We interrupt the usual, pollyanna technology updates to draw your attention to an article called The End of Solitude by William Deresiewicz in this month’s Chronicle of Higher Education. Deresiewicz postulates that people in their teens and 20’s

…have no desire for solitude, have never heard of it, can’t imagine why it would be worth having. In fact, their use of technology — or to be fair, our use of technology — seems to involve a constant effort to stave off the possibility of solitude, a continuous attempt, as we sit alone at our computers, to maintain the imaginative presence of others. As long ago as 1952, Trilling wrote about “the modern fear of being cut off from the social group even for a moment.” Now we have equipped ourselves with the means to prevent that fear from ever being realized. Which does not mean that we have put it to rest. Quite the contrary.

Remember my student, who couldn’t even write a paper by herself. The more we keep aloneness at bay, the less are we able to deal with it and the more terrifying it gets.

There is an analogy, it seems to me, with the previous generation’s experience of boredom. The two emotions, loneliness and boredom, are closely allied. They are also both characteristically modern. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citations of either word, at least in the contemporary sense, date from the 19th century. Suburbanization, by eliminating the stimulation as well as the sociability of urban or traditional village life, exacerbated the tendency to both. But the great age of boredom, I believe, came in with television, precisely because television was designed to palliate that feeling. Boredom is not a necessary consequence of having nothing to do, it is only the negative experience of that state. Television, by obviating the need to learn how to make use of one’s lack of occupation, precludes one from ever discovering how to enjoy it. In fact, it renders that condition fearsome, its prospect intolerable. You are terrified of being bored — so you turn on the television.

I speak from experience. I grew up in the 60s and 70s, the age of television. I was trained to be bored; boredom was cultivated within me like a precious crop. (It has been said that consumer society wants to condition us to feel bored, since boredom creates a market for stimulation.) It took me years to discover — and my nervous system will never fully adjust to this idea; I still have to fight against boredom, am permanently damaged in this respect — that having nothing to do doesn’t have to be a bad thing. The alternative to boredom is what Whitman called idleness: a passive receptivity to the world.

So it is with the current generation’s experience of being alone. That is precisely the recognition implicit in the idea of solitude, which is to loneliness what idleness is to boredom. Loneliness is not the absence of company, it is grief over that absence. The lost sheep is lonely; the shepherd is not lonely. But the Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom. If six hours of television a day creates the aptitude for boredom, the inability to sit still, a hundred text messages a day creates the aptitude for loneliness, the inability to be by yourself. Some degree of boredom and loneliness is to be expected, especially among young people, given the way our human environment has been attenuated. But technology amplifies those tendencies. You could call your schoolmates when I was a teenager, but you couldn’t call them 100 times a day. You could get together with your friends when I was in college, but you couldn’t always get together with them when you wanted to, for the simple reason that you couldn’t always find them. If boredom is the great emotion of the TV generation, loneliness is the great emotion of the Web generation. We lost the ability to be still, our capacity for idleness. They have lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude.

But not all hope is lost for today I learned that  drinking coffee,  being tall and left-handed has an upside!

Digital kids take time out for some analog sushi building

Dimension 3D Printers

I must admit It took me a while to understand why there was so much buzz about “Additive Fabrication” or 3-D Printing. Machines that create 3D Models from CAD Files have been around for a while. For example, many dentist offices now have machines that can “print” you a new tooth crown, customized to your mouth, while you wait.

The disruptive aspect of 3-D Printing comes about when these machines are available to everyone. While there may be limited appeal at the moment to printing a plastic toy or iPod cover at home, just think about the benefits of being able to “print” spare parts for all those machines and electronic devices we have. Instead of ordering the part and playing the waiting game,  you’d simply buy the CAD file from the vendor’s website, download it to your 3-D printer, press start and voila!

A CBC Article on 3-D printing mentions one company called “Desktop Factory” that is aiming its technology at the small business market.

Desktop Factory aims to get the price down to under $1,000 US over the next three to five years and add different printable inks, such as those that produce flexible or transparent models. That would open up the market to everyday consumers, who could use 3D printers to fabricate household items, such as bendable toys or iPod covers, Lewis says.

“People will be able to disrupt the manufacturing chain and print replacement parts rather than having to drive to Home Depot for something that was manufactured in China,” she says. “We haven’t begun to tap into the users who really need the technology.”

Yeah I know, this is all hype. But just think about the potential. Suppose your hardware store printed out that tiny washer for your antique facet while you waited? Suppose it didn’t have to stock every washer under the sun? What about the aircraft that’s grounded at the airport waiting for a small engine part to be shipped from afar? The mechanics could just print a new one as required. Along the way, wouldn’t removing all the shipping, storage and handling be good for the environment?

