• Apple TV price is the same: $99
• Apple TV now with 1080p video
• iCloud now syncs video
• iTunes Store will start selling and renting 1080p video
• Apple sold 15.5 million iPads in their last quarter
• Apple is positioning the iPad not as a “tablet” but as a computer
• New iPad “Its amazing”
• 9.7 inch diagonal 2048 x 1536 pixels
• That’s 264 pixels per inch which is a lot
• Apple claims 44% better color saturation
• A5X processor with quad-core graphics
• Optics from the iPhone 4S are now in the iPad (this is big)
• 5-megapixel iSight camera
• HD video recording in 1080p (filmmakers rejoice)
• New Voice Dictation feature included
• 4G LTE now available
• Supports HSPA+ which increases the speed of a 4G connection
• Apple demo’d both AT&T and Verizon 4G LTE (Verizon has more coverage)
• iPad can now be personal hotspot
• iPad still works with 3G
• Apple claims the iPad still gets 10 hours of battery life
• Prices remain the same as well as memory
• Slightly heavier but size is the same (very close to the same)
• Available March 16 around the world and you can order today
• Supports non-english for Siri
• My sister is a film animator at Disney – she’ll want a new iPad with AutoDesk’s SketchBook Ink
• Epic Games has HDR graphics on the new iPad: Infinity Blade: Dungeons
• Some updated Apple apps are free if you already have the apps
• iPhoto for iPad – about time
• Photos can be “beamed” between iOS devices
• New iPhoto Journal that publishes to iCloud
• iPad 2 will continue to be available at a lower price: $399 for the 16GB model
• Hmmm but the new iPad is officially called “The New iPad” – this will cause confusion
• Apple “2012 There’s a lot to look forward to”
• And an Apple logo with colors!

Tablets in the Enterprise: Risks and Rewards

Tablets like the iPad can set your workforce free, but with benefits come risks and tradeoffs, from securing and supporting tablets to budgeting for them.

So…I am at a point where I am actively researching, testing, and budgeting the idea of migrating my legal team away from laptops to a powerful desktop teamed up with a well app-ed iPad.

http://gigaom.com/2011/12/20/androids-app-revenue-gap-and-how-developers-cope/

MacTech has posted their Mobile Device Management (MDM) Primer and I recommend you read it if you need to get started managing the iPhones and iPads in your organization instead of letting them manage you.

“You mean you don’t have any games?” my father-in-law said.

I am an IT administrator, also known as a sysadmin, so I use Apps to monitor nearly every piece of equipment on the firm’s network. Apps such as Lithium which monitors everything possible on the firm’s networks, an app for network scanning called Ping Lite, one for calculating subnets simply named aSubnet, and so on (you probably don’t know what a subnet is but every network has at least one).

To use an App like Lithium I had to set up a server to capture all the data as well as make changes to all the firm’s networked equipment. This took some time but it was worth the effort.

Then the iPhone and iPad Apps display the data for me with great detail. This graph is showing how fast the firm’s mail server is writing data to its hard drives. Having data like this literally at my finger tips helps me answer questions and make decisions.

The remarkable thing is that this data gets to my devices in real time.

Why did I tell you about an I.T. App? I find Apps for the things that interest me professionally. You will seek out Apps for the things you do or want to do.  My father-in-law likes games but he is also interested in financial news. So I began to tell him about an App called Flipboard.

On the left of the green sign is the packaging for the color cube ink and the maintenance cartridge over 4 years to the right of the green sign is the equivalent packaging and waste for a color laser print. Enough said.

Storage space is a premium in an office. In the IT Dept. we generate a lot of waste and recycling plus we have a need to store a lot of products both expendable and durable. A printer that can reduce the burden of this storage usage and the resulting waste that is generated is a good thing.

