Twittering for business

Disclaimer: I normally do not blog on business issues here. But using twitter for business also involves your private life... and in my case, as with a lot of managers, private and business life do interleave.

What is Twitter? Twitter is a micro blogging site, you send posts to it like SMS/texting on a mobile phone. The posts called "tweets" are blogged on your site like: http://twitter.com/DuncanMcNutt for all to see.

Why is this interesting for business? With Twitter you can connect to people interested in the same subjects you are working/interested in. Because of the informal nature of twitter you can search for subjects like: social media, sustainability, marketing, cloud computing, what have you... and then just start a conversation with people who are also into this subject. People you would normally find it hard to connect to. This lets you gain insights, field questions and build your network on experts on the subjects that impact your business. You can also use it to promote your company and its products, but you should be careful not to spam.

How to go about it? To be successful in this endeavor you need not just to "tweet" your thoughts but more important your insights and useful information for the community. The better your content the more interest you will garner. People will start following you based on the quality of your content.

You also need to follow the conversation of other thought leaders and engage them in conversations by "replying" (e.g. post "@user my comment on blurb"). If your posts are interesting and to the point people will start "following" you and that builds your community in twitter space. If you are into a certain topic, like "economy" then insure your posts include this word so others can find it in their searches. A commonly used feature is to prepend the keywords with the # symbol. This allows people to perform a search by clicking on the word in many twitter clients (e.g.: #innovation).

If you wish to promote your company it is best by showing off the strengths your company has by showing competence and supporting the community. If you publish to much advertising then chances are you will lose followers and others will consider this spam.

The down side is that this, like all social networks, requires time. You need to tweet regularly and keep it up. If you are not that type of person or willing to invest, then you should better leave it be. You should also be careful about what you say and how you present yourself, etiquette is important. Also obviously do not use it for company internal conversations or posting any company information that is not public.

To handle this on a professional level some companies have designated official social media representatives that handle this type of interactive media for them. One needs to evaluate the possible impact this media gives one in the market and if the expense is worth it. Obviously in the IT industry the ROI would likely be high, in other markets it depends on the topics being discussed. I have seen much in Twitter space in the areas of "marketing" and new technologies for example. Harder topics like "innovation" and "strategy" are hyped but often not well understood by the community and there is less evidence of any serious thought leader presence here. However if you use it to communicate/market/support your products and services then it may well be worth investing in this platform.

A CIO should consider checking the communications policy and working with the corporate communications division to insure that blogs and micro-blogging sites, like Twitter, are properly handled. This would probably be a good time to insure that all social media types (e.g. video sites) are properly addressed by corporate policies.

Twitter as a communications platform can also be used internally for adding social media interactive internal communications. There are several companies that offer solutions.

Summary:

• Seriously consider the pros and cons and investment required. To make an informed decision you need to try it out first, to fully understand it.
• See how others are using it, businessweek has an article on the marketing aspects.
• Be careful about how you communicate. CIO magazine has some good tips on social media etiquette.
• Review your corporate communications policies before you start.
• If you are looking at corporate representation, consider appointing a social media expert (example Pandora.com).

Here are some tips to get you started, but after a day or so you will likely find more in depth guides on your own that suit your taste: To use the full potential of Twitter you need a client that supports this, the standard web interface is really a least common denominator.

• For business hours I use Tweetdeck,
  which allows me to track serveral subjects areas simultaniouly. It requires a lot of screen space so keep in in the background.
• For private hours I use Twhirl, it is less intrusive but allows you to keep in touch and has a similar feature set to Tweetdeck.
  
• For mobile use I use Tiny Twitter on my mobile phone. I have heard that fring is good if you also like to chat.
  
• For the iPhone and the Mac I hear Twitterrific is good.

Next real life hardware breakthroughs

Well it is starting to look like there will be two developments that we can look forward to.

