Rich's Random Thoughts

Here’s a link to the outline of the Mobile Computing Discussion I’m leading today at the UVic Libraries.  Once I’ve cleaned up the notes, I’ll post them below:

Reading List for Mobile Computing and the iPad Discussion:

• Reminders From Out of the Blue [please take note of the location features] – David Pogue
• Urbanspoon iPhone App Adds Augmented Reality – Barb Bybwad
• QR codes for libraries – some thoughts – Aaron Tay
• Evernote for iPhone – Jeffery Battersby
• Looking at the iPad From Two Angles – David Pogue
• What are mobile friendly library sites offering? A survey. – Aaron Tay
• Amazon.com’s Kindle fails first college test – Amy Martinez

Read more…

How can you make your iPad more useful?  Velco!

iPad + Velcro = Amazing

Want to make your own map with custom pins showing important locations (important to you in any case). How about custom directions? Look no further than Google’s “My Maps”. All you need is a Google account, and then surf on over to Google Maps, and click on to “My Maps” (you’ll be prompted to sign on if you are not already).

You can just have fun playing around with the maps, or possibly do something more useful:

• You can send people directions to a party or event.
• Give conference attendees directions to hotels, restaurants, or other places of interest.
• Want to create a Sight seeing tour? Now’s your chance.
• Plot Crime rate statistics.
• Identify Neighborhood watch homes.
• Paper Route delivery (or non-delivery) map.
• Cool photo album, with pins put in where the pictures were taken.

Some of the features that could come in handy depending how how you want to use the system:

• Maps can be made public or private.
• You can draw lines on the map (sometimes the routes it suggests, just aren’t right!).
• You can embed pictures or videos in the pop-outs from pins.
• Email your maps to friends.
• Embed maps in a web page.

Lastly, here is a map of my neighborhood in Victoria, BC., complete with all the important locations to our family. Enjoy!

I’ve been back from Serbia for just over a month now, and I in talking to people about my experiences there, I find myself repeating a few things over and over to people. First, it seems ironic that there is a perception in the media (true or not) that the US and Europe aren’t getting along well very, but the US currently spending large amounts of money to help Serbia integrate better with the EU. In the case of the project I worked on, they are trying to help the law schools incorporate more EU law into the curriculum so that they can be better positioned for entry into the EU somewhere down the road.

Another interesting thing I was told by one of my drivers, who also happens to be a bee keeper, is that right after the US bombing took place, the quality and quantity of the honey production by his bees increased dramatically. Now why would that happen? It may have something to do with the fact the the US destroyed most of Serbia’s heavy industry in the bombing, and in the process eliminated the source of most of the pollution in Serbia. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective) many of the plants have now been repaired and the pollution if flowing freely again. It’s not surprising that Mirko (the bee keeper) now reports that honey production is down to where it was before the bombing again.

Lastly, during my stay in Serbia, the tenth anniversary of the Srebrenicia massacre was observed. Eight thousand men and boys were killed by Serbian soldiers while UN peace keepers looked on near the infamous Bosnian town. The Serbians I talked to in Belgrade were ashamed at what happened, but correctly pointed out that Bosnian soldiers had committed smaller atrocities in Serb villages around Srebrenicia before the Serbian solders committed their crimes. Prominent Bosnians and Croatians, including famous basketball players for example, rightly condemned what the Serbian soldiers did, and in their anger said many hateful things about Serbian people in general. There are now some signs of reconciliation though. An all star basketball game for the retiring Serbian basketball star and national hero Aleksandar Djordjevic was held during my visit. Many former team mates came to pay tribute, including some former Yugoslavia national team players from Bosnia and Croatia. It was reported in the media that one Croatian player expressed concerns about travelling to Serbia, because he literally feared for his life after some of the things he publicly said about Serbia during the war. Djordjevic told him not to worry, that he would let everyone know through the media that he was in Serbia as his personal guest. His visit went off without a hitch, and he was cheered by 20,000 Serbians at the beginning of the game. Hopefully we will see more cheering on both sides as time goes on.

Today I conducted my last site visit at the Belgrade Municipal Court, and had the opportunity to visit with Biljana Kosanovic, the head of the IT department (or department of scientific information) at the Serbian National Library. The Municipal court visit went well, but was uneventful. The visit to the National Library was extremely interesting. Biljana comes across as an extremely capable individual who has managed to accomplish many things at the library in the face of severe staff and monetary shortages. Among other things, she manages Kobson, which is a consortia of academic libraries, and government organizations, organized to purchase scientific journals and academic databases. It was formed in 2001 and currently has 151 members. They created their own federated search at the title level, and are evaluating DBwiz for in depth federated search (it is a small world after all). One obstacle for their adoption of DBwiz at their library is a current lack of linux or unix expertise in their IT department. They also include Serbian published journals in their index, and are in the process of harvesting 500 Serbian journals.

In her opinion, most students and faculty members at Serbian academic institutions do not know how to use on-line resources effectively. She was heartened to hear that the NCSC is helping the law faculties to offer legal research and writing courses. The library has a lab of 20 computers for instruction, and have used this lab to help medical faculty learn about on-line journals and databases for their research. IP authentication used to restrict access to the journals and databases, so that anyone coming from a Serbian government IP address can used the journals and databases (anyone at a university or government office). If using the service from home, students can use their Library assigned user name and password to access resources through a proxy server (Easy Proxy). They are also looking at citation manager for possible use.

In the past the National Library had 12 librarians, but because of funding cutbacks they are now down to 3 librarians and 3 senior IT staff. This was a conscious decision made on their part, in the face of their cutbacks, to concentrate their management dollars on IT related positions, as in their calculation this would allow them to maximize the effectiveness of their institution in an increasingly digital world. The library has 206 other library staff, and 5 million monographs (or books for all non-library people out there).

