Author Archives: lkeyes70

Preparing for FiberFête

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I’m preparing for FiberFête, and in going over my notes from last year’s Freedom2Connect conference, I’m (re) acquainting myself with some of the brilliant players from last year’s conference.

Public Knowledge is a public interest group which concentrates on network neutrality and broadband issues.

The Sunlight Foundation strives for full disclosure and accountability in government.

Fiberevolution Blog

Harold Feld has an exhaustive dissection of the recent Comcast/FCC ruling. Harold’s blog, Tales of the Sausage Factory appears as part of wetmachine.com. (I always wanted to write that.)

Like the Freedom2Connect conferences, FiberFête celebrates municipal broadband systems, as well as fiber to the home (FFTH); i.e. ubiquitous very high speed fiber connections which deliver internet, voice, data, and television to homes, and which enable the same to be delivered from homes. In some parts of the world this is going pretty well, in a lot of others it is not. While many of the presentations and discussions relate to policy and financial aspects of telecommunications, my presentation on home telemedicine highlights an application, which, if fully developed, is expected to play a major role in the transformation of health care and elder care. One of the reasons telemedicine hasn’t taken off as might be expected is that the financial beneficiaries, i.e. those who could save money implementing telemedicine aren’t necessarily the same as the implementers; doctors and hospitals.

The site venue, Lafayette LA, happens to be dedicating its own municipal FTTH network, and the conference is partly a way to celebrate that accomplishment. Lafayette is also hosting a music festival which coincides with the end of the conference.

Last but not least, on the Mac the way to type a circumflex over the ‘e’ in FiberFête is Option-I and then ‘e’.

iPad Ideas

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Trying to decide if the iPad is a deal killer. It doesn’t run Silverlight, Flash, or Java. (Guess who is completing their latest app in Java?)

As might be expected from an Apple blog, the in-depth review of the iPad on Apple Insider is mostly positive, but it also catalogues the problems, omissions and quirks.

iPad seems exciting to the progressive fringe of technical enthusiasts, and confusing and limited to those who hoped to just pack their PC and all if its 1990’s legacy into a screen and just continue dealing with the problems that are at least familiar to them: malicious viruses and spyware; file system spelunking with its potential for unsaved data loss; phone-home authorization of their operating system, and so on.

If Apple had faced any real competition to the iPod, it might be easier to imagine that the iPhone and even the iPad might also meet a credible match within a year or two of their release. Instead, it appears that Apple has defined itself a high end market that will force competitors to work a lot harder in their efforts to deliver similar technology products.

If you have problems with a limited feature set, you’re going to hate iPad. It scrapes the difficult edges off everything derived from the desktop. Pages’ footnotes and end notes are lost, tracked changes are all accepted and lost, 3D charts are reduced to 2D, Keynote’s presenter notes and embedded audio files are stripped, and so on.

What comes out in the review is the relativeness uniqueness of the iPad packaging… the combination of size, the touchscreen, and the long battery life, and the relatively low price; not much more than the first iPods cost. Consider that the iPod and iPhone are still way ahead in features, design, and buzz over any other competitors, I would predict that the iPad might enjoy a similar niche-defining spot.

What I’m trying to figure out is if the iPad serve as a general-purpose platform for touch-screen applications. We bought a 3″x5″ touch screen for $375 a few years back, that still requires a connection to an actual computer, and is connects with odd cables and software drivers to a Windows computer. An iPad at $499, that includes all of the processing necessary for displaying and interpreting gestures and “pushes”, would seem to be a bargain by comparison, as long as it can be programmed by mere mortals.

"Upgrades" Uh-Oh (Fairpoint)

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So, we called Fairpoint a couple weeks ago asking to upgrade our DSL from the lower speed, of 3 megabits download, 768Kb upload to something like 8 megabit download and 1.5 megabit upload. They offered us the latter speed for an increase of $10.00 per month, for a total of $69.00. This is equivalent roughly to what I pay for my home connection via Comcast cable.

They gave us a due date. Missed that twice. Finally, a guy calls today saying the order had been completed, and and asked whether I noticed any speed difference. So I go to dslreports.com and run a test to New York city, which gives me a latency of 24ms, and a download speed of 3 megabits and change, and an upload speed of 654Kb. This is at 5:00 PM on Friday afternoon, so it isn’t as if there is a lot of competition on the LAN. So, I’d say, nothing has happened, since the speed test I ran a week before the upgrade was roughly the same.

So, then, he says I should call the tech support line and request tech support. Excuse me, isn’t that their job?

Windows 7 64 bit Setup Quirks

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I’m setting up five laptops for use as classroom machines. Five is certainly beginning to approach the cusp of wishing that we had some kind of imaging software that would allow a single setup to be cloned to the other machines. These are Inspiron machines from Dell which cost about $650 (including Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit). The hardware is OK…they come as a glossy black plastic machine with a typical full-sized Dell keyboard and a very adequate 15″ screen. While configuring, I installed a wireless Microsoft mouse, but the touchpad works well too.

