Google Apps, Zoho and Scribd
Software as a Service (SaaS) is all the rage and for good measure. Several times in recent weeks I have had "issues" with customers not being able to sign into a WebEx session that I was hosting. In all but one of those cases I was not trying to share a desktop application but simply showing a presentation or document. The persistent problem has been incompatibility of the Webex client with Windows Vista, a problem I reported to Webex and the help desk response instructed me to download the client from the downloads section of their website and install it manually vs. the automated install launched when you log into Webex. I don't know about you, but if I have to do tech support for a SaaS application just so my customers can see a presentation, I'm looking quickly for alternatives.
The solution for me was to use Google Docs' presentation module. If you don't have a Google account yet, you need to upgrade that old 56k modem access to DSL and get with the program. Google's online "docs" applications include a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation program. The best feature in all of these is the collaboration, allowing you to share the document with others, have everyone with the document opened simultaneously and all are able to edit with each user instantly seeing the other's edits. This sure beats emailing the same document, spreadsheet or presentation multiple times to multiple users to get the final edits in place. Google docs also keeps revision history and versioning, so you can roll any document back in time if you mistakenly overwrite or delete a cell in a spreadsheet for example.
Anyway, to get around my Webex issues I simply uploaded my presentation document and Google's presenter application imported the slides and created an online, sharable, publishable presentation. I was able to choose between sharing, which would require users to have a Google account to gain access, or publishing which allowed public access to a URL.
I also have a Zoho account since Zoho has many more online applications available and was first to make them available with offline versions. Interesting note: Zoho has built their offline apps using Google Gears - and had that functionality available before Google did with their own apps. I ran into one issue where neither Google Docs nor Zoho allowed sharing of a PDF file, so I jumped over and used my Scribd account to upload and share a PDF file for an online presentation, again avoiding becoming a Webex non-paid support technician.
Why do I have so many overlapping online SaaS accounts you ask? Well, each has features that the others may not have and so I use whatever works for the project at hand. With Google Docs, when I share a document with other registered Google users, we can collaborate within the document simultaneously, chat using Google's built-in chat feature and I have versioning built in. Zoho's deep portfolio of applications gets more interesting every day so I look forward to testing them all, and Scribd fills some very specific needs.
So, if you haven't made the jump to SaaS apps like Google Docs, Zoho or Scribd, I highly recommend that you do.
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Friday, May 2, 2008
Don't email large attachments - SendUit
Senduit for distributing large files
The gods of mail storage are always limiting attachment sizes making it very difficult to send your latest forecasting spreadsheet to your manager - the solution - senduit.com.
A very simple solution to a common problem of limited email attachment sizes. You can avoid clogging up the email inboxes of your colleagues by using this service as well as reducing the time it takes to distribute large files to a group.
Step1: Upload your file - up to 100Mb in size per file
Step2: Share the Senduit private URL with the appropriate parties.
Senduit has options for expiration of the link in increments from 30 minutes to a maximum of one week.
There are many services out there that fill this type of need such as AOL's xDrive, Box.net and FilesAnywhere.com, but the simplicity of Senduit shines through with no registration requirement and a link that expires.
So, next time you need to send that 80MB PTF file group to a customer, don't spend two hours setting up a custom FTP site and struggling with getting an external IP address, just use the Senduit service.
The gods of mail storage are always limiting attachment sizes making it very difficult to send your latest forecasting spreadsheet to your manager - the solution - senduit.com.
A very simple solution to a common problem of limited email attachment sizes. You can avoid clogging up the email inboxes of your colleagues by using this service as well as reducing the time it takes to distribute large files to a group.
Step1: Upload your file - up to 100Mb in size per file
Step2: Share the Senduit private URL with the appropriate parties.
Senduit has options for expiration of the link in increments from 30 minutes to a maximum of one week.
There are many services out there that fill this type of need such as AOL's xDrive, Box.net and FilesAnywhere.com, but the simplicity of Senduit shines through with no registration requirement and a link that expires.
So, next time you need to send that 80MB PTF file group to a customer, don't spend two hours setting up a custom FTP site and struggling with getting an external IP address, just use the Senduit service.
SIMILE projects at MIT
SIMILE projects at MIT
Much like the geocoding application that I wrote about, the SIMILE project at MIT is all about mashups. There are currently seventeen open source projects that are a part of the overall SIMILE project. According to the MIT website, "SIMILE is focused on developing robust, open source tools that empower users to access, manage, visualize and reuse digital assets." (http://simile.mit.edu).
