While some TRU staff have fallen victim to targeted spear-phishing incidents here,  I am hopeful that everyone is aware of the Spanish Prisoner confidence trick or the modern variant, the 419 Nigerian Money Transfer Scam.  You know the drill: you receive an spam email with copious spelling mistakes informing you how a deposed rich person has picked you and needs your help (the Mark) to move money out of a country  in return for a ridiculously large sum of money as your “payment.”

The scammer’s goal is to appeal to that universal human frailty: greed.  Of course the Mark doesn’t get any actual money while the scammers siphon off the Mark’s life savings to fund an ever growing list of fabrications including local bribes and other red tape that stands in the way of the Mark hitting the jackpot.

Terrifying stuff and Canadians fall victim to this every year.

But revenge on scammers is a dish that is just as tasty served cold. An absolutely fascinating, frightening and highly entertaining look at the world of  419 Scammers can be found at 419eater.com as our hero (the scam-baiter) takes on the scammers at their own game. A delicious sample of the 419 eater work relates to getting the scammers to hand copy an entire Harry Potter book. But wise advice from another blogger – “don’t try this at home.”

Picture is from the movie “The Spanish Prisoner” , one of my faves.

Pssst do you want to know a secret?

You would be forgiven to have missed that for the last 10 months about 40 of us have been working on a multi-year, multi-million dollar Enterprise Systems Renewal project. We are standardizing our ERP (Enterprise Resources Planning) Systems on SunGard Banner. The core modules of this system are Student, Finance, HR/Payroll, Advancement, Degree Audit, Financial Aid etc. This project replaces effectively all administrative systems of the former OLA and UCC. But this project is so much more. It also includes Workflow, Portal Technology, Self-Service functionality, Operational Data Store, Enterprise Data Warehousing, CRM and more.

Now you’d think with such a big project that CHANGES EVERYTHING administrative system-wise at our school, everyone would know about it. Sadly this isn’t the case. Having a dry, technical project title called “ERP Project” probably doesn’t inspire much enthusiasm either. So with the help of some awesomely talented marketing people (i.e. Jennifer Read), we’ve come up with a new look and new name for the project.

We chose Project SAGE because;

a. It relates to really smart people – our university has lots of them;

b. As a herb, it’s fresh and alive, and;

c. Sagebrush can be found throughout our region. In fact, our logo is sage green!

We also will be including the owl in our logo as TRU is famous for them, and I happen to like owls.

The first go-live will be Finance/HR/Payroll in April 2009. Check out the project SAGE website for more info.

And by the way- happy General Person – only 500,000 student records to go!

Brian

I remember an electrical engineer once telling me that “all the best software becomes hardware.” I think what he was referring to at the time was that the most useful software based functions and drivers find themselves eventually mounted as an ASIC someday.

I’m starting to see this evolution of software to hardware more and more in the form of “appliances” in our data centre.  For example we use a “google mini”, an appliance to speed up searches of our website. The trade off with this blue (black) box is that it will index everything in our web environment, whether or not that was the intention.

Perhaps the biggest, most expensive appliance you can now get is the recently announced HP Oracle Database Machine.  Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle announced in September at Oracle World that the 168TB  monster can run your Oracle Data warehouses 10-50x faster than your usual hardware/software combos.

The marketing of appliances such as the Oracle Machine to institutions and corporations has me scratching my head. Is the future of cloud computing to be football field sized data-centres with thousands of inexpensive CPU’s and disks velcroed to the wall or these expensive, well branded appliances? Time will tell.

I’ve got very good news and bad news.

The very good news is the recent announcement that the good people at the FCC (pictured above) have ruled to allow unlicensed access to the airwaves between UHF and VHF television channels, known as white-spaces. This has come about because the US will switch over from analogue to digital TV signals in February 2009. This freed up spectrum can now be used for fast (50-100MBPS), free internet access, if Google and others get their way. This technology is being referred to as WiFi on Steroids.

The FCC could have auctioned this spectrum off for BILLIONS of dollars but chose to make it available for consumer technologies. That’s a good thing.  Call me a hopeless romantic but my dream has always been free Internet access for all and this egalitarian move on the part of the FCC is a great leap forward.

From a technical view, the beauty of this spectrum is that it operates in the 700 MHZ band and will penetrate walls and basements with significant range. Looks like radios built for white-spaces will squash any plans for Wi-Max to emerge as the broad spectrum technology of choice for consumers.

The bad news is that Canada is lagging behind the US with its digital cut-over. The CRTC doesn’t plan their analogue/digital cut-over until August 31st, 2011. This 2.5 year lag behind the US could have a significant impact to the Canadian technology industry  (think of the millions of devices on this new network) as the US moves to adopting long range “WiFi on Steroids” radios soon,  the killer app for free mobile applications and urban voice services.

