ITworld: How to safely access your secure desktop without your laptop

If you travel frequently, there will be times when you don’t want to lug your laptop along. Whether you find yourself at a local cybercafé or library, or have to sit down temporarily at a colleague’s computer, you need a secure and simple way to get online and get your work done. There are a few solutions that require a bit of pre-planning before you leave for your trip, but aren’t onerous, costly or complex.

You can read the article in ITworld on how to safely leave home without your laptop here.

Baseline: Virtual meetings that work

Video conferencing technologies are great for productive meeting that cuts across continents, time zones and cultures — if you pay attention to the details ahead of time. In one of my favorite pieces that I have written for Baseline this year, I describe some tips and tricks from IT managers who are extensive users of video conferencing products and how to be more effective at conducting these meetings.

You can read the entire article in Baseline here.

The golden era of geo-stalking

What do a DC drug dealer and a TV show host have in common? The ease at which they both can be tracked by GPS devices without their knowledge. Through a combination of Web technologies and cheaper, more ubiquitous devices, we are now witnessing what could be the golden era of geo-stalking. It is both thrilling and scary at the same time.

Last week, a man arrested for drug possession was set free in DC because the police put a GPS on his car to track his movements. The courts ruled that without a search warrant and without the person’s knowledge that he was being tracked, the arrest couldn’t stand.

Then there was the case of the host of the TV show Mythbusters who was tracked by virtue of information that he posted of a photo of his car. Because he took the photo in front of his house, and because the photo contained geo-tagging information, an enterprising reporter could piece together where the host lived, and bring up an actual picture of the host’s home on Google Maps.

Certainly, having a GPS inside your phone is convenient. No longer can men claim that they know where they are going when their wives can pull up a screen and give them turn-by-turn directions. Another click, and you can find the nearest drugstore or burger joint when in a strange town, or even a not-so-strange one. It amazes me how far we have come and how much and who you can track these days.

Earlier this year, I wrote about location-aware services like Foursquare and Loopt that are used for social networking purposes. But there are a couple of other services that I have been looking at since then that I want to mention.

I have been trying out an iPhone app called Life360 that can be used to connect with family members. You load it up on your phone and connect to your other family members. If you are running iOS v3, as long as you bring up the app to update your position it will let everyone else know where you are. This is its biggest weakness, because you need to bring up the app so your location can be tagged. (It will run in the background on iOS v4 phones, but everyone of your connections then needs to upgrade their phone accordingly.) It also disturbingly posts locations of known nearby sex offenders.

And if you have purchased a Garmin GPS, there is a site that works with these devices called Connect. Your GPS is set up by default to transmit your movements, and the Connect can be used to assemble a map of your regular workout routines if you jog or bike with the device on your person. The trouble is that you can quickly find others movements as well. I found several organized bike rides in my neighborhood, along with someone named Hannah’s running schedule, and lots more.

The iPhone’s default geo-privacy setting is “ask upon first use.” This means that when you run a new app for the first time, it asks you for permission when it wants to access your position. That might not be granular enough, and while it is essential for apps such as Foursquare, I am not so sanguine about publishing any of my photos with the geotags. There is a way to reset this setting, and the aptly named site icanstalku.com will show you how to do this for both iPhone and Androids.

And for the Garmin devices, you should change the privacy settings if this bothers you.

Expect a lot more geo-stalking to happen in the near future. And while it is amazing what you can do with a GPS these days, part of me longs for those bygone days when all you could do with cell phones was dial 10 digits.

Datamation: Best Smartphones for Microsoft Exchange

If your company is in the market for a new cell phone carrier and handset standard, one of the issues to consider is how well the mobile device works with Microsoft’s Exchange email servers.

Mobile Exchange support has been improving over the past several years, but there are various subtle differences that are worth considering to guide your corporate purchase plans.

There are four major mobile phone product families that offer Exchange clients: Windows Mobile, Apple iPhone, Research in Motion BlackBerry, and various Google Android suppliers. Read this story in Datamation that goes into details on which works best for particular Exchange features.

