2nd life for a Laptop

No, this has nothing to do with Second Life, the online phenomena and everything to do with re-purposing an old piece of hardware.

I am currently working on several projects that involve team members that work in different parts of the county. I work out of my home office in Atascadero but I spend quite a bit of time meeting with clients and colleagues in the SLO and AG areas. A lot of meetings are held at coffee shops, the home-office worker’s conference room. Silly me, the last time I bought a new computer I put together a rockin’ work station rather than buying myself a laptop. At the time I didn’t really need to travel or work away from my office and opted for the high powered server.

So here I am today in need of a laptop but I don’t want to plunk down any amount of money right now. However I have an old 3rd or 4th hand Dell Inspiron 7500 PentiumIII. Last year I reformatted the hard drive and loaded Windows XP on it – originally it came with WindowsNT or Windows98. I loaded XP because I needed to run a demo application for sales calls and it was all I had. XP loaded and I got it up and running no problem. But I had no apps on it and it ran the demo app very sluggishly.

The laptop sat on a shelf for over a year. It was not quite at door stop status but it was getting close. However I have always advocated that with the advent of web apps and remote admin software any old PC or laptop that can run a current version of a web browser still has life as long as the hard drive holds out. Now I have an opportunity to heed my own advocacy and I am going to resurrect the Inspiron 7500 to help me be mobile as I work on my various projects and spend little or no money in the process.

I followed Roberto Monge’s lead and set up one of my projects on BaseCamphq.com. BaseCamp is a web based project management tool. I am testing out the free version that allows you to work on one project. I am setting up the URL for the project on Google’s business apps and will run my spreadsheet and documents through there along with setting up Gmail on my domain.

Next I loaded Skype on the laptop and plugged my VoIP headset in and made a high quality call without a hitch. Finally I loaded Radmin Viewer on the laptop and set up Radmin server on my PC. Now through the web browser on the laptop I can run any app and access any data on my home server.

Other than the cost of the Radmin Viewer license (which I already had) it took no money for me to turn a rather old laptop into a very usable machine by limiting the software on it to the OS, Internet Explorer, Skype, and Radmin.

With this configuration I can almost divorce myself of a piece of hardware whether it be a PC or laptop. If all my apps and data are online, then all I need is access to machine with a web browser and I have all my tools and resources at my disposal – as long as I have an Internet connection.

Managing the crud via RSS, more like this, search filters, and social networks

I'm often asked "How in the world we are supposed to keep up with the various sources of information out on the net?" Part of the problem and what makes it extremely interesting is that more and more people are starting to blog. This means much more content but according to Sturgeon's Law it means 90% more crud. The key managing this big influx of data from varied sources is to have update notifications (RSS), with search filters (like google alerts), allow others to do the foot work for you (rank, trusted sources that you respect, blogroll, friends, or particular journalists), and finally a system that learns your preferences (ala amazon's more like this). I haven't seen a system that really helps you manage your data like this in one place. I use a combination of Google Alerts, my Google Reader, ims from friends, email links, del.icio.us for this but it is lacking the coherence of one system and it's missing the more like this and trusted network ranking. It looks like a few products are in beta to provide a service that might meet my criteria. Streamy looks very interesting

Check out the YouTube ad:



Here is the review article
http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9743458-2.html

Office 2.0 Conference videos

In my Web 2.0 and Beyond Talk I talked about how Web 2.0 was influencing the enterprise. The Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco last week was dedicated to this topic. They chose to use one of my favorite collaboration suites to run the conference. Clearspace X was used by the speakers and attendees to post documents, general meeting discussions and for displaying videos. Check out the site and especially some of the videos here

Office 2.0 Live Broadcast

If you have a small business and are thinking about expanding your internal office suites you should check out some of the products.

Opening Pandora’s Music Box

It seems I am on my computer way too much; such is life for a high tech entrepreneur, the modern day office worker, or just a plain old geek. I login first thing in the morning and logout the last thing at night. I use my computer for work, personal communications, finances, and entertainment. The family television set has been put in the closet and we don’t have a stereo system hooked up in the house. My computer and my wife’s laptop have replaced television and radio. The 22” Wide Screen monitor I treated myself to - much to my wife’s displeasure - is now one of the smartest purchases I have made lately but I “really should have gotten the bigger one”.