The machines come with a 64bit version of Windows. The main advantage of this is that the machine can comfortably address more than 4 gigabytes of RAM. It doesn’t appear to speed things up at all, and indeed the machine takes forever to log off, (two-three minutes) and reboot, and the login also takes more than 30 seconds. Another disadvantage is that the 64 bit version of Windows requires 64-bit drivers for any hardware (such as printers), which can be an inconvenience when tracking down printer drivers. So, as a recommendation, the 64 bit version of Windows does not appear to have any advantage for an ordinary user, and indeed may even have additional disadvantages.

There is a batch script which asks for the name of the initial user account. On a couple machines this appeared to go forward after accepting a couple characters…. and there is no “back” button. So, the machine inadvertently creates a lame account name. When changing the account name, it doesn’t change the folder that the account uses, so now I’m stuck with an account called Student which has a local folder called Studnet.

Dell has made something of the fact that it doesn’t install a lot of crapware on its machine anymore, and indeed we don’t have to remove AOL. Still, there is an amazing array of tweaks to apply, and still a surprising amount of software to remove, much of it from Dell, but also default software from Windows. The default installation comes with a variety of pop-ups (Macaffee, Dell system restore,) and an almost constant stream of messages about the virus status, Silverlight updates, etc. Here is our current list of changes:

1. Change Desktop Theme back to Windows default
2. Reassign computer name — Requires reboot
3. Uninstall Dell Dock
4. Uninstall GoToAssist
6. Uninstall Windows Live
7. Uninstall Windows Live Additional Components
5. Uninstall McAffee anti-virus, etc., etc. (requires a restart) (takes a long time.)

6. Install Microsoft Office 2007
Add the 25 character Product Key
Customize — not available: Access, Office InfoPath, Outlook
Open up Word: Accept Updates

In Internet Explorer
7. Change home page
8. Change Search Provider from BING to Google
9. Download and install updates
10. Download and install Windows Security Essentials
Requires an update to SilverLight
Does a long scan
11. Open a PDF file to get rid of initial issue with licensing Adobe Acrobat
12. Install Logmein

The upshot is that it is really over with Windows XP and that is OK. Windows 7 seems to be better and more secure on many counts. Windows Security Essentials appears to be a great alternative to third-party virus scanner and malware scanners. Setup is still a pain; I think I’m averaging about 1.5 hours per machine….and even at the point that I’ve got them set up here, I have to take them to their ultimate end-site, and install the wireless networking and printer drivers for the local site.

More on Letters of Support: Documentation

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In the Department of Amplification:

After submitting my grant application to the USDA, they bounced back a couple of items related to letters of support. Letter writers who were offering in-kind matches did not provide enough detail in their letter to effectively document the monetary value of what were offering.

1. In the first case, a professor was offering in-kind consulting services that were valued at $100 per hour. The grantor pushed back saying…how is the $100 an hour calculated? There are a couple ways this could be wired up, but the most honest is probably to take the professors yearly salary, plus the fringe benefit rate which is applied to the salary, and then divide that by the number or working hours that represents. So, let’s say the professor is on a nine-month contract (i.e. she gets the summer off, but also isn’t paid for summer), and she earns $125,000. The “fringe rate” is calculated at 42%. This is a typical percentage. Do the math on your own salary, and you may find that you end up in similar situation. Fringe includes vacation, sick days, social security (both the employer and the employee’s portion), and federal and state taxes and medicare, and any other fringe benefits that normally go into the calculation. 42% of $125,000 is $52,500 meaning that the full cost of the employee, salary plus benefits is calculated at $177,500. ( I know, we should all be so lucky, right?).

Divide $177,500 by the number of hours (9 months at 35 hours per week = 1260 hours)….which gives us an hourly rate of $141.

From the funder’s viewpoint, the professor is actually contributing their time at a rate of $141 / hour. From the college’s viewpoint, the $100 was really just a figure pulled out of the air, they may or may not actually expect that the professor is going to use a portion of their 1260 working hours as an in-kind contribution to our organization. My guess is the above kind of calculation would be sufficient to document this contribution to a federal agency and it is certainly more precise than the $100 figure.

Another way to quote this is by percentage of FTE (full-time-equivalency). Perhaps the college allows the professor to contribute up to 5% of the FTE to non-college activities and that the professor is planning to contribute 4% to your organization. 4% of $177,500 is $7100 which could be used for the value.

2. In the second case, a member organization is giving our non-profit office space, use of a copier, wi-fi access, etc. They valued this at $1250 a month or $15,000 per year. The funder asked how they came up with that figure… and so additional details were supplied including the square footage of the office space, the percentage of the donated space versus the full square footage of their building, the cost of wi-fi, prorated, etc.

Odds and Sods

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Toyota Woes: Getting Personal

Here’s an dispassionate analysis of the Toyota acceleration problem.

We have a 2003 Prius and a 2008 Yaris, neither of which appear to be part of any recall.

