http://www.wordle.net/. Images of Wordles are licensed Creative Commons License.

Twitter Delicious Digg Facebook Reddit StumbleUpon

Internet watchers, particularly business types involved in marketing, have been predicting that the Internet will become more tribal and it becomes more pervasive. The parallel might be the rise of Industrial Age cities: people left their local communities and moved to big anonymous cities, but then the cities got so big that people organically developed boroughs, gangs, neighborhoods, etc. The social internet of the old usenet days is the pre-city world; Facebook and Twitter represent the megalapolises. And now we the citizenry are self-organizing into tribes.

Tyler Newton thinks this will happen now, in 2010:

The tribal Internet–Social networking and Internet content will evolve into networks of sites and information streams focused around common interests. Whether it’s for work, hobbies or issue advocacy, interest groups will form virtual “tribes” online, sharing content, ideas, opinions, advice and information among themselves. Magazines, blogs, e-mail newsletters and video content are already interlinked and shared and promoted via RSS feeds and social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Because these tribes are built around natural affinities, in many ways they will have a more powerful hold on us than our existing groups based on schools and location. Marketers will not be successful with old-fashioned advertising that interrupts this flow of content. Successful marketers will be those that are able to join and gain the trust of the tribes, where people WANT to receive the marketing message.

You know how billboards are different depending on what part of the city you’re in? You’ll see that with tribal-based marketing. But aside from marketing, what does the tribal internet mean?

Organic Organization. Information will organize itself around the tribal centers that produce and consume it. If you want to find out about Iranian politics, you’ll go to the Iranian dissident tribe. This has been the case for a while, but it will become more explicit and become the shared understanding of the internet denizens. This should make it easier to find information and sort the wheat from the chaff; something’s going to need to.

Working Topically. Wikipedia and the USG’s Intellipedia have long been proponents of this. Rather than organizing information by, oh, which academic institution did the study, which journal published it, or which author wrote it, the pedias organize information by its topic and let you see the sources of the data. Mainstream journalism has been opposed to this, since their bread-and-butter is getting people to go to them, the source, and take what info they provide. With the decline of that business model, a few traditional media outlets are partnering with Google on the Living Stories project, which provides the news topically, the way tribes want it.

Metanet. The population of the internet has hit the point where we can no longer lump everything and everyone together as “the Internet.” There’s the internet of things, as more and more devices come online of their own accord, and more and more sensors are added. There’s the cloud, where data is stored and processed, there’s the commerce internet, there are the walled gardens of intranets and private instances, and there’s social media, now the main way people interact with the internet. I’m starting to call these the metanet, the macronet, the micronet, and the me net. Just like you travel a city differently if you are considering its architecture and structure, if you are attending class or doing business, if you’re shopping, if you’re having a private club meeting, or if you are going out with friends, you’ll engage with the internet differently. Transitions from one net to another will usually be transparent, but just like going through an airport or into a government building, there will be areas where you will still have to show your creds and leave a lot of your gear behind.

Twitter Delicious Digg Facebook Reddit StumbleUpon

We are pleased to announce that as of today, January 4, 2010 we have moved to our new Headquarters in Reston, VA. Please update your files as necessary.

1897 Preston White Drive Suite 202 Reston, VA 20191

703-880-1500 – Main Phone
703-880-1507 – Main Fax

Twitter Delicious Digg Facebook Reddit StumbleUpon

…and that Cloud looks like a highly redundant, geographically dispersed computer cluster…

Technology marches forward and the paradigm changes. The latest new paradigm – Cloud Computing! Cloud Computing is going to completely change the way we design our computing infrastructures, again.

Cloud Computing is the concept of using Internet services to support users. In general the term is applied more toward business users, but I would say that we all use Internet (or cloud) based services. One of the best and most successful cloud computing services is web-based email or webmail. Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail are all examples of webmail services – and these services are examples of Cloud Computing.

There are also some specific types of cloud computing models.  These are basic subsets of cloud services and are different in the sense that they are usually purchased and have SLA (Service Level Agreements) associated with them.  The models are Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platforms as a Service (PaaS).

Why do it in the Cloud?

In general cloud based services are more robust than similar in-house solutions. Yes, cloud services fail, but probably less often than similar services a business could deploy. Gmail for example has very high availability numbers. In fact, Gmail claims 99.9% availability, which is about an hour of down time per year,  less than 5 minutes a month.