So far my favorite app is the Exhibit 2.0, a great data/web mashup tool. The MIT site description is an ample introduction: "Exhibit is a three-tier web application framework written in Javascript, which you can include like you would include Google Maps. If you just want to show a few hundred records of data on maps, timelines, scatter plots, interactive tables, etc., why bother learning SQL, ASP, PHP, CGI, or whatever when you can just use Exhibit? To use Exhibit, you write: a simple data file, and an HTML file in which you specify how the data should be shown. Data + Presentation. That's all there is to publishing, as it should be." Check out some of the examples on the site.
My second favorite app is really two related applications Timline and Timeplot. Both are DHTML-based apps that allow you to plot a list of time-related events across a visual timeline. This can be used to show how an event unfolded, with one of their examples being the JFK Assasination showing the events as they occured, minute by minute on the day it happened as well as the followup happenings. You could also use this to build family history timelines, company histories, project documentation and many other uses. If you have a syslog-ng database that consolidates all your server syslog events into a single DB, then you could take the event correlation report that shows how an application failure took place, and timeplot it so you can have a pretty picture to show your pointy-haired boss, that he can take to his boss and they can hang color printouts of on their wall. Heck, you could even plot your income and expenses to show just how there's just too much month at the end of the money.
I guess by now you are thinking I'm a mad, mad, mad mashups addicted fiend, but that would not be true. It's just that there are some very cool, very useful tools out there that us non-programmer, sysadmin types can use to produce helpful results, cranked out by mashup obsessed programmer types (thanks guys!!).
.
Much like the geocoding application that I wrote about, the SIMILE project at MIT is all about mashups. There are currently seventeen open source projects that are a part of the overall SIMILE project. According to the MIT website, "SIMILE is focused on developing robust, open source tools that empower users to access, manage, visualize and reuse digital assets." (http://simile.mit.edu).
So far my favorite app is the Exhibit 2.0, a great data/web mashup tool. The MIT site description is an ample introduction: "Exhibit is a three-tier web application framework written in Javascript, which you can include like you would include Google Maps. If you just want to show a few hundred records of data on maps, timelines, scatter plots, interactive tables, etc., why bother learning SQL, ASP, PHP, CGI, or whatever when you can just use Exhibit? To use Exhibit, you write: a simple data file, and an HTML file in which you specify how the data should be shown. Data + Presentation. That's all there is to publishing, as it should be." Check out some of the examples on the site.
My second favorite app is really two related applications Timline and Timeplot. Both are DHTML-based apps that allow you to plot a list of time-related events across a visual timeline. This can be used to show how an event unfolded, with one of their examples being the JFK Assasination showing the events as they occured, minute by minute on the day it happened as well as the followup happenings. You could also use this to build family history timelines, company histories, project documentation and many other uses. If you have a syslog-ng database that consolidates all your server syslog events into a single DB, then you could take the event correlation report that shows how an application failure took place, and timeplot it so you can have a pretty picture to show your pointy-haired boss, that he can take to his boss and they can hang color printouts of on their wall. Heck, you could even plot your income and expenses to show just how there's just too much month at the end of the money.
I guess by now you are thinking I'm a mad, mad, mad mashups addicted fiend, but that would not be true. It's just that there are some very cool, very useful tools out there that us non-programmer, sysadmin types can use to produce helpful results, cranked out by mashup obsessed programmer types (thanks guys!!).
.
Do you twitter yet?
Twitter - blogging via SMS
Ok, for those of you that are not Twitter addicts yet, let's start with the basics. First, twitter-ing is blogging in short bursts of text (less than 140 characters), usually with SMS from your cellphone but it can be done in your browser. Very neat you say (I heard you), but why should you take a closer look at Twitter? From a personal standpoint, if you are blog addicted you can update your blog site (facebook, myspace, etc.) every 5 minutes all day long if you like, and there are twitter widgets you can embed into your blog; and your so-called "friends" can subscribe to your twitter blog and they'll be sent an SMS update of all your musings to their cellphone. If you are 15, this probably sounds cool.
There are other more productive uses of Twitter. First, I use it as a task management and reminder system. I can text reminders, to do lists, beginning and ending mileage tracking, call-back reminders and the like to my RememberTheMilk.com and Xpenser.com accounts via the Twitter direct message function, and then I can check them once I get back to my laptop and use the information accordingly. My latest Twitter toys are twittercal.com that connects Twitter to my google calendar and Jott.com's jotlinks that allows me to use voice messages translated by Jott into text to update my Twitter list. I'll do another post on Jott later.
