Top ten geeky things to do in St. Louis

A video post by Chris Pirillo got me thinking about the places that I like to spend time around town that might appeal to other geeks. Having lived in St. Louis for three years, I find myself liking the place more and more, and the city is definitely on the upswing with improvements in various attractions and infrastructure. So this is a very idiosyncratic look at my top favorite things.

• Certainly, the arch is very impressive and I enjoy seeing it from many different locations around town. If I look out of one of my living room windows, I can see a small piece of  it too. The newest place to see it is across the river in East St. Louis, at the Malcolm W. Martin Memorial park, and try to stop by at one of the times when the geyser is operating.

But if you are going to be at the arch grounds, make sure you get a ticket and see the movie that shows how it was built. It is much more interesting – and certainly less claustrophobic — than the actual voyage to the top.

• From the arch is a 10-mile bike path that goes along the west side of the Mississippi River and ends at the old Chain of Rocks bridge. It is one of my favorite rides because the river is always changing, and the decaying industrial waterfront has its own charms. The bridge has plenty of Route 66 history and was the setting for the movie “Escape from New York.”
• Speaking of rivers, St. Louis is near the confluence of the Missouri, Mississippi and Illinois rivers and there are numerous outdoor activities to take advantage of them, including various Lewis and Clark encounters. A neat overview can be found by downloading a series of podcasts from the Confluence Greenway’s web site and taking them with you as you travel around the region.
• Our newest downtown park is called Citygarden and is chock full of sculptures and water fountains that are fun for both adults and kids to play in. The descriptions of the sculptures are available by calling an IVR at 314-802-9571 where you can listen to many famous St. Louisans describe them. I have been back to the park many times, and is worth visiting at dusk when many of the sculptures and fountains are lit up.
• My favorite local bookstore is Left Bank Books and they now have a branch downtown that is worth stopping by after your visit to Citygarden. Here is a story about how they came to be.
• Near downtown is Bailey’s Chocolate Bar in Lafayette Square. It is one of my favorite places to take tourists and natives alike, with many innovative deserts.
• A very unique spot that can be seen on Google Maps is the 70-foot high nuclear waste disposal cell concrete tomb that encases tons of low-level radioactive waste located near Weldon Springs on the other side of the Missouri River. The area once was home to nuclear weapons labs and is perfectly safe for a hike up to the top.
• One of the first green-powered data centers has just opened on Emerson’s campus. The roof of the building holds Missouri’s largest solar photovoltaic array. While the campus isn’t open to the public, you can get a taste from my Web post here.
• The Kemper art museum located on the Washington University main campus is quirky and has numerous free concerts and opening events and lectures that is worth checking out.
• If you were around for the Apollo moon landing, then you will appreciate the collection of space memorabilia in the lobby of the Moonrise hotel in the University City loop. Collected by Joe Edwards, the owner of the hotel and Blueberry Hill and other places nearby, the restaurant and roof bar are also worth checking out.
• Okay, I couldn’t decide on just 10 items, so here is one more: it isn’t often that a shopping mall owner will think out of the box, but the Westfield people behind Crestwood Court have turned their aging and nearly vacant mall into a haven for local arts organizations called ArtSpace, including theater, dance, visual arts and more. While it feels odd to head to mall to look at art, the mall is filing up with studios. The last Friday of the month you can find food and entertainment, too.

Note to job seekers: watch that email address

If you are about to be unemployed, take a moment to follow Strom’s rules for appropriate email names:

1. Avoid use of Hotmail, MSN, AOL, and Yahoo. Get a Gmail address, or better yet, pony up the cash to get your own domain and let Google host your email for you. We are talking about $10 a year to do this properly.

2. If you must use a free account, try to not use names that aren’t professional, such as ones that include cartoon characters, sexual or religious references, or other things that are best left to your personal side. This isn’t a matter of free expression or taste. Ideally, it should be some combination of your first and last name.

3. Pick something that is easy to hear and understand. If you have to spell it out when you are on the phone, use something else.

4. Don’t use punctuation marks or numbers in your name. Why? See point #3.

5. Make sure you use one address for all of your job-related activities: resume, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Monster, Craigslist, etc. Set up these services to send you notifications when people post messages on them, so you can stay up to date. Remember, it is your brand, or it will be soon enough. You don’t want to have to check lots of different email addresses during your search.

6. Speaking of checking email, please remember to do so at least twice a day. Respond to any inquiries quickly. You want to show that you are on top of things.

7. Start putting your connections (what some of us used to call our Rolodex) in your email address book. You just need first and last name, a title or some other thing to remember the contact by, a phone number and an email address. Gmail can auto-populate your address book to help things.

8. Remember that email addresses aren’t case-sensitive, so David@strom.com and david@strom.com and dAvId@Strom.com are all the same mailbox.