Cloud computing is also less expensive.  Using cloud based services can save a lot of money in terms of capital investments and labor. Consider the costs of running an internal email server – hardware, software, system administration, networking, spam management, and so on. The costs of cloud based solution, the cost of the service and maybe a system administrator to help the users.

Why not to do it in the Cloud…

There are some very serious risks associated with Cloud usage. First and foremost is security. Cloud computing require you to rely on the cloud provider to address security.  Add to this the fact that the service is Internet accessible and security becomes a challenge. Recently Twitter felt the effects of failed security in its usage of cloud service. Without the benefits of hiding behind a firewall, cloud based services are more susceptible to hacking simply due to accessibility. It is critical to educate your users of these new challenges.

Another potential issue is data portability. Can you get your data out of the cloud? Unluckily, the answer is usually no. The ability to extract your data for archiving or backups is an important consideration when deciding whether or not to use cloud services and when selecting a provider. A recent move by Google to address data portability is a move in the right direction and will hopefully encourage others to follow suit. But the standard answer for most cloud computing solutions is “all your data are belong to us.”

Welcome to the Future…

And Cloud Computing is there. The use of cloud computing is almost completely ubiquitous. Most Internet user take advantage of cloud services daily.  In fact, I suspect that most web usage is primarily focused on the use of cloud service; email, work-related activities, blogs, etc. The Cloud is the Internet and Cloud Computing is its new purpose.

What is next? More Cloud Computing power! Google Chrome OS? Maybe…

Twitter Delicious Digg Facebook Reddit StumbleUpon

We would like to wish you and yours a happy and safe holiday season. With the snow on the ground still from this past weekend’s blizzard, we may in fact have a White Christmas.

We also look forward to a very Happy New Year and prosperous health for everyone in 2010.

Twitter Delicious Digg Facebook Reddit StumbleUpon

**co-written with Geoff Stack of STACK Consulting**

As you may have read in a recent post all federal agencies are facing a sustainability push. President Obama has tasked every Federal Agency for a target in Greenhouse Gas (GHG) reductions. This target is self-reported and is for the year 2020.

Both of these moves are unique in government since they focus on GHG’s and look for a deliberative planning process (take it seriously!).

Phew, what a complex set of taskings from Obama. This is going to require a tremendous amount of effort. We at Navstar have a growing expertise in this area to help you with your auditing, planning, and consulting.

To bolster our knowledge and broaden our capabilities we have teamed up with Geoff Stack of STACK Consulting Coordination. Geoff brings a wealth of strategic knowledge in sustainability from private enterprise.

The first step in our partnership was to dive into this executive order to see where we can help out. The results were a few best practices in key areas to guide the newly appointed Senior Sustainable Officers. Hopefully, these tidbits can alleviate some pressure as they get a crash course strategic sustainability planning:

Sustainable Contracting – Procurement

Per the order, Federal agencies must:

“Ensure 95% of new contract actions, task orders, and delivery orders for products and services are energy efficient, environmentally preferable, contain recycled content, etc.”

In addition to using EPA recommended Energy Star and EPEAT products. The Regional Municipality of Whistler has developed and implemented an excellent Sustainable Purchasing Guide that uses a six-step decision-making process to help managers make sound decisions. It guides decisions towards those that reduce costs and impacts and ensure long-term success and demonstrates that this seemingly daunting requirement can be met.

Agency Energy Audits – Baseline Assessments

The best way to develop a strategic plan is to develop a baseline of energy use. It is quite a challenge to measure your overall energy use, including the new challenge of identifying them as direct (scope 1 and 2) and indirect (scope 3) carbon emissions.

The Natural Step Framework and the PROBE for Sustainable Business tool offer ways to comprehensively evaluate and measure your organization’s full impacts and potential for improvement and change. This can provide the much needed longer term, budget focused, understanding of the sustainability challenge.

Reducing Energy Intensity

How to reduce our energy use? Where to start? Who to contact?

Many of these answers can be found in the commercial world. Some key takeaways to keep in mind when searching for ways to increase energy efficiency:

1. Begin by implementing a few proven projects and easy wins to get the ball rolling. Here are some great examples from the Midwest Energy Effeciency Alliance.

2. Bank the savings earned from your early wins and get familiar with the people and information sources that will help you with more difficult projects along the way:

• Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP)
• Flex Your Power
• Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA)

3. Plan for the long-term savings by integrating energy efficiency into ongoing operations with a comprehensive Environmental Management System (EMS).

