I have moved

check my new blog out at

http://www.geekswithblogs.com/dnewberger

Which File Extension Am I?

Which File Extension are You?

I got this from Jemimus who is on geekswithblogs.com

Valeries Discussion

THe main issue in this room is the education of tribal leaders and elders about techology.

Training-
ID who is cap of figureing out what is out there tech wise
training from leadership down
build there skills
mesure it by doing surveys

Funding-
when talking about funding you can look at the training to get what you need for writing a grant.
Universial services would be a good palce to look for more help on funding.
have clear cut goals to get grants
mesurment would depend on what the sorrunding area has and what you would like to do.
giftsinkind.org

Emerging technologies- skype, voip, rss, podcasting.

Top Issues at the ITI Conference

Here is a quick run down of the top issues here at ITI

• Native American Connectivity Act
• Re-writing the telocom act with more tribal influence
• Homeland Security (This seems to be a biggie)
• Universial services funding
• E-Rate
• VoIP
• Training for the community
• Corporate Influence on the tribal market.

ITI Elsten Speaks

Elsten is going to be speaking about setting standards and the tremoundus needs for these standards

ATNI-EDC has built a metric to show the digital divide between the tribes and major metro areas.

They have done metric on a tribe and followed it up a year later and have not see a bridging of that gap.

ATNI is a membership assocation and includes 53 tribes. ATNI was est. in 1953. It was made so the tribes could could act as one group to fight a consertive governemt that wanted to take tribal right away.

How can one measure the Digitial Divide? the metric was mentioned above is one way Elsten says. But no one knows if the state and federal governement will agree with a metric like this. The metric will allow tribes to certify

The definition of Digital divide is seen like this by ATNI

Transport
Distro
Access
Content

There should be intergration between this metric and content that will show the tribe has bridiged the divide.

Goal for closing the divide

Metro Equivilence
Universial access
Locally detemined content

metro equvilent bit price for makah was port angeles was about 148% different.

Basically ATNI-EDC uses a bunch of benchmarks and metrics to come up with a final solution what would be best fro each tribe to bridge the digital divide.

more to come I think.

ITI Ben Speaks

Ben and Alex Ratasmen are talking about how there tribe is using technology on there reservation.

This tribe is kinda over looked most of the time when it comes to homeland security.

There nation is 2.8 mil acrea
covers 76 miles of international border
recived a DOJ grant to set up wireless hot spots along a 75 mile strech of the interstate near them.

Agency Relation ships are very complex and include 3 county sheriffs plus the FBI etc....

Says not enough tribes have participated with the homeland security planning

Promoting the administrations idea of closing the borders at least long this international border.

Along this border there are 1500 imgrants entering this 76 mile legenth of border every day.

Also along this border there are nearly 100,000lbs. of drugs coming over this same border.

Finally along this border there have been 75 imigrant deaths this year alone.

The tribe has a community based policing agency.

3.2 million on law enforcement alone on this reservation.

within the past 12 months the interoperability between the cops shop and frie shops on this reservation.

The main question is where is the money to fund these projects that are being required by the US governement.

There seems to be a major disconnect with how the funds are being distributied. this funding should be overhauled.

Senete bill 578 was mentioned as a solustion to the issues that are being brought up. this is becuase it mentions tribal instead of federal and state alone.

The tribes must imbrace cooperation between then and the governments.

ITI NOW!!

Well here is a quick update. here at ITI we have just got back from lunch and visiting my IT offices. now they are talking about homeland security. more to come.

Dial Tone

A interesting thing was pointed out there are still people fighting to get a dial tone on reservation. So when people look at the broadband role out it's skewed. in the us in general there is 93% boradband connectivity but in reservations there are 67% broadband. This is a sad fact that in this day there are still people with out a dial tone.


As I write this there was a person speaking about the fact that she would have to pay $23,000US for her to get a phone line to her home.

Tribal Lands Bidding Credit

The FCC has said the Tribal Lands Bidding Credit initiave has not been well used. 12 people have showen interest in it and only 6 have gone beyond the short process but 0 have been throught the hole process. of the 12 people who showed interest most if not all were the one applying for the etc licence.

ITI Update 3

A few things of not in this update have to do with the content of the package we got.

