In The Clouds -- Part 3

One might properly conclude from prior stories that I have become a real believer in Cloud Computing. From a personal perspective, the vision is simple. All of my documents, contacts, calendar entries, photos, music, patrickWeb content, and backup files safely and securely kept in various clouds. All contacts, calendar entries, and selected songs and pictures, and email synchronized and accessible on the iPhone. Everything else accessible via the iPhone browser or any browser or any computer, anywhere, anytime. It is that simple. Oh, how I wish. The vision is attainable and I am confident that it will happen in 2009 -- but, there is a way to go.

Let's start with the easy parts. Effective and simple backup has been elusive for me for decades and much has been written here about the subject. Finally, a solution is in place that I am comfortable with. It has two parts to it. First is idrive.com. The service is free for up to 2 GB. You simply identify which files and folders are critical and it keeps them backed up in the idrive cloud. Very simple interface and you can't beat the price. I have been using the service on two Windows ThinkPads in the house and have been extremely pleased with how it works..

The other half of the solution is the Iomega one terabyte StorCenter. The six-pound marvel plugs right into the home LAN in the basement. Very inexpensive and easy to setup. I use it to back up really big files and Linux ThinkPads. It is set up as an I: drive and is accessible just like the C: drive. It is connected via gigabit ethernet so copying files to and from the box is lightning fast. Like the predecessor I had been using for years, it is RAID storage, so there are always redundant copies of everything. The box is smaller than half a shoe box and it uses roughly $3 per month in electricity. The predecessor used $30 per month, so the justification to spend $250 on the StorCenter was very simple.

There are two applications on my desktop that keep me chained to Windows and which I backup every time I use them. First is Quicken, which I I have been using since Release 1.0 back in the early 1980's. As I wrote in Net Attitude seven years ago, the web version is not a viable alternative. Unfortunately, that is still true today. In theory a web-based application like Mint.com and others could replace Quicken but they just are not up to it quite yet. The other workhorse for me is Dreamweaver, which I use to manage patrickWeb. In theory there are many web based alternatives but I have yet to find one that is as powerful and easy to use. Eventually, I expect both of these to be "in the clouds" but not quite yet.

Now, on to the more interesting things. Photos are all in the Picasa cloud and music is in iTunes. No particular issues with either of them. Next is email. I started using email in the early 1980's with a system at IBM called PROFS. In 1994 the company email system became Lotus Notes. I was an early adopter and in the beginning there was nobody to send email to! When I e-tired in 2001 I switched to Microsoft Outlook so I could be like everybody else that I attended tech conferences with. As with many people I know, it developed into a love-hate relationship. The Lotus and Microsoft mail solutions are great in many respects but in a way you are chained to someone's central infrastructure with them. I was looking for freedom. Along came gmail and, bingo, I was liberated. Or so I thought. The mail part of it was easy. Gmail is lightning fast and although it is a "cloud" application with all the user functionality appearing in the browser, it acts like a desktop application and I can use it on the Ubuntu Linux ThinkPad in the kitchen, a Windows PC in the workshop, or any computer anywhere. And freedom from Outlook -- almost, expect for contacts and calendar entries, my lifeblood.

Contacts and calendar entries were still in Outlook but they synchronized with MobileMe which in turn synchronized with the iPhone. Seems a bit convoluted but it worked. Some occasional glitches but it was acceptable. How to add a new contact or modify a calendar entry? Could do it with Outlook but that would defeat the purpose behind my strategy. MobileMe might actually be the perfect cloud application. It was awkward at first and Apple definitely had some problems as chronicled here before, but I began to get used to it. Apple appeared to have fixed the most serious bugs, and I actually began to like it. However, as I got to be really dependent on MobileMe I found a lot of shortcomings. Calendar invitations did not work. Contacts would at times "go missing". The MobileMe page would hang up in certain browsers under certain conditions. Bottom line -- MobileMe proved to be extremely slow and unreliable. It had to go. It became clear that the solution was Google contacts and Google calendar. I was getting sucked in -- just as Google no doubt hopes we all will. Quickly getting over the issue of having all my eggs in Google's basket, the bigger issue became how to get there from here.

