Campus Technology

In this online Article at campustechnology.com, it talks about a topic that has become rather important at Rider University, Emergency Preparedness. In my meetings about this topic, it’s specifically about technology, e.g. how to keep the web server up in the case of a blackout. This article talks about a presentation done by the people at Tulane, who had spotlights of national coverage on them regarding their response to emergency and their preparedness during Katrina, and the focus is that they realized the people are so much more important than the technology, and it’s actually possible to over prepare in terms of technology. I’m not saying that we’re over-preparing at Rider, but maybe we should consider the length to which we’ll rely on technology as a focus in the case of a real emergency.

Campus Technology
Moreover, they added, no level of hitech preparedness can ever be guaranteed to be enough, or to be precisely the right kind of technological preparation for any given disaster. How easy it would be to assuage our fear of future catastrophe by constructing a fortress of systems and tools! But that would not only be no assurance of safety, the panelists pointed out, it would represent a conscious decision to move dollars (always a finite commodity in institutions of higher education) away from the provision of learning—and the mandate to educate our students is the reason that institutions of higher learning exist.

index - Terminal Emulator Poderosa

I just found the potential replacement for PuTTY as an Open Source SSH client for Windows: Poderosa. There are some things that are caveats, such as missing portability (this must be installed to work), and the fact that the .Net framework is required for it to work, but other than that it seems like a genuine improvement over some of the inconsistencies in PuTTY, like the nonstandard private key. I especially like that you can set your options globally, instead of per connection. (that’s just me, I’m sure)

At any rate, I’ve only been using it a few minutes, but I like it a lot. Due to PuTTY’s portability, I’ll probably be keeping that handy on my USB key for a while. - j.

index - Terminal Emulator Poderosa
Against common terminal emulators such as Putty or TeraTerm, Poderosa has following features.

Tabbed style GUI
It is convenient to open multiple connections at the same time. Moreover, you can split the window into panes and allocate each connection.
Many differnt ways in connection method.
In addition to Telnet and SSH1/2, local cygwin shell and serial ports are supported.
Fulfilling options and tools
A lot of functions for terminals are available. For example, SSH2 port forwarding tool, SSH Key generation wizard, SOCKS connection.

Plugin architecture
You can extend the feature of Poderosa by plugins like Eclipse. Actually serial port and X/ZModem are provided as additional plugins. A manual for plugin developers is included the installation package.

Support of government
In 2005, the government of Japan chose us as one of originative software projects and promoted financial resources.

CIO Blogs - Why IT and Users Hate Each Other |

This is an interesting metablogpost about a slashdot story that talked about a potential user revolt against technology. Haven taken part one or two hostile-against-technology meetings myself in the last couple of weeks, the story hit a chord. The dissection of the Slashdot thread is not something I’ve seen before in a blog posting, and it’s done very very well. I found it, as most things, on delicious/popular

CIO Blogs - Why IT and Users Hate Each Other |
There is little hope that IT will ever truly be aligned with the business–at least if you judge by this sometimes hilarious, sometimes maddening conversation thread on Slashdot a couple of weeks ago. It displays all the worst behaviors of business and IT people—and by accident reveals some good lessons.

Password Recovery Speeds

So here is a site that shows why it’s important to choose good passwords. For those of you who groan when I give you your default password for an account because it’s ‘hard to remember’ note that the reason it’s not something as simple as, oh, your last name, is so that bad people don’t come into our system and mess up your stuff without having to do some work to figure out your shift-character laden, alphanumeric, mnemonically phrased password.

From: http://www.lockdown.co.uk/?pg=combi&s=articles

Examples

These are just a couple of examples to show the resilience of certain types of password, using the information in the tables above you will be able to make your own examples.

Sample Passwords		Class of Attack
Pwd	Combinations	Class A	Class B	Class C	Class D	Class E	Class F
darren	308.9 Million	8½ Hours	51½ Mins	5 Mins	30 Secs	3 Secs	Instant
Land3rz	3.5 Trillion	11 Years	1 Year	41 Days	4 Days	10 Hours	58 Mins
B33r&Mug	7.2 Quadrillion	22,875 Years	2,287 Years	229 Years	23 Years	2¼ Years	83½ Days

Technology-Enabled Teaching/eLearning Dialogue

Most of the people who heard of this merger between Bb and WebCT seemed to think it was a great thing, but I didn’t. Or, I should say, I don’t now if it’s a good, thing, but I don’t think it will be. I think that the tools in WebCT will be merged into Bb quickly and clunkily. I think that prices will rise to the point that we simply couldn’t afford to continue to use Bb. I think that WebCT is difficult for the average end user, and I think that the inclusion of the tools that I saw in WebCT to Blackboard will probably complicate Bb’s expensive but easy interface. At any rate - here’s a page with some analysis, commentary, and suggestions for people like me, who feel some apprehension about the merger.

