BDPA Charlotte Member Blogs

How to Get Ahead In Technology or Cybersecurity Careers In Three Steps

Julius Clark — Mon, 08 Jun 2015 11:37:00 +0000

Apply for your next dream job. (Even if you are not qualified!)
If you don’t get selected for the job. Find out your gap in skills and get those skills.
Repeat step 1.

For more go to: www.cybersecuritycareeradvisor.com

Triggering Events That Led Me To Pursue a Cybersecurity Graduate Degree then Career in Cybersecurity

Julius Clark — Sun, 29 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Triggering Events Timeline Which Led Me To My Career In Cybersecurity

I did not wake up one day and decide on becoming a Cybersecurity professional. A series of events led me down the path to going in a new direction and not touching or configuring technology anymore. Before becoming a cybersecurity professional, I was a Sr. Systems Server Engineer for a very large financial institution. The entire division of System Engineers and myself spent hours walking around data centers with a CD of tools for the purpose of removing viruses and installing virus software on servers to protect them from another attack. In addition to removing viruses, we also were spending a lot of time making changes to the registry of Windows systems to comply I with federal regulations regarding protecting customer data and privacy. The following sequence of events caused me to think critically and I had my “ah ha” moment: I said to myself: “Protecting systems from attack, data from being stolen and preserving customer privacy.”

Thus the following timeline:

November 12, 1999 - Gramm-Leach –Bliley Act (GLBA) (Safeguards Rule) Enacted.

GLBA compliance is mandatory; whether a financial institution discloses nonpublic information or not, there must be a policy in place to protect the information from foreseeable threats in security and data integrity.

Major components put into place to govern the collection, disclosure, and protection of consumers’ nonpublic personal information; or personally identifiable information include:

•Financial Privacy Rule
•Safeguards Rule
•Pretexting Protection

July 15, 2001 – Code Red I - Affected computers worldwide. Put a halt to many company operations.
August 2, 2001 - Code Red II – Affected computers worldwide. Put a halt to many company operations.
September 18, 2001 - Nimda Worm – Affected computers worldwide. Put a halt to many company operations.
November 22, 2001 – Attended a BDPA Charlotte meeting where Ron Clement shared a presentation about the CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) exam and 10 Security Domians and entering the IT Security field.
November 28, 2001 - News of Enron’s hidden losses became public knowledge; stock decreased to $1; Once had a high of $90.56.
July 30, 2002 - Sarbanes-Oxley Act Enacted - Law put in place because of the scandals at Enron and Worldcom. "Corporate and Auditing Accountability and Responsibility Act" (in the House) and more commonly called Sarbanes–Oxley, Sarboxor SOX, is a United States federal law that set new or enhanced standards for all U.S. public company boards, management and public accounting firms. There are also a number of provisions of the Act that also apply to privately held companies, for example the wilful destruction of evidence to impede a Federal investigation.
September 2004 – Started Graduate School
June 2006 – Obtained Position as IT Auditor
June 2006 – Finished Graduate School.
Present – The rest is history.

Kind regards,

Julius

Technorati Tags: cybersecurity,careers,career,job,jobs,windows,linux,black,african,american,regulations,laws,data,privacy,protect

How Learning Technology Changed Everything For Me

Julius Clark — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 00:12:00 +0000

Technorati Tags: STEM,technology,code,programming,computers,cloud,students,black,african,american,community,minority,college,education,family,teachers,teaching,engineering,science,IT,bdpa,creating it futures,comptia

I was born in Boston, Massachusetts to parents who worked in the fields of South Georgia. They got married, moved to Boston and raised two boys in hopes to offer them a better life. I always wanted to know how things worked like TVs, Radios and my toys; took them apart and sometimes could put them back together. I was shy and found it difficult sometimes to fit in, because I had a huge imagination. I enjoyed science fiction and super heroes. You would always find me in front of the TV on Saturday mornings watching the Super Friends and up late in the evening watching shows like Star Trek, Space 1999 and Battlestar Galactica. Science kept me fascinated about this awesome world I lived in and offered me an escape. But growing up in poverty and with a father who could not read or write; he was forced to work on farms to help feed his brothers and sisters, a mother who was in the beginning stages of schizophrenia and with me being born with Sickle Cell Anemia would make me face the reality of pain and hardship every day. Despite these challenges my parents raised my brother and I with lots of love and always told us that hard work would give us a better life. I grew up fixing things for my friends and broken items around the house. I thrived in middle and high school shop classes that offered exploratory careers in carpentry, machining and electrical/ electronics. But in 1984 I had a teacher named William McGuire who was working on a Master’s Thesis to prove that you could teach urban high school students college programming. I was part of only a handful of students who were interested in his course; he changed the trajectory of my life. Mr. McGuire challenged me, he pushed me, and he constantly told me that I can do this. I was an inner city youth writing code before writing code was cool in the 80s; programming languages: BASIC and Turbo Pascal. I still remember the problem he gave to us, where we had to write a program that initiated the countdown sequence to launch the space shuttle. It was the most challenging thing I ever worked on. We learned team work and successfully designed the program to Mr. McGuire's problem.

