There is no box

thinking out loud about technology, education and life

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K-12 Superintendent, reformed IT guy, educator, 1:1 evangelist, life long learner, father, husband, geek, ex self-propelled field artillery turret mechanic, GCT, CCTO, INFP

  • Backupify cares

    Well, someone read my last post on backups and restores using the online cloud backup service Backupify.  I reported a problem where I could not open my archived email files.  Rob from Backupify replied to my post and suggested a possible cause:

    Hi Andrew,
    We can’t replicate this error, and haven’t had a single user complain about anything similar, so you might want to send us an email with some more information so we can look into it.

    We’ve seen a weird bug with some versions of IE 7 where it downloads empty zip files that really have data, so you may want to include your browser info.

    Well, I did some more testing and found that downloading and opening the .eml files works fine on my OS X system.  Mail opens them right up, the spam and the ham, attachments and all.  So cool, it works, I can sleep at night.

    So what was the problem?  Either my Windows XP box is hosed (I suspect it is) or the Untangle box at work is stripping .eml file data.  I’ve been meaning to reformat my desktop and install Windows 7 at work and one day I will. Really.  In the mean time I’ve got a 27″ iMac inbound any day now and as soon as that comes in, I’ll check and see if I get the same result at work.  That will rule out Untangle.  Everything works fine from home and so I look at setting staff and students up with Backupify for their Google Apps accounts (something I am seriously considering) I’m fine knowing my email is being backed up and I can get to it if need be.

    Again, its restoring one email at a time which is sufficient should I accidentally delete an email and need to recover it.  I would love to see an archive download option that would allow me to download every email to my local desktop in a single, easy to move folder.  Maybe when the service comes out of beta…

    Blogger is also working now, although it was not on the two computers I tried from work and from home yesterday so I am guessing they kicked a server or too and knocked lose some dust bunnies that were sitting on my account settings.  I like it.  It’s a nice clean backup with all my posts listed in chronological order.  If need be, I could copy and paste them back into a blog.  I’d lose the dates and links (probably as bad as losing the data completely in the link based economy), but the content would be recoverable.

    This whole experience has left me excited about the cloud and blogging.  I’m guessing someone over at Backupify must have read What Would Google Do by Jeff Jarvis.  They obviously are on the lookout for customer issues on the Interwebs and responding to customers in a meaningful and authentic way.  Great to see companies that get it and I look forward to seeing Backupify’s services continue to improve over time.

  • Restorify

    After my glowing review of Backupify last week, I’m ashamed to admit that I forgot the golden rule of backups, if you can’t restore, then you haven’t successfully backed up anything. In checking some of the services besides twitter in my Backupify cloud backup account yesterday, I noticed that while I’ve been receiving nice emails about successful Gmail backups, when I went to restore my email (one at a time) all I got were empty .eml files. (Don’t get me started on that format either, seriously I need an email client to read restored gmail email?). This appears to be a problem with the backupify gmail service, which is still in beta after all.  But beta or not, I don’t think it should be cheerfully telling me that my email is backed up if I can’t restore it at all.

    Now, formats aside, my Hotmail backup actually works. And yes, I have a hotmail account, have since before there was dirt and I am kind of partial to it. It was my first web based email and I still remember having to use pine at University too, so there.

    The twitter backup is still awesome, although threaded conversations would be nice.  Google Docs works as advertised, although again the format is all in Microsoft Office docs. It looks like they simply do an export as Office documents to their cloud. While I would prefer a zip archive option, this will work as protection against the accidental delete. My blogger backup currently says “Application Error” when I try and look at the Archive. I guess if anything happens to my Andrew T. Schwab blog I’m SOL.  But hey, its free and still in Beta so I really shouldn’t complain.

    Oh, and Backupify does work with Google Apps, I have it backing up one of my Standard Apps Gmail accounts.  So I’m an idiot, what else is new?  Now, where’d I put that iPad?

  • Comparing Twitter Followers

    Tool 22 from 30 Twitter Tools For Managing Followers is http://tweepdiff.com/ and I just used it to compare @iteachag (610 followers; my co-worker who started on twitter about the same time as me) to my twitter account @anotherschwab (447 followers).  I then proceeded to tweet out the following breaking news flash:

    Hey @iteachag we have 104 common followers and we follow 93 of the same people according to http://tweepdiff.com/

    This is interesting information for two reasons.  One it tells me that between the two of us we are seeing about 15-20% of the same stuff.  Now I don’t know if the people we both follow are producing a majority of the “high quality” tweets but I would suspect so.  Given such a small number of users and the immense value both of us get out of it, I can only imagine how it must scale.  I’m guessing at some point stuff starts to get lost in the noise but for now, for me, I’m very happy with the information and interaction I’m getting out of twitter.

    The second thing it tells me is that perhaps I need to branch out a bit more and start looking for some new people to follow.  Finding people that I might want to follow seems to be the major hurdle right now.  My twitter community was mainly built through participation in education technology events, following the active participants and then combing through their followers/following lists to find interesting tweets and following those people in return.  When lists were added I thought it might get easier to find people posting what I would find interesting, but it hasn’t really worked out for me that way.