FCC Auctions
Universal Licensing System
Consumer Facts on High speed internet "broadband"

but of all of the info in the packet the Low power FM Radio Fact sheet is the best.

There are few people who know about low power FM. I will post as much as this as possiable in the coming days and weeks cause there is so much info begin spewed here.

more to come.

ITI Wireless Spectrum Access

This was one of the shortest presentation I have seen so far.

As we all know the FCC tends to licences for 10 years and in 30 mhz blocks.

when they first did tis they piad special attention to companies that could produce the wide coverage area.

they have mention the aviabilty of small business credits to allow small bussiness in to the market.

The FCC has also mentioned the tribal lands credits to allow people to purchase spectrum on tribal lands.

some stats are as follow, 53 auctions, 51,200 licences given out, 14.4 billion put in to the tresury from the sale of the licence, and finally they have qualified 2,700 bidders to bid in these auctions.

there was also short in this section. there will be a Broadband PCS auction on january of 2005.

The FCC are working on std the processes, and to make sure tribal govenments have the last say when it comes to spectrum on there reservations.

On a funny note the FCC has just become accoicated with the term Wi-Fi

more to come.

ITI Blog Notes

HEllo, From the ITI conference in Worley, ID.

It was interesting to find out that some reservations still do not have some basic phone services like we have come to rely on. Here on the Coeur d'Alene Reservation there wasn't elec and phone services till about 50 years go.

The FCC see the relation between then and the tribes as very good.

The goal of ITI is to engage tribal access in to critical technologies.

The GAO is also here to find out about the state of telecommunications in Indian country.


The First session on IP-Enabled services was very interesting. The FCC has said that they do not want to monitor CALE services on Peer-to-Peer communications, but would like to monitor services are are carrier initaited.

Of interesting not is that in this meeting atleast the FCC does not see VoIP as a std telecommunication but as an information service. This could siginal the direction the fcc is going in todays announcement.


The FCC is also staying they are struggleing with someof the issues and would like to keep an open mind on this developing technology.

They have mentioned things like Provoal.com, vonage, and SBC to name a few.

They have also mention the fact that they are looking into what state regulations and fed regulations can do.

They are also concerned with 911/e911, inter carrier compinsations, universal services,the economics with common carriers, comsumer protection, Disabilty access, and finally rural access.

As I mentioned before they were talking about CALEA and how they want it for carrier based calls but not peer-to-peer calls.

They have also said they are working on promoting a wireless forum, broadband over powerlines, Modification of the unbinding rules to promote broadband service deployment and investment, finally they talked about section 706.

Basically they want to have a close ye on this subject but also keep a wide open mind on it.

I may not agree....

Now I may not fully agree with the business ethics of Microsoft but this seems to be a step in the right direction when it comes to helping out governments. I don't think this will stop Brazil from converting to Linux or Cities like Copenhagen but it will have a bit of an impact on the rest of the world.

Snippet:

Microsoft is trying to help governments stop reinventing the digital wheel.

As part of its many programs designed to keep government customers happy, the software giant has set up what it calls the Solutions Sharing Network, essentially a series of portals that government entities can use to post their own tips, procedures and even in-house software.

There is no cost to the governments that set up the site and the tools that they provide are also free to other governments that wish to adopt them. For example, the London Borough of Newham has posted a customer relationship management application that it developed.

"There is no restriction from Microsoft on what's hosted," said Oliver Bell, the program manager for the project.

So in theory, a government could post its own Linux implementation?

"They could do that," Bell said, but added "I'm not expecting them to."

Here it Comes!!!!!

Firefox, a browser based on the Mozilla Foundation's open-source development work, is scheduled to be available for free download at 1 a.m. PDT Tuesday.

WooHoo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Update: Feds expected to ease Net phone rules

This is from c|Net and I can't be happier.

The nation's top telephone regulators are widely expected to decide on Tuesday to further deregulate Internet phone services.

States would be barred from imposing telecommunications regulations on Net phone providers, which treat calls no differently than any other application on the Internet, according to those familiar with the Federal Communications Commission.

That class of operators includes Vonage Holdings, which asked the FCC for just such a designation last May, plus Verizon Communications, AT&T and dozens of other commercial Internet providers, according to those familiar with the FCC's thinking.

