9 Nov

Gmail To Kick Blackberries To The Curb

Posted by Douglas in Telecommunications. Tagged: , , , , .

It looks like Google is going to end support for the Gmail mobile app on the Blackberry platform:

Beginning November 22, 2011, we will end support for the Gmail App for Blackberry(installed native app). Over this past year, we’ve focused efforts on building a great Gmail experience in the mobile browser and will continue investing in this area.

Users may continue to use the app, if installed, however it will not be supported by Google, or available for download starting November 22. BlackBerry users can continue to access Gmail through the mobile web app at http://www.gmail.com in their BlackBerry web browser.

Anyone that has the app installed on their phones now will be able to continue using it. I wonder how long it will be before a system update to the Gmail service will break these unsupported apps? If you have to wipe your Blackberry after November 22nd (and let’s face it, we’ve all had to wipe our Blackberries before) you will no longer be able to install the application.

The best bet is to go ahead and start switching over to the mobile application now. I’ve always preferred to move to a new platform on my own time. Waiting until it breaks is a recipe for disaster. You’ll likely be stuck and waiting on the IT guys to return your call.

I can’t say that I am surprised by this. At work we have been encouraging our end users to migrate away from the Blackberry platform for a few years now. Most of our smart phone folks have moved to either the Android or iPhone platforms but there are still a few that like to use their Blackberries. I wonder which app will be the next to end support?

25 Sep

My Hard Drive Is Bigger Than Yours

Posted by Douglas in Hardware. Tagged: , , , , , .

Over the last (almost) decade of working at the same company I have been amazed by the ever growing need for storage solutions. We have moved over time from a mixed Windows 95/98/ME environment to a homogeneous Windows 7 installation base. Where we were long ago running Office 97 we are now running Office 2010. During this time the file sizes produced by these software packages has increased dramatically. We are storing images of entire hard drive installations now where we used to rebuild from disc (cd-rom and floppies). Throw in redundant copies of critical information, along with the fact that no one ever deletes anything, and our storage requirements were growing at an alarming rate. Eventually I needed to make a change.

When I decided that it was time to take action I didn’t have any single device that could hold all of our short and long term storage needs. I also didn’t have any portable devices that could move this data around without breaking it up into small pieces first. This was becoming quite a problem. I needed to find a solid network storage device that was robust, redundant, easy to implement and relatively affordable.

One of the barriers to working in a smaller shop is always budget. There was a long list of storage devices that we simply couldn’t afford. Since I had already been using two of the original Drobo (Data Robotics) devices I decided to see what higher end options were available. I was initially impressed by the DroboElite. This device offered many of the features that we were looking for in a storage device. It was compatible with our virtual servers as well as offering a great deal of network storage. With the dual NIC (network interface card) configuration I could easily dual purpose the unit. I decided to pull the trigger. Once the new device arrived I quickly took it out of the box and started working with it. I made a few bad assumptions during the initial setup due to my previous experience with the original Drobo devices. The DroboElite is almost nothing like its predecessors. Here are a few key lessons learned:

  • You have to connect the DroboElite directly to your computer using the USB cable for the initial setup.
  • Once you have the desired volumes set up you can then access it via the Drobo Dashboard over the local area network.
  • You cannot format the volumes while locally connected. You have to format the volumes over the network after the initial setup is complete.
  • This device doesn’t work in Linux. Period full stop. I lost a day and half trying to get it to work. You have been warned.
  • The only really good way to set up these larger volumes is to format them in NTFS. EXT3/4 won’t work. You have been warned (again).
  • Only ONE computer on your network can access each volume at one time. This one took me some time to work out.
  • You really should enable a CHAP password on any volume exposed to your local area network. One computer can lock out the volume so that no one else can access it. You might not know which computer that is. You might spend days trying to figure out how to regain access to your data before you finally think to enable a CHAP password. You have been warned (one last time).
Now that we have the ground work laid out let’s take a look at the setup:

All drives are recognized and working!

At this point I have initialized the Drobo, installed all eight hard drives (2 TB, 7200 RPM) and moved it to the local area network (LAN). The primary network interface card (NIC) has been configured with a static IP address and is accessible from all the devices on my network.

Now we need to set up the individual volumes:

Volume Setup Screen

We are sharing this storage device between our regular LAN and a virtual storage network. Before this device arrived I was running virtual machines locally on their physical hosts. This was risky since a hardware failure could potentially take down multiple virtual servers. With the arrival of the new Drobo I will finally be able to run the virtual machines on the storage device. If a physical host goes down I can quickly recover by moving the virtual machine to another physical host and starting it up again. The public facing recovery time shrinks from hours to minutes.

