GeoChron is a wall map of the world that actually functions as a clock. It updates the view of the world showing current daylight and takes into account the rotation of the Earth on its axis and other factors that impact the “terminator” on the globe. At the top of the map it shows the current time in each time zone across the world. It’s quite pricey and there are free software programs that provide equivalent functionality. But I like the idea of having a “wall map” clock that doesn’t take up screen real estate. I do work and interact with people all over the world and keeping track of global timezones in my head can be a pain, especially with daylight savings time in the Northern and Southern hemispheres being opposite. I don’t see myself buying one any time soon, but if I had an extra $1800 that I had to spend, I’d consider it.

Reversica makes a hardware mount for cabinetry that allows you to have a cabinet rotate 180 degrees on its axis so that you can hide, for example, a plasma television with bookshelves on the opposite side. When I build my super hero hideout I’ll be sure to get one. But since I currently rent I don’t think I’m investing $3,000 in custom cabinetry hardware to hide a plasma TV I don’t have. But once I do finally buy a place I may re-evaluate.

Digital Concepts makes something I might actually buy, the Digital Concepts Ps-101 Portable Lighting Studio. It’s a small table top lightbox for photographing small objects. I can think of any number of uses aside from taking pictures for ebay listings. Particularly since I’ve never sold anything on ebay. I couldn’t find a link to the manufacturer but it’s available on Amazon.

Someone asked me today how much coffee I drink a day. I don’t really know the answer, but suffice it to say I consume an above average amount of caffeine. At work. At Starbucks. In my car. But not at home. For whatever reason, I don’t actually own a coffee pot. That’s simple enough to remedy but I suppose I haven’t purchased one because I’m always on the go and I’m drinking my coffee in the car or at work or some other location. The Wagan 12 V Travel Mug is a coffee thermos that has a 12 volt car adapter to keep coffee hot during the drive. When I googled to find out more information I learned that there are a million of these things out there, including coffee mugs that can be powered by USB. But I was not aware of any of this, so I post it here for your information. Maybe I’ll have to finally get a coffee maker for my house.

I have uploaded various documents of personal interest, such as time sheets, offer letters, tax information, etc. and I have access to these bits of information from any web browser.  Much more efficient than trying to look through my filing system at home, consisting of an underused file drawer and a highly used system of “piles of mail spread around”.

Having been a UNIX systems engineer for a long time, I’m not a fan of manual configuration.  It’s time intensive and error prone.  So I set about configuring a cfengine installation using Subversion for revision control of the configuration files.  My team mates were not familiar with cfengine or Subversion, so I documented their use on our internal wiki.

I’ve had occaision to set up fresh cfengine configurations at several contracting clients now, and it occurs to me that while cfengine is incredibly powerful and useful it can be a bit overwhelming for new users even if they are experienced UNIX administrators.

In my copious free time (yeah, right!) I should start a consulting business around system process automation using cfengine with revision control for more managable and scalable infrastructures.

The job is going well, although I am completely swamped from the moment I walk in to the moment I go home.  Sometimes I have 15 minutes to go to the drive-thru for lunch.  That’s not a bad thing, it just means that I’m pretty drained after work and haven’t made much progress on keeping this site updated, my People Keeper, etc.

My friend Nicole and I are working on starting a web design/marketing company which has been taking up whatever minimal free time I might otherwise have had.  Hopefully that will get off the ground.  I’m hoping she can take the lead on it, as my schedule is just so packed.

I did take break last weekend and went camping with some friends at Prince William Forest Park in Triangle, VA.  It was a good time.  I’m not much for camping, but there’s something to be said for having zero cell phone reception for two days.

Instead of making me wait on hold for 10 minutes, their call management system asked if I would like to keep my place in line and receive a call back when they could assist me.  I have not had experience with that option before, but it sounded like a great idea so I pressed the button to do that.  Sure enough, all I had to do was enter in my phone number and in a few minutes their system called me back and connected me to a support person who resolved my technical issue.  For those who are curious, it turned out that some setting in the PVC had become mysteriously mismatched.

While I would rather not have to wait at all when calling customer support numbers, if I have to wait I’d much prefer to have the system call me back than to sit around listening to hold music.  I hope many other businesses upgrade their call center telephony applications to support this feature.

On a side note, while I have been a happy speakeasy customer, Verizon FiOS is finally available in my neighborhood so I suspect I will be switching from DSL to fibre in the near future.  I’m sure I will miss the speakeasy support, but the faster speed and lower cost of fibre is hard to resist.

In other news, I bought a new car.  I had been driving a 1990 Lincoln Town Car, but alas I was driving over to pick up a friend a week ago Saturday, April 26, and a woman driving a PT Cruiser crashed into me and destroyed it.  That made me sad.  I was thinking of picking up another $500 car on craigslist, but instead I decided to take the plunge and get a car loan.

