Clear Blue Dei

It is coming on the holiday season and one gift that everyone would love is more memory for their computer. Nothing will revive an older computer better than adding memory and nothing will speed up a good computer better than more memory.

If you are like me, you have at least one computer that seems slow now, although when you bought it you thought you had gotten ample CPU size and memory. A lot of people blame their CPU when really they just need to add memory. I have a Dell Dimension 4400 desktop computer with (believe it or not) 256 meg of memory and my Dell Inspiron 8600 notebook has 512 meg. At the time I bought each of these, that was considered ample memory, but nowadays 1 gig is about the minimum you would want and if your computer can accept more, so much the better.

My desktop can only handle a maximum of 1 gig (two 512 memory modules) and my laptop can handle 2 gig (two 1 gig modules). I plan to upgrade both of them to their max and as a matter of fact, have already ordered it and we are waiting for it to come in. It is my Christmas present and I can’t think of a better present than that.

But when I asked for memory, I realized that I did not know what I needed to get. There is a lot of different kinds of memory and it is very confusing. The first thing I did since I have Dell computers is to go to the Dell website and look up each of my computers by their service tag. The service tag is on each Dell computer. If you haven’t done it yet and you own a Dell computer, sign in to the Dell website and go to My Systems and Peripherals. Then locate your service tag on your computer. If you can’t find it, there is a Find My Service Tag link right below the where you would enter it. Be aware though that it requires Internet Explorer 5.5 or greater. It doesn’t work with Netscape or what I use, Firefox.

When you enter the service tag (and a description, like “Susie’s Laptop”), you will see a wealth of information about your computer. It will give you a complete summary of the configuration of your computer when you bought it. And on the left will be a list of a whole bunch of support and documentation for your computer.

If I click on Manuals, it takes me to the manuals for my specific computer with a “Tell Me How”, “Service Manual”, “Owner’s Manual” and “Setup Diagram”. All very useful, no? In the Owner’s Manual, it has a whole section with pictures on exactly how to add memory (in this case, to my laptop). And it listed the type of memory to get in the Appendix.

It pretty much spells it out for me. Once I had this information, I could go anywhere and look for two 1 Gig 333-MHz DDR SODIMM SDRAM (PC2700) memory modules. And as it states, my laptop comes standard with 256 meg (I have 512) and can go up to 2 gig (1 gig each slot).

But what if I didn’t have a Dell?

Well, thank goodness, there is a very easy way to tell what memory you need for your computer, thanks to Crucial, makers of very fine computer memory. Crucial provides a system memory scanning tool for your computer that tells you exactly what memory you have and what you need. You do have to either be using Internet Explorer (why does everywhere require that?) or to download their system scanning tool which takes a second and pops the scan results up in your regular (in my case, Firefox) browser just like you ran it from there. It identified my exact computer type, the type of memory I needed and how much I had and what I could use. Here are the results of my scan.

Pretty easy to figure out what I need now, that is for sure. Of course, I would not necessarily recommend buying through their website, it is generally cheaper to go somewhere else. I ended up buying mine from Newegg because they were selling the 1 Gig modules for $70 with a $16 rebate for each module. They don’t have the rebate now (and the price is now $80) but looking up PC2700 on Dealcatcher, I see that now Buy.com has the same 1 gig Crucial memory for $58 with no S&H.

Crucial memory is considered very good and reliable and it guarantees that it is compatible with your computer when you run the scan to determine what kind to get. That is especially important with Dell computers since they are known to be somewhat picky.

I ended up getting Kingston memory for my desktop. They were sold out of that particular Crucial memory and the Kingston memory got good reviews. That is one thing nice about Newegg, they list reviews for each of their products. And Kingston has a list on their website of what computers their memory is compatible with and what type of memory to get. It is good for a double-check, but doesn’t actually scan your system the way the crucial website does.

Kingston also provides some Memory Installation Guides. They are pretty generic though. Better to go to the website for your particular computer and see what online manuals or help they have. Or you can always look in the manual that came with your computer I hardly even think of that, I am so used to looking it up online.

So if you are thinking about what you might want for Christmas (or holiday of your choice) or what you might get someone else, think of the gift of memory! It isn’t as hard as you think and it really will make a big difference to how well your computer will run.

~Susan Mellott

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I was looking through My Yahoo news and found an interesting article about a robot that the japanese were developing called Twendy-One.