MobileMe not only has huge performance problems it is also a closed proprietary system, just like iTunes and most everything Apple does. Some people fear Google but what gives me comfort is that they use Internet standards and they provide both import and export from any of their applications. Their only lock on you is that their stuff works really well and you get addicted. MobileMe is a one way system -- easy to import things to it but you can not export. Maybe you can if you have a Mac but not with the hodgepodge of Windows and Linux systems on my home LAN. No problem. I synched back to Outlook, exported from Outlook, and then imported to Google. Good riddance to MobileMe. Now everything is in Google. Calendar invitations work. Contacts are nicely integrated with the calendar and with email and with maps and documents that I choose to share. Microsoft has good reason to fear Google. Their cloud approach is far superior to the heavy-weight desktop approach of Outlook and Office. Google is not without faults, however. There are issues when importing and at one point I lost all the contacts and calendar entries and had to stitch everything back together from various snippets and backups. It was worth the pain.

Google Docs is still a work in progress but highly worth using. You can email documents to Google docs but not pdf files. You can upload pdfs but only one at a time. There are issues with printing certain things and various other shortcomings, but having documents in the cloud assures they are continuously backed up. You can share them with others and work on them anytime from anywhere.

The biggest gap with the Google cloud is that it doesn't synchronize contacts and calendar entries with the iPhone. Ooops. I am sure they want to offer synch and that it is not a technical issue. It is an Apple issue for sure. I found two third-party applications in the app store that not only work with Google but also provide extra functionality on the iPhone than the basic calendar and contact manager that comes with it. I can recommend them both -- SaiSuke calendar and Sync in a Blink for contacts. I am sure Google will soon offer their own iPhone synchronization soon.

If this all sounds complicated -- it is. I have spent many hours getting to this point but I am a happy camper. More importantly, I am confident it will get better and better and I am almost no longer chained to my PC. Almost everything is in the clouds!

Internet Technology , Mobile , Personal Computing , iPhone December 28, 2008 10:55 AM

Oxinium Update

It seems like everyone knows someone who has had a total knee replacement or is considering one. There was a lot of feedback about the Oxinium knee, so I decided to share some more about my knee replacement experience. Tuesday marked eight weeks since the surgery and I feel very fortunate that progress has exceeded my expectations. At the final physical therapy visit I had hoped to achieve a flexion of 130 degrees. The therapist bent the knee while measuring with his goniometer and the result was 131 degrees -- the therapist was thrilled and so was I. A 120 degree flexion would be adequate for most activities but I was determined to get to 130, plus one for good measure.

My new knee has gone from a dream to reality. In a couple of weeks the real test will come -- getting through security at Westchester Airport on the way to Florida. No doubt that the pound or so of oxinium will set off all the bells and whistles. The "knee card" shows a very accurate picture of the prosthesis and on the back of the card are the details of who did the surgery, when, and where. I have a hunch the TSA staff will not be impressed.

Perhaps the Fly Clear card will help. It contains nothing about knees but it does have biometric fingerprint and iris image verification. Clear is also working with General Electric to offer shoe-scanning technology as soon as it is approved by the TSA, which will enable Clear members to leave their shoes on during security screening. Some people have security concerns about "smart" cards. By necessity we all travel with complete strangers. I don't feel a need to know about travelers life history but I think it is reasonable to know that each passenger is in fact who they say they are and that their travel history is not suspicious. Back to knees.

I feel extremely fortunate and happy that my knee replacement has gone so well and that the rehabilitation is ahead of schedule. Most knee replacements go well but it is possible to have an impact on how well. Following are the key factors from my layman point of view that I feel can make the difference.