But even if they were recalled, I wonder if it would make much difference. My Prius has an issue when coming down long hills, where the regenerative braking appears to either actually overheat a battery terminal, or just trips the sensor, thereby hanging up the on-board computer. It was also the first car that I had that came with automatic skid control, and a couple times when I was evading a skid, I was automatically overridden, and it actually released the brake on the affected (skidding) wheel. If I had a choice, I’d be able either to turn it off, or not have it in the first place.
My theory is that there may be something going on with the cruise control, which affects acceleration, of course, or indeed a problem with a displaced floor mat, which has happened to me too, in other cars, not just Toyotas. Our Yaris is a totally low-end car, and is manual almost everything, so it is less likely that it would be affected.
Blogger FTP Service Deprecated
I only just noticed that the Blogger FTP service is being deprecated. Eeek. (If I may use the expression). TFNP has been a Blogger blog for almost ten years; before Google bought Blogger. So, sometime soon, we’ll have to figure out what to do next. My initial inclination is to take them up on their offer to move to a custom domain, or blogspot blog…. but blogspot is so, um, like AOL. This is a manageable problem for me, but in the comments about the move suggest it is going to be a real issue for people in China, where blogger.com is blocked.
Pesky Technical Problem #1 iDisk Sync Issue
After working flawlessly for what seemed like months, my iDisk synchronization stopped working with both my desktop and laptop machines saying “disk not in sync”, even after repeated attempts at syncing both manually and automatically. The solution was to sort of unwind everything:
1. In iDisk preferences, stop syncing on both machines.
2. Create a backup folder on the desktop machine, and copy everything from the iDisk into it.
3. Delete the iDisk contents on the desktop.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 on the laptop.
Now you have a local copy of the iDisk contents on both machines (which may or may not be in sync with each other.
5.On the desktop, go on the web in Safari and log into your mobile.me account.
6. Log off
7. Log in with bogus credentials (i.e. different name, different password). You’ll get an error message saying that your credentials aren’t valid.
8. Log in again with the correct credentials and log off.
9. Do a manual sync with the desktop. This will “refill” your desktop’s iDisk with the contents of the iDisk from mobile me.
10. Copy the contents of your backup iDisk to the desktop’s iDisk, and manually sync again.
At this point the desktop should be synced with mobile me.
11. Repeat steps 9 and 10 for the laptop.
This should have everything synced together.

Step 7 was a suggestion; it seemed dubious, but I tried it anyway. The explanation was that it “reset” the index or something on mobile me. Sound like a crock, but the above steps all seemed to work, and everything is back to normal.

Another suggestion is to only have one machine set on automatic sync…and then manually sync the other (probably the laptop if that is the one used only occasionally)

Netbooks or Laptops for Classroom Computers

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When asked about Netbooks as opposed to Laptops for equipping a classroom, I replied:

re: Netbooks:

Con:
1. At $650 each, a full-fledged laptop with CD ROM is going to be only marginally more expensive than a NetBook with external peripherals
2. A Netbook will probably be close to $400.00, less expensive by itself, but when adding CD-ROMS, and maybe memory, etc, the price will rise.
3. Both Rosetta Stone (English language software) and several other programs, lilke Mavis Beacon, (a typing tutor program) require the external CD Drive. It is also a pain to install other software without one.
4. If you are working collaboratively, it will be difficult for two people to see what is on a netbook screen at the same time.
5. The netbooks are smaller and “cuter”, and perhaps easier to conceal and therefore more attractive to “borrow”. They are tiny!
6. NB keyboards tend to be quite small…. considerably smaller than a regular laptop. They also often have weird keystroke combinations to substitute for the lack of extra keys.
7. Many are limited to 1Meg of RAM, and therefore end up running a pretty limited version of Windows, either XP or Win 7 “home”, and will be slower.
8. A conventional laptop is more likely to be closer to the kind of machine that most students will have contact with, in the workplace, at home, or at school. The NetBooks, are great supplementary machines; good for eMailing and web surfing with a wireless connection in Starbucks….less satisfactory for things like word- processing a paper.
Pros:
Small and lightweight. Easy to carry around in bulk, if you’re going to the library, for example and need to schlep all six machines.
Now, what *would* be very cool….would be a dedicated computer literacy project using NetBooks for, say, at-risk teenagers or young adults, where they actually get to keep the Netbook if they complete the program, and where the emphasis wouldn’t be on Microsoft Office, or R.S., but simply on becoming a “connected person”… This would allow for less conventional software, and even really inexpensive computers, in the $299 range.
Wireless router and printer shouldn’t be an issue. Routers are about $75.00. Printers: the usual caveats apply, laser is better than ink jet.. and Cannon and HP are recommended printer brands. (you can get parts for them as opposed to say, Brother.)
In short: Absent really convincing evidence to the contrary, I would recommend, “boring and conventional” for the classroom and keep the netbook idea in reserve for a fully-funded foundation project.