Mr. McGuire succeeded in building my confidence, so much so that I had the audacity to go to college and earn a BS degree in Electronic Engineering. Mr. McGuire was an integral facet of my life. He was an inspiring mentor to me. As a result of what this teacher exposed me to, I have been able to work with scientists who have items they made that were left on the moon, scientists who researched and developed the energy system for the Voyager satellite space program, successfully implemented a computer network and data center for an online start-up, designing engineering drawings for a biomedical company. Now I provide cybersecurity for one of the largest financial institutions in America. In addition, I learned from Mr. McGuire how to give back to my community. Since 2001 I have had a parallel career as a community activist who has helped underrepresented minorities pursue careers in technology. Currently I am the Chief Information Officer for the National Black Data Processing Associates (BDPA) and board member for CompTIA's Creating IT Futures Foundation. Mr. McGuire's innovative learning environment has paid off and keeps giving. I have been able to help mentor and influence hundreds of individuals pursue careers in IT. Additionally, as a positive influence to my younger brother he obtained a degree in Computer Science and works for an Ivy league college as a technologist; he told me that he had to keep up and could not let big brother out do him. Giving back has been rewarding to me on so many levels.

I feel that this is my life's purpose. It’s easy to be kind to others when you know pain and hardship.

Kind regards,

Julius

Why is AI so difficult in 2015?

mobeamer — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 07:11:00 +0000

For my 16 year old son Alex, who asked about bots that are able to think,

This is based on a scientific publication "Symbol Emergence in Robotics: A Survey". This article deals with the ability for a computer to think, act and communicate as a human. We shall call this a bot going forward.

Since a bot that I can't speak to is a dumb bot, this bot has to have some understanding of language.

They propose that the bot has some sort of internal "symbol" recognition system.

What's a symbol, you ask? A symbol is a word that represents something (a single thing) in the real world. IE: Dog, Cat, People, Sherry, Jump, Run, Etc...

We humans are very good at stringing these symbols together to mean something larger. This is called emergence. Simple put emergence is when simple rules when followed create a idea/action/object that is larger than itself. Be careful as this is VERY different from traditional logical programming. But we can dive into that at a different time.

So, if humans are good at stringing symbols together, our intelligent bot better be too. However there are three almost universally accepted challenges with this system.

Some symbols just don't mean anything. This is called grounded symbol problem.
A symbol means something but it can't be explained by a collection of simpler symbols. This is called the dynamic symbol problem.
A symbol itself and the way people "interpret" the symbol are different. Usually due to some social aspect. This is called the social symbol problem.

Looking at it a little deeper...

Grounded Symbol Problem

"Feeling", that is a word or a symbol. But what is it's connection to the real world. There is nothing you or I can touch/see/taste/hear that defines the word "feeling". It is an internal symbol that is exclusive to the human brain.

Now, this leads down a very slippery path of what is the internal representation of the word feelings in our brain. Unfortunately, that is too large a subject for me to cover. (Also, I don't think I could put it in layman's terms.)

However, just note that there are words and symbols that have this issue. And symbols that have this issue are extremely difficult to fit into our intelligent bot's brain. (more reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_grounding_problem)

Dynamic Symbol Problem

Let's do a simple walk through of the word "Dog", it's symbols might be "animal, mammal, canine". We step deeper, what's an "mammal", "organism", what's an "organism", "cells". What is a cell?

See how we just kept drilling down but we never actually arrived a meaning for the word "Dog".

This is the issue with dynamic symbols.

FYI: If you google Dynamic Symbol Problem you won't find much as I made it up. It's a subset of the Grounded Symbol Problem.

Social Symbol Problem

"Screaming"

The girl was screaming in terror.

The car was screaming down the track.

See how the word screaming means two different things depending on the social context?

This is a difficult to capture in a symbol collection system.

Ok, so now you know what the issues are how do we proceed to solve?

First, it's been proposed that we separate our definition of symbols into two families.

c-symbols, are symbols that are related to computer science (Think: Things with very exact definition)

m-symbols, are symbols that have meanings (Think: Feelings, senses and ideas)

Now, forget about c-symbols, I think us programmers have that covered.

m-symbols are the hard part. Let's say we look at these symbols and break that into 3 parts

The Sign - This is the word. That actual physical characters of the symbol. The symbol Dog is made up of 3 characters. D, O, and G. That is it's sign.

The Object - All symbols have to refer to something. Dog refers to a four legged animal, at a basic level we connect this symbol with our mental image of a dog.

The Interpretant - Now this is where things get odd. Ummm, I have to use some science lingo. Human have 5 senses (see/touch/hear/feel/taste). ESP might be a sixth but I digress. When we use one of our senses we call that an input to the brain. So humans have 5 inputs. With this we are aware of our environment. Ok, lecture done.

Back to the Interpretant, this is when the remembered input is reconciled with the sign. In other words we connect the sign with some remembered sense we got from our environment. So the three letter word(symbol) dog, triggers us to remember a bark, growl, petting, dog walk, etc that makes us "know" what a dog is.

This translation is called Interpretant (in this paper). I hope I got that right...I'm not sure that I did.

Interesting Distraction: This is why reading a story can be so powerful to us. As we read these senses are triggered creating an internal feeling of what is going on. The more closely we can relate our internal translations to the words we read the more powerful the story becomes. I think this is why we love some books and just can’t seem to get into others. Some stories just don’t trigger those internal translations.

