Using the cloud for product testing

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Back when I toiled in the fields of IT for Megasurance Corp. we had a simple process for testing new hardware and software: Step 1:Get the latest PC from our IBM rep. Step 2: insert 3270 mainframe terminal emulation board. Step 3: Insert floppy from software vendor and see if it ran properly. It wasn’t too intellectually challenging, and DOS meant that we could only run one program at a time (plus connect to the mainframe).

Then we had memory managers (remember Quarterdeck?) and early Windows, and all of a 10 MB hard drive to store programs on, and life became difficult. I remember I had one user that kept experimenting with the FORMAT C: command in DOS, and didn’t understand that it would wipe his drive clean. Ah, those simpler times.

When I started my freelance business back in 1992, I had a whole lab filled with various PCs of different shapes and sizes, running Netware (RIP Novell), OS/2, and Windows 3. Whenever I had to test something, I needed a new PC to try it out on. Keeping a virgin copy of the OS was difficult until Ghost and other imaging products were invented to help return your computer back to its pristine state.

Back then, Novell had its superlab of 1,000 PCs that it used to beat up its network servers. The guys that started that lab left the company about the same time I started my own business to form Keylabs which eventually became parts of Applabs and Symantec. In the process of building out their huge lab, they developed test tools to help automate deployment of new computers.

Then virtualization was created, and the ability to run multiple instances or different OS on the same PC, and life became even more complex in one way, but easier in another: Now instead of having a room full of PCs, you could have one or two machines with huge hard drives to store the copies of the virtual ones. And returning any of these virtual PCs to a pristine state is even easier than dealing with imaging products.

But just like everything else, product testing is moving into the cloud, and I have taken a look at two different cloud providers that are leading the way.

The first one is dirt cheap, and makes it easy to setup and run a new computer. Like other cloud providers, you don’t need to install anything, just your browser and some other programs that you probably already have. You connect to a Web site, and in a few clicks you are looking at a Windows 7 desktop, or a Linux machine, or whatever. The PC runs at some hosting provider somewhere out there, and you don’t have to worry about upgrading it, or anything. When you are finished, you close your browser and the state of the machine is preserved so that you can get back to what you were doing in a few seconds. And it is free. The service is called Cloudshare.com.

In a matter of minutes, you can set up to three virtual PCs running a range of operating systems, including various Windows, Ubuntu, and CentOS. That’s right – free. Yes, you have some limits on your free account, which is why they want you to upgrade and where you will spend some cash, but still the price isn’t a lot for what you get. There are lots of other cloud computing competitors who will charge hundreds or thousands of dollars a month for equivalent services, such as Skytap and Terremark.

On the other end of the complexity spectrum is Hatsize.com. They specialize in very sophisticated lab environments that can span the virtual and physical universes, and get involved in rolling out all sorts of equipment such as expensive tape libraries and threat management appliances. They can dynamically provision resources between your on-premises and cloud computers, and run on various hypervisors and OSs. They have their own custom browser applet that can control remote access and file transfers to the cloud environment. They start at $40/user/day for pay as you go. If you are trying to showcase a product for several hundred people across the globe and don’t want a lot of network latency, this is the place to go.

Cloudshare and Hatsize will be game changers in terms of product testing. And I think there will be other providers in the future that will offer similar arrangements. We have come a long way from merely sticking a floppy disk into our PCs!

Sharing documents in the cloud with Google, Microsoft and Box.net

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For the past couple of weeks, I have been attempting not to store anything on my own hard drive, to try to test out the cloud services of several providers for document storage and collaboration. It has been a mixed bag, to say the least.

Cloud services store files on their servers so you don’t need to worry about backups or available computers. They can be as simple as a file repository to more sophisticate things that create entire networks of virtual computers for applications and databases.

Every cloud provider has lots of fine print that mean you have to kick the tires pretty carefully before you can understand what is offered and what isn’t.

