Since I seem to be on the topic of backup... Let's take a look at Windows Live Mesh

Windows Live Mesh gives you the ability to store up to 5GB for free on a centralized storage area on the Internet. Once you setup your account you don't have to load any software to be able to access your data from any machine. All you need is a browser and an Internet connection.

Windows Live Mesh is still in beta but it seems to working pretty well. It will interesting to see where Microsoft takes this capability. The basic concept is the ability to load a small application on your computer, and link it to your Live Mesh account. Anything that you drag into the folders of the account gets shared to all of the systems that are part of your Mesh Network. This allows you to synchronize information with your business workstation with your home workstation without having to drag the files back and forth or emailing them to different email accounts.

Just install the live mesh software on each device.  Then add folders to your mesh.  Your forceful than be automatically synchronized and always available for all the systems you have set up on the mesh.  You'll also get access to the machine remotely and init programs on that machine the matter where you are.

It is all so simple to share files and photos with friends and family and colleagues.  Simply invite them to a folder.  Everyone has kept up to date because files can be synchronized automatically with all of your devices in all of their devices. To take a tour of this product click here. Enjoy!

Don't try plugging in your camera's memory card with the camera on!

How stupid can I be. You'd think that I would know better, but obviously when you are in a hurry you sometimes do some very stupid things. Here's a lesson for all of you so that you don't have to be the one to have it happen to you. When inserting a memory card into a device consider turning it off so it doesn't get the jolt from the power supply in the unit you are plugging it into. I had videos of the bike race that we have going on here in PA with the bikers riding across Pennsylvania. A nice overview of this event can be found here. I wish I could have saved the pictures I took, they were pretty neat but things happen. So be careful because sometimes there is no recovery. Anyway, I was so angry with myself, I reformatted the card, luckily I didn't blow it up completely, and took some pic's around the yard which you can see here. Enjoy .

Woops! Found a little problem with Carbonite...

We did a new installation on my machine with some of Adobe's graphics programs and we found out that Carbonate Backup caused a problem with installing CS3 on my notebook. It was becoming a problem because I planned on working with a lot of the applications this next week while I am off. Yes I am strange and find a lot of comfort in working on projects involving different programs and applications. I am truly looking forward to spending some time learning some new applications. Anyway, I started talking about how Carbonite caused a problem installing Adobe's CS2 Suite applications on my notebook. Once we uninstalled Carbonite the programs loaded without a problem. I haven't tried reinstalling the Carbonite program to see if the problem persisted yet. More later as we work with this.

Google Docs - A nice alternative word processing, spreadsheet and presentation application

I was a bit skeptical about Google's Google Doc application, but once I began playing with it I found that most of the general functions that I use can be found in these applications. I did bump into their limitations but for something available online in the cloud, these applications can fill a nice niche. Here is quick look at the Google Document Management Screen: Video Overview of the Google Document Mangement Screen. 

In the document management screen (overview of the file functions) you have the ability to download your document in multiple formats including a zipped HTML file, open document, PDF, RTF, Text, and Word format. Managed sharing allows you to set up individuals as collaborators or viewers of your documents and two email those individuals the site location of the document that you are sharing.

The publish command allows you to use this application to store documents that you can later push to your blog site. So you can work on a document and when you have it ready for publication you can then push is quickly and easily to your site. It works great with Google's Blogger and it has connections to other popular sites like Wordpress and LiveJournal. I tried unsuccessfully, albeit with out much real effort to push this up to Microsoft's blog program (which is what I use for my active sites) I will update this as I play with it a little more.

Other document management functions that you can apply from this screen includes Renaming the document, Deleting, Create Folders to manage your documents, and create spreadsheets, word processing documents and presentation files. The presentation program very simple, shareable slides that can be controlled from one machine to multiple connected viewing systems. If you were on the conference call, or speaking with the client, you could direct them very quickly to the document by sending them an e-mail pointer to the presentation document, and you would be able to control the speed of the slide presentation from your screen on theirs.  The one limitation that I found that bothered me, was that I was unable to share are a video from a site other than YouTube. Of course this would be the first connection that they would create since both are properties of Google. Even this has a limitation though, the video image control box will be shown on the slide presentation that you cannot controlled remotely.  This means it you can start the video you will have to have the individuals on the other side click on the play button themselves.  I inserted some links onto the pages and with that I was able to then give the users on the other side of the presentation the ability to jump to another video presentation URL.  So the real limitation here is the inability to control the whole presentation yourself, but, for a free application this is pretty nice.