Think about all the things creative designers and TRU technology students could do with an in house, desktop model builder.

What’s even cooler are these sugar sculptures. I gotta get a 3D Sugar Printer!

Pour some sugar on my 3D Bread

Well not really. But the viewing of today’s wonderful, historic inauguration of President Obama put a major strain on the Internet, American cell phone networks and our firewall here at TRU. Here’s a snapshot of our firewall traffic during the speech. All the extra traffic on port 8247 was caused by staff watching the inauguration on CNN.

People noticed the network slowdown even though preparations for the increase in traffic were anticipated for the event. For example, CNN used the Octoshape plugin for the live stream to Flash players. This technology is Peer to Peer (P2P) which is an effective way of reducing traffic from CNN’s host servers. Even so, CNN reported having slow downs meeting the deluge.

Stonehenge - Ran out of Programmers?

This just in: Our students are spending lots of time online. From Educause Review January - The NetGens 2.0: Clouds on the Horizon:

The Pew Internet & American Life Project uses the quaint term “Omnivore” to label that group of users who “do an enormous range of things online.” This report noted: “Perhaps unsurprisingly, many (42% versus the 13% average) of Omnivores are students.” Likewise, the Pew study of cloud computing usage affirmed that use of the cloud is growing and that those in the youngest cohort (18- to 29-year-olds) are leading they way, with 77 percent having used web-mail services.³

Additionally, the authors of the recent book Born Digital state that a NetGens 2.0 student, when turning twenty years old, will have spent 10,000 hours online. To accumulate that much time at 3 hours per day would require just over 9 years; 2 hours a day would require nearly 14 years. The authors put it this way: 10,000 hours is equivalent to the amount of practice time someone would need to become a professional cellist.⁴

Okay so they can play the cello but can anyone program anymore? Where have all the talented programmers gone?

BEGIN rant

The problem is that the NetGen omnivores don’t see IT as a “thing” or a viable career choice anymore. I think IT became irrelevant and boring in 2001 after the dot com bust. Declining computer science program enrollments starting back then support this. 

Around the office there are two schools of thought on the talent shortage as it relates to the 18-29 cohort.

Camp 1 – Don’t Worry Be Happy

• The NetGens don’t have an interest in programming because it’s not a necessary skill anymore. 
• If I want to program the latest Web 2.0 thingie I just use a super-high-level scripting language that just lets me glue objects together. I don’t need to concern myself with stuff thats happening at lower levels of abstraction. What could be easier? 
• CPU’s these days are so ridiculously fast that who cares about code efficiency?
• Isn’t all the world’s programming now done in developing countries with the lowest labour costs?If I need new code, I just dial the call centre offshore…

Camp 2 – IT’s the End of the World as We Know it

• The dearth of programming talent (and computer scientists in general) is a major problem and will impact Canada’s competitiveness in years to come.
• Understanding how to communicate with the machine at it’s most BASIC level is a foundation skill that all students should have.  
• As more and more appliances and devices become IP aware, code efficiency will be critical. This requires skills.
• Newsflash: We are getting older: Who is going to run all this technology when us old curmudgeons have shuffled off this mortal coil?

Guess what, I’m firmly in camp two. I’ve predicted IT worker shortages in earlier postings and continue to have trouble recruiting and retaining IT talent. With the predictions that the IT Industry may not be as adversely impacted by the current economic troubles as other industries, times will continue to  be tough for hiring managers. You see, we still need programmers. It’s the end of the world as I know it.

END rant

From guest blogger, colleague and IT Security Guru Hugh Burley, CISSP…

You may not be aware that you are part of a war raging on the Internet. At TRU over 90% of all email directed to our accounts is SPAM. Every time one of these messages slips through our SPAM gateway and you open it, the enemy scores a direct hit. There are billions of these messages clogging the Internet every day which are generated by machines that have become part of botnets.  These zombies can also be used to launch increasingly sophisticated attacks to either add new systems to the botnet or attempt to steal information from vulnerable machines.  If your machine becomes a zombie or information about you is stolen, score another hit for the bad guys.

According to Brian Krebs, “The close of 2008 sounded the death knell for some of the most notorious spam networks on the planet.”  Atrivo/Intercage was shut down putting the final nail in the coffin for the Storm worm, one of the most ingenious spam botnets ever created.  McColo — a network that experts say absorbed many of the refugees from the Atrivo shutdown was taken out the next month and spelled the beginning of the end for “Srizbi,” which was until recently considered the most massive spam botnet with an estimated 450,000 infected computers. The world also saw what is likely to be the final spam run from Bobax, a botnet that once rivalled Srizbi in size and longevity.