First and foremost is to make sure you really want to have your knee replaced, your surgeon agrees, and you are prepared to make it your top priority. Some say you should be in your seventies to have it done, but the advanced materials used today can last 30-40 years. I had two surgeries on my knee (1985 and 2001) and I waited too long. If you have daily pain and can't get the level of exercise you want, I say go for it.

Clear the calendar. It really needs to be your top priority. If you are a type A and can't wait to get back to things you may end up taking shortcuts that end up preventing the fullest possible benefit to accrue. Your knee is numero uno. Medication and rehabilitation should take precedence and focus over everything.

Find a surgeon that does nothing but joint replacements. There are many surgeons who have done replacements but I would say find one who does nothing but. High volumes leads to high quality outcomes. You can go to big cities and famous places but if you have a local surgeon who does just joint replacements and who is accessible you will feel better about the process. In the end, a part of the best result is having the best attitude going into it and feeling a relationship with the surgeon becomes a part of your attitude. I feel extremely fortunate to have had Dr. Sanjay Gupta perform my replacement.

Learn everything you can about what is going to happen to you. Find out what company makes the prosthesis your surgeon will use and then visit their web site and read about what will go into your joint, how it works, what it is made of, and what procedure is used to install it. If you have the stomach, watch a video of a real operation at the National Library of Medicine. Maybe it doesn't really matter but I feel it is part of the attitude factor. The more you know the better you will feel.

Prepare for it physically. Trim a few pounds, exercise as much as possible, cease any medications you don't really need, and get your mind around what will be happening. Envision the pain and process but also envision the "desired outcome". Another part of the attitude factor.

If your insurance covers it, or maybe even if it doesn't, go to a rehabilitation center after you leave the hospital. There are mixed opinions on this. Some say going to another institution after the hospital increases your exposure and risk of infection. Some say there is nothing like home as the place to recover. I spent four nights in Danbury Hospital and then six nights at Bethel Health Care Rehabilitation Center. The center specializes in short-term "rehab". They have a continuous flow of patients. They have seen it all. Pain management is a vital part of recovery and they administer it and monitor it three shifts per day. Physical therapy is not an option -- you go to a therapist in the building twice per day, every day. It is painful but essential and the rehab center has it down to a science.

Whether you are in rehab for a week or two (two weeks is probably average), pre-enroll with a physical therapist (PT) and start the day you leave the rehab center. Three times a week is best and keep it up for six weeks. Don't cut corners.

Plan and commit to a home PT program. Ask the therapist for printouts of home exercises and do them faithfully. The investment you will have made in your knee -- in my case a lot more than my first house -- should be thought of as an investment (more accurately a joint investment with Aetna Healthcare). To get the most from your new knee it will need strong and flexible muscles surrounding it.

Develop a balanced exercise program. For me, four marathons, many thousands of miles and dozens of races were too much. No doubt that my knee needed replacement because I wore it out. More exercise is not necessarily better. Not enough is not good either. I often heard the advice to "listen to your body". I let my mind be in charge instead. Don't let it go to your head. Exercise, but think about your joints.

Oxinium knee - Part 1

Healthcare December 17, 2008 09:33 PM

IBM Happenings: November 2008

The month of November was a busy month, as usual for IBM, filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. The list of announcements made during the month is here. Included was the third annual "IBM Next Five in Five" -- a list of innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years. The Next Five in Five is based on market and societal trends expected to transform our lives, as well as innovations IBM is projecting will come from it’s research laboratories around the world.

These are some highlights of the five areas in which IBM sees our lives being impacted by technology innovations. For more, visit ibm.com.

Energy saving solar technology will be built into asphalt, paint and windows. There could be huge savings by having solar heat embedded in our sidewalks, driveways, siding, paint, rooftops, and windows. The cost of solar is going to drop with the creation of “thin-film” solar cells that can be 100 times thinner than today's materials. The new material can be “printed” and arranged on a flexible backing, suitable for not only the tops but also the sides of buildings.

