So you’re a PC tech, and you’re used to being called in to look at problem PC’s under all sorts of circumstances, and you probably have all the SysInternals tools loaded on a thumb drive just for those occasions. Well, what happens when you don’t have it available?

Head over to SysInternals Live and run them from the site! How very useful!

Have you been over there and run them? Let us know what you think!

(h/t to Ed Bott, who you really should be reading too…)

I got to drive a Prius the other day, for the first time. I’ve been curious for a while now about the technology, and about whether it was an easy switch to make.

After driving it for a bit, I’d have to say that, at least in the case of a Prius, it’s not a smooth switch to a hybrid. It really takes some getting used to. In fact, I actually started to get used to the weird feeling like it was stalling whenever you stopped at a red light, and it switched from gas to battery power. I might have even gotten used to just how light it felt as we were driving around and how odd it is to have a park button instead of a park on the gear shift. What I don’t think I’ll ever get used to is just how little power it had! Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a big SUV, V-8 kind of guy. We have two Subaru’s in our family, a Forrester (lightweight SUV) and an Impreza so it’s not like we’re blowing people away with the engine power, but there’s enough there that I can step on it and get up to speed merging on the freeway, or turning out into traffic, as quickly as I need to. I didn’t feel that in the Prius. I felt like I was in danger of getting run down by other vehicles on the road as I put-putted along trying to get up to speed. That’s not a good feeling.

So techies and early adopters, is this a hybrid thing, or just a Prius thing?  Any of you own a hybrid? What are your thoughts? Do you expect the technology to get better and eliminate the lack of power, or are we headed to a future of driving around in golf carts?

One of the sessions I attended last week at ABA Techshow was one that was aimed at helping attorneys and legal staff handle their email better. Since this is something we are going to be trying to help people do, in an effort to cut down on the ridiculous amount of email we store, I went looking for ways to help explain handling email better.

As the session went along, one of the speakers recommended using a second, web-based, email account for non-essential stuff. That way you don’t have mailing lists, newsletter subscriptions, Google News alerts, or other non-essential email keeping you from finding what you need in your Outlook, or interrupting you with a new mail alert. (Although they suggested killing that too, in all fairness.)

Anyhow, that got me thinking. Lots of places block access to web based email as a matter of policy. I began to wonder if unblocking that would put a small dent in the amount of email that our users are storing, and handling? After all, I know there are mailing lists I would rather subscribe to in Gmail, but don’t because I can’t access it at work.  That means, at least in my case, there’s a significant amount of email being handled by our Exchange server, and having to be dealt with somehow, in my Outlook, as opposed to just being over in Gmail, and me looking at it occasionally.

Now, I know the common refrain is that web based email account are a security risk, but is the risk that large, and does blocking access to web mail really mitigate that risk in a significant way? For example, years ago people decided to block it because of the virus risks, but just about all major web mail services do anti-virus scans on any attachments, and even then,  your desktop AV product should scan any attachments when you try to open them. So, to my mind, blocking might decrease the chance of getting a virus attachment slightly compared to depending on these other tools, but doesn’t make that much of a difference.

Now I know that’s hardly the only concern, but it’s just an example. Anyway, what do you think? I know some of you guys block web mail, and I’m sure some of you don’t. I also know almost all of us are struggling with what to do with all that email coming into, and being stored on, our networks and mail servers, so I’m curious about what you all think? Would allowing access put a dent in that, or is it not worth the increased risk?

In the past two days I’ve seen references to three different options for online file storage. Obviously this is a growing industry!

The first two were in the latest issue of Tech Support Alert

1.3 Fifty Gigabytes of Free Online Storage
Most sites offering large quantities of free online storage usually impose strict monthly transfer limits. This one, suggested by subscriber “Greetz:One”, doesn’t seem to. More accurately I couldn’t see any. I gave it a quick whirl and as usual the upload speeds were modest. Also, the desktop client is pretty basic but it does allow you view your online files and to transfer files by drag and drop. OK, the service lacks the fancy backup management features you get with services like Mozy, but if you simply want a lot of online storage space then this site is well worth checking out.
http://adrive.com/home

