March 15, 2010 by Joel.

I just left a meeting, and in the post-meeting discussions, I was talking with a colleague about computer security. I wanted to write this down, as I’m getting more passionate about limited functionality, walled garden devices.

I wear the hat (among many others) of managing the UNCG information security office, and I’ve seen the challenges we’ve had coping with the deluge of new threats and system problems of the last couple of months. It’s not just here, but a part of a larger phenomenon. I am much less sanguine, day by day, that we can protect the “organizational” (corporate, university, etc.) general purpose computing device at scale. Sure, you can do a decent job protecting some, but it’s very labor intensive and takes a lot of user education. I talked with my colleague about thin-client solutions being our likely future, and I think that this is true. Now, on to some more radical thinking. I believe we’re seeing the beginning of the end of the general purpose device as the standard end-user tool. As I walked back to my office, I was reflecting on my recent iPad order, and I believe that such devices (the iPad won’t be perfect, but it’s a great example of the class of device I’m describing) are what we’ll be using. Reasonably extensible via easy-to-install applications, and applications vetted by a central entity. Reasonably flexible in what you can do, but very hard to shoot yourself in the metaphorical foot. I believe in net neutrality, and I believe in the need for general purpose devices, but not for everyone. They are complicated, a lot of work to maintain and patch, and far too easy to compromise.

The future is with thin client/tightly managed desktops in business, where it harkens back to my old mainframe terminal days, and for personal computing, cloud-based services accessed via a walled garden appliance. Think about it. It’s coming…

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January 12, 2010 by Joel.

OK, so it’s already January 12th…it’s still early in the new year! 2010 is off to a good start. We’ve got both kids back out of the house again, off at their respective schools, so peace and quiet reigns. I’ve been trying to keep on top of communications and planning for my new BSA role as District Chairman. I think that the key is to do what I need to do right when I think of it; if I let it sit, too much time will pass and I’ll also stand a better chance of dropping a ball. Electronic communication will be important, and I plan to try to use Skype for conference calls, and also leverage either the current Yahoo site or a Google group. We’ll also make use of collaborative editing with Google Docs. I’m gearing up to teach at UNC-CH again this semester in my role as an adjunct in SILS. Last semester was the first time in 10 years I’ve not taught a class, and I feel energized to do it; it’s been good to take the time off. I’m working on getting my vacation schedule set up and coordinated with my colleagues at UNCG. I want to be sure that I get some time for shad fishing in March, Bassclave in June or July, and beach time in August. Time flies, and the cold weather we’ve been having will be gone soon, and the fish will be biting. I do plan to try for some trout in early February. There’s a local pond/lake that gets a trout stocking during the winter. I’ll be giving that a try this year. What’s that whooshing sound? Time rushing by

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March 18, 2009 by Joel.

Time for a technology posting! A dearth of meetings on my calendar today gave me a chance to catch up, and then to go and read some of my favorite RSS feeds and troll for some useful perspectives on where computing is heading. I’m more and more convinced that the SaaS (software as a service) industry is going to make it this time (unlike the first Internet boom of the late 1990’s). Physical infrastructure is more robust, connectivity is better, and application architectures are much more sophisticated and capable. One thing that caught my eye today was a cloud computing blog posting that referenced a great article on Cloud-Based Memory Architectures. I think that this is really where things have been headed for a while, we just didn’t realize it. Need performance? Big disk arrays with more cache. Hold indexes in memory. Are you I/O bound in your app? Odds are, yes…I’ve seen that time and time again, even when I thought from looking at the system performance tools that I was not I/O bound. Anyway, the article referenced above is a great set of thoughts and links on this subject. It’s a long read, but if you are interested in application architectures, it’s worth it.

How do I see this trend affecting computing at organizations like mine, UNCG? I think that we’ll see more applications moved to the cloud, not just for cost savings in hardware and support staff, but for performance. With big pipes we can consolidate in ways that leverage business/organizational scalability, and by moving to applications where the canonical copy of the data is in memory, not disk, we’ll gain substantial performance benefits. We need to be prepared to continue to move applications away from our own machine rooms. As this develops, though, it will be interested to see how issues surrounding security and backup will be handled…

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March 2, 2009 by Joel.

One nice thing about snow in North Carolina…things tend to shut down for a day or so when it snows. Yesterday, it poured rain all day, but changed over to snow about 10PM and dropped 3 or 4 inches of fluffy powder here in Chapel Hill. Got out for a walk with the dogs, the woods were quiet and still. I’m at home today enjoying a “snow day” as UNCG is closed for the day (more snow west of here in the Greensboro area) and we have a nice approach to adverse weather. If the University is closed, then faculty and staff and students stay home; staff don’t have to make up time. Think I’ll go grab a cup of tea!

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December 5, 2008 by Joel.

I’m at NCREN Community Day today. This annual event brings together the NCREN stakeholders and network users, which now includes the entire K20 community in North Carolina. It’s encouraging to see participation from the K12 community and the emphasis on bringing value to K12, leveraging the information resources of the traditional University community community to holistically improve education in the state.

