A Week In Review - STARWEST Conference -or- A Week in Disneyland

So a couple of weeks ago I went to California for a business conference. The conference was pretty cool…lots of great speakers, tutorials, keynotes, vendors and other work sessions to fill my head (and my bag) with lots of great information and contacts.

As an added bonus, the conference was held in the Disneyland Convention Center in the Disneyland Hotel. While this certainly wasn't my first reason for opting for this particular conference, it didn't hurt.

The conference (STARWEST) is hosted by SQE and they do a number of great conferences each year and also have a good selection of webinars and ongoing resources online. I've followed them and have been wanting to go to one of their conferences for a while. It was well worth it.

Unless I happen to have readers who are in the Software Test and/or QA industry, I won't bore you all too much with the various things I learned at the conference…hit me up after if you're interested. ;)

Instead, I figured I'd give a little recap on the "entertainment" portion of the trip.

Happy Pi Day

That's right. Today is Pi Day. Go have a slice of your favorite pie in celebration.

The Positive Side of Piracy?

So, over the past couple of months you may have heard about Son of Erebus. I have it on my "to read" list after hearing about it and reading the excerpt chapter available online through the publisher.

It seems there were a bunch of people who were much more interested in the book than I was....they swiped the book and posted the pirated copy online for download. The pirated version quickly grew legs and "went viral." I haven't seen download stats, but from the sounds of things, it spread across the web like wildfire

Today, the publisher and author released a press release talking about the positive angle they tried to take with this piracy. Basically, they posted a request on the author's Facebook page for everybody who downloaded the pirated copy to post a review of the book. I'm sure there were some who didn't post for fear of repercussions, but the publishers made the request in good faith and were rewarded with a ton of great reviews comparing the book to "the likes of Tolkien, Barker, King and Goodkind."

The book is slated to be the first in a trilogy. And even though the first copy was pirated, it's getting a ton of great hype and added press from the piracy. I'm sure the piracy hurt the sales. I've been involved in many discussions about how piracy can hurt actual sales of products (talking in the past with regards to music, movies and video games) though I'm sure there are also a lot of people who have now legitimately purchased the book as a result of the media spin around it and the great reviews that are out there.

I know that with the increased use and acceptance of electronic versions of books, there was a lot of concern from the literary world that they would see pirated versions of books in the same way as there have been pirated versions of other media. The past couple of years have certainly proven their fears to be valid as a number of books have been pirated.

However, the debate once again opens with the question of - Is there a way to spin piracy in a positive light and actually reap some benefit from the downside? The author, J.S. Chancellor, notes that she was flattered that it was stolen, but also left feeling sick at the thought. And the press release points out that, although the publicity is certainly not coming in the preferred method, "the book is quickly gaining notice".

My personal opinion is that there are (sadly) always going to be thieves and crooks out there. There are always going to be hackers who try to break through a DRM or other form of security system just to prove they can do it. At the same time, there are going to be people who will work through the system legitimately as designed...shopping and purchasing and generally doing things the right way. I optimistically hope and believe that the majority of people actually go through legal rather than illegal means. I would potentially worry about those who got the illegal copy without knowing it was illegal (if someone just posted a version online and they got a link saying "check out the new book for free"...a person may think it was part of a promotion or something) but still, I think the ignorant pirate is another fairly small category.

With regards to books (and even some movies, music, and games), there is almost ALWAYS a way for the frugal reader to get a FREE copy of the book (even the ebook in some cases) and that is to simply make a trip to their own library. The literary world is somewhat unique in its use of the library system...there is actually an acceptance of "getting the books for free." However, even then, this free copy is given with certain rules and with certain protocols to be followed...which again brings me to my earlier point that I think a lot of piracy (especially book piracy) begins more with those who just steal the copies for the sake of stealing them.

As a person who eventually wants to see my own work published and for sale, my heart really goes out to J.S. Chancellor over this issue. I'm very saddened to see her lose out on the sales and have her book dragged through the mud of piracy. At the same time, I agree with her that it must be somewhat flattering to have her book the subject of piracy and then to see it spread so virally. Furthermore, the reviews that came of it have been good. I think she and her publisher did an excellent job of making lemonade from lemons and doing what they could to turn a bad situation to their advantage.

