So what is Technology Plumbing?

As I entered the second calendar year of publishing this blog, I thought it would make sense to explain the meaning of the blogs "Technology Plumbing" name.

The name actually came out of my corporate job world where we used to joke that we needed to get all of the plumbers on the phone at the same to help deal with technology operational issues and problems.

We call technology operations staffers "plumbers" because they deal with the various pieces of infrastructure and how they connect to each other. For example PCs are connected via wires (or wirelessly) to a local area network via switches. Applications run on a servers which are connected to local area networks which provide access to database servers and deliver data to end user PCs and so on. So a technology infrastructure is similar to a plumbing system that delivers water to a faucet.

So "Technology Plumbing" evolved into a term meaning connected infrastructure that can deliver technology solutions and the "plumbing" keep it all flowing. When the data stopped flowing the "plumbers" got together and cleared the drain.

So with that as background we started the Technology Plumbing blog to talk about how individuals and small / medium business could leverage technology and its corresponding business value, like the big corporations do.

Speaking of technology knowledge, in addition to blog posts, I also post updates (including links to these posts) to the Technology Plumbing Twitter page. Earlier today I tweated some security tips that you might want to review.

Using one of my favorite tools, TweetDeck, my tweats are also posted to the Technology Plumbing Facebook page. So feel free to become a Fan of the page, if that is the way you like to consume your news updates.

Finally, for the Kindle fans out there, you can subscribe to the Technology Plumbing blog for your Kindle and take this blog with you where ever your Kindle goes.

Whatever way you consume your news, Technology Plumbing will be there to pass on technology tips, new product information as well as ideas and trends in the industry to help with your personal or business life. Good luck to all in 2010!

Happy New Year ... Here are some technology ideas for 2010

As people around the globe ring in 2010, the Technology Plumbing team wishes everyone a happy and prosperous new year.

To help get the new year off to a good technology start here are some technology thoughts to ponder:

While the ebook wars heat up, Amazon has quietly provided a software upgrade (version 2.3) for its Kindle readers. While not earth shattering, they do provide a few key improvements as noted below. Click here for Amazon's official description of the changes. It should be noted that the rollout to at least my Kindle was slower then I was willing to wait, so I manually upgraded my Kindle by following the directions specified here.

Key changes:

1. Native handling of PDF files. When I had originally sent myself a PDF file to read on my Kindle it never did show up and there were several steps that had to take place in order to actually read it. With the upgrade, just email the PDF file to your Kindle's email address and a minute later it just shows up, ready for you to read it. This will be quite nice if you need to take business documents on the plane with you to review without having to get the paper documents out (not to mention potentially saving the printing of the document in the first place) or firing up your PC on today's over crowded planes. I won't go into the security issues in this posting, so please no flame mail from the security folks.
2. Longer battery life for Kindle (Global Wireless): You can now read for up to 1 week on a single charge with wireless on. Turn wireless off and read for up to 2 weeks.
3. Manual screen rotation: The Kindle screen can now manually rotate between portrait and landscape views so you can see the entire width of a web page or magnify the page of a PDF file. The page-turn buttons work the same in either orientation, and the 5-way controller movements are switched to match the orientation. Click on the "Aa" key at the bottom of the keyboard to bring up the options.

Intouch Products has come out with an interesting product that competes in the premium digital picture frame market that HP is attempting to market to with its DreamScreen product that I mentioned back in November. Both seem to suffer from 1st generation issues, but it will be interesting to see if they are able to sell to the early adopters while finding ways to add in the missing functionality from the early versions.

Forbes Magazine, not exactly the home of technology, had an interesting sidebar to compare and contrast "virtulization" vs. "the cloud". While technologists are still arguing about the details and the directions of these two technologies, Forbes boils it down this simple premise that I think most people can understand and work with: You virtualize hardware and run your software in the cloud.

• This means that utilizing virtulization products from vendors like VMware you can run multiple virtual servers (or PCs) on large physical servers and users and applications will think they have multiple servers or PCs at their disposal.
  
• This works by leveraging the fact that most technology only uses the physical resources for short periods of time and thus they can be shared.
  
• On the other hand software not hosted directly on your PC (I am using the term PC in general, meaning your personal computer of choice, Windows, Mac, Linux, etc) is hosted by your business, at your data center, or by a third party provider. As these hosting environments are abstracted further and further from a users computer it is said to be hosted in a cloud.
  
• The concept here is that the cloud, if properly done, is made up of many servers in multiple locations protecting users from failures in the infrastructure running the software and driving down and spreading out the cost of the infrastructure.
  
• Given these definitions of virtulization and clouds it becomes easier to think about the various permutations that can occur based on your specific needs and structure. Consider in the extreme you can run cloud applications such as Google's Gmail or Sales Force on a virtual PC running on a thin, inexpensive client.
  

