My Inspiration for Networking, my son

March 25, 2010 Dave Ohara

Going to data center events are great ways to network. And, honestly I learn very little from the presentations, other than different ways to present the same material or how slow progress is being made in the data center industry. I learn 10x times more as I talk to others before, during and after the events. I am driven to network to learn.

When I was young, I was one of the smallest and quietest kids in class. I was introverted, and it is easy to go back to an introverted mode as I think and research topics. Thinking of things by myself is easy. But, there is so much more you can do when you work with others. I left Microsoft 4 years ago after 14 years mostly working on Windows. Microsoft has an immense network inside and outside the company. I needed to create a new network to work on some new ideas. I didn't want to start a company with employees, but I like developing innovative solutions.

Some people join other companies right away, but I took a year off to think about what I wanted to do. and started the green data center blog as part of a way to research the topic and socialize ideas.

When I left Microsoft my son was 2, and will be 6 next month. He has a special gift of networking, a talented extrovert. Socializing is natural for him, allowing him to build a large strong network. He can play sports with 3rd graders, the 5th grade girls think he is cool, and he makes high school kids laugh.

How good is he? He is in kindergarten, and he is one of the most popular cool kids at school. Yes, we have had many parents warn us we are going to have interesting challenges given his social skills and popularity.

On his own he wanted to be in the school's talent show. He is in kindergarten and wants to solo perform in front of the school. He has his own idea of what he wants to do, makes up his own dance, and won't listen to any help from his mom who is a talented dancer. He's got his own vision.

How popular is he? He gets applause and people call out his name when he walks on stage, receiving more attention than most get after they perform.

He's been practicing his moves.

His smile is natural and effective.

He knows how to create intensity.

And finishes with a bow, then another, and another as the crowd claps.

I can't even come close to what my 5 year old can do, but I keep on trying to learn from his natural talent to network. :-)

A different interpretation of “Open Source” in an Intelligence Analysis scenario that defines how GreenM3 works public data

March 9, 2010 Dave Ohara

I ran across the term Open Source Intelligence.

Open source intelligence (OSINT) is a form of intelligence collection management that involves finding, selecting, and acquiring information from publicly available sources and analyzing it to produce actionable intelligence.

This description fits what I have been telling others about the various data center sources of information.

“If there is a public publication of information, we are open to look at and provide feedback on the value we see in the information.”

Which is a pretty good description of how this blog has been run, commenting on public available information.

The description goes on to clarify the difference vs. open source software.

In the intelligence community (IC), the term "open" refers to overt, publicly available sources (as opposed to covert or classified sources); it is not related to open-source software or public intelligence.

Sources of information are:

OSINT includes a wide variety of information and sources:

Media: newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and computer-based information.

Web-based communities and user generated content: social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies.

Public data: government reports, official data such as budgets, demographics, hearings, legislative debates, press conferences, speeches, marine and aeronautical safety warnings, environmental impact statements and contract awards.

We have seen helicopters flying over Apple data centers, and world wide maps of Google data centers.

Observation and reporting: amateur airplane spotters, radio monitors and satellite observers among many others have provided significant information not otherwise available. The availability of worldwide satellite photography, often of high resolution, on the Web (e.g., Google Earth) has expanded open source capabilities into areas formerly available only to major intelligence services.

Professional and academic: conferences, symposia, professional associations, academic papers, and subject matter experts.^[1]

Most information has geospatial dimensions, but many often overlook the geospatial side of OSINT: not all open source data is unstructured text. Examples of geospatial open source include hard and softcopy maps, atlases, gazetteers, port plans, gravity data, aeronautical data, navigation data, geodetic data, human terrain data (cultural and economic), environmental data, commercial imagery, LIDAR, hyper and multi-spectral data, airborne imagery, geo-names, geo-features, urban terrain, vertical obstruction data, boundary marker data, geospatial mashups, spatial databases, and web services. Most of the geospatial data mentioned above is integrated, analyzed, and syndicated using geospatial software like a Geographic Information System (GIS) not a browser per se.

OSINT is distinguished from research in that it applies the process of intelligence to create tailored knowledge supportive of a specific decision by a specific individual or group.^[2]

I wonder how much OSINT has started searching twitter and Facebook.

In the Open Source Data Center Initiative I anticipate we be using this type of description for what we will be doing. Part of the challenge for the data center industry is there so much information out there, it is hard to make sense of it for an organization that doesn’t have a full staff of experienced professionals.

Here is where I got the idea for Open Source Intelligence.