Twendy-One, named as a 21st century edition of a previous robot, Wendy, has soft hands and fingers that gently grip, enough strength to support humans as they sit up and stand, and supple movements that respond to human touch.

It can pick up a loaf of bread without crushing it, serve toast and help lift people out of bed.

The robot is a little shorter than an average Japanese woman at 1.5 m (5 ft), but heavy-set at 111 kg (245 lb). Its long arms and a face shaped like a giant squashed bean mean it resembles the alien movie character E.T.

Here is the website for Twendy-One. It is mostly in japanese, but has videos of Twendy-One performing various tasks.

So I went to YouTube to see if there were other videos of Twendy-One, or other robots. I found this video of a montage of Japanese robots.

And this video of the LandWalker Robot Suit:

And I love this one of Robots Fighting. It is so cute!

And here is a totally cool robot toy ROBOZAK RZ-1 that it looks like you can build yourself? Watch it’s amazing moves. For some reason it is not displaying in my post, but follow the link to view it in action.

Here is a video of and a link to the Humanoid Robot Project: Promet MK-II, very cool. The HRP-3 Promet Mk-II is a blue-collar android tough enough to trudge through heavy rains, carry out disaster relief operations and work in environments hazardous to humans. The robot was unveiled on June 21, 2006 at Kawada Industries headquarters in Tochigi prefecture, Japan, where it showed of its ability to operate power tools and walk on slippery surfaces.:

And last but not least, here is a picture (and the set of pictures) from our local ACPL Shawnee Library branch of their Sumo Robot building and testing from their teen robot program.

Pretty cool, huh?!

~Susan Mellott

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How about this in your living room?

Click on the picture to see it full-size. Check out the console TV hanging on the wall!

The caption reads:

“Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a “home computer” could look like in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also, the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use.”

We’ve come a long way baby,

UPDATE:  Not True.  See my post called Blog Tip Lessons Learned: Email Sources Always Need Verified for the real story.

~Susan Mellott

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Well I’m sure you all are getting as sick of the repeated speculations as to what really happened with Skype. So am I.

In many ways, it is unfortunate that so much has been written about the Skype outage, to the point that now that people are looking at it from a broader perspective, such as why did their communication fail, or how companies need to review their backup plans for situations such as these, either no one wants to read about it or it gets buried in the overwhelming amount of Skype related posts.

But the bigger picture is not about what happened to Skype as much as it is about how Skype tried outdated, 1.0 communcation techniques that failed miserably in the current 2.0 environment. Even in their ‘clarification’ post today on the situation, seems to sort of recognize they have a communications problem, but clearly doesn’t recognize why.

And forget this is about Skype. Think of it as about any company, in a situation that affects their users and how they communicate and handle the situation.

I wish I had written this post, but it says everything I would want to and so rather than repeat it, just go read P.R. 2.0’s post called “Crisis Communication 2.0 - The Skype is Falling“. Or if you prefer, here is the post on a white background (I don’t care as much for black background with white lettering if I’m trying to read something).

And I hope this doesn’t get buried in the continuing rehash of the Skype problem

~Susan Mellott

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I imagine most of you know who Wil Wheaton is. He is an actor who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Actually, he has done a lot more than that, but that is mainly how I know of him.

But what makes him interesting is his love and knowledge of technology and his leading edge use of Web 2.0 tools. Here is the wikipedia entry that talks about him and what he has done.

From wikipedia: “After leaving Star Trek, Wheaton quit acting altogether. He moved to Topeka, Kansas to work as a programmer for Newtek, where he helped develop the Video Toaster 4000.” (I assume they meant he temporarily quit acting)

Wil was a very early adopter of blogging, creating his site wilwheaton.net (see the wikipedia article on his blog) which is currently being updated (since about last June) and is replaced for now by his blog WWdN: In Exile - Wil Wheaton’s not-so-temporary blog. Per the wikipedia article on his blog: “Rather than just a fan forum, it was a place where people could gather to talk about various subjects including movies, music, books, religion, politics, gaming, geocaching, and miscellaneous topics; the original emphasis was on topics of interest to Wil Wheaton and not the man himself.” He has entries on his blog dating back to July 2001.

Wil also has written 3 books, and most of the entries are extended versions of his online blog entries. (Take note, bloggers, this is not a bad idea if you have a following).

Also from wikipedia: “In late September of 2006, Wheaton began hosting a Revision3 syndicated video podcast called InDigital along with Jessica Corbin and veteran host Hahn Choi. ” Of note: Wil found an error on the wikipedia entry for himself and asked on slashdot for someone to correct it.

