webdoyen reborn
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Google Apps for Education
In my new position as IT Director for the Great Falls Public School District, I have been investigating Google Apps for Education. The product offering from Google is the same as their standard enterprise Google Apps suite, but they give it away without ads to K-12 and University level education. Actually, they give this suite away to all non-profit organizations, so you don't have to be in education to get Google Apps for Education for free!
In my new position as IT Director for the Great Falls Public School District, I have been investigating Google Apps for Education. The product offering from Google is the same as their standard enterprise Google Apps suite, but they give it away without ads to K-12 and University level education. Actually, they give this suite away to all non-profit organizations, so you don't have to be in education to get Google Apps for Education for free!
It's a good suite. We have definitely encountered some small bugs along the way (primarily with the Google Docs tool), but overall it seems to be working very well.
We are easing into it in our production environment. Right now, we are using it to synchronize our senior staff member's calendars with their clerical staff using Google Calendar and Google's Outlook Sync tool. By using this tool on both the administrator's and the secretary's machines and syncing to the same Google calendar, we can generate a solid and working relationship between two calendar contributors. We've thrown in Google's BlackBerry sync tool to keep the administrator's BlackBerry up to date, and now we have successfully generated a system where three active endpoints (the BlackBerry, the administrator's computer and the secretary's computer) all can read, modify, and delete items on the calendar. Pretty impressive set-up.
I'll keep you posted on the success of the Google setup.
Friday, August 29, 2008
A mixed emotional day
Today we closed on and took possession of our house! Very exciting day. I had to sign for my wife and after each signature had to include "by (my full name) her attorney in fact".
Today we closed on and took possession of our house! Very exciting day. I had to sign for my wife and after each signature had to include "by (my full name) her attorney in fact".
Today also was my granddaddy's funeral. He was something very special to me. He actually passed away on Monday, my first day on the job as IT Director of the Great Falls, Montana public school district. That has been a heavy weight this week.
So this is it - my last day of work for my first week. This weekend I'll work on the house and prepare for the rest of my family's arrival mid-month. Until then, I'm just going to keep throwing myself into my work.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Bye Bye Nike
Yesterday was my last day at Nike. It was a very bitter-sweet experience - very surreal. Nike was a FANTASTIC place to work and I am going to miss the people and my job quite a bit. Here are a couple of pictures from my going away lunch. See those sweet boots in the last pic? Those are very customized - way more than you can get out of the standard NIKEiD.com website ;)




Yesterday was my last day at Nike. It was a very bitter-sweet experience - very surreal. Nike was a FANTASTIC place to work and I am going to miss the people and my job quite a bit. Here are a couple of pictures from my going away lunch. See those sweet boots in the last pic? Those are very customized - way more than you can get out of the standard NIKEiD.com website ;)




house rented - but where do we go?
We rented our house! We are still looking to close on a house in Great Falls soon, but we haven't finalized the negotiations yet - we'll keep you posted.
We rented our house! We are still looking to close on a house in Great Falls soon, but we haven't finalized the negotiations yet - we'll keep you posted.
Sunday, August 03, 2008
House for rent (ours!)
We're renting out our house. It's available starting September 1st.
Here's the craigslist listing: http://portland.craigslist.org/wsc/apa/782063438.html
And the PDF I created: http://www.freewebs.com/nikerental/rental.pdf
Know anybody who wants to rent this place? Let me know!
We're renting out our house. It's available starting September 1st.
Here's the craigslist listing: http://portland.craigslist.org/wsc/apa/782063438.html
And the PDF I created: http://www.freewebs.com/nikerental/rental.pdf
Know anybody who wants to rent this place? Let me know!
Library thrives in digital age | greatfallstribune.com | Great Falls Tribune
Library thrives in digital age | greatfallstribune.com | Great Falls Tribune
Here's an article in the Great Falls Tribune (newspaper of my wife's hometown) discussing how the local library is embracing technology. Take a look at the photo of the guy sitting in the library using the free wifi - yep, that's me.
Library thrives in digital age | greatfallstribune.com | Great Falls Tribune
Here's an article in the Great Falls Tribune (newspaper of my wife's hometown) discussing how the local library is embracing technology. Take a look at the photo of the guy sitting in the library using the free wifi - yep, that's me.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
How long will it take to infect an unpatched Windows machine on the Internet?
Slashdot just put out a short article on estimating the time-to-infection of an unpatched Windows machine on an ISP subnet with no NAT protection. The estimation ranges from 4 minutes to 16 hours - make sure your automatic updates are on and use a router which provides NAT if you can!
(NAT stands for Network Address Translation - it is a technology to obfuscate your computer's IP from the Internet through your router to disallow direct attacks against your machine. It's standard on almost all routers - if you are using high speed internet [DSL or cable] behind a router, you are almost certainly using NAT technology already...)
Slashdot just put out a short article on estimating the time-to-infection of an unpatched Windows machine on an ISP subnet with no NAT protection. The estimation ranges from 4 minutes to 16 hours - make sure your automatic updates are on and use a router which provides NAT if you can!
(NAT stands for Network Address Translation - it is a technology to obfuscate your computer's IP from the Internet through your router to disallow direct attacks against your machine. It's standard on almost all routers - if you are using high speed internet [DSL or cable] behind a router, you are almost certainly using NAT technology already...)
Monday, July 14, 2008
3 and 1/2 minutes to sort a Terabyte
Bill de hÓra: 3 and 1/2 minutes to sort a Terabyte, and a look at Hadoop's code structure
Want to be momentarily confused? Check out this great article on the terabyte sort benchmark competition. The winner, Apache Hadoop, was able to sort one terabyte of data (10 billion 100 byte records) and write the results out in a blazing 209 seconds! This is "push the envelope beyond" type computing...wow.
As an aside, I thought I was pretty hot stuff back in the day when I was studying the postman's sort. I guess sorting algorithms have come a long, long way :)
Bill de hÓra: 3 and 1/2 minutes to sort a Terabyte, and a look at Hadoop's code structure
Want to be momentarily confused? Check out this great article on the terabyte sort benchmark competition. The winner, Apache Hadoop, was able to sort one terabyte of data (10 billion 100 byte records) and write the results out in a blazing 209 seconds! This is "push the envelope beyond" type computing...wow.
As an aside, I thought I was pretty hot stuff back in the day when I was studying the postman's sort. I guess sorting algorithms have come a long, long way :)
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Johnny Lee Wii Remote discussion on TED
Watch this fantastic video that demonstrates how to get some amazing technological interactions with a little imagination and very minimal financial outlay.
Watch this fantastic video that demonstrates how to get some amazing technological interactions with a little imagination and very minimal financial outlay.
Star Trek consoles and things of that nature
Look at how technology is starting to melt into the background - these concepts are fantastic.
http://www.whitevoid.com/application.html
Look at how technology is starting to melt into the background - these concepts are fantastic.
http://www.whitevoid.com/application.html
all content © 2006 Jeff Patterson - thanks for stopping by