Technology: Rantings, Ramblings and Reviews

Mashup Corporations - Great Little Book

Recently I was introduced to and read a great little book entitled Mashup Corporations.  This book introduces a fictitious corporation that undergoes a change using service oriented architecture principles.  A non technical marketing employee has an idea of marketing popcorn makers branded with the logos of sports teams.  His idea gets out of hand when he posts his idea to his personal blog and hundreds of individuals think it is a real product and place orders.  The CEO loves the new sales opportunities, but the CIO and his staff are worried about security, control, etc.  The book describes the conversations, interactions, and the cultural changes that take place to give the CEO and the CIO what they want, the best of both worlds.

The style of the book makes it fun to read.  Each chapter describes the changes taking place in the ficticious firm and describes the related principles and how these can be used in the real world.  Perhaps the best attribute of the book is that it is short and to the point.  The entire book is ~170 pages long and a quick and easy one night read.  The book is a bit pricy at $40, but it is available on the Kindle for just under $8.  While this book may not give you a roadmap to converting your organization to SOA it seems to be the perfect book to share with your associates and others you are trying to help see the light.  Give it a read!

Magicjack - Really Inexpensive Home Phone

Today I called home several times, and each time was immediately directed to voicemail.  Now you’re thinking my wife or teenage girls were talking on the phone all day, but not in this day and age, they have cell phones.  No, what really happened is that I forgot to pay my annual telephone bill and got disconnected.  When I set this phone system up I used a credit card that was going to expire in a few months so if I didn’t like the service it would be terminated without me having to do anything.  It worked as planned except I have liked it, let me explain.

A little over a year ago, while staying in a hotel, I was working on my personal budget (using Mvelopes, one of my favorite online programs worthy of another post) and was disturbed by the amount of money I was sending to my local telephone company for the amazingly little they offered.  While silently expressing my typical frustration with communication companies, I heard this television commercial mention $19.95 / year unlimited local and long distance telephone service offered by Magicjack.  Of course I was skeptical, but being right in front of a browser I searched for Magicjack and actually found their site, magicjack.com.  Now their site didn’t inspire me, in fact it looked much like a late night TV ad, but I stayed long enough to be tempted, and that is what the rest of this post is about.

Magicjack Device - Photo from Magicjack.com

I purchased a Magicjack device and it arrived a few days later.  The device is about the size of a large pack of gum and plugs into a USB port on a Windows or Intel-based Apple computer.  The other connector on the device is an RJ-11 (regular phone jack) connector.  Now the intended use of this device is something like this.  While traveling whip out the Magicjack device, plug it into your laptop, plug a handset or headset into the RJ-11 connector, call home using the handset or softphone interface on the laptop, and talk as long as you like for free, well $19.95 a year.

My intentions were quite different; get rid of my telco bill and their limited / lame service.  I disconnected the interior side of the phone line marked “demark” from my patch panel and plugged the Magicjack RJ-11 cable in its place.  This line simply drives all of the phone lines in my home.  I then plugged the Magicjack device into my old and reliable Apple Xserve and installed and configured the software.  I had to choose a local telephone number, painless, setup voicemail, not too bad, and get the 911 information updated.  Within seconds I had dial-tone and could place and receive calls.

Now for the good, the bad, and the ugly during my first year of service.  The good is the price and quite frankly the quality for that price is amazing.  The audio quality is fine, the voicemail drops wave files in my email inbox, the phone rings, what more could you expect.  Well, what you could expect is some nice software, but this software looks like it was created by the same individuals who created the device.  It works, but it looks like it was designed for Windows and forced to run on OS X.  It won’t run while minimized, not great on a server, but in all fairness I suspect they didn’t expect someone to fire it up and let it alone for months on end.  If the application is just left open and hidden in a corner of the desktop display it works great for weeks and months.  After the first installation it unexpectedly stopped working often and needed to be physically unplugged and plugged back in.  That was enough to reset it and then it worked fine again.  This issue seems to have been fixed in the latest software updates.

