Technology As A Journey, Not a Destination

A couple of projects have taken my attention this week.  One of which is nearly complete and that entails some cleaning of our technology items.  The amount of “stuff” that’s accumulated over the years has reached a point where it needs to be thinned signifcantly.  Some is just recyclable junk that has no useful purpose left in it. Some of it, however, is reusable for students or families that don’t have computers at home.  How that will work out is yet to be determined, but it’s on the table.

The second project deals with content filtering for our schools.  We use a product that is included in our hosting.  It’s perfectly fine and does the bare minimum, but not robust enough to meet some of the demands that are on the horizon.  I’m not one for censorship, but schools and libraries are required by federal law to filter “obscene” content.   What it determines is obscene is sometimes at odds with common sense and I know that the students can find whatever they want on the Internet if they are determined.  I have had it demonstrated to me how easy it is to bypass these filters with just a few mouse clicks.

While I admire the resourcefulness of our students, I am also in a position where I must take steps to mitigate these easy, but creative, workarounds.  Whether or not I agree that this is the right thing to do with my time aside, the most obscene thing I’ve seen in the past week is just how much a robust solution costs for a school district.  If I didn’t know any better, I’d think people passing these laws had some financial interest in content filtering appliances and services.

I am completely turned off by the prospect of spending tens of thousands of dollars upfront and then subsequently forced into annual licensing agreements.  In this time of budget shortages, teacher layoffs, and a necessity for more technology, it pains me to spend anything on censorware.

Thankfully, there exists Free/Open Source software to meet these needs.  Rather than invest tens of thousands and be on the hook for annual renewals, it makes more sense to spend a couple thousand and never have to pay a fee again.  So this has been my task these last few days, finding and tweaking a solution on a test system.  It seems promising and just in need of some tweaking and should be ready to go when we have some downtime.

On a bright side, our cluster seems to be on the way to becoming a reality.  Yesterday they got the master system up and running and today they were able to image one of the compute nodes.  It seemed like a simple process, or at least they made it look simple.  I am always impressed by these two guys and what they create.  Check out the blog they made.

For the longest time while a Mac user over a decade ago, there was a definite boundary of “stuff” that one could do with a Mac.  I’ve tried to pinpoint my switch to Windows and I think it was just by sheer lack of “stuff” to do on my computer.  Couple that with becoming part of the corporate world, and I suppose that’s just what happens.  During my time as a Mac user, I dabbled with various flavors of Linux and always ran into the same thing.  If you were not a programmer or hardcore computer “techie” there was not much for you in Linux.  Web browsing, e-mail, basic word processing, and that was about it as far as mainstream applications go on a desktop computer.  It never lost its value as a server, and has increased in that regard even more so.  For this discussion, however, I’m talking about the desktop computer that you check your bank account, check Facebook and share digital media.

Fast forward to now.  Since it’s release, I have upgraded two machines to Ubuntu 10.04 and I am just blown away in how far it has come.  Every release of Ubuntu Linux is better.  I’ve even got a few friends and family running Ubuntu exclusively, and they have never even noticed that Windows XP is gone.  In fact, you tend to notice the OS even less with Linux.  And really, that’s the way it should be.  I guess that’s why I’ve fallen in love with my Mac.  It just does what I want and stays out of my way.  A few software updates here and there, but otherwise the OS stays out of my way.

Ubuntu started out as a very polished and commercial-looking flavor of Linux.  I have been regularly using it since 5.10.  Each version brings us closer to even more freedom in our desktop computing needs.  I kept a virtualized copy of Windows XP and Windows 7, just in case.  Since leaving one of my customers that had a VPN that wouldn’t work in anything other than XP, I have not booted up those virtual machines since.

Where once I was dependent on the applications in Windows XP, I find that I no longer need it for anything.  I’m at a point where I’m surprised that Microsoft products are completely irrelevant in my personal life, and increasingly less relevant in my business role.  Do I love Office for Mac?  Not really, I could switch to something else if I had the ambition to learn it.  Could I live without it?  Absolutely.   That makes me happy.