Based on my experience with various servers, file systems, 32-bit vs. 64-bit, and available RAM every server is going to have some upward limit on how many individual items it can reasonably index in a given amount of time. The result of having numerous mail user’s folders that have crept up to 10,000 or beyond means that the Kerio Connect system can fall behind simply because it hasn’t finished indexing. If it can’t index it can’t add new messages to that user’s folder and so on (somewhat similar to a cascade failure).

We are running Kerio Connect on a fast Intel Xserve with a RAID 5 with 7,200 RPM SATA drives. Now we could change the drives to a RAID 0 to speed things up a bit but that’s not an option right now (actually I am giving serious thought to putting in a flash-based boot drive for the OS and Kerio Connect and have the data on the RAID) or we could find some other method of speeding up disk access but I feel these mostly are workarounds. The server just isn’t that slow.

The one thing that must happen is that each user’s mail folders must be kept under 10,000 messages and so I established a policy with a 5,000 message limit (this gives us some cushion). After the break are the details of how I am using a shell script, Lingon, and Splunk to help us efficiently keep track of each user’s mail folder contents.

When I contacted Kerio about our issue they provided me with a find command that searches through the index file for each folder and outputs the totals to a text file. I modified this command so that it outputs the text file to someplace that Splunk can index. If you are not familiar with Splunk it is a self-contained log file index and search tool. I have found it to be a very powerful and useful tool. It is also very expensive, probably worth it, but I have been unable to sell the firm’s shareholders on the idea of paying for it. What I do is run the free version on each individual server, instead of centrally on a single server, and this gets me what I need. The downside that is instead of managing one Splunk installation I am managing 10.

What happens is that once a week my script runs and outputs the data to the text file. Then once a week I search through the data to find who needs help with their folders. To get this to work I had to first figure out how to get Splunk to identify which folders in the text file are over 5,000 messages.

Because the file with the data is just a text file and not actual log data Splunk doesn’t know what to do other than treat each line as a separate log entry. It turns out it isn’t that difficult to get Splunk to recognize how understand the data. Splunk has a built-in regex tool to make this step easy. Below is an example of the basic search to identify all folders that have more than 5,000 items in them.

Then way Splunk works you can simply click on a user’s name in the search results and then it will automatically refine the search to include just that user. Below is the final search string for the user “donk” (that’s me) and below that is the result of the refined search.

Yes, I was quoted as saying that recently and I do not take it back.

Here’s the guy I dislike, the CIO of the USA, Vivek Kundra, note that his career starts on 9/11/2001 and that there are no entries previous to that:

Vivek Kundra – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And of course the article I originally read that detailed some of Mr. Kundra’s failings is “down for maintenance” so I had to find a cached version from Google:

Dvorak allegations againt US CIO and the Kundra bio on the White House website – UPDATED

The government approved and went ahead with this web site for $18M just for “rebuilding”, which might lead you to believe it wasn’t an entirely new website, and it isn’t, so what the heck is the $18M for?

Recovery.gov

And here’s who got the money:

Updated: Hoyer-linked firm wins $18M Recovery.gov contract | Washington Examiner

This is a related site that has “tons” of freely available information on it but I hear a lot of negative things about it (admittedly things I can’t verify since I’m not a researcher):

Data.gov

OK, I’m going back to do some real work.

Someone has it backwards—it is HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and H.264 (all supported by the iPhone and iPad) that are open and standard, while Adobe’s Flash is closed and proprietary.

Found on Gizmodo, says it with feeling, the way I’ve been feeling about it…

Why is Trudy right?

Until you can load FLASH in a web browser like this, for example:

(open carrot) fla src=”sample_flash.swf” attribute=”auto”…. (close carrot)

WITHOUT the need for a separate browser plugin…

WITHOUT a development cycle separate from all web browsers…

WITHOUT performance requirements separate from the browser itself…

WITHOUT incompatibilities across different hardware, even when the browser software is the same…

WITHOUT the plugin itself being of a closed an proprietary nature…

WITHOUT every browser vendor in existence beholden to the motivation of a single company to develop and optimize it’s source in hopes that a given browser may have a chance of running this plugin in a way that does not break web pages and does not egregiously consume computing resources thereby compromising the overall performance of said web browser…

Until, then, FLASH will remain nothing more than *another program* installed on a computer or mobile device, running in parallel with a browser, separately interpreting and rendering code to be *embedded* within the browser contents.

