Utilizing Technology in Today's Mobile Work Force: Inspection IO

Using technology for the on-the-go professional is always a bittersweet challenge.  The speed at which today's business moves, and at which technology moves is lightning fast -- but not always the same.  Today's mobile professional finds themselves constantly having to keep up with and modify technology to meet their every changing needs.  And these needs and tools are different for different industries.  A new tool has come to the surface for the home inspection industry that I think it pretty neat.

Inspection IO is an all-encompassing web application that allows to you run and manage your home inspection business from anywhere, anytime with any device.  With an account on Inspection IO's website, you have control over every aspect of your home inspection business.  It helps keep you up-to-date on what your team is doing, and it keeps your team on the same page with what is what in the business at that moment.  One great feature is the ability to have one team member inspect a house, and another to follow up with access to the previous inspection, notes, pictures and plans that the previous inspector had taken.  Keeps everyone working, accountable and simply better at what they do.  The application includes customizable reporting, checklists, data entry, scheduling, signature handling, multimedia and collaboration tools that will enable your business to be more efficient and simply work smarter.

And that's a win-win for everyone, isn't it?

And industry seems to agree.  With big names like Coldwell Banker, Century 21 and LJ Hooker using this product to keep their home inspection and remediation flow working efficiently, it has to be pretty good.  Check it out for yourself today at http://www.inspectionio.com.

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Bruce has worked in educational technology for over 18 years and has implemented several 1:1/BYOD programs.  He also has served as a classroom teacher in Computer Science, History and English classes.  Bruce is the author of five books: Sands of Time, Towering Pines Volume One:Room 509, The Star of Christmas, Philadelphia Story: A Lance Carter Detective Novel and The Insider's Story: A Lance Carter Detective Novel.  Follow Bruce's Novel releases by subscribing to his FREE newsletter!

Be sure to check out Bruce's Allentown Education Examiner Page, his Twitter and his Facebook!

The Spanning Tree Protocol - STP

I find that talking about and explaining how to prevent loops in a network is something I do an awful lot.  So I thought I'd post something up that helps explain how to prevent it, and what the Spanning Tree Protocol is.  The Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) is a network protocol that ensures a loop-free topology for any bridged Ethernet local area network.  Spanning Tree offers your network redundant and loop-free operation. Think of spanning tree as a tree that the bridge keeps in memory for optimized and fault-tolerant data forwarding.

What is Spanning Tree?

• STP provides a means to prevent loops by blocking links in an Ethernet network. Blocked links can be brought in to service if active links fail.
• The root bridge in a spanning tree is the logical center and sees all traffic on a network.
• Spanning tree recalculations are performed automatically when the network changes but cause a temporary network outage.
• Newer protocols, such as TRILL, prevent loops while keeping links that would be blocked by STP in service.

Eliminating loops with spanning tree
If your switches are connected in a loop without STP, each switch would infinitely duplicate the first broadcast packet heard because there's nothing at Layer 2 to prevent a loop.
STP prevents loops by blocking one or more of the links. If one of the links in use goes down, then it would fail over to a previously blocked link. How spanning tree chooses which link to use depends entirely on the topology that it can see.

The idea behind a spanning tree topology is that bridges can discover a subset of the topology that is loop-free: that's the tree. STP also makes certain there is enough connectivity to reach every portion of the network by spanning the entire LAN.

STP configuration
Bridges will perform the spanning tree algorithm when they are first connected to the network or whenever there is a topology change.

When a bridge hears a "configuration message," a special type of BPDU (bridge protocol data unit), it will begin its disruptive spanning tree algorithm. This starts with the election of a "root bridge" through which all data will flow.  The next step is for each bridge to determine the shortest path to the root bridge so that it knows how to get to the "center." A second election happens on each LAN, and it elects the designated bridge, or the bridge that's closest to the root bridge. The designated bridge will forward packets from the LAN toward the root bridge.  The final step for an individual bridge is to select a root port. This simply means "the port that I use to send data towards the root bridge."

Note: Every single port on a bridge, even ones connected to endpoints, will participate in the spanning tree unless a port is configured as "ignore."

A newly connected bridge will send a reconfiguration BPDU, and the other connected devices will comply. All traffic is stopped for 30-50 seconds while a spanning tree calculation takes place.

Rapid STP
In 2001, certain vendors started introducing rapid spanning tree, a modified version of the spanning tree algorithm that reduces outages. It's fully compatible with older devices that only know the old spanning tree algorithm and reduces the 30-50-second outage time to less than ten in most cases, so use it if you can.