1.4 More Free Online Storage Options
Subscriber Richard Barnes writes, “Gizmo I saw in January issue you mentioned Amazon S3 online Storage. I use a company called Online Storage Solution [1]. They charge $3 a month for unlimited storage and unlimited downloads. The upload/download method is a bit slow and primitive, but it does the job eventually. I see that they’ve got a special offer at the moment: $20 for a year’s storage. If you’ve got a load of stuff to store, it’s a lot cheaper than Amazon’s S3. I’ve uploaded about 12GB of photos and am now embarking upon uploading my 100GB music collection.”
http://onlinestoragesolution.com

The third mention I saw was today over on Online Tech Tips, about MediaFire, which  offers unlimited storage for free. A business model I have my doubts about, but that I have no experience with to give an opinion one one way or the other.

I have to admit, aside from a few things I keep in Google Docs, my Google Notebook, and my Flickr account. I don’t really store much online, but I am thinking about taking advantage of some of these tools for a nice offsite backup for my files. What have your experiences been?

Today I ran into a problem trying to make copies of a CD full of documents. The copy process in Nero threw me a number of unreadable errors, even trying to copy each folder at a time put me headfirst into a cyclic redundancy check error, which told me all I needed to know about the state of the physical media. Of course, just saying “Sorry it’s not readable” without trying something wasn’t an option, so off to Google I went.

I found a little utility called Recovery Toolbox for CD Free. Once installed, I launched it and had it copy off all the data from the CD. It took a little while, and made some odd noises in the CD drive when it hit the files that resided on the bad sectors of the CD, but it did recovery everything off the CD, which then allowed me to go ahead and make a copy of copies of it.

Can’t complain about a tool that does the job!

My wife got wind of this tool in one of the PR/Marketing newsletters she’s subscribed to. It’s called Qipit, and the idea is that you take a photo of class notes,  a whiteboard, or other document, email it or SMS it to them and get a PDF version of it for your use or to share with others.

My question is, do you see this as a useful tool, or do you corporate security type folks see it as your worst nightmare, someone coming to work and photographing sensitive documents with their phone and being able to easily get them as PDF, completely bypassing all the measures you take to keep them from being emailed outside your organization?

I didn’t know about this feature either. Flickr Guest Pass:

You can share public photos in your photostream by copying the URL in your browser’s address bar and pasting it an email. Anyone can see your public photos anytime, whether they’re a Flickr member or not.

But! If you want to share private photos with people, use a Guest Pass. You can grant anyone access to the entire contents of one of your sets, including any private photos it contains. A Guest Pass is actually just that URL. This means that whoever sees that URL can access the set and all the photos inside it.

Go to the set you want to share and click the “Share this set” button. Then we’ll help you either send an email to friends via Flickr or make a special web address (URL) that you can share.

You can then expire the pass whenever you want to. I had no idea until I saw it on Daring Fireball tonight. I could see myself using it.

Kevin Devin located a site that has links to 4 of the Common Craft “In Plain English” videos. The 4 included on this page are RSS Feeds, Wikis, Social Bookmarking, and Social Networks. These are great ways to introduce the newbies in your life to these technologies, without all the techno mumbo-jumbo.

How about 10 Dirty Little Secrets you Should Know About Working in IT?

Do they sound familiar to you? Personally I think they ring pretty true, although I’m currently an hourly employee so I don’t get the “they own you” quite as much. They tend to not call you off hours too often when they have to pay you extra for it!

But I’ve definitely seen all of these things go on in one organization or another. How about you?

Link via Geek News Central

According to eWeek, many of you IT folks are having second thoughts about your career choices.

“If you ask an IT pro what they think of their chosen career path, a surprising number might pause before giving you a litany of reasons that the technology workplace leaves them feeling unsettled.

They love what they do, but they’re not sure IT is a great place to be doing it anymore. Even worse, they’re not sure that they would encourage their own computer-inclined children to pursue the same line of work.”

Now, personally, I’m not really having second thoughts. On the other hand, I’ve moved out of general IT into a specialized field, Litigation Technology, so maybe I’m not the best person to represent the IT field any longer.

What say you, IT pros? Are you having second thoughts? Would you discourage a geeky kid from pursuing IT as a career?

