IT Turf Wars. 

I’ve had a few of these myself, especially within larger organizations. I’ve negotiated between the Mac people and the Windows people. Mediated between outsourced providers (“incompetent!” say the system administrators) and the in-house staff (“nincompoops!” say the outsourced techies about their clients).

Non-profits are not immune.

Most geeks wouldn’t recognize a critical business process if it bit them on the nose. And though their boss may have “technology” or “information” in his job title, he appears to knows little about either. This is perhaps the most intractable battle in all of IT — the war between the officer corps and the troops.

“The biggest conflict is between IT management and IT staff,” says Pratt. “For some reason, the companies I’ve worked for seem to hire or promote people who are not technologically literate. It’s like that person lost a bet or the president of the company has a half-wit brother who needs a job. You have the IT guys in the field saying, ‘You really need to do XYZ,’ and the managers saying, ‘We’re not going to do that; it’s going to cost too much money.’ They’re constantly blocking things that have to be done just because they can.”

Now is the time for all good people to write to aid their country.

Ommwriter

Ommwriter is a blank canvas for writing. You can have it open on your computer, and when you change to it presents a completely blank screen, except for a single writing window, accompanied by an ambient music background. There is no formatting to speak of, in that respect it like TextEdit or Notepad. The purpose of Ommwriter is to do a brain dump and it uniquely suited to that purpose.

Curio

Curio is a single user project manager (among other things). Curio consists of a number of objects which mimic traditional items used for organizing and project managment. Curio uses mind-maps, lists, drawings, tables, and index cards. Each of these can be created and placed on an _idea space_ a single screen.  Idea spaces can also have document links to items created in other programs such as iWork Pages or Microsoft Word. (As far as I can tell, such files are physically stored within the Curio project file as part of a package. They can be extracted, but the process isn’t entirely transparent. )

Each project can have multiple idea spaces. After using Curio for a couple of weeks, I haven’t graduated beyond a single curio project file. Instead all of my various projects live in a single project file, each of which has its own idea space.  I have the following idea spaces so far:

• Dashboard – consisting of a daily to-do list and a mind-map showing all of my projects, goals, and tasks.
• Clients — One idea space for each client. The top of the idea space consists of a file card with all relevant contact information, a to-do list for each project for the client and tables which show fixed tabular information, like budget numbers. In one case I have a mind-map outlining some strategic goals for the client. 
• Projects — I’m currently revising our embedded application to work with Windows Embedded Standard 7. This requires absorbing a host of new information related to the new version of Windows Embedded, and I have an idea space for this project. 
• Grant Application — One idea space per application. Since these are collaborative, most of the critical grant transactions happen on BaseCamp. In the case where I’m organizing the application before transferring to BaseCamp, an idea space works well. Of course any bids or grant applications that are largely done by myself can be kept in Curio. 

There is a lot more to discuss regarding Curio, and as I learn more I’ll report back. Suffice it to say that it is a very interesting application. The Curio team has a unique and generous evaluation offer; you can download an evaluation version valid for 15 days. Once that has expired you can apply for a 60-day evaluation extension.

750 Words

http://750words.com/
This is an online site which provides you with a very simple interface to get down 750 words per day. The site supplies a certain amount of motivation. The site creator was inspired by Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way which discusses the concept of “morning pages”, a daily quota of free writing.

I’ve just uploaded, for the fourth time, a research grant application to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and it appears that this time it has managed to get through the many layers of checks, and so now has been accepted by the Electron Gods.

Like most grant applications, this was a team effort. There were two principal writers and a number of additional contributors. Each collaborator needed to submit a “biosketch”, which in NIH-ease is a highly stylized resume as well as a letter of support stating their affiliated institution or company, the scope of the services they would provide, and agreement to our payment arrangements.

For the first time, I managed this entire process using my Mac and the Pages word-processor, without having to default back to a Windows machine using Office Word. The only awkwardness, which, in hindsight might have been avoided, was extracting the list of footnotes and citations so that the body of the research plan which has all the footnotes, could be saved as a single Adobe .PDF document, while the actual citations were saved in a separate .PDF. If contributors didn’t have a Mac, then I asked them to submit information as Word documents, using Arial 11 point body text on pages with .5 inch margins. These opened up fine within Pages, and could then be modified and then “printed” to an Adobe .PDF.

We used BaseCamp as our project manager. Over the course of about six weeks, we posted over 100 individual files, in various formats.  I used the BaseCamp tasklist most of all, along with the milestones.

In the best of all possible worlds, all the writers would submit documents through BaseCamp.  In practice they would usually eMail Word attachments directly to me.  I would convert these to .PDF files and post those on BaseCamp for everyone else to look at. Once they were in finished form, I kept final .PDFs these in a series of folders on my iDisk, which provided a safe repository and access from my computers in the office and at home.

Almost exactly a year ago I experimented with getting some older Dell SX270 and SX280 machines off of eBay for between $30-$75 with the thought of turning these into low-end workstations. The experiment failed… one machine was dead on arrival, one was noisy, and one worked for a little while, but then seemed to fail as well.

Optiplex 270

So I was a little surprised to find some swapped-out Optiplex GX270s, which, while not as compact as the SX boxes, seem to have a lot of life in them.  They aren’t young… they were built in 2004 and first delivered to an insurance company which then recycled them sometime around 2007. But they have 2.6 or 2.8Ghz Intel processors, 40 megabyte hard drives, 1 gig of RAM, and most them of them, nine out of ten or so, are silent. The one deficiency that I can find is that the USB ports are not the fastest, so some peripherals that expect a USB 2.0 interface may not work. This issue came up with connecting to an iPod media player.