These take downs were major victories for our side and had a big impact on the amount of spam that we saw at the TRU mail gateway, but the bots are gaining ground again quickly. “Cutwail,” (a.k.a. “Pushdo”), now stands as the world’s largest botnet, with some 175,000 sickened PCs in its thrall according to SecureWorks Senior Researcher Joe Stewart.  Rustock,” a sophisticated botnet that uses rootkit techniques to hide on host systems is estimated to have some 130,000 Microsoft Windows systems in its family. Donbot,” popular among spammers sending junk e-mail for weight loss drugs, stock investment scams and debt settlement offers has claimed more than 125,000 PCs. The list goes on; with the addition of “Xarvester“, “Cimbot”, and “Waledec,” now including over 140,000 machines.

Although we have won some significant battles in the last few months the tide may soon be turned in favour of the enemy by massive new botnets which may be created by the downadup/conflicker infection. This infection grew from an estimated 2.4 million machines on January 13^th to 3.5 million on the 14^th.   As Mikko Hypponen points out,

It would make for one big badass botnet.

And where in the world are these infections? We’re glad you asked. We resolved the IPs to countries and here are the results.

 

Number of IPs	Registered country of the IP
38,277	China
34,814	Brazil
24,526	Russia
16,497	India
14,767	Ukraine
13,115	Italy
11,675	Argentina
11,117	Korea
8,861	Romania
6,166	Indonesia
5,882	Chile
5,531	Taiwan
5,162	Malaysia
4,392	Germany
4,261	Philippines
3,958	United States
3,719	Colombia
3,307	Spain
3191	Thailand
2,871	Kazakhstan
2,828	Venezuela
2,685	Mexico
2,518	Europe (resolved to EU)
2,337	France
1,901	Bulgaria
1,789	United Kingdom
1,655	Pakistan
1,636	Turkey
1,544	Saudi Arabia
1,399	Hungary
1,389	Iran
1,272	Poland
1,259	Macedonia
1,193	Japan
1,052	Portugal
1,029	Vietnam

 

These are the raw unique IPs; you could think of this as China having 38,277 infected companies, not persons.

London’s Sunday Times reports that, according to a Harvard study, each Google search generates 7g of CO2. Two google searches, for example searching for  “vortex shedding” or “Faulkner on the past” uses 14g of CO2, the same amount of energy required to boil a tea-kettle.

Now I was quite shocked by this number and no technical information was provided in the report. Google disputes the numbers provided by the Harvard study, saying that searches use the equivalent of much less energy (0.2 grams of CO2.)

Whatever the right number, it does bring into focus the giga-watts of power required to run massive data centres. That said, I’m sure Google is doing what it can to make all that infrastructure as energy efficient as possible.

Just to be on the safe side, remember to hold your breath with each search.

Vortex shedding behind a circular cylinder. Courtesy, Cesareo de La Rosa Siqueira. via Google

Here’s some “blue-skying” for the year ahead in IT. Note that I reserve the right to be breathtakingly wrong.

1. Being Green Saves Green

Everything will continue to be about reducing IT’s CO2 footprint and reducing costs. Virtualization technologies (VMWare etc.) now rule the server room and are a no-brainer approach; desktop virtualization technologies (VMWare, XenSource, Citrix, nComputing, etc.) will improve student access to bespoke applications, improve access and reduce costs.

The total carbon footprint of technologies now guides all our purchases. We now consider the whole lifecycle of devices: how and where electronics are built, how much power they use and how the can be safely disposed of form the evaluation criteria.

Of course, all this virtualization reduces the number of machines required – spelling bad news for hardware vendors.

2. Disaster Recovery

2008 was a bad year for “cloud” outages. Google and Amazon had major service interruptions. Banks and stock market systems failed. In 2009, keeping things running will be the core competency of IT teams. To do this properly we will rely on new technologies and partners to protect critical data and networks.

3. The Year of Living with Video Conferencing

2009 is going to be the year when we have to start delivering good video conferencing services. We aren’t talking about 3D holographic telepresence just yet, but high definition cameras, good quality sound and wireless microphones, proper lighting will improve the videoconferencing experience and provide a sound alternative for in-person lectures and meetings. Improvements to videoconferencing and synchronous collaboration tools should slowly reduce the requirement for travel.