I have avoided driving new cars for the past number of years, as I got stuck with a high interest new car loan back in 1998 that was an albatross for five years.  This time I was a bit savvier and so far am very happy with my decsision.  I’m now driving a new 2008 Hyundai Sonata Limited.  The 2009 cars were available but much better deals were to be had on the 2008 cars and the difference between the two model years was not sufficient to matter to me.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a new car and I’m enjoying it.  I went with the 6 cylinder engine which is quite sporty.  Much sportier than what I really need, but I didn’t want an underpowered car.  Although my gas mileage won’t be as fantastic as it would have been with the 4 cylinder, it’s still a big improvement over the Lincoln.

A lot of “CIO type” interviews and articles are long on theory and short on practical reference.  This article does include some concrete references to real projects under way.  Notably the intelligence community’s answer to Wikipedia, Intellipedia.  Also mentioned are Politicopia, a Utah project to create a wiki community where citizens can voice their opinions about pending legislature.

The article mainly discusses theory and a few wiki examples, so I’m not sure that it lives up to it’s “Web 2.0″ claim as many other “Web 2.0″ technologies are ignored.  Still, it’s worth skimming.  Not so much to learn anything groundbreaking but to get the cognitive juices flowing.

There is one extension that I do use on a regular basis. FireGPG is a Firefox extension that allows for integration with GnuPG. The extension has a number of features, including allowing the selection of web page text and then encrypting it via a right-click context menu.

The killer feature of this extension, however, is its integration with Gmail. The problem with web based email systems is that they are inherently insecure. Regardless of whether or not the HTTP connection is encrypted with SSL, all of the mail content is being stored on a remote server.

Sending encrypted emails to web email services has always been possible, but it’s painful in practice as the encrypted email must be copied out of the web browser and into a local text file and then decrypted. That is not an efficient workflow, and so very few people with web mail accounts actually use encryption.

FireGPG has support for Google’s Gmail. When you have FireGPG installed, the Gmail interface is subtly modified to include options to sign, encrypt, and decrypt emails. When an encrypted or signed email comes in, the software automatically recognizes it and decrypts or verifies the digital signature. The integration is very subtle and over time I forget I have it. Until I’m on another computer and realize I can’t verify digital signatures.

The downside to encrypting web based mail is that the encrypted version is stored on the mail service provider, which makes the web mail’s search functionality unusable. I find that I still don’t send much encrypted email, but the ability to see verified signatures is very handy and does not prevent my mail from being searchable.

If I were running a “mission critical” web application, I may not pick Dreamhost as my hosting platform. But in that case I’d be looking at the offerings from Amazon Web Service or Google’s App Engine. They are inherently more scalable for production commercial sites.

Dreamhost offers a lot of features that make my life easier, but one of their newer features I’ve started to take advantage of is Subversion. Dreamhost’s web panel allows users to create Subversion repositories, manage Subversion users, etc. They support webdav access, although I prefer to do my development on their shell using the svn client with a local path to the repository.

Being able to keep my People Keeper application in a Subversion repository at Dreamhost has been very handy. If you’re a Dreamhost customer who does any sort of development and you weren’t aware of this feature, I suggest checking it out. Revision control is critical in any software or web development project, and Subversion is a very popular package.

I have been researching open source Document Management Systems, but it occurred to me that I already have a wiki and with my People Keeper project I’m concerned about further fragmenting my personal data across multiple systems. So I decided to try using my personal wiki as a DMS.

I’d say the project is in “beta” at this point, but so far it seems to work well. The nice thing is that I don’t have to worry about filing documents under one location as it’s searchable and I can link to one document from as many different places as I’d like. The wiki already handles the case of multiple versions, so I don’t have to worry about version control. And it’s very simple to set up.

I’m using MediaWiki which isn’t really intended for storing general purpose documents. It considers everything an image. In truth though, it can handle whatever type of file you give it. I only had to make a few small modifications to the LocalSettings.php file.

The following settings needed to be added or modified in LocalSettings.php:

$wgEnableUploads                = true;
$wgStrictFileExtensions         = false;
$wgFileExtensions[] = ‘doc’;
$wgFileExtensions[] = ‘xls’;
$wgFileExtensions[] = ‘pdf’;
$wgFileExtensions[] = ‘mpp’;

The additions to the $wgFileExtensions[] array were not strictly necessary, but I did not want to have to confirm every non-image file upload so I added them. Because I have $wgStrictFileExtensions set to false, I can still upload other file types but I will have to confirm them which is an annoyance so if I had other common file types I would add them to the $wgFileExtensions[] array.

I find that I like to have my document links include a link to the document itself as well as the wiki page for the document upload. It is inconvenient to have to type out the wiki code for that each time, so I have created the following templated called Doclink

[[Media:{{{1}}}|{{{1}}}]] [[:Image:{{{1}}}|(wiki page)]]

This allows wiki entries such as

{{{Doclink|My_Document.doc}}}

to format as

My_Document.doc (wiki page)

Not the most sophisticated template ever devised for MediaWiki but it has already saved me substantial time and tedium.