Houston, give us a reading on the 1202 program alarm

Like many of you that grew up in the 1960s, I have been spending a lot of time online looking at the various commemorative links to the Apollo 11 moon landing that happened 40 years ago this week. I found it fascinating, not just because the event was such a key moment in my teenaged nerd life, but also because it shows how we managed to triumph over technology that wouldn’t even be found inside your average watch today, let alone a cell phone or computer.

The Apollo spacecraft had three different display units onboard, running two computers: one in the main command module and one in the lunar module. Both weighed 70 pounds, ran at 1 MHz and had about 152 kb of memory.

To get an idea of how primitive the guidance computer was, you didn’t have a typewriter interface or a display screen, but a box with mostly numeric input that you had to key in “nouns” and “verbs”. You can go here and try the simulator.

The first moon landing was beset with problems. Armstrong had 17 seconds of fuel remaining, after having to take manual control over the lunar module and fly past some obstacles. The site was four miles off course because the module wasn’t completely depressurized when it separated from the command module – a small amount of gas pushed it off course.  And during the descent, several people (including the New York Times at the time here) documented how many times the guidance computer would get overwhelmed with data inputs and had to be rebooted, because Aldrin had not set one of the radar switches properly and it was filling up the computer with too much data. A young engineer, Stephen Bales, made the critical decision to ignore these warnings.

There is a great video segment about it from CBS News.

There are probably hundreds of Web sites with various tributes to the space program, I will just mention two places that I enjoyed reading. First is a special report compiled by EE Times, which has eyewitness accounts from a few of the engineers who worked at NASA, along with a teardown of the space suits used and other technical info about the program.

The other is a list of numerous technological achievements from the space program that have found their way into our lives. And while Tang isn’t on the list (and it is dubious whether it should be), there are lots of other things showing just how much innovation NASA had to do to put two men on the moon and bring them back home safely.

Emerson opens new green data center in St. Louis

I had an opportunity to visit Emerson’s new data center located here on their St. Louis campus. The most interesting feature isn’t inside the building, but a 100 kV (DC) solar array that is attached to the roof of the building and provides about 15% of the power requirements for the equipment inside. The array is canted a bit for the optimum angle, because Emerson wanted the building placed in a particular spot on its campus that didn’t match the best orientation for the array. Currently, it is the largest collection of solar panels in Missouri.

The data center has a mirror (without the array) in Iowa that is used for disaster recovery and R&D purposes. It is also the first commercial deployment of Liebert’s NXL power conditioning system (pictured at right). Eventually, the data center will house 400 servers, and another innovative feature is that all rack-to-rack connections will be handled by fiber optics, rather than copper.

Locating a data center in Missouri makes a lot of sense and cents too: we have one of the lower power rates in the country, and combined with high telecom bandwidth and a moderate climate means that power needs are also reasonable. They also make use of lower-powered CPUs, virtualization technologies and showcase a number of other Emerson power products, as well as rack-specific cooling, to minimize air conditioning loads.

Computerworld: How to Save Time Updating Multiple Social Networks and Blogs

As the number of Web sites offering status updates – such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., etc. — proliferates, it can get tedious, not to mention take a lot of time, to log in to each one and post the same information.

Have no fear — there are a number of multiple posting services that can help you send a variety of information to a collection of sites, including blog posts, photos, videos and status updates. For a review that is for Computerworld.com, I looked at three such services: Ping.fm, Pixelpipe.com and the unpronounceable Quub.com.

Baseline: Tips for Managing Virtual Storage on Your SAN

IT managers have a lot more motivation when it comes to keeping their storage area networks or SANs up and running. More and more data is being stored on these virtualized networks, and they continue to be popular. In a survey conducted of 388 executives in December 2008 for SHARE, storage virtualization was underway at half of respondents’ companies but that management was still a challenge and many of the implementations were at the departmental rather than enterprise level.

So what can you do to keep your SAN properly maintained? Read my article in Baseline magazine for  several suggestions.

When did the browser become the next OS?

“We view the Internet as the fourth desktop operating system we have to support after Windows, MacOS, and DOS.” That quote was from an executive at McAfee, and DOS gives it away that it was spoken back in 1996.

With the announcement that Google will develop a quick-start operating system by next year for instant-on netbooks, I thought it might be interesting to take a trip down memory lane and remind us how we have gotten to the point where the browser has become the next OS, and probably now moving into first place rather than fourth.

Of course, the smarmy retort to Google’s announcement is that we already have a quick-start, ultra-reliable Web OS, it is called OS X and my MacBook takes about five seconds from when I open the lid to when I can be surfing the Web. Unlike many Windows PCs, I don’t have to have a degree in advanced power management techniques with a minor in spam and virus prevention to get this to work.

But let’s go into the WayBack Machine to the early 1990s and see the context of that McAfee quote.

