And this one has Path Finder.

The ABCs as told by my cat Chloe:

A is for All the food that should be in my dish
B is for Bone dry, like my dish is right now
C is for the Cat food that should be in my dish
D is for Dish.... Duh....
E is for Everything that should be in my dish right now
F is for Food... Which if your were paying attention, should be in my dish now...
G is for Grub, which I want... In the dish...
H is for the Hole, which my dish kinda is, without food
I is for Irritated, which I am, because of the dish thing...
J is for Just feed me
K is for Kitchen, where my dish is
L is for Love, which I will express toward you, post dish-filling
M is for Mine... Like my dish
N is for Now, which is when I'd like food
O is for Only, as in the only thing I want
P is for Pantry, where the food for my dish is
Q is for Quite, which I vow not to be until the dish is filled
R is for Really really hungry
S is for Steak, which I see you wish to eat in peace, while I wait for my dish...
T is for Trust, which is what I had in you... For my dish...
U is for Unfortunate, which is what the consequences of not adequately filling my dish are.
V is for Vicious... What I can be... If need be...
W is for Where is my food?
X is for Ex owner.....
Y is for WHY????
Z is for Zero... Which is what you are if you don't pay attention to the dish...

She loves me... Deep in there somewhere...

This is not just a topic of debate for businesses and large enterprises, but also for your personal data at home. Do you use your local ISP's email, downloaded via POP3, or do you use gmail/yahoo/hotmail? Do you keep all your digital photos on your hard drive or do you have a flickr/picasa/photobucket/snapfish account? Do you use Google Docs, Zoho or Microsoft's Office Web Apps? How about Facebook/MySpace/Twitter?

What about online backups like carbonite? or File synchronization services like dropbox, box.net, etc? or file sharing systems like cloudApp?

The real question I'm asking is: how much control have you actually maintained over your data? Do you know where it's all at? Or how many people have access to it?

I'm not saying there's necessarily anything wrong with having your data spread out, either... but it is food for thought.

Here's an even scarier thought: you may know which companies you trusted with your data, and where their headquarters are, but... do you know in what country their datacenters are in? or who they outsourced your data to? You may have laws that protect your data in the US, but what about Brazil? Europe? Southeast Asia?

Some have said that it's old fashioned to think of your data as your own, or of the details of your life as private any longer. And perhaps all of the above is just part of the a massive paradigm shift in computing, culture and privacy. Perhaps it's an unpleasant (pleasant?) side affect of progress.

Be informed.

By day I do a lot of work with very large databases. By night, I work on smaller databases all the time, many to do with minotaur. One thing I really like about Microsoft SQL Server is The SQL Studio. Of course, this is a product limited to 1) the windows platform and 2) MS SQL Server. So what are the best options out there for MySQL database management for the mac? I've found two options.



1) Navicat for MySQL for Mac

The light version of Navicat is available in the mac app store for free. It does not contain the visual view builder and other advanced features, but this is a VERY good option for mac users. You can design tables, write functions, save queries, write views, etc etc etc. It is a very mac-like experience even though it is a cross-platform application; they obviously took time to work on making the experience for mac users very fluid.



2) MySQL Workbench

The official GUI. A while ago, I would have never recommended it, but it has been through so much development of late that it is stable, fast, the experience is pretty fluid, and it works very well on the mac. The biggest advantages here are that 1) it's the same interface that your windows and linux colleagues will see and use, which provides for a better better collaborative experience and 2) it has all sorts of system management options. Oh, also... it's free.

Right now, I'm using both. I haven't figured out how to save queries to the server in workbench like I can in Navicat. Navicat is still a better mac-like experience and feels more optimized to me. Workbench though is a lot fuller featured, is the official GUI and is what a lot of your colleagues will be using, if they use a GUI at all (and no, phpMyAdmin does not count).

Why use a GUI at all? Well, if your asking that, I'm probably not writing this article for you to begin with... I tend to think in parallel. I think and work on many different tasks at the same time and swap between them really quickly. Therefore, a proper GUI with plenty of tabs in windows works best for me, especially when it comes to analytics. I find I can keep my train of thought better.

Any other/better packages out there?

