Brad Myers - Get Your Geek On

Google. What are they up to? Every super geek in the country keeps tabs on google pretty closely, but I think you have to look at the bigger picture to get an idea of where they are heading. Let's just look at some facts:

1. Google owns a LOT of dark fiber. How much? I don't think anyone knows for sure, but a couple of years ago they started buying all of it using various hidden company names around the globe.

1.5 Google's bid to buy the 700 Mhz range. Google would love to put the internet in every person's reach. Especially if that comes in the way of 700 Mhz wireless that you can get everywhere, even in your car.

2. Grand Central. Google recently bought the small, smart, and very cool GrandCentral.com. This company specializes in making sure you are always connected, via voice, email and all that. It's just Google's version of Unified Messaging.

3. Gmail. They know who you are. They know what you like. They advertise directly based on the content of the email you are reading.

4. Froogle. (Now Google Product Search) They know how to find stuff "at the best price". They currently sell priority ads through adsense here.

5. The Gphone. Although this is still vaporware, this will be the big piece. Gphone will most definitely include a GPS service that will keep track of where you are, and where you are going. Now they know who you are, what you like, and where you are. Ads will be based on all of this combined. It will likely, as most cell phones do, have a camera. It will likely also have Wi-Fi.

6. Google WiFi. City wide Free ISP. Google provides free WiFi access to all of Mountain view california. Oh.. and this can have ads to pay for the "free" access.

7. GTalk. Combine #1 with #2 and #5. Google has GTalk. GTalk has voice capability. Think Skype. Free voice phone calls anywhere in the world while using WiFi, with the possibility of using the camera on the phone for video conferencing. Free txt messages via GTalk. Oh.. And Google also owns that fiber that will be used to connect all of the Points of Presence around the country, which will in turn be hooked up to all of the Google WiFi spots. Oh.. and they can put voice and txt ads in here.

8. Orkut. Google owns a social networking site. Only really geeky people probably know this. It's not been popular.. It's not even advertised on Googles own websites without some digging. I think that Google is keeping it under some pretty close raps and will eventually leapfrog Facebook, Myspace, and most of the other Web 2.0 sites. Oh.. and they will sell ads here.

9. Youtube. Google bought Youtube for a boatload of money. People were puzzled by this.. but should they be? I can vouch that if I'm looking for video content, youtube is most likely the first place I'll look. They recently started putting ads in the bottom of some videos.



Where does this hodgepodge of seemingly disparate services lead us? Google is posed to become not only a search engine that sells advertising, but the company that owns the backbone of the internet, owns the PoP's for WiFi, owns the device you are using to connect to that WiFi, Owns the content that you are viewing on that connection, and at the same time, can direct ads based on all of the combined info it has.


Stock symbol: GOOG currently at 519.75 Up+5.27

The futures so bright, Google's got to wear shades.

It's been a while! But here it is..the post that no one's been waiting for. I thought I'd mention my current situation with regards to my cell phone. I've had my Sony Ericsson S710a for a couple of years now, and it's been good to me.. well, it's actually my 3rd S710a.. The first was lost to a retention pond in Orlando, FL at 3 AM, the second, Max wanted to see what happens when you hit it with a hammer, but the 3rd one... that's been with me for a couple of years now. :) Anyway, back to the point of this entry. The iPhone came out a couple of months ago, and my contract with Cingular / AT&T has been over the 2 year requirement for a couple of months. The iPhone is VERY nice.. based on the 5 minutes I got to spend with one at the store a while back, and now that they are being unlocked, and have nintendo emulators and more and more homebrew will be coming soon, I've been tempted. Until I read about the Gphone.

Google has been rumored to be releasing a cell phone for a while now. And I've never doubted that has been one of their goals. What better way to target advertising then to know who you are, where you are at, and that you have this portable billboard in your hand. I've long had all of the google apps installed on my cell. Combine that with Opera Mini, and any cell can be pretty darn cool. I wonder if Google will try to sign some exclusive deal with a provider, or if it's just going to be open for all providers. Apple makes money on every cingular contract sold with an iPhone, not just on the hardware, so I'm guessing Google will try to follow that model as well.

In other news,
I'm working on putting together a podcast targeted at Systems Administrators. I've set up a talkshoe account and podcast. Look for Sys4dmin coming soon to an mp3 player near you.