    I browse through wefollow every now and again but even that is hit or miss.  Not everyone who says they are in IT or Education actually tweets about those things.  I guess in that respect Twitter is more like building relationships in real life than I thought.  You have to go to where the people are and join in on the conversation if you want to make contacts.  I guess there really is no way around the social stuff when building a social network, is there.

  • Backupify – A nice little cloud app

    Nice? Ok, so far Backupify is awesome.  I looked at my Twitter archive today and what can I say but Wow!  I mean, come on. It built an entire pdf book of my Twitter activity that I can download!  I also have it backing up 2 personal gmail accounts, my google docs and delicious bookmarks.  The interface is simple, its easy to use.  I understand the thing.  It just works.

    The email notifications of completed backups surely must be making me sleep better at night knowing that my cloud data is being backed up.  I did reduce the backup frequency from daily to weekly.  Since my cloud data is supposedly “distributed” and “redundant” anyway I felt super paranoid every day when the backupfiy email would arrive telling me my services had been backed up.  Once a week feels better.

    Now, if only they had something similar for Google Apps accounts I would be all over that.  As long as it was free, or nearly free.

  • Operating Systems Don’t Matter, But I Still Want a Mac

    I’ve become one mixed up computer user. For the past few months I’ve been running Snow Leopard on a hackintosh at home as my main desktop computer. I also have an old laptop running Windows 7 that I occasionally will drag into the living room and work on in front of the TV but more and more, my living room surfing is done on my iPhone.

    At work I am running Windows XP; mostly because I just haven’t had time to upgrade to Windows 7. I also have an Ubuntu Linux netbook that goes with me to meetings and what not.

    Just a few years ago, I would have found it impossible to jump between Operating Systems like this. Just keeping up with the application requirements would have driven me insane. But now I just open up my web browser (Firefox or Chrome mostly) on whatever system I am using and Bam! its all there. Email, Docs (we use Google Apps at school), Remote Desktop (yes I do need to access my Windows Servers), The Internet.  Everything I use on a day to day basis is cross platform or in the cloud.

    I guess if I stop to think about it I’m what you could call tri-lingual when it comes to Operating Systems.  It’s kind of neat; in a geeky sort of way.  Having said that I should be able to format my computer right now, reinstall Windows or even better (for my wallet) Ubuntu and be back on my merry way.  Except I don’t.  So if someone would care to explain why I continue to find myself inexplicably drawn to the most expensive platform out there I’d be much obliged.

    Because I still want a Mac.

  • Quick Note

    Catching up on grades and letting the brain swelling subside from the awesome CUE Conference last week. Hope to post some thoughts later when they have had a chance to percolate.

  • Google Apps for Education and Scaling Down for Small Schools

    I cannot begin to express just how great Google Apps for Education has been for our organization and for me in particular. We are a small school with just 550 students and 75 staff. We did not have student email until Google Apps for Education came along. Cost and management had always been the main issues preventing it. As the only IT guy for our District I had my hands full managing 75 Exchange accounts. I did not want to have to manage over 600. With Google Apps, a tech savvy teacher setup the domain and imported the students from our SIS system and then told me about it after the fact. And that was fine with me. It was the perfect solution for our small school. Free, easy to manage and thin client friendly.

    When Google announced free message security it was just after I had migrated us from Exchange 2003 to 2007. We had spam issues and I was frustrated with the learning curve on Exchange 2007. I was spending too much time on infrastructure and wanted to spend more time on projects that were closer to the classroom. We had been using Google Apps and Gmail with students for 2 years and had been very happy with it. In one fell swoop I realized I could get rid of Exchange (the one server that kept me up nights), free up a server and greatly improve our spam and anti-virus filtering.  And I could do it all for free.

    Not until midway through the migration did other benefits present themselves. My users were trained on and are now using the web interface so I won’t be supporting Outlook on the desktop anymore. I also won’t be upgrading a significant number of users to Office 2007/10. Google docs with OpenOffice as backup are our new office apps now. My boss discovered chat and how to get instant tech support from me from her gmail account. Now our collaboration platform is constantly being updated and expanded and I don’t have to do anything to make that happen. Our students, staff and teachers are all on the same platform so they can share and help each other use, learn and discover the tools, features and functionality of Google Apps.

    Not that there haven’t been issues. The Google focus for Education is aimed at large organizations. IT specific documentation is written for enterprise IT shops and the education support is geared towards end users. There is no happy middle ground for the mainstream edtech community. We are relegated to Google groups and the CETPA listserv to find our own answers and ask for help from other users while Google points us at Partners if we have any complex questions like migration (who isn’t migrating?) or single sign on (who doesn’t want that?).

    In fact many of the features that I would like to have like Single Sign On (SSO) or Active Directory Password Sync, Domain Contacts management, inter-domain trusts, the mythical gDrive and password reset Google leaves up to Partners to sell. While I have managed to configure some essential functions like AD sync (minus the Password) is is generally accomplished despite sparse documentation and mainly through trial and error. Some things, like Domain Contacts management, do not have free solutions (that I can find) and so I use work arounds. I don’t know about you but I’m getting really good at CSV import/export.