Wil also twitters regularly and has just recently twittered on the Comic-Con he attended. Interestingly, he is having a problem at the moment trying to remove people he no longer wishes to follow and is talking about it on twitter. Update: as of about 4 hours ago, he twittered that the problem was a bug in twitter and was fixed by Biz Stone.

Wil also uses flickr and has some very interesting photos. And something I found interesting too that Wil has been doing on buzznet is “What is Wil looking At?” which is sort of a cross between flickring and twittering (flittring?). It looks like he is taking pictures with his phone of whatever he is doing and uploading them. It’s a neat idea and I’m sure at some point, people will be doing that just like they twitter now.

And of course, he checks technorati for links to his blog and has a profile technorati for wilw. Here are some other things of his (from his blog):

 

• My Netscape Submissions (he’s a navigator at Netscape News)
• My delicious bookmarks
• Geek in Review
• blogging.la

And there are quite a few interesting videos of him talking about technology on YouTube. Here is one where Wil talks about Podcasting (answering fan’s question at reading of his book, Just a Geek)

And there is a lot more that he is or has been involved with. The wikipedia article and his blog has more information.

To be honest, although I knew who he was, I’m old enough that I watched the original Star Trek more than I watched The Next Generation. But I think he seems like an interesting person and certainly one who is Web 2.0.

~Susan Mellott

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As you know, I’ve been concerned about the institutions that host data for Web 2.0 applications. Code4lib, a major library 2.0 site (and everything else hosted on anvil.lisforge.net) was hacked on July 21 and is still not available. They are hoping to have everything back on Aug 1 - we’ll see.

And 6 back-to-back power outages hit the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco last Tuesday afternoon causing major havoc with popular web services. 365 Main was down, along with craigslist, Technorati, Yelp, AdBrite and SixApart (including TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox). Many other popular sites such as CNet were unavailable too.

I wrote a couple of posts about these problems and suggested that it is is greater issue earlier - this one on the 365 Main Outage and some thoughts and this one on if you trust online sites to protect your data re: Code4lib.

Well, Code4lib is taking this seriously (as they certainly should) and is hosting a special discussion on August 1st to discuss this. Here is the announcement from their Planet Code4lib website (the only code4lib site currently available).

“You are invited to a special discussion in #code4lib on irc.freenode.net on 1 August 2007 at 1900 GMT about how to prevent this from happening again. We’re going to be talking about moving some of the web applications to institutions that are better set up to manage them.”

I am thrilled that code4lib is now thinking about this and I hope they can recover all their data in a timely manner. And I hope that other organizations that are heavily web-based will follow their lead and seriously look at who is hosting their data and that they are thinking about ensuring that they know what is in place to protect them.

In the Web 2.0 world, it isn’t just about content and collaboration and new ways to interact. Now that these Web 2.0 concepts are coming to fruition and are becoming valuable resources, it is time to look at making sure they are operating in a stable and protected environment.

~Susan Mellott

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Have you tried Skype yet? If not, why not?! Probably because you couldn’t think of a good reason to use Skype over your regular phone or cell phone, especially since you can make free long-distance calls with your cell phone, which at one time would have been a good reason to use something like Skype.

I had the same thoughts when my mom and uncle started using Skype and were trying to get us to set it up. I waited quite a while before setting it up, just because it seemed like a hassle and I couldn’t think of a good reason for it.

Well, I have changed my mind! I installed Skype for us and surprise! It was a piece of cake to install (really! even for people who are not comfortable with computers) and we found so many uses for it that I am surprised that we did without it before. Here are some of the things we use it for:

1. For absolutely free, we can talk to my husband’s brother who is going to school in Italy. And since it is much easier for him to be online than to be near a phone, we can talk to him frequently where otherwise we would not easily be able to get a hold of him. Skype makes it very easy to know when someone is available and online, the symbol for that person turns green.

2. Again free, we can all talk to him in a family conference call where anyone who is online can be conferenced into a call. So we can all catch up on everyone at the same time and we can also make plans or discuss things in a group instead of playing “he said, she said”.

3. My sister just moved to Florida for 13 weeks (and will be traveling around the U.S. since she is a traveling surgical tech). She has set up Skype and a web cam at home and on her laptop. So she and her husband can talk to each other and see each other at the same time. When you are away from loved ones, seeing them is very good. Free!

