The Secret Techie Blog

A bit before Christmas, I ran a survey on Internet usage among members of the junction. The web-site has languished for some time and I wanted to gather information to help make some decisions on how we can best utilise our site and the Internet moving forwards. Some of the highlights of the survey results are:

• Almost everyone has broadband access.
• Almost everyone spends at least a few hours a week using the Internet and check their email quite regularly.
• Most respondents have reasonably good computer skills.
• Very few use facilities like social networks, instant messaging or forums.
• A lot of people only use our site for the calendar, but many would check the site if the content was updated more often.
• Many members would be interested in seeing articles and discussions on a range of subjects like social justice, church life and parenting, and a fair number of people would be willing to write articles (or even podcast).

So in summary, my plan for the site is to keep the calendar, but scrap the forums and blogs. In place of these, the idea is to put in place a more article oriented site, which could be viewed as a more unified blog of sorts. Articles will be published by members, appearing on the front page and such, and people will be able to comment on the articles, and reply to comments, etc, and thus generate discussions.

All in all, it will make for a more coherent site, instead of this split between blogs and forums, neither of which ended up being used much.

I also plan to have an automated weekly email summarising new content on the site that people can receive if they want. Given that email seems to be the main way we keep connected in the online universe.

Hopefully after that, I will then start nagging those of you who said you were interested in writing things to write things! I will be assisting anyone and everyone who is interested in training on how to use the site, how to publish articles if they wish, or just publishing them on their behalf if they prefer to just type up their stuff but not get involved in that messy web-site stuff.

So when will all this be happening? Good question! I'm currently waiting for version 6 of the Drupal content management system to be released (should be in the next few weeks). I've been doing a fair bit of research on this, and it will become the main backbone of our site, allowing us to do the rest with more ease. I will also copy over to the new site the more popular blog and forum postings from the current site to give us some initial content.

Kim and I have made inroads to sourcing a website designer to give the site a more contemporary look, so you wont have to suffer the programmer art that some hack put together!

So that's the summary of the state of affairs. Please feel free to leave a comment below with any ideas, observations, suggestions, bribes, etc...

When I was hired to run the IT department of a major company my predecessor left three letters in the desk that was now mine. Each letter was clearly labelled; System Failure #1, System Failure #2, System Failure #3. A post-it note was attached to the bundle of letters.

In case of a substantial system failure open the letters in order, once per failure, and they will help you through the problem.

I put the letters back in the desk and forgot about them.

About one year later we had a cascading server failure that left our corporate intranet and several important production servers off-line. While repairing the problem I remembered the letters. Curious, I opened the first letter.

"Blame me, your predecessor"

The day after we got the servers back up I was called in to my boss's office to explain what happened and why were down for so long. Taking my queue from the letter I blamed my predecessor. My boss was satisfied with my answer and let me go.

About six months down the road we had another big failure. This time our primary database server went down and the secondary was having trouble dealing with the load. I had to put a lot of extra hours into getting them back up and we lost a few transactions due to the backup server not being able to function under the load.

Once again, I reached into that desk drawer and opened letter #2.

"Blame the equipment"

This time I lamented to the boss about how it wasn't my fault. It was that backup server! If we had some good equipment to run on these things just would not happen. He was satisfied with my answer and I went back to work.

Things ran smoothly for the next 18 months. Then we got hit with a virus that somehow got past our firewall and wrecked havoc on our systems.

I opened the third letter.

"Write three letters"

Original source: hmtk.com/blog/
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Being a software developer and general geek, when I'm working at home on my desktop computer I usually have my laptop sitting next to my main monitor, as there are bits and pieces on it that I am always using (and besides I occasionally need to use that dreaded operating system).

One thing that is a pain though is having to swap between my main computer keyboard/mouse and the laptop. Enter a handy piece of software called Synergy.

Synergy allows you to share your mouse and keyboard from one machine with another computer on your local network. Now, when I want to use my laptop I simply move the mouse cursor off the right edge of my desktop monitor and it appears on may laptop, where I can type and do anything with my main mouse and keyboard. When I want to switch back to my desktop computer I simply move the mouse cursor off the left edge of the laptop and it reappears on my desktop monitor. Very simple and natural.

In techie parlance this is called "KM sharing" where "KM" stands for "Keyboard & Mouse". There is other software that can do "KVM sharing" where "KVM" stands for "Keyboard, Video & Mouse" which also has it's handy uses, but when you've got two or more computers with screens on the same desk, Synergy kicks butt.

Oh, and did I mention that it is free and works on several operating systems?

What's the hottest temperature you've ever heard of?
In an experiment using something they've called "The Z Machine", for a brief moment, scientists have produced temperatures in excess of 2 billion degrees. That's hotter than the interior of the sun.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060313.html

You probably didn't even know this, but your computer is making sure it keeps the correct time.

If you run Microsoft Windows XP, go to the control panel, select your date and time properties, then the Internet Time tab, and you'll see something like this:

If so, then your using a server at Microsoft to keep your time on the computer accurate. This is bad for several reasons:

• Everybody else are probably using the same server.
• It is probably all the way over the other side of the planet.
• It's bad enough you rely on Microsoft for an operating system, do you really want to trust them to keep accurate time too?

However there is an alternative. The time synchronisation mechanism uses an open standard cleverly called the Network Time Protocol or NTP for short. Thus, any NTP server on the Internet can be used, and there are many that are themselves synchronised to super-accurate atomic clocks, and then those that are synchronised to them, and so on - creating a whole hierarchy of servers with levels of trust.

What this means for you though, is why not use a server that is more local to your region? In fact, wouldn't it be handy if you could seamlessly rotated the servers used to a bunch of local servers?

Then dive into the NTP Pool. Basically they keep track of lots of public time servers, and have handy host names to allow you to easily access a server local to you.

For those of us in Australia, simply change your server to "au.pool.ntp.org" and then click the Apply button. That's it.

Oh, you could always hit the Update Now button to make sure it works...

This host name will point to an NTP server in Australia, and the machine pointed to gets changed on a regular basis to help spread the load.

If you live in another country, then replace the "au" with your own country code and you should be set.

If you're running an older copy of Microsoft Windows there's free software available to keep your computer's clock in sync.

Technical verbage here.

To be fair, the time.windows.com host name probably rotates among servers or does other clever optimisation too, but using the pool gives you better and more regional control IMO.

If you're running Linux, you can set up a standard multi-server configuration using host names like "0.au.pool.ntp.org", "1.au.pool.ntp.org", and "2.au.pool.ntp.org".

If you're running a network of any reasonable size, you probably want to cut down your network traffic a bit and pick one of your servers as the master time-keeper for your network, syncing to the Internet, and have all your other machines in the network synchronise to that.