I have blogged on multi-touch input devices before and you will note that I did this before the iPod touch came out or Microsoft vaunted it's Microsoft Surface! The multi-touch interface is interesting because it overcomes many of the limitations of the old regular touch screens.

I also some some interesting 3D LCD displays from Sharp a some years ago at the 2004 CeBIT (the worlds largest electronics show). These are the ones that do not need you to wear glasses, they "just work". I actually played some DOOM in 3D and was amazed. Unfortunately Sharp didn't go over the 15" size at the time and did not mass market the displays.

While Microsoft Surface is still more of a marketing gimmick, I see Apple pushing mutli-touch. They have it not only in their iPhone and iPod Touch but are also adding the capability to the notebook touch pads. Apple has constantly innovated personal computing hardware: they were the first to introduce the mouse, 3.5" floppies, graphic displays, the plug-and-play desktop bus as well as a few others. I believe the multi-touch will creep into our lives over the next few years.

I also believe 3D displays are coming, this will take more than a few years but I am hoping that just like HD large scale displays are the rage the 3D displays could be the rage in about 6-8 years.

I believe this because companies like Pixar and others are starting to produce their movies in 3D. Furthermore the BluRay format has enough capacity to display the 3D images, even if the drives would have to be updated to handle the output. The 3D displays may or may not work like the Sharp system, though I think only systems without the need for glasses will really penetrate the market.

Samba vfs recycle feature: clean up script

After much looking around and not finding anything apart from crontab "find" jobs that that do not really cut it. I have finally gotten around and written this script, that will clean out Samba server 3.x vfs recycle trash/rubbish bins.

The script looks for all files with an access date older than a certain number of days and deletes them. Empty directories will be deleted as well.

I have noticed that there is a lot of outdated information on the recycle feature of samba. For up to date documentation on the recycle feature, check the present Samba documentation page for this feature.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# v1.0
# Copyright (c) Duncan McNutt May 2008. Free for personal use.
# Please send enhancements & bug reports back to me duncan _at_ aranea net
# For commercial use, please contact me.
#
# This script will clean out samba 3.x vfs recycle trash/rubbish bins.
# It looks for all files with an access date older than a certain number of
# days and deletes them. Empty directories will be deleted as well.
#
# There is a lot of outdated information on the recycle feature of samba.
# For up to date documentation on the recycle feature, see:
#  http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/manpages-3/vfs_recycle.8.html
#

# List of the shares with recycle bins goes here, use colons ":" to separate
# the different directories.
$recycledirs = "/home/exampledir:/home3/groupshare:/home/you-didnt-configure-this-yet";

# If I have time I will write a smb.conf parsing script to get it from there,
# but don't hold your breath.

# If you are paranoid (like me) and don't trust scripts that delete things
# without testing them first, then set this to one for dry runs.
# This is a good idea the first time you run this script, you may have mistyped
# a directory above...
# This can be 0 for off and 1 for on.
$testing = 0;

# After how many day in the recycle bin should the files be removed?
# Most people seem to think a week is fine.
$maxage = 7;

# The next parameter needs to be set depending on how the recycle system
# handles the dating of the "deleted" files.  Most administrators "touch"
# (update the timestamp) on the files to mark the date they were moved to the
# recycle bin.  This allows you to use scripts such as this to delete them
# later based on thier age.
#
# There are two ways to mark the files that were moved to the recycle bin:
# "recycle:touch  specifies whether a file's access date should be updated when
# the file is moved to the repository.
#   So if you use "recycle:touch = true" then use "atime" below
# "recycle:touch_mtime specifies whether a file's last modified date should be
# updated when the file is moved to the repository.
#   So if you use "recycle:touch_mtime = true" then use "mtime" below
#
# ATTENTION: you must set either the touch or the touch_mtime for each recycle
# entry in smb.conf for this script to work!!!
#
# As most of the tips in the internet use touch, atime is the default.
#$modifiedtime = "mtime";
$modifiedtime = "atime";