4. Can’t we all just get along – with all those new devices?

Over the last few years we’ve seen a veritable plankton-bloom of equipment on our wireless “bubble.” With laptops, net-books (ie mini laptops),  iPods, iPhones, iDogs (kidding), Smart Phones, RFID Tags, Security Equipment, dual mode phones,  – the number of new consumer devices connecting will continue to grow exponentially.  Survival for IT in this new landscape requires us to be really good at security and network availability – policing the stuff on the network may be tricky. Strong security and identity management will be critical here.

5. And all those new devices better work well together

This year expect better touch screens, cameras, power management, and, most importantly,  less wires connecting those devices. I’d loove to do away with the big plastic box of cables I have to plug everything in. Other vendors and Open Sourcers should follow Apple’s beautiful walled garden approach to device and application integration.

Walled Garden - by Paul Englefield

6. Speaking of Netbooks, is it the beginning of the end of Desktops?

Windows Version 7.0 will no doubt emerge this year but it’s overall presence will be a big yawn. How important are operating systems in a world of “information anywhere” devices? I expect to see continued use of mobile computing with users bypassing laptops to Netbooks or smart-phones. Applications via the Cloud will figure prominently in this shift.

7. Will ERP Vendors start to get “SaaS-y”?

I’ve got no idea how or when the (Enterprise Resources Planning) ERP vendors will get there but Small and Medium Sized (SME) customers, their last frontier for new revenue, will want their ERP solution as  Software as a Service (SaaS) where applications are used and rented on-demand. Here at TRU, I’d expect we will be using more SaaS solutions into the future as everyone rushes into the “clouds.” That’s probably the new gold dream.

8. I’ve Looked at Clouds from Both Sides Now

While I don’t think things will change overnight, I’m a believer that if cloud computing offers a greener, cheaper and easier way of doing things to your standard data-centre model, it will succeed. That said, I don’t think people will shut down their IT infrastructures overnight. Look forward to seeing cloud-based implementations of productivity applications like MS-exchange, gmail, sharepoint, office, google docs taking a foothold in enterprises. On its heels applications from Intuit, Mint, 37Signals, and the like will continue to gain in popularity.

Big ERP’s may take much longer to migrate to the cloud. Perhaps “Platform as a Service” will be the approach that succeeds for core enterprise applications. Can you say Service Bureau 2.0?

We will continue to work with other schools to create “trusted clouds” of shared services.

9. Social Networking

Now that the whole world is on Facebook (fb) or some other social network, look forward to seeing more corporate implementations of social network-like packages. I’m not thinking that we would actually use fb for University collaboration (I’m not convinced fb groups or applications actually have much uptake)  but look forward to fb look and feel in collaborative applications behind the firewall to improve internal communications.

10. The Search for IT Talent Continues

Global Economic Downturn or not, the IT talent pool is shallow. We will continue having trouble attracting and retaining pros over the next year. Woe is me.

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

“Everything is just a few hundred clicks away”

Happy New Year – Bonne Année.

It’s a beautiful, snowy day and the PVR is loaded with dozens of MythBuster Episodes and the fire is blazing. What else could you need?

A quiet New Years Day and a headache causes me  to reflect on the past and make some predictions for the next 12 months. Part of my job as an IT leader is to determine what’s coming and figure out when new technologies should be adopted. A tool I use is the Gartner Hype Cycle. The goal with this information is to always try to adopt technologies on the Slope of Enlightenment or Plateau of Productivity as opposed to when the trend is at the Peak of Inflated Expectations. This is more easily seen in the diagram below.

Gartner Hype Cycle

While tools like the Hype Cycle are great, I still want to make my own wild guesses of what’s coming next. I’m not too proud to admit that I’m often spectacularly wrong. In that I’m in good company – oil at $200/Barrel and wrong calls on technology futures spring to mind.  I’ll indulge some of my predictions in future posts.

Anyway, I digress. Saw an interesting post about futurist Richard Watson’s predictions for 2009. The trend I found most relevant to this blog was the concept of unplugging from our digital lives.

“This means that people will start to edit and unwire their lives, removing unwanted “friends” and dropping out of social networks as they reclaim personal or family time. There is an aspirational element here, too – just as owning a mobile phone was once seen as a mark of sophistication, not owning one (or using one sparingly) is becoming a signal that a person has sorted out their priorities or has staff to take mundane calls. Hence the new phrase “digital diets”, and an interest in analogue products: fountain pens, wet-film photography and vinyl records.”

Who knows, maybe a digital diet is just what the doctor ordered. That said, it may be best to pull the plug first before you have to suffer the indignities of being “de-friended” from other people’s social networks. That’s never fun.

Time to unplug and go play in the snow.