Back to the matter at hand, we each have a different set of senses that we recall this leads each of us to have a different view of what we hear/read/see. I think the technical term for this is Umwelt.

Reality encapsulate all of our translations of every symbol we hear or express. That is a deep thought that should be pondered…deeply.

So let’s bring it all together, we have these symbols, which are made up of signs, objects and interpretations. There are rules for how these symbols can be shared with others, this is called a language. This language emerges from the simple actions of combining symbols together. This is called the Emergent Symbol System.

The How

The first thing the bot must do is collect a set of inputs that it can identify as a “thing”. It might be as simple as an image of a black square versus a white square. The inputs of the two differ enough for it to categorize these two objects as two different ‘things’.

Notice, it has not assigned a symbol to these two things, rather it has an internal mechanism to say this black square falls into this category and this white square falls into this other category.

This is a complex example though as the input to a bot is all digital, so it really is just categorizing its digital input (senses).

We have solved this problem already there are many algorithms (programs) that are able to classify input. Search for pattern recognition for examples.

Let’s call this categorization of the inputs, patterns.

The next step is to connect these patterns with a sign. Remember a sign is the physical representation of a symbol. “Black Square” = pattern 1, “White Square” = pattern 2.

There have been a few attempts to create these connections with written words, LCore by Iwahashi is an example. However I don’t think that anyone has successfully conquered this problem.

If we solve this problem, the next issue is how to create a collection of symbols that have some type of actual meaning to another person. The technical word for this is “Double Articulation”.

From a high level perspective this sums up the difficultly of creating a bot that can think/act/communicate as a human. That being said there are a few other considerations, I’ll just list them to be brief.

Time – The ability to establish time sequence events and how they relate to our symbols and actions. This has been explored but is presenting issues in the field of A.I.

Mutual Belief System – There is a set of ideas that we all share. Typically from a common experience that we all have. “This coffee is cold”, we can easily determine that this means our coffee is not hot enough. But humans will also perceive that this means we will be getting/needing a different cup of coffee. Because that is what we all do when we drink cold coffee. This is a shared belief or implied understanding.

Active Learning and Active Perception – As children we explore. We actively seek new inputs (senses). We do this as children but our need to do this lessons as we grow older. Programmatically finding this balance is challenging.

Syntax – There is a “proper” way to group symbols (words) so that they make sense. While the bot may understand that the words “dog bites man” are the correct symbols. It may put together the sentence “man bites dog”. A totally different meaning. This is syntax, this is difficult to solve.

New Words learned:

Semiotics - The study of symbols and how they play together.

Symbol Emergence in Robotics (SER) - The official term for all the above, this is a research topic which seems to be spinning off in Japan.

Epigenetic Robotics - Robotic developement which models how children learn

Umwelt - German for "Self Centered World", a particular organisms view of the world.

Emergent System – A complex system

For the Scientific Community

This is my layman interpretation of the following paper:

Symbol Emergence in Robotics: A Survey

Advanced Robotics Vol. 00, No. 00, January 2015, 1–27

Authors: Tadahiro Taniguchi, Takayuki Nagai, Tomoaki Nakamura, Naoto Iwahashi , Tetsuya Ogata, and Hideki Asoh

Link: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.08973.pdf

Link: http://arxiv.org/format/1509.08973

FYI: This took a lot longer to write than I thought. I wish more people would write a laymans explanation of their scientific publications

Startup Weekend - Transformations in Business

mobeamer — Mon, 02 Mar 2015 15:20:00 +0000

I participated in the Charlotte Weekend Startup Event this past weekend. I had a great time, met some awesome people and learned a good deal about starting a business. I suggest it for anyone with a business idea.

That being said, I wanted to talk about Transformations. I was on a team of 7 folks and we spent 3 days working through a business idea. I won't go into the details of the idea as what I want to talk about is the transformations that I saw took place.

I think everyone could learn from the changes that I saw in my co-founders.

Flexibility
Shaun was the originator of the idea. He had been thinking of this business for quite a number of years and had some very strong ideas on what the business was about. While I think his vision is great, the scale of it was daunting. To be honest, I watched as for 54 hours 5 strangers poked and prodded at his "baby", criticizing and making "suggestions". He took it like a trooper!

The transformation came about half way through, he pulled the team together and said

"Look, I want this to be OUR business, we all have good ideas and I think the business will be better due to our collaboration". (I paraphrase)

From my stand-point this was an amazing way to engage your team and give them power to run with your idea.

Adaptation
Cris was our finance guy, I am not a finance guy. My eyes glaze over when you start talking assets, debits, bips and percentage points. (Not really, but you get the idea).

Cris could TALK the numbers! Within one hour of business planning, he was asking and pointing out concerns and benefits from a strictly finance perspective.

However, we were too early in the process, the value proposition hadn't been flushed out so conversations around revenue were pre-mature.

He must have realized that at some point. Because I noticed that suddenly he wasn't talking "numbers" but was talking general financing approaches and tactics.

I knew a transformation had taken place when I heard him mutter to himself "That's too much detail, that's too technical, how do I say it easier".

This was a transformation that I think we could learn from...bring our knowledge to bear at an appropriate level for the task at hand.

Filling the Gap
Dan was our "intern". He's a student at Davidson college and I think he came just out of pure interested and thought he probably wasn't going to have much to contribute, considering he was in a room of seasoned professionals.