Some other document control features that you have in this application include: uploading a PowerPoint presentation that would then be converted to this format, you can import individual slides from a PowerPoint file but individual animations are not imported. You can print the presentation, either to paper or to a PDF file, with or without speaker notes, and with a choice of how many slides per page. You can also save the document as a PDF document slide presentation the you can shipped out as well. The Publish button allows you to create a mini presentation module that you can insert into your site as a video module. My Live Writer Program didn't like it though.

I created a document that shows the basic formatting that you can do with a page and describes what you can expect and what the limitations are. You can see this more clearly if you jump to this video. You can see this document as a PDF file by clicking on this link.

I'll talk about the spreadsheet application as I have a chance to spend more time with it.

Intel Modular Server Seminar

This week we held a little introductory seminar using our new Intel Modular Server that we will be putting in place for our own network system. We are really looking forward to having this in place and the response from those IT professionals that attended the seminar solidified our view of just how great this product really is. Ken Lindsay, one of senior network technicians did the presentation and did a wonderful job showing the resiliency of the system. Beyond the redundancy of the  power supplies, motherboard and Raid drive arrays, all of the components interact to take advantage of the modular control interface. Unbelievable control to switch functions within the unit. We demonstrated losing a drive, rebuilding the array, switching your server to a spare server module and the ease of moving functions from one server module to another. If you lose a server module you can be up and running with your spare in less than 10 minutes. Down time is minimized by an unbelievably short time frame.

We also showed the management module's logging features to track faults and the potential growth path within the product as well. Be sure to contact to register for the next scheduled presentation. 724-838-7526 or email to sales@paconnect.com

3PM Uggg! On our way to Baltimore.

Nick and I got an early morning start yesterday to attend a Northern Video Show in Baltimore. We took the Route 30 Route to Breezewood, only encountered one deer that we saw, and followed the TOMTOM pretty accurately right into the Show Site north of Baltimore in 3.5 hour quick romp. The traffic was not bad and we ended up being the first to sign in and were able to have our discussion on the pros and cons of each service plan that we are considering for our service support software. I think that we have a clear winner but that is not what I plan on talking about right now.

I attended the refresher course on IP Networking while Nick attended the Avermedia and Azelea Networks presentations. the IP refresh was a good overview, didn't contain too much that I didn't already know, but it doesn't hurt to be reminded what is what and how things work. Will see if it gets me to a point where I might crack one of my many books on IP Technology to expand on it again. Nick said that the Avermedia presentation was interesting but he didn't get too much more out of it except contact information for their field support people which can always be useful. They gave us some hints on how to get the PTZ Sony IP camera integrated with their software that we are going to try and that would be really a good outcome of this show. Nick was really impressed with Azelea's Mesh Technology product. This is a product that lends itself for wiring campus wide areas to the Internet. The types of organizations that this works well for include municipalities for giving their police and emergency personnel remote access back into the city systems, setting up general campus or municipal access to the Internet, (they have done large areas in China for the Olympics, construction sites for local area communication, wireless broadband, video surveillance and other applications. In smaller setups like hotels this would give property-wide access to Internet access as well as employee communication within the property area as well. Some neat potential there.

We had broke for lunch and some face time with the vendors in their booths. I attended the ACTI presentation while Nick went to the ARM Electronics presentation. Again the biggest benefit was the contacts, we now have access to the main ARM support guy and I got together with the primary support tech with ACTI. The ACTI presentation discussed megapixel IP Camera technology and the different technologies used for encoding the video and the benefits and problems with the use of each one. Very good discussion of where the digital video technology is right now and where it is going in the near future. It gave me some insights into what to look for, how to size systems correctly and what we need to control when it comes to client expectations.