My family relies on NetFlix, Comedy Central, and a variety of video content sites for our audio/visual experience. For music I have a dedicated hard drive with ripped CD’s and purchased downloaded music. I can queue up quite a bit of music – but I am limited to the music I own. When I am focused on work I want music to suit my mood without having to think about it. Rather than sorting through my collection and making a play list, I want to have mood or setting based selection of music like radio but with a focus on my musical tastes and preferences and without commercial and DJ interruptions.

Of all the online music listening options available the one I use the most; the one I have set as a “home page tab” in IE7; the one that keeps me from closing my web browser is online music broadcaster Pandora® (http://www.pandora.com/). The folks at Pandora® and The Music Genome Project® have put together a rich music portal that blends radio and social networking with an emphasis on delivering songs I want (and many I didn’t know I wanted) to my desktop. No commercials – no interruptions. Like radio I can select Stations to listen to based on tastes. As with the social networks I can share my Stations with other listeners and look for people with similar tastes in music.

I can’t describe what Pandora is any better than the people at Pandora, so here is the FAQ from their site:

Q: What is Pandora?

Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help you enjoy music you already know, and to help you discover new music you'll love.
It's powered by the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken, the Music Genome Project: a crazy project started back in early 2000 to capture the complex musical DNA of songs using a large team of highly-trained musicians.
Just tell us one of your favorite songs or artists and we'll launch a streaming station to explore that part of the musical universe.”

“complex musical DNA” is an accurate description in trying define tastes in music. There is a great deal of information that we process to define our likes and dislikes for most anything in life. Music has many facets as do moods. For Pandora to have the intelligence to cross reference a massive database of music, tastes, and preferences and find songs that I will probably like is pretty cool. After experiencing the day-in-day-out use of the site I swear it alters mood based on the time of day. Melodic and instrumental in the morning and a little more up tempo in the afternoon. It also pushes my musical boundaries by testing the waters with different artists. I can tell Pandora what I like, what I don’t like, and it will respond accordingly.

What’s really cool about the service is I have found many artists I would not have found otherwise. I am learning about musicians and bands from years ago that I never came across as well as new artists breaking onto the music scene. With a click I can read a bio of the artist, see a catalog of their work, and hear samples of their music. If I like what I hear there are convenient links to Amazon and iTunes. I have purchased more music this year than in the last two years combined and my Amazon Wish List keeps growing. Pandora is the ultimate online music station and store.

When I first came upon Pandora in February of this year I was hooked instantly. By searching for a favorite Artist or Song I want to hear I have started my first Station. For the ease of use and the great user experience I was willing to pay up to $10 per month for the service. Upon reading the FAQ’s I found out it was only $36 per year without advertising and with additional benefits. My initial thought was “Why pay, I’ll never see the ads. The music will just play in the back ground.” Wrong.

Why am I wrong about not seeing the advertising? Because I am drawn back to the site by curiosity – I want to know more about the artist or I want to rate the song. I keep going back and in the process my mind is being imprinted by very well done ads whether I like it or not. I tend to block out quite a bit of marketing and advertising, but the nature of this site causes a very high imprint rate which is what the advertisers want. After six months of daily eyeball hits to the site I can recall the names of their top advertisers.

I still haven’t forked over the $36 and I’d like to think it is probably better for the company if I don’t. Pandora’s effectiveness imprinting ads in my mind should create very high demand for their web real estate while at the same time delivering a very high quality online music service. IMHO the folks at Pandora have created high standards and value for delivery of music and advertising in a Web 2.0 environment. When you open this Pandora’s Box a world of music escapes and engulfs you.

by Fred H. Dyste

Meeting: Second Life - User-created Content - Social Networks

Paca Nathan from HeadCase labs gave a great talk at softec last week about Social Networks focusing on Second Life and Facebook. One great point he made was that we are in a good physical location to take advantage of the collaboration between Silicon Valley and Hollywood in the emerging 3D social media and machinima space. These social 3D worlds are being designed by architects, scripted by programmers and animated by artist. He though that Cal Poly has a unique advantage to be a leader in Virtual Worlds because of their strong Architecture and CS departments.

If you missed the meeting you can watch the video here:



Paco has also posted his slides, notes and links on the HeadCase blog.