Zero-Net-Energy Buildings

Getting to net zero, it’s possible but complex. The tips above help you to reduce the impacts of existing operations and maintenance, but much more can be done in longer term planning. Things like retrofitting our old buildings to designing new buildings. This reaches deep into top-of-the-line strategic planning in building design, construction, operation, management, maintenance, and more.

To meet this challenge is essential to work through the design process with an understanding of how the building, its surroundings and the design team function as a whole. Creating ‘zero-energy,’ ‘green,’ or ‘sustainable,’ development requires extensive coordination to ensure that the building’s various systems work together in an effective way.

The Whole Building Design Guide is a great place to start, as is the GSA Sustainable Design Program.

Even more is possible when we “redesign the design process” as explained in a new book on the integrative design process for green building.

Twitter Delicious Digg Facebook Reddit StumbleUpon

Congratulations to our Director of Green IT, Steven Mandzik for getting accepted to speak as a Core Conversation for South By Southwest in 2010. Green is very important to us at Navstar and we support Steve’s passion with A Clean Life.

Navstar is looking forward to continuing “greening” ourselves as we are completely reworking our internal processes and equipment to meet newer green office standards.

If you would like to see what Steve’s talk will be about you can see his accepted entry below. Again, congratulations to Steve. Have fun in Austin.

Zero Waste: The Future of Green

Twitter Delicious Digg Facebook Reddit StumbleUpon

“That which is not monitored is not managed.” - A wise System Administrator

Failure is a part of life. This is especially true in the world of IT. It is not a question of if, but when. The key to successful enterprise management is to know when things fail. This can only be accomplished through monitoring. The name of this art – Network Management. Well, actually it is more than network management, but I guess this is the title it gets because of its roots; kind of like the way we still say we are dialing the phone.  A better name would be – Enterprise Management, which is starting to catch on, but the old IT folks won’t understand what you are talking about.

Monitoring the Enterprise

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it really fall?  Well, I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know that if a system fails, someone is going to hear it. The goal of the IT staff is to be the first one to hear it (or better yet, know that it is going to fall/fail). Nothing is more painful than having your customer point to a fallen tree and ask you if you heard it. You must listen to your forest (Enterprise).

Referring back to the Enterprise Architecture post, I view systems as collections of services. Going a bit further, services are composed of components. These components are computers, switches, storage (SAN, NAS), and a bunch of other stuff. Therefore; systems are composed of services, and services are composed of components. And, the collection of our systems, services, and components is our Enterprise.

So, what do we monitor? Simple, as much as we can – systems, services, and components. To simplify this discussion, let’s look at this in terms of levels; Systems, Services, and Components. At the top level, Systems, we are checking for functionality. For example, if the system was a website, we could perform an HTTP get to check the functionality of the site. To accomplish more detailed monitoring we might craft a special HTTP request that would exercise the services that make up the site. The data returned from this HTTP request could then be analyzed to determine if the site was operating normally. In the case of Services, well, basically we are doing the same thing, keeping in mind that services are systems. So looking at the website again, we connect to its database and run some queries to gather status information. For the Components we can use SNMP to collect a whole bunch of data. In the case of a computer we would collect CPU data, disk information, memory usage, process data, and more. For switches and routers; system performance (CPU and memory), port information (usage, up/down status, error counts, etc.), and routing data (updates, errors, etc.).  The more data we collect, the more likely we are to identify issues.

Relationships -

At each level we are collecting data that will be use to determine the operational status of all of the parts that make up a system; as well monitoring the system itself. Why not just monitor the system? Monitoring all of the supporting services and components allows us to quickly address the actual cause of a problem. If we know what caused the problem, we can fix it. The website is down is not enough information. Is the actual problem the server, switch, load balancer, router, database, firewall, or the user? Not knowing leaves a lot of things to check. If we are monitoring all of the supporting services and components we will know what is wrong and our efforts to fix the problem can be focused on what is broken.

When we monitor the Enterprise in terms of its architecture, we do not really need the “system” level monitoring, because we will be monitoring all of the services that comprise the system. Well, ok this is not really completely true. The point is that in most cases, if we are monitoring components and services, problems that affect systems will be identified at a lower level. And if the relationship of services to systems is know, and maybe even incorporated into or monitoring tool(s), we will understand why a system is down based on lower level issues. This is the goal – service and component level monitoring of the systems, for the whole Enterprise.