Nick's Arm presentation led him into some discussion about the problems we have had with night vision video capturing and we now have some solution paths to follow. Another product that I found at the Vendor Booths was from a company called Videolarm who claim to be the first manufacturer of video housings in the market. They have a fully adjustable Infrared Illuminator that might help us out in some of these low light areas. Distance adjustable from 100-660 feet, five year warranty and an adjustable beam angle of 30, 40 and 60 degrees. There other products are also highly ruggedized as well.

D-Link was also highly promoted by Northern especially in the IP video slide presentation. I have brought back some of their information as well. For the most part there wasn't too much being shown by the vendors when it came to lenses and such except by ARM. I think Nick got a good bit of insight with that. All in all this was a good conference to attend that gave us support for what we already know, reinforced that we are on the right track and gave us the contact that will help us on into the future.

ZDNet article on the memory usage by different Browser Programs

See the article here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=2024

Interesting to see how during the day your system can be bogged down more and more by simply using your browser. Think about your system having only 512mb of memory or less and you are using IE7. You can easily see what the consequences are.

SmugMug (still loving it)

I have been uploading like crazy this week and everything seems to working just fine. I have been using their tools to move things around, edit keywords for searches, and setting up text in the description fields. All pretty neat.

They have three different subscription models that range from reasonable to pretty expensive unless you have a following for your pictures and they are selling for you. Definitely not me! If you are interested, the site is: www.smugmug.com

Reposting New Intel Modular Server Project

Here is the new slide presentation with narration that I did last week from Intel's PowerPoint Slide Package. It came together pretty will I think.

ims project wmv2

SmugMug Photo Site

There are so many places that offer free storage of you images but very few give you as much control and ease of printing as SmugMug. Recently I keep hearing about this site and it made me very curious to see why so many of the industry commentators speak so highly of SmugMug.  So I took a quick look, signed up for the 14 day trial, spent half an hour uploading files, purchased by first set of prints, and quickly signed up for power user account.  That is how impressed I am of the site.  Now why on earth would I pay a store my photos when sites like flicker, Microsoft live spaces and others offer this storage for free?

First, I like the fact that there is no advertising on your site.  That in itself is worth a lot.  Nothing is worse than having some kind of dating advertisement show up on your page that you are displaying pictures of your wife and family.  The second reason is the amount of control that SmugMug gives me to not only set up the theme of my homepage but also to stop a separate theme for each gallery that you set up.  A gallery is a directory or storage area for set of photos. Once you have installed their upload program then you will be able to copy your pictures to your galleries. You can categorize your galleries so that they can be sorted, you can categorize your images by using keywords, you can put captions on the images that describe what they are, and there is room for comments that to be left by you or your visitors.  You can also sort your photographs so they appear in the order that you would like them to be displayed in. It takes only minutes to learn how to use it and customize your gallery. 

I jumped right into the power user account set up so that I could store videos as well as photographs.  You can select more than one photograph at a time to upload, and a stored in their full resolution unlike the free sites which will downgrade then to fit their storage requirements.  Your yearly fee includes unlimited storage, your videos are limited to 2.5 minutes Max for DVD quality video files.  If you upgrade to the professional version you can upload 5 minute videos in HD format and 10 minute videos and DVD quality format.  There is one caveat though, your files are limited to a 512 MB maximum size.

The last thing that I want to talk about is the buy this photo feature.  They give you a large number of choices for printing these pictures at very reasonable prices.  The only thing I don't like is the cost of shipping which I think is a bit exorbitant, however they do need to pay for someone to package the pictures and send them out to you.  You can also have your favorite photos placed on different kinds of items like shirts, bags, cups, photo books, greeting cards, note pads, posters, coasters, playing cards, puzzles and even ceramic tiles.  You can also have them create a CD or DVD of your images as a backup that can keep for safekeeping.  You can never have enough copies of your precious moments.  If you're interested in the site you can sign-up at www.smugmug.com and if you use this coupon code FkoWZ8IjsnygW to get a $5 discount on signing up for your very own SmugMug account.