If suddenly my Mac went away, I would have not trouble switching to Ubuntu exclusively.  The Mac is still obviously a commercial release and the hardware/software integration is second to none.  I doubt they have much to fear from Ubuntu, but the other player in this business sure does.  What I don’t understand is that probably significantly more development and resources went into Windows 7 and it wouldn’t even be a consideration for me if my Mac self-destructed.  If you haven’t yet, go get Ubuntu.  It’s free and easy.  You just might find yourself surprised.

So I have two Acer AspireOne netbooks that I have tried, unsuccessfully, to auction on ebay.  One is running Windows 7 Home Premium that I upgraded via a USB flash drive.  The other is running Ubuntu Netbook Remix.  The more I use them, I realize that the size of these netbooks is not particularly great.  There was a time when I really enjoyed taking them into bed or sitting on the couch with them for just web browsing.  Before I got a macbook, I always had bulky laptop computers that were just too big to sit comfortably with.  The Macbook changed that, but then made me crave smaller.  The size of the Macbook 13″ is just perfect for portability, but sometimes you need something smaller.

Taking a laptop into bed to read is a hassle and an annoyance for your spouse.  Whether that is a full-size laptop like my Macbook or the Acer Aspire netbook, it’s still a pain.

It had been a while since I even turned on either of the netbooks, so I decided tonight to grab one and try to work on some learning in Moodle that I am woefully behind in finishing.  The Windows 7 machine, for some reason, decides at the most inopportune time to install updates and restart.  Then it decided that it couldn’t  update anyway, but that’s a rant for another time.

As I was working on those, I realized that the size of the screen just wasn’t right for reading the tutorials.  I was forever scrolling and moving and it just irritated me to no end.  So I grab the iPad to see if that would work.  Well, some of the tutorials were in flash format, so that scratched that idea.  However, the size of the iPad was perfect for what I needed.

In the end, I needed to use my Macbook, but I was left annoyed by the fact that the two devices I wanted to use wouldn’t work for me.  And then I realized that this whole iPad type device is still the first of its kind.  As it progresses and people try to outdo each other, I’m sure in about five years these devices will see as archaic as the floppy disk.

The highlight of my day today was getting even closer to having my Ubuntu Linux lab ready for production.  I have not been able to devote the time to it that I wanted, so I’m working on it in bits and pieces, which is why it seems it’s gone on forever.  However, I’m now about one day away from having it ready to pilot.

I worked out the problem that I was having with the wireless network connection and have had the ones that are fully operational working all of this week without a hitch.  The trick was to leaving the roaming mode enabled, and then removing the requirement to enter the a password to unlock the keyring to connect to the wireless.  This was an ugly hack, but simply leaving the password blank was fine.

Security was mitigated because the only thing that is stored on the keyring is this password.  And since the username and password are posted all over the place and everyone knows it, there’s really no point in actually making you enter it.  When dealing with kids aged 9-12, there’s really no way to implement rock solid security in a lab environment.  Anyway, I digress, security is another matter entirely and a project for another decade.

The second part of my day was spent configuring a lab for Kindergarten through second grade students. It was a rush job, but my team and I managed to get it going in just over an hour.  We still have a little tweaking to do, but it is much better than it was and fully operational.

During that fun job, we were struggling with the problem of teachers that cannot play DVD’s on their computer.  Why this has to be such a difficult process is beyond me.  In my Mac, I put the DVD in and it plays.  With a few minor tweaks, any Linux disto will do the same.  Why, in a PC, is getting a DVD to play so hard and unreliable?  And why does Windows associate Windows Media Player with DVDs when it cannot play them?  I just don’t get why this has to be so difficult to play a DVD.  I don’t want to spend a lot of time on it anyway, because I have written a grant and been funded to buy new laptops for all of the teachers, so it’s only a matter of time before I have to go through all of it again.

I love my job, even on days like today when I want to drop kick computers just to see what happens.

I am almost complete with the Ubuntu linux lab.  Today I installed most of them and managed the updates using my work laptop as a caching server.  This simplified the upgrade process from about a 45 minute process down to about ten.  It helped a lot, and I’m sure that Canonical appreciated the reprieve on bandwidth – at least from my little project.

