Technology Matters

The programming on Southeastern Idaho Votes is progressing, although quite slowly. We’re in northwestern Montana vacationing with family. While there’s no cell phone coverage here, we do happen to be in a place with high-speed internet. I’m getting about an hour a day of uninterrupted time to work on the programming.

Meanwhile, the Garmin Street Pilot GPS continues to frustrate me. I bought an external antenna to use in the motor home which allows the GPS to get reasonable satellite signals. However, there is no zoom setting that consistently shows the names of streets! In this rural area, the roads are far apart, but the GPS doesn’t display the name of the road … just shows a nameless road going off to the right or to the left. If I zoom out far enough for the GPS to display city/town names, then what few road names it displays disappear completely. I think I’m going to also build a GPS comparison site as an excuse to buy some different GPS units and try them out.

I’m sitting in a mall parking lot waiting in the car … and there’s an unprotected wifi access point somewhere in the vicinity. I’ve no idea if it’s illegal to be using this access point or not, but I am appreciating that someone has set up an open access point!

A while ago I wrote a post about Garmin GPS’s and the horrid customer service experience. I was unhappy with the device (particularly the inaccuracies) as well as the very poor customer service. Apparently, I’m not alone in this experience. Several others have commented about their poor service from Garmin.

The other day I saw a car commercial for a new vehicle that appeared to be targetting young marrieds who wanted a small (but efficient) SUV-like experience. One of the features being touted was a built-in Garmin GPS. That alone would dissuade me from buying the car! There would have to be another option before I would even be interested. I did send the automobile manufacturer an email expressing my disappointment with Garmin and that many others had similar opinions … which possibly could detrimentally affect car sales. Will it make a difference? One could hope….

Meanwhile, the Dash Express GPS has opened up a whole new world of mobile connectivity. Features include real time traffic information, Google maps, over-the-air updates, gprs and wifi connectivity, and that it can twitter my location. While it’s not the perfect solution, it sure seems to be better than what I’ve got now. I gotta get one of these!

The first few tables necessary to be able to describe a political entity, the elected offices associated with the entity, and the incumbents in those offices are nearly complete. The database sketch I made several days ago is holding up reasonably well as I’ve been entering the data for Bannock County. The programming to be able to maintain the tables is almost complete, but working well enough for being able to enter the information on 52 elected offices and the incumbents.

Geek Stuff:

The database will be MySql and the programming is in PHP.

The Entities table contains the information about a specific political entity. Entities owns offices which are described in the Offices table. One of the data fields in the Offices table points to the incumbent information in the People table. The People table has information about a particular person holding an office. Some offices have several regional offices. For instance, each Idaho State Senator and Representative have regional offices in major cities in their district. Consequently, I built a People_off table to contain the information on each of the regional offices.

Normal Stuff:

Another decision was how to represent mailing addresses. I decided that the field for the mailing address would have the complete information including the name of the person (along with any honorific), Title, Street, City, State, and Zip code. That way if someone looking at this information wished, they could simply copy that data from that field and paste it into a letter or onto an envelope.

I’ve got a couple of cleanups to do on the database sketch. When that’s done, I’ll scan it and upload it as a document associated with this blog.

Finally, I’ve change the theme of the blog somewhat. There’s still more work to do (such as get a real logo), but I like the look and feel better than what I had before.

I’ve deployed WordPress and the generic theme to http://www.seidahovotes.com/ along with some explanation in a brief post. I’m negotiating with a graphic artist for a price to build the seidahovotes logo and banner. When that’s done, the new theme will be deployed and the website look will be completed.

A few weeks ago I sketched out what I thought the data table design should be for seidahovotes. The design was at a pretty high level based around what kinds of things I wanted the website to be able to do:

1. Show for a particular jurisdiction or entity (such as a city or a county or a school district) all of the elected offices, the current incumbent, and what the term of office is.
2. Show for a particular jurisdiction upcoming elections and the offices and issues that will be contested along with the candidates for office.
3. For an upcoming election, show information about the candidates and issues and allow public comment on the candidates and issues.
4. Provide a candidate for office who doesn’t have a web presence the ability to have a rich web page on this site.
5. Show the results of past elections.

