Video Tutorials for Work
Next week we will be responsible for supporting a new two factor authentication system for our campus portal. If you are familiar with how Bank of America's online banking works, you already know what this concept is. This is a pretty major change for our facuty, staff and students, so I have had the priviledge of making video tutorials for the new process. I have to say that it was a lot of fun making the videos. I really wanted to copy the look and feel of the best lynda.com tutorials, but in my opinion fell much closer to some of the worst. I learned a great deal about what I was doing and hopefully can do more in the future. If you want to check out the videos below I would love any comments.
For students not signed up for password reset:
For students signed up for password reset:
It’s virtually LANDesk
Friday marked a major turning point in our LANDesk project. It is phase 1 of a three phase project to secure our LANDesk environment. Phase One was to move our LANDesk core off of a single physical box and place it on an ESX cluster as a virtual machine. In what has the be the single largest stresser of the last few months, it ended up taking about 10 minutes for the switch over. Seven of the 10 minutes was figuring out how to deactivate the old core, calling LANDesk, and activating the new core. Overall it was a great end to a very stressful week.
After the switch over we did about thirty minutes of testing and it looks like the VM core is actually going to be a great solution for us. We are just shy of 3000 nodes and expect towards the end of spring semester to be closer to 5000, and the VM did great over the weekend. As the work week gets ramped up we'll be keeping a close eye on the system and begin work on the next two phases. Phase 2 is getting service pack 2 for LDMS 9 installed. This is a major upgrade and hopefully a major step forward. Phase 3 is a more realtime backup/failsafe solution for the LDMS database. Over the next few weeks LANDesk should become one of our most stable and dependable systems.
This is also a somewhat sad project for me as it is the last major LANDesk project on my radar. Once all three phases of this are complete, the handing of the reigns to Sundiata should be as well. I am so ready to start another project but I really have put a lot of time and effort into this one. It is hard to get my mind off of it and onto the next thing. I am excited about the next project though and hope to have some more information in the next couple months.
I have been waiting for an app that really makes the camera on my iPhone fun and it has finally arrived. Instagram (Get it on iTunes) is a fun app that really makes sharing on social networks a breeze. You just shoot, add a title and select which sites you want to upload to, all in a very polished and simple interface. On top of it's ease of use, it also has several really cool vintage camera filters.
I am a little dissapointed there isn't a WordPress connector, but no reality wordpress isn't really designed to be used for small photo uploads. It does however connect directly to:
- Flickr
- Tumbler
- Foursquare
I am not really a huge fan of all of these social networks and one of the big reason is time. I don't have time to upload my information to twitter, facebook, flicker, etc. With Instagram I just shoot, and upload directly to all three, just one, or a combination of them instantly.
As an added bonus, Instagram is itself a social network that links all the Instagram users. You can set it up to follow who you want and get a feed of your friends' photos when you load it up. If you do end up getting it, feel free to add me, jwallom, to your friends list. And the beautiful thing about this app is that it is free!
Minecraft!
So James Fries talked me into playing Minecraft and I have to say that I now want to hurt him. I am addicted. If it wasn't for work I would probably have spent all day playing this today. Here is what I made in about 20 Minutes yesterday.
Play Time
Some years back I made the choice to quit playing video games. They were a distraction to life and I really wasn't enjoying the time I spent playing them. Over the lasst couple years however, I have started to get back into gaming, but as anyone who plays with tell you, very casually. During the time I quit, I let my home computers fade away and die to the point that all I have at home is a work issued Mac laptop. My iPhone takes up 90% of my computing at home, so I really don't need anything else.
Lone Pine Mall
I usually try to keep the latest and greatest apps I find off of here because that would just turn this thing into an Apple App Store Awesome App Guide. I really download a lot of apps and I know no one really wants to know what the free app of the day is. I am sure there are sites that do much better job of that than I could. iFlux is an exception though. It is rare for a useless toy app to really catch my attention, but even harder for it to make me fall in love with it. This is an app that now has a permanent spot on my home screen. The last app to do that was Pandora.
