A recent story on CBS News reveals that photo copiers can be loaded with secrets. While below is a link to the story, the thrust of it is this. Nearly all copy machines built since 2002 have a hard drive on them, much like your personal computer. Copies of hundreds or thousands of the documents copied on the machines resides on these hard drives. Thus, if financial documents, medical documents, highly proprietary information or such have been copied on the machine, and the copier is disposed of (trashed or sold) whoever controls the copier also now controls all that info!

Read below - another case where we are victims of our own desire for convenience!

http://tinyurl.com/y3mwyco

Once upon a time, folks who had ruined their life, generally screwed things up or just wanted to get away and start over, could up and move to a new town and voila - new life. Those days are gone my friend, thanks to the Internet and, specifically, social networking. The advent of Web 2.0 with all of it's interactivity, blogging, tweeting, facebooking, rss feeds, shopping and all that goes with it, means that most folks have left a trail that will live virtually, forever (every pun intended). User names and passwords on shopping sites means that even if you move from New York to California, they remember you. That is, unless you change them all. And how many folks really want to, or will take the time to do all that? Face it, if you shop Amazon, even if you appear in a new location, they'll greet you with your purchasing history and a collection of items they know you'll like! Wait, I thought this was a new start?

OK - I'll make a new Facebook. Wait, I need to add a lot of my old friends, because I don't have any here! And those old friends will probably forget to remove my old profile from their list of 600 friends and some of thim will make more than one reference to my old personality. Busted! And Oh - and with sites like "Whitepages.com" - if I get a new phone, it's just a matter of days . . .

While you can put in a huge amount of effort to cover your tracks, fact is most folks won't put in the effort, and even those who are willing, aren't aware of all of the places they are identified, tracked and tagged. So face it. Now, more than ever, your best bet is to take your time, and do your life right the first time. The Biblical saying "be sure your sins will find you out" is now something that even non-believers must believe in!

Publishing mogul Tim O'Reilly posted a commentary on 10/25/09 about the White House's move to open source Drupal for their content management system (CMS). It's an interesting article in which he makes the following statement near the bottom which reads:

"Features that would have cost millions of dollars and years of development to add will now be rolled into the scope of current contracts."

The it's intended context, that open source is significantly better and cheaper than commercial applications, the above comment, coming from someone like Tim O'Reilly surprises me. Why? Because it's false! Does Tim think that the Drupal community, or open source communities in general, are the only ones that shares code and applications? It's no secret that I am a huge ColdFusion supporter. Maybe there is an upfront cost to the ColdFusion stack, but anyone who has worked in the environment will tell you that the savings in development time, especially on an enterprise scope project such as the Whitehouse.com website, will quickly recover the up front cost, and from that point on, it's pure savings.

Some may argue that the savings, in the case of the President's website, is in the fact that others, not White House programmers, write the code. Well, let's see. The White House employed prime contractor General Dynamics Information Systems, Drupal specialists Phase 2 and Acquia, hosting provider Terremark, and CDN-supplier Akamai, in order to pull this off. That had to have taken an economic stimulus package all it's own. Oh, and Tim O'Reilly has stock in Acquia (a fact that to his credit, he properly disclose in his article).

Please understand. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Tim O'Reilly. I also know that I'm basically a nobody in the IT world. I have no bone other than with the general mindset that open source is the answer to all the world's IT woes - it just ain't true. And I have never seen a cost analysis that proves, in the enterprise, it is a long term cost savings. What you save in software licensing fees, you will quickly eat up in deployment and development fees. And the maintenance is often much more painful than with some commercial products. (Just ask any Java developer when Java goes from, say Java 4 to Java 5). Many commercial products (such as ColdFusion) have a nearly pain free and almost 100% backward compatible upgrade path. Can you say SAVINGS?

There is a time and place for any solutions - otherwise, they would not really be a solution at all. I wish the White House all the best with their Drupal deployment.

Tim O'Reilly's article: http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/whitehouse-switch-drupal-opensource.html

While I've never considered myself to be a dinosaur, I do believe that if I am not careful, I am in danger of becoming one. You know what I mean - someone who is skill-set, paradigm, mind-set, technologically, or otherwise locked into a time that is quickly fading into history. The rapid advance of web technologies can render one a dinosaur in a blink of an eye. I know. I work with one (or more). It is so frustrating to have to explain and justify using technologies that, in the era in which they are locked, were so bleeding edge that you didn't dare use them. However, now, if they are not commonplace, are in many cases yesterday's methods. I believe it has to be as equally frustrating for them, to be scared to death of video, cascading style sheets and DHTML and heaven forbid Ajax, Flex, Flash and the like. But if I'm honest with myself, I see that what I'm doing with Ajax, DHTML and such are quickly falling laps behind the leaders. One thing I see that I believe protects me from becoming a fossil, if not a dinosaur, is that I at least am knowledgeable of these new technologies, what they do, how they do it and their place in today's web world. But true dinosaurs haven't got a clue how far they are behind. I sit in meetings with those who vehemently resist the use of Flash on a home page, page widths, beyond 540 pixels and have a massive stroke at the mention of video. It really makes me wonder why they still want to work in this environment when they are so very far behind the curve. And the sad fact is, the technologies are changing at an ever increasing rate. It's like a few years ago. The vehicles I drove were either current generation or maybe one body style change away. Nowadays, I see that the vehicles I drive are sometimes three or four generations behind. Today, it would be very easy to fall two or three generations behind in the technologies and methods I am using. It's a bad time to drift into the "dinosaur" mode. Once there, you are almost hopeless. I've not built a Flex application. But I sure know what Flex is, what it does, and know that I want to do things with it, things that would be very valuable to the mission of the department I am in. I'm not a dinosaur - I'm not a dinosaur - I'm not a dinosaur.

Budget cuts, layoffs, consolidation, hiring freeze - but get the work done. Times like this remind me how good I've "had" it. In my still relatively new role in the "Web Services Group" here at Ohio University, I'm told I'm in a position to be on the "cutting edge". The CIO's vision of our group was to be, what he referred to as a type of "Skunk Works." I can see where that is true, however, I can't see how it's supposed to happen. Our "new" department is short several key positions. Thus, we are constantly under a crunch to turn out our projects. However, tasks that might be covered by the folks that we are short, fall on us who are there. So, to research, develop, experiment, learn, train on and thus develop the "cutting edge" stuff I'm supposed to be on the edge of, does not have time to happen. I see the technologies passing me bye. Flex, AIR, Ajax - all the things that are involved in "cutting edge" still elude my skill set. The things we "could" be doing are just that - things we "could" be doing. My boss agrees, but has no budget for and is so under the gun to satisfy customers, that we have no time or money to do what we "could" and "should" be doing. It's very frustrating to say the least. In the past, if I wanted/needed to learn something new, I went to a conference, seminar or training. Not now. Now it's learn it on my own - and I would - if I had time! The web is wonderful like never before for us developers. There are more tutorials, examples, example code and helps out there on about any technology. What there is NOT on the web is "time". You can't find more hours in a day on the web - not in any book, tutorial, demo or example code. It's just not there. So I tread on, caught between a rock and a hard place. I do what I can to provide useful things to our customers - not what I'd "like" to provide them - or what I "should" provide them. But just the minimal to get them buy. Oh, we have a few cool things in the works - but not the whiz-bang things I'd like them to be. Alas, the good thing is I still have a job - for now. The way they're talking around here - stay tuned!