"This is going to be huge," said Jeff Pulver, co-founder of Free World Dialup, a free PC-to-PC telephone service provider that won exemption from federal and state regulations last year. "Otherwise, anyone who wanted to offer Internet phone services could be subject to 51 different sets of state regulations."

Here is the full article

Does CBS Really have room to speak

CBS has posted an article on the website about blogging comparing it to something that the author did while in school. I don't really think CBS has a leg to stand on when commenting on the blogging community because it will come off as "You screwed us so we will try to screw you."

Show Us Your Rack

Over on Kevin Devin's site he has asked people to show him there racks. Now before you go taking pictures of your girlfreind or wifes rack STOP!!! He is talking about your server room rack. So Check it out cause I want to see what other peoples racks look like.

American Rhetorics: top 100 speeches

American Rhetoric has posted it's list of the Top 100 speeches.

the top 5 are:

1. Martin Luther King, Jr.- "I Have A Dream"
2. John Fitzgerald Kennedy- Inaugural Address
3. Franklin Delano Roosevelt- First Inaugural Address
4. Franklin Delano Roosevelt- Pearl Harbor Address to the Nation
5. Barbara Charline Jordan- 1976 DNC Keynote Address

It looks like there is a new phishing scam going on.

Some of you may have received a message similiar to this one:

Congratulations! PayPal has successfully charged $175 to your credit card. Your order tracking number is A866DEC0, and your item will be shipped within three business days.

To see details please click this link.

DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE VIA EMAIL! This email is being sent by an automated message system and the reply will not be received.

Thank you for using PayPal.

The link is designed to take you to a web site that will attempt to compromise the security of your system.

If you get this message, delete it immediately. You will save yourself and others many headaches.

More on Open Source From IT-Director.com

In this article the author is describing how people are moving away from MS to open source and I think it's happening quicker then most people think.

Positive Moves For Open Source- A recent news release from Excedent, the parent company of Webmail.us, informs us that Webmail.us is migrating away from Microsoft to open-source. The company provides a hosted email service with virus filtering and spam blocking, for the mid market. The company believes that the move will improve the scalability of its service and its time to market (time to add new features). The open source products it will be using include Linux, SquirrelMail, PostFix, Courier and Clam A/V. Cost was not mentioned as a motivating factor, but it was probably part of the mix. Why is this significant? Well not because it happened, but because the company chose to press release it.

A Couple of Articles from IT-Director.com

The 2 articles below both have to deal with security but I realllty liked the 2nd one on Sourcefire. As most of you know I am an advocate for opensource software including firefox, openoffice, skpye, and snort. For intrusion detection snort is hands down the best in my opinion.

The 1st article has also got my attention because it tell as story of how MS is trying to secure it's OSes.

Microsoft and IT Security- Microsoft has come in for heavy criticism in recent years on the IT Security front, for obvious reasons. There are a vast number of Windows servers and PCs deployed in the corporate world and the Microsoft platforms have been the hackers’ primary target. However the problem doesn’t just belong to Microsoft. The reality is that the Internet has, by virtue of its rapid and fairly ad hoc expansion, created a huge playground for digital criminals and the digital criminals have created a loose network of their own, trading stolen information, software and various techniques for breaking in to systems.

Sourcefire - the open source answer to network security- In the past couple of years, technologies such as intrusion detection and protection systems have become mainstream tools in the corporate security arsenal. But many feel less than satisfied with the performance of some of these technologies. In particular, the number of false positives - when a legitimate piece of communication is flagged as being a possible security threat - is proving to be expensive for organisations in terms of the amount of time IT staff must spend dealing with what is actually legitimate traffic.

What Will the FCC Decide on VoIP

We may know as early as tomorrow if the FCC will decide to plaster the interstate label to VoIP. This would hurt the VoIP community because it could force a tax on the calls that we as users will have to pay. VoIP call in most peoples opinions (Not the Major telocoms though) are not interstate because they do not touch the PSTN and this is what I believe as well. I use Skype to make a lot of my phone calls al over the world and I am waiting for the calls to landline phone to be free on skype as well. When they do this Skype will be come the end all be all solution to VoIP.

I'm Not sure what to think of this one

this just seems like a way for the gov to find a way to find out what people are doing on the internet like carnivore.