Complimentary Online Seminar:

Real-Time Intelligence - Exploit Open Source Multimedia

Online Seminar

Real-Time Intelligence - Exploit Open Source Multimedia

Date: Thursday, March 18, 2010
Time: 11am Eastern; 8am Pacific
Duration: 1 Hour

Hello Dave,
Al Qaeda uses online videos to recruit and train. Other terrorist networks use audio files to disseminate messages. China circulates propaganda via video. The Internet is exploding with multimedia; streaming video, audio, images, PDFs and more. Open Source Intelligence needs to account for and take advantage of all advanced media types. But how?
Learn how you can:

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Please join this free online seminar and see a live demonstration of Kapow Technologies’ advanced web harvesting capabilities in use at US Intelligence Agencies, extracting from sites like YouTube, China.org, Al-Jazeera and MySpace.

Most Wired Place on Earth, South Korea an indicator of where we are heading

February 2, 2010 Dave Ohara

I am watching the PBS Frontline special Digital_Nation, and previously blogged on dangers of multi-tasking.

The show is now discussing South Korea as an example of the most wired place on the earth. I haven’t been to South Korea for over 15 years, ironically the start (1994) of the broadband growth in South Korea. I worked with Samsung when I was at Apple and acquired & managed the Korean fonts for Win3.1.

Here are some of the facts from the Frontline website.

WIRED KOREA

Population: 48.4 million(July 2008 est.)

Median age: 36.7 years

GDP (PPP): $1.312 trillion (2008 est.), 14th largest in the world

Korean gaming industry (including game centers): $7.8 billion (2006)

Internet usage rate: 76.5 percent (2008)

Percentage of Internet users age 3 to 5: 2.3 percent (2008)

Wireless Internet usage rate (ages 12 to 59): 52.5 percent (2008)

Household broadband penetration:: 97 percent (2008)

Landlines: 23.02 million (2008)

Cell phones: 44.98 million (2008)

Other facts:

The Korean government began investing in a nationwide broadband network in 1994

South Korea has over 20,000 Internet cafes called "PC Bangs"

43 percent of Koreans maintain a blog

20 million people belong to Cyworld, an online "parallel universe"/social networking site

In early 2009 the Korean Communications Commission (KCC) announced a plan to invest $837 million -- in addition to $21.1 billion in private funds -- to provide 1-Gbps average broadband speeds to major cities by 2012 (meaning a 120-minute feature film will take 12 seconds to download). The average U.S. broadband speed is 4.8 Mbps -- 200 times slower.

Trust in the Data Center, Lost in Translation

January 27, 2010 Dave Ohara

Mike Manos’s post on why Private Clouds will exist brings up an interesting view, a belief that “trust” is what is going to define people’s behaviors using cloud computing.

Private Clouds – Not just a Cost and Technology issue, Its all about trust, the family jewels, corporate value, and identity

January 24, 2010 by mmanos

I recently read a post by my good friend James Hamilton at Amazon regarding Private Clouds. James and I worked closely together at Microsoft and he was always a good source for out of the box thinking and challenging the status quo. While James post found here, speaks to the Private Cloud initiative being what amounts to be an evolutionary dead end, I would have to respectfully disagree.

It’s a little ironic that Mike discusses ‘trust” as an issue when he is a Sr. VP at Digital Realty Trust. But, this trust is more like this kind.

In common law legal systems, a trust is an arrangement whereby property (including real, tangible and intangible) is managed by one person (or persons, or organizations) for the benefit of another

The Trust Mike Manos refers to

In sociology and psychology the degree to which one party trusts another is a measure of belief in the honesty, benevolence and competence of the other party. Based on the most recent research, a failure in trust may be forgiven more easily if it is interpreted as a failure of competence rather than a lack of benevolence or honesty. In economics trust is often conceptualized as reliability in transactions. In all cases trust is a heuristic decision rule, allowing the human to deal with complexities that would require unrealistic effort in rational reasoning.

Part of the problems to establish trust is the lack of good communication. Lost in Translation is a book on this topic for IT.

Do you speak "business" or "IT"? Perhaps you speak a little of both. In today's connected world, where business and IT are fused, chances are that if you're a business or IT executive, or someone working to transform a business, you speak a little of both. But what if there was a "third" language? A common language that was natural for both "business" and "IT," straightforward enough to use, yet sophisticated enough to work in today's connected world? What if such a language only comprised a handful of words? With such a language, the "loss in translation" between the business and IT would happen less, because both would be using the same language. With such a language, business outcomes and transformations would become much more achievable. This handbook describes what this language is-the language of Information Systems for the 21st century.

How many problems do you think could be addressed if both parties understood each other better? And not Lost in Translation?

News Dots: The Day's Events as a Social Network

An interactive map of how every story in the news is related, updated daily.

WIRED KOREA

Other facts:

Private Clouds – Not just a Cost and Technology issue, Its all about trust, the family jewels, corporate value, and identity