I was reminded of the need for backups once again today. One of the folks I work for had a hard drive that wouldn’t boot. We dropped it in as a slave to the “clone” machine we use to do bit by bit cloning of drives for e-discovery, and for a little while it seemed like we might be able to get the data from the bad drive over to a good drive. Unfortunately, that process errored out as we went rather quickly from a drive that wouldn’t boot, to a drive that was completely unreadable. Of course, they didn’t have any backups of all those family photos and movies that were stored on the drive.

Now he’s looking at the choice of paying a whole lot of money to someone with the proper tools to try and recover that data from the physical drive or it being gone forever. Not good choices any way you look at it.

It got some of us discussing home backup strategies.  Personally, I keep a backup of all our photos and other important files on an external USB drive, but I’m keenly aware that while that lessens the chances of data loss, it is still possible. Should both drives fail in short order, or if something should cause damage to my home office, I may be in just as much pain as someone with no backups. I’ve been keeping an eye on some other tools to add to the overall backup plan, such as Windows Home Server, and online storage. I’ve also been considering burning the photos to DVD and storing that at the office. I guess you could call Flickr my online storage right now, but only a small percentage of my photos show up there, and they show up in reduced quality from the original. I wouldn’t really want those to be the only photos I wind up with, but I guess it would be better than nothing.

I know there’s some folks out there with similar concerns. What are your backup plans? Any of you using online file storage as part of your backup plan? What has your experience with those services been?  If you had a client who took a lot of photos, maybe a few home movies, etc. what would your recommendation be for their plan?

Let us know, after you go do a backup, of course.

While we’re all having a fit of nostalgia around here, I do have to admit to growing up as what you might call, less than a geek. (I was on the Math Team at one point though!) Actually, I didn’t really have a computer in the house until 1985 or so, an old IBM PC, you remember the kind with dual floppy drives, one to boot the DOS OS and the other for whatever programs you wanted to run? Yeah, no hard drive of any kind.

I never had a Commodore 64, never really took to programming, (they tried to teach us BASIC back in those days in High School, and TurboPascal during my freshman year of college, that’s what they considered being computer literate.) but I do remember countless hours spent loading Frogger and Qbert from floppy disk.
Of course, we had a dual monitor setup,  with a small, something like 9 inch, color CRT for the games. I can remember struggling with the correct DOS commands to load the game so that the output went to the correct screen, and no I don’t have the slightest idea what the command was, which shows my lack of geek cred I guess. That was nothing, of course, to the struggles trying to type up research papers my senior year, and on into my freshman year of college in WordStar. I can’t tell a lie, Wordstar wasn’t actually all that bad a program at all, I was usually able to type up the papers pretty easily, it was printing them that was a huge headache! Keeping the paper from falling off the spool of the dot-matrix printer and getting the page completely misaligned, random page breaks that would cause the printer to page forward in the middle of a page, which inevitably caused the printer to print over top of the perforation between pages, etc. It was like a scene from Office Space, that printer and I going at it, usually late at night when the paper was due in the morning. (Yup, I had killer study habits, and never procrastinated, back in the day….)
I seem to recall that after a few instances like this, I was destined to discover my first technology “workaround”. If I printed the paper one page at a time, instead of trying to print it all at once, I could usually avoid the headaches.

Who knew that 22 years later, I’d be making a living out of finding ways to work around technology?

Earlier today, in a fit of frustration, I decided to delete my Twitter and Jaiku accounts. Why? I was tired of getting “spammed” by my “friends” whenever one of them would post a new blog entry to one or many of their blogs. This “spamming” is a result of a utility called TwitterFeed where any time one posts to ones blog, the RSS feed is updated and TwitterFeed submits a tweet on ones behalf.

What ensued thereafter was a nice conversation, a point/counter-point discussion between myself and Mike McBride on this issue and what is wrong with these social media services and how they are being abused because of their lack of maturity as applications or services. We thought it would be interesting enough to share with everyone else.

If any of you use these services… what are your thoughts?