I would love to see piracy go away entirely. There are also a lot of other bad things in the world that I'd like to see go away. But the sad fact is that many of the problems in society/world are here to stay. I think Rhemalda and Chancellor handled this example of privacy very admirably and set a good example for the future. I'm not saying publishers and authors (or musicians, movie/game studios, etc) shouldn't try to stop piracy or should endorse/promote piracy, but I think they should strive to wind ways to turn negative situations to their advantage rather than just bemoaning the situation and looking to post fines all through the dark underbelly of the Internet.

Blog template/layout

Well, it's been a while since I've looked at my blog on the actual page. I read my own posts via an aggregate Reader and so I miss the formatting. Imagine my surprise when I hit my page today and noticed a lot of the formatting/images were broken or missing.

I've been using a "free template" for the past year or so. I'm not sure if the free place has gone down altogether or not. So, for now, I just want to apologize for people who may read things on my actual blog site...I'll spend some time over the coming days/weeks getting the formatting right.

Although, this has brought up a question in my mind as far as how much of a priority this would be. So, I've added a little poll in my sidebar. Yes, I acknowledge that in order to actually view this poll you have to click through to the blog which seems almost counterproductive to the poll...but it was the quickest/easiest way to do this.

So, please click through and take the poll to fulfill my curiosity. Also, I'm curious if anybody has any recommendations on free blogger templates that are kind of cool. I could get ambitious and try to code my own...but I feel like I've got other higher priorities and so I haven't yet bothered to learn the syntax/requirements.

Thanks.

A selection of random videos & music for the weekend

As we move into the weekend, here's a bunch of random fun/inspiring/cool/creative bits of multimedia that I wanted to share.

Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

---

The Highwayman
Here's a cool little poem/story that's even cooler as set to the beautiful sounds of Loreena McKennitt


Morgan & Destiny's Eleventeenth Date: The Zeppelin Zoo
An intriguingly hilariously creative video created by Joseph Gordon-Levitt's online production company.


Let Me Fall
A thought provoking song by Josh Groban


Game On
Hilarious Bollywood style song promoting The Guild...an online series I watched intently for the first 'season' but then stopped following.


I've Got Friends
A cool sound and creatively stylized video


Lost Things
A rather creative and fun stop-motion film with a cool song as the backdrop

THINK before you POST - You may forget, but the web has perfect memory and universal indexing

This article is a few weeks old (I'm still catching up from vacation on some news sites) and it's somewhat lengthy (at least in terms of web articles). Still, it's an interesting read.


I see two main, related, themes:

1. The Internet "remembers" all of your actions...good and bad....so you'd better "think before you post"
2. Privacy and reputation are a big concern on the web - but we can't (and shouldn't) rely fully on the technology and the sites to protect us

The article brings up a number of examples of people being fired, passed over for raised, or otherwise "discriminated against" because someone "Googled them" and found some skeletons in the closet...or in some cases, some skeletons sitting at the table eating dinner with them.

With the explosion of Web 2.0 technology and the rise of "social networking", more and more people have a huge online presence...and many of them aren't even aware of what that means, let alone that it exists.

I've seen a number of "Dateline" stories about "protecting our children's privacy online" but I found it interesting that this article suggests that younger people are actually more concerned and aware of their online privacy than the older generations. And I can see why...the younger crowd is so totally immersed in the online community. They know that they can search for and find information about their friends easily and they are thus instinctively aware that information they post will be out there about them...so they are cautious. Older adults on the other hand are still caught up in the novelty, the fun, the experience and they are less likely to think that THEY have influence on controlling their privacy by monitoring what they post and how they post it.

I'm not saying we should back off on the "protect the children" mindset...but I think we need to be sure we also focus those lectures on ANYBODY online who isn't yet savvy about the privacy implications.