Labels: iPhone GPhone Google phone

Ok.. so, It's been a while since I was out nosing for cool admin utilities. I ran across an article on Windows IT Pro (one of only 3 magazines worth reading.. the other 2 are CPU and Technet) that talked about some tools from Nir Sofer. I remember using some of his tools a couple of years ago and being impressed (I think it was NirCmd...) Well, as it turns out, Nir has been very busy. There are a lot of awesome utilities on his site. Mostly security related, but some others for network troubleshooting and discovery. He's obviously been following the Mark Russinovich school of "How to make kick ass tools".

Check em out...
http://www.nirsoft.net
and of course sysinternals (now part of Microsoft) at http://www.microsoft.com/sysinternals

Labels: Nirsoft Sysinternals utilities

Wow. This is too cool. Imagine not just having email where ever you go from any pc. Imagine not just having your files where ever you go. Imagine having an entire OS with you. That is the future.. and that is what You OS is about. Every couple of years, I see some technology that really is a total shift in thinking. You OS is one of those things. I mean, theres always been terminal services and stuff, but an OS that lives within a web app.. now thats new. I'm betting that Google buys this company within the next year. They'd be silly not to. Now take that portable OS, tie it to your gmail.. and then to a G: Drive (when it comes).. and have everything you need whereever you are.

You OS.. you had me at hello.

I ran across this website while scavenging thru my daily deluge of sysadmin geek emails. Thought it was a very nice comprehensive list of security tools with good descriptions and easy to find what platforms each tool is available on.
http://sectools.org/

I'll be flying to Redmond on Sunday to do 1 week of consulting at Microsoft for Longhorn Server stuff. I'm pretty excited about it, as it's my first trip to MS's campus. The new job at Darcomm is going very well, and it's nice to work someplace where I feel challenged and like my best interest are also the best interests of the companies.

I'll do some bloggin from Redmond I'm sure!

So I was checking on a domain availability for a co-worker.. http://www.rocks.com. Turns out, rocks.com is owned by Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie. Ok..interesting. Then I peruse his page and find some links to labs.live.com. I'm a big fan of the live.com personalized pages (love the pop-outs for content), but hadn't check out the labs portion of live. On a side note, if you are going to keep contending that you aren't competing with Google, perhaps you should find some different prefixes for your portals, like labs.google.com which has been around for years. But the point of this article is to check out this link. http://preview.local.live.com/ It's good idea..just implemented in a strange.. scary.. weird way. I do like that local.live.com (again..stealing from google in their local.google.com) now has updated traffic reports.

In a side note, I'll be installing Vista Beta 2 and Office 2007 Beta 2 later tonight. I'll let you all know how it turns out. According to Paul Thurott, Beta 2 isn't yet a viable XP replacement.. but I'll give it a shot.

Just ran across this blog about turning your Windows XP into a multi-user version. Not sure if it works yet, but thought it's worth a try. Let me know if you get it working before I get a chance to try it..
http://riccardo.raneri.it/blog/eng/index.php/2006/04/24/windows-xp-multiuser-remote-desktop/

Wow.. I think Satan is a bit chilly today. Ask anyone even 1 year ago if they thought they'd see the day when Apple hardware would not only run Microsoft OS's..but be supported and encouraged, and I'm sure you'd be called a fool. Well, times change. Apple today released "Boot Camp", a free download from apple that gathers all of the necessary drivers and allows your Intel based Apple hardware to dual boot between OS X and Windows XP. Perhaps we should have seen this coming.. after all, both OS's have an X in their name. ;)

I find it rather ironic that this announcement comes just a few days after Apple's announcement that Man Behind OS X Leaves Apple Computer. Obviously, he wasn't too happy with Steve Jobs decision to support another OS. So now Apple has hardware that run's 2 OS's. What do you suppose their success rate will be in this area? My thought on the matter is that Apple has no desire to be an OS company. They haven't been for years. The majority of Apples profits have always come from their hardware. It's driven by the somewhat niche crowd that didn't want to cave into "the man" by buying standard ugly hardware from Dell or some other hardware manufacturer. Apple struck gold a few years ago with the release of the ipod. The suddenly had a business model that relied on selling music players, and more importantly, content to put on that player, than it did on Macs. This afforded them the opportunity that I think they have wanted for a while.. Get out of the OS business.

