Archive for September, 2008

Study Reveals End Users Don’t Pay Attention

A study done by the Psychology Department at North Carolina State University released today shows something we already knew: end users don’t care about technology. The study assigned tasks to be performed using Flash applications to several college students. During the tasks, the users were presented with four pop-up dialogs inside Internet Explorer. The first pop-up was a legitimate application pop-up and the rest were browser windows displaying an image made to look like a real dialog, each more obviously fake than the previous. Sadly enough, 23 of the 42 participants clicked the ‘OK’ button on the dialog that didn’t even take away the IE status bar at the bottom of the page.

Fake Pop-up

When questioned afterwards, the researchers also came to the same conclusion any technical support or systems administrator would have told you: the users viewed the dialog boxes as distractions from achieving the task at hand. Fortunately, usability has gotten much better in the last few years, but users still don’t read errors unless educated about implications of ignoring them. Obviously raising awareness about viruses and other dangers online is not enough. Also, I’m guessing that a lot of people depend upon their security software installed on their PC to make it idiot-proof. Of course this study ‘reveals’ a problem that IT professionals have known about for years, but have end users become numb to the feedback they are receiving from their machines?

Filed under News : Comments (0) : Sep 23rd, 2008

7 Software Utilities I Need for Real Life

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We as humans have designed software to make our lives easier. My life is so ingrained in software that sometimes I find myself wanting to just type a simple command to make things easier myself. In fact, some days I even know what utilities to use and exactly how I would script common tasks in my life. Here are a few of the utilities I’ve wanted to use for the physical world:

grep – I’d be a rich man if I had a quarter for every time I wished I could do something like this in the physical world: ‘grep -R car_keys /home’. Unfortunately, this would probably allow me to be even more unorganized since I could just search for what I need rather than actually organize things so they are easy to find.

rsync – I’ve always wanted to be able to take a set of knowledge that someone has and just copy it over to me. Using rsync, I could easily transfer all data or a set of data from someone else’s brain to mine. But, alas we couldn’t be that lucky.

Xgrid – Whenever a task is too large for me to comprehend or accomplish in a given amount of time I really wish I could just hand it off automagically like Apple’s Xgrid. Delegating tasks tends to be a pain. You have to transfer the information (which we just discussed) and then give an explanation on how to accomplish the task. Using Xgrid, I could just hand off tasks (this would’ve been useful in college) and get the results back.

snapshots – We’ve all been there. We think “wow, that wasn’t my brightest moment”. It’s times like this where I wish I could just fall back to a point in time. We can make volume snapshots or virtual machine snapshots, mess up a machine beyond repair, and fall back to a previous running state. This would have been especially helpful that time that I tried closing that garage door by putting my fingers between the panels and pulling down. Doh!

rm – The human brain remembers a lot of things (though it seems not the things we want it to). Some days I’d like to be able to just wipe bad memories from my mind using rm.

kill – Don’t worry, I’m not looking to kill anyone. What I really need is a way to kill off processes. You know, when you’re lying in bed at night and you just can’t stop thinking about that latest article on whatan00b.com? Wouldn’t it be nice to just to just kill off the process? I know I need that some days.

SSH – Some days I know exactly what I forgot to do or want to preheat the oven on my way home or just change my laundry while I’m at work. SSH would be perfect for that, but sadly enough, no such luck. (note: The oven thing would actually be possible, though a little bit ridiculous at this point.)

Software running in the human world would definitely be helpful and help me accomplish a lot more in a day. What’s really sad is when I know exactly what command to use.. Now, I need to get back to grepping searching for my keys.

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Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (0) : Sep 22nd, 2008

The Tent Datacenter

In Microsoft’s “The Power of Software” blog, they recently ran a post about a “datacenter” they ran inside a tent. The idea was to prove that they could run a rack of servers without any air conditioning using only the outside air to cool it and show how resilient servers really are. This way, the only power that was actually used was the power used to run the servers, thus achieving a better PUE. The rack of servers actually got wet and stayed up. Interestingly, (at least to them) the servers maintained a 100% uptime for the entire 30-day experiment. I’m going to throw out my security and environmental concerns just for the sake of this argument.

