Technology, FTW1

Backup your most important data...to paper?

2009-09-02T01:52:33Z

This is one of those things that is just too weird to be true, and then you realize that it's not a joke, but then it might actually have some merit and might actually be exactly what's called for.

PaperBack translates a digital file into an array of dots that you can then printout and store securely. To recover the data, you use a scanner to create a bitmap, and then the application recovers the paper into the digital file.

Crazy, you're thinking, but then you realize:

. paper, on the other hand, to claim it will last for 100 years is not even vaguely impressive. High-quality paper with good ink regularly lasts many hundreds of years even under less than optimal conditions. (via CodingHorror)

To the right is a small sample of the microdot array that is generated by the PaperBack product. I printed a copy of a 36MB PDF file, and it ended up being about 100 pages of nearly edge-to-edge microdots. Not terribly efficient, but when you think about it that long after you are dead this could be readable by a computer, it's kind of cool!

I almost forgot the most important part. You can recycle paper, so when you're done redigitizing your content, you can shred it and recycle without fearing where those nasty petrochemicals will end up in the waste stream. Cool!

And yes, it even has built in redundancy to protect against those darned coffee mug rings!

Dell makes it easy to recycle their products

2009-08-30T13:10:20Z

Ran across an article extolling the Greenly virtues of Dell, Inc. (via Greenbiz.com), talking about their reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, cutting its packaging, and increasing the number of Energy Star certified computer systems. Go Dell!

Of keen interest to me, though, is that Dell has managed to recover approximately 67,500 tons of e-waste worldwide. That seems like a lot, but how do they do that?

Turns out they've got a bunch of different programs to reclaim e-waste, including donations, recycling, and trade-in programs. Strictly in the consumer products space, so all those aging Enterprise-y iSCSI arrays that we've got are, yet again, up to us to responsibly recycle.

Good job, Dell. I'm impressed with your efforts, and that's saying a lot coming from me!

Recycle your gadgets, games, and gizmos for cash!

2009-08-20T02:13:27Z

Well, really it's not recycling, but it's re-using, which is another one of the "Big-Three" pillars of the sustainability model.

Over the weekend, Ted and I were doing a late-summer cleanup of our cluttered garage, and I came across a few boxes of DVDs, copies of which we both had so one copy (most likely the least pristine one) ended up in this box in the garage.

I have been trading in my old video-games with Amazon.com trade-in for several months, and remembered recently that they started accepting used movies (DVD, HDDVD, and BluRay) for Gift Card bucks. Uber-convenience factor: Amazon will give you a pre-paid shipping label to ship it to them. My last shipment was dropped off on Monday, and I got the credit today (Wednesday). Awesome.

And then, come to find out, there's an online service that will do just about the same thing for your gently used, previously enjoyed, still-working gadgets! I ran across this article on Greenbiz.com about a company in Boston, started by an entrepreneur and Ebay Exec pair, give you cash for your electronic clunkers (thanks to the author for that fabulous line).

"Our vision is nothing short of redefining consumption, changing the way people buy, sell and recycle electronics," Ganot, who is president and CEO of Gazelle, told me recently by phone. "We own too many products that we don't use. We always buy the latest and greatest. They end up tucked away in your attic. Some get thrown in the garbage. Or recycled improperly."

Brilliant, folks. Do you have a few gadget that are gathering dust that could use a second or third life in the developing world or in the hands of an erstwhile young person just getting started in their college lives? For those of you who are somewhat gadget obsessed, take heed!

I made a movie…with JMP!

2009-05-12T02:55:16Z

In the end, the screencasts didn't seem to fit with the overall message of the Greening: Monitor Sleep in Brainstorm, but I did put in some work into creating them so I figured I'd include them below for your please.

Animated Bubbleplot of Lab Usage by hour over a 1-month period.

Animated Bubbleplot of Lab Usage over a 1-month period.

It includes narration, too!

Ah, the wonder of JMP. Oh yeah, and I used Jing to capture the screen-contents (and my mellifluous voice).

Dell 11G servers are now the new hotness

2009-03-26T02:06:59Z

Dell released some details about their new 11th Generation PowerEdge line, and while of course it's more of the usual faster procs, more embedded hypervisors, and higher density and more power-efficiency, the thing that catches my eye is just how awesome they look.especially when you've got them all stacked together.

The new M710 Blades are looking pretty cool, too. I'd love to have 8 of these arranged in an awesome renderfarm, grid, or VMware ESX Cluster. By my count, there are 18 memory sockets, which means at least 72GB of ram for the max (assuming 4GB modules).

Still only two CPU sockets (can I get some 4-way action please?***), but with 6-cores (and likely 8-core procs on the horizon), that's still a good deal of compute-power in a 0.8U package. Here's my favorite picture from Dell's 11G Flickr photoset (because I'm a geek about blades).

And believe me when I say that I wish I could wake up every day and look at a row of DataCenter equipment that looked this HOT!