US Air's current magazine has excerpts from Dov Seidman's latest book titled HOW: Why HOW We Do Everything ... in Business (and in Life) , which focuses not on what to do but making sure whatever we do, we do it the right way. In other words, it is the HOW, not the WHAT that matters. After reading the excerpts, I have downloaded the entire book to my Kindle hoping to find better ways of doing things in 2010.

• I have to point out that on the page facing the start of the excerpt Amazon had placed an ad for the Kindle. While the ad featured a different book, the connection was quite clear. Read this excerpt and if you like it, download the book to your Kindle.

As you finish up your various holiday festivities, hopefully you will find some interesting (calorie free) food for thought in this blog post and will come back and read my 2010 posts.

Until then, happy new year!

A real world example - Setting up a new PC

Last week I wrote a post about the steps you should follow in setting up that new PC you got for the holidays. Now I am back with a real world example as I have just returned from setting up a new PC for a family member.

The mission was to setup a new Windows 7 (64-bit) HP Desktop and bring over all of the good parts (without the "bad parts") from a 5 year old Compaq desktop and after 2 days of work we can say that the mission was accomplished. To guide the process we created a checklist of items that combined the best practices of setting up a new PC along with an inventory of the old PC's applications, data and functions to help ensure all applicable parts were migrated.

Here are the milestones and notes from the project.

• Make or create restore disks. While the HP PC did not come with restore disks, the Windows 7 O/S on the PC did have a nice utility that easily walked me through the process and the I created the 3 restore DVDs along with a recovery disk (that Windows 7 also walked me through). I even got to take advantage to the built in Lightscribe functionality to label each of the disks appropriately. In terms of Lightscribe, while this was my first hands-on experience with it, it was easy to use, but the results were just OK, compared to putting a real label on the disks or writing on them with disk markers.
  
• Update your PC. It was interesting that not once during the setup did Windows 7 ask me to install any updates, but since this was a significant item on my checklist, I navigated to to Windows Update and forced it to apply all of the O/S updates and patches, which took place without an issue.
  
• Setup your anti-virus application. The HP PC came with a 6 month trial of Norton's anti-virus which we chose to activate and subscribe to vs. transferring the license from the AVG product we were using on the old PC. This decision was based on two reasons: 1) The AVG website made it very difficult to figure out how to transfer the license and 2) my past experience with uninstalling AV packages tells me it is usual a messy affair and I didn't want to have remnants of Norton hanging around and causing issues. While we kept Norton, taking advantage of the 28% discount they were offering based on the new PC purchase was not well done. We followed the instructions on the enclosed paperwork, but it was very unclear if we were really getting a discount as there was no displaying of the base price or a discount amount. Going directly to the Norton site didn't help as identifying and comparing the products proved to be difficult at best. At the end of the day we went with the simplest method to ensue a good initial experience and less issues down the road. In my book Norton is a fine product, but their marketing process leaves something to be desired.
  
• Move or install your software. This was a time consuming but straight forward process thanks to having the various CDs or access to the appropriate web sites. What we did experience was some of the Windows 7 incompatibilities as we were moving from 32-bit Windows XP to 64-bit Windows 7. The net result was we were not able to install the existing web camera, the film scanner or the Palm Tungsten EX synchronization software. The web camera and file scanner vendors had not created 64-bit drivers and the Windows 7 generic drivers would not work with these devices. Palm did have an updated Palm desktop product that works with Windows 7, but for some strange reason no longer supports USB synchronization with a 64-bit O/S. Palm will work via Bluetooth synchronization, but the new HP PC did not have built in Bluetooth capabilities and finding a Bluetooth adapter that works with Windows 7 was beyond what we could find in the local stores.
  
• Install the common plug-ins and utility software. Installed Adobe's PDF Reader, the Firefox browser, Thunderbird mail client (the newly released version 3 is very nice), RoboForm for password management, Xmarks for bookmark management, Picasa for photo management, YammerFox for managing our families Yammer site, Microsoft's SynchToy for data synchronization (more about this in the backup bullet) and Dell's DataSafe client for off-site data backup.
  
• Develop a backup strategy. As noted above, we installed SynchToy, which copies all of the changed data files from the HP's hard drive to an attached USB drive every night by leveraging both SynchToy and its simple integration with Windows Scheduler. In addition we setup a scheduled Windows Backup process that every Sunday creates a full Windows backup on the attached USB drive. In terms of off-site backups, we configured Dell's DataSafe client to copy all changed data files to Dell's storage cloud every night.
• Remove the "bloatware" that comes with many PCs. In terms of new PCs, there wasn't too much bloatware, but we removed it as we found it.
• Register your PC with the vendor. HP made this process as simple as possible.
• Synchronize your browser favorites. As noted above, we installed Xmarks on the old PC and copied its bookmarks to the Xmarks repository. Once we installed Xmarks on the new PC and signed in, all of old bookmarks become part of the new PC's bookmarks. While you can move bookmarks without a tool like Xmarks, using the tool not only moved the bookmarks but keeps the data current in the Xmarks repository giving us another backup of this data.
  