One of the biggest values is the human networking, and the opportunity to talk with colleagues across the state. While we have a similar event for the University of NC system (UNC CAUSE), Community Day brings in representation from the K12, Community College and state government sectors. National research networks such as Internet2 are also represented. The opportunity to talk and synchronize with this extended community is a key to the importance of this event. Already I’ve had several productive conversations and have another scheduled for lunch.

Of course I did have a chance to also talk with my colleagues about boating and fishing

Now, back to the meeting…

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November 19, 2008 by Joel.

Well, my wife has been successful in passing along her cold to me…fortunately, I waited until this afternoon until UNC CAUSE 2008 was over to crash! UNC CAUSE is:

“… an organization composed of the management and staff of the information technology based unity of the 16 campuses of the University of North Carolina. The organization exists for the purpose of promoting and facilitating cooperation, information exchange and technology leverage between the campuses of the UNC System in all areas related to information technology. The activities of this group are recognized, supported and participated in by the UNC General Administration.”

This year it was the turn of 5 schools in the UNC System “central region” to host the conference. I was asked to chair the planning team. We booked the site a year ago. I recruited staff, and we started meeting in the late winter of 2008, planning logistics, program, social events, etc. This year’s event went very well; we had ~350 attendees, plus over 30 vendor corporations as sponsors, with over 100 staff attending as well. Kudos to my great planning team, including representatives from NCCU, NCA&T, UNC-Pembroke, UNC-Chapel Hill, and my institution, UNC-Greensboro.

We had 18 vendor presentations, about 60 campus presentations and numerous Birds-of-a-Feather sessions.

Whew! Now, back to the office tomorrow and try to catch up (assuming I can stop hacking and sneezing).

Posted in UNC-G, Technology | 1 Comment »

February 6, 2008 by Joel.

Discussions at the office re: security cameras (due to some thefts of computers from labs, etc.) got me to thinking about webcams, video motion detectors, and so forth. Not as a solution to the problem (that’s outside my area), but from more of a “that’s a good idea, there oughtta be a way” perspective. It seemed to me that there ought to be some easy-to-use software that took advantage of the cameras built into today’s Macintosh platform (my computer of choice!). I went looking and quickly came up with a link to EvoCam. This is a nice piece of software (yes, I did pay my $25). Tons of options & features, for logging, for publishing to web sites, for emailing pictures, etc. Easy to use. I did have to think about about how to configure the SMTP service for port 587 (no config box for that, just use something like “your.smtpserver.com:587″). I tried to use it with the Google SMTP service, but that uses SSL and Evocam doesn’t support that. I sent an email to the Evocam support address and had a response back in minutes. I just used another SMTP service.

As a test, I’ve put up a page that takes a picture of me in my office every five minutes. Not very exciting but I’ve gotta remember not to pick my nose now!

This should work when my laptop is docked and I’m in my office at UNCG, but obviously won’t when I’m away. I don’t think it will work transparently with the laptop’s built-in iSight, since I’ve got it configured for the external iSight that sits on my Apple Cinema Display.

I took the very easy way out and hosted it on dotmac, since I could just tell Evocam to save the picture on the directory that’s exposed to the web. Could have done it on another server from my “jdunns.com” domain and used FTP, but this was the simplest way to go…

Posted in UNC-G, Technology | 2 Comments »

December 23, 2007 by Joel.

Glad to have some time off! I don’t have to be back at work at UNCG until January 2nd; am looking forward to some time off to recharge. Family holiday stuff early in the week, and then taking the scouts on a winter backpacking trip in the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. We’ll hike the northern section of the park, from Thornton Gap to US522 near Front Royal. It’s about 30 miles; we’ll spend 3 nights on the trail, getting back on New Year’s Eve…

Look for some pictures in a couple of weeks!

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November 9, 2007 by Joel.

So, decided to get my wife to drive on the college visit trip (see previous post), so I could work some on a strategic planning document I need to get some traction on…

While I was riding, I thought I’d check my email, since I’ve got my blackberry 8830 configured as a tethered modem with my MacBook. However, it would not connect. I was reduced to paying $9.95 for connectivity at the hotel

However, with my “fine” ethernet connectivity (packet loss, jitter, etc.), I decided to see if I could figure out the problem with my bluetooth modem. It would connect and immediately drop. I’d just last weekend upgraded to Leopard, and figured that must be the problem. Did some web searches and didn’t find anything relevant. So, I changed the modem settings to something that shouldn’t have worked, and it didn’t. Then, changed back to the original settings. Damn thing works perfectly now. Go figure.

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October 26, 2007 by Joel.

I’m posting this from Seattle, where I’m attending the Educause conference. Internet response is somewhat turgid, since I’m using my Blackberry for a modem (but it’s still pretty cool that I’m able to do that, with a Bluetooth connection to the device while it sits over on the other side of the room). This has been a good conference. The sessions have been pretty interesting, and the “side meetings” have been especially fruitful. It’s ironic, but I’ve had great conversations with my colleagues from 7 of the other UNC System schools. We had to go 3000 miles to get together, but there is a lot of value in what we’ve discussed.

I leave tomorrow to head home. I wish I’d had some extra time to explore the area, as this is the first time I’ve been to Seattle. There truly is a Starbucks on every corner here ;-).

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