There have been some complaints about Twitter over the past year as it has grown in popularity and they have run into issues with scalability of their Ruby-on-Rails application. It was reported yesterday on Techrunch that they were abandoning Rails for it's lack of scalability. Other options for this type of service are Jaiku (now owned by google) and Pownce just to name a few.
Check out the following link to see how other users are exploiting Twitter:
Twitter Mashups
Ok, for those of you that are not Twitter addicts yet, let's start with the basics. First, twitter-ing is blogging in short bursts of text (less than 140 characters), usually with SMS from your cellphone but it can be done in your browser. Very neat you say (I heard you), but why should you take a closer look at Twitter? From a personal standpoint, if you are blog addicted you can update your blog site (facebook, myspace, etc.) every 5 minutes all day long if you like, and there are twitter widgets you can embed into your blog; and your so-called "friends" can subscribe to your twitter blog and they'll be sent an SMS update of all your musings to their cellphone. If you are 15, this probably sounds cool.
There are other more productive uses of Twitter. First, I use it as a task management and reminder system. I can text reminders, to do lists, beginning and ending mileage tracking, call-back reminders and the like to my RememberTheMilk.com and Xpenser.com accounts via the Twitter direct message function, and then I can check them once I get back to my laptop and use the information accordingly. My latest Twitter toys are twittercal.com that connects Twitter to my google calendar and Jott.com's jotlinks that allows me to use voice messages translated by Jott into text to update my Twitter list. I'll do another post on Jott later.
There have been some complaints about Twitter over the past year as it has grown in popularity and they have run into issues with scalability of their Ruby-on-Rails application. It was reported yesterday on Techrunch that they were abandoning Rails for it's lack of scalability. Other options for this type of service are Jaiku (now owned by google) and Pownce just to name a few.
Check out the following link to see how other users are exploiting Twitter:
Twitter Mashups
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Batch Geocoding
Geocoding at batchgeocode.com
Ok, so you read batch geocode and your first thought was what the heck is he up to now? Well, I'll tell you. Batch geocoding allows you to take a list of addresses and apply latitude and longitude coding so they can be translated into points on a digital map. If you have ever wanted to create a google or yahoo maps mashup but didn't want to have to learn the API, here's your chance to play.
As a sales guy, I have PLENTY of lists of every conceivable type of company so I picked out a short one, a list of chartered banks in Mississippi that I got from the FDIC website. I cut and pasted the list from fdic.gov (once I entered some sort / select options) into an excel spreadsheet and added the appropriate column headers
Then, I cut and pasted this into the block on the batchgeocode.com website (highlight the existing sample text so that you paste over it). Step three is to select "validate" so that they verify the data is usable. This step will also populate the Step Four location fields. Make selections appropriate to the data you selected and then "Run Geocoder". It's handy that for impatient souls like me they put a counter so you can know whether you have time to go get another cup of coffee. Once that step is complete, Step 6 will give you back your data with geocoding that can be then cut / pasted into a spreadsheet or other application. You are also then presented with a Yahoo maps mashup of your data that you can post to a web page that can then be embedded or linked to. Optionally you can download the Google Earth KML file which can be viewed in the Google Earth application. Here's my Yahoo maps mashup of the bank data:
Bank List Mashup
Where this gets even more interesting is that you can specify data grouping with color coding for the "push pins" on the mashup map, so you can map two (or more) types of data on the same map, say proximity of liquor stores to churches or pawn shops close to casinos, the possiblities are endless. Some cool examples of this type of data analysis is on swivel.com , but we'll cover that in another blog entry.
I can think of dozens of applications for this from social uses such as mapping the sunday school members to help decide a central location for the next BBQ, to business mappings of existing customers, prospect list maps, competitor mapping and the like.
Ok, so you read batch geocode and your first thought was what the heck is he up to now? Well, I'll tell you. Batch geocoding allows you to take a list of addresses and apply latitude and longitude coding so they can be translated into points on a digital map. If you have ever wanted to create a google or yahoo maps mashup but didn't want to have to learn the API, here's your chance to play.
