Todd Kwon-Do
Just in the nick....
I got into technology just in time. When I was first getting interested in technology, the Internet wasn’t anything more than a few bulletin boards that were connected together by modems. IBM had just launched their “Personal Computer” line, the really big hard drives were 10mb (we all thought we would never fill them), and the modem hanging off the back of my Commodore 64 computer was 300 baud (about 50,000x slower than my current connection – literally). In those days, DOS was still king and Microsoft had just launched Windows 2.1.
Since then, the pace of change has been staggering. I remember excitedly telling my parents that I could send an “electronic mail message” from our home in VT to a friend in CA just as fast as the U.S. Post Office could. It took about five days from the time I sent the message for it to get where it was going. Its travel plan involved all of the various computers it touched to dial each other nightly and transmit their batch of messages to their closest neighbor. Eventually, the message would get where it was going.
Today, we don’t measure the delivery time of email in days, hours, minutes, or even seconds; we measure it in milliseconds. In fact, as IT guys, we get irritated if we can’t send data around the entire planet in less than 150ms.
Yeah, I got into it in time to see the technology equivalent of the Renaissance. I have seen dialup give way to ISDN, which lost to DSL, which was later replaced by T1’s, which are now slow compared to Fiber Optic Cable connections. I have seen Palm Pilots lose to tablets which were defeated by Treos which are on their way out in favor of newer Blackberrys and iPhones. Everyone today has email, and most have some sort of personal networking page like Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn. We have been through countless iterations of Windows and mountains of software to make our lives “easier”.
It has all happened so fast. The funny thing is that most of us have now become acclimated to the pace of change. We are at a point where the wonder of innovation is lost to the expectation of development. A little more than a year ago, Mercedes unveiled a car that could parallel park itself! It’s a car… that drives itself! As a community we should have been falling out of our chairs at an idea like that. Conversely it was taken in stride as a normal occurrence, just like the first commercial space flight and the ability to get absolutely anything on the planet delivered to our door by Amazon.com.
And why should we get excited? We expect nothing less. For example, many of us receive personalized driving directions from a device the size of a pack of cards that gets information beamed to it from billion dollar satellites in outer space. What do we use this unbelievable power for? Obviously, we use it to find the nearest Starbucks!
I guess my point is that it’s a good idea, now and then, to stop and consider where we are, where we have come from, and where we might be going. I did this a week ago in Las Vegas at a conference about virtualization technology. At the conference I saw some of the most amazing tools for businesses. I spent a couple of days walking the show floor, and every vendor there was sporting some new and unbelievable innovation. After three days it was obvious to me that the Renaissance is nowhere near to being over.
As I sat on the plane on the way home, I watched the people around me type on their laptops, play games on their cell phones, and watch their portable DVD players. I wondered how long it would be before the planes are all Internet ready and we can continue to work or stay connected with loved ones while we travel. I also wondered what the personal electronics will look like just 10 years from now.
In the end, there is an awful lot to keep up with. For business owners, it has become that much more important that we surround ourselves with good advisors. The benefit of a good consultancy is the breadth of experience that they bring to the table, and the exposure that they have to new solutions. A good consultancy can clarify options, simplify deployments, and make it dramatically easier to “leverage the best and avoid the rest”.
Todd Kwon-Do
How do I love thee?
At this time tomorrow, I should be underwater in Fort
Lauderdale exploring the wreck of the Captain Dan. The "Dan" was a 175' Coast Guard buoy tender that had several owners before it was sunk as part of Florida's artificial reef program. She rests in 110' of water... a significant depth to be sure. Recreational Advanced Open Water certifications prepare divers for maximum depths of 120', however it's rare for most people to venture beyond about 70'.
The "Dan" is the first of about eight dives that we will do in the next two days. For people that don't scuba dive the fears always involve sharks, or running out of air. However, the fact is that the real dangers in diving all revolve around things you can't see until it's too late; nitrogen narcosis, air embolism (the "bends"), and oxygen toxicity are just a few of the dangers you have to be careful to avoid.
The reason that a lot of people don't go beyond 70' is that your body absorbs lots of nitrogen under pressure and the "bends" become a real possibility. So, you have to limit the amount of time that you spend at deeper depths. For lots of people, the risk associated with "going deep" for 3-7 minutes of time to explore doesn't make it worth the trip.
One way to extend your bottom time, and be safer when diving, is to use mixed gasses. Instead of breathing normal compressed air like most divers (which contains 21% oxygen), you can use a higher percentage of oxygen or even a complex gas called
tri-mix. This kind of technical diving can extend your range, but it comes with it's own risks.
