Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Morning run: 5 minutes. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Telecommute day. Installed adminpak.exe to for remote admin functions. Investigated r-u-on, which is a free computer system and website monitoring service which I discovered through Apple's OS X widgets site. This service is for sysadmins who need to stay informed about when the servers they administer go offline. Everything sounds great about the service and company except that the company is not very forthcoming about its identity. No names are given, no company address is given, no privacy policy is posted. Mid-morning run: 7 minutes. Snack: leftover bun bo xao. After some research, I feel that the people responsible for r-u-on and their services are probably legitimate but they simply don't know how to run a business—establishing customer confidence this early in their game is essential for them, and they are not performing well with that, in my opinion. (e.g., I don't have the time or expertise to do a security code review for their open-source code.) Instead, I signed up with mon.itor.us, which is a similar service. Established, cross-referencable names are associated with the company, a privacy policy is posted under the About page (though this should be linked from the home page, too), and unlike r-u-on no software installation is required, which means that it's non-invasive, particularly so for public-facing websites and services. The AJAX interface has minor problems (cannot reorder tabs, dragging items from one tab to another is not intuitive and somewhat clunky—position the top left corner of the dragged item over the desired tab, views default to table view between sessions) but for the most part it's slick—a good use of AJAX—and it seems to work very, very well. It's like PageFlakes for sysadmins. You can even try it out—and customize it—without creating an account, which is a really non-threatening, low-hurdle entry feature. There doesn't seem to be a way to easily change your password once you log in, which presents a problem with security handling. (e.g., what if your account information has been known to be possibly compromised? what if you share the account information with other admins and one leaves the company in anger over a salary issue?) The mon.itor.us service is still in beta. (Tags: ruon, r u on, monitor us, monitorus.) If you're interested in mon.itor.us, let me know and I'll send you a "send to a friend" thing—I get something if I get 5 people to sign up in their pyramid scheme. Afternoon run: 9 minutes. Lunch at home with Patrick: pizza. Mid-afternoon run: 6 minutes. Research for the student computing committee: security software compatibility with Microsoft Vista, calendaring features in Exchange and Outlook 2007. I discovered by accident today that Outlook 2007 has a really great new feature called overlay mode which enables you to view items from multiple calendars on a single calendar. iCal and Google Calendar have had this feature for I don't know how long. The way it's implemented in Outlook 2007 is slick—the default is the old side-by-side method and to get the new overlay method you right-click a calendar name or you click the left arrow on the named tab at the top of the calendar. My office uses a separate calendar for people to reserve the shared office laptop, and in Outlook 2003 it was too troublesome to have that calendar always open in side-by-side mode because there were so few items in it. Now with Outlook 2007, I am no longer caught off guard when someone says they're ready to pick up the laptop as I was sometimes in the past. Boo to the Office development team that this feature was so late in coming, but kudos that the implementation seems to work very well after an initial review. Backup research. Online training. Meeting prep. Dinner at PDD's with Phil, Drew, Danny, Mom Ryan, and Patrick. Home. Weight training: plank, crunch.