Technology Bytes

Allright. I’m sticking with the TV theme of the night. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the skit from Sesame Street with Lefty the Salesman trying to sell the Golden AN. The plan went something like, “Take the Golden AN, put it in the tan van. Give it to Dan, who takes it to Fran.” He can’t quite keep the order together, so he audibly tries to work it out. Which would have been fine had a police officer named Stan not been passing within earshot. Stan gives him “ten days in the can for stealing the Golden AN.” The skit ends with Lefty saying “I should have ran!”

If you’re old enough to remember that skit, you may, from time to time, have issues with the myriad of ANs that exist in the world of computers today. From WANs to MANs to LANs and even CANs, PANs and HANs, it seems like there’s a new Lefty at every elecronics show trying to move yet another AN. So how do you keep them all straight? To help you out, we’ll borrow a bit from Grover’s Near and Far skit. I don’t know if Jay Lee has a Grover in addition to his Kermit, but the skit entails Grover running into the foreground of the television frame, shouting NEAR, running to the background, shouting FAR. That’s pretty much it. For our own AN tour, we’ll start with Far and work our way up to Near.

The universal bulding block in this excercise is the AN, which stands for Area Network. The network is the medium used to connect any number devices or users to other devices and/or users. So really, all you have to do is learn and understand the first letter of each Area Network acronym. It’s not like I’m asking you to memorize CCMP. Anyone want to take a guess at that? CCMP? It’s my latest acronym.

Counter Mode with Cipher Block Chaining Message Authentication Code Protocol aka the new 802.11i encryption protocol that does away with parts of WEP and WPA.

*You* don’t have to memorize that. All you have to do is remember ‘Area Network’ and make an educated guess at the first letter.

So, starting with farthest out, we’ve got the WAN or Wide Area Network. If you have a hardware router or wireless access point at home, chances are it has a WAN port on the back that you connect to whatever device provides your broadband. And that’s what a WAN is, a large network designed to cover very large distances. Several routing protocols exist to make this happen, with TCP/IP (or Transmission Control Protocol slash Internet Protocol) being the most widely known. So when you see WAN, think Internet, and plug things in accordingly.

A little closer to home we have the LAN. This is the Local Area Network that interconnects all the computers in your home or all of the computers in a small office. Most home broadband routers, firewalls, and Wireless Access Points will have a LAN port on the back. Some have several. If the WAN port faces the Internet, then the LAN side faces the computers on your side of the device. Most LANs use a certain class of TCP/IP address that isn’t routable on the WAN. These IP addresses usually start with a 192, 172 or 10. And if you remove the wires, you’ve got a WLAN, or Wireless Local Area Network. So that’s your one hard AN acronym. Technically, you can have up to 254 hosts on a LAN. If you want to go beyond that, say, in a large office environment, you have to look back to the WAN or decide to go MAN.

Now there’s some gray area surrounding MANs. MANs are Metropolitain Area Networks and can usually be recognized by their exellent personal grooming habits (that’s where the term MANscaping comes from), their fashionable wardrobe and their stylish accessories. Remember: It’s not a purse, it’s a Metropolitain Area Network Bag. Actually, it’s a purse.

Continuing the run into the foreground, we have CANs. CANs or Controller Area Networks, have already been deployed in newer automobiles, in factories and even in some hospitals. These simple network devices replace short runs of wire where wire just won’t do, letting things like the air pressure sensors in your car’s valve stems communicate with your car’s controller, flashing a ‘low air pressure’ warning on the dash. Another application is letting multiple pieces of medical equipment communicate with each other without the need for runs of wires all around the operating table, tripping both doctors and nurses.

HANs or Home Area Networks are definitely the new hotness. This network connects household appliances like washers and dryers to Smart Energy Meters and thermostats that are popping up in parts of Texas. With a HAN, you can easily do things like schedule your washer and dryer to run when energy prices are low. And your appliances will know the current price of electricity because the SmartMeter on the outside of the house makes that information available to the main HAN controller. Giving you the ability to turn on your AC remotely or even pre-heat the oven if you’re on the way home from the store with some frozen fare.

Both Controller Area Networks and Home Area Networks take advantage of low power devices with a very small form factors. The ZigBee standard is one that’s being leveraged more and more these days, due to the small size and the fact that it can run months if not years on a single battery. If you remember WarDriving or using Network Stumbler in the early days of WiFi, know that this is going to be the next version of that. There’s already a Network Stumbler-esque program for the ZigBee standard, which is quickly becoming the defacto standard for HANs and CANs.

And finally, the PAN, or Personal Area Network. BlueTooth is an excellent example of this. PANs let you connect personal devices to other personal devices. For instance, streaming music from your phone to another BlueTooth device, like a pair of wireless headphones. Several of Dwight’s mice would also land in that category, along with any kind of pairing you do between your phone and your laptop or car.

So, you’re now ready to handle anything “AN”, golden or otherwise.