Note: RSTP works by adding an alternative port and a backup port. These ports are allowed to immediately enter the forwarding state rather than passively wait for the network to converge.

VLANs and PVST
STP can cause problems with VLANs if one of the physical links happens to be a VLAN trunk. That's because with only one spanning tree, it's possible the link with the VLAN trunk will need to be blocked. That could result in no connectivity for a particular VLAN to the rest of its LAN. To solve this, enable per-VLAN spanning trees (PVST).

With PVST enabled, a bridge will run one spanning tree instance per VLAN on the bridge. If a trunk link contains VLANs 1, 2, and 3, it can then decide that VLANs 1 and 2 should not take that path, but still allow VLAN 3 to use it.

Spanning tree drawbacks
One of the drawbacks of STP is that even though there may be many physical or equal-cost multiple paths through your network from one node to another, all your traffic will flow along a single path that has been defined by a spanning tree. The benefit of this is that traffic loops are avoided, but there is a cost. Restricting traffic to this unique path means blocking alternative, and sometimes more direct, paths.

That means that your full potential network capacity can never be realized. (It is possible to use multiple simultaneous spanning trees for separate VLANs, as mentioned above, but the traffic in any given VLAN will still not be able to use all your available network capacity.)

In the past this has been acceptable, but with the increasing use of virtualization technology in many data centers, there is a need for a more efficient and reliable routing infrastructure that can handle the very high I/O demands of virtualized environments.

Spanning tree alternatives: TRILL and NPB
Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) is a routing protocol network standard which:

• Uses shortest path routing protocols instead of STP.
• Works at Layer 2, so protocols such as FCoE can make use of it.
• Supports multihopping environments.
• Works with any network topology, and uses links that would otherwise have been blocked.
• Can be used at the same time as STP.

The main benefit of TRILL is that it frees up capacity on your network which can't be used (to prevent routing loops) if you use STP, allowing your Ethernet frames to take the shortest path to their destination. This in turns mean more efficient utilization of network infrastructure and a decreased cost-to-benefit ratio.

These benefits are particularly important in data centers running cloud computing infrastructure. TRILL is also more stable than STP because it provides faster recovery time in the event of hardware failure.

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Bruce has worked in educational technology for over 18 years and has implemented several 1:1/BYOD programs.  He also has served as a classroom teacher in Computer Science, History and English classes.  Bruce is the author of five books: Sands of Time, Towering Pines Volume One:Room 509, The Star of Christmas, Philadelphia Story: A Lance Carter Detective Novel and The Insider's Story: A Lance Carter Detective Novel.  Follow Bruce's Novel releases by subscribing to his FREE newsletter!

Be sure to check out Bruce's Allentown Education Examiner Page, his Twitter and his Facebook!

Cutting out Cable with PlayOn!

As you may have gathered from my previous post, Finally HBOGo Without Cable.. sort of..., we do not subscribe to cable television and have not for almost 5 years.  99.9% of the time we don't miss it at all.  Sure, there is the occasional event that comes up that we'd like to see live, but they are few and far between.  Watching the ball drop on New Years Eve was one of those things for the first two years.  Now, UStream has their own New Year's Eve show -- problem solved!  We can watch just about anything we want, any time we want on our mix of AppleTV, Roku, PlayStation 3 and iPads.  But this post isn't about our set up -- I'll do one on that at a later date -- this one is about one of the best things that we have in our set up and why we'd be a little lost without it!

That is PlayOn!

What is PlayOn! exactly?  I call it the glue that binds all of our devices together!  Why?  Simple... We are Apple people as a rule.  My wife and I have MacBook Pros, everyone in the family has an iPhone and we have 3 (going on 3) iPads in the house. Biiiig Apple people.  That means that we are heavily invested in iTunes and have been for years.  In fact, several years ago (perhaps as many as 8) we began copying our DVD collection into iTunes and ditching DVDs when we could (you know, if we didn't think we needed them for the car -- but that's another post, too!).  So, with that being said -- we have chosen iTunes as our defacto media database location.  All our collected music and video is housed within our gigantic (over 500GB) iTunes library.  Initially we were using a Windows Media Center PC that I built, and it worked to play videos and music via iTunes.  A little clunky, but it worked.  But when Microsoft killed support for WMC and we had no need to record shows off cable TV any longer, we wanted to ditch the huge PC that was sitting in our living room.  So naturally, we purchased an AppleTV.  It had Netflix and we could easily stream our movies and music from iTunes.  But then we wanted one for the bedroom, too.  And we didn't want to shell out another $99 for an AppleTV.  So we bought a Roku instead at half the price to see how good it was, figuring if we didn't like it we would return it and buy another AppleTV.  Well, we loved it.  There were hundreds of channels -- many free -- and we discovered new things to watch content on.  One big problem, though.  You couldn't stream from iTunes to it...  that was sad.  We kept it anyway because there was enough content to justify it, we just couldn't watch any of our movies on it.  