*** In the immortal words of Vala Malderan, "Not everything I say is innuendo!"

Fences makes a great Desktop

2009-02-09T22:01:01Z

I happened to be browsing www.stardock.com, looking at their latest 4X gaming offerings, and ran across a product that they claim will help me "clean up my desktop clutter".

If you're anything like me, you keep a ton of links, documents, folders, and other stuff all over your windows desktop (not unlike your physical desktop). I have been manually organizing my clutter for a long time. PDFs here, Zip Files there, To-Dos up there in the right-hand corner. My "nightmare" scenario? Having to do a presentation with my laptop on a projector with less than the native 1920x1080 resolution of my screen. All of my desktop icons get re-arranged all over the place!

I installed Stardock's Fences about three days ago, and it really has changed the way I interact with my desktop. For the better! Here's a look at my desktop with Fences, followed by my favorite feature: double-click on any empty space on your desktop and all your icons are automatically hidden.

I wish I had a picture of my desktop *before* installing Fences, but I never want to go back! It's free for personal use (at least for now). Here's a short video giving you a demo of the product.

Any other nifty desktop productivity apps you want to recommend? Shout out in the comments!

A TUPPERWARE Party – take 2

2009-02-06T03:57:23Z

A year ago, roughly, we had a major SAN outage; half of all the LUNs on our primary Fiber Channel SAN went belly-up, and services were down for approximately 36 hours. That event started us down a long path to a different storage vendor and technology.

Today, me and some die-hard SAN geeks, met and said goodbye to the disk subsystem we've affectionately known as TUPPERWARE (in all-caps, 'cause that's how we identify systems, ya dig?). And yes, at one point we had a ZIPLOC, a HEFTY, and a RUBBERMAID. And PYREX is still humming along in the new DataCenter.

Yes, we had a TUPPERWARE Party. Check below for the festivities! First up, the storage scene before and after. Our power and cooling requirements just got a heckuva lot lighter in that DataCenter! Woohoo!

UPDATE: I accidentally deleted my blog directory on GUTENBERG and had to re-create this post. Sorry for the redundancy! I'm furiously adding the Backup Client to the server now!

More photos after the break.

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Coincidence? I don't think so.

2009-01-27T13:31:52Z

Had this strange conversation over IM this morning. It's like Kurt and I were sharing a brain or something!

Oh yeah, and we're *still* running Live Communications Server 2005. Upgrades coming soon!

BlackBerries are a Racket: iPhones rule.

2009-01-21T01:29:01Z

First off, I thought this day would never happen:

| BlackBerry Messaging Agent bes-blackberry Agent 1 (Application Event Log on BES) | 01/20/2009 20:14:17 (*********) -> [AUDIT] jcruz@wharton.upenn.edu - User activated on the BES

That's one of the automated messages we get when a user successfully connects to our BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Yes, true believers, I've switched from a vaunted Windows Mobile phone to a BlackBerry.

Mostly because my AT&T Tilt is dying, and an 8820 became available recently, but also because we need some in-house support expertise on the BlackBerry itself.

Which leads me to the subject of this post.

BlackBerry and their vaunted Enterprise Redirection is not worth the money. Here's my tally (assuming we're buying a phone for a new account)

BlackBerry Enterprise License: $100
BlackBerry Enterprise Redirection Plan: $45/month (unlimited), $39.99/month (4MB.yeah.*4*MB)
BlackBerry Bold: $299

Look at the below for an iPhone:

Exchange Active Sync License: Free/included
iPhone Data Plan: $45/month (unlimited for Enterprise)
iPhone 8GB: $199

And for a new HTC Fuze:

Exchange Active Sync license: Free/included
MS DirectPush Data Plan: $29.99/month (unlimited)
HTC Fuze: $299

Out of the gate, the iPhone costs us less, and even more insidiously, the data plan costs us less per month. So my question to everyone is:

Why are we still buying BlackBerries?

Granted, you know, we're *not*, because we're trying to cut spending, but think about how much money we could be saving if all 200+ BlackBerry users we have had started with iPhones to begin with?

Do I hear a call to switching to the iPhone? Even switching to Windows Mobile phones (the HTC Fuze being the current example) would save us some bucks!

Don't even get me started on the amount of staff time *wasted* because the various carriers out there don't have a clue about how to add BlackBerry Enterprise Redirection to the phone's plan. It took me 55 minutes to do that tonight, and I know exactly what I need and what to ask for!

As you were, true believers. I'm saving up for an iPhone.

UPDATE: So it turns out that the Enterprise plan for the iPhone, the one that lets you connect to Exchange, is actually $45/month, not $30/month. Soooo, looks like this whole post is a wash!!!

UPDATE2: According to peeps in the know (and an actual iPhone user on our Exchange servers) only the $30/month plan is necessary. Take that, BlackBerry! iPhonez still rulexz!

Online Scanning for free

2009-01-13T15:32:46Z

I was tooling around with my Brother's home computer over the holidays, and noticed that there may have been a good bit of malware installed (thank you BearShare!).

I was about to run a scan using Symantec, then my other brother piped up and said:

Why don't you use Windows OneCare? It's online and free!

