If anyone is interested in doing some screen casting, but do not like the free web based program Screencast-o-matic, Techsmith is now giving away an older version of Camtasia Studio (it is one of the better screen cast programs around, with plenty of bells and whistles). For the download links and information, please go to the Downloadsquad website. It’s fun to play with and they say you can upgrade to the latest version for half price.

As the systems administrator at the UVic Faculty of Law every semester I see one or two students who have lost everything… documents, pictures, music… Everything on their laptop computers. The look on their faces is unmistakable. They come to me looking for help. Unfortunately more often than not I have to deliver the news to them that they have lost all their data. Typically the the data is lost because of a hard drive failure (a recent Google report seems to indicate that newer high density hard drives are becoming less reliable not more reliable). Recovery is sometimes possible (just ask my good friend Mike Binstead), but it can often be quite expensive ($1,000 or more) if the problem is severe enough that a hard drive recovery company needs to be involved.

The most recent student who came in to my office with a troubled look on her face, just had her laptop stolen, and did not have any of her data backed up. She lost everything except for things she had e-mailed other people (she uses a webmail program, so her e-mail was not lost).

Last week I heard another sad story from publishing company that I’ve been working with. One of their branch offices had a fire which destroyed all six of their computers. The person in the office I’ve been working with most closely didn’t have any of her data backed up and lost everything. Two others in the office had backups, but stored them at the office, so their computers and their backups were both destroyed (just because you back things up doesn’t make your backup system full proof).

I know a number of data loss stories from Hurricane Katrina… I won’t tell them here, but I’m sure you can imagine what happened to many people and companies who were not backing up their data, and keeping some of the backups stored off site.

The biggest complaint I hear about backups is that people feel they are a pain to do. I agree! Most backup systems are a pain. If a backup system requires human intervention on a regular basis, it is probably not going to work well. Up until recently I backed up my home computer by burning the Data to DVDs. I have enough pictures and videos on our computer now that it took 3 DVDs to back everything up. It was a pain to do, and as a consequence, I ended up backing things up once every two or three months … not very impressive for a systems administrator.

At the Faculty of Law we backup everything on our servers nightly using a little piece of software on the servers that backs all the changed data to a central server on campus. The next day, a copy of the backed up data is shipped to a storage location on the other side of the country. I sleep better knowing that if the Law School Burns down, all our data is recoverable.

I recently started using a similar system for my laptop and home computer to backup all the data. It is Wonderful easy to use service, and for up to 2GB of data it is Free! The company is called Mozy Online Backup. If you have more than 2GB of data, you can pay $5 per month to store Unlimited Data. I am happily paying $5 per month for my unlimited account. Mozy works on both Windows (2000/XP/Vista) and Mac OSX (the Mac client is currently in beta testing, but I am happy with it’s performance on my laptop). Here are the features I love about the Mozy backup service:

1. It requires no intervention to backup. Just setup an account, install the software, select what you want to backup, and then just let it run!
2. It backs up your changed files every 3 hours, and keeps different versions of the same document for 30 days.
3. It stores your data off site at a different location, so in the case of a natural disaster or fire, your backup will be safe.
4. It is cost effective. Free for up to 2GB (which will work perfectly for UVic Law students) and $5 per month for unlimited backups.
5. The data is encrypted before it is sent to the server so that it is secure while it is being transfered over the internet, and while it is being stored on the Mozy server.
6. Mozy just signed up General Electric as a customer, to backup their systems world wide. A nice vote of confidence in Mozy.

I encourage everyone who does not have a good, reliable backup system in place to take a hard look at Mozy for your personal backup solution. I’ll be installing it on the two computers are my parents house the next time I visit.

I was listening to a podcast today that featured an interview of Tim O’Reilly (a famous technology book publisher). At the end of the conversation the interviewer, Steve Hargadon, asked Tim if he had any advice for students. Tim’s advice rang true to me. I wish someone had given me this advice as I was going through High School and University:

My best learning experiences were with teachers who were excited and passionate about their subject. Ask around your school to find out who are the most exciting and passionate teachers. When you find that list, go take their course, it does not matter what it is. - Tim O’Reilly

The best grade I received in my University career was in Probability & Statistics 151. Before taking that class I has consistently done poorly to average all my math related courses. Stats 151 was different. It was different because the professor was excited about the subject, and had a knack for using interesting gambling and farm examples to help illustrate concepts as he taught the class (some of the farm examples were a bit off the wall). Inspired by the "A" grade I received in his class I took one more statistics course, and with a more average teacher, I received a more average grade.