To view my account go to: http://www.bappleby.smugmug.com

Revisiting Carbonite

About a month ago I was talking about my system crash and getting my system back up to speed, and one of the reasons that I was able to bring my system back as quickly as I did was the fact that I had been backing up using a service called Carbonite.  This is very reasonable service, $49.95 per year for unlimited storage, had taken about a week to get most of my files that I needed backed up uploaded to their service.  When I restored from their site it only took a couple of hours for the data that I needed to be reinstalled on my machine.  It's great to see something worked as advertised.  The one drawback that I see with this service is that it does not include attached Storage Devices, like my network hard drive and it's piggybacked USB hard drive.  I can understand why they have not included that this price since if they did I would be able to map any drive on my network and back up its content as well.  Since the license is for individual workstations this cannot be allowed.  Their work around when I called their tech support is to copy the files I want backed up on to my computers local drive and then back up from there.  There is one problem with that, if you remove a file from your hard drive that is marked as a backup file then after 30 days of its being gone from your system it will be deleted from their system.  This prevents you from archiving and creating more space on your hard drive and using them as offline storage.

So if you're thinking of using this service then keep in mind what it was designed for.  The $49.95 yearly fee covers active file backup for one machine of its internally attached hard drives.  The service will not support USB or firewire attached storage or a backup of any files are located on this machine.

Publish! Publish! Publish!

I think down deep in my heart I'm always wanted to be a published author, writing that "super exhilarating, can't put it down" spy novel or some deep thinking manuscript that everybody must read.  Well this morning while I was looking around Twitter I came across a book publishing site called LuLu.  This site helps you to put together your idea for a publication, put it into a format that can be distributed and then provide a distribution path for that publication.  Whether you have created your epic spy novel, delicious cookbook, eye popping calendar or photo book, whatever your idea, they can help you to produce itm print it and distribute it.

This is also great for making short run for technical books for your company, catalogs, or brochures.  They can produce hard back books or paperback, perfect bound, saddle stitch or spiral bound books.  They can be in full color or just black and white.  Or they can just be electronic, to be distributed through the Internet.

It's free do sign up, and until you use their service for publication you can work on the development of your publication and then pull the trigger when you're ready.  They provide a site for you to manage your projects, and help you to manage the selling your masterpiece.  This includes using their online shopping cart system to collect the funds for your sold works.  This is all pretty neat stuff and I have a couple of projects in mind already.

Links: http://www.lulu.com/

Wiimote repurposed for multi-point interactive white

Jude just came back from the WIU vendor show in one of the interesting things that he came back with was a demonstration of using the Wiimote as a multipoint interactive whiteboard.  The link I will give you is from engadget and has it pretty neat video showing how works.  I think I'd love to have one of these right at my desk and have it pointing onto my desk surface.

"While certainly there's been no shortage of Wiimote hacks, the number of genuinely useful ones has been considerably more limited. It looks like you can now add one more to that list, however, as Johnny Chung Lee (he of the Wiimote finger-tracking hack) has now upped the usefulness even further with a makeshift multi-point interactive whiteboard. There's a bit more involved with this one than just a Wiimote, however -- namely, an IR-emitting pen (or two), which the Wiimote tracks while relaying all the necessary information back to a PC. That, as the video after the break shows, allows you to turn any surface into a multi-point whiteboard with the use of a projector, or turn any LCD screen into a touchscreen, of sorts. Best of all, Johnny has kindly provided the necessary software free of charge, so hit up the read link below if you want to give it a shot."

wiimote projector whiteboard

Johnny Chung Lee Project - Wii Johnny is a Graduate PhD student at CMU and has several other projects that he has posted to this site using the Wiimote for other tracking experiments. The 3-D is pretty neat as well. He has a blog at: http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/  called procrastineering. Enjoy!

Spam 101

Brian Fine has put together an article that will help us understand a little better about how to protect ourselves from all that nasty SPAM! Here is a little excerpt from the article or you can click here to read the entire article. 

