Software Project Management Resources — Columbia University: “Project management resources: templates, samples, articles, software, lecture notes on software & general PM. Updated Apr 14, 2005.”

Everything you ever wanted to know about software project management.

which could be subtitled…“Bonehead Network Manager Saves Neck With Nifty Software Utility”.

The Acronis Disk Director Suite 9.0 is an alternative to Norton Partition Magic and its ilk. What is great about this software is 1. It works
2. It is reasonable. $50.00
3. It is available as a download.

When installing Windows 2003 server, there was a default of 4 gigabytes for the system partition. Like an idiot I chose this, and about 10 days after installing it we were down to 5% free disk space. The Acronis software resized the disk partition almost effortlessly, taking free space from the main data partition and applying it to the system partition. Once the software is installed on a machine, you can create a boot disk (diskette or CD) and then boot the machine from that media.

I was a little worried about this because the “disk” is actually a RAID array… but since all of the NTFS partitioning takes place at the Windows software level, the Acronis software still treated the array as a single disk for partitioning purposes.

Recommended.

 Visual Mind is a simplified, and elegant implementation of mind-mapping. $89.00 for the basic version, $199 for a “business version” that interfaces with Microsoft Office.

 BlogJet is a desktop application for putting entries into a web log. It works with most common blogging software. Free!

 X1 is still on top for desktop indexing. About $79.00.

 Onfolio: used both reading RSS feeds, and for organizing web links and information.  About $80.00 If I had to take one piece of software to a desert island, (assuming I could still bring my office suite, operating system and development tools) this would be it.  I even like it better than …

 ITunes which I like pretty much, although I don’t care for the restrictions that they put on the use of the music that you download, and I have to say that the sound quality of CD that you create from downloaded music leaves much to be desired.

 UltraMon A great utility that manages dual monitors.

Years ago, I took what was then called The Grantsmanship Seminar. This was a three-day proposal-writing workshop held in a sweaty meeting room in a Waltham, Mass. Then, for years afterwards, I got a quarterly update from the seminar in the form of a thick newsprint tabloid. Hadn’t heard from them for a long time, but I see they are alive and well. Their web site has an outstanding series of articles on grant seeking.

There is a scary history of cable and telecom companies lobbying for laws to prevent local cities to offer broadband service. In Telco Lies and the Truth about Municipal Broadband Networks (.pdf link) Ben Scott and Frannie Wellings take several instances where cites and telecom companies have been at loggerheads and provide a rebuttal to the disinformation campaigns that have been mounted by the telcos. From the Executive Summary:

The attention of policymakers in both parties is now focused on the question of how to promote competitive broadband markets that will deliver high-speed Internet access to all Americans at affordable rates. It is a difficult problem. Present estimates are that around 30% of US households subscribe to DSL or cable modem service. This compares to over 70% in countries like South Korea. Virtually every rural state remains underserved and uncompetitive. In urban areas, many families are priced out of the market. The telecom and cable kings of the broadband industry have failed to bridge the digital divide and opted to serve the most lucrative markets at the expense of universal, affordable access. As a result, local governments and community groups across the country have started building their own broadband networks, sometimes in a purely public service and more often through public-private partnerships. The incumbents have responded with an aggressive lobbying and misinformation campaign. Advocates of cable and DSL providers have been activated in several state capitols to push new laws prohibiting or severely restricting municipalities from serving their communities. Earlier this year, Verizon circulated a “fact sheet” to lawmakers, journalists and opinion leaders proclaiming the so-called “failures” of public broadband. Many of the statistics come from a widely discredited study of municipal cable TV networks published in 1998. This paper debunks these lies case by case, juxtaposing information direct from the city networks with quotations from the telco propaganda. The results are unequivocal and damning.