POINT: Kevin Devin

Silly as it may seem, I just couldn’t take it any longer. The posting to twitter every single blog posting was so redundant that it made me ill. As I mentioned in my conversation on the issue with Dean Jensen, there is NOTHING that I write in any of my blogs that is worthy of my “friends” needing to read, much less know about immediately. Getting the word out is one thing, but to your “friends” it is like preaching to the choir — how effective is it really? It effectively becomes spam at that point. I read blog posts in my RSS reader — I don’t need to be informed of each and every post.

So… since I’m unable to control it on my end, I’ve decided to simply delete my account. Now there is NO WAY that I can get irritated over this silliness. Sure, perhaps I’m throwing out the baby with the bath water, but I don’t think so. I can’t utilize these services at work where I spend most of my time anyway, so my participation was minimal to begin with.

I still have my pownce account… but it may fall victim to the same fate since it requires browser-only access.

I really think these social media tools are simply out of control. Too many “me too” services with one maybe two differentiating features. But all running amok. People be-friending hundreds of people and then using it to pimp themselves. The initial concept of “what are you doing” was cool. But it just seems it now overextends those boundaries and as a result… I don’t care for them anymore.

So… I’ll be available via e-mail or this list, and I’ll be watching my rss reader for things you post to your blogs. I think that is more than sufficient for the level of urgency any of these actions deserve.

COUNTER POINT: Mike McBride

Interesting. I can see your point about not needing to see blog postings, but at the same time, not everyone subscribes to my blogs with an RSS reader. Some people I’m friends with outside the tech world look at my MySpace profile, or other such services and are informed that I’ve posted something by the Twitter applet there. This is especially true of people who read my non-tech blog or are interested in Flickr photos, etc. They simply keep an eye on the Twitter feed, or a place where they can see the applet, to see what I’ve been doing, including what I’ve been posting. Unfortunately, Twitter and the other services don’t really have any way to direct something to the “public face” of my Twitter profile without sending a notification to my friends. That would actually be kind of a nice feature to have.

I like giving people a multitude of ways to keep track of my writing. That’s why there’s a choice of RSS feeds, notification email list, Twitter notifications, etc. It may seem like shameless self-promotion at times, but I’m not running ads or making any money off my sites at all. If I’m promoting anything, it’s making it easier for people to interact with and be part of the community that my sites, including FiT represent. Perhaps, as these tools mature, it’ll be easier to use them to do that, without constantly “pinging” friends with updates they already know about.

POINT: Kevin Devin

OK… so lets expand on that one. Not everyone subscribes to your blog via an RSS reader. So then that means they likely visit the site at their own frequency, no? Does anything you write require an immediate read? Those who look at your MySpace profile… same thing. They’re likely not monitoring an RSS feed, but again, anything requiring an immediate read?

Do you have any numbers of any kind to backup how many additional readers you are getting because of the twitter applet on MySpace? In comparison, how many friends are having to endure the spamming in pursuit of those additional readers? I guess it comes down to, does the end justify the means?

My point is, these services are being misused, IMHO. Sure, that is how things advance. Take podcasting for instance. RSS was not originally meant to carry with it audio enclosures, but with a little misuse of the technology, it became part of standard.

At this point in time, these services need to mature — BADLY. Most of them are having a hell of a time scaling making them somewhat useless to begin with. But what if all of these blog post notifications and pleas for people to go digg their latest blog entry were gone… how many true “what are you doing” messages would be able to get through?

There’s a fine line between “what are you doing” versus “look at what I did.” They are very close, but one is informational, the other is self promotion. I guess its the shameless self-promotion that is eating at me… it always has.

COUNTER POINT: Mike McBride

I don’t have numbers, it hasn’t occurred to me before to track who’s coming from the Twitter page. Of course, there’s no real way of knowing which of these folks might also use an RSS reader and simply see it on Twitter first, so any numbers I could give you wouldn’t necessarily prove anything. I do know people follow the links from Twitter. Not a lot, but some. I also know some people who normally don’t follow the child abuse blog have followed links from Twitter, I assume because the title interested them to take a look. Most of my “friends” on Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce come from the techie side of things, obviously, and most don’t subscribe to anything more than my tech blog RSS feed. Obviously, seeing posts from the other blog causes some of them to click over.

Also, there are some clicks that come from not my Twitter feed, but the “with friends” feed of some of my followers. Obviously, these may very well be people who are not familiar at all with my blog, and are being introduced to it through common Twitter contacts.