When I get home in the evenings, I catch up on the world through podcasts. I have my main iMac downloading them throughout the day as soon as there is an update for any of them. Then I usually watch them on my Apple TV, because using the Apple Remote on my iPad and iPhone, I can play a video playlist on my AppleTV, something you can't do straight from the interface. I have a smart playlist called "Unwatched Videos" which is just a smart (always updating) list of all the podcasts I haven't watched yet. I also watch in other ways, since not every podcasts is available in iTunes.

So what are the podcasts I think are must-see?




1. ScreenCasts Online - Yes, it's a paid subscription, but this is an absolute must for any mac user. Each week (or every other week) Don McAllister publishes a tutorial on a different mac application.



2. CNET - All HD Videos - Subscribe in iTunes, search for "cnet all hd videos" and subscribe to the all hd videos feed - this is basically every hd podcasts and video release that cnet makes.



3. webbeat.tv - geek news - web



4. geekbrief.tv - same company as webbeat - geek news - gadget



5. The Hacker News Network - All security news, tool updates, upcoming cons, and color commentary in one place.



6. The IGN Daily Fix - All the gaming news you need.



7. AppAdvice Daily - face it, the app store changes too much to keep up. Let AppAdvice do it for you and tell you what's hot.



8. The Apple Keynotes feed - search in iTunes for "Apple Keynotes" - this feed is updated with an hd video of each apple keynote talk, shortly after the talk occurs.



9. The Best of YouTube - Maybe you're not interested in the Numa Numa guy, or double rainbows, or chocolate rain... but your friends are and it's part of current culture, whether you like it or not. Rather than spend all your time surfing through mindless dribble in an attempt to understand, watch only the best videos, filtered down for you, laugh, learn and sometimes even be amazed at what the rest of the world does in their spare time.



10. YMPNow - Not available (that I know of) in iTunes, subscribe to the youtube channel instead. I love the format of this one, concise, informative and always a "say-what?" story at the end. The format reminds me of Qwiki.com (who I am hoping comes up with a daily podcast)

So there's a few. I'm sure there are more, and would love to hear about your favorites in the comments of this article.

Following on with yesterday's article on my complicated network here, I wanted to write a bit about dealing with a heterogeneous network with multiple internal ecosystems.

I have windows machines, macs, game consoles, media devices and everything in between, and I imagine that part is fairly normal. But I have more complete ecosystems than that.

On the Apple side, I have desktop macs, a MacBook Air, an iPad, and iPhone, an Apple TV, etc.

On the Windows side of the house, I have desktops, laptops, severs, and a full windows domain, exchange server, share point, etc.

I also am a tester of the Google Cr-48 ChromeOS netbook, and several other proprietary systems.

So... How do they all fit together? How do you make them play nice so that you don't spend most of your time fixing incompatibilities? This is a very important question, and there is more to it than just the technology. There is more to achieving network harmony than just making the devices talk to each other, you need to find out where they fit in your life and in your workflows. And sometimes you'll find that they simply don't, at which pint you have two options: if this is your hobby and you enjoy tinkering and making things work no matter what, you keep the device and play, but if you know you need to focus more on life and less on the technology that surrounds it, de-complicate your life and get rid of the pieces that don't fit. This is the basis of my post yesterday.

The Apple ecosystem works together very, very well. iTunes does a fantastic job, especially with home sharing, of bringing your content to each of your many devices. All the devices see each other and talk to each other with no problems and you get the sense that each piece of the puzzle was made for the next.

The windows ecosystem works daily well. When you join the workstations to the domain, all the resources you get on one machine, you get on the others, and as long as you are smart about your network shares, etc, it works well. Microsoft Office and Exchange are great systems.

And speaking of exchange, that's my first tie-in. My macs and iDevices all talk to exchange so all my email, calendar, and contacts are kept in sync, no matter the platform. I suppose this could even be true on my Linux boxes if I used Evolution. This also the first problem with the Cr-48. The other components of my various ecosystems ares built to work together, even if it was a reluctant process originally. ChromeOS is more centered on google services which would rather you migrate your infrastructure to google than sync with your existing infrastructures.

Next is network shares. Everything understands SMB, so windows shares are king. My main storage is a windows share, but I have a pogoplug and
other dlna based systems as well. This means that all my documents, and especially my media, on this devices is accessible on my game consoles and other tv-connected devices. Even my new router has a USB port for connecting a storage device to share out to your computers and dlna devices.

When mail, contacts, calendars, and documents are all accede no matter which device you are logged into, that's the bulk of your compatibility issues. The rest is workflow and harmony.

