Like a lot of people, and all geeks, I spend a lot of time on the computer. Of course when you are on the computer you spend a lot of time typing. I think the new modern term is keyboarding, but it is the same thing. The interesting thing is that years ago we used to have a class in high school called typing! We learned all about proper form for business letters and other types of documents. More important though is that we learned to touch type. We learned where to put our hands and what fingers were suppose to go with what keys. We also then learned how to increase our speed over time. If you were reasonably good you would type about 60 words a minute, which is about what the average person speaks. Most secretaries would type in the 90 to 120 words per minute range. There was a teacher that could actually do close to 200 words per minute!!!
Now days touch typing and decent speed seem to be a lost art. Most people that I work with in the computer field don't even touch type. They use the old hunt and peck method. It takes a long time for them to type up anything. Many times I will be communicating via instant messaging with a work partner in another city somewhere and it takes forever for them to respond with a single sentence. Emails are rife with spelling and grammar errors. They are very short, and often don't communicate the information well. Most of this, in my opinion, can be attributed to the fact that they are such poor typists that it is painful to communicate through typed correspondence.
The other issue with poor typing in business is how much less productive you are. If you type at only like 10 words per minute it will take forever for you to complete a typed task. Well it will take a long time if you do a good job at it. Thus the tendency for people to have short, choppy, poorly formed documents. It just takes to long to do it right.
Well here is the point of this blog post, it is easy to fix. You can easily get pretty decent at typing skills on your computer. All you need to do is to spend 10 minutes a day with a typing tutor program. There are both commercial and free ones. The most well known commercial one is probably Mavis Beacon Typing. You can get it for $19.95 from Amazon. There is also SpongeBob Typing 2008 for $13.49. TypeRightNow includes a special peekproof keyboard cover and sells for $26.99. I think for my kids I am going to make my own version of that. I have several extra keyboards laying around. I think it is time to start taking the letters off the keyboard and making them type with those. If you go to download.com you can find some free typing tutor programs too.
Anyway, like all good skills, it is all about repetition. If you are trying to learn the piano or guitar they will tell you to spend like a half hour a day every day and not try long marathon sessions. The same is true with keyboarding. And you don't even need a half hour a day. Just take 10 minutes a day going through the exersizes. Or you can even break it up and one day is exersize day and the next is one of the keyboarding games. Yes these programs include games too! First you will want to see how fast you can type. Then set yourself some goals to hit for speed and accuracy. I bet by this next fall you can easily be up to between 3o and 40 words per minute, and you will feel much more comfortable with typing on the computer. And if you get to 200 words per minute then email me with a screen shot of the results and I will post it on www.atomicsupergeek.com hall of keyboarding fame so you can be world famous!
Monday, March 23, 2009
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Microsoft Hyper-V and the cloud
Well it has been a while since I have posted. I have been meaning to, but I have a master plan I am working on that this blog is just a part of. There will soon be an AtomicSuperGeek website also. But in the meantime I did want to blog a little about some stuff that I saw at a Microsoft conference I was recently at.
********* GEEK ALERT **********
This is a really geeky post this time. High end stuff more for the people that work in computers. So, unless you are suffering from serious insomnia or work in computers, you might want to wait for the next post.
There were three things at the conference that I found really interesting. The first one is the cloud computing strategy of the company. If you have read the computer trade rags at all you know that cloud computing is the new wave. If you are unfamiliar with the term then cloud computing is where a company like Microsoft or Google creates a huge server farm (you don't plant and grow servers you house them... so it really should be a server ranch) and then offers you a way to put your app on top of the farm and it just runs somewhere. So if a computer or two, or a whole data center goes down then your app will automagically switch to another server or data center. Your users will never ever know that there is a problem.
This is like the golden end point for computer data centers, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery. The thing is that to get enough computers into enough data centers with enough bandwidth to work you need to spend a whole ton of money. In the meantime none of the computers are really working very hard. So, unless you have a whole lot of different apps to run on your cloud, it is just not cost effective. In steps Microsoft. They are building a cloud with an abstration layer for you to build on. It is still in the early stages, but looks really good. I am thinking that all small and medium businesses that need a lot of uptime will find this very interesting. Not sure if the cost savings will be there for large companies at this time. Time will tell.
OK, second is the Hyper-V offering. This is Microsoft's answer to VMWare ESX Server. If you have not used virtual computing yet then just wait. I will be putting some really cool stuff together on virtualization for the main website soon. In the meantime, ESX server in the large corporate environment is way cool. You can have one physical computer host like 6 or 8 or more virtual servers. The users never know that it is virtual. If you have multiple ESX servers and they are all linked to a SAN then you can move a virtual computer from one host to another with the click of a button.