He had come to learn as much as he could from the process and soak it in. (I apologize Dan, if that was not your first intentions, however that was my perception.)

At some point in the game he realized that he could contribute. He could organize the presentation.

See we had a lot of great ideas, our plans were coming together, but none us where slide show jockeys, or even that creative.

Dan saw a gap and filled it.

What was special was the smoothness with which this happened, we all just kinda turned around and there he was with the framework for a smooth "show", he just need the details.

I think his transformation was all about stepping up and filling the gap. There always is one, there is always "something" that needs to be done. You may not be the best for the job, but step up and do the best YOU can at it.

Learning to Sacrifice
Rama (short for a long Indian name that I can't remember, I apologize Rama)., he was our initial developer. Rama's transformation was "willing sacrifice".

It's an odd transformation to think about. A few hours into the project we realized we wanted some "demo" product to show, a simple website.

Rama was all over it. He jumped on Wix and began banging out some code.

Unfortunately, later in the game we decided to go with a mobile app. If I was in Rama's shoes, I'd have been a little pissed. All that hard work for nothing. However he took it like a champ.

He understood, and made some pieces of his work could be used in the mobile app, and he showed no remorse about us throwing his hard work away.

Sometimes in business, you start down one path and you find you have to back-track and take another. That's the way it is, and because of that hard work will be wasted. The best attitude to take is to salvage as much as you can and move forward.

Becoming the Glue
Maria was our glue. She held the team together. Typically you might call this a project manager. I don't think she knew that was going to be her role when she joined the team.

Her's was not a transformation but rather a catalyst for the transformations in the rest of the team.

I watched as she bounced from teammate to teammate and opened lines of communication, pointed out where we were not aligned and when an important concept was being missed.

All transformations need a catalyst to spark change, in your business you will have to be that spark or find people to give your business that spark. It is hard to see the transformation that need to be made from the inside of our problems.

Transforming into a Leader
Carlos was our leader. He would NOT like me saying this. Other team members may lay claim to the title. But I watched the transformation. Carlos has a started a business, he had run large times, he was knowledgeable about management. Carlos was NOT there to manage. I think he joined the team because for once he wanted to sit back and let someone else run the show and just "help out" someone.

For the first 75% of our trip, we didn't have a navigator.

The business idea was too large

We were all trying to be "nice".

We were trying to incorporate all ideas and push nothing off the table.

It was GREAT...but we were getting no-where fast.

All this time Carlos sits quietly, nods his head, smiles, works a bit hear or there and generally goes with the flow.

12 hours to presentation time and we have nothing to show...we all go outside to talk about whey we were not getting anywhere. There's a 20 min debate...in circles. Frustration is starting to show.

Then Carlos looks up from his laptop and speaks.

"Frankly, I think we lack from leadership. We need some clear direction, even if it is wrong. We need to have some decisions made". (I paraphrase).

It was just a sentence or two... not more then 20 words. Said into the exact moment of silence when we all were thinking it.

Problem clearly stated, solution proposed and feedback requested. All said in a graceful but commanding way.

"Frankly", I was impressed.

For the reminder of our planning, I think he offered a maximum of 3 full suggestions. He didn't even go on stage with us, or come up after the presentation, or even mingle after the show. But he offered guidance and a beacon for a very large idea.

As for myself...

I'm not sure how I contributed or how I transformed. BUT I did learn a ton. And for me that was why I was there.

I thank all my teammates. I learned from all of you. I enjoyed my time with you. And find inspiration in what all of you did. Thank you.

To My Future Self

mobeamer — Fri, 20 Feb 2015 23:00:00 +0000

I was listening to The Tim Ferris Show, a set of podcast interviews with interesting folks. He was talking with Peter Diamandis, the guy that ran the first Xprize.

He made three very interesting statement.And I paraphrase...

First: Think about what you enjoyed when you were a kid. What did you love to do and were passionate about it. Find a way to do that today. This will be your passion.

Second: What can you build that will impact a billion people?

Third: What can you do that will be remembered 200 years from now?

The focus is to think BIG. Not incremental, not next new thing, but different...dramatically different.

You know, I love what I do. I'm very good at what I do. But I feel like my talent is wasted. I can be building something that will change the world. I have it in me.

My most compelling excuse...I get paid to well to stop doing what I do now and start doing what I was meant to do.

I would say it is sad, but I in actuality it's just reality.

But I want to say to my future self, think on this, perhaps there is a way that you can start small on this world changing idea.

Internet Background Noise, WTF?

mobeamer — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 05:23:00 +0000

Stumbled across and thought it was interesting.

From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_background_noise

Internet background noise (IBN, also known as Internet background radiation) consists of data packets on the Internet which are addressed to IP addresses or ports where there is no network device set up to receive them. These packets often contain unsolicited commercial or network control messages, or are the result of port scans and worm activities. The Conficker worm in particular is responsible for a large amount of background noise generated by viruses looking for new victims. In addition to malicious activities, misconfigured hardware and leaks from private networks are also sources of background noise.^[1] For example, some DSL modems have a hard-coded IP address to look up the correct time.