This, of course, also gave me the perfect opportunity to use Ubuntu on my work laptop.  Tomorrow I am going to test VMWare Workstation to see if I can boot the Windows partition without having to actually boot into it.  This could be something good, who knows.

I took three of the computers to the teacher that I am going to use for the pilot, and she seemed very pleased with the setup.  She seems very intrigued by the prospect of a different operating system and I am glad that I have the opportunity to expose it to her. She is a technology teacher by training, and seems very eager to try it.  I want to have it completed tomorrow so that I can let her try it out this week.  The suspense of whether or not this is going to work is killing me.

I hope that this works, it’s been a headache to set up, but should be relatively trouble free once it’s going. I plan to use a remote management system such as Multivnc or something along those lines for the teacher to manage the computers.

Today I finished setting up three of the problematic notebooks with Ubuntu Linux.  I had boot time from completely off to 1 minute 9 seconds to a completely usable state.  When coming back after a suspend, it was a matter of a few seconds.

So the next hurdle was to connect to our district’s wireless network and join the domain.  I found some documentation on how to join an Ubuntu machine to the Windows domain and I played with that a little bit.  We were able to successfully join it to the domain.  What I was not expecting was that it completely trashed the machine.  It went from a lean, mean, learning machine to just about as delayed and lousy as the Windows XP Pro OS it was replacing.  That was really unexpected, so it could have been user error.  There’s no reason it should, but now it’s just messed up for some reason.  It’s very odd.

So I now have two computers that are amazingly fast and usable, and one other that has caught whatever all of the other Windows based computers seem to have.  I really am not an anti-Windows person, I have just had the experience of other systems that seem to work better and more consistently.  My personal Windows computer for work has very little problem with anything and seems to be very efficient.  Other than a few little problems – which are not Windows’ fault – it works great.  And in all fairness, XP is a very good OS.  That said, there are also others out there that perform just as well and better.

On a side note, I have recently went back to Mac for my home and I am left wondering why I ever left Mac in the first place.  I can’t really remember a specific time, but it just sort of happened.

What a great day, topped off by watching my kids’ football team win and playing with the iPod Touch and (additional) Macbook that came Fedex priority overnight for our district to demo for the next two weeks.  I love my job.

For the last two days, I’ve been struggling with a mobile computer lab of 25 laptop PC’s that just doesn’t seem to work right.  It seems that the teachers spend more time fighting with the laptops than actually getting useful stuff done with them.

This is a unique situation because technically, there is nothing wrong with the laptops.  They boot up, log in and are ready to go.  However, the time to get all of this done is very time consuming.  So I have been experimenting with various programs to manage them remotely, with limited success.

Unfortunately (or fortunately) I have the knowledge of how a similar lab works that is made of Mac computers.  They have none of these problems.  Unfortunately, there is a resistance to anything that is not Windows based.  I am slowly opening eyes that Microsoft is not the only game in town, and am working to move the mindset away from Mac vs. PC to seeing computers as a tool.

It makes no sense to have this – I don’t even know what to call it – rivalry, for lack of a better term, in the schools.  Schools do not debate on what type of pencil is best, or what type of paper will work. They pick what works and that is what is used.  The same approach should be taken when it comes to computers.  The kids don’t care one way or another, the kids view computers as a tool.  It’s only the staff that has this view of computers as one or the other.

Back to the point, so today I got the go ahead to experiment with this lab that is, for lack of a better term, unusable in its current state.  I opted to use Ubuntu Linux and OpenSolaris as a test case.  As part of another initiative, we are experimenting with options for student laptops.  This will be a good real world test of alternate operating systems.  All these computers need to do is access the Internet for research and do basic word processing.

What surprised me the most is that a teacher that I rely on for her advice seemed very impressed with Ubuntu.  She had never seen it before, so it was a dramatic change.  In fact, these computers were transformed.  So I’m taking two or three laptops and putting Ubuntu on them as a test.  I am so excited that this can be something useful and will require no maintenance.

I am so fortunate to work in a district where I am given the freedom to experiment.  Sometimes they look at me like I have three heads when I have crazy ideas, but overall they work out and improve systems.  I have brought a lot of Free/Open Source software into the district and everyone loves the things that I have done with it.  I only hope this is one more thing.

I will post more as things develop.