need to sit down and talk.  

What is next?

If you have never seen Gizmo5, have a look. 

http://gizmo5.com/pc/

It is the cheaper free version of Skype ad they are proud to tout that.  Grand Central had some interaction with the, so you can imagine the same level of Skype interaction will follow soon.  

The Privacy

Let’s face it, the number one reason people don’t trust google apps is the privacy.  If you are worried that your transcripts online are invading your privacy or worried that Google will deliver ads based on what you are talking about, they will.  If the material you are talking about is that sensitive, then don’t use this system.  While somehow Google always manages to put things into a warm and fuzzy way of invading your privacy, it still happens. For myself the benefits of organization that it ads to my life has been well worth the fact that somebody else may know what I am up to. 

Media Check

Mildly perturbed at all of the articles out there, pointing to this as a new technology.  While I still pay homage to the guys at CNET for keeping up with most of this information, the rest of the real media has once again dropped the ball in recognizing that this was coming.  

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/here-comes-google-voice.html

On January 12, experts from over 30 US and international security organizations released the consensus list of the 25 most dangerous programming errors.

The procurement language under development by the State of New York and other state governments already is being adjusted to use the Top 25 Errors in the process.

For companies who sell software to state or government agencies, they may run into these restrictions rather quickly. It is unclear on whether or not these restrictions will apply to legacy software already in place. While I would hope that all software is met with a certain level of scrutiny to keep it secure, those legacy applications are more prevelant than we might expect.

It would be in everybody best interest to review your software development process and start to think about compliance to these regulations.
http://gcn.com/Articles/2009/01/21/New-York-software-rule.aspx
http://cwe.mitre.org/top25/pdf/2009_cwe_sans_top_25.pdf

The solutions available for bringing a phone call to your desk have matured greatly over the past 10 years. The past three years however have brought an entirely new solution to the market for businesses, with the maturing of hosted VoIP infrastructures and what consider to be “cloud based VoIP”. The availability of these products has almost moved too fast, as many organizations are not ready to understand the implications, but the opportune time to jump on is now.

When we approached a new phone system back in 1998, we really didn’t have any resistance when I suggested a VoIP system. At that time the cost to maintain or even expand our Intuity Audix based platform was ridiculous. I think it cost upwards of $10K to add a line card to the system to expand 10 internal phone lines. The cost of the new system was almost insignificant in comparison. Choosing a platform was a huge technology commitment at the time, only having a handful of platforms to choose from, knowing it would have to last for another 10 years.

Shortly after 3com bought NBX, we bought into their solution, largely driven by the ease of use of the platform. We saved the company hundreds of thousands in implementation alone, putting systems in our offices around North America ourselves. Fast forward 10 years and we are running off of a relatively zero cost VoIP platform to maintain.

Those 10 years moved fast however, and it is time again to get back to the drawing board to define a new generation of voice requirements. We have grown over 46% in personnel over the past 5 years and we have more visibility of our actions, as globalization brings us closer together. Our once robust system is now outdated and undersized, leaving us incapable of delivering the same advantages we have in the Americas to the rest of our corporation worldwide. We were ready to expand our system into new offices in 2006, knowing the system would not scale to support the direction it was taking us.

In 2007 the discussions began of “what to do next?” to bring us all up to a unified communications platform? In 2007, the direction was easy. The industry had matured greatly, bringing some huge vendors to market for us to build a more robust VoIP platform. We would of course go with a larger vendor, capable of supporting more phones, and had more of a worldwide presence to support all of our offices. At the time, the only thing we heard about hosted voice services was our friends who were struggling with home voice solutions like Vonage. Hosted VoIP services for business were un-polished and deemed unreliable.

Turn that 2007 VoIP discussion into a 2008 project and the industry had started to change. I remember writing up the proposal in 2008, noting that “cloud” based services for VoIP will surpass our internal decision process. I knew it would become a more attractive option before we ever get a phone on a desk. Here we are in 2009 and nobody could have predicted how fast that cloud came. We have a budget in place, we have management on board, and everybody is ready to pull a trigger on laying down a new VoIP infrastructure. Internally, this would be the worst possible time to mention that there is a better solution. Knowing myself however, I would regret not moving putting up a flag now in two years.

That cloud, which we knew of in 2007, spotted on the horizon in 2008, is right on top of us in 2009. Fueled by the economic drop outs in 2008, the Hosted based VoIP platform has taken legs and is the most approachable, low risk option for any size company considering replacing their phone system. Remove all of the deployment overheads, lead times, and interoperability problems you have with deploying your own platform in an organization and you are left with the hosted VoIP solutions today.

Providers will take all of your phone numbers, trunk them together and deliver your voice to your desk within days, not months. Take an office that has an old PBX still in place, and they will put some SIP gateways in place so you can maintain your phones if you want. Most important is that you aren’t buying into a solution, knowing it might change leaving you stuck with outdated hardware. You are renting or paying into a solution that will evolve with the advancements, and reduce your investment dollars.

If you find yourself at the same crossroads of entering into VoIP by developing a self managed platform, move cautiously. You cannot predict is how management will react to a shift in direction. It feels somewhat like running out in front of a train, expecting it to hop tracks, without losing speed. While the concept is solid, and the initial investment to approach the solutions is significantly less, that train has a lot of momentum and a lot of cars attached to it, which all need to move at the same time. Be prepared for the logistical train wreck that this could create and the damage it could mean to a project and your reputation.

I have been looking for a solid advancement in Home Automation for a while. Being a network snob, I really can’t get myself to buy into the X10 line of products, which hasn’t seen advancement in years, doesn’t integrate into the rest of my network and just feels like it is old architecture.

Google’s PowerMeter announcement not only brought large news into the home energy and green initiatives around the world, but it also brought life to the otherwise stagnant development into the home automation industry.

I have had one of the first developed Zigbee wireless thermostats in my house since 2006. I picked up the thermostat when a company called Control4 first brought it to market. Although I was never able to buy into the entire Control4 package because of cost, I appreciated the emergence of a company leaning into new technology in home automation.
Displayed proudly in Google’s FAQ section under “Who else is working on the issue of energy information?” is the Zigbee Alliance. I suspect over the next couple months you will start to hear more and more about Zigbee wireless and their involvement in this project.

Google’s announcement to help organize the world’s power consumption is positive leap in energy conservation efforts. It is my hope that the push drives the home automation industry forward into making better, more affordable, and scalable solutions to make my own life easier. Keep an eye on those automation companies that do have a zigbee solution already in place.

A couple of weeks ago I held a basic class in Twitter at work. My main objective was to breakdown the misconceptions that Twitter is only a social outlet. Twitter has really grown out of a medium locked into social networking.

Twitter Notes

It is true that Twitter is still a broadcasting service that you can use to promote yourself or your business. Today however Twitter is also a Mobile Communication tool that can be used to coordinate groups or teams. With every news media established on Twitter, is also becoming the place to keep current on news or information specific to any interested. On January 15th, Twitter marked itself as a news source, as the first information the world heard about a plane going down in the Hudson river, was not from CNN, or MSNBC, it was in the twitter universe.

You don’t need to setup a twitter account to let everybody know what you are doing, but everybody will want a twitter account to see what is happening.