But this is suppose to be about Hyper-V from Microsoft. The Hyper-V virtualzation is really pretty cool. It all comes out of the VirtualPC product Microsoft bought several years ago. The thing that Microsoft is working on right now is management of the virtual environment. This was really cool. What was exceptionally cool is that you can manage both Hyper-V and VMWare environments from the same management console. The other cool thing is that you can actually manage down into the box to the application level. This was something very impressive.
There were two things that kind of surprised me though. First, if you do a P2V (physical to virtual) move of a server it clones the MAC address along with everything else. I have never seen a need to do this in any of the P2V clones I have ever done before. Also, this means you will have a problem if/when you reuse that hardware on the same network segment again. NOT a good idea. Second, if you clone an existing computer then it destroys the source computer. The clone of course has computer name and SID etc all stripped out, but it blows away the computer in the process. That seems totally unneeded. I would like to know what they were thinking.
Finally, they showed the software for creating apps for Windows Mobile so you could make an application for a cell phone. There were a number of asides about iPhones during the presentation, but you could see that they have seen the light that cell phones as a computer platform is a very large growing market. I am only a minor programmer. I do scripting but never thought of doing an app for a cell phone. I don't think I still could do it, but it does look interesting. If you are a programmer you might just be able to become financially independent with a cell phone program. BTW there was a guy I read about that made $700,000 this last year for a simple tank program for the iPhone.
********* GEEK ALERT **********
This is a really geeky post this time. High end stuff more for the people that work in computers. So, unless you are suffering from serious insomnia or work in computers, you might want to wait for the next post.
There were three things at the conference that I found really interesting. The first one is the cloud computing strategy of the company. If you have read the computer trade rags at all you know that cloud computing is the new wave. If you are unfamiliar with the term then cloud computing is where a company like Microsoft or Google creates a huge server farm (you don't plant and grow servers you house them... so it really should be a server ranch) and then offers you a way to put your app on top of the farm and it just runs somewhere. So if a computer or two, or a whole data center goes down then your app will automagically switch to another server or data center. Your users will never ever know that there is a problem.
This is like the golden end point for computer data centers, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery. The thing is that to get enough computers into enough data centers with enough bandwidth to work you need to spend a whole ton of money. In the meantime none of the computers are really working very hard. So, unless you have a whole lot of different apps to run on your cloud, it is just not cost effective. In steps Microsoft. They are building a cloud with an abstration layer for you to build on. It is still in the early stages, but looks really good. I am thinking that all small and medium businesses that need a lot of uptime will find this very interesting. Not sure if the cost savings will be there for large companies at this time. Time will tell.
OK, second is the Hyper-V offering. This is Microsoft's answer to VMWare ESX Server. If you have not used virtual computing yet then just wait. I will be putting some really cool stuff together on virtualization for the main website soon. In the meantime, ESX server in the large corporate environment is way cool. You can have one physical computer host like 6 or 8 or more virtual servers. The users never know that it is virtual. If you have multiple ESX servers and they are all linked to a SAN then you can move a virtual computer from one host to another with the click of a button.
But this is suppose to be about Hyper-V from Microsoft. The Hyper-V virtualzation is really pretty cool. It all comes out of the VirtualPC product Microsoft bought several years ago. The thing that Microsoft is working on right now is management of the virtual environment. This was really cool. What was exceptionally cool is that you can manage both Hyper-V and VMWare environments from the same management console. The other cool thing is that you can actually manage down into the box to the application level. This was something very impressive.
There were two things that kind of surprised me though. First, if you do a P2V (physical to virtual) move of a server it clones the MAC address along with everything else. I have never seen a need to do this in any of the P2V clones I have ever done before. Also, this means you will have a problem if/when you reuse that hardware on the same network segment again. NOT a good idea. Second, if you clone an existing computer then it destroys the source computer. The clone of course has computer name and SID etc all stripped out, but it blows away the computer in the process. That seems totally unneeded. I would like to know what they were thinking.
Finally, they showed the software for creating apps for Windows Mobile so you could make an application for a cell phone. There were a number of asides about iPhones during the presentation, but you could see that they have seen the light that cell phones as a computer platform is a very large growing market. I am only a minor programmer. I do scripting but never thought of doing an app for a cell phone. I don't think I still could do it, but it does look interesting. If you are a programmer you might just be able to become financially independent with a cell phone program. BTW there was a guy I read about that made $700,000 this last year for a simple tank program for the iPhone.
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