At this point the ugliest thing about this setup is that once you setup voicemail you cannot disable it.  I left a message that we don’t take messages at this number and so we only get a few a day.  However, worse then this is that once voicemail is activated it answers the phone after four rings and this is not adjustable.  In a reasonable sized home it is difficult to get to the phone in less then four rings.  In fact it is difficult for me to decide whether I want to answer the phone in less then four rings.  So as you might imagine we miss a lot of calls.  Not that any of us really miss them, but those calling may think we are never home.  However, for those who know us well enough for us to want to talk with them they have our cell numbers and within seconds one of the five cell phones in our home rings, we talk to someone we know, and we never had to get out of our chair.

In summary, I don’t care much about our home phone, I don’t like paying the phone company over $35 / month for something I don’t care much about, and Magicjack provides a great solution for the youngsters without a cell and those we don’t share our cell numbers with.  The only interruption to service in the last 60 days has been when I upgraded the software on the server and when I forgot to pay the annual bill.  I noticed today that I could pay for 5 years for $59.95.  If it would have come with a set of knives if I paid before midnight I probably would have done it, but instead I signed up for another year for $19.95 or in other words $1.67 / month.  I love Magicjack because it works, it allowed me to get rid of my local telco, and saves me nearly $400 / year!

Color Management for Dummies

Have you ever imported photos from your digital camera, adjusted their color and other characteristics on your computer, submitted them to a photo printing service or printed them yourself and then been disappointed by the results because the print looks nothing like what you saw on your screen?  Well I did this for years until I discovered color management and a device and service that make it practical for us dummies.  This post describes my novice workflow and reviews the X-rite i1 Display 2 device and the Costco photo printing service.  I am sure this post glides by the beautiful theory of color management, but my intent is to help those who have been frustrated with printer output and want to get much better results in 10 minutes.

The general idea of color management is to align devices and software so that what you see on the screen is precisely what you get out of the printer.  I only own Apple computers and will describe how I do this in an OS X environment.  I am sure this is all possible on a Windows or Linux based machine, but I have no idea about the details.

The first step is to plug the i1 Display 2 device into a USB port and hang the device over the front of the monitor you wish to adjust.  The device comes with a counter weight that hangs on the USB cable so that the device easily hangs in the front while the weight hangs on the back of the display.  Little suction cups hold the device, that is about the size of a small computer mouse, to the screen.  When the device is attached to the screen you start the i1 Match software and in my case choose the easy configuration selection.  The software then displays white and black boxes on the screen, boxes of various colors, and various intensities of gray.  After several minutes the software terminates indicating the creation of a monitor profile.  In my case the profile was named Monitor_3-8-09_1 indicating the date the profile was created.  This profile is stored as an .icc file and resides in /Library/ColorSync/Profiles.  To apply this profile to your monitor you simply open System Preferences, navigate to the Display preferences and click on the Color tab.  Here you will see a list of possible monitor settings.  Choose the one you just created and your monitor will better reflect what you will see when you print.  The i1 Display 2 software will remind you periodically to recalibrate your display so that the results reamin consistent as your monitor ages and its characteristics change.

The next step is to calibrate your software or print drivers so that what you see on the screen will be reflected in what you get out of the printer.  The idea is quite similar; you want to describe to your software the output device’s characteristics using a specific type of paper.  This process uses the same type of .icc profile.   X-rite sells products that can be used to acquire these profiles for your printer, but in many cases the profiles are available from the manufacturers of the printers or those providing print services.  For example, I like to do my printing at Costco.  I am certain there are many other photo service providers that provide profiles, but I like to shop at Costco and printing pictures gives me an excuse to go.  I will explain the process with respect to Costco, but I am certain it is similar to the process one would go through with other providers.

If you go to costco.com and then to the PHOTO area and click on the large ad for inexpensive small prints you will be taken to a login page.  At the bottom of this page there is a link to printer profiles.  After clicking on this link click on continue and a list will appear on the left indicating where Costco stores are found.  Choose your state or country, your city, and your specific Costco store.  Here you will find profiles for the printers located in the selected store and the particular paper you are interested in using.  After downloading these profile to ~/Library/ColorSync/Profiles they are easily visible and usable in software such as Adobe Photoshop CS4 [Mac] or Adobe Photoshop CS4.

Now my workflow consists of the following.  I take pictures, download them to my computer, edit them until I am satisfied, instruct Photoshop CS4 to output them as high quality jpeg images using the profiles for my chosen printer, upload them to costco’s web site, and pick them up an hour later.  The process is easy and the results are stunning.  It is amazing to send in your pictures and actually recognize them when you go to pick them up.