These are the facts. Now, it doesn’t mean that web developers and designers do not enjoy the creative freedom afforded to them by Adobe Flash-based vector graphics design and audio/video media creation.

Adobe should understand, though, that it’s multimedia solution is not unlike, for example, MS developing a PowerPoint browser plugin for Internet Explorer.

Macromedia developed flash and Adobe bought it – they didn’t stake their business on it. Heck, before flash-video, embedded Flash was mainly a tool for designer presentations, animated buttons and ads.

Adobe has tried very hard to make people think that “swf” and “flv” are web standards like “img” and “href” – they certainly are not. There are no standard cross-platform, cross-browser hooks directly into Flash APIs, beyond the use of javascript variable settings when embedding swf wrappers, which are used to call up flv files and depend on XML files which may or may not be dynamically updated by the embed script.

Layers upon layers of embedding and abstraction – who could EVER expact Flash to be resource friendly.

The truth is that Adobe has to re-invent the wheel every time a new browser comes out or a major upgrade is released or some new hardware platform is developed. Bugs and security vulnerabilities have to be separately maintained. Performance issues have to constantly be monitored and optimized as both it’s host browsers and operating systems get upgraded and evolve.

Let’s take for example the most ubiquitous of Flash implementations – video:

What wrapper file will you use?
-The swf file defines your video “window”. XML file(s) will define parameters.
-Actionscript in the swf wrapper files will hook into javacript variable settings and XML defenitions (or rather the other way around).
-Don’t forget video dimensions!

How will you embed that wrapper file?
-You’ll have to use javascript to call up the swf.
-You need to makes sure you set startup variables correctly for viewing the flv through the swf

Is the browser compatible?
-Chrome, Firefox, IE6,7,8,9, Opera, etc. all need compatible plugins

HTML layout?
-Oooh, make sure you set proper z-indexes
-Make sure you’re not accidentally covering modal windows with that Flash.
-Again, don’t forget video dimensions!
-Also, don’t forget to account for the player tool bar and frame.

Now, how do you embed video with HTML5?

Ex:

(open carrot) source src=”__VIDEO__.MP4″ type=”video/mp4″ (close carrot)

(slight over-simplification, since above is iPhone/iPad compatible. Webkit, whatever…)

Flash is not a true web standarded – it is an embeddable application. It is the aforementioned pitfalls that Apple is trying to avoid by not embracing Flash compatibility.

Do I wish, for example, that the iPad supported Flash? Sure, just like I want all my computers to open JPEG’s, Word Docs, Excel Spreadsheets, check email, run PowerPoints, etc. etc.

Macromedia developed a great web-compatible multi-media tool. Adobe, you bought it and had your chance to open it up and allow it’s use as a browser-agnostic audio & vector-graphic HTML standard, while still retaining the rights to the Flash development platform. You got greedy, lethargic and stubborn. Check back on this post in a couple years and it will read as either “Good Luck” or “Good Riddance” – only time will tell. Reply

Edited by Stevox at 04/21/10 9:22 PM

There is a new e-mail phishing scam circulating that has the potential to easily catch you off guard, especially if you make purchases from the iTunes or Apple stores. It works because if you get this message you’re going to think right away “I didn’t make any Apple Store purchase” and you’ll click on the link to check your order status.

The message looks like one of those innocuous messages you might  be familiar with acknowledging a purchase and/or download from the iTunes or Apple stores. It is definitely a scam and should be deleted.

You can always check your iTunes account safely from within the iTunes application and any orders made or not from the Apple Store can be checked by going directly to the Apple Store web site.