Are any of these new “readers” enough to justify, what is obviously considered by you to be, spam? Again, I don’t really know. I don’t really know how many people are that bothered by it as opposed to the number who find it useful either. I haven’t done the survey.

As to your claim that it’s “what are you doing” versus “look what I did”, is there really a difference? If I simply wrote “blogging” as my Twitter entry with no link, would that somehow change your opinion of the message? Which one is more informative, “I’m blogging”, or “I’ve written something about Twitter on my blog and here’s a link”? Is it self-promotion? Maybe a little. On the other hand, if I have an interesting article that I’ve read, wouldn’t the natural inclination be to share that on Twitter with a link, as opposed to simply saying “I’m reading something”? By it’s very nature isn’t something you’ve posted about something you’re interested in sharing? Why would it seem so odd to not only post to your blog, but let people on Twitter know that you have written something longer than 140 characters about it and where they can find it? It may be redundant to people who are already subscribed to that same RSS feed, but most of us have more than one RSS feed (tech blogs, link blogs, non-tech blogs, group blogs, Flickr, photo-blogs, Zoomr, etc.) so many of the things that show up on Twitter aren’t redundant even to RSS subscribers. (Unless of course, someone out there is actually subscribed to each and every RSS feed I produce, in which case I’d like to talk about a restraining order..*L*)

It’s true that none of these things require immediate attention. That’s the thing I like about Twitter compared to IM, the opportunity to put things out to the public and/or my contacts without having to put one person on the spot to respond immediately. It’s a tool to let you know what I’m doing, if I’m eating at a good restaurant, watching a good movie, learning something new, and no one needs to respond right away. If what I’m doing at that time doesn’t interest you, you ignore the tweet. If enough of them don’t interest you, you quit following me. If not enough of anyone’s interest you, I guess you quit using it, as you have. No harm, no foul. Everyone’s got that prerogative.

I think you and I can agree that these services need to mature, fast. I would love to be able to promote the stuff I’m writing without drowning my friends in updates. Pownce has a group feature that could, eventually I think, be used to do exactly that. Unfortunately, they haven’t implemented a way to post to the public, and not notify your friends. They also don’t have a mobile interface, as you pointed out, that is a severe limitation.

I’m hopeful that these services can mature to the point where we’ll all find those new ways to use the technology, on both ends. As a promotion tool, but also with tools to filter out and only receive notifications we choose individually. That’d be nice…

As you may, or may not, know, one of the things we try to do with the Friends in Tech site is highlight not just the techie aspects of our members through their various podcasts and blogs, but also showcase them as regular people as well. People with a variety of interests, hobbies, and projects that are not part of the normal FiT world.

In that regard, over the next few weeks, or months as time allows, we’re going to be putting together some “mashups”. Basically, these are mashed together RSS feeds of other online projects that we are involved in that you can subscribe to and keep track of what the various Friends in Tech members are doing in one place. The first of these is FiT Photography.

FiT Photography was an obvious choice for the first of these projects because so many of us have an interest in photography. Most of us have Flickr or Zoomr accounts, if not a seperate photo blog, to use as part of the mashup, and thus it was just a matter of finding a good mashup tool, and putting them all together.

The tool I used to create the aggregate feed was xFruits. It is a very powerful tool for doing a lot of different things with RSS feeds, I highly recommend checking it out. Then I am routing that finished product through FeedBurner, which gives us even more power to use the feed in a variety of ways, if we decide to, or to gauge what sort of interest there is in the topic, which will help us decide what more we might want to do with it going forward.
Anyway, if you’re interested in subscribing to the feed, you can locate it here:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/FitPhotography

In keeping with the sudden DNS focus of the blog, I saw this article today talking about how social networking sites, specifically MySpace, create such a huge increase in DNS traffic, and bandwidth consumption, that network admins are struggling to keep pace.

How MySpace is Hurting Your Network

I know we’ve had some discussion about MySpace in the forums before, but I’m curious how many of you Network Admins or IT policy guys are starting to deal with this, and what you’re doing? Is the ultimate answer just blocking all social networking sites? Do you think that’s going to be sustainable as more and more tools, including productivity tools, rely on networks like this? Maybe not MySpace so much, but certainly LinkedIn, Facebook and others will become places where your salespeople, for example, are expected to have a presence and interaction.

