Magical Jelly Bean Product Key Finder

I am preparing to upgrade to Windows 7 at home, and I am a little leery of it, because if the upgrade doesn't go well, I may end up reinstalling certain software, such as Office 2007.  There is a free program called Magical Jelly Bean Key Finder which will find the product keys for many of the Microsoft tools.  For example, if I needed to reinstall Vista or Office, I wouldn't have to go find my original product keys.  I could just use this program to get that information now.  It will also allow me to save or print them automatically.  It's a random little tool, but definitely something that I am going to use before I do my upgrade, and it's a free piece of software, which is nice.

Link to download

A Really NSFW Situation

NSFW stands for "not safe for work".  It is an abbreviation someone might use when sending an email with questionable content to a friend, as in "check this out, but it is NSFW, so make sure you read it at home".

A few weeks ago, something that takes NSFW to a new level showed up in the news.  Two people who work at Cornell University were having an affair, and somehow, the guy just happened to copy the entire business school.

Now, leaving aside issues of whether this person was being self destructive and actually wanted to get caught or not, this is just awful.  Lesson learned here?  If you are going to have an affair, use your home email, not your work one.  Just remember, when you get a work email account, most companies reserve the right to read your email if they want to, because you are using their systems.  Also remember, they typically reserve the right to monitor your Internet, because after all, their computers and their Internet.

The site below has the entire email exchange, and I warn you now, it is NSFW.
http://guestofaguest.com/news/breaking/breaking-the-email-scandal-that-just-shook-cornells-campus/
(and yes, this was also reported on sites like Business Week, so it is legit...but on BW's site you need an account to read their full story)

MMORPGs and Disney's Toontown

MMORPGs (Massively multiplayer online role-playing games) are typically thought of as games that are for adults. For example, I play one called World of Warcraft. However, there are definitely adult themes there that I wouldn't want a child exposed to. Aside from violence, there are plenty of people in the public chat channels that say inappropriate things.

However, a friend of mine pointed out one that is geared towards children. This is a MMORPG created by Disney, and it is called Toontown. Like most MMORPGs, this does include a monthly fee...but it's interesting to see Disney targeting a younger audience with this.

http://play.toontown.com/about.php

My Spring 2010 Schedule

Here is my current schedule for the 10/SP semester. I will be teaching the following courses:

CIS-101-M10 COMPUTER CONCEPTS/APPLIC (Paterson - Intensive Writing)
Tuesday, Thursday 11:45AM - 01:00PM

CIS-125-P01 MICROCOMPUTER SOFTWARE I (Passaic Campus)
Monday, Wednesday 11:45AM - 01:00PM

CIS-152-M01 INTERNET/E-COMMERCE TECH. (Paterson)
Tuesday, Thursday 10:20AM - 11:35AM

CIS-273-ME1 WEB GRAPHICS (Paterson)
Thursday 07:05PM - 09:35PM, HAMILTON HALL, Room H307

CIS-294-M01 CIS INTERNSHIP (Paterson)
To be Announced

I will also be coordinating the Web Technology capstone course.  There seems to be an issue with the section numbers at the moment, so I didn't want to post the incorrect section number.

Free RAM Analysis Tool

I always seem to walk out of other people's classrooms learning something.

I observed one of our part-time faculty a few weeks ago (this is part of my responsibility as a faculty member), and she gave an example that I plan on using in the future.

One thing I always have trouble explaining to students is what type of RAM they need.  The best answer I've been able to give is to consult the manufacturer's Web site, which is admittedly a pain in the rear end.

Crucial (a company that makes RAM) has made available for free a memory scanner.  This program will tell you how much RAM you have, along with how many slots you have available.  If you were considering a RAM upgrade, this is vital information, and this tool saves you having to open up the PC. 

www.crucial.com/systemscanner/

Windows 7 and the "Hi, I'm a Mac" ads

Last week, Microsoft released the new version of the Windows operating system, simply known as "Windows 7".  This replaces Windows Vista as the most updated version of the operating system.  Windows Vista just never gained acceptance in the way Windows XP did.  Think of it this way.  Windows XP was released in 2001, and Windows Vista was released in 2007.  XP was the primary client operating system for six years.  Windows 7 was released in 2009, two years after Vista.    This says to me that Vista did not accomplish what it needed to.  I bought a new machine a few months ago, and most recently purchased machines came with a free upgrade option.  Mine did, and I ordered the upgrade kit.  I'm going to install it and see what happens.  For those of you who are a little more tech savvy, we're planning on installing it in a few machines in our public lab (H310) so that students interested can try it out.  For what it is worth, reviews so far seem cautiously positive overall.