One thing that also gets me, and has bugged me for months and months (every time Facebook "breaches privacy") is that people complain that the various technologies and sites are wholly responsible for protecting individual privacy. From what I've seen, there are very few "required" elements when signing up for social media accounts and those required fields are usually wholly or at least significantly able to be hidden. The "private" stuff that people complain about being shared...are the OPTIONAL things that individuals can add themselves. If you're concerned that somebody may find out what city you live in...don't include your city (or find the option to hide it...which is almost always going to be there). If you're worried about who may see your photos online, don't upload them...email them instead. Or upload them to a more "premium" service where you have full control over who you share them with.


(As a side note - if you're uploading a photo that is in any way embarrassing or self-compromising, you may want to consider thinking before you ACT in "real life"...just a thought)

Granted, I have sometimes seen instances where a website has shared by default something that should have remained private. But by and large, these sites are aware of privacy concerns and they don't want to open a hornets nest. At the same time, these "social" sites exist for the purpose of a community...and if you want to exist in a community, you are by definition "going public" at least to some extent.

The hazard, as is pointed out in the article, is that the web has perfect/eternal memory and immense "indexing" and "cross-referencing" capabilities. So while you could walk around a park or a mall and be largely anonymous...by being in an online community, all it takes is a few keystrokes to cross-reference your profile from one community with your activity elsewhere on the web.

This again reiterates the need to THINK before you ACT...especially online. Take control of your online IDENTITY by taking control of your BEHAVIOR.

Bringing my audio into the 21st century -- suggestions?

OK, so from time to time I wander through different stores and see stereos or other devices that are built to play old audio formats (records, cassettes, etc) and at the same time to digitize them to an MP3 format or straight to a DVD.

The price point usually keeps me from thinking seriously about it (they usually range from $100-150). So even though I have many dozens of LPs and Cassettes just collecting dust, I haven't been able to justify the cost. There have been a few times where I've just gone ahead and bumped up to the CD/iTunes version of the album. Part of me didn't want to "buy it twice" but I really wanted to have it in the new format.

Anyway, the question came up at work today and so I did a quick search and found a couple of options. First, there are the full-on devices that are stand alone stereos but will also convert to MP3 or DVD. Then there are lots of instruction sites talking about just plugging into your microphone jack on the computer and using your OS audio recording software coupled with a lot of freeware software. Now, I didn't really want to pay the price for the big stereos…but also, even though I'm technically savvy enough, I've been burned sometimes by the full "do it yourself" method, especially with some of the freeware software out there that claims to be very simple and also very robust but once you dig into it and start using it doesn't turn out to be either of those.

So I found a few "middle ground" areas. Some "premium" software products that provided more user-friendly capture/edit capabilities. Exploring this avenue, I found the following product and I'm wondering about it…basically it includes a device with the audio-in ports (so you can get stereo channels rather than a mono through the microphone jack) that then go into a USB. Furthermore, it claims to include a robust software package with some software names I recognized from the forums I was just searching.


Soooo…after a lot of rambling, here's my question for the blogosphere.

If any of you have done audio encoding from old formats…what are some of your recommendations? Does this $30 product from Amazon look like a good investment considering it looks to provide multi-channel encoding support as well as some reputable software to do the capture/edit/cleanup work?

Wow...catching up takes a while.

So, I've been on vacation for the past week. I had a laptop, iPod (with wi-fi) and iPad, so I checked in on work and personal email from time to time to make sure nothing 'urgent' needed my attention.

Anyway, we got home and did a little more relaxing but today I finally hopped onto the computer to do some actual catching up. I had 108 messages in my work email to go through...70 in my personal email (most of which were filtered away due to specific rules for various newsletters, etc).

I pushed through all the various emails in 15-20 minutes. There are some I'll address when I get to the office tomorrow and a number of newsletters I'll read over the next few days but I'm mostly caught up on email and fairly quickly.

And then I went to my "Reader" to catch up on the various blogs and news pages I follow. To my dismay, there were over 1000 new posts for me to filter through. Wow! Fortunately my reader has them broken down into categories...so I caught up on close friends and family first then on my favorite blogs...but that still left about 800 unread posts.

