Apple announced this morning that their line of professional notebooks will finally utilize Intel’s Merom dual-core processor.
This makes me so happy. I have been waiting for this for months as I waded through rumors of this release. I didn’t believe my eyes when I saw it on digg this morning. But it’s actually true!
See article on Appleinsider.
I am still taking on challenges in the Office of Instructional and Research Technology at Rutgers University. I am getting more involved in the bug tracking process for Sakai. I am now a member of the international Quality Assurance working group for Sakai. I am in the process of verifying fixes that have been put in place for the release of the upcoming version. Closing bug tickets on an international level makes me feel very good about myself.
IT folks that are coming out of school should definitely try to volunteer their time to a well-organized open source community. I have learned so many different aspects of application development in the past few months. The Application Development Life Cycle has many parallels in other areas of IT and my experience with it on this project has been very educational.
I have also been charged with taking a look at the local CSS for the release of the next version. Rutgers wants to be ahead of the game when it comes to developing the next round of help documentation where we will most likely need a lot of new screenshots. If we can develop that documentation well before the release, that means less headaches come deployment time.
I am working to complete my Rutgers University IT Certification. While it has no validity outside of the University, I am interested in any supplemental education that I can get from the school. So far, the program has been very good. This morning I completed a class titled ‘Setting Objectives and Analyzing Risks’. It was a good refresher course for a lot of the research that I have already done in Risk Management.
Yesterday, OIRT attended the Rutgers President’s Award Ceremony. We were nominated for the Bridge Award which is for departments or groups that show extraordinary service to the University. We set up a table to talk with the folks there about Sakai and what it is we do. Here is a shot of our booth and the team, complete with chef hats (an homage to Hiriyuki Sakai, for whom the CMS is named).
For the last year or so, my house has had Satellite Internet through DirecWay. While the download speeds were much faster than the dial-up that we had for the previous nine years, the time it took to make a call to a server took forever. The upload speeds were also abymsal.
Embarq DSL was recently made available on the mountain, which is a god-send. While we can only get the lowest speed package (1.5 mbps/384 kbps) it is worlds faster than satellite or dial-up.
One problem that I was having was with Embarq’s DNS servers. Every five requests or so, I would have to wait 20-30 seconds for a response. I’m not sure if this is an overloading issue or if there is a cap that Embarq puts on requests from a given IP address.
To get around this issue, an individual on the DSLReports forums suggested that I use OpenDNS. OpenDNS is a free domain name resolution service with some extra features. Check out the Wikipedia article on OpenDNS.
I changed the primary and secondary DNS IP addresses on my modem, and it worked like a charm. Requests are instant. OpenDNS also has functionality for fixing spelling errors in a URL and for protecting against phishing attacks. OpenDNS is funded by advertising that shows up on a custom notification page when you spell a URL wrong that OpenDNS cannot resolve.
Upon further research, there seems to be some question as to user anonymity when using the OpenDNS service. When using your ISP’s DNS servers, you are largely anonymous because DNS is a highly distributed technology. When using OpenDNS, your lookups are centralized. This is scary, especially in light of AOL’s recent publication of twenty million search queries by 650,000 users over a three month period.
For the time being, I have switched my primary and DNS servers to 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2. These servers are run by Verizon/Level3 and are not restricted to Verizon customers. The lookups are similary quick when compared to OpenDNS. I will continue to use these servers while I research the anonymity issues of OpenDNS.