Either way, Mac has been putting together a set of advertisements since 2006, and Macintosh is clever enough to put ads together putting together already, playing off of the fears.  I went back to the 2007 Vista release ads, and it's funny to see how quickly the annoying issues (like the security warnings you kept getting in Vista, or the fact that Microsoft had six versions of Vista) were almost immediately turned in to ads.  If there is something wrong with 7, we'll see it in the Mac ads soon enough! 

I still don't know if these ads are enough to get the average user to switch to Mac, but they are interesting.

The ads can be seen here: www.apple.com/getamac/ads/

Spring 2010 Registration

The school has posted the Spring 2010 semester on the school Web site.  You can go to pccc.edu and click on the "Course Schedule" link.  Click on "Credit Course Schedule", and then you can select "Spring 2010" as the term.  Registration starts next week, and I would highly recommend getting in as soon as possible to do your schedule - this way, you get the best possible schedule.

The first step in this process, if you have chosen a major, really should be to see a faculty advisor in your major, rather than someone from the Center for Student Success.  The reason is that the counselors in the Center are really typically generalists - that is, they have a general knowledge of all the programs at the school, but typically aren't experts in them.  With all the programs available at the College, who can blame them!

Instead, you should see a faculty advisor.  For example, in the Business major, there are three choices for the math elective.   Some transfer to certain schools better than other schools, and realistically, the faculty in the major (in this case, Professors Cox or Gheorghiu) will know these details because they are the ones who typically do the transfer agreements with the four-year colleges and universities.  In addition, the faculty are typically more in tune with what courses are offered in what semesters, and how pre-requisites may hold you back.  Plus, on a personal note, it's really a great chance for me as a faculty member to work directly with students.

You can see any faculty member in your major, and I would recommend seeing a faculty member for advising now, even if you don't plan on registering yet.  This way, if you do end up registering late, you don't have to worry about getting bad advising during late registration.

For the Information Technology, Computer Science, or Graphic Design majors, you can typically see me, and as always, my office hours are linked near the top left hand side of my blog.

Random paper generators

In what started as a joke, some people at MIT put together a "random abstract generator". It's a tool that will generate a random Computer Science abstract. The funny part is that the papers, though grammatically correct, just really don't make a ton of sense. For example, I just generated this one:

Evaluating Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games Using Amphibious Theory
Abstract
Knowledge-based communication and RPCs have garnered great interest from both scholars and cyberinformaticians in the last several years. After years of technical research into sensor networks, we prove the investigation of flip-flop gates. Our focus here is not on whether model checking can be made amphibious, embedded, and robust, but rather on proposing new symbiotic modalities (Soder).

It's giving me a headache to try to interpret all that.

Basically, there are some conferences that will basically accept anyone's paper, regardless of if it makes sense or not.  So, using this random program generator, the authors of this tool were actually accepted to present at conferences, even if what the abstract said was complete gibberish.

Edit: Here's the link to the generator: pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

Stumbling upon new sites

In my CIS 101 class today, we discussed (among other things) add-ons, and I demonstrated one called StumbleUpon.

As a computer person, I love this.

Basically, StumbleUpon allows you to download an add-on for your Web browser. You select some of your interests, and you can "stumble" upon sites that you like. You can select whether you like a site or dislike it, and based on what your interests are and what sites you like, you will be able to stumble to sites that other people with similar interests like. The more sites you rank, the more accurate it becomes.

This is fascinating to me because on some level this makes use of a technique called "data mining" - basically, how we can use a computer and some data to make predictions better than any person can do by hand. This is similar in some ways to "wisdom of the crowd" - where if you ask a hundred people who are going to win a football game, the collective opinion of the crowd would tend to be correct.

As with many things I mention here, this is a free Add-on!