Hopefully this real world example will help you in setting up your or your friends / families new PCs, but let me know how your experience goes.

In case you missed my post on my travels to do this work here is the link to that story.

One more case of partners not talking to each other

Yesterday I talked about how United and US Air couldn't get their boarding pass formats in sync as I started on United and then picked up a US Air flight to get me to my final destination. Well today, on my return trip, the roles were reversed and I started on US Air and finished on United, but more problems ensued.

Last night, when I tried to check in to my flights via United's website it let me check in to the second leg on United but would not check me in on the first leg via US Air. The message told me to check in for this leg at US Air's website. So if United is first and US Air is second, United can check you into both flights, but forget it if it is the other way.

Trying to get everything done before heading to the airport, I went to the US Air website and tried to check in. It did suggest I could check in to the US Air flight, but then failed to complete the transaction with some sort of undefined error. This forced me to get my US Air boarding pass at the airport, killing the whole point of on-line check-in.

One more rant on US Air / United integration (or lack thereof). When I landed after my US Air flight and checked the screens for the gate for the United flight, my flight was not listed. In its place was a different United flight number (clearly marked as the UA flight number) going to my destination at my scheduled time. I made the assumption that this was my flight and either the flight number was wrong or the flight number had changed and headed for the gate noted. As happened last time, the US Air screen was wrong and when I got to the gate, it was the right gate with the right flight number.

I know the airlines are under tremendous cost pressures, but when you decide to do something you might as well do it right and make the technology work for you and not against you.

Am I being too hard on the airlines? Let me know or share your thoughts on this topic.

Strange technology tales from the road

As my Technology Plumbing readers know, I travel a lot for business, but this week I am traveling for pleasure and visiting family in Florida. While I will talk more about the reason for my trip in a later post, wanted to use this post to talk about some strange technology tales that I have observed this week.

• I flew into the West Palm Beach (PBI) airport, which I have not previously done, and was shocked to be asked to sign the credit card receipt for my $3 charge. Now I know I could have paid cash for this transaction, but one of the allures of credit cards is their convenience. But having the attendant hand me the receipt by itself and ask me to sign it on my lap is just so last decade. O'Hare and most airports I have visited have the swipe and go process down, so time to get it together PBI.
• I booked my flights on United, which got me as far as Washington DC's Reagan airport, before handing me off to US Air for the flight to Florida. When I checked in for the United flight, via the Internet, I received boarding passes for both flights in United's format. This of course worked fine for the United flight, but the US Air gate attendant insisted on taking my entire boarding since there was nothing to tear off (United scans and returns their boarding passes). This left me with no boarding pass as I walked down the jetway. Luckily I recalled my seat assignment and was able to board without incident, but if there had been an issue with seating assignments I would have been in a strange position. If United and US Air can't figure out how to share boarding passes formats, how can we trust them to share much else?
  
• I am Sprint customer for my family's various cell phones and while visiting Florida thought it would make sense to move my family in Florida to Sprint as part of my existing family plan. Since I don't use all of my plan's minutes, and my Florida family doesn't use many minutes each month it seemed like the perfect match. Now here is the problem, Sprint limits the number of phone lines for a single package to 5. I understand they wouldn't want this to be unlimited, but in this case they have passed up the incremental revenue from the 2 new lines and the sale of 2 new phones, not to mention making this long time Sprint customer less then happy. In a competitive situation isn't it better to take some incremental revenue and keeping a long time customer happy then to get nothing and give the customer another reason to look around?

Well hopefully, my trip home won't involve anymore strange technology tales, but while I am traveling home, I will let my readers and these companies ponder these tales and hopefully learn from them.

The Evolution of Digital Camera

Back in Florida this week, which means flights on US Air and an opportunity to read the latest copy of the US Airways Magazine. As I have mentioned before in this blog, I find the US Airways magazine one of the best in the industry.

In this issue, they have a nice article on Samsung's new Geo-Cam (CL65) digital camera. This camera continues the recent trend of convergence in the technology world by adding functions not traditionally associated with cameras to this technology marvel.

In the case of the Geo-Cam, in addition to the traditional functions like taking pictures, it also features Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities allowing this camera to function like the camera functions of many smartphones. This means you can upload directly from the camera to Facebook and other social networks. Some would argue that improving the quality of pictures being posted to Facebook is a double edged sword (more pixels showing you doing potentially stupid things, anyone). You can also use these functions to do "old-fashioned" functions like uploading pictures to your computer and / or network wirelessly.

In addition, it provides Geo-tagging of your pictures by using GPS functionality built into the camera. This means that it will get easier to know where the nice pictures this camera takes where taken.

It will be interesting to watch as cameras gain more smartphone capabilities and smartphone's gain improved camera capabilities to see which platform rules the day. For now, if you are in the market for a digital camera be sure to add the Samsung Geo-Cam to your shortlist.