Mediablather podcast: Freelance destruction

We all know that freelance rates have fallen through the floor as
publications have shriveled and community journalism operations like
Associated Content and Demand Media have brought legions of writers
into the market working for pennies on the dollar. They produce a lot
of content, but is it any good?

Tune in to my latest MediaBlather podcast that I do with Paul Gillin.
While we are both all for media democratization, we also believe the
quality of some of the information we get today has declined
precipitously over the past few years. One example is product reviews
and analysis. While more people than ever are beating on the new iPad
and documenting their experiences these days, few of them apply the
methodological rigor and discipline of professional reviewers. It’s
easy to get opinions now, but not necessarily opinions you can trust.

Right-click here to download and listen to the podcast

Facebook/Livejournal scam

I have been getting dozens of Facebook “friend” requests over the past week. It isn’t because I have suddenly become popular, much as I might wish.

These requests all have several things in common:

  • All are from women, with a picture (usually safe for work)
  • None of these people have anyone in common with my existing FB network of friends
  • All of them have just a single post on their wall, which looks like the above picture
  • All of the posts lead to a Livejournal blog site, with a different name than the name of the owner of the FB account
  • All of these lead to a final destination site that tries to get you to sign up for a “free” iPhone which I won’t bother to list here.

Needless to say, this is an annoying scam. So beware of whom you befriend. I guess they are trawling for victims.

ITexpertVoice.com: Going Green: Emerson’s Data Center in St Louis

When it came time for Emerson Network Power to consolidate dozens of its mostly collocated data centers scattered around the globe into a new data center at their campus just north of St. Louis, the most interesting feature wasn’t even put inside the building.

As part of this consolidation Emerson, who manufactures a wide array of power conditioning and management systems, built a new 35,000 sq. ft. data center in St. Louis last year. The building sports a rooftop 100 kV (DC) solar array that occupies about a quarter of its surface area. The array provides about 15% of the power requirements for the equipment inside and is just one of several technologies that are used to show how green you can make a new data center.

 

When Emerson built the new data center, they wanted it placed on a particular spot on their campus that didn’t line up with the best orientation for the array. This resulted in an extra expense to tilt the array on a slight angle to get the maximum exposure to sunlight. Currently, it is the largest collection of solar panels in Missouri on a commercial building.

The array is just one of several green building technologies used to qualify the data center for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certification. (To put this in perspective, a new data center built last month for StreamDataCenters.com in San Antonio only received silver LEED certification.) Emerson also put the air conditioning condensers on the roof — that reduced the overall building footprint by more than 15,000 sq. ft. and eliminated more than two miles of copper tubing needed to carry the coolant. The saved space was used for plantings and grass. The roof is white to save about $800 per year in cooling costs, and all exterior lighting was shielded in such a way as to minimize light pollution to the surrounding area. Interior lights also turn off automatically when a room is not in use, and large windows that are hurricane-proof are used liberally to bring in daylight to the offices and further reduce power consumption.

The data center has a twin (without the array) in Marshalltown, Iowa that is used for disaster recovery and R&D purposes. It is also the first commercial deployment of Liebert’s NXL power conditioning system (see link). There are other Emerson technologies installed throughout the building, both for practical purposes as well as to showcase the products for visitors.

Typical of many a newer data center is to use rack-specific cooling towers so as not to have air condition the entire air volume of space inside the server area. This means that the air space immediately inside each rack is cooled, which results in big power savings. Emerson used the XD equipment from its Liebert division to pull cold air directly to the racks.

 

They also alternate hot and cold aisles for more efficient air handling. The ambient room temperature is kept at a comfortable 76 degrees, again to reduce power consumption. The raised floor has a capacity for 5,000 servers but is only running less than ten percent of that capacity at the moment, according to Keith Gislason, who oversaw the IT infrastructure project for Emerson and since has moved on to join the Avocent product management division of the company.

“We have had zero downtime during the past year, and while we have had some failures – including a lightning strike that caused one of our power buses to fail — otherwise we have been operating continuously,” he said.