What if you could foresee your health destiny and use that knowledge to modify your lifestyle? Our doctors will be able to provide a genetic map that tells you what health risks you are likely to face in your lifetime and the specific things you can do to prevent them, based on your specific DNA. Pharmaceutical companies will also be able to engineer new, more effective medications that are targeted for each of us as individual patients.

You will talk to the Web -- and the Web will talk back. You will be able to surf the web hands-free. Already, in parts of the world where the spoken word is more prominent than the written word in education, government and culture, “talking” to the Web is leapfrogging the PC because of the ubiquity of the mobile phone. We take voice for granted but soon we will just as easily use our voice to post to our blogs, scan and respond to e-mails and instant messages, and sort through the Web verbally to find what we are looking for and have the information read – as if you are having a conversation with the Web.

In the next five years, shoppers will increasingly rely on themselves - and the opinions of each other - in combination with technology "assistants" to make purchasing decisions rather than wait for help from in-store sales associates. Fitting rooms will be outfitted with digital shopping assistants - touch screen and voice activated kiosks that will allow you to choose clothing items and accessories to complement what you already selected. Once you make your selections, a sales associate is notified and will gather the items and bring them directly to you. You will also be able to snap photos of yourself and email or SMS them to your friends and family for the thumbs up -- or thumbs down. Shoppers can access product ratings and reviews from fellow consumers and will even be able to download money-saving coupons and instantly apply them to their purchases.

Forgetting will become a distant memory even as Information overload keeps you up at night. In the next five years, it will become much easier to remember what to buy at the grocery store, which errands need to be run, who you spoke with at a conference, where and when you agreed to meet a friend, or what product you saw advertised at the airport. Such details of everyday life will be recorded, stored, analyzed, and provided at the appropriate time and place by microphones and video cameras. Our mobile phones with GPS will remind us to pick up groceries or prescriptions if we are in the vicinity of the appropriate store. Strong privacy protection will have to be a key feature of these new technologies.

Complete index of IBM Happenings

Energy , Gadgets , IBM , Mobile December 13, 2008 05:03 PM

Wind Power

One morning a year or so ago we met some friends and took a motorcycle ride up to Sackets Harbor, on the shores of Lake Ontario, at the eastern-most and smallest of the Great Lakes. On the ride back we saw huge wind turbines -- 195 of them -- that produce 2% of New York state's residential electricity. I had seen the giant turbines before from a distance but a visitor center allowed us to stop for a closer look and hear the whooshing sound of the giant blades. Standing there made me wonder what the real potential of wind energy may be.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the United States has enough wind resources to generate electricity for every home and business in the nation. All areas are not suitable for wind energy development, but if you look at the map developed by the Wind Energy Program working with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) you can see that the wind is blowing at 15-20 mph at 150 feet above ground in many parts of the country. From a distance wind energy seems very simple. Instead of using electricity to make wind -- like a fan -- wind turbine technology uses wind to make electricity. The wind turns the blades, which spin a shaft, which connects to a generator and makes electricity.

GE Energy recently shipped its 10,000th 1.5-megawatt wind turbine and over the past decade the GE machines have been installed in 19 countries and have accumulated more than 130 million operating hours, producing more than 78,000 gigawatt-hours of clean wind-generated electricity. The 10,000th unit was shipped to the Ashtabula Wind Energy Center located in North Dakota. (See full list of wind farms). It is often said that wind energy is a drop in the bucket in terms of total energy needs but that is beginning to change. GE's "fleet" of 10,000 1.5-megawatt machines can power more than five million homes and produce more than 50 million megawatt-hours annually and there is an added benefit. Compared to "traditional" ways of generating electricity, the wind farms represent a savings of more than 27 million tons of CO2 emissions each year, the equivalent of removing more than five million U.S. cars from the road. Hardly sounds like a drop in the bucket.