• stumbleupon.com (Click on "Get the Add-On")

Amazon Associates Program and interstate commerce

In my CIS 152 course, we recently discussed some of the ways a Web site can make money. We discussed "affiliate marketing", where one site can advertise products on another person's site. The example we discussed was Amazon Associates.

Amazon's program is relatively successful, as far as these things go. For example, I as a person with a Web site, can advertise their products like this:



...and if you were to click on that link and buy something I'd get a (small) percentage of the proceeds.

We also talked about the oddities of interstate commerce, such as the legal mess that is wine.com's shipping policies. There are many different laws in different states, and it's tough to keep track of. When New York changed laws to require all residents to pay sales tax, though traditionally you only had to pay sales tax to companies that had a presence in your state. I knew other states would follow suit. North Carolina decided to do something similar, and it's affected the Amazon Associates program.

Any people living in North Carolina are not eligible for this program now, as of June 2009. The laws read that you couldn't tax any company that doesn't have a physical presence in your state. North Carolina decided that if there are Amazon Associates in North Carolina, that qualifies as a "physical presence", so they wanted Amazon to start collecting sales tax on all purchases.

Amazon was not interested in collecting sales tax on all purchases in North Carolina, so they decided not even to bother with North Carolina. Now, since there are no Amazon Associates in North Carolina, there is no physical presence, so there is no reason to collect sales tax on purchases made in North Carolina.

Obviously, Amazon hopes people are outraged enough to run to their Congressmen and have the law changed...but at the moment, North Carolina is out.

Following this, Amazon also made this program unavailable to residents of Rhode Island, also in June 2009, for the same reasons.

I think eventually laws will be amended to tax all Internet sales, but as we've discussed in my course, the laws are almost always behind the technology. The interstate commerce law was first passed in the 1960's, and this is what happens when you try to apply a law written 50 years ago to technology.

15 ways to be a leader

Trent, who publishes one of my favorite blogs, The Simple Dollar, recently had an article listing "15 ways to be a leader". It is a very interesting topic, because like anything else in life, I think leadership can be developed with the right energies. We rarely see as part of a general education curriculum a course that teaches these topics.

I think that, many times, people end up in jobs they dislike and never move up because they don't show any leadership skills. If you don't show leadership skills, why would a company promote you?

I even see this in co-workers. There are times when difficult tasks arise, and it's always the same few people who seem to be the ones who step in to those roles, and a bunch of others who don't take the initiative. I see negativity...there is a difference between venting to a friend who is a co-worker, and venting to a group of people how much things suck. I've tried to remain positive around people, even the ones who are negative. One of the other things Trent discusses is what to do when one is asked for their opinion. It's important to develop the skill of telling the truth when something is bad without hurting people's feelings.

Workplace morale is an overlooked thing sometimes, but I think anyone who has worked can tell you, a bad boss makes a good job horrible, and a great boss makes a bad job bearable.

Link to article

Keywords and Internet placement

When designing a Web page, Web developers have the chance to add what are called keywords to the Web page source code to help search engines such as Google to drive users to your Web page. There is always a debate on how many keywords to include, because if you have 5 keywords, search engines typically view them as more important than if you had 100.

Complicating things is that Google and most other search engines also include things like "how many other sites have a link to your Web site" and other such things to rank your Web site.

There are some things you don't have a ton of control over, but you can choose effective keywords that help drive visitors to your site. One of the ways to do that is to use a keyword suggestion tool. For example, the free site listed below will show you related keywords you can use that might get you better placement on search engines.

Again, there are many sites that do this, the one below is an example. However, it can tell you words related to your keywords that you can use to attract more customers.

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

Keep in mind that this is also a technique less reputable Web sites can use. For example, let's say you have a Web site about the Sopranos TV show. The first thing that shows up on the list above when you look for sopranos is not "Tony Soprano" or "The Sopranos", but "Isabella Soprano" - an American pornographic actress, according to Wikipedia.

If you were really looking to drive people to your Sopranos TV site, you could throw in a reference to the actress and when people Google that actress, they may come across that site. Who knows, in the future, perhaps people looking for this porn star will end up here by accident!

I'd recommend using this for the purpose it was intended - to find popular keywords to help drive traffic to your Web site.

Twitter and the NFL

...Twitter strikes again!