Technology-Enabled Teaching/eLearning Dialogue
1. The merger will be a boon to the open source community, providing a forceful rationale for preserving self-initiated pace of change, customization, managed cost, and multi-vendor support platform for innovation. Skeptical WebCT users will move in droves to Sakai and Moodle. (or) The merger is a major set-back for open source, the forthcoming standardization/harmonization between the two market leaders will facilitate content sharing and tool development among schools that use the new Blackboard. Finally, there is the opportunity for higher education to focus on content development and pedagogy.

2. Basic costs will go up more slowly; there is an economy of scale that can be leveraged to reduce the rate of growth in licensing fees. The new Blackboard will grow revenue mainly through volume and BuildingBlocks sales that add value to the core CMS functionality. (or) The two big fish are now one bigger fish; the uncertainty, and the competition, is over. There is yet another bigger fish (e.g., Oracle-Peoplesoft, Microsoft) waiting to consolidate the educational market with the corporate training market. Each phase of consolidation will be accompanied by rapid price escalation.

3. Others in the CMS space (e.g., Angel, Desire2Learn) will redouble their commitment to service–who but their current customers can really sell to the newly disenfranchised? (or) How can relatively small companies resist the urge to divert resources to sales and growth? Service may suffer, but there’s nowhere for the current customer to go so they will stay during turbulent expansion.

Sysinternals Freeware - RootkitRevealer

This is a Windows NT based Rootkit hunter called Rootkit Revealer. It is not open source software, and it runs only on Windows, but it does not cost anything. I got it because I am trying to emulate all of the security tools I have on my Linux boxen in my Windows environment for free. It’s not an easy task. Rootkits are ways that crackers use to get into your system and control it. You don’t want a rootkit installed, and you often don’t know if one is present without help. This provides that help. You could think of it as a highly specialized virus scanner. rootkits–

Sysinternals Freeware - RootkitRevealer
Introduction

RootkitRevealer is an advanced patent-pending root kit detection utility. It runs on Windows NT 4 and higher and its output lists Registry and file system API discrepancies that may indicate the presence of a user-mode or kernel-mode rootkit. RootkitRevealer successfully detects all persistent rootkits published at www.rootkit.com, including AFX, Vanquish and HackerDefender (note: RootkitRevealer is not intended to detect rootkits like Fu that don’t attempt to hide their files or registry keys). If you use it to identify the presence of a rootkit please let us know!

*** OIT ADVISORY SERVICE OUTAGE ***

Date: Wednesday, November 2
Time: 8:00 – 8:30 am
Users affected: Faculty, Staff and Students
Services affected: Myinfo/WebAdvisor, Colleague and Benefactor

The server will be down during this time frame for required maintenance. Please call OIT Help Desk at x3000 if you have any questions.

RedDot 6.5: New Features Extend Usability and Simplify Content Delivery

I quite literally almost choked when I saw this. Saving to CMS from Word? Editing from Firefox interface!! Yay!

New Features Extend Usability and Simplify Content Delivery

RedDot, Now Even More User-Centric

With RedDot’s improved SmartEdit, content contributors and other business users can create and edit content using Microsoft Word and save changes directly to CMS, eliminating the need for any CMS training.

A new Mozilla Firefox user interface allows RedDot CMS users to work on any platform supported by the open-source browser, including Macintosh, Linux and Unix based systems.

The Daily Princetonian - Blackboard merger may benefit users

Here’s one analysis of the acquisition of WebCT by Blackboard. I personally think that it’s very likely the merger will create a disaster. I also think that the revered simplicity of Blackboard will go away. Oh, yeah, and since there’s no competition to speak of, demand of services, support and features will rise and supply of those will fall, resulting in [incredibly] a larger price tag.

The Daily Princetonian - Blackboard merger may benefit users

“What people will see in the next year or two is more and improved features, but I think we would see them without this merger,” he added. Later on, Hood said, Blackboard will probably try to fuse its reputedly easy-to-learn system with WebCT’s more complex, feature-rich system.

“For people who want to do more collaborative work in their teaching and research, I think [WebCT] facilitates that more easily,” he said. “It’s not a simple thing to learn how to do. I would say, for example, the learning curve for Blackboard is an hour as opposed to the full day to learn WebCT. I know that the WebCT folks say that WebCT is so much richer [in features].”

APP.COM v4.0 - Principal curbs kids’ Internet activity | Asbury Park Press Online

Somehow I don’t think they thought this out very well. I know privacy is dying in this country, but it’s certainly not dead yet. blogging == free speech, especially where personal independent accounts exist. I think Rider might take some issue with what their students blog on their own, too, but I’m sure they would never try to do anything to stop them.

APP.COM v4.0 - Principal curbs kids’ Internet activity | Asbury Park Press Online

When students post their faces, personal diaries and gossip on Web sites like Myspace.com and Xanga.com, it is not simply harmless teen fun, according to one Sussex County Catholic school principal.

It’s an open invitation to predators and an activity that Pope John XIII Regional High School in Sparta will no longer tolerate, the Rev. Kieran McHugh told a packed assembly of 900 high school students two weeks ago.

Effective immediately, and over student complaints, the teens were told to dismantle their Myspace.com accounts or similar sites with personal profiles and blogs. Defy the order and face suspension, students were told.