Kobbis is their library automation system. It was developed in Slovenia, and was purchased by the government for all academic institutions on the country. Conversions are taking place at universities across the country to this new system. The migration is taking place slowly because of a general shortage of staff at all the universities. The Kobbis systems allows for a Union catalogue & OPAC for all involved.

One innovative way the National Library has found to combat staff shortages, has been for the head Librarian to request from the government young men who do not want to do their two years of national service in the military, to do that service in the library. They have requested technically minded (i.e. Computer literate) young men to work at the library, and it has been successful. The quality of work that the young men do is uneven, but overall it is very helpful. They do their best to hire the individuals that work out well, but are unfortunately not always successful.

The rest of the afternoon I spent working on a hardware and software purchase form for USAID, and worked on writing my final report. I’m coming down to the wire now, and hope to have the report substantially done before I get on the plane on Monday morning. I have a conference call with the purchasing specialist in Virginia tomorrow afternoon, so I’ll find out if the list of hardware and the specifications I’ve sent are acceptable for a purchasing perspective (for some reason USAID prefers to purchase from US Companies?).

After work I had dinner with the chief of mission, David Anderson. We went to a wonderful little Serbian restaurant. I ate a chicken dish, wrapped in bacon and filled with cheese. It tasted wonderful as you might have guessed, but was probably not the most healthy thing I could have eaten. Actually most of the Serbian dishes seem to score high in the taste department, but not so high if you’re looking for healthy food. Time to head to bed now.

Anthrax, Digital Signatures & Our Mail:
How we will do business in the future
November 1, 2001

Infected paper cuts used to be the most dangerous occupational hazard you could expect to face while working in the mail room. Unfortunately the events of the past few weeks have made the mail room a potentially much more dangerous place to work. Right now it seems that primarily high profile US government organizations, and media outlets have been the targets of Anthrax letters. However US postal workers and others have also been exposed to the anthrax bacteria through the handling of the mail as it went through their work place. At this point we have no idea how broad this threat will be. Will it be just the US that will be targeted? Will smaller companies and organizations be targeted? At this point, we just don’t know.

It is not difficult to see why some US organizations have begun to encourage more and more people to use on-line or other electronic means to contact people and do business rather than use the postal service. The sheer volume of mail that has to be processed in some organizations is enormous. There are bills, cheques, letters, promotional materials, and the ubiquitous junk mail, that some poor mail room worker has to sort through and deliver. Finally the clerks, secretaries, and other workers that open the letters and deal with them in one way or another (the circular filing cabinet is a good friend of mine come mail time).

In order to more easily manage the risk of contaminated mail, the volume of conventional mail needs to be reduced. This can be done in a number of ways. For starters I’m sure that many organizations are rethinking the effectiveness of mass mailings for promotional purposes (i.e. junk mail). I know if I was working in a mail room the first thing I’d do with junk mail would be to take it in my latex gloved hand and deposit it in the garbage. The second thing would be to cut down on mail from the people I do business with. I would encourage my customers to direct deposit cheques into my bank account rather than send cheques. I would also encourage my suppliers to send my bills to me in electronic format. Finally I would encourage my customers to either avail themselves of my 1-800 number, send me e-mail, or chat on-line with one of my customer service representatives – anything but send a letter.

I’m sure all the lawyers and accountants out there are just starting so say, “but it isn’t quite that easy.” And they are right. Moving from paper to digital documents does present a different set of challenges for a business. For example, if a customer sends me an order, how do I know that it did in fact come from my trusted customer? It could have come from some hacker who is going to play a practical joke by ordering a million widgets in stead of the 100 that are really needed? Can you see the problem? I believe that the e-mail with the order for a million widgets attached to it came from bill_gates@microsoft.com, however it is very easy to forge an email. I am sure that Bill Gates would not be happy to see a million widgets sitting at his loading dock waiting to be unloaded.

In this case you have two possible solutions. One: you can have a secure web form that all your customers have to order through, or Two: you require your customers to send purchase orders to you via digitally signed e-mail. Both the secure web order page, and the digitally signed e-mail offer adequate security for your transaction. There are a number of companies that offer both personal and web server digital signatures to help make your transactions secure (see www.cacert.org orwww.thawte.com for more information about digital signatures).

Another issue that our lawyer and account friends will bring up is the enforceability of contracts with electronic signatures. Care must be taken that when completing a transaction, or making a contract with a digital signature, the laws in the jurisdictions where the transaction is taking place will enforce the contract. Your local lawyer should be able to fill you in on what to watch of for.

Besides Digital Signatures, there is another technology that is making it’s way into more an more software, that will make it much easier to automatically process all the digitally signed documents. It is call XML (or eXtensible Markup Language). What XML really is, is a standard for importing and exporting data into different programs. For example, I am using my accounting program to make up a purchase order to send to you. When I am ready to send it to you, the accounting package will convert the order into a standard XML format and then will digitally sign it and e-mail it to you. Your accounting system will import the order and start to process it, all without anyone having to re type the order (thus eliminating errors that can creep into the process).

By moving our processes from manual to secure electronic transfers over the internet, we can leave ourselves more susceptible to hackers if we do not take appropriate steps to protect ourselves. Firewalls and sensible corporate policies regarding the use of networking equipment will be more important than ever. Keeping our private digital signatures will be as important as making sure we don’t loose our wallet or purse at the mall.

As you can see, our mail room friend now has less and less to mail to open. That is good, because now he can concentrate on new ways to open the reduced volume of mail without being exposed to anything nasty.

Rich McCue
System Administrator
UVic Faculty of Law
rmccue@uvic.ca

Interesting Links:
http://canada.justice.gc.ca/en/cons/jeh/adamache.html
http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/ISB/Planning/ecom/index.htm