by zach @ . February 26, 2010 . 11:59PM
by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . February 24, 2010 . 12:04PM
Tim O’Rourke – Temple University CIO
Mr. O’Rourke’s presentation, for me, was a great example of the diversity of professions that find themselves working in Information Technology in enterprise. Many people who have a non-IT background can find themselves in a similar situation: I remember when I was a salesman for Sprint, bypassing a broken UPS for my store in order to restore connectivity for the store that was busy on a Sunday. It would stand to reason that in the minds of many managers, especially ones who worked pre-IT, that a person “who was good at computers” would be the one drafted into service in an IT role. I don’t mean to say that Mr. O’Rourke is unqualified, only to make a point of the business reality that managers of IT don’t have be a career IT professional.
Unfortunately, Mr. O’Rourke’s presentation caused me to question, especially in regards to Temple’s Tech Center, the long-term repercussions of such an endeavor.
First, I have very practical problems with using the Tech Center to complete tasks: as a laptop user, I’ve made the investment to have my own computer, and based on the trend of laptop purchases outpacing those of laptops (especially in the wake of “good-enough” computing in the form of netbooks), I’m not alone*.
I think that the popularity of the Tech Center can be overstated: First, its a large open space for students in a university with many commuters, and secondly, its one of only a handful of places where one can print something for class. The university’s growth made public places, especially for study, scarcer. Due to the nontechnical nature of many instructors, who are on average at least twice as old as the students they teach, much of the work flows from student computers, to paper, to instructors.
Laptop-toting students, who many be over-represented in the CIS department, face a much-maligned (by me) process of either saving my work on a flash drive or storing it in the cloud somewhere, and then having to trek to the tech center. Then, I find an open computer (depending on the time of day, this could be a process), log in (which takes a long time, granted, due to server-side lag), and then find the document in question (on my flash drive on in the cloud), open the appropriate application, and then send the job to the printer. Then, I’d trek over the printer, swipe my Temple ID, and then the toner would mark the paper when applicable and I’d be done.
When I attended Community College of Philadelphia, the system was much easier: desktops were always on, logged in, able to print to local printers (the ratio of printers to desktops was something like 1:10) for free, without limitation. When I attended both Temple University and CCP simultaneously, I was “robbing peter to pay paul” by printing assigned articles and homework at CCP for Temple, because of the ease of process. I could print 10 articles, get a Snapple, and sort the ants of the world out by pugnaciousness in the time it’d take me to get all the way into the Tech Center.
As for an alternative, a local wifi network (belonging to each printer at about a 1:10 ratio for seating), requiring a logon could collect the fee for printing (if Temple must be so mercenary) and the whole process could save time, and move us closer to a paperless academia, where professors use tablet PCs to write in red ink. Hopefully, laptop-friendly considerations** are being kept in mind for any future expansions or renovations of Temple’s current student-facing Information Technology structures.
* 2008 was before netbooks had critical mass, as well. http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2008/01/2008-could-be-the-year-laptop-sales-eclipse-desktops-in-us.ars
** also, could I please have FTP over wifi? Some us do run websites, you know.
by zach @ . February 19, 2010 . 11:59PM
by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . February 16, 2010 . 10:30AM
After another draft, I finished my paper for Mosaic 852 (IH 852) examining Darwin’s treatment of slavery in On The Origin Of Species.
Full text after the jump or you can download the PDF here.
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by zach @ . February 12, 2010 . 11:59PM
by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . February 12, 2010 . 12:40PM
First draft! Be gentle! Help me learn a little, post a comment!
I’ll be posting the full text below, or via PDF: Darwin’s Ant Slavery – Draft A!
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by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . February 11, 2010 . 12:26AM
This review is a little off schedule, I’ve been making an effort to review a book every week; I frantically read this in one day last week but couldn’t review it right away: The ideas and notions brought forth within it are just too big and near to me as a technolog-phile-ist for me to turn around and fail to give this book its due course.