So what is iFlux? Well it is a flux capacitor for your iOS devices. Not only that, if you have a GPS equipped device, the flux capacitor will activate at 88mph and generate the 1.21 gigawatts of power needed to travers the 4th dimension. Ok, so 88mph is a bit over the limit, so it has the ability to set activation at any speed. And if you turn your device into landscape, you get the time control circuits as well. Overall this app really does nothing at all, but brings back one of the greatest movie franchises in an incredibly well designed app.
This is a Universal app and can be found here (app store link) for $0.99. Now I just need an iPad and a dash mount.
Light Painting with an iPad
Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.
Absolutely amazing. Human creativity blows me away every day.
iOS 4.1
HDR of Super H-Mart
Towards the middle of last week Apple released iOS 4.1 which brought a lot of updates and new features. Some of the highlighted new features are Game Center, HDR Photos, AirPlay and Ping. Ping really was released a week earlier with iTunes 10^43 or whatever huge number we are on now. Well, Thursday morning I updated my phone to the new version and I have to say I am both excited for the future of iOS and underwhelmed with what this release brought.
First off lets talk about Ping. I have been dying for a good social site that is geared towards music. So many of my friends listen to great music that I just would never stumble across, so hopefully this would allow me to find it sooner. Everything about it on the surface seemed perfectly suited for this. It wasn't very long, about 5 minutes into using it, before I broke that surface and realized why it just won't work. It only works with music in the iTunes store. I think this is a huge mistake. I cannot "like" a song, album or artist I have in my collection unless I go into the iTunes store and find that album or what ever. Some of my favorite music just isn't in the iTunes store. The other issue I have is that there is no linking between it an other social networks like twitter or facebook. That means I have to create a whole new network of friends for Ping. They really needed to work out a deal with those companies.
I think the biggest draw for me with iOS 4 is Game Center. It was touted to be an XBox Live like gaming platform, and just like Ping, falls just far enough short to be annoying. The main reason I was looking forward to GC was the ability to play games with friends everywhere. Invite them into my game, and they will get a notification and can jump into the action. Of all of my friends I have by far the most games. Not one of them allows me to invite friends into the game unless they are on the same wifi or on bluetooth. In which case what is the point of GC, as they are close enough for me to just ask them in person. Another really huge annoyance is the achievement system. Why do achievements have points if all it shows is how many achievements you have completed? This seems like a poor design flaw.
A Little Black Book
While surfing today I came across the perfect case to go along with my BookBook from 12South. It is a small moleskin notebook for my iPhone. I am posting all the information a friend might need if they wanted to pick one up for me 
http://padandquill.com/the-little-black-book.html
Subtracting Hulu Plus
I am not a big TV person these days, but there are a few shows that I really like to watch. I usually catch these shows using the online video site hulu.com. It has been a great place to see the latest episodes of my favorite shows like Eureka and Burn Notice when I get the chance to. It has been one of the biggest reasons I still carry my laptop when I go out town instead of just my phone. Well, this week I finally got an invitation to Hulu+. Ever since it was announced I have been waiting to get an invite. It was not worth the wait or $10 a month ($120 a year plus commercials!).
My current list of shows added to my queue for Hulu each week are Psych, Burn Notice, Warehouse 13, Royal Pains, Wipeout and Eureka. Of those shows, Wipeout is the only one available with Hulu+ for mobile devices. It is also the one I really could care the least about. This information is buried near the bottom of the Hulu+ site. I think that was what really irked me. If I had known that most of the shows I watch are not available, I wouldn't have paid the $10.
I didn't just give up on Hulu+ immediately though. I tried it out for a bit. I have now attempted to watch Wipeout on 4 different occasions using my iPhone. The first three times it crashed out either before it played the first add, or just as the first add finished. The forth time I had much better luck. It played almost all the way to the first commercial break before completely loosing sound and 10 seconds later crashing back to the home screen. The first two tries were on WiFi, while the one that worked the best was on 3G. To say the app is a bit buggy is an understatement.
I am not really sure what Hulu+ brings to the table outside of mobile viewing and it really has failed at this so far. I know it also brings a large catalogue of back episodes of TV shows, but so does Netflix and for a dollar less per month, no adds, and a larger catalogue. I have really loved the idea of Hulu and hope that someday it will wake up and realize that what consumers will pay for is ease of use and quality. When it figures that out I will be one of the first in line to sign up.