In the example above I have set up an 8 GB NTFS volume. This will be shared on the LAN for storage. The 2 GB volumes will be used on a separate storage network as shared storage for the physical virtual servers. All of the virtual machines will be migrated to the storage network ranked by importance.

Now that the volumes are set up it’s time to start copying data over to the Drobo!

Time to start copying files over!

One of the major differences between the original Drobo and the DroboElite is that only one computer can access a volume at a time. To work around this limitation I mounted the volume on our file server and used the domain permissions to control access.

Setting Up The Storage Network For Virtual Machines

To segment the virtual machine traffic from our normal LAN traffic I set up a second switch to manage the storage network. All of the physical host servers have at least dual NICs. One NIC from each server goes to the storage switch. The storage network runs over iSCSI instead of the standard TCP/IP protocol. This service is disabled by default in the physical host. To enable iSCSI click on Configuration – Storage Adapters.

Enable iSCSI Detection In VMWare

Once iSCSI has been enabled you can scan the network for your iSCSI device.

VMWare Can Now See Your iSCSI Volumes

Click on the Storage link to format the volumes with vmfs3.

All volumes are formatted and ready to go!

Click on the Networking link to set up the network. In the following example we are running one physical network attached to our LAN and a second attached to our storage network.

I am surprised at how many virtual machines can be run over the single gigabit ethernet connection without any apparent loss of speed. I haven’t hit a limit yet where performance is materially impacted. All in all this device is very impressive. You can really push the capabilities of this storage device on a rather tight budget. Kudos to Data Robotics for producing such a robust (and affordable) network storage device! Very impressive!

21 Sep

Texting Rots Your Brain

Posted by Douglas in Reading. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , .

I recently read a very interesting article in Newsweek magazine. The author, Niall Ferguson, posits that too many people are spending their time texting and not reading. The statistics he cites are fascinating:

According to a survey carried out last year by Nielsen, Americans between the ages of 13 and 17 send and receive an average of 3,339 texts per month. Teenage girls send and receive more than 4,000.

…

Half of today’s teenagers don’t read books—except when they’re made to. According to the most recent survey by the National Endowment for the Arts, the proportion of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 who read a book not required at school or at work is now 50.7 percent, the lowest for any adult age group younger than 75, and down from 59 percent 20 years ago.

Back in 2004, when the NEA last looked at younger readers’ habits, it was already the case that fewer than one in three 13-year-olds read for pleasure every day. Especially terrifying to me as a professor is the fact that two thirds of college freshmen read for pleasure for less than an hour per week. A third of seniors don’t read for pleasure at all.

What happens when people stop reading books? Why is this important? Why should we care?

For two reasons. First, we are falling behind more-literate societies. According to the results of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s most recent Program for International Student Assessment, the gap in reading ability between the 15-year-olds in the Shanghai district of China and those in the United States is now as big as the gap between the U.S. and Serbia or Chile.

But the more important reason is that children who don’t read are cut off from the civilization of their ancestors.

Being an avid reader myself I try to encourage my own children to read (well, the one that can so far) as much as possible. I am addicted to reading personally. I try to read the Kindle edition of my local newspaper every day, Newsweek and Time magazine every week, technical and news websites during the day and as many books as I can fit in any other time. I also spend a significant amount of time monitoring my social network feeds and my extensive Google Reader habit.

The hook that caught my attention was the challenge at the end of this article:

So take a look at your bookshelves. Do you have all—better make that any—of the books on the Columbia University undergraduate core curriculum? It’s not perfect, but it’s as good a list of the canon of Western civilization as I know of. Let’s take the 11 books on the syllabus for the spring 2012 semester: (1) Virgil’s Aeneid; (2) Ovid’s Metamorphoses; (3) Saint Augustine’s Confessions; (4) Dante’s The Divine Comedy; (5) Montaigne’s Essays; (6) Shakespeare’s King Lear; (7) Cervantes’s Don Quixote; (8) Goethe’s Faust; (9) Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; (10) Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment; (11) Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

…

Order the ones you haven’t got today. (And get War and Peace, Great Expectations, and Moby-Dick while you’re at it.)

After looking at the list I saw several that I had read long ago, a few I tried and put down and a few I hadn’t had the pleasure of exploring. I’ve officially decided to take up the challenge. It may take me years to complete but I’m going to read every book listed above. I was able to download all of these classics to my Kindle in less than 20 minutes and for less than $10. That is a staggering statistic by itself. We have such quick, easy and cheap access to the great works of the Western world and instead we choose to play Angry Birds and send text messages. Man, I feel old just writing that sentence. :)

I’m taking the plunge. Why don’t you join me?

