Every one I talk to thinks it is one of the weirdest things they have ever heard of.  Personally I have found it to be a lot of fun.  Without going into great detail, the department of agriculture is working to stop the spread of the gypsy moth through trapping and spraying of pesticides as it poses a major threat the the forests of several north eastern states.If you want more information than that you can get it here.  As a trapper it is my responsibility to place, check and remove the traps while documenting how many moths I find and where.  This information is used to track the their migration.  I use a GPS to both find the traps and record the trap information.  It’s a lot like geocaching but instead of a cache of goodies you get a glue trap full of moths and other bugs.

I guess I find it amazing how they are implementing the GPS and GIS information in all of this.  If you get a chance follow the above link read a little about the project, it is really great to see how well organized they are with all of this.  By the way, the number one question I have been asked is what the large purple traps are for that hang from the trees, it is for the emerald ash bore not the gypsy moth.

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The biggest mistake people make is using a password that is made up of personal information.  For example a name with a birth date like josh101980.  Passwords like this are easy to guess by anyone with common knowledge about you or your family.  A password needs to be something that a person can’t guess and using easily attainable information.  At the same time a password needs to be complicated enough to be guessed at random.  Using dictionary words a password can be easily cracked by lots of free, easily accessible software.  Passwords need to be a combination of characters, both upper and lower case, along with numbers and for maximum security symbols.

Now I know that this seems a little over complicated and hard to remember but there is an easy way.  To make a a password you can remember use words or phrases substituting symbols and numbers for letters.  Here is what I mean, take the word Internet for example.  Using letters and symbols you can make it into something like !n73rn37 which is much harder for anyone to guess.  Substituting a ! for the I , a 7 for a t and a 3 for an e just made a weak password into a strong one.  This is a common practice that became really popular with gamers several years ago and I have found it to be really useful for passwords.

The second mistake people make is not keeping their passwords secret.  Other than common passwords we have certain sites, I don’t even share my password with my wife.  If a coworker needs my password for something I will change it then give it to them or just give it to them and change it when their done.  Clifford Stoll said “Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don’t let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months.” and I think he was right on target.   I have even seen people so lax on password security that they will prite their username and password on a post-it note and stick it on the monitor.  Not exactly the hight of security.

Lastly, going back to what Stoll said, Change your password at least once a quarter.  Changin it may seem inconvenient but it is one of the easiest things you can do to protect your security.  If you can keep up with this along with the other tips you should be on your ay to a more secure computer experience.

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For me both of those options are a major plus. The idea of the iPhone as a development platform means all kinds of third party apps. With the overall popularity of the phone there will undoubtedly be a lot of really cool software that come out of all of this, some of which was previewed by people like MLB.com with stats and streaming video apps. With the popularity of the jail broken iPhones and the installer that is available there I can only begin to imagine the loads software that will flood the new apps store. I can definitely see the iPhone being the hot new platform if not for the phone than for the cool apps and games that will be on it. The thing is that all of the same apps will be available with a software upgrade on the original iPhone (FREE!) and the iTouch ($9.99) so this is really not an improvement for the iPhone 3G.

The enterprise support however looks to be Apple’s attack on the Blackberry and the entire business world. Not only are we getting full blown Exchange support but a lot of key security enhancements for Wifi and VPN. There also looks to be some really cool management for the enterprise such as the ability to enforce policies on phones as well as the ability to push out configurations though XML scripts. All of these are definite improvements over the current model but again all of these are improvements are available in the software upgrade.

I’m sure there are a lot of people that will buy the new model for the GPS and the 3G radio. That’s fine but I don’t live in a 3G coverage area so I guess strike number one. The new price points, $199 for the 8Gb and $299 for the 16Gb, makes them look a lot better though. Compared to the laundry list of expected improvements people expected, better camera and copy & paste and 32Gb or 64Gb models, there wasn’t a whole lot that changed beyond the software. To me this is where the iPhone should have been to begin with so I can’t say that I am overly impressed with today’s announcement.
I had thought about buying one but after today i think I will wait a little longer. I am going to wait to see what cool apps come out and maybe give them a little more time to introduce the 32Gb model that I know has to be coming. In the mean time my Tilt already has 3G and GPS. It’s not an iPhone I know but I already have it and I can spend that $299 on something else like a Roku box and some HD space for my aging PC.

By the way, official launch date is July 11th.