Reality –

All right, here is the truth, you can never get there. The problem you run into is Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. Once you monitor half of the stuff, there is still half to go. You can get close, but close is all you can do. That being said, it is well worth the effort. Most basic stuff can be addressed quickly and easily with open source tools like Zenoss and Nagios. And as your monitoring solution matures it will become more effective. Just keep in mind that the task is never done. The more you monitor, the less you will miss.

Navstar has successfully implemented Enterprise level monitoring and capacity planning solutions for our customers. At the Department of Treasury we implemented a complete solution based on open source tools. At the core of the solution are Zenoss and Cacti. We can help you get there too.

So what are you waiting on? Start monitoring.

- Carl

Twitter Delicious Digg Facebook Reddit StumbleUpon

Twitter Delicious Digg Facebook Reddit StumbleUpon

I started following the saga of the missing blog via Diplopundit, so I’ll link to her post Best Consular Blog. Dead, So Very Dead calling the case closed. I’m reposting a lot of it below.

The consular blog “The Consuls’ Files,” by Madam le Consul went missing from the blogosphere 30 days ago today. By missing, I mean just gone. Disappeared. Like it had never been. The only place it exists now is in piecemeal RSS feeds scattered among its subscribers, and one copy of the cached file, grabbed quickly by another blogger before whoever removed the blog eradicated that also.

If you go missing for more than 48 hours in real life, the chances of finding you drop precipitously. The chances of recovery in virtual disappearances, um don’t really know. But she’s gone. Missing for over 700 hours now. The trail is cold. Most likely dead. Just dead. And we can understand if she wants to stay dead for now.

I imagine that there are folks out there who are relieved that though she may browse among us, she is now a ghost among us. And ghosts, you know, can’t be seen or heard, and have not been known to blog, yet. Dead blogger gone. End of line.

Other folks out there, of course, still harbor hope that she comes back. Dead bloggers, like cylons, have many resurrection ships nearby: WordPress.com, Tumblr.com, LiveJournal.com, Yahoo 360 and more … dead bloggers do not really go away, they just get new URLs. But I won’t be surprised if she stays dead.
Every single day I also get somebody knocking on my door looking for MLC. I suspect that she is more popular now dead than she ever was, alive. If Madam le Consul is not resurrected, I hope her ghost starts micro-blogging on Twitter soon, if only to give the folks responsible for her demise nightmares and ulcers.

Yup, I’m going to hell for wishing that. Whatever. I’m still royally pissed that I no longer have her company when I have coffee each morning.

Liam Schwartz who publishes the Consular Corner has a brief piece on Madam le Consul (republished below with permission):

Respect for MLC

“The Consuls’ Files” — probably the best visa blog in the universe — has disappeared from our screens. Over a relatively short period of time, ‘Madam le Consul’ provided more consular education to more people than any of us would have thought possible. For her devoted audience, the reason for MLC’s sudden disappearance remains a mystery; that said, opinion in consular cyberspace is virtually unanimous that “The Consuls’ Files” was forced to close down by a skittish Bureau of Consular Affairs.
For a brief few months, MLC provided us with an enhanced level of information regarding the world of consular officers. In so doing, she created more public trust and support for that world than any one person has done in a very long time. We are deeply saddened by the loss of “The Consuls’ Files” and thank MLC for having given so much in such a short period of time.

MLC’s final blog piece, posted on October 2, 2009 was perhaps appropriately entitled “Yuck.”

Yuck, indeed!
I think we have to remember that the Bureau of Consular Affairs was born out of the McCarthy furor of the 1950’s and was set up under INA of 1952. Robert Walter Scott McLeod, the first Assistant Secretary of State for what was then called the Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs (SCA) was known for his bureau’s slogan, “an ounce of loyalty is worth more than a pound of brain.” Also known apparently was his “field study” of 19,000 employees at home and abroad trying to find “security risks.” Donald Warwick, author of A Theory of Public Bureaucracy (1975 p.19) writes that “to become a “security risk,” one needed little more than an unflattering remark by a colleague.”

Ah, the bad old days. Don’t you just miss them?

I’m not saying that MLC was a security risk or that the bureau is still trying to fumigate the commies out there, just that the bureau’s “skittishness” may stem from its turbulent and sad history. In any case, I think we’ll let MLC rest in peace now. Let’s have a parade when she comes back.

Rumor is that the latest consular cable has an odd item discouraging the conception, immaculate or otherwise, of a consular blog. We shall see.

Twitter Delicious Digg Facebook Reddit StumbleUpon