9 Sep

So It’s Been Awhile…

Posted by Douglas in General. Tagged: , , , , .

That seems like an awfully long time...

I really haven’t been updating this blog as much as I should. I promise I’ll work on it. I was working with some files on a server at work this week and ran into this rather odd time estimate. I didn’t really want to wait for almost 1500 days so I let it run overnight. :) It reminded me of how long it’s been since I have updated this blog. It’s time to start posting here again. I have several subjects in mind so keep an eye out for some rather diverse posts soon (hopefully)!

3 Jul

E-Readers Are Your Friend

Posted by Douglas in Hardware. Tagged: , , , , , , , .

Amazon.com recently released statistics that shows the explosive growth of e-book sales in the first half of this year. Considering the amount of sales that a company like Amazon makes this is simply staggering. A few interesting statistics:

Recent milestones for Kindle include:

  • Since April 1, for every 100 print books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 105 Kindle books. This includes sales of hardcover and paperback books by Amazon where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher.
  • So far in 2011, the tremendous growth of Kindle book sales, combined with the continued growth in Amazon’s print book sales, have resulted in the fastest year-over-year growth rate for Amazon’s U.S. books business, in both units and dollars, in over 10 years. This includes books in all formats, print and digital. Free books are excluded in the calculation of growth rates.
  • In the five weeks since its introduction, Kindle with Special Offers for only $114 is already the bestselling member of the Kindle family in the U.S.
  • Amazon sold more than 3x as many Kindle books so far in 2011 as it did during the same period in 2010.
  • Less than one year after introducing the UK Kindle Store, Amazon.co.uk is now selling more Kindle books than hardcover books, even as hardcover sales continue to grow. Since April 1, Amazon.co.uk customers are purchasing Kindle books over hardcover books at a rate of more than 2 to 1
Keep in mind that this does not include the use of free books. If you think that is impressive, how about this statistic? According to a recent Pew Internet poll, overall e-reader ownership has doubled in the last six months.
The percent of U.S. adults with an e-book reader doubled from 6% to 12% between November 2010 and May 2011. Hispanic adults, adults younger than age 65, college graduates and those living in households with incomes of at least $75,000 are most likely to own e-book readers. Parents are also more likely than non-parents to own these devices.
Ownership of these devices still lag far behind laptops and cell phones but the e-book reader is gaining ground quickly. As someone who owns all three of these devices I have to say that the signs are encouraging. As a Kindle owner I have greatly enjoyed the ability to carry around several books at once (along with the daily newspaper and a few magazine subscriptions). Traveling around with this much paper would be impractical to say the least. With the Kindle I can switch around my reading order depending on what I am interested in. It gives me a freedom that the paper world just can’t match.
My favorite feature of the Kindle is the ability to read in short time increments. With my busy schedule and healthy reading addiction it can be difficult to find a few hours to work my way through whatever book(s) I am reading at the moment. With an e-book reader I can read a few pages over a break, while I am standing in the server room waiting for a computer to reboot or in the car waiting for my wife to come out of the store. Being able to bounce between my desktop computer, netbook, laptop, Android phone and the Kindle itself leads to a very flexible reading schedule.
The only place where the Kindle falls short is in looking at photographs. You can’t read a magazine and expect to see all of the same pictures that you would see in the paper version. That is not generally a concern for me however, so I don’t pay it much attention. If you haven’t tried reading an e-book then I recommend you give it a try. You can download the desktop software for free for all of the major readers. Grab a free book and give it a shot. I think you will like it!

27 Jun

What’s Your PIN?

Posted by Douglas in Security. Tagged: , , , , .

I found an interesting article today studying the frequency of PIN usage on the iPhone. If you have an easily guessable PIN number then you really are doing yourself a disservice. I’d bet that people who use these common PIN numbers on their iPhones use them everywhere else as well. If you find yourself in this boat then you should consider changing it up!

Naturally, 1234 is the most common passcode: mimicking the most common internet passwords. To put this into perspective, these 10 codes represent 15% of all passcodes in use. Most of the top passcodes follow typical formulas, such as four identical digits, moving in a line up/down the pad, repetition. 5683 is the passcode with the least obvious pattern, but it turns out that it is the number representation of LOVE (5683), once again mimicking a very common internet password: “iloveyou.”

Interestingly, 1990-2000 are all in the top 50, and 1980-1989 are all in the top 100. I would interpret this occurrence as a subset of users that set their passcodes to the year of their birth or graduation.

24 Jun

Annual Conference 2011

Posted by Douglas in Church. Tagged: , , , , , , , .