With those objectives in mind, I’m now on the third iteration of the database … which currently exists on paper and in my Macbook development environment. After version two was sketched out, I decided to assemble all of the data for one political jurisdiction to satisfy objective #1 above.

I settled on the City of Pocatello as the initial entity to gather the data about. That has been a very interesting task and gathering all of the data has proven to be difficult.

The City of Pocatello has seven elected offices: the mayor and six council members. Names and addresses were easily obtained from the city’s website. However, what is their term of office? No online information available. That’ll require either a visit to City Hall or a phone call.

Pocatello is part of Bannock County which has nine elected officials (specified by the Constitution of the State of Idaho, I’ve learned). The County website has names, addresses, and contact information for these people, but again term of office is not available online. Further, the County Commissioners, again by constitutional decree, serve alternating four-year and two-year terms of office. I need to find out who is in which term length and what the ongoing rotation schedule is.

Pocatello is part of the State of Idaho Legislative District 30 with one senator and two representatives. The State of Idaho website provides their name, address, and contact information (scattered in several places). The constitution describes their term of office. That information is now pretty much complete.

Pocatello is part of the State of Idaho Judicial District Six with four District Judges and Five Magistrate Judges. These judges are appointed and stand for re-election after they have served for a period of time.

Pocatello is also part of the State of Idaho with a governor and six other elected officials.

Pocatello is also part of the Federal House of Representative District 2 with a representative in Congress.

The State of Idaho has two Senators, both of whom represent Pocatello and have regional offices in Pocatello.

Finally, there’s the President and Vice President of the United States.

I still have a little bit of data to accumulate, but what I have for the City of Pocatello currently requires fifteen pages to print out (pdf available here)!

My goal is to cover seven counties and all their cities and school districts in southeastern Idaho. I’m beginning to realize this is a big task. Most of the entities do not have much, if any, information online.

Gathering the data for Pocatello has caused me to revise the database and I’m now working on version 3. I’ve decided that I probably need to gather all of the data for another political entity, one that doesn’t have an online presence, as verification that the design will work. Some questions still I need to answer include:

1. What is the definitive list of political jurisdictions? For instance, what cities are in the region? There’s a place in Caribou County called Niter. I think it used to be a city, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t anymore.
2. The elected offices in a county are established by the Idaho constitution. Where is the definition of the elected offices that a city may have?
3. I haven’t even begun looking at school districts. What is the political hierarchy for school districts? Do they all report directly to the State Department of Education?

There’s still a lot of data gathering to be done before I can finalize the database design to satisfy objective #1. Then maybe I can start on objective #2.

This is fun!

After striking out with Qwest, I moved the domain seidahovotes.com back to GoDaddy’s domain name servers (DNS) and pointed DNS at the correct IP address. After correcting my typo in the IP address, the domain started resolving correctly and testing from other parts of the world come up with the right address and display the holding page. Some observations about GoDaddy:

1. The service is comprehensive. All DNS entries are readily managed, including the ability to define Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records to help cut down on spam. Qwest did not have any of this capability.
2. The Interface is clean and intuitive. They use the right DNS language to label the DNS entries and also explain in English what the terms mean.
3. They let me manage Time To Live (TTL)! This is a biggie benefit. The TTL parameter defines how often another computer in the Internet has to check back with GoDaddy’s servers to verify the translation of a domain name to an IP address. Generally speaking, long TTL’s are good and take a significant load off the authoritative servers. However, if something is going to change in the DNS entries for a domain, being able to shorten the TTL to one hour is very important. By doing so, the change will propagate to other domain name servers around the Internet very quickly. Not only does Qwest not allow the customer to manage TTL, even the Qwest engineers do not have the ability to change this number.

However, there are a couple of things that I’d like for GoDaddy to change!

1. The site is slow. I think this is because there is so much advertising (all of it advertising for different GoDaddy services) that has to be dynamically loaded. I have to be patient with the website and give it time to display the page. Further, the pages are generally set up so that the things the customer wants to do are the last to display.
2. There is so much advertising on the pages that it’s sometimes difficult to figure out where to click. But, when I get to the actual DNS pages, there’s almost no advertising and the pages are very clean.