    Again, Google’s solution to most of the core IT management features is third party Partner solutions that charge for features per mailbox. In most instances, these charges quickly negate any costs savings I gained from moving from Exchange (with its very robust management tools) to Goole Apps. The one thing that is sorely lacking in a free tool for small schools is Active Directory Password sync. I know the Directory Sync tool was recently updated to support hashes but in typical Google support fashion, there is no documentation (again, that I can find as of today) that says if this update will sync passwords from AD to Apps. SSO would be nice too and there is a reference implementation for it that I got off the CETPA listserv but again, the documentation is sparse and I have not had time to spend on trial and error config yet. My one hope on this front, aside from money raining down from the sky, is that Google Apps for enterprise documentation did take a major leap forward over the past year and perhaps it will again one day soon. Google is also releasing and updating tools like Directory Sync and Outlook Sync that are making the process much easier on IT.

    The one area I was very excited about even before starting our staff migration was Message Archiving. eDiscovery is becoming more and more of a concern so I am keen to implement Google’s message archiving solution. Originally I had planned to provide tiered archiving levels for users depending on their job classifications however I found out today that I can’t mix and match the 1 and 10 year archiving services within a single domain. This is disappointing from a cost perspective. Even more disappointing from a cost perspective is that while I am eligible for a significant discount to the service, my small user count (75 staff) is apparently insufficient to meet Google’s arbitrary minimum annual charge of $1500. Because of this small school tax, I’ll only see half the education discount that large schools see. To add further insult, there is a $900 one time implementation fee (we get 10% off of that) so my initial annual cost is almost double the recurring charge. Call me cynical, but I am guessing that $900 setup fee is for someone to go in and flip a bit to turn on our service.

    I realize that $1500 for 10 years of message archiving for 75 users is not a bad price. I just hate it that when it comes to the one premium service everyone is going to need in the immediate future, Google doesn’t have fair discount pricing for small organizations (yes, I know message security is free for now, that was the hook, wasn’t it?). Another case in point is the cost of more storage for Google Docs. I am going to be able to add 1GB of storage to my personal Gmail account for a quarter, but as a small school it will cost me $3.50 to add the same amount of storage to my user’s accounts. I understand SLA and uptime and all that, but really for my Students do I really need 5 9’s of uptime on their docs? I would bump every student to 2GB and stop handing out flash drives if Google would take a minute to realize there is a difference between the needs of a 30,000 user organization and a small school.

    There are hundreds of small school districts in California and thousands across the nation and despite my rant I firmly believe that Google Apps for Education presents a compelling, if not magical, value proposition to the small organization. I would not have moved my District to the platform if I thought otherwise. I can’t really argue with free but sometimes I just wish Google would think about scaling down to our size, instead of always scaling up.

  • Browser Confusion

    Ok, so I use Google Chrome for my HTML5 Beta on Youtube and then have to switch over to Firefox so I can edit my blog because wordpress doesn’t always like Chrome and then I jump back to Chrome to check Gmail because everybody knows Google apps are just stupid fast in Chrome but then I jump back over to Firefox for more work stuff that doesn’t run so fast (or at all) in Chrome.  I’m browser challenged at this point.  I remember when Firefox first came out I still had to do certain things in IE until IETab for Firefox was released and I never looked back.  Yes I was basically running IE in a Firefox skin, but I didn’t care.  I had a brief moment of single browser UI bliss.  Now I find myself wanting to be in Chrome but I just can’t.  Maybe I could get a Chrome extension to run Firefox.  That way I could mark certain sites to run in FF while still living in the Chrome interface.  They could call it FFTab.  Now that’s just silly.

  • The Buzz is on

    That goofy quad colored balloon called Buzz was waiting for me under my Inbox when I logged into gmail.  It looks interesting.  Of course the first thing I did was figure out how to link it with twitter.  After that I wasn’t really sure what to make of it.  Like all most google apps (not search and gmail) the interface demands probing and prodding to illicit discovery.  Gina Trapani came to my rescue with How to do Everything in Google Buzz (including turn it off) and it started to make more sense.   Buzz ties (magically?) into my Google profile services which is nice.  I can post to it using email (it is in gmail after all) and use my favorite friend the @ sign to message my friends and contacts directly.  I can even turn it off (hey, can I turn it back on later?).  And of course because I finally started using foursquare last week, Buzz will even let me broadcast my location to the world direct from my iPhone.

  • Backupify

    My first Backupify email arrived today telling me that my precious cloud data had been successfully backed up; to the cloud.  I suppose this should make me feel more at ease with storing all of my life’s 1’s and zero’s in some ephemeral gaseous state.  What if the entire cloud dissipated?  It wouldn’t really matter where that my email was in two different parts of it, would it?  But I guess the chances of that happening are very small.  I mean my Internet is more likely to go down than to have anything happen to the cloud.  I wonder.  If the internet goes down, is the cloud still the cloud if I am no longer connected to it?