As of November 2010, it is estimated that 5.5 gigabits of background noise is generated every second.^[2] It is also thought that a modem user loses about 20 bits per second of their bandwidth to unsolicited traffic.^[3] Over the past decade, the amount of background noise for a section of the IPv4 address block that contains 17 million address, has increased from 1 to 50 Mbit/s. The newer IPv6 protocol, which has a much larger address space, will make it more difficult for viruses to scan ports and also limit the impact of misconfigured equipment.^[2]

Internet background noise has been used to detect significant changes in Internet traffic and connectivity during the 2011 political unrest from IP address blocks that were geolocated to Libya.^[4]

Backscatter is a term coined by Vern Paxson to describe Internet background noise resulting from a DDoS attack using multiple spoofed addresses.^[5] This backscatter noise is used by network telescopes to indirectly observe large scale attacks in real time.

Thanks BDPA

mobeamer — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 07:49:00 +0000

I wanted to share a success story about how BDPA helped me in my career recently. Some history on me, I’ve had the pleasure of serving as the past president for the Charlotte BDPA chapter and as an educational instructor for their High School Computer Competition program. I participated in BDPA as a way to give back to my community and a way to expose young black folks to the career of IT.

I had been working a job with LogiXML, great pay but it was a 100% travel. At the time I had a 7yr and 14yr old at home and my wife was working full time. Needless to say my traveling was wrecking chaos on the family. So I decided to find a job close to home.

I happened across a job posting from a recruiting firm, Ciber. It turns out I had met someone who worked at Ciber and I recall meeting her through BDPA. So I gave her a ring. Turns out she no longer worked with Ciber but she put me in touch with the right people and gave me a good recommendation.

Three weeks later I was hired at Duke-Energy, contracting through Ciber. Great pay, great folks and good hours. I'm still here almost a year later.

I thought I’d share this with folks for two reasons. First, we network today for what we may need tomorrow. And secondly because I wanted to express my appreciate for what BDPA has done for me in my career.

MSSQL - When does data move from Memory to Disk

mobeamer — Wed, 27 Aug 2014 06:28:00 +0000

So I had to ponder this question (I had a vague idea but wanted to get a firm understanding)

Question: We know SQL stores data objects in RAM as it needs, at what point does the changes that are made in RAM get written to the disk?

In layman's terms: In the background the server monitors it's memory. When a particular object has not been used "in a while" that object is moved to disc. It is at this point that the disc and memory are syncronised. This is also done on a proper shutdown of the SQL Server.

Side Note: If memory is full of objects that are frequently used, SQL Server will read directly from disk. This can negatively impact performance in a substantial way.

From Wikipedia (link):

SQL Server buffers pages in RAM to minimize disc I/O. Any 8 KB page can be buffered in-memory, and the set of all pages currently buffered is called the buffer cache. The amount of memory available to SQL Server decides how many pages will be cached in memory. The buffer cache is managed by the Buffer Manager. Either reading from or writing to any page copies it to the buffer cache. Subsequent reads or writes are redirected to the in-memory copy, rather than the on-disc version. The page is updated on the disc by the Buffer Manager only if the in-memory cache has not been referenced for some time. While writing pages back to disc, asynchronous I/O is used whereby the I/O operation is done in a background thread so that other operations do not have to wait for the I/O operation to complete. Each page is written along with its checksumwhen it is written. When reading the page back, its checksum is computed again and matched with the stored version to ensure the page has not been damaged or tampered with in the meantime.^[58]

Review of a Stock Trader

mobeamer — Sat, 28 Jun 2014 10:38:00 +0000

From time to time, I find a guy giving trading advice/posts online. I like to do my own due diligence on them. Here is another one.

A review of EasyDollars, a StockTwits user.

Comparison of close the day after twit was sent (Some rounding being done)

Stock on 6/19/2014 10 days after post
05/02 - SWKS +14% +3%
05/12 - ORCL +2% +2%
05/14 - IWM +5% +2%
05/20 - IWM +7% +2%
05/28 - PCRX +10% +7%
05/28 - KNDI +8% -1%
05/29 - HZN +9% +1%
02/06 - FEYE -51% +9%(he did say it could go either way)
02/06 -JRJC -32% +15%
02/13 -CSIQ +26% +5.2%
12/18 -FAS +22% +10%

This guy is magic when it comes to predicting stocks. Of course I added him to my favorites.

Awesome Desktops

mobeamer — Tue, 24 Jun 2014 13:27:00 +0000

Just click the links fool...

https://www.flickr.com/photos/saadbaig/3168489281/in/pool-lifehacker-desktop-showandtell/

The hex background
The white and black theme
Side menu is neat

http://daurbanmunky.deviantart.com/art/My-Dues-Ex-Human-Revolution-rainmeter-theme-325406554

Side Menus and all around look

http://rw4n.deviantart.com/art/Reach-84833870

I like the bottom menu

http://kyods.deviantart.com/art/March-desktop-clean-16378300

I like the side pop out menu

https://www.flickr.com/photos/orb9220/13769713363/in/pool-lifehacker-desktop-showandtell

I like the blue outline around the menu

http://cduru.deviantart.com/art/When-Quicksilver-meets-Aero-10971670

I like the clock

http://airu0423.deviantart.com/art/My-DT-Main-Display-2007-10-68326645

I like the calander at the top

http://barberiox.deviantart.com/art/Winter-Desk-I-December-107627959

http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/Sz8LXWTeyRg/maxresdefault.jpg

Bookmarked Links

mobeamer — Sat, 21 Jun 2014 12:37:00 +0000

http://cybermap.kaspersky.com/ - Very Cool

http://buysellads.com/ - Advertising space

https://pickcrew.com/how-it-works/ - Freelance talent, I like how they do things.

http://www.justinmind.com/ - Design Mobile Apps (good for prototyping)

http://proto.io/en/examples/ - Another mobile prototyping site, check out the Kitchen Sink Demo at the bottom.

https://revenue.com/ - another advertisment space...like the site, never used them though.