Workflow is very important. I use some mac-only applications for development and graphics. I use those applications because they work for me. It's important to find the apps that work for you, and build around them.

Harmony is also very important. Once you know the require pieces of your workflow, each component you add needs to have harmony with those required pieces. In my case, I know I need to work from a mac some of the time, so given the choice of media boxes, I know I need something that works well with those macs. That let me to use the appletv instead of say, the roku or boxed box, but those can be made to work well for you as well, each with different strengths, strengths and weaknesses.

The point with harmony is that regardless if you can technically make something talk to something else (compatibility) if it takes more work than it's worth to use that compatibility, or if it disrupts the workflow or even the consistent feeling of your device ecosystem, then it's not worth it.

So Compatibility, Workflow and Harmony are my key areas for making heterogenous technology work for you in one environment.

I have a network layout that's probably a lot more complicated than most households. That's because I have my machines, game consoles, appliances online next to corporate boxes, work machines, next to my lab machines, next to live malware analysis units.

So last year when it came time to replace the aging Symantec SGS firewall/router, I looked at other enterprise-grade gear. After doing a lot of research that took way too much of my time, I figured I wanted something with content filtering, in-line antivirus, antimalware, etc. of course I'd need the lab and malware machines excluded from this, but I wanted to protect the others.

After reviewing several vendors, I settled on sonicwall, and proceeded to purchase a TZ 210W. This is a great little solution that would probably be great in a normal small office environment, but in my crazy hybrid home/office/lab environment, I've run into several issues.

First, the game consoles and other devices are more and more requiring the use of UPnP on your network to open holes to the outside world to enable to-way communications. Of course, this is kinda scary if you have corporate information on a network, so you'd not want UPnP on an office network.

Second, content filtering got in the way far more than I thought it would... Nothing would stream without going through the filters first so I had issues with large downloads, and things like YouTube video streams. Of course, you can exempt file types and internal ip addsses, but it felt like I was excluding the whole network.

Third, throughput was designed for security, and an office environment. My cable modem at home gets greater than 20mb/s from my provider, and any UTM appliance slows down throughput, so I ended up turning off most of the UTM services, even the ones I thought were really cool.

Fourth, I had some wifi incompatibilities with this box and ended up having to have a second acess point. To be fair, I started a support ticket on this, but never got around to calling them back and working with them.

Now none of this is the fault of sonic wall or the device, but I am just finding it hard to use enterprise-grade equipment at home without serious tradeoffs.

So I started researching prosumer-grade gear. I looked at the NetGear WNDR3700 and the Lynksys E3000, and all the variations of the NetGear. I looked at all the Chet reviews and amazon coments and I decided on the WNDR37AV.

Before the unit came in though, I was standing in line at BestBuy and saw a box for the Linksys E4200... doh! Ompetely forgot about that one, because I had only just seen the review video for it. When I got home I looked up all the stats, and sure enough, it was way better and fixed the flaws in the E3000 that made me go with the netgear. So I went back to best buy the next day and picked up the E4200.

So far, my throughput is greatly improved. I have some wifi issues to work out, but already it is better than either of the old access points. It has enough port forwarding capabilities for me to keep everything running here, and I think it will work long term. Especially since all my game consoles and other appliances a finally happy again.

So I'll send the WNDR37AV back when it shows up from amazon.

Continuing with the TED video from yesterday, today's video is on "filter bubbles". This is a very real problem with very high consequences. This is why I go to both google news and other online sources and still watch news broadcasts, read newspapers, etc... Until online media stops deciding what it thinks I want to see vs what I need to see, we cannot consider ourselves informed or well-rounded based on those sources of information alone.

While this research is fairly common sense to some of us, I wonder how little the mass population of the internet stops to think about what they're not reading, what they're not seeing and what they know nothing about.

I like spotting design inspirations in every day items. There have already been comparisons of the iPad 2's smart cover to Japanese bathtub covers, but today I noticed yet another similar item, also in the bathtub.

iPad 2 smart cover:



Bath mat from Bed, Bath & Beyond:

The above video from ted.com is truly amazing to me. I work with data in large databases continuously and am always amazed when I or my team discovers a new metric that we can trend from the simplest data sources and be able to see some new data that we previously thought was completely irrelevant to the original data source and now can see very clearly and trend and graph it appropriately.

But this... well, this takes all of this to a whole new level. And listen and watch how not just words but ideas and influence spread.