# Following is the name of the recycle bin, the default is ".recycle"
# This can be changed with the "recycle:repository = " option in smb.conf
$recyclename = ".recycle";

# Extra messages for each action is printed when "verbose" is on.
# 0 means be quite; 1 means print informative output, 2 means print everything
$verbose = 1;

# ------------------------------------------------------
# END OF CONFIG
# ------------------------------------------------------

@dirs = split(/:/, $recycledirs);
if ($testing) { $verbose = 2; }

foreach (@dirs) {
 if (! -d $_ ) {
   print "ERROR IN CONFIG OF $0 , this is not a directory: $_\n";
   next;
 }
 $dirpath = "$_/$recyclename";
 if (! -d $_ ) {
   print "ERROR IN CONFIG OF $0 , this not a directory: $dirpath\n";
   next;
 }
 if ($verbose) { print "Processing directory: $dirpath\n"; }


 # Delete all old files older than maxage.
 #`find "$dirpath" -$modifiedtime +$maxage -delete`;
 @a=`find "$dirpath" -$modifiedtime +$maxage`;
 if ($verbose) { $count = 0; print "Deleting files: " };
 $count = 0;
 foreach (@a) {
   chomp($_);
   if ($verbose) { $count++; ($verbose==2 ? print "$_ " : print ".") };
   if (! $testing) {
     unlink($_);
   }
 }
 if ($verbose) { print "\nDeleted $count files.\n" };

 # Delete the empty directories.
 # The mindepth makes sure we do not delete the recycle directory itself.
 # `find "$dirpath" -mindepth 1 -type d -empty -delete`;
 @a=`find "$dirpath" -mindepth 1 -type d -empty | sort -r`;
 foreach (@a) {
   if ($verbose) { print "Deleting empty directory: $_" };
   if (! $testing) {
     chomp($_);
     rmdir ($_);
   }
 }
}

Free software substitutes for those programs everybody needs

As my own computer that I bought about 4 years ago was a built-to-order without the usual software package, I needed to find alternatives. I needed a set of programs that would let me do what I needed without costing me an arm and a leg.

Another thing I noticed, while you used get lot free software (e.g. Microsoft Works or a full copy of Nero CD ROM), new equipment purchases often come with software that only give trial licenses (time limited licenses). These allow for period of time before you must purchase a regular license to legally use the software or require constant updates.

Here is my list of programs that I settled down to use after several years of searching and replacing. There are others of course but this list should help if you need some powerful but low cost (free or shareware) software to do those things everybody wants to do with their computer.

• Image Software: if you have a digital camera (who doesn't ;-) ) then usually the software with it is really all you need. I have my second Canon Powershot now and that comes with several programs, including a decent editing suite. If you have a Mac then you will have iLife, which should be more than enough for most... Still some people want more. If you are semi-professional then Apple's Aparture, is worth a look (they have a 30 day free trial period).
  
• Viewing, scanning, printing: I used to use ACDSee, but the ACDSee Classic 32 (the last free version) is no longer supported and is also a bit dated. You can still find it in some free ware/shareware sites. I now use IrfanView, a very fast universal view with basic editing options. Another useful and more fancy one is Picassa from Google, it also works as an image database. If you use the internet for personal communication a lot, Picassa is probably the better choice.
  
• Editing: some people want PhotoShop, personally I think if you are not a professional you do not need that. But, if you want that sort of power, then you can get the GIMP, it will do anything with a picture you can imagine.
  


• Music Software: well the multimedia PC is here to stay. If you have a PC then there is media player, which I don't use, and if you have a Mac then again the iLife package will include iTunes. But there are plenty of alternatives:
  
• Music Player: personally I prefer iTunes, it is a good media center and works fine with my iPod. However I also use VLC Media Player as a light weight media player for normal use. It plays everything you throw at it, with out the need for downloading an extra codec (which might get you spy ware instead) and without "calling home" as other media players (e.g. Microsoft) tend to do.
  