The three providers that I tried were Microsoft’s Live Office, Google Docs, and Box.net. The first two are free. Box has free accounts, but you probably want to make use of one of their paid ones that start at $15 per month. All three have been busy adding features to their services over the past several months, and that is the first thing that you notice about cloud computing: things change, and sometimes on a daily basis. So evaluating these moving targets means a lot more work than just installing some DVD on your PC. You have to periodically return and see what has been added.

Microsoft Live has made the most improvements over the past year, but it still is a hodgepodge of services that have knit together its Hotmail email hosting, Skydrive backup service, and hosted Office Live services. Of the three, they have the best solution if you want to upload PowerPoint slide decks and be able to quickly make adjustments to either the slides themselves or the speaker notes that are shown underneath each slide. Google Docs ignores the notes, which for me is an issue because I use them as prompts for my speeches. Box will let you edit the notes and the slide data, but only after opening your slide deck with Zoho, a hosted open office solution. It isn’t all that much trouble, but certainly not as easy as Microsoft’s Live Office.

Each service has varying limitations on the maximum file size they will allow you to upload and your overall storage allotment. Box has a limit of 2GB per file for its paid accounts and 25 MB for free ones. Skydrive allows up to 50 MB per file. Google 1 GB per file sometimes. I say sometimes because of the way they calculate the overall storage quota. If you convert any MS Office files into their own formats, these files don’t count towards your storage allotment. Microsoft’s Live Office gives you 25 GB of free storage as part of its Skydrive service. Box free accounts give you 5 GB, and the paid accounts can up that to 500 GB or unlimited if you shell out more dough for the enterprise version.

The other part of using cloud services is it makes sharing and collaborating with your documents easier than having to send email attachments around and getting bogged down in resolving different versions. The goal here is to use email for the notification portion, but not for the actual transport of the documents. All three make it easy to send a link to your file to your collaborators. Goggle has made the most improvements here and there are some interesting near-real time editing features that they have added into their Docs platform. The only catch is that all of your collaborators have to have a Google account. Microsoft and Box can send links that anyone can open to view and edit all of the files in a particular folder without requiring them to sign up for their services.

Microsoft and Box both have some interesting tie-ins with social networking apps that can post notifications to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn status feeds so your followers and friends can see what files you are working on.

So how successful have I been with sticking in the cloud? Certainly, old habits die hard, and to resist the temptation to save my files locally is tough. I wish we could have one cloud provider that combined the best of the three services.

Clean up your PC with TuneUp Utilities

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I know many of you are planning your 5 am commando raids this coming Friday on the local shopping emporia, but if you need a break from trying to download all the various holiday flyers so carefully preserved in PDF format by Walmart, Best Buy et al. or trying out Black Friday apps on your iPhone, you might want to take a moment to clean up your Windows PC with the latest 2011 version of TuneUp Utilities. It will be well worth your time, and for $50 for three computers, cheap too.

All of us who use the same computer for more than a year have noticed that things tend to slow down over time: it takes longer for the PC to boot up and shut down. Even when we try to restrain ourselves from adding or deleting programs, the registry gets bogged down with superfluous entries that slow the machine down while it is running too. That is where TuneUp can help.

I have used previous versions, and while they were good about optimizing the overall Windows OS parameters, they didn’t do much in the way of figuring out the applications on my machines. The new version goes deeper into how the apps work, and makes it really easy to adjust them to meet your particular needs. You get constant feedback about the consequences of your decisions, so you immediately know whether something that you just did is going to actually improve your performance or not have any impact. I wish we had something like this for our lives.

One of the new features in the product is called Program Deactivator. If you wanted your PC to run faster, you previously had to uninstall programs that took up a lot of your system’s resources. Now, with just one click, you can deactivate a software program that you don’t normally use. However, the bits remain installed on your computer, and when you need to run the program, you just click on its icon or select it from your Programs menu and it comes right back up with almost no lag time.