Another innovative feature is that fiber optics rather than copper will handle all rack-to-rack wired connections. This boosts bandwidth and cuts down on the power that is needed to move all the data around between racks, since fiber doesn’t have as much electrical resistance as copper wiring.

Emerson is powering their Dell Windows and Sun Solaris servers at 240 volts directly from the power distribution equipment. “All the high efficiency power supplies already supported that voltage, so we didn’t have to special order any gear,” says Gislason. In older data centers, power is provided at 480 volts and then stepped down to 120 volts to operate the equipment. Dell estimates that Emerson’s configuration will save around 20 MWhr of electricity annually. Notice that there aren’t any IBM mainframes on the floor – Emerson made a conscious decision to move away from them in their new data centers, and they are in the process of migrating their enterprise resource planning applications – their last critical IT infrastructure – onto more distributed systems hardware.

Locating a data center in Missouri makes a lot of sense and cents too: the area has one of the lower power rates in the country, and combined with high telecom bandwidth (most of the cross-country Internet lines are nearby) and a moderate climate means that power needs are also reasonable. They also make use of lower-powered CPUs and like many modern data centers have extensive use of virtualization technologies to consolidate servers.

The array has been operating within its predicted parameters and they haven’t had any problems with it in the past year, according to the company. All told, Emerson claims that the data center is at least 31% more efficient than traditional data centers that they were moving out of. So going green can end up saving a lot of green too.

The generational divide of Google Docs

I gave a speech last week at a class at the business school at Washington University here in St. Louis. Before the class I ate lunch with a few of the students, who were interns in various start-ups around town. It was a very enlightening afternoon for me (and I assume for them as well). One of the things that I realized was how our generations have split on using collaboration tools such as Google Docs.

Yes, you probably already know that GenY (20-somethings) are big on texting and not voice calls, and are all over Facebook. But the same is true with Google Docs. They understand how to use it, and they use it by default to create new content that they are going to being sharing with colleagues. Most of us old farts are still emailing our Word docs around the countryside. It isn’t because we don’t know how to use Google Docs – we do. But we just are native PC users that date back to the days when it cost lots of hard cash money to connect to the InterWebs. Another part of the issue is that email is burned into our older consciousness in a way that isn’t the case for Gen Y. My 20-something children only use email to communicate with me and my generation, and only when they are forced to. But part is that they grew up using IM and social networks, so they think of their PC apps as just natural communication tools with their peers.

Here is a quick test. Turn off your wireless modem on your laptop, or unplug it from the network. How much of your work can you get done before you feel the twitch to get online? An hour or more, and you are probably closer to my age than your college years. Less than a few minutes? GenY’er.

Google Docs isn’t the only collaboration tool around, and indeed it has been recently beefed up if you haven’t had time to try it out. Last year they acquired Etherpad, which was a far simpler service for doing real-time editing that I wrote about in March 2009. The typical scenario is a group of people is in a conference room, or in two conference rooms across the country, and want to produce a document. You bring up your Web browsers, give everyone a URL, and they start jointly editing the piece. You can also run a chat session as a sidebar to collect comments on particular passages.

Now Google Docs has both real-time editing and chat that works pretty well. If you still like the simplicity of Etherpad, you can go to PiratePad, they continue to run a similar service. (No images, no real fidelity to Microsoft Word, but if you need quick and dirty text, they are the place to go.)

Ironically, Google pulled the plug on another collaborative tool, Wave. That had nothing to do with the generational gap, but an unusable product.

Running IE v6 on Windows 7 with Symantec Workspace Virtualization

If you are looking for a way to run IE v6 on Windows 7 desktops, take a look at Symantec’s Endpoint Virtualization technologies. The software includes two different modules that are free of charge, including Workspace Virtualization administration and the Browser Selector tools. They are fairly simple to setup and flexible enough to isolate individual applications from the host Windows 7 OS.
Symantec Endpoint Virtualization
http://www.symantec.com/connect/endpoint-virtualization
Entry level pricing starts at $45 per node

You can see a video screencast that I recently did for Symantec here.