Looking at eBay again, I see a number of these selling in the $75.00 range, with various case styles and memory. Most include a Windows XP sticker, which means if they don’t have Windows already installed, there is a legal installation number available. The machines also work well Ubuntu Linux as a desktop operating system, and I’m using a couple as FreeNAS file servers. A colleague is giving one to an senior member at his church. They are like candy… you can just pass them out.

OK…the $30.00 figure for a Windows computer is a little like The Four-Hour Workweek. In this case, I managed to get a dozen of these machines for free, when we upgraded to new Windows 7 machines from Dell. In the Real World, they might cost more, and I think I may just have lucked out (finally). On the other hand, similar machines might be available from other larger companies who are upgrading. My original premise that you might be able to get a Windows workstation or small file server with some sweat equity and maybe $150 or so, now seems within reach.  When you have more time than money …

Installed the FreeNAS server yesterday in our student lab. Looks promising.

Don Lancaster has now created a free PDF version of his classic book, The Incredible Secret Money Machine. Get yours here.

It turns out that the same day all the ruckus was going on regarding the new TSA scanners, I was flying out from Philadelphia and got myself scanned. The whole thing seemed weird…even after getting scanned I got an upper body pat-down. By the time I’ve removed my jacket, shoes, belt watch, and emptied my pockets you begin to think it would be easier just to shuck off everything. The whole thing seems unreasonable. It would help if there was some trustworthy evidence presented that would document the effectiveness of all these security measures.

Keep up with all things Skype with the Skype Journal Blog

LifeHacker did a comparison of desktop videoconferencing apps. Not very rigorous, but is interesting nonetheless. I tried FaceTime on my mac, but wasn’t that impressed compared to iChat. Obviously if I had an iPhone it might be a different matter. Frankly, we’ve had really good luck with Skype and it works on Macs and Windows.

Having worked on several NIH grant applications using BaseCamp to keep track of all the bits and pieces, I’ve started to put together a BaseCamp project template that covers the workflow and components of the application. Here is what I’ve come up with so far for the task lists:

Microsoft has a beta test version of Internet Explorer v. 9. available, and it is buggy. When I first installed it, it crashed on a regular basis. The solution appears to be to disable all of the add-ons that might have been present in IE 8. After doing this, the browser itself seems to work, but things like pop-up editing windows, and You-Tube don’t work.  Of interest is that installing the beta, seems to remove IE 8, so that you’re stuck with the buggy version 9, unless you use an alternative. Maybe my expectations are too high, but the beta seems to be pretty unstable.

Oops,   even with all the add-ins disabled it just crashed again.

For Windows browsing, I still like FireFox. Google Chrome appears to be a fast-gaining alternative which is available in a version for the Mac although on the Mac, so far, I’ve stuck with Safari which is also available on Windows.

With so much choice, it is refreshing to see the return of browsers to their rightful place as a lightweight application platform, as well as an information display utility. Perhaps this is the end of the trend by Microsoft to couple the browser so tightly to the underlying operating system, that you literally could never remove it entirely from a Windows installation. Internet Explorer has always been a major target for malware, trojans and viruses, and Microsoft never seemed to be capable of protecting users. The alternative browsers have flourished with attractive interfaces, standards compatibility, and effective countermeasures.

Scholarships Available for Fall

Partnership for Capacity Building matching grants

Potash Hill alumni grants

Grants for Individuals

Work-Study

Find out more…

• What the Certificate is all about
• Dates and venues
• How to register
• Certificate coursework
• Our faculty
• Financial aid: contact Kate at (802) 451-7510 or katej@marlboro.edu
• Receiving graduate credit: contact Kate at (802) 451-7510 or katej@marlboro.edu
• Marlboro’s MBA in Managing for Sustainability 

This is a work in progress, and needs to be checked against the current NIH Grant application guidelines. Click on the image to enlarge.

Hewlett-Packard Procurve Network Switches

There are dozens of network switches from various companies at both the consumer and enterprise level. One reason to consider paying a little more upfront for HP Procurve switches is that they have a no-questions, no-BS lifetime guarantee. I’ve replaced two or three of these (out of thirty or so that I’ve bought over the years). The latest is a little eight-port unmanaged switch that I have at home that developed an irritating high-pitched whine which I first thought was a fan problem. I opened it up and saw that there was no fan; so it must be some component on the circuit board that has developed an audible oscillation. Anyway, 15 minutes on the phone, with a very short wait, a native English speaker, over a land-line quality connection, and I’ve got a free replacement unit via UPS on the way. Now if HP would just make their printers as robust (as they used to…).

OmniGraffle

I’ve been looking for years for a replacement for Visio for the Mac, and Omnigraffle may fill the bill. Almost any drawing or illustration that I do for presentations is done in Visio, which is a.) a wonderful program, and b.) only available on Windows, and c.) unlikely to be ported to the Mac as it is part of the Microsoft Office suite. I’m continually amazed at how even mildly complex ideas can be conveyed by a simple drawing. You can almost hear the sigh of relief around the conference table as people look at a graphical representation of your data table, budget, design or idea instead of a three page narrative.