4. And my sister just became a grandmother for the first time. So she can use Skype and the webcam to see her granddaughter and to see her get bigger and all the new things a baby does. It just isn’t the same at all to look at pictures. And of course, she talks to Grace and Grace gets to see and interact with her too (or at least hear her voice, she is still a a very new baby). Need I say it - free!

5. My husband’s father and mother live in New Zealand. So of course it is expensive to call them. And one doesn’t even have a computer and the other is not very computer-literate so she doesn’t have Skype installed (and may never). But for $29.95 a year, we can call any regular or cell phone in the US and Canada. And for 2.1 cents a minute (plus a small connection fee), we can call any regular phone in New Zealand. This is much, much cheaper than calling international long distance on our land line.

Having this, we could get rid of our international calling plan and for that matter, we could get rid of our long distance on our regular phone altogether since we can use our cell phone or skype to call national long-distance and Skype for international. Take a look at your phone bill sometime, especially if you call international long distance, and see how much you spend each month for that service. It’s not just the per-minute fee, but all the taxes they add on each month, and you only have to make 1 long-distance call to incur a ton of extra charges.

The different countries have different rates but for the vast majority of them, they are considerably cheaper. And of course, if the other party has Skype, it is absolutely FREE!

6. A friend of ours has a business that takes him out of the US regularly since he has offices both here and in England. I think that what he has done is to set up two SkypeIn phone numbers, one for the US and one for England. That way people in either location can call a long-distance number in their own country (so it is free from their cell phone). And he can be anywhere and get the call. He can be sitting on the shore in England and take a call to his US number. To get a SkypeIn number (a number that anyone can call from a regular phone, it looks like a regular phone number), it is $60 a year and includes free voice mail.

Also, even if you live in the US, if most of your business is done in a different country, you can get a SkypeIn number for that country and people can call you on a phone number that is local to them. I have another friend who does a lot of business in Japan and if he is not using this, he really should. I’ll have to ask him because it would be really useful for him.

7. Until we had a lightening strike that took it out (!), we had set up a small device that plugged into our phone and into our computer. We have a phone setup that has 1 base phone and then 3 phones you can plug in anywhere, they don’t need a phone line. We plugged the base unit into the device and then we could make and take Skype calls from any of our regular phones. We got it from and it worked great. It had lots of great features including call recording, voice mail, routing calls to and making calls from other phones (like our cell phone) and all sorts of neat things. They probably have newer models out now. We bought ours from von-phone.com. This is what we got:

AU-600

Skype Gateway with Remote Calling and Call Recording

1

$38.9

There are also many add-ons to Skype. Here is a list of Skype add-ons to record calls and take messages:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/online_collaboration/skype-recording/how-to-record-Skype-calls-tools-guide-20070624.htm

Note: PrettyMay and KishKish Sam are free

8. We have not used this yet since we haven’t had an international vacation lately (and I am NOT happy about that). But since we do normally do a lot of international traveling, we will be able to call people easily very easily, which is not usually the case. And as I understand, we will be able to call any US phone for free, regardless of where we are, because we have a Skype Unlimited US account. And of course, we can call other countries for the regular Skype Out International Rates.

Sean has also taken an old cell phone that doesn’t work anymore (was replaced with a different one) that has a wireless card and set Skype up on it. What that lets us do is to connect through the phone using a wireless connection rather than needing a computer. Since wireless connections are becoming ubiquitous really, throughout the world, it’s a good way to call people without having to haul a computer around.

I remember when I was “backpacking” through Thailand for a month in 2001 and even then, I could always find a computer with an internet connection, although finding a phone to call from was difficult and a hassle to use. Even in the tiny village of Pai (which took about 8 hours to get to from Chang Mai, riding on a big pickup truck with benches in the back), I could find a couple internet cafes. But there was only 1 public phone in the whole village, in the post office on the farthest end of town. To use it, I wait in this long line, then I had to fill out a bunch of paperwork (and didn’t really understand it all so they made me correct it several times) and then I had to dial a bunch of numbers that I couldn’t get to work and then there was a time limit of 10 minutes. And I knew I would be going at least a week before I could call him again. …But I digress…
Anyway, as you can see, these are uses that we have found for Skype so far. And I know there are many other great uses. But this made it worthwhile to us.

Do you think it might be worthwhile to you?

~Susan Mellott

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Power Outage in SF Tuesday brought down major Web 2.0 sites.