NSA plots software center:

The National Security Agency's top information security official disclosed plans this week for a government-funded research center devoted to improving the security of commercial software, calling the initiative a modern-day Manhattan Project. Comparing the proposed high-assurance software initiative to the famous atomic bomb research project of the 1940s, NSA's director for information assurance, Daniel Wolf, said the research would focus on tools and techniques for writing secure software and detecting malicious code hidden in software. Before NSA officials can create the center, the Defense secretary must approve the concept and find money for the project, Wolf said.

Say hello to my little friend. Yes folks I got a tattoo 

This is Bear Now 6 months later

This is a Picture of my dog Bear at 2 month

And Once Again The US Patent System Screws up on Technology patents

Yes folks it has happend for about the billionth time in the last few years. DE Technologies has gotten a patent for covering international transactions handled over the computer. something that some of us do on a daily basis and they are now sueing dell for a portion of there profits. Here is the Cnn article on it.

When will the US Patent Office get a fricking clue. Things like this should NOT Be patented.

Geek Guy Out

Little help

Does anyone know of a way to tranfer your skype contacts from one computer to another? If so please email me or if you have skype

Geek Guy Out

Hmmm

I think this person needs some computer help.

Lets all Welcome The Browser that will topple IE

You all know what I'm talking about Firefox. This browser was stated by a 13 year old who like netscape as an alternative to IE. Well this 13 year old is now 18 and has what I think will be the browser to take a big bite out of Micro$ofts browser market share and ultimately harolds the downfall of the Internet Explorer browser. This browser has been eating away at the MS market share and is looking to have a 10 % share by 2005. I have been using it for 1 year now and I love it. I plan on advocating a network wide switch to Firefox as well as deployment of Firefox to the new technology center.

• O'Rilley has a good article on how Firefox is shrinking the MS market share
• Spreadfirefox.com is a place to show your support for the browser
• Finally if you are a new convert to Firefox The Boston Globe wants to hear from you!!!

Geek Guy Out

When the Market is there Cisco Will come

Network World published an article about Cisco's move to residential IP services. Here is a quote from the article

Cisco is looking to grab a chunk of the customer premises equipment market when converged IP residential services catch on and demand blooms for multifunction home appliances, the company's home-gear president says.

You can read more by following this link. It seems to me that the US is algging in areas like this.I look forward to seeing this happen and can not wait for the US to catch up with the rest of the world when it comes to networked home appliances.

Learning about Computer Science and IT Management

I have been surfing the web looking at college level courses on computer science and I have found 2 useful links.

The first is for people who are just getting started with programming or are taking a High School AP course in the subject. As you High School avers know the test is in the java language. With that in mind you should check out John Ramirez' CSS 401 course from the university of Pittsburgh. He has provide a wealth of information on his course to the point of being able to follow along. I would also recommend the 'Java By Dissection' textbook he has suggested. The reason for this is because it give great beginner and intermediated level information on the java programming language.

The second site is called OpenCourseWare and it is provided by MIT. This site provides more upper level classes then the undergrad classes. One place of great interest on this site is the Sloan School of management. The interest for me came from viewing all of the courseware media on IT management that they have.

I know there are many more useful links out there for learning about IT and computer science in general but I wanted to showcase these two site to begin with.

Geek Guy Out

Help Doc Searls Out with podcasting

This is from Doc Searls It Garage Website:

I've been getting a lot of urging lately to do what seems inevitable, given my extroverted nature and my background as a Radio Guy — which is to start podcasting.

I suppose I will; but first I'd like to issue a challenge to those who'd like to help — not just me, but anybody from the DIY-IT community who wants to podcast: give us ways (or show us ways that already exist) to podcast from Linux platforms. The means already exist to podcast easily from OS X and Windows platforms. But I have a professional interest in podcasting on Linux. As well as something of a moral one: I believe that podcasting will arrive at its most open and universal standards and practices when it's not limited or biassed, conceptually or practically, to closed and silo'd devices like the iPod after which podcasting is named.

While I enjoy and appreciate the iPod (as do millions of others), and while I believe that it pioneers a whole new category of device (no less important, culturally, than the transistor radio, forty-some years ago), it is designed to live in Apple's silo, rather than as a free-range device in the world.

Linux is free-range.