By deactivating unused or infrequently used programs, you speed up your overall operations. TuneUp shows you the impact of your selection on startup, during operation and upon shut down, so you can get an idea of what kind of resource hog each program is.

TuneUp engineers did some benchmarks that showed deactivating programs returned a sluggish PC almost back to its first day performance characteristics. The process is very intuitive and takes just a few minutes.

There are a lot of other performance enhancements in the utility, including a special “turbo mode” that can make your machine run a lot faster when you need it for playing games, editing videos or doing other processor-intensive tasks.

TuneUp Utilities works for all versions of Windows since XP with SP2, including 64-bit versions. You can download a free trial here.

And if you want to see a quick video screencast that I did for the company, check it out here.

Datamation: Virtualization update, Nov 2010

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The second half of 2010 has seen more development on virtual desktops, along with some interesting twists on improvements to virtualization infrastructure.

The end of 2010 hasn’t seen many new products from the three major virtualization vendors (Microsoft, Citrix and VMware) but more key acquisitions and filling out some gaps in their offerings. In my regular update for Datamation.com, I review these and other developments.

 

Three tools to make an impact with your presentations

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As a professional speaker, I spend a lot of time polishing my presentations to keep them up to date and making more of an impact. Of course, the standard is Microsoft PowerPoint but over the years I have found three particular tools worthy add-ons to use. Let me share with you how each of these three can benefit your own presentations.

When I first started speaking many years ago, my slide decks were 100% text and boring as could be. They were more like speaking notes or an outline than something that should be shown to any audiences. After getting help from other speaking friends, I realized that I needed to completely rethink what I was doing. Now I start with the words but take things a step further and present a series of images and ideas, screen captures and other visual aids. You need the outline of your talk settled first so you can complement what you are saying with the right graphical images.

The easiest way to do this is to use a series of stock images from CrystalGraphics called PowerPlugs. For $100 subscription, you can download an unlimited number of royalty-free images from them. Your subscription lasts for an entire year, and if you need more than just a few images, it really pays to sign up for a subscription. They have a great search engine, and the site is very easy to use. Once you select your images and enter your subscription code, you get an email with links to download each image. In a matter of minutes your presentations can look very snazzy.

Once you are finished with your presentation, you want to share it with your audience. Some speakers don’t like to do this, claiming it is their property and work product. I find that the more that I share and give away for free, the more likely that I am going to get hired for my next speaking gig. And I also like to tell my audiences when I begin my presentation that they don’t need to be concerned with taking lots of notes and can just download the presentation from the Internet themselves.

There are a number of ways to share your presentation, including Google Docs. Google is great when you have two or three presenters that want to work together on the same slide deck. A better choice for general sharing is Slideshare.net. It is easy to set up a free account and within a few minutes you can upload your presentation. Slideshare also has add-ons that make it easy to publish your slides to your LinkedIn and Facebook accounts too, so that every time you upload a new deck it goes out to your Facebook Wall and main LinkedIn summary page. You can set restrictions on each presentation to just be viewed or also to be downloaded, to make them private for particular people instead of for the general public. You have an unlimited number of uploads for the free account. Slideshare has a paid Pro service where you can track and respond to leads of people who have viewed your work, look at other analytics, and remove ads from your account starting at $19 a month.

The third tool isn’t for PowerPoint, but is a new way to offer your presentations using an online service from Prezi.com. You can upload pictures or PDFs, type in text, and create a dizzy animated tour around a single canvas or surface that can be fun to view. I haven’t developed any presentations yet using this service but having seen a few live. It is worth considering, particularly for webinars where you want to keep your audience engaged and may not want to use all images for your presentation. A good example of what you can do with this service can be found in this presentation talking about teaching math to high school students.

The downside is that you need a separate tool to present offline. Like Slideshare, the basic Prezi account is free for up to 100MB of storage space. If you need more storage, want to work or present offline, or add privacy controls, you will need to sign up with one of the paid accounts starting at $60 a year.