The more I learn about wind energy the more exciting it is. You can follow wind energy developments at the Wind Energy Update. As the market grows, the technology will advance. GE has already introduced a 3.6 MW machine specifically designed for high-speed wind sites such as exist offshore -- remember the map? The main challenge with wind energy is getting the electricity from where the wind is blowing to the places where the electricity is needed. The wind is howling off the Aleutian Islands but that is a long way from San Francisco.

The engineers at GE are doing incredible work. The technical details behind the design of the behemoth wind machines is staggering. They must also stay on top of wind energy as one niche of the exploding new subject area of sustainable energy. I suspect that the GE engineers are using Knovel as their constant online companion. Knovel Corporation has has recently expanded their already vast online engineering resources to include new books such as the Wind Energy Handbook.

The now Knovelized book covers what engineers are looking for -- ranging from practical concerns about component design to the economic importance of sustainable power sources. The online book includes 95 digitized and interactive graphs that will be an indispensable asset to engineers, turbine designers, wind energy consultants and graduate engineering students who are anxious to get out in the market and design the latest and greatest wind turbines.

Other patrickWeb engineering related stories

Energy December 7, 2008 03:30 PM

In The Clouds (Part 2)

There is something about clouds that brings the term into our daily lives. We say "it is a cloudy day", or "there is not a cloud in the sky", or if we feel especially elated or happy we might say "I feel like I am on cloud nine".  Nowadays many are talking about "cloud computing". Sometimes we just say something is "in the cloud". It means different things to different people. The goal of this story is to share what cloud computing means to me, personally. In a way it is simple, but in a way it is profound.

In the early days of the Internet we thought of it as made up of three parts. First there was a discrete collection of specialized computers called routers which moved packets of ones and zeroes between origin and destination. Secondly was another set of computers called servers which contained emails and web pages, and finally the networking infrastructure including telephone wires, modems, and various networking devices such as hubs and switches that loosely tied everything together. Users of the Internet today that are not aware of this technical history -- which is the vast majority of the world's billion + users -- know the Internet for it's most popular application, the World Wide Web. In a sense, the web is a "place" that contains all of the information and applications that we want to use.

In more recent years the larger web application providers, such as Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo!, and others have begun to refer to their infrastructure as "clouds". If you create a spreadsheet at Google Docs and then save it, where is it actually saved? In the Google "cloud". We don't know where it really is -- it is just "there" at http://docs.google.com --- in the "cloud". There are many millions of servers on the Internet but to most people there may as well just be one. That is the beauty of the Internet -- you don't have to know what the infrastructure is or how it works. But suppose the spreadsheet you create and save at Google Docs happens to be your personal financial plan with income, taxes, assets, liabilities and estate plans. Do you trust Google with this information? There are multiple dimensions to the question and answers. From my perspective it is important to compare the risk to that of keeping such data on your own computer.

I have been using IBM ThinkPads since 1992. They are very reliable -- but they do break. Hard drives are mechanical devices that fail; not often but they fail. How many people keep their data backed up? The minority. Does Google keep your data backed up? I completely trust them on this and have no doubt that their commitment and execution on backup is better than mine. The Google File System is very sophisticated and distributed. I don't know where my data is exactly but I know it is not at Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California. In fact I am sure it is  replicated around the world and combined on the fly as needed. From a security perspective there are some risks but Google does support document transfer using encryption and I suspect their security will get better and better over time. I suspect they have excellent programs to protect against employee intrusion and disaster recovery.According to Safeware Insurance Agency in Columbus, Ohio, more than 600,000 laptops are stolen or lost every year. I doubt if Google's computers will be lost or stolen.