When we descend on the Dan tomorrow, my wife and I will be breathing a
Nitrox mix which contains a higher percentage of oxygen than normal air. It makes us less susceptible to the "bends". The trade off is that if we calculate the mix wrong, fail to properly monitor our dive times, or don't keep track of the volume of mix that we breath, the oxygen in our systems can actually become toxic and kill us (wierd huh?).
Of course there are lots of things that will work to keep us safe. There is the fact that we are both trained in this type of diving, we will also be monitoring each other (as well as ourselves) during the dive, and then there is also our most important tool... our computers.
We have little waterproof computers that we dive with that are attached to our air systems and ourselves. These little guys (when properly programmed) will monitor how many breaths we take, our depth, the pressure in our tanks, and the percent of
Nitrox mix we are using. They will track our depth every .5 seconds and will recalculate our oxygen exposure, nitrogen absorption, and other factors, and then they will use that information to keep us safe. They will tell us when and how to surface so that we have appropriate "decompression" times at specific depths that they will calculate on the fly.
Basically, we need these computers to stay alive.
So, how much do I trust my little computer? Not that much!
I carry three of them.
As long as they are all telling me the same thing, I know I am OK. I have been laughed at by other divers on the boat for having more than one with me, but I feel good knowing that I am not betting my life on a single piece of equipment, or a single manufacturer.
The bottom line is that I believe in redundancy, which is a lesson that NASA learned this week when the computers on their space station got a virus.... AGAIN!
NASA announced this week that the computers on the space station had
spyware on them that was designed to collect account information and transmit it back to a server on the Internet. They also announced that this was not the first time they have had this problem up there.
Down here on Earth, our engineering team is dealing with the same problem every day at our client's offices by applying what I have learned while diving. We count on several layers of virus protection to keep us safe from the bad things on the Internet. That redundancy helps me and my client's sleep well.
A good virus strategy has at least four layers. Information is scanned at the SPAM filter, on the mail server itself, at the border of the network by the firewall, and finally at the workstations and servers. Like my dive computers, we try and use different manufacturers at each level so that we get the benefit of different "points of view" when scanning for viruses. Again, redundancy saves the day!
To all of you I say that you should take a lesson from my dive computers, or learn from
NASA's mistake, so that you don't have to suffer the humiliation of calling your computer guys to come clean a virus out of your network.
Remember, you have been warned! :)
Ok... I am off to check over my gear and prepare for tomorrow's festivities!
Todd Kwon-Do
I might end up hitting this boat....
My good friend Maggie has a saying, “Every once in a while, you have to chew through the leash.”
What she means is that now and again it’s a good thing to break the ties that bind you in your everyday life. Don’t answer the cell, don’t check your email, and don’t call in for your voicemail. That can be hard for me, and it takes a conscious effort on my part.
It’s almost midnight. I am sitting on the deck of my boat in Newport, RI watching the changing tides and winds push us VERY close to the boat that was previously in front of us. Since I can’t sleep anyway, I have been sitting here thinking about how it is that I got leashed in the first place.
I think it all started with a pager. Early in the life of my business I resisted getting a pager and being “on call”. But the life of a technology consultant isn’t forgiving in that way, so ultimately I relented. I remember thinking that having a pager was like being chained to the office. The only other person employed by my fledgling company shared my concern.
Later on, we had the opportunity to get remote access in the form of a Citrix server. I remember resisting that too, for the same reason. Likewise, I have had concerns with the VPN’s, terminal servers, IP phones, PDA’s and all the other gadgets that have been designed to make my life “easier”. Each one of these little wonders is designed to be more efficient at chaining me to my office.
...Or is it?
That first pager was an eye opener for my partner and me. While we thought it was a leash, it turned out to be a pair of wings. What I mean is that once we had it, we didn’t have to constantly check our voicemails. We didn’t have to be paranoid about being in the office either. If someone had a problem, they would page us!
Oddly enough, many of the other “leashes” were implemented with similar results. Our various remote access solutions allowed us to work from home and avoid having to go to the office to deal with an emergency. Now, instead of missing a meal with family, all we had was a slight interruption. So, as time went on, we became early adopters of each new “time saver” or “life enhancer”.
Pretty soon, we had so many of these “conveniences” that they had become leashes again.
I think this is how most people today live. I know that my Father can’t go 12 hours without checking his email, and my best friend has to have his phone with him at all times so that he can respond to his office messages immediately. It may be true that these technologies free us from having to be “at the office”. But if that is the case, then it is equally true that these technologies grey the line between our business and personal lives.