Good luck with improving your presentations, and feel free to share your own tools here.

Inside the Koobface crime botnet

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Nart Villeneuve, who has written some excellent security reports in the past, takes us on a tour of Koobface, the botnet that continues to invade various social network in this report.

The author has managed to dissect the twisted pieces of this network to show that in the past year the villains have made off with more than $2 million using pay-per-click schemes that entice marks to download their exploit and click on phony security software ads. It is well worth the read to see how this botnet has been built, and how it continues to elude authorities and frustrate users.

8×8 Virtual Office Pro v2: SMB IP Telephony

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If you run a small business with people in different locations but don’t want your customers to know that, then consider the latest Virtual Office Pro v2 from 8×8.com. For $50 per user per month, you get a desk phone and a collection of software that formerly was only available to bigger businesses or for a lot more dough.

The phone is an IP phone, meaning that it connects to your Ethernet network and AC power. The downside is that it can take several minutes for the phone to boot up, because this is really a computer under the covers. You have a clear speaker phone with conferencing, do not disturb, and other buttons, along with a good sized LCD screen.

There are dozens of features as you would suspect in the phone, but what impressed me is the associated software that you can use on your Mac or Windows PC (it is all Web based, by the way, so really you just need a browser) to make calls, send faxes, and set up your address book. You can record calls, do video chats, have Web meetings, and let your co-workers know if you are present or on a call or free. The screenshot at left shows you what this all looks like. There is another piece of software for your Web browser that is used to set up the phone and PBX features and line configurations. One downside is that the two programs have somewhat different user interfaces.

The price includes unlimited local and long distance calling.  The product is extremely easy to setup, within minutes really. If you are looking for a managed and hosted virtual PBX service that is inexpensive but feature-rich, then consider Virtual Office.

The next PDF you open may be your last

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You know by now not to open unexpected email attachments, but what if someone that appears legit sends you a PDF? How harmful can it be? As it turns out, very. This week a harmless-looking invitation to a Nobel Prize ceremony was a nasty piece of business indeed. When saved to a hard drive and opened, it sets up a backdoor so that the bad guys can take over your PC at will, all while you think nothing is going on. What is troubling is that this isn’t new.

This PDF exploit has been around for several years, yet it seems that it doesn’t get much attention from the general public. The security community is all over it. Here is a collection of articles that appeared on SearchSecurity.com earlier this summer that tells corporate IT folks how to secure these type of files.

And here is a video screencast that shows you the exploit in its gory detail.

So why hasn’t word gotten out? Why hasn’t Adobe fixed this issue? Well, they try, but the structure of the PDF format itself makes it hard to secure. It even has the nasty habit of saving revisions, so some hackers can go in and review previous versions and redacted text.

Yes, you can password-protect your PDFs. You can also sign them, so that your recipients know that they haven’t been tampered or forged by anyone in transit. But few people use these features. And because a PDF isn’t exactly an executable file, most of us are lulled into thinking that it is harmless.

As a test, go take a look and see if the version of Acrobat Reader on your PC is anywhere close to 9.4, which is the current one. I have seen people running version 5 or 6, which are years old – obviously, the older the version, the more likely it can be exploited. Take some time now to update your software to the current version.

And the next time you receive a PDF, take a moment to consider the consequences. Or use one of any number of free alternatives on Windows, or better yet, a Mac – its PDF viewer, the built-in Preview app, can’t be exploited as easily.

Techtarget: Social networking tools emerge for the enterprise

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Social networking is everywhere, and traditional software vendors — like Novell, Cisco, IBM and Oracle — have created products that allow Twitter-like discussions, Facebook “friend” groupings and more behind the corporate firewall. In this story for Techtarget‘s SearchEnterpriseDesktop.com, I write about what some of these products can do and how they can be useful for enterprise discussions and intranets.