The first collection of Web browsers literally weren’t much to look at, because they only displayed characters and basically just a page of hyperlinked text. This was the then-popular Lynx that was initially designed back in 1992 for Unix and VMS terminal users (that was back when we called them that). Think about this for a moment: this was pre-iporn, pre-IPO Netscape, pre-real Windows — when the number of Web servers was less than a few hundred. Not very exciting by today’s standards.

Then Microsoft got into the game, and things started changing. With the introduction of Windows 95 we had the beginnings of a graphical Internet Explorer, which ironically was licensed from the same code that Netscape would use to create their browser (and eventually Firefox). Windows 95 came with both IE and Windows Explorer, and the two were similarly named for a reason: browsing pages of the Web was the beginnings of something similar to browsing files on your desktop. Things didn’t really get integrated until IE v4, which came out about the same time as Windows 98, and they were so integrated that they begat a lawsuit by the Justice Department. At the end of 2002, Microsoft was legally declared a monopolist and had to offer ways to extract IE from Windows going forward for users who wanted to install a different browser.

During the middle 1990s, we began to see better support for TCP/IP protocols inside the Windows OS, although it really wasn’t until the second edition of Windows 98 that we saw Microsoft improve upon the browser enough that they could include it as part of their Office 2000 product. Before then, we had separate drivers and add-on utilities that required all sorts of care and feeding to get online, in addition to using AOL and Compuserve dial-up programs.

As an example of how carefully integrated IE was with Windows, when Microsoft released IE v7 along with Vista, initially you needed to verify your license of Windows was legit before you could install the latest version of IE on earlier operating systems. That restriction was later removed.

And lately Microsoft has announced its next version of Office 2010 will have even further Web integration and the ability to create online documents similar to the way Google Docs works. Google Docs is an interesting development of itself, because now documents are stored outside of the desktop and managed through a Web browser. As long as I have an Internet connection, I don’t need any software on my local machine to edit a document or calculate a spreadsheet.

So what is the real purpose of an operating system? Originally, it was to manage the various pieces of your PC so that your applications could talk to your printer or your hard drive or display characters on your screen without having to write low-level programs to do these tasks. Three things have happened since the early PC era:

First, as the Web and cloud computing became more powerful, we stopped caring where our information is located. In some sense, having documents in the cloud makes it easier to share them across the planet, and not have to worry about VPNs, local area network file shares, and other things that will get in the way. And we even have cellphones like the Palm Pre that have a Web OS built in, so that applications don’t have to be downloaded to the phone but can run in the cloud. At least, when developers will finally get their kits to build these Pre apps later this summer.

Second, as the desktop OS matures, we don’t have to worry about the underlying hardware as much because that hardware has gotten more generic and the OS has taken on a bigger role (to match their bigger footprints too). Although printer drivers are still scarce for Vista, and 64-bit apps aren’t as plentiful, for the most part we don’t need a “thick” desktop OS. Yes, there are enterprise apps that need the OS, and some that need a specific version of Windows too, but most of our computing can be done without really touching much of the OS.

Finally, the browser is the de facto Windows user interface. Perhaps I should say the browser plus Ajax or the browser plus Flash. But most applications that were formerly client/server now just use browser clients, or run inside a browser with minimal desktop downloads. This has been long in coming, but now Rich Internet Applications can be considered on par with local Windows and Mac ones.

So here we are, at the dawn of the new Google OS. We have come full circle: from the green-screen character mode terminals of the mainframe and Unix era to the browser-based Webtops of the modern era. This doesn’t mean that Windows 7 or 8 or whatever will become obsolete. Just less important. And given the multiple billions of dollars that Microsoft has made over the years from Windows (and let’s not forget dear old DOS), you can imagine that there are some nervous folks up in Redmond these days.

CIOupdate: An Enterprise Collaborative Communities Roundup

Okay, so Twitter is everywhere. But what use is it for real business purposes? How about build a quick and dirty intranet that can be used for discussions, real-time status updates of team members, and be able to collaborate without having to shift through the Oprah tweets and still keep it secure. That is the idea behind a new collection of enterprise-ready microblogging and file sharing applications.

You can read more in my article that was posted today on CIO Update.com.

Software Testing: We are all part of the story

The software testing industry is at a historic crossroads. Rich Internet applications, cloud computing, the rise of virtualization and more capable mobile device have all made the job of producing reliable software more complex. All this activity has made the software test industry a very big tent. I interviewed several testing gurus to share their thoughts on the state of the industry and where they see things evolving.

You can read the feature in Software Test and Performance magazine here.

How to use Symantec products to stop buying (more) storage

A new screencast product review is up today over at Webinformant.tv.

We looked at several products available from Symantec to help provide insight into how to reduce overall enterprise disk storage requirements and cost. The video touches on several strategies that enterprise IT managers can employ to analyze their storage use.

• Symantec NetBackup Pure Disk v6.5
• Veritas Command Central Storage v5.1
• Symantec Enterprise Vault v8.0
• Veritas Storage Foundation v5.0