The cause here is two-fold. First, I follow a number of bloggers who are VERY prolific...writing sometimes 4 or 5 posts a day. Second (and this I found by looking over my list), I am "following" 207 blogs/sites. So even an average of a single post each day would have gotten me well over 1k in a week. Yikes.

Now the question is...do I just do a bulk "mark all as read" and move on? Or do I slowly but surely push through the list so as to be sure to catch any posts that really interest me and make sure I comment on them?

Due to the mass of posts, I'm leaning towards the former...I went through ~150 posts, skimming some and reading most. I commented on ~10 of the posts. I found many of the others interesting. But the 2+ hours it took to go through them make me wonder on the productivity of it.

When I stay on top of my "blog reading", it's usually something that I spend 10-15 minutes on each day catching up with the various blogs. But when it piles up like this, I suddenly wonder if I'm following too many sites and if so, how do I go about trimming down the list. Honestly I really enjoy the sites I follow and while I may not be passionate about every post/article that comes from every site, I find cool nuggets from each of them over time.

Have any of you fellow bloggers run into this dilemma? Come back from an "offline" hiatus and found yourself so far behind that you just want to clear the slate and start fresh? What have you done in those situations? As of now, I have 659 unread posts to go...and tomorrow, I'm back at the office.

The Speed of Google Chrome

I've honestly only used Chrome a couple of times. It seemed alright but didn't really do anything for me that I couldn't get from Firefox. In recent months, however, Chrome has been coming up in general market share which means I'll probably need to start officially supporting it at work and thus using it on a more frequent basis.

This particular video isn't really a motivator for me...but it's still pretty cool. It's a creative, attention grabbing way to show off Chrome.

Enjoy.



(Grabbed from this blog)

One-day-Sale - Cool iPhone/iPod application - Great Work, Great Career

A few weeks ago I read and reviewed the book 'Great Work, Great Career.'

I felt like the book had plenty of great information, suggestions and advice and it came at a very relevant time. The job industry has gone through major upheaval in the past decade…even in the past few years/months. This book really provides some great reading to help work through those changes.

Anyway, in addition to the book, FranklinCovey has developed an iPhone (or iPod Touch) application that builds on the content presented in the book. I know we've all read books like this and made notes or nodded our heads and thought "those are great ideas….someday I'll try to implement them." Well, this iPhone app takes some of these ideas and wraps them into a nice interface where you can begin to put them into practice.

It's a cool application with sections for "Know Your Strength" which includes self assessments to help find your own strengths), "Define Your Contribution" (including tools to help match your strengths to your career prospects), "Build Your Village" (tools and advice for networking your career relationships), and a number of "Resources" and "Action Center" tools to help you along the way. There are also a number of FranklinCovey videos to reinforce the content.

All in all, this is a pretty cool application.

As an added bonus, I just received word that they as an incentive to try and get the word out, FranklinCovey is offering this application at nearly 50% off the standard price.

Today only (April 13, 2010), you can use this link to get more information and purchase the app for only $2.99! Even if you're not job hunting now, the tools and resources can help you improve your skills and reputation at your current job. Feel free to pass the link to friends, neighbors, co-workers, etc….anybody you think may benefit from this.

In addition to the information available from the link above, you can use this link to view a video presentation of some of the features. The video may require installing a plugin to fully view it. I'm looking for an embeddable and/or youtube version of the video.

Whether or not you decide to purchase, you should at least click over to the site and check out the information.

Let me know what you think.

Cool new Google App

Phishing - A PSA and a Quiz - How well can you score?

If you've had an email address for any length of time, chances are you've received something that could be categorized as Phishing. The basic idea behind phishing is that somebody (or a group of sombodies) creates a process for drawing in unsuspecting users and having those users provide them with otherwise secure or sensitive information (such as usernames, passwords, credit card info, and more). There are a number of phishing scams I'm aware of that go via the phone or even snail mail. But probably the biggest and easiest opportunity I see is for phishing via email.

I received an email and link to this quiz as an advertisement to use Verisign's services to help ensure security on our websites.