Quotes on Starting a Business

mobeamer — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 14:40:00 +0000

“Chase the vision, not the money; the money will end up following you.” -Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO

“An entrepreneur is someone who has a vision for something and a want to create.” -David Karp, Tumblr founder and CEO

“A ‘startup’ is a company that is confused about three things: (1.) What its product is. (2.) Who its customers are. (3.) How to make money.” – Dave McClure, 500Startups co-founder

"Just Fu*king Do It"

On Creating a Startup

mobeamer — Sat, 14 Jun 2014 04:36:00 +0000

Repost: http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/43774/The-5-Minute-Guide-To-Cheap-Startup-Advertising.aspx

I recently advertised my developer's guide to launching a startup on StumbleUpon. The plus side of StumbleUpon is that all clicks are 5 cents. The downside is the bounce rate is high since people are basically channel surfing. I achieved a 96.88% bounce rate in my experiment, with an average stay of 2 seconds. I wonder if it was something I said? In my test, only 25 visitors stayed longer than 5 seconds. I paid $50 for 1000 clicks, but since only 25 of them stayed long enough to read anything, I effectively paid $2 per click. Your mileage may vary, but through this and other experiments I've gathered the following tips for advertising on StumbleUpon:

Your #1 goal is to get stumblers to stay longer than 5 seconds. Your #2 goal is to get them to up-vote your page. Paying $50 for 1000 clicks is one thing. Having it go viral and receiving 10,000 clicks for the same price is another.
Don't send StumbleUpon traffic to a landing page that asks for an email address. StumbleUpon users are notoriously fickle about providing their email.
People stumble to be entertained, so if your page doesn't have the potential to go viral or turn into linkbait, you will not likely fare well.
Blog-like content and videos seem to work best. Anything that resembles a traditional landing page will bomb.

http://www.winningtheweb.com/reddit-homepage-advertising-results.php

In 24 hours, my listing was shown 26,050 times (to 3,187 unique visitors). The link in my ad was clicked 419 times, resulting in a unique click through rate of 13.15%. Not bad – that’s about $0.09 per click.

http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/80121/How-To-Get-Media-Coverage-For-Your-Startup-A-Complete-Guide.aspx

Timing of your email and Tweets

Timing is also a very important aspect for getting you covered. The best days for traffic for getting coverage of your story I have learnt are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Monday is way too fast to get you written up, the inboxes of reporters are full it's just not a great day.

At the same time, I learnt that, whilst Fridays aren't as good for traffic, the news is slower. So your chances of getting covered on that day can be higher. With a recent story about Buffer on Mashable, I took advantage of this. I followed up on a story I had pitched earlier in the week. Since it was extremely busy, I wouldn't get a response, yet a quick follow up email on Friday would receive an immediate response.

Are you secure

mobeamer — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 13:01:00 +0000

If you ever wondered what could be traced on your person....check out this site.

Click on the little dots in the picture to learn more.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/a-941262.html

Random Interesting Links

mobeamer — Sat, 07 Jun 2014 12:23:00 +0000

RobinHood.com - 100% Free Stock Trades - no commission....no way, could this be true?

http://www.techhive.com/ - Interesting

http://thewirecutter.com/ - Tech Product Reviews, make sure you buy the good stuff for the right price

https://haveibeenpwned.com/ - See if you have been hit by the Heart Bleed Virus

Click Through Rates and Google Ad-Words

mobeamer — Fri, 06 Jun 2014 04:55:00 +0000

http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/02/11/average-click-through-rate#.
A must read on click through rates and google ad-words, this made a lot of things click for me

Kill a Patent

mobeamer — Sat, 31 May 2014 04:36:00 +0000

If your wanting to kill some time, try this. Took me about 10 or 15 min to find a good one.

Ask Patents puts out recent software patents for the public to dispute. You think of an existing software or website that does what the patent says and submit it as prior art.

Poof - The patent is dismissed.

Awesomeness.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2013/07/22.html
How to Read a Patent in 60 Seconds

Thanks for nothing US Airlines!

mobeamer — Wed, 28 May 2014 04:07:00 +0000

A rant....

I had a job late year where I flew every other weekend on a consulting gig. Must have paid upward of $20,000 in airfare. As a "reward" I got 35,000 miles. Yeah for me!!! OR NOT!

I want to take a trip to Vegas, according to Orbitz I can buy a flight cash for $550. Hummm, I guess I'll use those reward miles and save some money. OR NOT!

A flight cost me 60,000 miles. I have the option to buy additional miles. Guess how much 25,000 miles cost....you guessed it....$550.

What a freakin rip-off!

Thanks for nothing US Airways!