So, is that a good thing? I don’t know. In the end, I suppose it all comes down to setting boundaries, showing good common sense, and establishing priorities. We have to make time for ourselves.
So Todd’s tech advice for this week (mostly because I am on vacation), is that you draw a line in the sand now and again and press whatever power buttons you can. Shut it all down. Turn it off. Cut the power.
Chew through the leash!
...That being said, please ignore the irony of the fact that while on vacation, and on my boat, I am using a laptop to post to my company’s blog :) I didn’t check my email though!
[looking up from the laptop] - Wow. This boat is getting really close....
Todd Kwon-Do
A Pear-fect Plan
In April of this year I moved to a more rural setting. I grew up in Vermont so this was a welcome return to familiar things. However, there are some differences between Vermont and my new surroundings. Most notably, there are a lot of fruit trees on the property.
I am a computer guy.
I have never been a cultivator of food products.
When I moved here I wasn’t really expecting that these fruit trees would produce anything more than nice flowers. However, this is one of my pear trees:
As you can see, it is producing fruit! It’s exciting, but it’s also creating questions and quandaries. When do I pick this fruit? How do I ripen it? Is there anything I need to do for the tree so it doesn’t die? Also, I have noticed something else… look at these two pears:
The two pears came from different trees that are only about 15’ apart. The two trees appear to be about the same age and presumably the two trees get the same amount of sunlight, rain, and nutrients from the ground. So, why are the pears on one of the trees so much larger?
The trees are doing their jobs, so I decided to do mine. I got online and started learning about pears. You know what I found out? The difference between the two trees lies in the way they were cultivated in the early part of their lives.
It turns out that the best way to get bigger fruit from a pear tree is to pluck half the fruit off of the tree when it first starts to produce. Very simply, the tree has limited resources for growing fruit. Fewer pears means that each one gets more of those resources… hence, bigger, better fruit. Each successive season, you leave a few more pears on the tree until you have the tree producing at full capacity.
It all comes down to quality over quantity, and it occurs to me that as business professionals we can all learn from this.
I once had a new customer who came to us because the deployment of their new business management software was a total failure from management’s point of view. It was an expensive product to be sure, and it had every bell and whistle that the business could ever need. To be fair, the software was working… but the business hadn’t really seen any additional productivity or benefit from having it.
In the end, it seemed to me that the deployment flopped because they failed to thin the fruit when they first installed the software. New software almost always means a change to the way that the staff works. Rolling out the new workflow and software with 10,000 features left the employees in a tailspin. Everyone became a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. The company would have been far better off if they had rolled out a few features that provided the most benefit, and turned everything else off.
In my experience, users tend to respond better to this. It is so much easier to master a few new features, and once people see how much easier their job has become, they start to ask management and IT for more. That is how you know when the tree is ready to produce more fruit.
So, the bottom line is this: in business technology as in nature, you need to be a little patient. Trying to do too much too soon only leads to mediocre results.
Now, does anyone have any idea what to do with 150 pears?
Todd Kwon-Do
The K.I.S.S. of death…
Computer guys are a funny lot. Where most of the rest of the world places a high value on a simple and elegant solution, computer people tend to go the other way; they like their world complicated. Computer “geeks” get off on high-tech, super complicated equipment. They want to see racks full of blinking lights and interconnected cables. The bigger and more complicated something is, the better they like it.
So, it should be no surprise that most computer consultants and internal technical staff tend to focus their thoughts on the complicated problems. It’s fun to be a hero and figure out a difficult problem before anyone else does. Unfortunately, that often leaves the easiest problems unresolved. In fact, it is a rare occasion that an IT person will sit down and put some serious thought to how to handle something like a virus attack, or a deleted hard drive. These problems seem run of the mill and hardly worth the time of someone that just de-jiggered the central matrix oscillator (IT people also like to make things sound complicated).
I guess my point is this, there is a reason that people say, “the devil is in the details”. I have been spending a fair amount of time recently writing disaster recovery plans. What I have noticed is that everyone wants to know what the plan is for a fire, terrorist attack, or some other major issue. What I know for an absolute fact is that 90% of the “emergencies” our clients have had over the last 10 years have been a product of some mundane, every day issue.
Here are some questions to ponder:
1) If you think you have a virus on your computer, what are the right steps to take to deal with it?
2) If you accidentally delete important files on your computer, what is the very first thing you should do?
3) What should you do for your computer network if the power in your building goes out?