As a whole, the IT industry definitely does a lot of over-building of architecture. We buy two of everything. Through my job I’ve learned to trust nothing. Heck, sometimes I feel vulnerable driving down the road in my car since I don’t have dual tires and dual engines so in case one fails, I can keep going. Don’t laugh, it’s funny because it’s true. In our industry we quickly learn that everything fails. Hard drives, power supplies, RAM, and the worst of them all is people. Given this state of mistrust, we tend to buy much more than necessary, constantly chasing that elusive 100% uptime mark.

The idea behind this experiment was great – we really do over-purchase cooling, fire fighting, and power equipment. However, there’s one basic flaw here. For the same reason we buy seat belts, air bags, and insurance policies. 9,999 times out of 10,000 (hopefully it’s much higher!), everything is just fine when we get in our cars and drive away. But it’s that one time that will kill you, literally.

I find it interesting that people have been thinking of this as a new idea. People working with festivals and other events where temporary networks must be established have been running computers in tents for some time. I helped work with a large outdoor music festival called LifeLight for a couple of years. We did the same thing. We put computers in tents. Except for having less than ideal hardware, everything was fine. The machines got dew on them when they sat out overnight but they booted up in the mornings. It works, but it’s far from ideal. I’m sad to say that we didn’t achieve the 100% uptime these two did, but our equipment wasn’t quite the same.

Now I’m a progressive thinker, but seriously, let’s not forget where we came from. There’s a huge difference between 99% uptime and 99.99% uptime. Whether or not this is a reasonable goal is another conversation, but that’s what everyone seems to “need”. The big problem with this idea is this: our environment can cause disruptions in computers. Just like insurance policies, we never need the “wasted” money and power used for brick, cooling, fire, and power equipment until we need it. I do understand where they are coming from, but I’m not going to be the one telling my CEO that the servers that our company depends upon are down because it’s slightly warmer than what the servers can handle outside and we decided to save money by not spending a little more to have extra equipment to handle the load. I don’t want to be that guy.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Sep 22nd, 2008

Windows 7 Screenshots

With all the hype Microsoft has been trying to create around its products lately with its new advertising campaigns, it’s about time they showed something. Now, I’m not a Microsoft fan, but I’m anxious to see what they can produce. Microsoft has taken a lot of heat over Vista in the media and I think they’re going to step up to the plate with some UI features. Evidently in the new Windows 7, they’ve introduced the ribbon into the built-in editors like Wordpad and Paint. Now, I’m not a usability expert, but.. this seems like a complete waste of monitor real estate. I don’t want to get into the ribbon vs. no-ribbon debate of yester-year, but come on. The ribbon’s over-sized buttons saved space in Office because there were several tabs in the ribbon. We supposedly gave up some space to gain it in the long run. Unfortunately, Wordpad only has one tab. Doh! Plus, how is this going to look in a 9-inch netbook? No thanks, Microsoft. I’d like to keep and use all the valuable screen space since laptops and computing devices are, you know, getting smaller.

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Filed under News, Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Sep 19th, 2008

The Google Datacenter on Water

Rumors are flying around the web about potential Google data centers out to sea. Google has cited a few reasons including using the energy from the waves to bring down cooling and power costs. Others have suggested that Google is trying to escape property taxes for its data centers around the world, but that seems it seems a bit ridiculous to me. Whatever the reasons, I’m not sure that I’d like to see their data centers on water.

Isolating data centers on the water scares me. Google of course has a very robust infrastructure, but, like it or not, they are an extremely important part of our national and international ecosystem. We’ve seen what kind of affect a small mistake by the Googlebot can cause on Wall Street. Combine that with the attacks on Georgia‘s infrastructure from Russia and we could have a real concern on our hands. I definitely see the advantages here, but let’s keep our feet on solid ground for now. Whether or not we choose to believe it, a crippled Google means a crippled Internet and a crippled Internet means a crippled nation.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Sep 17th, 2008

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