Z Trek: The Alan Zeichick Weblog

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NetGear blinked – will continue VueZone video cloud service

Thank you, NetGear, for taking care of your valued customers. On July 1, the company announced that it would be shutting down the proprietary back-end cloud services required for its VueZone cameras to work – turning them into expensive camera-shaped…
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Ramsey Canyon and Fort Huachuca – A bird photographer’s paradise

We spent a long weekend in southern Arizona viewing wildlife, with time spent at birders’ paradises in Ramsey Canyon, as well as two canyons in Fort Huachuca: Huachuca Canyon and Garden Canyon. Wow. We saw and photographed so many incredible…
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The Birth of the Internet Plaque at Stanford University

In the “you learn something every day” department: Discovered today that there’s a plaque at Stanford honoring the birth of the Internet. The plaque was dedicated on July 28, 2005, and is in the Gates Computer Science Building. You…
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Internet over Carrier Pigeon? There’s a standard for that

There are standards for everything, it seems. And those of us who work on Internet things are often amused (or bemused) by what comes out of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). An oldie but a goodie is a document from 1999, RFC-2549,…
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A response from NetGear regarding the VueZone IoT trashcan story

Thank you, NetGear, for the response to my July 11 opinion essay for NetworkWorld, “Throwing our IoT investment in the trash thanks to NetGear.” In that story, I used the example of our soon-to-be-obsolete VueZone home video monitoring system:…
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It’s a fake award for SD Times – thank you, scammers!

Scammers give local businesses a faux award and then try to make money by selling certificates, trophies, and so-on. Going through my spam filter today, I received FIVE of this exact same message praising SD Times for winning the “2016…
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Coding in the Fast Lane: The Multi-Threaded Multi-Core World of AMD64

I wrote five contributions for an ebook from AMD Developer Central — and forgot entirely about it! The book, called “Surviving and Thriving in a Multi-Core World: Taking Advantage of Threads and Cores on AMD64,” popped up in this morning’s…
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Ten-and-a-half years of my Steelcase Think office chair and I still love it

After more than a decade of near daily use, I still love my Steelcase Think chair. Today is cleaning day at CAHQ (Camden Associates Headquarters). That means dusting/cleaning the furniture, as well as moving piles of papers from one part…

Real food vs yucky food – don’t eat what you don’t understand

Eat real food. Avoid food laden with additives, or which are overly processed. My family has a few rules which we follow pretty closely when shopping: Always look at the ingredients. The fewer ingredients, the better. (Food expert Michael…
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SharePoint 2016 On-Premises – Better than ever with a bright future

Excellent story about SharePoint in ComputerWorld this week. It gives encouragement to those who prefer to run SharePoint in their own data centers (on-premises), rather than in the cloud. In “The Future of SharePoint,” Brian Alderman writes, In…

A scammer owned by the “Christian Church”? I don’t think so.

Isn’t it reassuring to know that this scammer’s loan agency is “owned by the Christian Church”? Yeah, right. Don’t be fooled by these sorts of emails. The scammer’s next step would be to request sensitive personal information (like…
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Photo and artwork guidelines for people, products, logos and screen shots

If you are asked to submit a photograph, screen shot or a logo to a publication or website, there's the right way and the less-right way. Here are some suggestions that I wrote several years ago for BZ Media for use in lots of situations —…
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Beyond the fatal Tesla crash: Security and connected autonomous cars

Was it a software failure? The recent fatal crash of a Tesla in Autopilot mode is worrisome, but it’s too soon to blame Tesla’s software. According to Tesla on June 30, here's what happened: What we know is that the vehicle was on a divided…
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Crash! Down goes Google Calendar — cloud services are not perfect

Cloud services crash. Of course, non-cloud-services crash too — a server in your data center can go down, too. At least there you can do something, or if it’s a critical system you can plan with redundancies and failover. Not so much…
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Need propane? Refill your five-gallon tank, don’t do the exchange thing

What do you do when your 20-pound (5 gallon) propane tank is empty? If you are Alan, you go to a near-by filling station and refill the bottle. There’s a Shell station close by with gas-refilling capability. The cost is minimal. Filling…
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MEF LSO Hackathon at Euro16 brings together open source, open standards

The MEF recently conducted its second LSO Hackathon at a Rome event called Euro16. You can read my story about it here in DiarioTi: LSO Hackathons Bring Together Open Standards, Open Source. Alas, my coding skills are too rusty for a Hackathon,…
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When do we want automated emails? Now!