Most people think they know the answer to these questions. Unfortunately, unless some thought has been given to educating the users of the network, everyone's answer could be a little different. For example, some people would call their IT guys if they had a virus. Another person might click SHUTDOWN, and still others might try running a virus scan. On the surface, those all seem like decent ideas, but in the end none of those solutions deals with the immediate risk to the company.
In case you were wondering, the number one concern if you have a virus is that it will infect other systems in the network. The priority has to be containment; you don't want the virus to spread past your PC. Trying to shut down, scan the system, or waiting for IT, gives the virus time to execute code that can damage the network. So, if you think you have a virus, the first step is to disconnect your network cable. Once that is done, the virus is contained and your IT guys have the time to decide how best to handle the situation.
So, my advice is simple. If you are a business owner or an IT manager, I suggest that you make a cheat sheet with the 3-5 steps that you want your employees to take for the following:
Distribute the list, and answer any questions that the users have. If you are an employee, ask your boss or IT guy how you are supposed to handle stuff like this.
As a business owner, I would also be certain that your IT people or your consultants have some documented procedures for issues like:
With just a little planning and education of your users it is possible to prevent small problems from forcing you to break out the disaster recovery plan. Not sure what the right procedure is for some of these? I would suggest that you ask your IT consultants, I am sure they can give you a hand!
Todd Kwon-Do
Virtually Indispensable
Ten years ago this October, Envision Technology Advisors was incorporated. Our first client hired us to replace an aging Novell network that was crashing multiple times each day. Their Internet access was a 56k (fast at the time) dialup connection that was shared among the 20 users with a little piece of equipment called a “webramp”. Their “email server” was running on an old laptop and it checked for new email twice a day.
I clearly remember replacing that network and how great it was to add a second dialup to their internet access. Everyone marveled at the speed that two dialups delivered! It was so fast that we changed the mail server to check four times a day and patted ourselves on the back as our new Windows NT 4.0 server ran the network.
Technology has changed a lot since then. Windows NT hasn’t been supported for years now, and I would bet that there are people that will read this who have never used a dialup Internet connection. The one constant though is the aggravation that I feel after I roll out some new technology in one place and then have to work in other networks that don’t have it yet.
The reality is that not everyone can afford to be on the leading edge. However, as a consultant, it sucks to know what the available technologies are capable of and to not have those resources at your disposal. If you can imagine how it would feel to watch a client ride to work on a donkey everyday when lots of your other customers just bought BMW’s then you can start to catch my meaning.
Today the BMW is
virtalization and
centralized storage, and the donkey is pretty much everything else. With a well designed virtualization and storage platform, a computer network can deliver high availability that was previously reserved for fortune 500 companies.
Just last night, one of our engineers started a vendor mandated upgrade on a database application for a customer that has this technology in-place. The upgrade crashed the server. In a conventional network, we would have had to work all night to put that back together. However, for this client, we clicked the mouse about 5 times and the entire server was recovered to the state it was in moments before we had started the upgrade. It was as if nothing ever happened. There was no downtime, and our engineers were on their way home 15 minutes later.
Aside from the disaster recovery and uptime benefits, virtualization also reduces long-term IT costs. In fact, if the customer from last night didn’t have this technology in-place there would have been a huge bill for the all-nighter we would have had to pull to recover their systems. In that one moment, the storage platform saved that company about $1,500 in operational expenses. It only has to do that a handful of times for it to pay for itself.
As if all of that wasn’t enough, these technologies are a great way to jump on the “Green” bandwagon. The point of this technology is to do more with less. A virtualized environment typically employs significantly fewer servers. This means less waste, less electricity, and less heat generation which means less air conditioning. All the way around, these technologies reduce your carbon footprint and make mother earth smile!
Is it hard to get started with Virtualization? NO! All you need is a desire to save money, have better uptime, and to do the right thing for the planet. That is why Envision is focused on these technologies. It’s a great feeling to sell something that is such an easy win for everyone involved.
So why do some companies try to ride that donkey until it drops dead? The most likely reason is that no-one has ever told them not to. According to VMWare, 96% of small businesses run on conventional computing technology and have not yet switched to virtualization. Their IT people may fear change, or it could be that their IT company isn’t trained in these technologies so they are keeping their clients in the dark.
Whatever the reason, my advice is that you should ask your IT people or your consultants about virtualization. If you don’t know what questions to ask, feel free to email me at
Todd@envisionsuccess.net or call at
401-272-6688 and ask for Todd Knapp. Any of our engineers will be happy to spend some time talking to you about how you can leverage these solutions to streamline your business and at the same time give the planet a helping hand.