I expect to be making a lot more use of this service. It’s definitely better than Qwest for managing domains and a far sight cheaper than Network Solutions for buying domain names.

I have Qwest DSL here at the house. When I had DSL installed, I signed up for the service level that allows me to run web servers and serve up HTTP web pages and along with that I purchased a block of ten IP addresses.

Since then I’ve only been using one of the IP addresses which is associated with rnsmith.com. The Qwest domain name servers (DNS) are authoritative for that domain. Qwest isn’t a domain registrar, so when I bought the domain ’seidahovotes.com’, I bought it from GoDaddy. The next step was to move that domain from GoDaddy to Qwest. There was no online method of doing that (while there is a web form to make the request, submitting the web form always results in an error). So I called Qwest Technical Support.

Eventually I was connected to a person with a very foreign accent quite reminiscent of India who had not a clue about what I was wanting to do. It took at least ten minutes for him to get the spelling of the domain name correct. I was put on hold several times for five to ten minutes while he was checking things out and trying to figure out what to do.

By the way, every time I was put on hold, I got a barrage of Qwest announcements … the same ones over and over and over and over ad nauseum. I got downright tired of all of that. Hold music would have been much better.

Eventually, I learned that the Qwest DSL setup only allows one domain name to be associated with an account. They can do a “reverse DNS” (and their definition of reverse DNS is completely out of context with how DNS works) which will associate the domain with an IP address, but there is no possibility of adding any CNAME (or alias) records, such as www.seidahovotes.com pointing to seidahovotes.com, or any other variation.

So, I need to use a different domain name services provider. Tomorrow I’ll talk with GoDaddy and see if they can be authoritative and point the domain to my Qwest IP addresses.

I’m very puzzled at Qwest’s response. Somehow I need to talk to someone in the United States who speaks American, understands DNS, and knows about their DSL offerings. The answer from Qwest Technical Support doesn’t compute!

I’ve decided to use WordPress as the base software for the Southeast Idaho Votes website. WordPress is a good content management system as well as good blog software. The website currently is on my Macbook where I’m doing the development.

I’ve obtained the domain ’southeastidahovotes.com’ through GoDaddy. I’ve had GoDaddy unlock the domain so I can have Qwest transfer it to their servers so I can manage the Domain Name Services (DNS). Once that is working correctly, I’ll put the basic website out on the web server and then as additional functionality is developed, I’ll release that to the public.

The first planned set of functionality is to be able to select an entity in southeast Idaho, such as a city, or a county, or a school district, and display some information about the entity as well as the current elected officials for that entity.

The information will be stored in database tables and I’ll be writing PHP code in a page template to do the queries and display the information from the database. The WordPress software along with my code will display information and allow the user to submit comments. All of the PHP code for the maintenance of the information will reside outside of WordPress for security purposes

I started this blog last year to specifically talk about technology as it relates to IT inside of corporations. In the meantime, I’ve left big business and have embarked on my own small, one-man business. While big IT is still interesting to me, the thrust and focus of this blog will be changing to be about my new venture.

The new company name is “RSmith Ventures, Inc.”. It’s being formed as an S-Corporation and becomes the umbrella company for several planned ventures. The current primary focus is on building a new website called “www.southeastidahovotes.com”. As I work on that website, I’ll be discussing the design ideas and soliciting feedback on this blog.

There will be some other websites primarily as affiliate marketing sites, which are intended to generate some revenue while the voting information website is being built. That process will also get written about on this blog.

And, if anything interesting happens elsewhere in the technology world, I’ll write about it as well.

Next will be a theme change, though. Something new to go with being new all over again.

British Petroleum is one of a growing number of companies taking a new approach to personal computers. Rather than supplying a PC with an installed set of company applications, the employee is given money towards that purchase and the employee can buy his own notebook computer. The company’s applications run in a virtual machine which is installed on the new PC. The virtual desktop runs alongside, and separate from, the employee’s personal applications. Support costs are reduced, the employee truly has a “personal” computer, and this tactic may well help retain workers.

This growing trend gained more speed and credibility with Microsoft’s announcement on March 12th that it intended to buy the Israeli desktop virtualization company Kidaro. That acquisition is now complete and Microsoft has become a significant player in desktop virtualization.