And then we discovered PlayOn!  Playon! allowed us to stream (almost) any digital media file directly to our Roku.  Now, we can watch anything out of our iTunes library (by pointing PlayOn! Server to the folder with our iTunes library in it).  Our viewing and listening experience on our Roku has expanded exponentially -- and as a bonus -- it works seamlessly with our PlayStation 3!  So the kids can watch the movies in our library on the PS3 without any hassle at all.  PlayOn is compatible with any iOS device, Roku, XBOX 360/One, PlayStation3/4, Android and dozens of other devices.  They have a page that details supported devices here.

PlayOn! requires that you have a half-way decent PC (Yes, Windows only) running on the same network that your Roku or other device is on.  Once you have the software installed, you simply need to download the PlayOn app onto your device and it simply works from there.  Once you have it all set up and installed you will notice that how I use PlayOn isn't all it does... it does so much more.  It takes just about all the television media content on the Internet and puts it all in one place!  That means that any website that streams its video content may be in PlayOn!  This includes Hulu and Netflix, sure, but also SyFy, ABC, NBC, FOX, History Channel, MLB.TV, YouTube and so much more!

If you are serious about "cutting the cord" from cable, you have to take some time and investigate PlayOn! for yourself.  It's well worth the investment!

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Bruce has worked in educational technology for over 18 years and has implemented several 1:1/BYOD programs.  He also has served as a classroom teacher in Computer Science, History and English classes.  Bruce is the author of five books: Sands of Time, Towering Pines Volume One:Room 509, The Star of Christmas, Philadelphia Story: A Lance Carter Detective Novel and The Insider's Story: A Lance Carter Detective Novel.  Follow Bruce's Novel releases by subscribing to his FREE newsletter!

Be sure to check out Bruce's Allentown Education Examiner Page, his Twitter and his Facebook!

Finally! HBOGo without Cable TV! Sort of...

It has been a very long time since we had cable in our home.  My littlest guy is turning 4 in November, and it was before he was born that we finally told Comcast, DISH and anyone else to take a hike.  We only have Internet service through Comcast.  We don't have a choice as to who delivers our Internet, so we have to pay the Big Red Machine something... but we have a nice big Internet pipe at a reasonable price, so no complaints about that really.  We also subscribe to Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu+ that we watch on our iPads, iPhones, Roku, PS3 and AppleTVs.  In addition to that, I buy the MLB.TV baseball subscription each year.  Let's me watch my Royals, Yankees and Pirates games at will.  It is working out quite nicely, honestly.

But I've always said that if HBO would follow the same subscription model as Netflix or MLB.TV, we'd certainly subscribe to it.  But no, HBO still insists that you have a subscription to HBO via one of the big cable companies so -- sorry - no HBO.  And at this point, with True Blood and Boardwalk Empire pretty much done, we don't care.

And then AT&T came out with this... they have a deal where if you subscribe to their Internet with basic channels for $39/ month they will give you HBO with HBO Go and Amazon Prime as part of the deal.  Not too bad, right?  I mean... Amazon Prime is $89/year alone.  But, of course there is a catch.  OK, a couple.  First you have to subscribe for a year, and if you cancel you get hit with $180 service charge.  Installation is $99 and only includes one set-top box.  Television is not in HD (but HBO Go is).  Cable Modem rental is $7 a month and the price goes up to $120/month after one year.  

Obviously AT&T has felt the pinch, as I'm sure other cable providers are feeling.  So they made an effort here, but it seems like they simply veiled the same old type of package with some shiny digital add-ons.  It looks like in year one, it's not a bad deal.  After that it is the same old cable company rip off price switching that we have been putting up with forever.

Thanks, but no thanks AT&T.  You still don't get it.  We don't need cable.