America’s going to hell in the near future and there is some very smart people who are going to save the stars and stripes with some kick-ass hacking and finally consumerizing RFID (lord knows, I’ve thought about it). The book begins with the genesis of a new company built on the ashes of Kodak and Duracell, massive layoffs, and subtle hints of a country gone crappier since we stopped looking. As part of a visionary restructuring, a CEO lets loose the power of a duo of hackers toiling in obscurity in America’s sweatsock: Florida. These two brilliant hardware-software gurus were in it for the lawls, making non-rent quite easily in a junkyard.
Given the slightest provocation, these two makers, without any sort of business aptitude or motivation create product after product out of the scrapheap of throwaway technology (yes, the iPod does get mentioned here) – and in the process redefine the way people work. The products are everything from a mesh network of elmo dolls to mechanical computers to wiki-style cultural exhibits in an abandoned Wal-Mart. This process of redefinition (and its associated community building) is, of course, very unpopular – by stockholders, the traditional media, the gub’nit, and even Uncle Walt’s beloved multi billion conglomerate.
There is a (blessedly) few point-of-view, place-in-time shifts that feel sudden or coerced and through these shifts, I felt almost like I was reading a Clancy book (in a good way, honest!). Clancy usually has a character or three, never more than five, each contribute, deal with, or engineer some world-shattering event (war) and we only realize the enormity of the event (war) because of the various strata of person (military unit) affected. The America that exists in our near future is bleak, tasteless, and most likely a worse place than we live in today. The characters aren’t simply flat planes, sure, a little DOOM 2.5D at moments, but I found myself hating or loving the lot of them by the end.
The solution found by the duo of makers is one that I’ve been espousing since last year: If the economy and environment can’t sustain how we live as Americans – its time to teach ourselves to do more with less before we are left by the side of history’s highway selling teledildonics for Mcsnackwrap money.
by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . February 8, 2010 . 3:15PM
After I finish this paper and post it, this is going to look awful(er).
The description of slavery in The Origin of Species is one that attempts to show a lack of morality in regards to slavery and slave-making amongst ants. A question of morality in regards to a seemingly-dispassionate naturalist’s description of a species behavior may have some context below the surface.
Darwin mentions slave-making as an instinct in the ORigin of Species; however chooses not to imply any sort of morality when describing the species F. sanguinea and its curious habit of taking larval ants from other species to perform work. Darwin’s text does mention that the nature of their work is mostly “domestic” and the heavy-lifting is done by the much larger F. sanguinea as opposed to the smaller species it uses for care of the young, feeding, etc.
by zach @ . February 5, 2010 . 11:59PM
by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . February 3, 2010 . 12:20PM
Of course, unless you heard the speaker this might not make perfect sense. For my IS&T 1048 class.
Speaker: Seth S, Temple University.
1. What are the main parts of this person’s job?
Seth Shestak, an employee of Temple University (I missed his title) has responsibilities in maintaing network security for the university’s large LAN (5600 beds = >5600 ethernet jacks for dormitories alone), which includes two class B networks (that is a lot of IPs). Over the course of his job, Seth has tasks in traffic analysis, end-user security, forensics, and helps develop network security policies for the university.
2. Why is this important to the student of Information Science and Technology?
As a perspective-builder, I’ve came to the realization that while systems design, especially for planning a network is an involved job with specialized skills, that much of the work happens post-installation. The changing needs of a business/institution (like the university) mean that not only does infrastructure, but policy and processes pertaining to the use of the infrastructure needs to evolve as well.
Since Temple basically has a leper colony’s worth of infected computers plugged into it every semester on move-in day, the need for a specialized process of setting up the end-users had to be established in 2004. This was because of the evolving threat of malware, which used to be spread from internet to computer, now having the ability to infest an entire LAN without having to go through the web. The web threat was also seen as growing/worsening in regards to drive-by downloads not even needing a careless action of the user.(URL shortening services are increasingly seeing complaints in making DBDs easier, too)
3. How was this talk applicable to your studies and future plans?
I think that it’d be more important to have skills in network administration than in systems design when it comes to the amount of jobs available, simply because of the nature of the work. Although there is a lot of overlap, knowing that security is paramount means I can take classes that are more in line with developing the skills for a comprehensive security policy would be helpful. Also, having a sample policy available as part of my portfolio would make me a better candidate who just took the Cisco test and forgot half of it by the next morning.