To check out some PAN, HAN and CAN gear in person, come out to this Friday’s Geek Gathering, happening at the Coffee Groundz in Midtown Houston at McGowan between Bagby and Brazos. Things get started at seven and can go quite late. We’ve lined up our own 8-bit DJ for a return performance, along with Brenden Macaluso of Recompute. He’ll be bringing at least one Recomputer, a very green PC that’s made of corrugated cardboard held together with non-toxic white glue. We’ll also have a smattering of Arduino gear and open source hardware. WiFi and electricity are free, but coffee, beer, wine, liquor and food will set you back a dollar or two. All of this happens this Friday starting at seven on the Siete de Mayo.

And while that’s nearly it for the cessation of your Cinco de Mayo, that’s that for BarretTime.

One of the recurring stories we heard after Hurricane Ike involved loss of data. Computers and external storage devices that were destroyed as a result of flooding. In an ideal world we’d all back up our data twice and keep a copy with us and store another copy off-site for insurance. But even that doesn’t give you any guarantees in a city wide catastrophe that could conceivably wipe our your primary AND your secondary backup locations.

We all have to come to our own decisions when it comes to protecting our data. Many of us tend to be rather lax about making backups and when we do, we only make the one copy. And for those situations it might be worth considering the ioSafe Fireproof Waterproof Solo External Hard Drive.

Guaranteed to be Fireproof to 1550° F for ½ hour
Guaranteed to be Waterproof to 10 feet of fresh water or salt water for 3 full days

The drive comes with a 3 Year Warranty and a $1,000 Data Recovery Service in the event that the company cannot retrieve your data in the event of a disaster.

The ioSafe is not an inexpensive, lightweight desktop external storage device, it’s a hefty data protection system weighing in at 15 lbs and costing from $199 for the 500 gigabyte model all the way up to $449 for the two terabyte version. And there are additional fees for additional warranty coverage

This thing is a black box for your data. Your house may burn to the ground or be submerged under several feet of water, but you will have some peace of mind knowing your data has been given a fighting chance.

You can learn more by clicking here.

The one certainty of life along the Gulf Coast is that it’s going to be hot this summer. And things start heating up next week with a sizzling sale at Directron’s Bi-Annual Customer Appreciation Day. Directron is a national e-tailer with a storefront here in Houston. In addition to a giving you a free sub and cold drink to keep the temperatures of May at bay, they are bringing out representatives from several tech companies to field questions from the public.

AMD, Asus, Cooler Master, Evercool, Gigabyte, Intel, Microsoft, MSI and SuperMicro to name a few. Not that I would want to incite any friction at this kind of event, but it would definitely be fun to bus in some Linux evangelists to hand out leaflets outside the festivities. Are you listening, LUGs?

All of this goes down on Thursday, May 6th, from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM at Directron on Harwin Drive.

If you subscribe to the old addage of ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire’, then things are heating up over at Apple, too. Let’s ignore the fact that police have executed a possibly illegal search warrant at the home of the journalist who accepted the infamous ‘found iPhone’ from a California college student and go straight to a smokin’ hot new app hitting iPhones around the nation.

So…Apple has approved a game for inclusion into the App Store called “Puff Puff Pass”, a game where up to five players choose a cigarette, a cigar or a pipe, a location (either indoors or out) and a time frame, then puff and pass as many times as they can before the clock runs out. I’d be curious to know exactly when this hit the App Store… It probably wouldn’t be such a big deal if Apple hadn’t previously banned Wi-Fi searching apps, political parody apps, apps that constitute duplicate functionality, third party code translation frameworks, (*cough* Flash *cough*), an LCD buyers guide and a port of Leisure Suit Larry. I’ve still never gotten to play that game and it looks like I never will, at least on the iPhone.

While the water may be a little warm on the Apple side of the pool, the Android half is doing fine. If you’re running Android 2.0 or better, you will soon have yet another web browser to choose from. A pre-alpha build of FireFox is now available for the platform, and though it’s far from optimized, it does bode well for both Android phones and especially the oncoming onslaught of Android powered tablets.

And if we continue to peer through the tablet Looking Glass, we can see things heating up between users of the HP tablet and those of the iPad. Apparently, there’s some contention in the world of tablet users as to which is best, with lines often being drawn along business Use Cases. Apple could potentially wipe the Slate clean with updates allowing the iPad to be more business-y, much like they tried to do with the iPhone in 2008.

I don’t know: trying to blend the world of business with the world of entertainment may not go so well. Of course I would like a single device akin to Captain Picard’s Ready Room briefing tablet to use at both work and home, but “Business Up Front, Party in the Back” may only produce the digital equivalent of a mullet. I think that Apple should stick to the home experience while HP carves out a place in the business world. Whatever may transpire in the tablet arena, there’s certainly no end to the flames spewing from both camps.

And here at home, we have five Fridays in the month of April, meaning that we are experiencing a bit of a drought as far as user group get-togethers go. In fact, attendees of our Geek Gathering will have gone a full five weeks since having a chance to level their D&D characters, knit a summer scarf, or lay down dark digital tracks from the DJ booth. DJ table. That’s coming up Friday, May 7th, but for now, that’s it for this puff-puff-passing of my Apple angst and that’s that for BarretTime.