• Meta data tagging: when you import music with iTunes it does a decent job of setting the ID tags in the media files and downloading extras, like art work, from the iTMS. If you are a perfectionist like me then I can suggest two extra utilities. Musicbrainz is a meta tag database site with two programms (Picard for Windows/Linux and IEatBrainz! for Mac) to help you update your meta data in music files. MP3tag is the best manual tagger I know of. In spite of the name MP3tag will tag any media file, be it music or video.
• Music Editing: while Quicktime, which comes with iTunes as well, can do some editing you may want to look at Audacity for a full featured sound file editor.
  
  
• Office / Productivity Suite: I know of really only one cheap, actually free, alternative to Microsoft Office (or Corel Wordperfect Office) and that is OpenOffice or better OxygenOffice Professional, which is OpenOffice plus many extras such as templates, clip art, samples, fonts and includes VBA support. Another nice thing about OpenOffice is that it gives you the full range of programs availble from the expensive Microsoft Office Professional package.
  
• Document sharing: I have been using OpenOffice for several years now and have not had any problems sharing documents with Microsoft Office. Usually I save in the MS format if I know I need to exchange documents with others, but you can also get a free Microsoft Office plugin that will read the open document format (ODF) of OpenOffice.
• Upgrading to a newer office: chances are (at time of writing) you are using Microsoft Office XP or Microsoft Office 2003. I am now using Microsoft Office 2007 at work and and not really happy with it, not just the changed interface but also the feeping creaturism (i.e. feature creep) is taking it's toll on the package. Personally I have found working with OpenOffice 2.x more rewarding than Office 2007 from a user experience view, especially the word processor is much nicer (in my humble opinion).
  Of course if you use a Mac you could go either with OpenOffice or Microsoft Office for Mac, which apparently includes the features of MS Office 2007 without messing up the user experience. I have not tried Apple's iWork, so I can not comment on that.
  


• Communication and Network: the Internet changed everything and apart from the security software below one needs an assortment of programs to help master this phenomenon.
• Email: I suggest Thunderbird and Lightning, for reasons posted in my security article below. See also my blog post on Thunderbird below.
  
• Surfing: I suggest Firefox, for reasons posted in my security article below. See also my blog post on Firefox below.
  
• Messaging: I use Pidgin, a good multi-protocol instant messenger. It talks to all systems which is nice if you have buddies using different systems (AIM, ICQ, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, QQ, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, MySpaceIM, and Zephyr). It doesn't do video yet though. If you are using only one system, then the native program (e.g. AIM) may be a better choice and these are usually free of charge anyway.


• Security: I have a separate entry on home computer security, but here is the list of my present free security software that I use:
• Anti Virus: I use AVG from GriSoft, it is free for personal use but ClamAV is also supposed to be good.
• SpyWare Remover: SpyBot Search & Destroy is my favorite, I have it set up to run every 14 days automatically in the background. Another good piece is Lavasofts AdAware.
• Firewall: of course the Windows firewall is turned on, but as explained in my article on PC security mentioned above, this is not enough. So presently I use an add-on package from my router producer. Free for personal use firewall software, that I have not used personally, but have seen recommended are: SunBelt Personal Firewall, Comodo Firewall Pro and Online Armour Free.
• Encryption: If you are using a Laptop, you may want to encrypt your data with TrueCrypt to protect against data piracy and ID theft if the laptop gets stolen.
  


• Utilities: there are always a few helpers that are useful in day to day life. There are just too many options to list, but I will mention a few I consider the most useful:
  
• Compression: most will find the built in capabilities of the OS does the job (e.g. archive using ZIP format or similar). I like 7Zip as it unpacks everything and works well at packing things. This program is free and even unpacks files like ARJ or RAR.
  
• Search: even with Vista there is nothing better for searching than Google Desktop Search, you also get a Vista like sidebar to boot.
  