Interesting Startups in Charlotte

mobeamer — Mon, 26 May 2014 08:18:00 +0000

I like to see IT take off in Charlotte, having said that here are some folks, in no particular order, doing it big in startups in IT in Charlotte (my home town):

Online TV - http://www.dailybalancewithkim.tv/

Data Sharing - http://www.Mytradeabledata.com - Not online yet, but coming soon...maybe

Breathalyzer Phone App - http://www.alcohoot.com/

iOS Factory Floor Apps - http://www.faktory.co/

HR Software - http://canopyssi.com/ - Very Cool site

Connexio Labs - http://www.connexiolabs.com/

eComDash - Inventory Management and Order Fulfillment Software for Multi-Channel Ecommerce Sellers

DataLakes - Datalakes offers a comprehensive Self-Service Big Data Analytics Platform that enables enterprises to make faster accurate data driven decisions for business. (Check out the blog as well)

Dc74 - Data Center Services

BeanStalkData - CRM Applications and B2B or B2C??/ solutions

NexTable - Restaurant table reservation app(s)

2014 Startup Companies - From Venture Challenge.

I hope to add to this list in the future.

Quote

mobeamer — Mon, 26 May 2014 07:00:00 +0000

The fewer secrets I keep, the better I get at keeping them.

If somone said this to you, would you think them honest? Think on that for a while....

Recent Bookmarks

mobeamer — Sat, 24 May 2014 13:40:00 +0000

http://www.pubnub.com/blog/javascript-php-real-time-stock-quote-app/

SQL to create a line from a number of points
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1171521/linear-regression-confidence-intervals-in-sql

What is "Big Data"?

mobeamer — Fri, 23 May 2014 05:03:00 +0000

I get asked this often, usually by management level types who have heard it as a buzz word and really want to understand how it affects their business. Here's how I broke it down to my 14 year old.

If you look at the press (news, TV, commentators) big press means anything that has to do with the words, pictures and connections that people put on "social sites".

In the business world Big Data means ... well ... a lot of data. And I don't mean a little, I mean a ton. Think on the order of Billions of rows of data. A good rule of thumb would be any data that is over a Tera-byte in size. And that's the minimum.

The third thing "Big Data" could refer to is volume speed. It might not be huge in size, but how fast does the data get generated.

For example, let's say you record the date and time for any phone ring that happens within the United States in the next 30 min. And you had to pinpoint the busiest phone out of all the phones in the US. The data volume size is small. But the volume of data that comes in is crazy, your talking 2 million data points a second. And your "Big Data Solution" has to make some decision on that data within 60 seconds.

This is really the "new" and revolutionary part of Big Data as only recently (in the last 5 years) has the average computing power been strong enough to handle this volume at that speed.

The other reason "Big Data" is considered as new is because businesses have started to take new approaches to it. The goal is to figure out how all this data can be used to "hit" the bottom line.

Personal Opinion:
The challenge that I see with Big Data is letting your solutions be driven by a measurable ROI or a measurable impact to customer.

The "Big Data" solutions that succeed are those that start with one of those two objectives in mind and move from there.

Nebulously built "repositories"/"reporting ware houses"/"business data troughs" don't really thrive in the long run. (Notice I said thrive, they serve a purpose and can be of value, but they don't generate that spark that makes the C-Level executives go nuts.)

So to put it concisely

Big Data is not social data
Big Data can refer to physical data size
Big Data can refer to the speed of incoming data
The goal is to use Big Data to affect the bottom line

Check my Facts:
IBM Article - Analytics-The real-world use of big data

More Interesting Javascript Libraries

mobeamer — Sat, 17 May 2014 13:39:00 +0000

JQuery - Spark Lines - http://omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/#s-about - free

Peity - Spark Lines - http://benpickles.github.io/peity/ - free

SigmaJS - Draw Graphs/Node Map - http://sigmajs.org/ - free (might be nice to draw an AI's node interface)

D3js - Just cool - http://d3js.org/

http://www.profitspi.com - Stock Analyser Site

Jquery Dashboard Library - http://cube3x.com/sdashboard-simple-jquery-dashboard-plugin/

Recent Bookmarks

mobeamer — Sat, 10 May 2014 13:51:00 +0000

http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/design/web-designers-who-earn-passive-income/

Stock Charting Library

mobeamer — Sat, 10 May 2014 13:38:00 +0000

A few stock charting libraries and their cost

This is in order or my preference and I typically like free *grin*

HumbleFinance - http://www.humblesoftware.com/finance/index - free
Uses Flotr and Prototype

Dcjs - http://nickqizhu.github.io/dc.js/ - Free but uses svg not compatable with IE 8 or lower

HighCharts - http://www.highcharts.com/stock/demo/ - The best around but runs around $1,000

Dygraphs - http://dygraphs.com/ - seems to be free

AnyCharts - http://www.anychart.com - $399

AmCharts - http://www.amcharts.com/demos/multiple-data-sets/ - $150

Koolchart - http://www.koolchart.com/ - $600

JsCharts - http://www.jscharts.com/examples - $79

ZinCharts - http://zingchart.com/gallery/ - $2500

Fusion Charts - http://www.fusioncharts.com/buy/ - $3000 and higher

Best Stock Charting Sites:

mobeamer — Sat, 03 May 2014 13:37:00 +0000

These sites seem to be stock charting right

http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=AAPL

http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/

http://www.freestockcharts.com/

On Leadership

mobeamer — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 23:29:00 +0000

Great Article - http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikemyatt/2013/07/01/the-4-pillars-of-stable-leadership/

If I might summarize...