One of the highlights of my job is the production of our Annual Conference. This conference consists of several worship sessions and business meetings over three or four days, held in early June. For the last three or four years the conference was held in Greenville, NC. This year, due to a scheduling conflict, the conference was held in downtown Raleigh. Being so close to home was a nice change from previous conferences. I was able to run back to the office if I needed something. I was also able to rely on help from the family with transportation logistics.

The Raleigh Convention Center (RCC) is a beautiful facility. We were used to filling the entire building where our conference was held in the past. This building however, was so large that it dominated us! We could have easily fit two or three more conferences our size into the same facility. That in and of itself was quite an adjustment!

Raleigh Convention Center Shimmer Wall

The RCC has a much more formalized Information Technology (IT) infrastructure than I am used to working with. They had their own internal IT staff that worked with us all week. There was plenty of bandwidth for all of our attendees as well as the video streaming application and internal staff needs. I worked with the Minutes Room staff this year due to personnel changes resulting from the death of one of our staff members (and personal friend). All of the minutes for the 2011 Annual Conference were recorded using Google Docs and Spreadsheets. The system served us well and the minutes folks were able to complete their work for the week on time.

Everything is better with balloons!

There are several different ministries that take place during the week of our conference. One of these was done in partnership with Stop Hunger Now. Volunteers gathered during the dinner break one day to assemble food packets that will eventually become meals for hungry families in North Carolina. The small (smaller than you would think!) group managed to assemble 150,000 packets that will eventually become 90,000 meals! My friend, Steve Taylor, wrote an excellent blog post on this event.

Where the rubber meets the road!

One of the big parts of annual conference is the business sessions. There are at times quick votes and at others seemingly endless debate. Resolutions are offered, discussed and voted upon. Rules are changed, removed and created. People are generally civil with each other as large and small theological issues are debated.

One of the many business sessions.

Through all of this I am responsible for setting up the initial staff IT operations including the News Room, Minutes Room, E-mail Station, Registration area and all of the staff members scattered across the building. Once everything is set up and running I sit in the News Room and help out with the various social network feeds that are covering the event. I enjoy the work but using the social networks to communicate with people out in the conference is the most fun part of the week. Who is looking forward to next year already?

23 Jun

Death By Paperwork

Posted by Douglas in Church. Tagged: , , , , , .

image

It’s been a very busy month at the office. I can usually guage how busy I am by looking at how high the credit card bills and invoices pile up. Yes, even the IT Office generates paper sometimes. I spent most of today catching up. I hope this brings me back into the good graces of the Treasurer’s Office! The next project is tackling the out of control Inbox!

21 Jun

The New (Old) Me

Posted by Douglas in Exercising. Tagged: , , , , , .

The New (Old) Me

In January of this year my office started a walking program. We were all issued pedometers and started off on a long journey together. I decided I would go all in and try my best to work hard and lose as much weight as I could.

Fast forward six months: I have walked, hiked, jogged, roller skated and swam over 300 miles in about 100 hours. I completed my first 5k race and am looking for others. I have lost 32 pounds and am working to lose another 18 or so. In short, I feel great! I’m working to get back down to my weight back in my high school/college days.

While I was at annual conference this year a friend of mine snapped this picture. I don’t think it really hit home until I saw this just how far I have come. I have a ways to go from here but I am a lot closer than I was in the beginning. I’ll be writing another blog post soon (hopefully!) that explains how I have come so far. I keep getting asked that question so I will answer it here. I’ve gotta go for now though, it’s time for another run!

17 Jun

Memorial Day Camping Trip

Posted by Douglas in Geocaching. Tagged: , , , , , .

Over Memorial Day Weekend I was able to take my two oldest daughters on another camping trip. We decided to go to the KOA Campground in Wilmington, NC. We spent three days outdoors driving around Wilmington, hunting for geocaches, visiting the aquarium, and enjoying the on-site playground and pool. My children love to camp and I love taking them. One of the highlights of the entire trip was a big hike that I took on Saturday. That’s a story for another post though.

Setting up camp on the first day.

I’m pretty sure I did all of the work setting up the camp. They had to try out their new chairs and make sure I was setting up the campsite correctly.

Trying out their new chairs for the first time!

I don’t go out of town on an overnight trip without finding a few geocaches. This one was a very old and famous one. I’m glad we took the time to hike out and find it.

All good trips include some geocaching!

The girls love going to the aquarium. We try to go every time we are in town. This time we were driving down from Wilmington instead of riding the ferry over from Southport. That was a very different experience over the holiday weekend.

Fort Fisher Aquarium

All in all it was a very successful and fun trip. The girls had a big time and we found a lot of geocaches. Who could ask for anything more? I would be open to turning this into an annual trip. We’ll see…

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