Wordpress Crashes Gradually

I have been an electrical and computer engineering graduate student, a systems administrator, a computer science faculty member, and currently work as a CIO and after all of this, and all of those years, today I experienced the strangest computer crash I have ever seen.  I have a DL360 server with RAID 1 boot disks running the CentralPointe Server product from DirectPointe.  I use this product to perform services for my home including firewall functions, port forwarding, DHCP, DNS, content filtering, and a web server; it’s a great product, but back to my experience.

It all started by the reception of an email from a former graduate student who now works in Hawaii, somebody has to do the tough jobs.  His email indicated that he was not able to post a comment to one of my posts.  Immediately after receiving this email I received a tweet, if you don’t know what that is go to twitter.com, get an account, and follow kelflanagan, that indicated that the pictures on my blog were gone.  At this point I went to my blog to investigate.  What I found changed over time.

First, I initially noticed that everything looked good, but then I noticed that none of the posts had associated tags or categories, strange.  I signed in and went to the post editor to add tags and categories, but the editor reported there were no posts to edit, bad.  I returned to the main page and everything was gone.  I navigated to the settings menu and nothing, really bad!  I tried to ssh into the server with no luck and had to give up until I got home where I could face the problem from the inside.

Immediately after opening the door my daughter informed me, yelled, that the Internet was down, I have been hearing this for 20 years.  I thought about my issue and hers and the common factor was the firewall / server.  I went down into the basement to look the server over and both hard disks indicated an error, scary.  I then did what any good system administrator would do pushed the power button and smacked the machine a bit, I was gentle.  The server came back up without an issue, the Internet came up with it, and so did my blog with tags, categories, posts, etc.

When I first tweeted my experience another of my sons responded that their father had taught them that if they had something they cared about they should have a backup.  I am taking that step right after this post

What is strange in all of this is that I have never experienced a gradual computer crash.  The web pages slowly degraded, things went missing, but it happened so slowly.  It was like watching your work slowly die, a very painful experience.  Anyway like most technology oriented things, a flip of the switch and a gentle reminder of who is boss fixed the problem.  Now before I rant too much about this experience let me say that this server and the associated DirectPointe software ran flawlessly for over two (2) years, that’s a long time - and yes I have a UPS!

Mac Mini as Media Center

Apple markets the Apple TV as its media center, but I have found this unit to be quite limiting.  The primary limitation is that the Apple TV does not have a DVD player.  When the kids want to rent a Redbox video for a $1 there is nowhere to put it.  In addition, it simply isn’t a plain vanilla Apple computer with web browser, keyboard, mouse, slingbox client, etc.  Mac Mini to the rescue!

The Mac Mini has a built in DVD player, has a DVI output that can be adapted to run an HDMI input on your television, and a digital optical output that can drive your sound system.  The Apple remote, or other programmable remotes, can interact with the Front Row application on the Mac to enable the viewing of DVDs, online content, photo, listen to music, etc.  Adding a small wireless keyboard and mouse enables simple web browsing and access to SD and HD content on sites such as netflix.com, abc.com, fox.com, hulu.com, etc.

The Front Row application has a menu item called Movies.  Subdirectories created within the users Movie directory show up in front row as submenu items under Movie.  This can be used to create directories such as Home Movies, DVDs, etc.  These directories in turn can contain media or be links to external devices attached to the Mac Mini or network mounts from other machines.  One very nice feature of Front Row is that it is capable of calling the correct application to play various media types.  It even knows how to play VIDEO_TS files resulting in online playing of DVD content with the full feature set of DVDs such as menus, previews, extras, etc.

In addition to its technical abilities, the Mac Mini is small, nice looking, and very quiet!  It simply sits under the plasma display and allows the family to watch DVDs, online DVDs, encoded home videos, web based content, photos from iPhoto, and music from iTunes.  It is also possible to rent video content from Apple via iTunes and watch it directly on your TV.  The Mac Mini is not a perfect media center, but it is the easiest, most convenient, and most reliable unit I have used to date.  I highly recommend it.  Now why doesn’t it have a Blu-ray player