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It wasn’t all that long ago, about 2 years ago, that I lost a years worth of pictures of my kids. The hard disk was making that evil clicking noise and refused to work.  I looked at data recovery services but they were all too expensive.  I guess you can put a price on your memories.  Anyways that taught me one important lesson, you must have backups. I know a lot of people that backup pictures and such to DVDs or other media and store them is a safe or a fire box but for me that just doesn’t cut it. For a while I used file synchronization between 2 hard disks but there was one thing that kept haunting me with this method. In the event of a house fire or a natural disaster of some sort all of my pictures and all of my other important data could be lost forever. While it’s nice to have a local backup of your data in case of a hardware failure or such it is a lot better if you can get an off site backup solution. This is is what I once heard Alvin refer to as a “Nuclear Backup”, or something far enough away from your house that it could withstand even the worst of disasters.

For me it has been a long process getting my backups to where they are now. I started out keeping an external hard disk at work with my data on it but eventually found it to be in the way more than anything. Later I decided that the most important data I had was the pictures of my kids so I got a Flickr Pro account and uploaded all of my pictures there and used that as a backup. The downfall with both of these first two methods was this, my wife could not backup anything without my intervention. I have finally settled down on a backup solution that is working really well for me and requires little intervention on anyone’s part, Amazon S3 and Jungle Disk.

This is something I had heard floating around within some of the School Districts but I never checked it out, assuming that it would be way too expensive. A few months ago I finally looked into it and I have been loving it ever since. Jungle disk is an application for Windows, MAC OS, or Linux that allows you to easily automate backups to the Amazon S3 service. The software runs in your task bar and allows you to schedule your incremental backups. It also maps a drive to your backups and even allows you access to your documents through a secure web portal at myjungledisk.com. The cost of the software it’s self was around $20 one time. The Amazon service on the other had is billed monthly depending on the amount of data you are storing and the amount of data you transfer within a given month. The price is currently $0.15 a gig for data storage on Amazon.

Like I said, so far I have been really happy with this new setup. I have 3 PCs being backed up every six hours with no intervention from me other than the occasional check to ensure everything is still working. Everything was easy to set up and you really can’t beat the price. I am backing up about 15 gigabytes of data currently and I am only paying about $3 a month so if your in the market for a new backup service you might want to check jungledisk out.

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With all of that in mind I have been working to overcome some of the shortfalls of the Mini to accomplish the task at hand.  My primary concern was the lack of ability to have 2 display adapters or even run dual monitors.  I have found that running an extended desktop often runs best as it gives you the ability to work on one monitor while displaying the finished product on the other.  That eliminates a splitter of any sort.  I searched around the net and came across the EVGA UV Plus+ which via a USB 2 port gave you the ability to run a second monitor with resolutions up to 1680X1050.  Not too bad if you ask me.

The problem is I was very skeptical of it’s ability to perform when facing tasks such as full screen video.  This product, apparently being fairly new to the market, had very few decent reviews available.  Most of the other USB video cards I had looked at people had mentioned problems with full screen video and the like and I didn’t want to dump $80 on a piece of crap.  Finally I bit the bullet and ordered it.  It showed up yesterday and boy am I impressed.

The device is fully powered off of USB with no need for any external power adapters.  It is about half the size of a deck of cards with one LED to indicate power, a mini USB port and a DVI port.  Pretty straight forward and simple really.  I installed the drivers and after a quick reboot it was up and running.  I could run full screen video at 1280×1024 with no lag or pixelation at all.

Overall the product is a solid one.  The only thing is that I can’t really find a whole lot of uses for it.  My situation is very specific, had I been using a normal PC I would have just went on eBay and found a second video card to install.  It would have been cheaper and would have a much smoother integration.   I guess if your out of expansion slots in your PC or you just don’t feel comfortable opening the case it would be an OK product.  I think their market is mostly for professionals with laptops that desire a DVI port over a VGA port.  In that case, the product performs fantastically.  One problem however, it does not work under OSX at this time.

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Outside of the people I work with there is not a lot of people I socialize with that I can talk tech with. When I do find someone who really understands what I do it is really nice to be able to talk shop with people outside of the office. It’s a nice chance to contrast and compare and just see what other people are doing. My wife on the other hand just doesn’t get it. My “geek talk” as she calls it aparently leaves too many people out of the conversation.