True North: Stable leaders have an open mind, but they also have strong convictions and principles. While stable leaders listen to others, they are not prone to being wishy-washy. Their values drive their actions – not the court of public opinion. You might not always agree with stable leaders, but you’ll never have any doubt as to where they stand. An aligned vision based upon clearly stated values, and the character to hold people accountable to values over outcomes create a high-trust culture. Purpose and people matter more than process and short-term results.

You Play How You Practice: Whether it’s Nik Wallenda, a CEO, an educator, politician, or anyone else, your performance is always tied to your preparation. Training, development, and continuous life-long learning are the foundational cornerstones of stable leadership.

Lead With Compassion: The most stable leaders understand their success is rooted in the care and well-being of those they lead. Stable leaders have a natural bias toward empathetic and compassionate behavior. When those you lead know you care, it creates a sense of trust and stability not found in more mercenary and callous leaders.

Freedom To Fail: If the people you lead are afraid to make mistakes you’ll never see their best work – you will have led them to perpetual state of mediocrity. Smart leaders make it safe for people to think big, take risks, and try new and different things. Nothing creates stability more than a high-trust environment where people are rewarded for the right behaviors – not punished for them.

How to Scan for NetBIOS Names

Tue, 17 Dec 2013 03:51:57 +0000

I need to scan a network for Windows hostnames for a project I'm working on. Eventually, I found that I could use a combination of the nmap port scanner with the nmblookup utility from Samba. I scan the network for machines that don't have port 137 closed. Port 137 is the port that machines participating in Windows file sharing use to broadcast their names. I take the results of the scan and call nmblookup on each IP address, looking for the NetBIOS name.

2012 Election Lessons

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 04:19:57 +0000

The 2012 election is now over and there are plenty of lessons to be learned. Plenty of pundits have already written about the politics of the election outcome, but few look at it from the IT perspective. I think its interesting to look at how this election validates the role of IT in the modern world.

Big Data Wins Big

Embracing Diversity in the Information Age

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 01:27:17 +0000

In honor of Black History Month, I'm reposting one of my early writings... This editorial was published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Feb 14, 2001.

A new economy is upon us. The so-called "Post-Industrial Information Age" is maturing. That means that most companies know how to make a good product. High quality is a requirement for entry into a market, it is not sufficient to differentiate a company from its competitors. Quality control is no longer in charge of economic growth.

#NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement and Why so Many Projects Fail

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 06:31:07 +0000

If you're a parent your child has at some time told a "whopper" that's so outlandish that you had to respect the kid for having the cojones to even try it! Yesterday, while trying to drill down into the numbers surrounding the recent budget fight, I bumped into two such whoppers within 15 minutes, but they weren't from my kids... they were from elected officials.

The Hot IT Skills of 2011

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 03:29:51 +0000

Dice.com just released the results of their salary survey of nearly 20,000 IT professionals taken last fall. You can see a summary of the results on eWeek. This survey is self-selecting, but I think you can still draw some conclusions from the results, one of the main conclusions being that you need to know Java.

Setting up a Xen Server

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 00:36:10 +0000

New Laptop

I got a new laptop a few weeks ago. This machine, an HP Pavilion dv8 is radical! Intel i7 quad-core processor with multi-threading shows up as an eight-way box in System Monitor. With Blue Ray DVD, 8 GB of memory and 18.4" screen it still came in under $1400 on eBay. I decided to go with Ubuntu this time instead of OpenSUSE. Ubuntu 10.4 (lucid) is working quite well for me. Everything except the fingerprint reader is working. I even got the TV card (which actually came from my previous HP laptop) working, though only for digital TV broadcasts.

A quick look at Liferay Portal Server

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 16:54:12 +0000

I've started a development project on the Liferay Portal server. Liferay is a nice opensource Java Portal server with auser-friendly Web-2.0 interface. For example adding or repositioning portlets on a page is a simple drag-n-drop affair. Liferay also ships with a lot of portlets, so it's easy to build a portal site with Wikis, RSS feeds, and discussion forums right out of the box. However, I did run into a few irritating issues with Liferay:

Have you checked your electric bill?

Sat, 01 May 2010 11:02:32 +0000

A funny thing happened at lunch the other day. I was dining with several area CIOs when one fellow asked the table whether or not they were able to realize any electricity savings from their virtualization efforts. You may recall from Why start a Virtualization Blog? or Virtualization: The Importance of a Story to Tell that few companies account for electricity or floor space in their server charge-back models.

Old School Virtualization

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:04:20 +0000

Yes, it's been a while since my last post . I've been completely buried under a number of projects, including kicking off this year's BDPA-Charlotte High School Computer Competition (HSCC) training program. The good news is I learned a few things, which I may write about in future blogs.

Hammers and Screws - Know when you shouldn't use a technology

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:41:17 +0000

I once interviewed for what I suppose you could call the chief architect position at a small firm (about 1,500 employees) that wrote logistics software. Their flagship product was based on Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) version 2.1 and they were looking for someone to lead them through the migration to EJB 3.0. At the time I was the team lead for the Java half of a internal resource management application.