 My own experience in this contretemps was about a month ago, when I testified at a public service board hearing in favor of a certificate of public good that the local municipal broadband company was seeking to offer cable television programming over its no-yet-actually-existing fiber network. Their idea is that they’ll bring fiber to the home. They will offer telephone service, broadband internet, and cable tv over the fiber. And they will allow other content providers, including commercial providers like Verizon and Adelphia access to the fiber as well. The company, Burlington Telecom, is a subsidiary of the local municipal electric company, that is, it is run by the city on a non-profit basis. As an electric company, they have provided some of the lowest rates in the state, some 10–20% less than the other state utilities. 

Since the local company is offering competition, and not replacement for Adelphia and Verizon, you have to wonder what the naysayers are thinking when they say this is unfair. Its not as if they are providing comprehensive broadband at all, in fact, many outlying areas are still using dialup. With DSL limited to three miles or so from a central office, and Adelphia cable years behind in their deployment plans (and the company is bankrupt), the municipal projects are just what the doctor ordered.   

Spent last weekend bringing up Windows 2003 server standard and attaching 10 user workstations and their accounts. Before I forget the pain, I want to get down some random observations. This was an upgrade to the server hardware, and from the Windows NT operating system to Windows 2003 Server Standard. 

1. Biggest change is adding Active Directory. AD is an order-of-magnitude increase in complexity from the old NT domain system. It is based in part on LDAP, the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, which is derived from DNS, the domain naming system used for the internet. The upshot is if you want to manage network user security, you have to have an (NT type) domain on the network, and to do that you have to install Active Directory, and to do that you have install DNS on the server. I’ve installed AD on several servers in the past but it remains a black box to a certain extent. Also, in terms of scale, AD may be great for multi-site companies, but for a single office it is way overkill. Once added there are no native client applications which access all that AD information anyway. What’s all the fuss?  

2. The fact that you have to install DNS is a pain. Everyone has an Internet Service Provider, and everyone normally uses their DNS. So why the heck would you need to install it on your small-office local area network?  The good news, is, when you do have it, and when it is working properly, your workstations will use the locally stored DNS for DNS look-ups, and that means you’ll get snappier performance when surfing the web, and doing other internet-based things that use DNS.

3. Once the server and DNS are up and running, it makes sense to change the DNS mappings of the local workstations, to include the local DNS as the first DNS server for look-ups. For Windows XP workstations, you have to do this anyway, otherwise, the workstation will take forever to find the server.

4. Attaching Windows XP machines and creating machine accounts works fairly smoothly by using the File and Settings Transfer Wizard at each workstation. Since changing the domain name requires new profiles and security settings at the workstations, the users’ desktops have to be rebuilt, unless…

5. …you don’t create machine accounts, and have the user log into the local account on their local workstation. You can still access resources on the domain, even though you are accessing them from a machine that doesn’t have a server machine account. This is the approach that you have to take anyway with any O/S other than WinXP Professional or Win 2000 Professional.

All the above reminds me of the phrase, “the beatings will stop when morale improves”. I suppose all this is “good for me” in the long run.

A couple of pleasant surprises:

Group Objects. There are dozens of ways to secure and customize desktops. Don’t like “balloon help” that comes up saying you’ve got obsolete desktop icons?  You can surpress this and other annoyances. You can turn off user access to the control panel. All these can be adjusted based on group membership.

SharePoint Services. This is among other things, a web-based content and document mangement system. Great for collaborative projects. It reminds me of the old E-Groups system    

Service Pack 1 was recently released  which includes several new security improvements.

Welcome to Tech for Non Profits. As the banner says, non-profit organizations (NGOs) need technology as much as for-profit businesses. As consultants to non-profit clients, we are interested in finding hardware and software for office networks that provides outstanding value both for the money invested but also for the time required to get them working.

Comments and suggestions are appreciated. And drop by the Microdesign Consulting web site.

Paraphrasing a couple of recent conversations with fundraisers:

——
“A major function of what a high-end fundraising software program does is track the productivity of the fundraising workers. How many calls, how many visits, how many follow-ups. In many situations, like an alumni development office, the pressure is such that the developers can’t go on vacation without being told to make a few calls on the way. ‘Going to Florida for a week? Be sure to visit prospect X in Miami while you’re there.'”