I thought the quiz was pretty interesting and wanted to share it. While I don't know that you'll be out looking to purchase Verisign security/authentication/etc, I think it is good for people to be aware of just how easy it is to be tricked into handing over your personal data to a phisher/hacker.

I know plenty of people who are just tech literate enough to muddle their way through documents, randomly surf the web, and read/reply/forward emails. It's these users who are likely in the most danger of being caught.

However, there are even plenty of opportunities for tech proficient users to be caught in a phishing scam, especially with how good some phishing schemes have become.

So…take the quiz. Learn some of the more common gotchas that you should steer clear of. I'd be curious to know how you scored so stop back here and share your scores. :)

Live Webcast goes wrong

Oops



Originally found here. Thanks to Parker for sharing.

Potential dangers to web developers who host user created content

See the google blog post here and a CNET article here.

“A public prosecutor in Milan decided to indict four Google employees... The charges brought against them were criminal defamation and a failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video. They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video's existence until after it was removed. ...A judge in Milan today convicted 3 of the 4 defendants... for failure to comply with the Italian privacy code.”

Google is appealing, but this is still disturbing news.

I realize that many/most people don't actually read the "terms of use", "privacy policy" or "community guidelines" on many/most of the sites that they post to. But having those disclaimers there for users to 'agree' to is supposed to protect the developer from liability.

The alternative is to have individuals screen and approve every single submission that comes through. When you consider that YouTube likely gets hundreds/thousands/more video submissions every hour, the human manageability of this is just crazy. YouTube is very community driven and the YouTube/Google developers have always been very quick to respond (at least as far as I've seen/heard) to infringements of copyright/privacy/etc policy.

Even in this particular case, the claim is that Google employees 'within hours of being notified' removed the video in question and even continued further by helping the Italian police identify the person who uploaded the video in the first place.

Now, I admit that I don't know all the particular details of the case. I suspect that they're being prosecuted on some corner case such as not including Italian-law-specific language in the policy or some such thing. But still, for Google/YouTube to have reacted as swiftly and with such cooperation and then to have been prosecuted and convicted is just amazing.

Fixing the world with online games

Cool video from Jane McGonigal one of the "ten fascinating people you've never heard of" from the TED2010 conference. I might have to try out Evoke...sounds interesting. Kind of "sim city" for the 21st century?

SixthSense Technology

I know the Internet attention span is usually 20-30 seconds...but you should really try to watch this whole video. It's cool new technology that really does some amazing things. If you must skip ahead, you can probably bounce to the ~5 minute mark (you'll miss a lot of the background and preliminary research) and just start watching some of the cool things he's doing.

Google DNS - the behemoth strikes again

Google is certainly poising to take over the world. They are now offering a public DNS that you can route to rather than relying on the DNS server from your ISP. I’m skeptical as to how much better that will be (since lookups generally happen VERY quickly anyway), but it’s intriguing to see them stretching out even more. It's even more interesting to think of the implications as they expand into so many different realms. I'm' really curious as to their long-term plan and direction

Link to Google Blog

Link to Google DNS info

Disaster Recovery...is dead?

I work in the computer industry and provide QA and support for a number of web portals. A few weeks ago, as part of an internal security review one of our clients requested a copy of our Disaster Recovery Plan for one of those web applications. I wasn't terribly surprised to discover that we didn't have a formal plan drafted. About a week prior to that, they had asked for information related to our uptime policies, server redundancy, hosting facilities and backup plan.

With regards to the disaster recovery, I reiterated our backup systems and redundancy plan and let them know that we would handle a disaster the same way we would handle any error on the system…that we would use our code repository, code backups, database backups and redundant virtual servers to get the site back up and running in as short a time as possible with minimal data loss. Naturally, this quick blurb didn't suffice and they wanted a formally drafted plan which eventually included very detailed schema of low level operations in place.

Today, this article came across my email indicating that "disaster recovery is dead." As it states in the first paragraph, that's a rather interesting claim, especially when you consider that it is coming from the director at the International Disaster Recovery Institute.

This article explains what I was trying to get across to our client's security team, but it does so much more eloquently.