My favourite social network has to be linkedin.com. Besides from being a really good addressbook for business contacts, there is something comforting about  keeping in touch with people you spent time with in the corporate trenches over the years.

Sadly, I don’t have that much luck with facebook. I’m sure younger people dig it but I can’t stand the cliqueness and opportunities for social drama guaranteed by design.  (Me being voted worst dinner companion of my  fb “friends” doesn’t help either. )

That said, I must say I like the micro-blogging aspects of fb – this feature was borrowed directly from twitter.com I think. I like the more esoteric messages:

Pete is thinking about what cereal to have for breakfast.

Sally is on fire. No literally. Call 911!

Linkedin actually has a practical use for me in my life. I’m finding some of the groups very helpful to my job. With 30 million business users, who knows, it could be the place to be for networking and career opportunities.

Now can I please add you as a linkedin friend? We can do lunch…

I want simple applications that I can get to from anywhere, i.e., I want the City to tell me when the garbage truck will be at my house. I get confused with the calendar and the changes in pick up days. I want a message that comes to my mobile device, TV, computer screen, refrigerator, and car dashboard that says:

“Reminder: Recycling/Garbage Day Tomorrow“

then, suddenly the next morning:

“Garbage Truck will be here in 17.38 minutes. Get out of bed lazy!”

I also want to be able to book appointments using my mobile device, TV, laptop, refrigerator, or car dashboard directly with the doctor, salon, golf course, dentist, hairdresser, or doggie-day care people without an endless back and forth of calls, hold musak and busy signals. I don’t want to talk to anyone. I just want to get a message that says “wisdom teeth extraction tomorrow: 8am.” (Well not really.) If the dentist’s office could also book it in my e-calendar I’d be most appreciative.

I want to get an email from the washing machine telling me it’s done.

While the smart-phone wars rage on and on, I think we will be moving to a time when we won’t really care what shiny device we get our info from, just so long as we get our info. Any old point of interface will do. As long the thingie I’m using connects to the cloud that connects to the garbage truck that is rumbling down the boulevard, I’ll be satisfied.

It’s about time that I started to do top 10 lists on my blog. For the record I originally posted this on our website in January 2007 but this is new and improved for 2008! Also, the items on my top ten lists are in no particular order…

In all seriousness, the ICT industry is, according to Gartner, as big a polluter as the aviation industry so we have lots of work to do to reduce CO2 emissions. Here are a few things we are doing:

1. Perhaps the biggest energy saver has come from the move from CRT to LCD monitors. LCD displays use only a third of the energy with a similar sized CRT. When you have thousands of monitors like we do, it adds up…
2. We continue to look for ways of reducing paper by providing people access to on-line reports, electronic mail or electronic workflow where possible.
3. We also actively promote the use of IP based video conferencing to reduce travel. In fact, we have 720p high definition video conferencing in place if you want to look really good.
4. The digital signage currently in use reduces the need for printing bulletin board ads. These displays also shut off at night to save energy.
5. Speaking of shutting off at night, currently all multimedia projectors connected to Crestron controls automatically shut off at 11pm each night. Except for the labs open 24 hours a day, all other lab PC’s are set to power down at 12:15am every night.
6. We are going crazy with VMWARE technology in the server room with a goal of 60% of our server instances running as virtualized sessions. This means that fewer servers and disks need to be purchased. Besides from reducing costs, the cooling requirements are reduced in the data centre, saving significant energy. We are currently testing desktop virtualization technologies to do get the same success
7. Our new data centre is a “lights out” environment – meaning just that!
8. Heat generated from the new data centre in the BCCOL is recovered and used to provide heat for offices.
9. The TRU computer leasing program means that end-of-lease doesn’t mean end-of-life. Instead of going to a landfill, TRU’s lease returned equipment is sold to secondary markets. All Apple products are manufactured with full-lifecycle green standards – meaning that the devices are mostly aluminum and glass.
10. Power management is enabled on all campus printing devices.
11. We lease equipment with ultra efficient power supplies. By this one simple move, we reduce energy requirements equivalent to burning approximately 12,000 US gallons of gasoline per year.
12. We are actively looking at alternatives to hosting applications locally, including Software as a Service and Cloud Computing.

From the Globe and Mail University Navigator Canadian university student survey. Below, I’ve extracted our IT performance from 2006 to present. While we’ve made steady improvements in a number of areas, “Good enough never is – (Chapter 9)”. Suggestions to improve things warmly welcomed.