So what does the future hold for OS X? Now that apple's without a commander of the OS ship, and they are now supporting the Evil empires' OS, my belief is that it is only a matter of time before Apple completely abandons the OS, and in an effort to appear as the REALLY good guys of the computing world, will openly give away the OS X source code.. the underpinnings of which are already very largely based on freebsd anyway. This will put Apple in a position to be heralded as the next "Good Guys" of the computer industry. Everyone loves a good vs evil story, and it seems Google has held the riegns of "Good Guys" too long and the image is tarnishing. Apple is poising themselves to be the Knight in Shining Armour.. all by doing something they are more than happy to do.

Is it just me.... or is blogspot.com...spotty today? I was checking out AskANinja.blogspot.com and got some errors.. a little later, browsing to another blogspot web page and it was down too. Then I read an article that Google just bought out Writely.com.. which I saw coming down the road.. and going to writely.com was down and gave me some bufferoverflow.htm page. Sounds like google owned web pages are either being DoS'd or having some problems.

There's a lot of talk lately about Google buying up tons of Dark Fiber around the country. Everyone seems to be speculating that their goal is to somehow create a "Google Internet" seperate from the existing internet. This idea seems pretty far-fetched to me. Why would google, an Advertising company, want to create an entire internet on their own? Some might say this is because they are currently fueding with Verizon and some of the other major bandwidth owners. That may be, but I don't think there's much to be gained by creating a second internet on their own..atleast not for regular users.

On the other hand, you have Google hiring 2 sharp guys to build shipping containers crammed with networking, hard drives and CPU's. Robert X. Cringley mentioned this back in Nov. in a great article. The idea is that google will dump about 300 of these "mini datacenters" around the country. Why? Most speculation I've seen so far says "Really fast searches!". Come on.. text searches don't take data centers located within 20 miles of where you are.

My belief is that Google is buying this dark fiber, not for public consumption, but rather to create the backbone between their mini datacenter shipping containers. Why? To Sell ads.

If you have ever owned a Tivo, or DVR of any kind, you quickly realize that it changes the way entertainment is brought to you. Everything is on your schedule.. AND.. you can fast forward thru those commercials. Think of a Tivo as a client device. Now, imagine an infinite hard drive in your tivo.. Any content of any kind.. brought to you .. wherever you are, quickly.. and most importanly, with Advertising targeted directly at you. Server Based Tivo with advertising based on your current location, your previous buying trends, by what you are watching. I believe that is were Google is heading. IPTV ..with google supplying the third-party content..and the ads.

Google has Google Earth.. combine that with a GPS cell phone, which they already have google earth for your cell btw, and now.. put ads in it.

If you put all of Google's existing products together, and think just a tiny bit out of the box, you see where everything is going.
Google Local : Find stuff close to you
Google Froogle : Find stuff the cheapest
Google Mobile : Have Google wherever you are
Google Earth : Know exactly where you are, and more importantly, where the nearest taco bell is
Google Base : a database of stuff for sale ..or anything you want to find
Google Video : Videos on demand

There was a lot of speculation last week about Google releasing an iTunes competitor or buying out napster.com. I don't think this will happen immediately, since Google has already declared their commercial offerings on video.google a bit of a loss, but I think it's immenent overall. They do own googlemusic.com. Why? because, they will want to make that content available.. but.. only if you see their ad. Imagine free mp3's..but only if you listen to the 10 second commercial before you play it. Free TV shows, but only when you see a google ad first. Look no further than the top of this web page to see an example in action.

Looks like VMWare is still in the giving mood. They've decided to make their Server product **FREE**. It was pretty obvious with Microsoft's recent pricing drops of their Virtual Server product that they were eyeing to drop the kaibash on VMWare. Now with the release of Windows 2003 Server R2, you can run 5 VM's with each license of Win2k3 for free.

VMWare started giving away the VMWare Player a couple of months ago which allows anyone to run a pre-existing VM. (Can't create new ones, but you can download any number of already made, "ready to go" VM's made by others. A great way to try an OS without reformatting and re-installing.

Here's a handy link to save yourself a nickel at a time. http://toolbar.google.com/send/sms/index.php
It's google's free SMS text messaging service. Handy if you want to send a msg, but don't have your phone handy or want to save the cost of sending.