Pictures as usual are up on the softec photo gallery.

Serious Fun Games

I'm an mechanical engineer by training and I used to spend hundreds of hours simulating load on virtual mechanical parts using finite element analysis. It was great I could try various permutations of length, width, tapers etc to optimize the load bearing capacity of the part and minimize the amount of material needed. I didn't have to build 50 different parts and test them in a lab. I learned many things in the simulations and after a while I intuitively knew where to start and was able to optimize the parts in 2 or 3 passes.

That's the power of games, you can simulate complex (economic, organizational, etc) models and have real humans run through the system to test your designs . We can tap massive player pools we can leverage the collective actions to understand if the models work or don't work. As we send new people through these models they can walk out with a better understanding of the whole system. Another advantage games provide over just learning from life experience is that we can do time compression in games. What if we make a simulation of our projected human population growths and current resource consumption patterns and have it run a 10X speed in Second Life. That would have an impact on the players, how would they react, how would the work together to solve this collective problem?

I've always been interested in social and political editorial in the media (e.g The Simpsons, South Park, The Daily Show and Colbert Report). Often humor is the best tool for analyzing our society and politics. Historically Lampoon cartoons have been a very effective political tool. How about games with some of these models and a political/social editorial edge?

I think Serious Fun Games is an untapped market and could help us understand our systems better.

Ian Bogost (of Persuasive Games) wants to

harness interactive entertainment for more than just tooling around in fantasy la-la land. Let the wonks have their Civ 4s and Age of Empires 3s, but why not also casual games that make engaging everything from food inspection to oil economics more...well, frankly more entertaining.

Check out his interview on the Colbert Report:



The rest of the article is here:

Game On Ian Bogost Dished on The Colbert Report

I'm pretty jazzed about what Georgia Institute of Technology Assistant Professor Ian Bogost is up to these days with his Persuasive Games consulting/development project (see my review of Food Import Folly). Okay, you pick up his latest book (also called Persuasive Games) and it's still a little heavy with the theory (though it does drop most of the unnecessary in-crowd jargon that plagued his prior uber-treatise, Unit Operations). But its hook? Fascinating. Bogost wants to harness interactive entertainment for more than just tooling around in fantasy la-la land. Let the wonks have their Civ 4s and Age of Empires 3s, but why not also casual games that make engaging everything from food inspection to oil economics more...well, frankly more entertaining. Get over your Puritan-esque pleasure-guilt -- having fun while learning is hardly "entertaining yourself to death," (where studying socio-politically irrelevant nobodies like Paris Hilton, on the other hand, is). How about a game that deals with China's treasury bond threats against the U.S. dollar? The international political and economic factors post-global catastrophe in terms of responsibility, cooperation, bureaucracy, and aid management? Cultural collisions (and compromises) when global economies collide?

Powered by ScribeFire.

June Meeting: End-to-End Software Integration and Implementation

Justin Couto was the presenter at last night's softec meeting. He had a record 3 projectors for his presentation. He walked through how a business would go about deciding whether to hire a custom solution provider. One of the key decision points was if a business had very repetitive tasks that could be programmed. He suggested that businesses should think of a custom software solution as a "Software Employee".

He also gave a great demo of an on going project his company created for Spalding Labs, a Beneficial Insect provider. The application was very impressive in the scope of the overall system systems (online orders, fullfilment, billing, VOIP CSR, shipping systems, weather systems, CRM,...etc) and depth of custom features (marketing code tied to call numbers, call logs tied to customer records, google maps integration). My favorite feature was the weather systems integration to help dynamically predict when customers would need to purchase more or less insects. The UI and usability of the system showed the love that Couto Solutions puts into their work.

If you missed the presentation check it out video here:

Some pictures from the last couple of softec events

Softec dinners happen the last Wednesday of every month and are usually held at Pelican Point Restaurant in Shell Beach.

Here are a few pictures from the last couple of events (it's an album so click on the first image to see more images):

softec

Web 2.0 and Beyond Softec talk

Thanks the fifty or so of you that came out last night for my "Web 2.0 and beyond" talk. I really enjoyed meeting everyone and I hope to see you at future softec events. We had some technical difficulties with the video capture so I can't upload the presentation video but I've uploaded my presentation slides to:

The softec website: softec-web20.ppt

There was much interest about that Web 2.0 video so I'll embed it here:

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us



If you feel like you understand the fundamentals of Web 2.0 this is a funny video to test your skills Super Market 2.0

.NET user group for the greater San Luis Obispo area and Central Coast of California.

