David's Blog

Geocaching - Treasure Hunting with a GPS

Geocaching is high tech treasure hunting. Using a GPS (I have a Garmin GPS V), you download coordinates (Lat & Long) of places where someone has hidden these little caches (ammo boxes, Tupperware containers, etc). You use your GPS to get to the location and then find the cache. Caches are hidden everywhere but mainly in parks or public areas where anyone can gain access.

The biggest site on the Internet for this "sport" is geocaching.com where there are, even just within a 50 miles radius of me, thousands of the caches placed. I go with the kids, but on some tougher ones, I go alone. The goal is finding the cache and signing the log book that each have. We get to the closest point we can park, and using the GPS, which points us in the direction of the cache (based on Latitude/Longitude for this cache downloaded off the geocaching.com site, we head off in the direction the GPS points. Sometimes the hike is a few hundred feet from where we can park and sometimes it is a mile or more. After we get back home, we log the find (or not found if we don't actually find the cache) back on the site.

My kids like, when we find caches have items in them, taking turns trading something in the cache for the load of stash we carry in our backpack. Since my kids do the trading they are looking for kid things and we usually replace them with kid things. Not cheap McDonalds Happy Meal toys (though some folks do - less and less now though) but fun things my kids would like to trade for if they came upon these same items in a cache.

I've met some of the folks involved in the area and even gone on some group hunts and it's been a blast. Just this past weekend as we were getting back into the car after finding a cache in a local park, a man with his wife and kids asked if we were caching. They had been looking for one where the coords were off and I gave him the info for another one in the area we had just targeted.

Geocaching has taken me to locations I would likely never have gone to on my own. It gets the kids (and sometimes my wife) and I out and doing some healthy hiking and to very interesting places. We even hit up some caches hidden around Disney World when we were last there. The kids are always asking me if we can go - you can't ask for anything better then that!

So next time, you are strolling through the park and you see someone with a GPS you'll know they are likely out caching. Also, as you walk around the pond in your local park, you might even catch yourself wondering if there's something hidden nearby that no one (other then us geocachers) know about.

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Anti Virus Gateways - Stop the auto-responses

Back in the days when a virus you received was from the person sending you the message, having your mail server anti virus gateway software auto notify the sender was useful. Today, it's not.

I'm sure everyone has received messages like the following:

Our virus detector has just been triggered by a message you sent:-
  To: mailbag@infogoal.com
  Subject:  Re: Here
  Date: Sat Mar 13 09:18:51 2004
Any infected parts of the message (yours.pif) have not been delivered.
 
This message is simply to warn you that your computer system may have a
virus present and should be checked.

Viruses today typically forge the "from" address. What that means is my address, picked at random from a machine that is truly infected, is made to be the address the mail is from. Now, any replies back from an automated system or from an individual that receives the message, goes to me and not the person that is infected.

Obviously, it's useless to notify me that someone else is infected and not only is it useless, but it causes double the email traffic for, what is in the first place, a complete waste of an email. A virus email is sent (a waste of an email message) and then an auto-response from an anti-virus scanner sends a notification back to the wrong individual (another waste of an email message).

Articles in trade magazines such as Stop Anti-Virus Gateway Responses help bring this problem to the attention of the masses, but obviously, it's not working well. I still receive, on almost a daily basis (and very often numerous times through the day when there's a new virus outbreak), these useless auto-notification messages. I've even started to contact the companies that are replying back to me with a form letter indicating the uselessness of their automated responses and the additional burden on their mail servers and those throughout the Internet. Hopefully, at least some of the admins receiving these messages will understand the need to disable this notification and we can all have a little more time in our lives to spend on something other then deleting of spam and useless anti-virus notifications.

Outsourcing - Killing IT & Killing Companies

I'm in IT. Have been for 20+ years now. I work with a bunch of folks that I would match up against any Corporate IT team for all around expertise. We're the team that "gets it". We do it all because we've done it all. What takes others days or weeks takes us minutes or hours. What they can't comprehend, we understand without even needing it to be explained.

So how does outsourcing come in? Well, we're outsourcing. Have been for a while but we're outsourcing more and more. Started, as I'm sure it has elsewhere, with outsourcing of Production Support. They said it was to free up our resources for more value added work. Sound familiar? It's now moved into new development and many other areas of our organization.

Let's look at what makes this special team so good... we've done it all. We started off as programmers back when you needed to know how to program. We worked on all platforms (Mainframe, Client/Server and Web), all operating systems, multiple languages, all the hot technologies, databases, applications and production implementations and support of everything we worked on. We knew whatever decisions we made and systems we implemented we were going to be responsible for and live with for years to come. We've come up through the ranks, we know what works and what doesn't work, we know how to diagnose problems and how to get things working again, quickly. We can solve problems on platforms and in applications we've never seen before by asking the right questions.

We're the crucial middle portion of the IT organization that pretty much gets it all done. We interface with Sr Management and we interface with developers. We know how to communicate effectively at all levels and we make things happen. We push for the platforms we know we'll need to keep the organization going in the future. We know the strategic direction (heck, we implemented them all) and we make decisions that align with that direction.

So, who will move into our positions in the future? Who will be the folks that truly make the projects succeed, the platforms work, turn the visions into reality and think beyond just a single program or a single system? With all the positions below us being outsourced, there's no one in the organization to step up into our position! Who will set the direction of the company and see it through to fruition? Who will be the enforcers of the strategies and align decisions with those strategic directions? I fear that there will be no one to do it.

Consultants don't have to live with choices or decisions they make - they develop and move on. The long term viability of their solution is of little concern as they won't be around to deal with the problems. Sr Management cares about the next quarter and they too don't care about the long term consequences of doing things quick and dirty and cheap. They too will likely be gone when the true impact of their short sighted decisions brings the company to its knees.

Not much we can do now but sit back and watch an organization that we cared so much about, that we've built with our sweat and blood, start to crumble before our eyes. In a matter of a year or two, what took decades to put into place will be gone. Like a disease taking over someone's body, outsourcing is eating away at the organization. Might not look bad from the outside right now, but as the disease progresses, and all the vital organs are attacked, the major life supporting systems will fail and then die. So will IT and so will the company.

RIP

Affiliate Store - www.stateposters.us

Was cruising around the net and stumbled on http://www.allposters.com and started thinking about creating a targeted affiliate store. Did a little searching and decided that creating a store concentrating on the 50 US states seemed like a good idea. I could create state specific pages, each focusing on specific state posters and state prints.

Grabbed a domain from GoDaddy for a couple bucks - http://www.stateposters.us - for a couple bucks and had my ISP create a subdomain of http://stateposters.levinecentral.com and started to build the site. If it starts to take off, I'll just host a true domain with them, but the subdomain was free and I forward to it from GoDaddy.

To build the site I created a simple mySQL table that contains a key, the state abbreviation, the state name, the dynamic store id generated from allposters.com and a description.

I then built dynamic stores for each state. Most are just one page but for states with a lot of posters/prints I created multiple. Each store gets an id that I entered into the mySQL table.

I then wrote 1 page in ASP that generates every state page by reading the relevant record off the mySQL table plugging in the values in various areas of the code. It adds the description to the top to make it more personalized by state.

I created 1 main ASP page which just links to each state page and viola - a quick affiliate site. The longest time was actually on the allposters.com site selecting all the prints in each state category to build the individual dynamic stores.

Check it out at http://www.stateposters.us and buy something. Let me know how it works ;-)