A dozen or more years ago, the Internet was still a bit shaky and it was understandable for sites to have outages, be laggy or otherwise have bouts of unreliableness (is that a word?). These blips of instability were not considered disasters. The disasters of the early 90s were more in line with the "natural" disasters one thinks about: floods, earthquakes, terrorism, war, alien invasion, etc.

Over the past dozen+ years, however, the world has shifted significantly such that even a flicker of a site outage is considered a disaster. As such, we are always in a sort of "disaster recovery" mode.

Rather than continuing to call it "disaster recovery", the article suggests we just integrate this policy into the policy of "continuous business operation", and I would tend to agree. In today's world, disaster recovery is now an integral part of the business policy for "100% reliability" provided via constant monitoring, redundant servers and frequent backups.

While all of this makes sense, it also brings to the forefront one of the things that most bothers me about this industry. There is no downtime. Indeed there cannot be any downtime. Which makes for a rather stressful work environment because even with a very robust action plan to provide continuous uptime, there are always times when something will go wrong that wasn't accounted for. And even a very fluid plan can be stressful to put into action. Depending on the number of people affected, even a 5 minute outage can be disastrous and have stakeholders and upper management breathing down your neck to get things fixed.

It's at times like these (like the 'fires' of this past week *grimace* that I long for a slower paced world where it's not the end of the world if a system goes down or has an error. It's bad, yes, but it's understandable and everyone knows that it will be back when it's back and that everyone is doing all they can to get it back up.

*sigh*

Okie's Amazon Store

OK...so I figured I'd try this thing out and I've set up an initial Amazon Store with some of my faves. It's obviously got a long ways to go if I want to make it truly representative of my tastes and recommendations...but for now, it will give a little taste.

Supposedly, below my typing here there will be a banner/widget containing a random selection of stuff from "my store" or you can just click here to go to the main landing page.

I don't know if I'll expand this at all...but for now it's a fun experiment and will just be a widget on the side of my blog. Let me know what you think.

Students of the 21st Century

Thanks to Education Stimulation for pointing me at this thought provoking video about students, learning, and teaching in the 21st century.

I'm a little torn on what to do with this information. Having been attending the University now for ~12+ years (yikes, I know), I have definitely seen a paradigm shift even in that short span (short in terms of the world...not in terms of how long it's taken me to get my Bachelor's). Extend that duration to the hundred plus years that our general academic system has been in place, and it becomes readily apparent that there's a disconnect.

Many areas of studies can still be conducted in the same "tried and true" methods of a teacher at the front of the room leading a lecture or class discussion while assigning students to read textbooks and complete essays and other busywork to prove they grasp the concept being taught.

Unfortunately, as is alluded to in the video, the culture today has changed. Students don't want to pour for hours over a hundred pages in a textbook when they can skim the vital information from wikipedia, you tube or some site found with a quick google search. (Granted, this gets into the problem of verifying information found on the Web, but that's a different discussion).

Students may participate in an open discussion in class, but they might get just as much (or more) out of an online discussion held on a message board, blog or even over twitter. (And for another discussion, there have been studies that are showing that the "youth of today" is more comfortable communicating via virtual/online methods as opposed to face-to-face such as in a classroom)

Many/most of the degrees having to do with science or technology are found in an especially difficult position. The world of science and technology is changing so quickly that it's difficult to decide what to teach, let alone how to teach it. As a result, many curriculums are just sticking with the "standards" and then letting a few "capstone" classes focus on whatever's most relevant at the time Seniors prepare to graduate. Unfortunately, this means these students may spend 3/4 of their college life learning things that won't matter or will only matter peripherally to the careers they are seeking.


As I mentioned earlier, I'm a bit torn as to what to do with the knowledge that our education system is antiquated and less than relevant in many/most cases. I fully acknowledge that there's a disconnect. This disconnect results in students who are disengaged and less passionate about their studies. These same students may be VERY passionate about the topic they're studying...they just don't have a good way to funnel that passion and access the information that will help them succeed. In the end, that seems to be the heart of the problem...how do we present relevant information in a way that will be engaging to modern students and help them prepare for careers in a world that is changing faster and faster?

Thoughts?