As a sales guy, I have PLENTY of lists of every conceivable type of company so I picked out a short one, a list of chartered banks in Mississippi that I got from the FDIC website. I cut and pasted the list from fdic.gov (once I entered some sort / select options) into an excel spreadsheet and added the appropriate column headers
| Institution Name | City | State | Class | Total Assets($000) |
| First Federal Savings and Loan Association | Aberdeen | MS | SA | 23,151 |
| Amory Federal Savings and Loan Association | Amory | MS | SA | 62,923 |
Then, I cut and pasted this into the block on the batchgeocode.com website (highlight the existing sample text so that you paste over it). Step three is to select "validate" so that they verify the data is usable. This step will also populate the Step Four location fields. Make selections appropriate to the data you selected and then "Run Geocoder". It's handy that for impatient souls like me they put a counter so you can know whether you have time to go get another cup of coffee. Once that step is complete, Step 6 will give you back your data with geocoding that can be then cut / pasted into a spreadsheet or other application. You are also then presented with a Yahoo maps mashup of your data that you can post to a web page that can then be embedded or linked to. Optionally you can download the Google Earth KML file which can be viewed in the Google Earth application. Here's my Yahoo maps mashup of the bank data:
Bank List Mashup
Where this gets even more interesting is that you can specify data grouping with color coding for the "push pins" on the mashup map, so you can map two (or more) types of data on the same map, say proximity of liquor stores to churches or pawn shops close to casinos, the possiblities are endless. Some cool examples of this type of data analysis is on swivel.com , but we'll cover that in another blog entry.
I can think of dozens of applications for this from social uses such as mapping the sunday school members to help decide a central location for the next BBQ, to business mappings of existing customers, prospect list maps, competitor mapping and the like.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Introduction to the Rackworthy Blog
This blog is written by Charles Crampton, who's day job is architecting solutions to information technology dilemmas.
As my first post to this blog, I want to set the tone for all future posts: my purpose here is to relay field-tested results of technology rollouts, strange but working mashups of seemingly unrelated technologies, outside the box solutions to common and not-so-common problems, real world datacenter practices that work (and what doesn't) and really cool tools that can make your life easier, more fun, more productive. I intend to dig into the "WHY" and the "HOW" portion of technologies and cull practical installation stories from the field that will hopefully save us all time and $$ when rolling out new gear.
Since 1986 I have worked with every technology imaginable, from DEC VAX and Altos Xenix boxes to Novell (started with version 2.0a) and OS2, programming in BBx (business basic extended) and on to the latest virtualization, linux, Web 2.0, and pocket/handheld gadgets and gizmos. I'm a total geek and I LIVE for this stuff - I spend WAY too much time tinkering with new technology and convincing customers and friends to "beta" the latest gadgets and let me know what works and help me stay informed on the newest, greatest techno wizardry.
I'll cover some new and not-so-new, but very essential technology. I look forward to the feedback on the ideas and let me know if you have had a "different" experience than I have with these technologies - and we'll figure out what works. My persistent question is whether the technology is worth wasting precious rack space on - thus the "rackworthy" title here (you fellow Seinfeld fans understand this more than others from the sponge-worthy episode).
Ok, so here we go - hold on to your shorts, it's going to be a very interesting ride.
Charles
charles.crampton@gmail.com
As my first post to this blog, I want to set the tone for all future posts: my purpose here is to relay field-tested results of technology rollouts, strange but working mashups of seemingly unrelated technologies, outside the box solutions to common and not-so-common problems, real world datacenter practices that work (and what doesn't) and really cool tools that can make your life easier, more fun, more productive. I intend to dig into the "WHY" and the "HOW" portion of technologies and cull practical installation stories from the field that will hopefully save us all time and $$ when rolling out new gear.
Since 1986 I have worked with every technology imaginable, from DEC VAX and Altos Xenix boxes to Novell (started with version 2.0a) and OS2, programming in BBx (business basic extended) and on to the latest virtualization, linux, Web 2.0, and pocket/handheld gadgets and gizmos. I'm a total geek and I LIVE for this stuff - I spend WAY too much time tinkering with new technology and convincing customers and friends to "beta" the latest gadgets and let me know what works and help me stay informed on the newest, greatest techno wizardry.
I'll cover some new and not-so-new, but very essential technology. I look forward to the feedback on the ideas and let me know if you have had a "different" experience than I have with these technologies - and we'll figure out what works. My persistent question is whether the technology is worth wasting precious rack space on - thus the "rackworthy" title here (you fellow Seinfeld fans understand this more than others from the sponge-worthy episode).
Ok, so here we go - hold on to your shorts, it's going to be a very interesting ride.
Charles
charles.crampton@gmail.com
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