Allright. I’m back among the living after my human body hosted a pretty nasty virus for the better part of a week. If I had had some sort of robotic telepresence in the studio last Wednesday, I would have informed you that the first National Robotics Week took place April 10th through the 18th. There were a number of events across the country, with a notable robotics meetup in Dallas along with a number of Robot Block Parties across the nation. The goal of Robotics week is to raise awareness about how robotics technology impacts society and to inspire students of all ages to pursue careers in robotics and other science, technology, engineering and math-related fields. www.nationalroboticsweek.org for a redux on the 10th through the 18th or to look ahead to the second National Robotics Week, taking place in 2011.

And to get you started off on the right foot, tread, track, or whatever your current means of motility may be, the HAL-PC Robotics SIG is meeting this Saturday, April 24th, at one in the afternoon at the HAL-PC headquarters. 4543 Post Oak Place Drive is where you’ll want to be to start building your robot army.

In addition to helping Houstonians welcome our new robotic overlords, HAL-PC offers a vast support network for pretty much whichever area of personal computing that interests you. And if things like Ubuntu, Slackware, Debian, Mint, or even the very word ‘distro’ excite you, then you’ll want to be at the second of two monthly meetings of the Houston Linux Users Group, aka the Linux SIG. The group meets this Saturday at two in the afternoon at the same location as the Robotics SIG. Just follow the fleeing humans upstream to SIG Room C.

For a complete listing of Special Interest Group activities, surf to www.hal-pc.org.

On a side note, the long awaited first beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 was made available for download earlier today. The Enterprise Linux 6 Beta aims to blur the lines between virtual, physical and cloud computing in order to address the shifts taking place in the modern IT environment. Available for the Intel 386, AMD and Intel 64 bit processors, the System z and IBMs Power platforms, ISO’s are available at www.redhat.com/rhel/beta.

Remember, Linux is a great alternative to getting mired down in the ever contentious Mac vs PC war. And if you’re feeling uber enough to shun Linux, there’s always the BSDs: derivatives of the Berkeley Software Distribution derivative of Unix, of which FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD are kings. Really, the only way to win a discussion about which Operating System is the best is not to get into a discussion about which Operating System is best in the first place.

On the North side of town, Alex Dumestre will be giving a two hour presentation on the use of PaintShop Pro X3, including its Organization and Express Lab capabilities. He’ll also touch on creating slide shows using ProShow Gold, getting the finished product on DVD, Blu-Ray or even the Web. The presentation wraps up with a finished slide show of a trip down an Eastern European river. All of this takes place under the umbrella of the 1960 PC Users Group this Thursday from seven to nine PM. Hit www.1960pcug.org for details and directions.

And tomorrow is Earth Day. This one is special not only because the Earth is still currently controlled by humans, but because tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of the Holiday. To honor this occasion, the Contractor Recycling Partnership has organized the second annual Electronics Waste (or E-waste) collection event to be held on April 24 at Space Center Houston. The event is free and open to the public from 8 a.m. to noon. TVs and white goods (such as washing machines, microwaves and dryers) will not be permitted at this event, but all other computer-related electronics will be accepted. I would assume that they’ll be recycling the non-fleshy bits of cyborgs, too, so if you’ve got some parts from the old Cyberdine T-850 Series that you can’t seem to melt down, this is your chance to get rid of them. That’s right – let the good folks at the Johnson Space Center drain the last bit of life out of those glowing red eyes for you… No muss, no fuss.

That’s it for this week’s robo-rendezvous and that’s that for BarretTime.

Barett Canon and phliKtid were out sick and could not make the show. Conversations included Apple fanboi-ism and iPhone jailbreaking.

Technology Bytes Podcast For April 14th, 2010 [ 1:59:22 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

On last night’s show we had a number of people calling in about jailbreaking the iPhone.

From About.com

In essence, jailbreaking your iPhone means freeing it from the limitations imposed on it by AT&T and Apple. You install a software application on your computer, and then transfer it to your iPhone, where it “breaks open” the iPhone’s file system to allow you to modify it.

Something we want to make abundantly clear is that taking action to jailbreak your iPhone can have dire consequences. Not only could it damage or destroy your iPhone if done incorrectly, it can also void your warranty. You should also know that there are abundant scams on the Internet that specifically target those who might want to explore the jailbreaking option.

One of our callers mentioned a web site that will provide you with the code to do this for a fee. We responded to the caller that you have no real assurance that the code provided isn’t malicious. To make our point for us, MacDailyNews published this article today called The Microsoft Tax: DNS Windows PC Trojan poses as iPhone unlock utility; Mac and iPhone unaffected

An application that offers to unlock iPhones is actually designed to hijack Internet connections on compromised Windows PCs, security watchers warn,” John Leyden reports for The Register.

While this malicious code only seems to affect Windows computers, who’s to say what the modification to the iPhone REALLY are in ANY of these applications? If you’re going to let someone you don’t know make modifications that could potentially destroy your device or compromise your personal data you are simply playing with fire.

At Technology Bytes we’re fully aware that users of technology like to tinker and we’re neither anti nor pro jailbreak. We just want our listeners to have all the facts.