Jets wide receiver David Clowney (and come on, that's an awesome name for a football player) was benched after tweeting ("Twittering") something about being unhappy with his playing time.

It's a fascinating thing to see this develop. In the past we've seen a soccer player fined for Twitter comments, a NBA player benched for it, and the NFL create rules to try and proactively prevent problems (my past thoughts appear here). It is certainly a change in the way we communicate. Now we can post our thoughts and have hundreds or thousands of people see the thoughts immediately. There are consequences to this, as people are learning, and you will likely see problems like this continue to arise as these social networks evolve. There is no filter if you are just upset, or drunk, or whatever, and that's going to lead to some issues in the next few years for some celebrities, I imagine.

Link to story

Ride the Wave

Yesterday (9/30/2009), Google released a new product, Google Wave, to 100,000 testers. Basically, this is Google's way of trying to bring together word processing, instant messaging, social networking, blogs, and directions. For example, in a video, they allow you to have a conversation with someone through chat, and have it autopublish to a Web site. (I can see this being extremely useful in technical support, for example - you could have chats published, and then when people search for that problem, it shows up.

It is a technologically interesting tool, but I am not 100% sure of whether this is really going to take off. Time will tell, as will the 100,000 beta testers (not counting the ones who sold their invite on eBay!)

Google Video on Wave
CNN Story

Fall 2009 Transfer Events

One of the things you should be thinking about NOW as a PCCC student is transfer. You don't want to wait until the last moment. The Center for Student Success brings in representatives from four-year colleges and universities, and has other events designed to help you with transfer. As Paterson is our main campus, most of the events will be held there.

Here is the email I just received about this. For our IT majors graduating this semester, I would highly recommend the NJIT Immediate Decision Days. You sit with a representative and get an answer on the spot about whether you are accepted or not. You need to make an appointment beforehand, however.

Transfer Advising Groups
Would you like to know more about the transfer process? Attend a Transfer Advising Group session! The Transfer Advising Groups are held in the Center for Student Success, A-230. No need to sign up in advance. For more information, call Liz Harrison, Student Development and Transfer Specialist at 973-684-5664.

Monday, October 5, 12:00pm
Tuesday, October 13, 5:00pm
Wednesday, October 21, 12:00pm
Thursday, October 29, 5:00pm
Just have a quick question about your transfer application? Stop by the Center for Student Success on Wednesdays from 3:30-6:30pm, or Thursdays from 10:30-11:30am, ask to see the Transfer Specialist. If appropriate, you may be asked to schedule an appointment to discuss more detailed questions.

University Transfer Admission Information Sessions
Get the facts directly from the source. These sessions are led by admissions representatives who are experts on the transfer admission requirements for their institutions. Everyone is welcome and advance sign-up is not necessary.

Caldwell College
September 22, 11:00am-2:00pm, Broadway Lobby
November 2, 11:00am-2:00pm, Broadway Lobby

College of Saint Elizabeth
September 29, 4:00-7:00pm, Broadway Lobby
October 20, 4:00-7:00pm, Broadway Lobby

New Jersey Institute of Technology
November 3, 11:00am-3:00pm, Broadway Lobby

Historically Black Colleges and Universities College Fair!
November 17, 2009
8:30am-12:30pm
PCCC Gymnasium
Paterson Campus

Gather admission and scholarship information from over 40 Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Many colleges will be waiving their admission application fees if you apply at the fair. This is a very special opportunity to learn more about these prestigious institutions. See Liz Harrison, Transfer Specialist in the Center for Student Success, if you have questions about the fair.


Transfer Admission Immediate Decision Programs
For students with 40 or more completed college level credits, Spring 2010 admission only. Students with scheduled appointments will meet with a university admissions representative, have their application reviewed, and receive an admission decision on the spot. The programs are held in the Center for Student Success at the main campus in Paterson.

University Interview Date Time
Montclair State University November 4, 2009 11:00am-2:00pm and 4:00-6:00pm

NJIT November 9, 2009 11:00am-2:00pm
November 19, 2009 3:00-6:00pm

NJCU October 14, 2009 11:00am-1:00pm
November 18, 2009 11:00am-1:00pm

Rutgers-Newark November 10, 2009 12:00-6:00pm

William Paterson University November 2, 2009 2:00-6:15pm