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Bruce has worked in educational technology for over 18 years and has implemented several 1:1/BYOD programs.  He also has served as a classroom teacher in Computer Science, History and English classes.  Bruce is the author of five books: Sands of Time, Towering Pines Volume One:Room 509, The Star of Christmas, Philadelphia Story: A Lance Carter Detective Novel and The Insider's Story: A Lance Carter Detective Novel.  Follow Bruce's Novel releases by subscribing to his FREE newsletter!

Be sure to check out Bruce's Allentown Education Examiner Page, his Twitter and his Facebook!

Title II -- What it is, Why it is important and Why it is bad for the Internet and Schools

What is Title II?
Title II is legislation that would provide the FCC the ability to regulate the Internet.  The FCC is an appointed body (not elected) that exists in order to oversee and regulate all communication forms within the United States and it territories.  The FCC is funded by wholly by the fees and fines that they hand out from year-to-year.  Title II would allow this body to creates rules, regulations and limitations on how the Internet in the United States would operate.  This includes pricing, privacy, traffic, availability, research and development of new Internet-related technologies.  It essentially puts a middle-man in between you and the Internet.  It is *not* net neutrality and at its basic level, it holds the ability to limit Internet access and increase a segmented Internet.

But I thought it was about Net Neutrality?
Well, it isn't.  It is about control and financing a controlled and neutered Internet.  Title II would allow for rules and regulations to be put in place to allow or disallow specific companies and organizations any activity that the FCC deemed fit.  This means that the government would sit square in the middle of technology development, research and availability.  This would lead to a bottle-neck of regulations that prohibit the investment in further broadband expansion.  Currently the United States has a much larger deployment of fiber optic Internet service than Europe does (see here), however this is largely because of the low level of regulation.  Regulations would stifle things like Google Fiber, which is just starting to get going, and other broadband services that would serve low income and low population density areas.  The places that the big guys like Comcast, Verizon and Time Warner can't be bothered with serving.  This isn't anything like Net Neutrality in that regard... neutral means equal availability for all.

Also, Title II does not put in place any safe guards against Internet "fast lanes".  In reality, any regulatory system opens itself up to the increased opportunity for pay-for-play to happen.  This puts companies like Netflix and Comcast in the drivers seat when it comes to how bandwidth is used and divided up once they have the safeguard of a regulatory environment.  And increased regulations mean increased costs for Internet startups and developers who want to create solutions for those who can't pay to play.  Increased cost always means strangled innovation.

Shouldn't the Internet be a public utility, like electricity?
No way, no how.  Why?  Just look at how far the generation and delivery of electricity has come of the past 50 years in the United States.  It hasn't come anywhere... since electricity was regulated and became a public utility throughout the country, it is reliable and steady in most areas.  It has not, however, seen any advances or enhancements in cost, delivery or technology.  We have coal, water, nuclear and solar power generation... but the oldest is still the method that most of the country still uses.  True, nuclear has come on the scene in the past 50 years -- but has it really made a difference in how much electricity costs?  Has it moved the technology of what electricity can do for us forward?  No.  The electricity experience in the average home in the United States has not been enhanced in our generation -- and that is what creating a public Internet utility would do for the Internet.  We've seen a great deal of expansion in broadband availability in the past ten years.  We have seen in-home, in-business and in-classroom speeds jump in the past five years.  Title II would cause that to come to a screeching halt.  Regulation would put a set limit on all of that, and everyone would have the same limitation as set by the FCC... except, of course, those who could pay to have more.  Like big companies.

I've talked about several subjects and points regarding why I see Title II as a death knell for the Internet as we know it, the Internet as we hope it can be... if it has raised your eyebrows, I invite you to visit DontBreakThe.Net and read more on the subject.  This is important because it impacts schools all over the country who do not currently sit on public networks.  That includes private schools, parochial schools, independent schools, boarding schools and schools that are in low population density areas.  Perhaps even sign the petition...  besides, it has some funny cat pictures on it.. and we all like that.

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Bruce has worked in educational technology for over 18 years and has implemented several 1:1/BYOD programs.  He also has served as a classroom teacher in Computer Science, History and English classes.  Bruce is the author of five books: Sands of Time, Towering Pines Volume One:Room 509, The Star of Christmas, Philadelphia Story: A Lance Carter Detective Novel and The Insider's Story: A Lance Carter Detective Novel.  Follow Bruce's Novel releases by subscribing to his FREE newsletter!