By now anyone who regularly uses email is familiar with the idea of spam. To be considered spam a message has to be both unsolicited and bulk. Unsolicited means that the recipient has in no way requested or subscribed to the messages. Bulk means that the message is sent out to a large (hundreds to millions) of recipients.

Spam messages cost money. First there is a cost in resources: bandwidth to deliver the message, and server memory and space to process it. Second there is a cost in man-hours, as the recipient has to “sort” through the spam on the chance that an actual email is there.

What can we do about it?

Brian Fine - In House Technical Staff

Google On Line Tools...

Google seems to be offering something new every day. Of course a lot of their tools have been around for a long time and we just don't have the time to look at each and every one of them.  I have been playing around with Goggles Blogger program, adding extra gadgets, and trying to add to the look and feel.  Very nice program, very simple and very straightforward.  You can add the basic elements that you want to have added to it, add your own code if you want to or leave it plain and simple like I have.  If it weren't for the integration of Microsoft's Live Spaces I would probably move to this in a heartbeat.  I like it that much better.

The other Google product that I started playing with is the Google Reader.  This product allows you to create an RSS Feed Aggregator.  What this means is that you can select all your different RSS feeds and look at the current postings all on one page.  It is like building up your very own technical/personal online newspaper that you can view each morning with your cup of coffee.  It allows you to quickly drill down into the articles that you are interested in which for all of last time sensitive information workers is extremely important.  The other benefit is that you don't have to worry about installing a news aggregator on your machine like Newsgator and others, and this setup is available to you on any machine that has Internet access.  This makes it very portable just not available when you don't have Internet access.

Jing - Wonderful New Support Tool

 

OK, you're now seeing me using voice to text recognition and it is being recorded by the Jing.

So we will insert the URL at the bottom of this message and you'll see it appear at the bottom of this message.

Tutorial on the Jing Program

This is really a neat application.  You have to be very careful on how you use it but if you understand what is going on in the screen sizes that you have to deal with you can get a good feel for what the other person will see you when you produce what you are creating for them.  You will see what I ran into when trying to record and use voice recognition at the same time.  I am looking forward to putting together a lot of quick training videos they can be shared on the fly both internally in our company as well as with our customers.

This program is offered by TechSmith who also makes Camtasia a program that I use for capturing screen displays for training purposes.  This is a beta program that you can take advantage of the share information quickly with customers and friends and family.  To get more information on this product please visit http://www.jingproject.com/.

Office Wide Spam and Virus Protection:Astaro

I can't imagine anyone who likes the daily ritual of pressing the delete key to rid themselves of all of their unwanted, unsolicited e-mail spam.  There are 23 of  us in our office, and if their incoming e-mail is anything like mine then this problem causes them all to lose between 45 minutes to an hour of productivity each and every day as they check their e-mail.  To resolve this we implemented a system from Astaro that we use as a Security Gateway for all of our Web Access.  The nice thing about this product is its unified approach for our total IT Security Protection.

Astaro Security Gateway provides immediate protection for your network, web access and email traffic. The Astaro solution integrates more security applications than any competitor in one award-winning management device. A complete range of hardware appliances scale to the performance level which you demand.

For more information on this product and it's capabilities be sure to visit our Solutions Center webpage and contact us so that we may configure the right system for you.

Up and Coming - Microsoft's Hyper-V for Windows Server 2008

Last Wednesday's release candidate is termed a Feature-Complete Beta of its Hyper-V virtualization technology, which is an add-on to Windows Server 2008.  A release candidate is a final beta before the code is considered finished.  Microsoft said it was on track to ship Hyper-V by August. The code is available on Microsoft's Web site.

In this newest beta, Microsoft has added support for new guest operating systems that can run on top of Hyper-V: Windows Server 2003 SP2, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1, Windows Vista SP1 (x86), and Windows XP SP3 (x86).

The company also said users can install the Hyper-V Manager snap-in to the Microsoft Management Console on Vista SP1 (x86 and x64). The snap-in allows for remote management of Hyper-V.