6 back-to-back power outages hit the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco Tuesday afternoon causing major havoc with popular web services. 365 Main is down, along with craigslist, Technorati, Yelp, AdBrite and SixApart (including TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox). Many other popular sites such as CNet were unavailable too.

Interestingly enough, a “source close to the company” (365 Main) had this to say:

“Someone came in sh*tfaced drunk, got angry, went berserk, and f**ked up a lot of stuff. There’s an outage on 40 or so racks at minimum.” ValleyWag had a good article on this with lots of interesting links.

This however was unlikely as the cause since the area had been having power outages and clearly their UPS system did not function properly.

The San Francisco website Laughing Squid has a write-up of the power outage .

Here is another informative post from Radar.OReilly.com

Six Apart, in a very 2.0 move, kept everyone updated via its twitter stream.

But the real question is, what happened to their power backups? They should be able to keep running regardless of any lack of power. This is a good post about what 365 had to say regarding its “Credibility Outage” (and basically they made a bunch of excuses).

So again, do you trust your Web 2.0 online providers? Clearly there is a gap between what “should” have happened and what actually did happen. Datacenter 365 Main released a self-congratulatory announcement celebrating two years of continuous uptime for client RedEnvelope, mere hours before today’s drunken blackout.. [PR Newswire]

And without extensive testing and backout plans, it is hard to know what exactly would happen if something happened like a server being hacked or a major power outage. I would be more interested in the disaster recovery plans and testing they (or any major player) had done than in what they theoretically think might happen, based on the things they think they have in place.

Coming from a big business background, where their only real commodity is data (in my case, insurance), I have seen and been involved in a huge amount of disaster recovery testing and planning. I remember what they, and other businesses went through for testing for the 2000 rollover and for any number of other potential disasters. September 11th tested their and many others disaster recovery plans. The Stock Market and major banks and other financial firms simply cannot just go down or lose data, for any reason.

But as we move to a Web 2.0 world, companies like 365 Main are now also the repositories of major amounts of data and for many Web 2.0 companies, their business is data, just like financial institutions. It’s not small potatoes anymore. Face it, they are big business now and need to act like a big business. I’m sure they are bringing in big business income. So who holds them accountable? I’m wondering if many of these Web 2.0 companies didn’t grow from such small beginnings that they may not even be aware of what they need to ask and know from their provider.

And unfortunately, I hear people with a business background being dismissed as “luddites” or “1.0″ or “dinosaurs” or just not with it, supposedly not able to comprehend the new 2.0 world. It reminds me of when PCs first came out and I started programming them after having had a mainframe background for several years.

PC programming was wild and wooly. There were no standards, no one documented their code so maintaining it was a nightmare, and people would see how many functions they could put on 1 line of code (more being better in their mind). An “elegant” piece of code would be completely undecipherable by anyone (which seemed almost to be the point) and would have no documentation. Which meant of course, that the code for most of the programs were a mess because no one could figure out what the last person did so they hacked around it. But if you were from a mainframe background, you supposedly could not “understand” PCs and were basically a dinosaur. Well, I know that is a bunch of nonsense because I didn’t have any problem understanding PCs and PC coding. What I didn’t understand was why they allowed projects and programs to be so sloppy and poorly run and written.

It was a real case of 1.0 technology meets 2.0 technology. In this case, Mainframes vs. PCs. Now it is happening again with Web 2.0. And regardless of what the current “New Thing” ™ is, one thing they all have in common is the belief that they know more than the people who have used the ‘old’ technology. But what they don’t realize is that they really haven’t learned anything at all yet. They have a great direction and new ideas and concepts and great plans, but if for no other reason than that the technology has not been around that long, they don’t have practical experience and a background to build on. I’m sorry, but while college gives you an in and a piece of paper to say you are somebody, the real learning starts when you start applying the knowledge in real world situations.

I remember taking a LOMA (life office management) test on data processing and thinking it should be a piece of cake. It turned out to be one of the hardest of the set because I had to learn what they thought the right answers were, not what was actually correct. I had the same experiences in higher education where what was being taught was so outdated that it was really completely wrong and in my opinion, was harmful in many ways to learn, especially if you thought you knew something afterwards.

And this is where I think the 2.0 arrogance is showing. It is a wonderful new way of doing things, but there are many foundations they could and should build on that have already been figured out. They can take what has been done to new and exciting levels, but reinventing the wheel for every single thing is pointless and causes the new technology to be without wheels for a while.

~Susan Mellott

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