I can hear the protesters. “What do we want? Faster automated emails! When do we want them? In under 20 nanoseconds!” Some things have to be snappy. A Web page must load fast, or your customers will click away. Moving the mouse has…
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Celebrating Ada Lovelace and doubling the talent pool

Despite some recent progress, women are still woefully underrepresented in technical fields such as software development. There are many academic programs to bring girls into STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) at various stages…
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A good HR department is the No. 1 secret for a successful startup

It’s not intellectual property. It’s not having code warriors who can turn pizza into algorithms. It’s not even having great angel investors. If you want a successful startup that’s going to keep you in the headlines for your technology…
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Retrospective: 2010’s ESDC, the Enterprise Software Development Conference

Today’s serendipitous discovery: A blog post about the Enterprise Software Development Conference (ESC), produced by BZ Media in March 2010. I was the conference chair of that event; our goal was to try to replicate the wonderful SD West conference,…
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Special Mac option key symbols – your handy reference

I am often looking for these symbols and can’t find them. So here they are for English language Mac keyboards, in a handy blog format. They all use the Option key. Note: The Option key is not the Command key, which is marked with ⌘ (looped…
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Quantify the risk of automotive software failures: The SRR Warranty and Recall Report

The costs of an automobile recall can be immense for an OEM automobile or light truck manufacturer – and potentially ruinous for a member of the industry’s supply chain. Think about the ongoing Takata airbag scandal, which Bloomberg…
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Bird meet bug, bug meet bird

This is one of my all-time favorite photos, taken during a week-long vacation in Redmond, Oregon, summer 2012. We've been visiting the Eagle Crest resort every few years since the early 1990s — it's a magical place. Canon EOS 5D Mk…
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Remote exploits are coming to a car, truck or other vehicle near you

Connected cars are vulnerable due to the radios that link them to the outside world. For example, consider cellular data links, such as the one in the Mercedes M-class SUV that my family owned for a while, allow for remote access to more than…
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Enterprise risks when an employee can’t find a BYOD phone

There are several types of dangers presented by a lost Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) smartphone or tablet. Many IT professionals and security specialists think only about some of them. They are all problematic. Does your company have policies…
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KFC’s Watt-a-Box jolts the fast food industry in India

“Would you like amps with that?” Perhaps that’s the new side-dish question when ordering fast food. Yes, I’ll have three pieces of extra crispy chicken, potato wedges, cole slaw, unsweet iced tea and a cell-phone charging box. New…
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I’m rich from the Apple Kindle eBooks Antitrust Settlement

This just in — literally, at 8:58am on June 21 — an $8.50 credit from Amazon, paid for by Apple. I am trying to restrain my excitement, but in reality, it’s nice to get a few bucks back. This payout has been pending for a few months.…
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Howdy, podners: Sheriff Alan rocks the Cowboy Look

It’s not the usual fisherman-in-a-yellow-slicker¹ look of a born-and-bred Yankee: Here I am in my Western duds. It’s a surprisingly comfortable style, once the boots were broken in. What’s the occasion? Why am I wearing a black…
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Happy World WiFi Day!

WiFi is the present and future of local area networking. Forget about families getting rid of the home phone. The real cable-cutters are dropping the Cat-5 Ethernet in favor of IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks, generally known as WiFi.…
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The legacy application decommissioning ceremony

I once designed and coded a campus parking pass management system for an East Coast university. If you had a faculty, staff, student or visitor parking sticker for the campus, it was processed using my green-screen application, which went…