So I hope that was a good overview. I spent a lot of time finding the proper program and I hope this list benefits you.

My Thunderbid Add-Ons (Plug ins)

My last blog post was on my Firefox add-ins. I also use Thunderbird and Lightning as my email and calender/task client at home. Again initially because of safety concerns about Outlook, but recently also because of all the neat plug-ins you can get for it.

Calendar and Task List:

• Lightning: is a calendar and task manager extension for Thunderbird. Basically this adds the extra functions that Outlook gives you to Thunderbird.Lightning is tightly integrated with Thunderbird, allowing it to easily perform email-related calendaring tasks.
• ThunderBirthday: allows you to add a calendar with all the birthdays in your address book to your calendars. You really need "MoreFunctionsForAddressBook" to fully use this add-on.
  

Address Book:

• More Functions For AddressBook: adds a few nice functions and fields to the Thunderbird address book. It adds Birthdays and other fields that are normally invisible (but not disabled) in the standard Thunderbird address book.
• Plaxo Sync: the Plaxo service allows you to sync all your address books across differnt platforms (e.g. phone, PC and Mac) as well as over different programs (e.g. Thunderbird and Outlook).
• Duplicate Contact Manager: allows you to remove duplicates from your address book in an intelligent way. The Duplicate Contact Manager searches for duplicate contact pairs and presents each pair to the user. The user can decide how to handle the pair.
• mozPod: is an extension to synchronize your Thunderbird Address Book with your iPod.

Other useful Add-ons:

• Dictionaries: I speak several languages and chances are everybody learns at least the rudiments of one additional language today. With Microsoft Outlook you tend to get one or two additional dictionaries, but need to pay extra for any others. With Thunderbird you can download any and as many as you want.
• LookOut: will allow Thunderbird to read Outlook proprietary TNEF extensions. If you get a "winmail.dat" or "win.dat" file instead of an email, then you might want to use this. Microsoft tends to take a heavy handed approach when it comes to file formats, this will alleviate the problem.
  
• EnigMail: is a PGP encryption and mail signing extension for the security conscious like me. It integrates the renowned OpenPGP standard provided by GnuPG.

There are of course loads of other useful plug-ins at the Thunderbird Add-On site.
[Disclaimer: This is my preferred solution for home use. I use Outlook exclusively at work.]

My Firefox add-ins

For many years Internet Explorer and Outlook were the primary problems for security under windows. So to save myself the hassle of constantly having to worry about some virus or Trojan attacking my PCs at home I decided to go with Firefox and Thunderbird. If you just want it to work well then Safari is a good alternative, it is fast and safe.

Firefox really shines as far as expandability and customization is concerned. Here are my favorites:

Bookmarks:

• Add Bookmark here This extension adds an option to the bookmarks menu and/or the context menu for bookmark folders that enables you to add a bookmark to that folder. This feature is present in Opera where it is called "Add page here..." and I think it's a very convenient way to keep the bookmarks sorted.
• Bookmark duplicate detector (BookmarkDD) is good to make sure you don't bloat your bookmarks with duplicates.

Remove Ads and other annoying stuff:

• Flashblock lets you control which Flash animations run on a web page. You just "allow" those site you want to show their Flash, the rest (mostly advertisments) get blocked.
• Adblock Plus blocks advertisments. There are a number of blocking lists (lists of web sites that get blocked because they only send ads) that make sure your blocking lists are up to date.

Useful Stuff:

• PDF Download I use at work, to allow me to chose what to do with a PDF document link.
  
• Sage is a Feed (RSS) reader. If you like to read news, blogs, etc in your web browser you should try it out.
• Unplug will get media files off of sites like Youtube, so it lets you save video and audio which is embedded on a web page.
• SessionManager this extension allows you to save the current state of Firefox (history, text data, cookies) and return to that state at any later moment. Besides the manually saved states, Session Manager automatically stores the current state in case of a crash.
• FlashGot is useful if you use an external download manager. Otherwise, if the built in download function is not snazzy enough for you, then try DownloadThemAll! an nice download manager that works from inside Firefox.