Jeff Woolsey, senior program manager on the Microsoft virtualization team, says the three most common roles virtualized among early adopters are IIS, application server and Terminal Services, and that the four most deployed Microsoft applications are SQL Server 2005 and 2008, Exchange Server and Forefront. He said more than half are running an antivirus/security application, nearly 50% are running a backup appliance, and approximately 75% are running Hyper-V with some attached storage.

On another note, Microsoft acquired desktop virtualization vendor Kidaro. Kidaro offers management technology aimed at making it easier for enterprises to deploy, use and manage virtual PCs. The platform comprises several components including a client that handles encryption and firewall security and integrates the virtual machine applications into the end-user computer. The management server assigns configurations and security policies for users and compiles information about clients for monitoring and auditing.

Microsoft expects that the software will help accelerate migration to Windows Vista because it can minimize compatibility issues between applications and the OS. In addition, the software makes the use of virtualization less noticeable to end users, which should also speed adoption, Microsoft said.

For more information follow these links:

• Microsoft releases feature-complete Hyper-V beta
• Windows Server 2008 Virtualization and Consolidation
• Hyper-V Leaves Linux Out In The Cold
• The Roadmap to Virtual Infrastructure: Practical Implementation Strategies (White Paper prepared by IBM)
• Cost Effective Analysis of Scaling with Virtualization (White Paper prepared by Coyote Point Systems)
• Disaster Recovery and Virtualization (White Paper prepared by Ixilix discussing using Virtualization as part of your disaster Recovery Plan)

The Crash! continued...

As catastrophic as losing all the information on your hard drive can be, if you have performed consistent backups you should come out better in the long run.  Luckily, three weeks ago I began testing a new offsite backup product called Carbonite to back up my critical data on my notebook.  The backups took a little while to complete, about four days for 25 GB of data, but it made it very easy for me to get download my OneNote project files to another computer while I had the service department replace the drive and bring it up with a fresh load of Vista Ultimate.

It took about a week to reload the different applications that I run but I now have a system that is consistently faster, and doesn't have the garbage on it from loading and unloading test applications.  Refreshing your computer by doing a fresh load every 3 to 6 months does wonders for your productivity.  The downside is the time lost during the reconstruction.

During the down time, I was using my desktop from home at the office. I didn't want it to be joined to our network so I started using the terminal server client to access most of our applications that I run on a daily basis.  What struck me was how painless it was to be able to jump between the live windows session and the terminal session as I was doing different projects.  The one drawback I did find was that because I did not join this machine to the network was a little hard to move files between two sessions.  But it could be done without too much trouble. 

Now that I have the laptop up and loaded, I am running most of our legacy applications, we have some Access 97 databases, our accounting system, and our CRM program that are rather dated, on a terminal server. And I am running all my research with Internet Explorer, OneNote, and Office Applications in the notebooks operating system.  Because I'm using their RAM from the terminal server I have found that I'm running much faster than before when I have ten to twelve applications running at the same time.  It makes sense now that I think about it and I am glad that have taken advantage of this ability.

If you have any questions about the process I went through or if you want to know more about remote access and terminal services feel free to let me know and we can discuss this further.  Happy Easter!

Camtasia Studio - Create Your Own Presentations

I have been working with the Camtasia Studio product for a month now and I am so thoroughly impressed with it's capabilities. This is a great product for anyone who needs to either present their company or product lines or  needs to provide training materials for their employees or for clients.

With Camtasia Studio, anyone can easily record and edit high-quality screen videos to share on the Web, CD, and mobile devices. You can use Camtasia Studio to create and share:

• Training videos
• Tech support tutorials
• PowerPoint presentations
• Sales demos
• Screencast

It took only minutes to get a feel for how easy this program works to give you professional quality presentations in most of the formats that you would possibly want to publish in. You will see more and more projects from my desktop becoming available in the next few months as we continue to produce new content on our Product Solutions Showcase.

Look for demonstrations on equipment, programs and gadgets that may interest you. As always, we are open for suggestions for content that you might be interested in.