Many times I've seen small under funded, but stubborn agents succeed at
projects large well funded groups have failed at. I've come to believe
that lack of funds can be a major driver of innovation.
always admired the touch screen room scheduling devices found outside of
business conference rooms such as those at the General Mills
headquarters. But implementing such a system required funding for
installation of displays at the room doors and a back-end server with
dedicated applications software.
The new STSS building has such a system for the classrooms (see below).
got us wondering about how we could gain some of the same functionality
on the cheap. This is really useful for those times you want to borrow
a room to have a quick meeting, but don't want to interfere with an
officially scheduled event or when you want to know if this is the room
your meeting or class is being held in. Our solution lies in the
observation that more and more of us are carrying small, internet
attached computers around in our pockets and bags.
phone camera scans the bar code bringing up a URL that goes to the room
scheduling web site and displays a mobile device formatted room
reservation schedule. Instant, cheap solution. And if you don't happen
to have or be with anyone having a smart phone, you still have the
old fashion method of typing a URL for the reservation system into a
browser on your laptop.
If you want to try something like this on your own, a useful QR code generator can be found at http://qrcode.kaywa.com/.
Imagine if every component vendor and sub-contractor
involved in the production of your automobile refined and changed their bits of
your vehicle every day while you drove.It seems obvious that sooner or later specification drift or feature
improvements would cause a cascading failure of one sort or another.Yet this is exactly how we drive our desktop
computer systems here on the internet highway.
This all started innocently enough.A software vendor wanted to ensure that their
software was protected from recently discovered flaws allowing hackers to gain
access to the computer so the vendors began offering easier methods of
downloading updates from their websites.Soon it became clear that many users had neither the time nor the
inclination to download and install these updates, so methods of automatically
pushing them out to computers were developed and deployed.
The result is an environment where many parts of a
computer's software persona can change at a moments notice in response to
perceived threats.These threats are
often very real as I am sure anyone who has lost their mutual fund account
password to a hacker employing a keystroke logger would tell you.Yet from a usability perspective all this
change can be unnerving.ITIL processes
for example try to rein in undocumented computer changes in their attempt to
increase stability and usability.
Just off the top of my head here's a list of people that can
make changes the computer I'm using to type this post:
Local IT staff
Central IT staff
The Firefox and Mozilla support communities
And of course any hacker that can slip something in via a malicious
advertisement, malicious webpage, malicious image, or any other clever use of the
software flaws discovered on a daily basis.
From a support perspective this means that the computer
placed on your desk yesterday is not the computer you are using today.And resistance is futile, for if the vendor
updates are ignored, it's only a matter of time before some automated hacking automata
exercises a flaw in your computer's software environment and changes your
computer to meet some else's nefarious needs.