Municipal WiFi – A Public Utility

Municipal WiFi networks (“MuniNets”) are city-wide 802.11x (b,e,g,n) (wireless) mesh networks that can run an average city $10-15 million. Wireless transmitters are positioned throughout the city in public right-of-ways like atop street poles, traffic lights, and pedestrian traffic areas. The mesh network creates a “fabric” of connectivity that allows anybody with a wireless device to [...]

MsOffice 2007 Compatability Pack for MsO2003

Strangely enough, I’m already finding that I had to download this: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=941B3470-3AE9-4AEE-8F43-C6BB74CD1466&displaylang=en This is a whopper of a “pack” – it’s 29 megs – and allows Office 2007 documents to be opened in Office 2003. Microsoft recommends that users run Microsoft Update against their machine to get the latest updates prior to introducing this pack. [...]

Outlook 2007 will not Support Exchange 5.5

Something of interest to system administrators in legacy environments. Outlook 2007 will not support MAPI configurations under Exchange 5.5. Outlook 2007 will only support Exchange 2000 or higher. From what I’ve read, Outlook 2007 doesn’t even recognize the Exchange 5.5 mailbox for establishing the MAPI profile, nor can you create the mailbox from Outlook. This [...]

Organic SEO Techniques

Over the last month and a half, I’ve been compiling free – or, “organic” – SEO techniques that anyone can apply to their website to improve search engine relevance factors. It’s been an interesting study because it has revealed a predictable, almost democratic nature of search engine technology that can be applied by anyone anywhere [...]

The Web Announces 3.0 Beta

This week it was announced that Web 3.0 is in beta! Now this may come as a surprise to many of you who figured there was still a lot of life left in Web 2.0, and for those who figured Web 1.0 never really got off the ground in the first place and for those [...]

Conversations from the Field: The Fall of the Geek

Regarding commentary that I wrote on an upcoming assignment where students are to explain the benefit of describing technical information in graphical terms. More ideas on my utilitarian principles of IT; IT as a ubiquitous utility. The visual representation of processes and components allow the technical professional to transcend geekness and talk to a business [...]

Why the Wii Won’t Work

The Guru Speaks…. I’m not sold on the Wii for two reasons. One, its new interface, the Wiimote, the long rectangle works great for consumer appliances because it forces you to use an index finger to push a control. I shudder to imagine the pain of clutching your TV remote, rotating your wrist down 40 [...]

State Data Breach Laws

Over 31 states have enacted a data breach law that obligates businesses to report theft of Personal Private Information (PPI). These laws generally define how a business is to legally notify the public when incidents involving the accidental disclosure, theft, or destruction of PPI occur. A complete listing of such states is maintained by the [...]

NIST 800-100: Information Security Handbook

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published an Information Security Handbook for Managers this week – special publication NIST 800-100: http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/#sp800-100 There are numerous publications from the NIST and they’re useful from two fronts. One, they provide a framework response used by the federal government which can be adopted and modified to fit [...]

What’s a Robot.txt File?

I was researching SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and encountered some information on a robots.txt file. This file is placed in the root directory of the website and can include or exclude certain webpages in your site from a spider’s crawl. A spider is a bot – a program – written to evaluate webpages and capture [...]