Justin Couto has informed us of a .NET user group that meets every 2nd Tuesday of the month. Everyone is encouraged to attend, including those who are new to the .NET world.

Check out their website at http://www.slodotnet.org/. If you would like to present at or sponsor one of their meetings, please contact the administrator at info@slodotnet.org for more information.

Bill Moyers "The Net at Risk"

Bill Moyers has a website dedicated to issues in America. He picked three topics and one of them is a technology related topic. The Net at Risk series delves into the importance of the Net on our society.

COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS
"The Net @ Risk" takes viewers to Lafayette, Louisiana, where residents and officials took on their phone company, BellSouth, and their cable company, Cox Communications, and built their own high-speed fiber network after the firms refused to bring true broadband connections to their community. Both telcom giants lobbied the state legislature to block Lafayette's plan, citing unfair competition. Ultimately, lawmakers put it to a vote to let residents decide. The measure allowing the community-built network passed overwhelmingly. BellSouth then filed suit, delaying construction by more than a year, before losing their case in court.

The Community Connections section resonates with Ken Dozier's presentation (skip to slide 31) at the Softec Symposium. Ken talked about a small community that decided to bring fiber to their homes as a community project. Bill Moyers also highlights a small town that decided to take on broadbad access as a public utility. He talks about how the economic and political vitality of small towns is greatly affected by their broadband penetration. Thomas Friedman in the "World is Flat" also talks about how we are far behind in our Broadband penetration compared to the rest of the industrialized world and how this will affect our competitiveness in the information age. As a remote technology worker this issue hits home. My ability to work effectively is directly proportional to by bandwidth (both down and up). I'm also in the gaming industry and it's amazing to see the breakthough's in the Korean and Japanese markets due to broadband and wireless penetration.

Should the Information Super Highway be a public utility like the commerce highways are? What role if any should associations like softec play in bringing up these topics into the local politics?

Events and Meetings in Google Calendar

All of us struggle with keeping up with the constant barrage of events in the local community that we'd like to attend. Getting this information into our calendars usually means subscribing to mailing lists or visiting each site individually and adding the events by hand into your calendar of choice. For those of you that use Google calendar or any iCal compliant calendar app we have good news. We've created a Softec Event Calendar

Just click on the subscribe link to add it to your Google calendar or to add it to your calendar application. If you use Google Calendar you also have the option to have it send you sms messages 10 minutes before each event. That's come in handy when I'm not in front of my computer quite a few times.

Enjoy

New Years Resolution Board Meeting

We met to discuss the goals for the year to review the past year and to define a strategy for this year. It was a bit like deciding on a New Year's resolution list. We covered many of the organizational favorites like:

• Plan better
• Follow through on tasks
• Increase attendance
• Clarify our Mission
• Focus on above Mission

One of the hotly debated topics was "Who is the target audience?". A couple freshmen in the group complained about a lack of Technical focus because of the expectation they had of an association called Softec. Others warned that if was too technical most of the audience would be lost. The applied technology focus seemed to garner the most nods.

Some of the takeaways were:

• Networking and building of local Social Capital is still the most important item. The monthly meetings are the key to this. We should focus on getting good content and marketing each event.
• The business registry and allowing more visibility into the community members would be helpful. LinkedIn has a group interface that would help community members visualize the network http://www.linkedin.com/static?key=groups_guidelines and could spark more networking. We could put an invitation to the group in the mailing list or on the website.
• We should spread out the work to presentors and across board members and down to willing general members. Maybe giving the community more power would help bring out those aspiring technical writers.
• Professional development is in high demand and local tech business owners are more likely to encourage their employees to join if they feel their employees will be educated.
• We need more content on the website but who has the time to manage it. The first oppurtunity could be to just leveraging the presentation content and capturing the output (short summary, slideshow, and maybe even a video capture). Also using more community driven concepts like Blogs and wikis could spread the load around to those who are passionate enough to want to write about local tech issues.

Here is Mind Map of what softec could mean