I really never understood what she was talking about until the other day on the ride home from college. The three guys I ride with all work for a rural water company and talk about things like raw water and venturies. I’m completely in the dark. I ask questions and learn a little about what they are talking about but if I asked about everything I didn’t understand they probably wouldn’t let me ride with them any more. Finally the other day it hit me, this is what my wife was talking about.

I get it, I see how my “Geek Talk” would isolate those in the conversation with less knowledge of the subject at hand. While I know I won’t stop talking tech when the chance arises I do however think I’ll be a little more aware of the others around. I guess my wife isn’t crazy after all…

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You see a lot of large ISPs use something called a packet shaper. These devices made by companies such as Sandvine Inc. and Packeteer Inc. and can be used to prioritize, limit and all together block varying types of web traffic. They work by inspecting the packet to determine things like where it’s from and where it’s going to, and what type of traffic it is. In a typical network situation these devices can be great to allow a struggling network admin to get the most out of a limited WAN connection by prioritizing mission critical traffic and slowing down the unnecessary traffic. SCOCA has employed one of these for quite a few years now to slow down things like Streaming Media and P2P traffic to ensure that the traffic necessary for daily operations could get through. Lately we have had less and less need to use the device however due to the increases in bandwidth we have recently seen.

The thing about a network like SCOCA is that the people using our connection are using it for the daily operation of a school system. Any traffic not related to this operation is of secondary concern. When I pay for an internet connection at my house I pay to be able to connect the whole internet at the speed I payed for. The ISPs are trying to force content providers to pay a premium to have their content delivered as well as punishing the end user if they do not pay. This is where Net Neutrality comes in. There is a group that is fighting these people to ensure that the Internet remains neutral without the threat of ISPs infringing on the end users ability to both publish and receive content without paying a premium price for it.

As the fight ramps up we have seen the first attempts of ISPs to filter such things as BitTorrent traffic because it is slowing their networks to a stand still. The problem is that I think their lying! Historically here at SCOCA, beyond the legality of some P2P traffic, we have little problem with things like BitTorrent. For us the problem has always been Streaming Media. On our 200M internet connection I have seen streaming media use as much as half of our bandwidth at times when our Packeteer was not turned on. Comcast and the others are just afraid to start the fight with large providers like Google with sited like YouTube.

I encourage you to keep an eye on this issue as it continues to work it’s way into politics and through the court system. A ruling in the wrong direction could ultimatley kill the Internet as we know it now or at least make subscriptions to our favorite sites a lot more common.

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Being the slacker that I am, I knew that If I didn’t get caught up on the missed work quickly I would never get it done so I started searching online for the book. Amazon had used copies for $1.99 with $4.99 shipping which wasn’t a bad deal. After further searching however, I found out that Google books had the text for FREE! Just the right price for me. I don’t mind spending money on gadgets and computer stuff but a book I won’t even read isn’t typically the type of thing I like to spend money on.

If you have never checked out Google’s Book Search, you might want to give it a try. They seem to have quite a large library. I had looked through their library a few months ago but I guess you never see the real value of something till it saves you $6.98.

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Don’t get me wrong, I like being able to help people. If I really didn’t want to do it I would start charging people and I have a feeling it would end quickly but I don’t mind helping people as long as it doesn’t get in the way of more important things. The question I guess is, when do you stop being as tech guy? I have been enrolled at Ohio Christian University for the past couple of years and and even among my classmates and instructors I am the “tech guy”. This week I started a new class and the instructor was having trouble getting his PC hooked up to the projector. In the classroom they have a VGA cable run to a switch so the projector can be used with both an in class PC or the instructors laptop. When the Prof. hooked up his laptop to the projector it didn’t sync up right. Easy fix, right? Typically a function+F8 or similar key combination can fix such a problem. One of the student tech people was there helping him out but they were using the keyboard connected to the classroom PC which of course did nothing for the laptop problem. My classmates noticed he was struggling and were urging me to intervene to fix the problem. At what point though does being helpful turn into being an annoying know-it-all?

I have run into other such situations before and I always wonder at what point do you intervene or do you intervene at all? I have never wanted to come across as the Nick Burns type but I also want to be able to help people when I can. At the urging of my class mates I did finally speak up and fixed the problem with that magical key combination leaving the professor forever indebted to me, or so he acted. For me, my willingness to jump in and help is dependent upon the situation. How do you as a technically competent person handle these situations? Are you the first to jump in and show off your technical prowess or do you act like a calculator is the most technologically advanced piece of equipment in your house?

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