I was confused, befuddled, and intrigued! There's a free scanning tool from Microsoft? And my little bro' knew about it and I didn't? Something isn't right with the world.

Turns out it's quite useful and pretty effective; check it out:

http://onecare.live.com/site/en-US/default.htm

Mike’s first post!

2008-12-15T22:18:51Z

After years of resisting, saying something about cultural differences or some such nonsense, Mike Adelman has posted his first blog post.

Not too shabby; read more about how we're saving the school some dinero by adjusting the temperature in our DataCenters.

Temperature Control in the Data Centers

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Magic Packets to Save the Planet

2008-07-30T21:41:41Z

Most modern computers with a wired network adapter in them can accept a Wake-on-LAN signal which will power up the computer if it is off, asleep, or hibernated. It's a combination of the NIC's MAC address (which is a low-level hardware address, which is unique across all network adapters out there), and some other voodoo, combined into an Ethernet frame commonly known as a "Magic Packet".

I thought, hey, this would be a great thing to help you shave off even more of the electricity footprint of your always-on computers. I know a lot of us might like to keep our desktops powered on, just in case we need access to them remotely.

So how about this?

You put your computer to sleep when you leave for the day. Sleep modes routinely use <10W of power relative to the 100+W when it's fully powered on.
Go to a site like www.remotewakeup.com, enter your IP address and MAC Address, send the Magic Packet to your computer to take it out of sleep mode (or power it on).
Do the work you needed to do remotely
Put the computer back to sleep

Say your computer used 100W when fully on and 10W when asleep. If your computer is on 24x7, that's 16.8kWh per week. If your computer is only on during business hours and asleep the rest of the time, that's 5.7kWh per week, a savings of 66%! If you shut your computer off at night, you can bump that savings up to 75%.

Congratulations; you just saved the planet.

Will you try to configure Wake-On-LAN and invoke the Magic Packet? Hit the comments with your experience!

Guerilla Networking

2008-07-28T22:48:11Z

So what do you do when you're Major Nelson, the voice of the Xbox Live community, and you're covering one of the largest media events for the Electronic Entertainment Industry, and you're stuck with a paltry uplink from your hotel to the internet, and you've got tons of video and content that you've got to push through that pipe up to the Xbox Live Mothership?

How do you go from piddling to 5.5/4.8Mb Up/Down in less than 12 hours?

You call this dude, Mark (links below are from the Original MajorNelson blog post).

From the 1 Gbps feed on the rooftop of an apartment building across the freeway we used a custom 2.4 Ghz mesh radio to get from one part of the roof to another. One of these devices also acted as the NAT router/firewall. From the corner of the apartment building roof to you we used Ligowave 5 Ghz point to point radios that are built into the panel antennas. All of the traffic from the Hotel to the 1 Gbps feed was encrypted by using a VPN which the radios do naturally. The apartment roof is part of a 1 Gbps ring around downtown Los Angeles using Freespace optics (ie lasers) which terminates in a building which houses the largest carrier hotel/interconnect point in Southern California. Their normal use is to provide internet and VOIP to tenants in the apartment buildings.

Now that's what I call Guerilla Networking! Why not recruit this guy to configure the networking for "that really big MBA simulational thingie"?

Awesome.

Microdots, in house, and wowing the masses***

2008-06-25T02:20:16Z

Okay, so like a blogzillion years ago, I posted about these neat little "smart pen" devices from a company called Livescribe. I'm happy to report that my Livescribe Pulse Pen arrived last week and I put it through its paces at a few sit-downers today.

First thing I noticed, very little documentation provided in-box. I thought that was peculiar considering that it was such a big shift in the way I thought about a lowly pen. Then I realized, the documentation, itself, was populated with microdots, and you were "forced" to start using the Pen right away.

Tap here, write there, and the tutorial was a snap (including, smartly, a right-hand/left-hand orientation setup option as step 1).

I realized this as I write, no software to install to start using it. Brilliant! Since the focus is on the pen/paper relationship, and the pen/computer relationship is just adding functionality/value, why start the process with a software install?

The desktop software, though, did harbor the "Most Impressive Moment". Install the Livescribe Desktop software (downloadable from their website; no CDs to press ) and synchronizing my Pulse Pen to the LiveScribe library. Guess what? I was immediately able to search my handwritten notes. Killer feature.

If anyone's interested, stop by my desk and I'll do a quick demo for you; if there's enough interest, maybe we can do a presentation.

Do I smell Future Friday? Who wants to get in touch with the LiveScribe CEO? I'm telling you, put this in the hands of the incoming class of MBAs and get the Faculty to annotate their lectures using this thing and we've got teaching gold!

*** Masses = 4 people in Core Systems

Words as art?

2008-06-24T12:57:01Z

I know how they say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what about a thousand words (well, actually 250) as a picture?

Here's a couple of pictures of previous articles about Link Aggregation and Dell Blade unboxing, as rendered by wordle.net. Pretty cool, huh?

wordle.net via LifeHacker.