How do you keep bandwidth usage low, while still maintaining a strong online presence? Discuss.

When I ran across this mention on Download Squad of TestDisk, an open source, cross-platform disk recovery tool, I just knew this was a tool that Friends in Tech readers needed to know about. I can’t say that I’ve tried it out, but it certainly sounds like it could be a very useful tool. Has anyone had any experience with it?

In that same vein, I later stumbled upon the largest list of Sys Admin tools I’ve seen in one place before.  Definitely something worth bookmarking for future reference.

I ran smack dab into the problem with having your critical documents hosted elsewhere last night. Granted, the stuff with Google Docs and Spreadsheets I have stored isn’t vital, or really even important, so when I was greeted with a red “Loading” message, and nothing else, I just went on about my life. But if I was on the road, and a coworker had stored some vital info there for me to look at, that message would not have made me a happy camper.

Ultimately, that is the big hurdle that “software as a service”, or hosted apps is going to have to overcome.  How do I know my data is going to be available when I need it?

Have any of you been using hosted applications as part of your business IT strategy? How are you dealing with this?

I stumbled onto an interesting, and free, tool to turn an Exchange Public Folder into a searchable knowledgebase of tips as I was browsing my feed reader this afternoon, thanks to IT Techno-Babble.

It’s from the folks who sell the Public Folder for Helpdesk product, which is an interesting idea in and of itself, called Outlook Knowledgebase.

Now, obviously, there are some nice features that integrate with the paid Public Folder for Helpdesk product, but even without those, this seems like a no-brainer way to throw together a knowledgebase to share tech tips, have them be searchable, and have it easily accessible to everyone in your organization without the need for maintaining any kind of database or webserver back-end. I might have to send this to our training guru and see if it’s something he wants to look at.

If any readers want to give it a shot, let us know how it goes!

Just saw this mentioned by Marc Orchant, a service called Contactify that makes it easy for even the web novice to create a way for readers to send them an email without having to post an email address on their blog, or learn how to create an email form, etc. You just sign up, they give you a link and you make that your “email” link. Just like this one I created for myself.

So if you are, or know someone, who just wants an easy email form, this doesn’t seem a bad thing to try out. I’ll let you know if I run into any problems with it!

As part of transitioning to my new responsibilities I’ve been spending quite a lot of time reading up on Electronic Discovery best practices. One of the themes that I’ve been seeing over and over again is this idea that anytime there’s impending litigation against a company, you have to immediately get a key IT person involved. Someone who knows the infrastructure, who knows where everything is stored and can testify to that as part of the discovery process. You have to have them implement a “legal hold”, which basically to recycling backup tapes or doing anything else that might destroy data relevant to the litigation as soon as you become aware that it is impending. Again, you need your key IT people to do this properly.
Anyway, not to bore you with too many legal details, (those are now my problem, not yours) but in reading about all the contact needed with key IT folks, both in implementing a hold, and having them present at discovery depositions, I wondered why, if this is a legal best practice, I hadn’t ever heard anyone in the IT community really discuss having been through this sort of scenario? Shouldn’t Sys Admins be familiar with the concept? Isn’t it odd that of all the Sys Admin types I know, I’ve never heard one talk about dealing with electronic discovery from this end of the situation? I’ve heard plenty of folks talk about retention policies, which are part of the whole area, but nothing about how those policies come into play when your company is party to litigation. Are there legal reasons to not discuss it at all, or is it a much less frequent occurrence than my research would lead me to believe?

So, I want to know. Have any of you been involved in a “hold” situation, or had to appear at a deposition to describe what electronic storage is available and can be searched? Leave a comment, tell me about it, and be sure to change names, dates, places, etc. Wouldn’t want any of you to be back dealing with the lawyers again. Even if you’ve never been involved in something like this, tell us what you think about it. Does your organization have good policies in place? Are you aware of what to do if it happens, has anyone identified who the key people are ahead of time? I’m curious to see how these best practices are playing outside the legal community.