I guess I should get back to work now. I am very busy watching a server in its fourth hour of a data transfer. This would have taken about 3-5 minutes if the client had centralized storage. [sigh]
Todd Kwon-Do
He should have carried a pack of Mentos....
The best thing about Mentos (according to the commercials) is that you can get away with anything you want if you have a pack of them in your pocket. Steal a taxi, run through a stranger’s living room to catch a bus, or use wet paint on a bench to pinstripe your suit after accidentally sitting on it! All you have to do is flash that pack of Mentos, give a toothy grin, and it all seems to work out.
Unfortunately, Larry Mendte didn't know that. He wasn't carrying Mentos this past Monday when he was charged with hacking into Alycia Lane's email accounts 537 times over the last two years.
It seems that Larry, as a product of obsession or just plain avarice, got into the habit of reading, recording, and leaking to the press, the embarrassing details of Alycia's life. He wanted to get ahead, and he wanted her to fall behind. Well, it worked... sort of. She did fall behind. In fact, she was fired from her job at the TV station after Mendte leaked sensitive (embarrassing) information about a pending legal case she had. Unfortunately, it backfired when the police seized his computer in May after discovering that it had been repeatedly used to access her accounts.
Everyone knows that accessing another user’s account is illegal. However, what caught my attention is that the authorities are focusing on the fact that he intercepted communications between Alycia and her lawyer. As a result, they are arguing that he violated privileged communications. The communications are only privileged if Alycia had a reasonable expectation of privacy when she sent her email.
The bottom line is that when it comes to email, privacy is subject to where you live. Some states claim that you have an expectation of privacy, and still others say that you don’t.
There have been plenty of law suits against companies that let people go after monitoring inappropriate email use. Of course, the business owner feels like corporate email accounts belong to them and that if they own the mail server, they own what it contains as well. Most of those business owners lost their case. As it turns out, you have to make it clear to your employees that you reserve the right to monitor them if you want to be able to smack them over the head with their own email.
Regardless of what the law says, if you know anything at all about the technology behind email, then you know there is no expectation of privacy. Here is some food for thought;
Email messages sometimes pass through a half dozen servers before arriving at their destinations. A copy is often left on each server the message touches. That server’s administrator (a complete stranger to you) can read that message any time he/she wants. In that way, sending an email across the internet is a lot like passing a note in class and hoping no one will read it, even though everyone that passes it along will have the opportunity.
Almost all email that is sent today passes through at least one or two spam filters. The filter’s job is to read the email! Then, if the message looks odd it will flag it. Most administrators review the messages that got flagged in the course of tuning their filters.
Most email is not encrypted. They travel across the internet in plain text where anyone and their brother can read them if they like. In Fact, there are “traps” online that collect random samples of email in transit to better update spam filters. Those samples are reviewed by network administrators in the name of creating better spam prevention products.
There are dozens of viruses and spywares that will collect and re-transmit email on any infected computer. Even if the recipient of your email is clean when you send the message, a future infection could easily result in the dissemination of your communication to hundreds, thousands, or millions of users. How do you think all that spam got out there in the first place?
I could go on for days, but I think you get my point. There is a lesson to be learned here. You do have an expectation of privacy when you are standing in a room with your lawyer and the door is closed, the shades are drawn, and you look around and don’t see anyone but your lawyer, his books, and maybe his 13 year old basset hound passed out on the floor.
However regardless of how this case goes, or how the law in your state reads, my feeling is that, when it comes to email, an “expectation” of privacy is a daydream. The fact is that your plain text email IS NOT private. Once you click send, you are leaving copies of it everywhere and setting yourself up to have someone read your message. Most of the time this will be harmless, but you should be prepared for the possibility that it might not be.
If you don’t email information that you wouldn’t want public then you have nothing to fear. For example, I sometimes will email a username to someone… but I never send the password. If I have to send something to my attorney, I encrypt the data BEFORE I attach it to an email. Do I email him the password for the file? NO! I use the phone, give him the password verbally, and take the opportunity to practice the long lost art of interpersonal communication.
Email is a great tool. It has revolutionized our lives. Unfortunately, it is also deceptively easy. If you are an employee, I would advise you to be more careful about how you use your email. Don’t expect that big brother isn’t watching.
If you are big brother, I advise you to inform your employees of that fact! Put it in the employee handbook so that you don’t end up emailing your attorney about being sued because you read an employees’ email……. perhaps you could email the revised email policy to your employees?
Wow. That’s it for me. I have to go now. I just got an email from a foreign finance minister. It seems that he has a large sum of unclaimed money. He needs me to to assist him by allowing him to transfer $30,000,000 to my account for which I can keep 20%.
