CNN Tech: The Top 10 Technology Fails of 2009

It has been an interesting year for technology failures, and part of the reason (I believe, anyway) is that technology is now considered important enough to get the media coverage to make it news.  Five years ago, it was not something that was noticed, and now it is.

It's always interesting for me to go back and see what sort of things happened this year, and see what sort of stories were big.  For example, you may have heard a lot of hype about a virus called Conficker (around April Fool's Day 2009).  This was supposed to be a big virus, but no major destruction and doom ever materialized.

Also, who can forget the Sidekick crash in October, where many users lost personal data - ALL of it.  Some users were able to recover it, but many were not.  This was one of those things that I don't understand.  This is why backups are so important, and I don't see how companies lose data these days.

Anyway, here's the article from CNN:
Link to Article

Facebook group hacking

I always love it when the words "hacking" and "protest" show up in the same article.

Recently, people on Facebook were annoyed with a feature of the Facebook "groups".  Basically, this feature said that if someone who had created a group left it, and there was no longer an administrator, ANYONE in the group could take the group over.  You can see why this was put in place - you wouldn't want someone to abandon a group and have it just disappear, after all.  However, you can also see the potential problem.  Anyone can take over a group!

In protest, a group of people "hijacked" administrator privileges in around 300 groups in November, just to show that Facebook has a major issue with security.

Link to article

Photoshop Trickery

Image editing is not something new.  The Soviet Union did this back in the 1920's and 1930's, famously editing people out of photos who had become enemies of the government.

This has been made a lot easier nowadays with the invention of tools like Photoshop, and has been used in a lot of situations.  For example, Time Magazine darkened a picture of O.J. Simpson in 1994, which Newsweek ran without changes.  Many people felt that Time Magazine's portrayal was in poor taste, if not racist.

In a more amusing twist, the Buffalo Bills recently fired their head coach, Dick Jauron.  They gave out team photos to fans at a recent game, and edited the former coach out, even as they left players there who had been cut from the team.  Viewing the high-resolution version of the picture, you can see a lot of things that aren't quite right, for example, look at the size of #31 Jairus Byrd's right arm.  There is a complete discussion of this on a Bills message board, and this also appeared on ESPN's Web site.

From Trotsy to O.J. to Jauron, image editing has many forms, and you can see why a simple photograph isn't evidence enough nowadays.

Time Saving Google Tips

There are many ways that you can save yourself some time on Google.  I always am amazed at how they update the search engine and add features as time goes on.

Some of the features have also been there for years, and there are a number of them that are documented on the site below.

Link to Site

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