So if any of ya'll can point me to whatever I need to podcast from this here Linux laptop (SuSE 9.1 on a ThinkPad T-40), let me kmow. If it's early enough, I'll share it at Bloggercon this weekend. And in Linux Journal, soon as I can.

Thanks!

I am sure a lot of people have an easy way to cast on a linux box.

Geek Guy Out

This is news to me

I just got an email from my cousin about the geek dinner mentioned below. It seems there is a small informal group who meets on the 2nd Tuesday of the month. You can find out more on there website.

I still think I am going to proceed with the geek dinner if enough people respond but this is another out let for the local people.

Geek Guy Out

When will upper management learn to respect the little people

I was reading a post by Jemimus yesterday that brought home a sad hard fact for me and others in the IT world. If you what to keep on top of new technology you must be a jack of all trades and a master of none(or in my case a master of one maybe two at best). Well this seems to be unacceptable to a lot of upper level management who demand that people master and work on one subject for the rest of there tenure at said business. This is total crap when you focus on one thing you will not see the next great thing if it hit you in the face. We must keep up by keeping our minds open to everything out there and not let what some in management may think about certain technology drive our own direction.

Please discuss.

Geek Guy Out

Get your Gmail Messages in your news aggregated

Some users are reporting a Atom Icon in there gmail accounts so you can view your emails with your news aggragator.

Here are 2 link to this new info:

http://blog.codefront.net/archives/2004/10/04/gmails-new-features-atom-feed/
http://www.webstractions.com/news/2004/10/adding-gmail-inbox-to-your-news-reader.html

If this is true I will be the first to start using it considering I have 9 account to look though on a daily basis

It's About Damn time

Finally the Cable companies are going to fight the telocos for market share in the business world. here is an exceprt from the Network World article:

Think your cable TV company is just for video and residential VoIP? Think again. Cable multisystem operators are building a strong presence as providers of business telecom services, particularly to small and midsize businesses.

In the U.S. alone there are approximately 5.4 million SMBs, about 98% of which are passed by upgraded cable facilities, according to Current Analysis. U.S. businesses will spend roughly $3.2 billion on cable modem services this year, as compared with an estimated $3.3 billion for DSL services, according to In-Stat/MDR.

I for one say woohoo!! becuase now maybe we can get some decent rates on business service here in the US.

Geek Guy Out

Tap dancing Podcaster

The people in the podcasting world have heard about the tap dancing podcaster but some other may not know about this.

The first person to tell me about the tap dancing podcaster was Jemimus so I had to go to openpodcast.org and listen to it. The podcast is a women giving a news brief while tap dancing. Well the identity of this person has been found out:

http://webwire.com/TopTenView.asp?id=4444

her podcast are #43 and #65 on openpodcast.org

Geek Dinner

This is a shout out to all the people in the Spokane,WA /Coeur d'Alene, ID are of the USA. IF you are interested in haveing geek dinner or get together let me know.

I can be reached in the following ways:

• Here in the comments section


• if you have skype


• or by emailing me at thegeekguy@gmail.com

Geek Guy out

Pod Casting

I know I know I have said I would post here on a daily baises but I just couldn't do it. I had to make some nurological connection for it finally work. I had to take some steps about getting over writing fears and such. So here we go.

Since late august there has been a new phenomon happening on the internet called podcasting. in just under 3 months podcasting has taken off and people are scrambleing to find uses for it. I my self thought of many business and personal uses for it when I first heard about it and have been working on bringing those dreams to life. I hope to do my own full fledged podcast in the next few weeks. I also hope to have the business podcasting up and running by the first of the year.

For some news on pod casting check out the following links:

• Adam Curry's The Daily Source Code: This is a must listen to podcast for anyone.
  
• Austraillan Brocasting Company: Music of the Blogospheres
• ipodder.org: a Directoy of podcasts as well as a directory for podcast aggrogators like ipodder and doppler
• Jemimus has posted a very good list of podcast for people to listen to
• audio.weblogs.com: This site has links to the 100 newest feed

I think that is all I have to post for now. but check beck here for my own podcasts in the future.

Geek Guy Out

PS: I hope to be blogging the ITI conference on the 9 and 10th of this months. which is next monday and tusday I think. So check back here to find out how it goes.