So I repeat the advice from Tim O’Reilly:

Find out who the best teachers are at your school (or in the faculty if you’re at a University), and then take classes from those teachers, no matter what the subject!

About a month ago I was able to help implement some collaboration technology that will be a big help to Moot teams, and study groups at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law. The technology consists of the following:

• A plasma display (ideally 42" or larger).
• A video switch for students to plug their laptops into.
• A table that allows 2 to 4 students to face the display

What typically happens is that a group of 2 to 4 students will plug their laptops into the video switch. As the group works on their project they can in turn display what is on their laptop screen on the Plasma screen so that the whole group can look at it and comment on what the person is working on (Here are our instructions for students on how to use the equipment).

The feedback from students has been positive, although some have mentioned that they would prefer to have the equipment in a group study room so that they could keep their discussion private.

What we have done is basically a "poor cousin’s" version of what MIT and Stanford are doing. Instead of a video switch, they use a dedicated PC with server software loaded on it. This software allows the networked laptops to share the Plasma screen between all the computers at the same time. The laptop screens are not shared, but as the users move their laptop cursor to the top of their laptop screen, the cursor magically appears on the Plasma screen… and all 4 laptop uses can interact on the plasma screen at the same time if they want.

The software that enables this collaboration is called TeamSpot. There is a server component that runs on a dedicated PC which is connected to the plasma screen. Each laptop needs to have TeamSpot client software installed to work properly (or at all).

If you’ve spent some time playing around in Google Earth, you’ve probably noticed the 3 Dimensional buildings in major US cities. The 3D buildings are drawn using a free Google program called Google Skechup. It is a very easy to use CAD program that reminded me of my days in grade 8 when I was took my first drafting class. It is a lot of fun to play with.

Google has announced a contest where the team that creates the best 3D version of their university or college campus with sketchup wins a trip to Google headquarters in Mountain View California. Very cool. I just wish I was back in College. I’ll see if my Son wants to do his school, and submit it. As a 9 year old he might be able to impress the judges even if his "campus" is a little smaller then most.

Google is in a unique positions to create “a DNS-like system that would store reusable code, and that would enable developers to write tiny programs that load libraries as needed from the cloud.” As Google is a heavy user of Python, it would make sense for them to be a champion for this. It would be a god send to developers who would not need to worry about library verion of a particular library is installed on end users machines.

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In my role as Systems Administrator at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law, I recently compilted the results of th IT/Computer portion of the annual 1st year student survey. Here is a link to the three page survey. Here are some highlights from the Survey:

• 94% of incoming students own laptops, and 98% of those laptops are wireless.
• 87% have high speed internet at home, and only 1% do not have any form of internet access from home.
• The average purchase price for laptops dropped again to $1358 (down from over $2000 in 2004).
• See the last page of the report for student comments (page 3).

I guess it’s not surprising that wireless capabilities on student laptops is approaching 100% given that you cannot buy a laptop now without a wireless card built in. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed large numbers of students using skype for their long distance calls, rather than land lines, cell phones, and/or calling cards. I wonder if that will change now that the "Skype-out" to regular phones is not free. It is interesting that laptop prices continue to fall at a fairly steady rate, which in part is helping increase the number of students who can afford to arrive at school with a laptop. The only question is what are they doing with their laptops in class

The disaster seminar was a great success with about 350 people attending from Victoria, BC and surrounding area. We were fortunate enough to video tape all the sessions, and have posted those videos on Google Video. Handouts from the sessions are also posted on the same page.

Until now the software has required that users install the X11 Window System, a graphical interface that lets Unix-based applications work on Macs. The new version of the software won’t require X11, and will work just like any other OS X-native application. I’ve been waiting for this since April when I bought my MacBook Pro. On both my Windows and Linux machines I’ve been using OpenOffice, and was disapointed to have such an ugly version of Open Office to use on my beautiful Mac… Righ now I’m using NeoOffice, but will switch to OpenOffice once it is out.

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