Microsoft’s press release announcing the purchase stated:

“Virtualization technology has tremendous potential to help companies reduce costs and increase control over their desktops, while simultaneously delivering benefits to end users,” said Kevin Brown, chief executive officer of Kidaro. “By adding Kidaro’s technology to Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, Microsoft can deliver sophisticated virtual desktop capabilities and management to a wide variety of enterprise customers.”

Microsoft also gains an additional significant benefit. Virtualization can accelerate the migration to Vista by significantly reducing compatibility issues between the operating system, user’s personal application and operating system choices, and the underlying hardware.

Does It Work?

When Apple migrated from IBM’s PowerPC chipset to the Intel processor family, two virtualization options appeared: Parallels and VMWare. In July, 2007 I bought a new Macbook PC with Parallels and Microsoft’s Vista installed. Most of the time I run the notebook in its native Mac OS-X state. When needed I can start up Vista and use that capability. If necessary, using Apple’s BootCamp software, I can boot the machine completely into Windows Vista. Further, I have a Ubuntu Linux virtual machine available as well when that capability is needed. It just works. It was necessary to upgrade the memory to get reasonable performance when both virtual machines are running alongside Mac OS-X, but that was a small price to pay for the convenience.

Both Parallels and VMWare have prebuilt images of Microsoft, RedHat, Ubuntu, and Suse virtual machines. All that is required is a license and within minutes a new virtual machine is installed and running. Companies can do the same … build an image of a virtual machine containing the company’s application stack. Employees bring their Personal Computer, load the virtual machine, do a day’s work, and leave with their computer … leaving behind not only the virtual machine image, but also the company data.

This is a good trend!

Photo courtesy of John Pastor.

I spent some time over the past couple of weeks in two different kinds of meetings. On the one hand, I was meeting with groups of senior IT professionals … managers, directors, CIO’s, and CTO’s. On the other hand I had a couple of meetings with young high school and college students. These two groups were remarkably different in their outlooks and expectations of employees and their tools. These two group’s expectations will certainly clash as these young people move out of school and into the workplace.

Senior IT managers tend to be very standards conscious and wish to enforce compliance to standards. The thought is that support costs go down as compliance increases. Further, IT managers are very concerned about security. That is, keeping information secure by keeping it locked up. Since IT is generally charged with storing information and making the data available only to authorized users, IT generally wants that the information stays within the company walls and on company-owned systems. One Vice President of IT told me that they don’t allow contractors to use their own PC’s on the company network, nor do they allow contractors to have VPN access in order to work remotely. Several other senior IT managers told me that they have similar, and in some cases, more restrictive policies.

Much of the senior IT manager mindset comes from their years of experience (much of it painfully gained) as IT has moved out of accounting and general ledger into the mainstream of a company’s business. For instance, many companies have an aversion to Apple computers. In Apple’s early days, these computers did not play well on the corporate networks. Apple had their own networking protocol named “AppleTalk” that wreaked havoc on the company’s TCP/IP network and many senior IT managers remember the painful process of getting AppleTalk off the company network. That was followed by an outright ban on Apple computers, even though those problems have long since disappeared. These kinds of problems weren’t limited to Apple, either. IBM mainframe computers had their own network protocol called System Network Architecture, Digital Equipment Corporation had their DecNet protocol, and other hardware companies promoted their own networking capabilities. The result was an IT insistence on commonality and standardization driven by the fact that all of these systems were competing with each other and often could not even exist on the same network.

The Internet today is vastly different and is also generally foreign to senior IT managers. Most have only heard about Facebook or MySpace and what they’ve heard is very negative. They think YouTube is generally bad. Most of these sites, along with many others, are specifically blocked so that they cannot even be accessed from inside the company network. Social networking is also alien, and services such as Twitter, Seesmic, and Friendfeed seem to have no value inside the corporation.

However, the next generation coming into the corporation has a completely different idea. For instance:

The list can be much longer and I’m certain that I’ll blog again about this topic in days to come. This is a good start. The kids are coming and they want their iPhones, MacPro laptops, YouTube videos, and Facebook social network. If they can’t get it, the best and brightest will go somewhere else.