——
“We’re scrambling. It is ten times harder than it was a couple of years ago. There are more people in the fundraising game, and they are getting better at it, so the competition for grants is much greater. With federal cut-backs whole programs are closing up shop.

——
“There is an amazing amount of public-domain information out there about prospective donors. The other day, I was actually given a diskette from a town clerk that contained all the property records and valuations of everyone in the town. Before, I could get this data by looking at printed real-estate records. Now it is either available directly on the Internet, or the towns are required by law to distribute this information electronically.”

——
“The trick of course, is to use such information with sensitivity. You don’t want to call a prospective donor and say…’Hello Mr/Ms. Jones, I see by the latest property assessment that you are living in a home valued at $450,789. By our calculations, you could afford a donation this year of $12,250 to our program….what do you think?'”

In Friedmans April 29th column he quotes Bill Gates:

“Training the work force of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teach kids about today’s computers on a 50-year-old mainframe. … Our high schools were designed 50 years ago to meet the needs of another age. Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting – even ruining – the lives of millions of Americans every year.”

Friedman continues:

Let me translate Mr. Gates’s words: “If we don’t fix American education, I will not be able to hire your kids.” I consider that, well, kind of important. Alas, the media squeezed a few mentions of it between breaks in the Michael Jackson trial. But neither Tom DeLay nor Bill Frist called a late-night session of Congress – or even a daytime one – to discuss what Mr. Gates was saying. They were too busy pandering to those Americans who don’t even believe in evolution.

Full column here. (may require registration).

The Dell 2800 is the same height as a standard case, but about twice as deep. This is the second time I’ve been surprised at how large these things are. If you wanted to install them in a rack, you need the four-poster type of rack, they are just too large for a standard two-point rack. The unit weighs at least 75 pounds, and it seems to be built to last. Sounds like a jet engine starting up, but settles down to a fairly tolerable metallic whoosh, which, while I wouldn’t want next to me all day, could probably still be in the same room.

This server came with a 3-drive RAID array. RAID is a useful way to provide redundance; if any single drive in the array fails, the other drives will still contain the data and the server will stay up. Sure enough: the third drive in the RAID group failed after running the server about 2 hours.

Got replacement drive from Dell, shipped Airborne. This was a naked drive which I put in the hot-swap “drawer”, and then plugged into the array. If this had been a production server, I would have probably been able to do this without bringing the server down.

Once installed, the array has to “rebuild” itself, that is, incorporate the new blank drive into the array by copying data to the new drive. This happens automatically, but takes a couple of hours for a 73 gigabyte drive.

Server shows a blinking orange light
Server shows a flagged “intrusion” detection.

Turns out the blinking orange light was remedied by clearing the “ESM log” (the embedded systems manager log). This is done by using a command line utility called DSM (Dell Systems manager) which is downloaded from the Dell FTP Site at:

ftp://customer:customer@dropbox.us.dell.com/dropbox2/ips/dset/Dell_DSET_1.0X19d.exe

Running OpenManage Server Administrator now showed a “diagnostics” alert….which stated that the configuration of the unit had changed. It allows you to “acknowledge” the change, which presumably will clear the alert. (It did).

I had ordered an external DAT tape drive for this unit, at the same time as ordering the server. I had assumed that the salesperson would put two and two together, and configure the server for the drive, but in fact an interface card was not included in the order. I ordered an “OEM” Adaptec 29160 SCSI card from NewEgg for this (about $125.00) Put the card in, and it was immediately recognized by the server, and subsequently by the Windows 2003 Server Standard operating system. Plugged in the DAT tape drive, and was making backups within five minutes using NTBackup the utility included wit Windows 2003. The NT Backup will get configured more thoroughly once I’ve migrated data from the old NT server to this server.