Here's a handy link to save yourself a nickel at a time. http://toolbar.google.com/send/sms/index.php
It's google's free SMS text messaging service. Handy if you want to send a msg, but don't have your phone handy or want to save the cost of sending.

At 12, I had 40 MB
At 22, I had 1 GB
At 32, I will have 1 TB

I've always loved this joke...

The Balloonist

A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a man below. He descended a bit more and shouted, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am." The man below replied, "You are in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet about the ground. You are between 40 and 42 degrees north latitude and between 58 and 60 degrees west longitude." "You must be an engineer," said the balloonist. "I am," replied the man, "but how did you know?" "Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost." The man below responded, "You must be a manager." "I am," replied the balloonist, "how did you know?" "Well," said the man, "you don't know where you are or where you are going. You made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are exactly in the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it's my fault."

Hitachi has recently started shipping their "perpindicular" storage Hard Drives. Whats a perpindicular storage you ask? Check this out.. "Get Perpindicular!"

I was parusing some old email today and somehow ended up at a webpage written by Jesper Johansson. Jesper is a Senior Security guy at MS that I've seen speak a few times at various conferences in the past. He's probably best known as the Microsoft guy that told everyone "Write down your passwords!"... which isn't a bad idea! Anyway, back to the point of this blog. The page that Jesper has written dealt with how LM and NT hashes are created and stored in AD and SAMs. I use a 17 character password, which every time I type it in front of someone, is met with a confused and strange look combined with some comment like "Gee..think your password is long enough". To which I respond "Gee..think we could stop storing LM hashes on our servers?". Anyway, there's lots of articles out there on why you should use long passwords on Windows servers, like this one from Mark Minasi. And here's the very good article by Jesper on Windows and Passwords.

A few weeks ago, Google announced that anyone with a gmail account and a web-enabled phone can now get there gmail by browsing to http://m.gmail.com. Well, it looks like they've One-upped it yet again. Now you can not only get your gmail, but everything else that you want on your personalized google homepage. All of the details are outlined at http://mobile.google.com/personalized/index.html. Now you can set up the rss site feed from this page.. and view it on your phone. How cools is that!? :)

The irony of it all, is that as Microsoft tries to get up to speed on all of the web 2.0 hype, they are SORELY lacking in the ease of use area, atleast for now. I know that slingbox recently added support to watch content from your personal DVR, Tivo, or just cable, on your cell phone.. provided it is running Windows mobile edition 4 or 5. So it looks like Microsoft is banking on selling a lot of OS's for phones, while Google is putting it's eggs in the "We'll do it all from the web side" basket. Starting to sound a lot like a "Thin-client vs. Fat-client" debate.

While scanning thru my Outlook RSS feeds, which are different than the Site Feeds I read on my google homepage, I ran across this link in Robert Scoble's Scobleizer blog. It's about a site written by Francis Shanahan that will do extensive background Recon on a product that you are shopping for. It looks like the page was originally called "Longtail" which I think is a catchy name. Longtail refers to the idea that a product would be too costly to keep on a traditional brick-and-mortar store due to the storage, shipping and other costs. However because of the lack of inventory costs and things associated, an online retailer can keep those one of a kind and hard to find items available for sale. The site now has the name BaeBo.. which..means nothing to me. :) It's cool in that it will automatically use the API's provided by Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Flickr, Ebay and others, and provide you with everything you could want to know about it. A nice use of combining a lot of disparate info into one useful page that can notify you via RSS of something you want to keep an eye on.

New Blog..

This page will be used for the random geek musings I find on the net. After getting a few complaints from people that my personal blog page was entirely too geeky to be enjoyable, I've decided to create another blog that I will use for the geeky things I find. My personal page, http://bradmyers.com, will still be available and will contain more day to day things. Hopefully neither page will suffer, but we shall see. I still believe the easiest way to keep track of web pages you enjoy reading is to create a personalized Google homepage (or yahoo!) and just add the rss Site Feeds to the page. My 2 site feeds are http://bradmyers.blogspot.com/atom.xml for the personal page, and http://sys4dmin.blogspot.com/atom.xml for the Sysadmin geek stuff.

Hope that helps,
Brad