Moving into the cloud
One of the current hot topics in many technology circles concerns the cloud-computing model. Wikipedia has the following definition for cloud computing:
a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet.
One of the biggest criticisms and concerns with this approach is the ownership, integrity, and security of the data. At work we are struggling with this concept as well. We are investigating moving our student e-mail into either Microsoft’s or Google’s online mail model. From an economic approach it seems very cut-and-dried. If we move the data for our users into the cloud then we cut down on our data storage, server and basic infrastructure costs. However, the legal ramifications of this are interesting.
Faculty and staff data are to be kept inside the enterprise due to concerns over the possibility that their mail would contain confidential or sensitive data, such as grade information, student id numbers, etc. What is interesting is that if a student is the recipient of an e-mail from a faculty or staff member that contains this information then the confidential or sensitive data has been placed in the cloud whether or not the faculty or staff member wanted it that way.
I have been dealing with this in a small way myself while trying to decide if I should move all of my personal mail into Google (which already hosts my mail accounts using the Google Apps services). Do I rely on the large scale backup and storage of Google? At first I was concerned that I might loose connectivity during a rare outage of the GMail system. But I realized that I only check my mail using a full client on my machine at home. Everywhere else I rely on an imap connection or the web interface. So I have made the leap!
Now to work on making my GPG signature stuff work with GMail’s web interface.
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Computer wallpaper as sexual harassment
While surfing around today for some new wallpaper for my computer desktop at work it occurred to me to wonder when a piece of artwork might be considered sexual harrassment.
Given that the only other person that works in my office with me on a daily basis (Hi, Ashley!) is a open-minded art major and tends to appreciate a wide variety of artwork I am not worried about whether she will be offended by my choices in artwork, however the same cannot be said for every individual that comes into my office.
Federal law defines sexual harassment as:
- Unwelcome sexual advances
- Requests for sexual favors
- Other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature when: submission to such conduct is made explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of an individual’s employment or academic success or; submission to or rejection of such conduct by an individual is used as the basis for employment or academic decisions affecting such individuals or; the conduct has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual’s work or academic performance or creating an intimidating, hostile, or sexually offensive working environment.
Since Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 protects students from unlawful sexual harassment in all school programs and activities, and I work in an educational institution that receives federal funds, then this means that I need to cognizant of the environment I create in my office.
Of course, even if I am within the law, I also should have an environment that is friendly (for the most part), if for no other reason than it is the right thing to do.
What sort of criteria should one apply to determining whether or not a piece of desktop art (or just art hanging on the wall) constitutes sexual harassment? How do you determine this in your own workplace?
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Website outage
Due to a problem with the grid-cluster at MediaTemple, the site was down for well over a day. They still don’t have everything up and running 100% yet, so their are at least two posts that are missing images.
Hopefully they will get everything finished today. According to the latest update on the status entry for Incident 754, they have approximately 155 sites to restore out of the almost 2500 that were hosted on gs cluster 2. Fortunately this didn not affect the database cluster, so none of my actually posts, pages or comments were lost.
The affected content at the moment is:
- Post: Starting ClamXav Sentry on login
- Missing the images show the screens
- Post: Configure AirPort Extreme MAC filter ACL
- Missing the images showing the screens
- Page: Colophon
- Missing the custom template that I made to auto-generate the listing of plugins
- Page: Archives
- Missing the custom archive template
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Starting ClamXav Sentry on login
UPDATE (2009-04-26 7:06PM EDT): Apparently I was mistaken. When poking through the preferences of ClamXav in order to restructure my watch folders, I noticed a checkbox that I had overlooked. Apparently you can add the login item from within the main application. However, it still doesn’t start the Sentry app when adding the item. You have to manually click the “Save settings & Launch Sentry” button.
Recently I have bowed to the necessity of installing antivirus software on my Mac, both at work and at home.
In investigating the possibilities I decided to try out the open source antivirus solution ClamAV. While I tend to gravitate towards commercially supported security products when possible, I currently don’t have the extra money to spend on the Intego VirusBarrier product, and the budget at work is quite strained, as are budgets for most people.
I like the ClamXav frontend for the ClamAV engine. I know that I can do all the scanning functions from the command line, but I am fan of gui frontends do to the fact that they are often more user-friendly.
The ClamXav is a nice frontend. The only problem I have with it is that there is inherent mechanism to launch the sentry program at user login. The ClamXav Sentry application is contained in the Resources section of the Contents of the ClamXav application bundle. Below are the steps to add the application as a login item.
Adding ClamXav Sentry as Login Item
1. Open System Preferences from the Apple Menu
Open System Preferences
2. Open Accounts Preference Pane
System Prefences
3. Select Login Items
Login Items
4. Click the Plus sign button at the button of the Login Items list.
5. When the dialog window comes up, hit the Command + Shift + G keyboard combo.
6. In the window type the following:
/Applications/ClamXav.app/Contents/Resources/”
then click the Go button.
Enter the file path to the Resources of the ClamXav bundle
7. Select ClamXavSentry.app from the list and click the Add button.
Select the Sentry app
8. Congratulations, you have successfully added the ClamXav Sentry as a login item.
Login Item Added
I also wrote an Applescript application that will add the login item for you. The benefit of using my utility is that it launches ClamXav Sentry after adding the login item. You download a zipfile containing both the application and script file.
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Great conversation leading up to being fired
I just got finished reading Stealing MySpace by Julia Angwin. In it there was this great conversation about the firing of Ross Levinshohn by Peter Chernin, the soon-to-be former COO of News Corps. Here it is:
“You’re not happy, are you?” Chernin said.
“No, I’m not,” Levinsohn agreed.
“This isn’t working out, is it?” Chernin said.
“No, it’s not,” Levinsohn replied.
“We should probably part ways,” Chernin said.
“Yes,” Levinsohn replied.
That’s just awesome. I wish I could make it work like that the next time I have to fire someone.
Ref: Stealing MySpace, p. 234.