There are of course loads of others on the FireFox addon site that you might find useful.

Home hard disk storage systems

My brother asked me about a home server yesterday. I have such a beast and have spend some thought on the matter.

What most people want is to have a disk available via the network (Ethernet or WLAN). What they should also think about is to have is one that does not lose the data just because a hard disk crash occurs. Which is very likely to happen as you run something like this for several years. It should just connect up to the existing house network (usually powered by a DSL or cable router with Wireless LAN).

The best solution is a hot-swappable NAS RAID 5 box.

That stands for network attached storage (NAS) redundant array of inexpensive disks (RAID) version 5. In non-technical terms this means you have a box with disks, that are available as a network drive and they are set up in such a way that if one disk breaks the system will continue to work as if nothing had happened!

This data safety system is what RAID 5 is all about. In the configuration that RAID 5 uses the data is spread out over several (at least 3) disks with backup information also spread out over all available disks. If one disk fails then the others still have all required data to continue to work. Because of this safety system the actual storage gets reduced by the size of one of the drives (e.g.: 3 * 750 GBytes gives you 1500 GBytes instead of 2250 GBytes).

The "hot-swappable" means that you can easily remove the drive that broke, and just plug in a new one as soon as you got a replacement. It looks something like the picture above.

The drives need to be inexpensive to cut costs. The best option for this is to use SATA drives. These drives are cheap, fast and can be built into a hot-swap box as pictured above.

These devices have fast Gigabit Ethernet (also works with older 100 Mbit and 10 Mbit Ethernet) for fast access as well as offer enough storage for your entire music collection, backup space for of all the computers in the house and even long-term storage of movies that you took with your hard-disk or DVD recorder.

Do not use the network storage devices with attachable USB drives. These are cheaper but you will eventually lose data. USB is much slower, not well suited for backup and you can not do the RAID magic with it.


There are several options for something like this. At the time of this writing you can (1) buy a fully equipped unit with about 2 TeraByte storage for about 1000,- or (2) a "bring your own disks" version for about 450,- plus the cost of the disks or (3) build your own from an old PC for about 70,- for a SATA card (disk controller) plus the costs of the disks. Disks cost about 80,- for a 750 GB drive so you are looking at a minimum price of ~350,- for a 1.5 Terabyte (1500 GigaBytes) storage box.


1) A fully equipped box from Buffalo Technology is the Buffalo Technology INC Terastation Live Multimedia Storage Server, you can get that for about 979,- for 2 TBytes or 490,- for 1 TByte at the moment. Or check Google for prices.


2) A good alternative are "bring your own disks" boxes. You need to order the disks separately, but this is often cheaper as you can high capacity disks for little money if you shop around. Examples are the Promise Technology SmartStor NS4300N for 380,- (Google product search) or the Intel Entry Storage System SS4000-E for 470,- (Google product search). I would choose the cheaper Promise box.

3) The third alternative for technology savvy power users is to use an old PC and add a SATA disk controller such as the Promise TX4 SATA 4-port card for around 70,- (for 4 SATA hard disk drives), a hot-swap backplane for about 80,- plus 3-4 SATA hard disks for around 90,- each. I suggest Samsung drives, they are cheap, quiet and use slightly less power on average than the other manufacturers. Set up Linux on the machine and you are ready to go.

UPDATE: I found a good article on how to do this yourself at Popular mechanics.
There is one article describing how to do this at Tom's Guide Build a Cheap and Fast RAID 5 NAS. This does not include the hot-swap feature and is a bit more expensive but any power user can do it.
If you are not afraid of a more complex, but cheaper, solution you can check my instructions for a hot-swappable RAID 5 box (note partially in German).