I was skeptical about using Google's gmail in the beginning because I was hooked on the Outlook client. Not that I really liked Outlook but it has the look and feel of the desktop. Generally speaking Outlook performs well and you can work on things without waiting for the network. Gmail on the other hand is an online web application. The surprise to me has been how fast gmail performs -- especially when using the Google Chrome browser which executes the program instructions which are stored in the gmail webpage at lightning speed. At this point I would say not only does it perform as well as a desktop application but is actually faster for most of the things I tend to do -- like looking for something in my archive of more than 30,000 emails. What about when I am not connected to the Internet? There actually are ways to work offline but in reality, and considering the great gmail support in the iPhone, I am almost always connected. When it comes to email, I have moved to a cloud. My email is still john@patrickweb.com but my server forwards everything to my gmail account which where I access it.

Cloud computing has been around for years, we just didn't call it that. What has changed is that it has become easy. If I add an appointment or a contact to my iPhone, a few seconds later it is accessible at me.com/calendar or me.com/contacts. Likewise if I make a change at me.com, the change is reflected a few seconds later on my iPhone. Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange have had this synchronization capability for many years but it was Apple that has made it really simple. So simple, that they explain it simply by saying that your data is in the MobileMe cloud.

Spreadsheets, presentations, text documents, email, contacts, calendar -- all in the clouds. What is not in the cloud? There still remain, for the moment, some applications that cling to the Windows or Mac desktop. The biggest example is Quicken. It is a large and complex application with intense graphics and sophisticated interaction. Can it be done with javascript in the browser.  like gmail? I have no doubt, but not so far. Quicken.com and mint.com and others are going after it but at this stage they have not been able to replicate what Quicken does on the desktop. There are other examples, such as Adobe Dreamweaver and other sophisticated tools, but ultimately everything that most of us need will be in the clouds. 

Will everything be in the Google cloud? They make a compelling case, but I don't think so. There was a time when pundits said that IBM was taking over the world. Later the pundits said Microsoft was taking over the world. Now some say it will be Google. The world is a big place. There are billions of people out there and large numbers of clouds they will utilize. In fact more and more clouds are being formed. Startup companies these days do not bother with the details of their Internet infrastructure. Many of them use the Amazon cloud. The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (aka Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides "resizable" compute capacity in the cloud. For storage, many companies use the Amazon Simple Storage Service (aka Amazon S3) to enable storage in the cloud. The advent of cloud computing has made it possible for startup companies to get from new business idea to a full implementation of their idea in weeks instead of months.

Great for smaller companies but what about the really big companies like GE, Goldman Sachs, Walmart, Bank of America, BP, or Toyota? How about when they have a new web-based idea? How do they deploy it? Generally speaking it takes a lot of detailed planning. The project manager has to specify exactly what resource is needed -- a very specific computing capacity and well defined storage. In many cases it is difficult to be precise when an idea is new. They could use Google or Amazon but chances are they would prefer to have their own cloud. The large companies of the world have vast computing resources and skills and they also have a desire to keep things inside their own tent for various security and intellectual property reasons. Enter IBM and their new plans for "Blue Cloud".

"Blue Cloud" is a series of cloud computing offerings that will allow corporate data centers to operate more like the Internet startup companies by enabling computing across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, rather than today's predominantly local machines or remote server farms. Blue Cloud technology will make it possible to have the computing resource and storage be specified in "virtual" terms and the cloud will do the provisioning in an automated manner using virtual resources. Underneath the cloud there are real resources but the cloud computing environment manages them in an autonomic way. That means that the cloud responds somewhat like the human body. When we get cold we shiver to warm up. When we get hot we sweat to cool down. In a similar fashion, the Blue Cloud will automatically add computing resources and storage on demand and when something breaks the cloud will provide alternate paths to keep things running. The project is based on open standards and open source software supported by IBM's hardware, software, and services businesses.

Blue Cloud will not replace the computing infrastructure of the world's enterprises any time soon but over time, this new approach to IT should dramatically reduce the complexity and costs of managing Internet projects. Ultimately, most computing may be done in the clouds and billions of people will be interacting with data and applications with handheld devices that will be more powerful than the supercomputers of just a few years ago.

IBM , Internet Technology , On Demand December 2, 2008 04:45 PM