Then came Tineye.com. They developed a search function that could identify parts of your image, the “likeness” if you will, and then compare it to other images on the Internet. By their own description “TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in our index to retrieve matches. TinEye can even find a partial fingerprint match. Our fingerprinting technologies have been developed by Idée Inc..”

It worked fairly well the few times I tried it. I found when looking for commercial images I always got the result I wanted. If I was trying to match a photo of a person or something more obscure I generally got nothing.

Then Google launched their reverse image lookup and soon integrated it into the standard image search and it worked REALLY well. Possibly because Google has permissions into more places and more powerful servers to cache and search existing images. You might have noticed when you search for images on Google there is a little blue camera icon now in the search bar, that is where you can upload your photo for the reverse search. http://images.google.com/ 

I think both of these services are limited by what they can peer into on the web. For instance, if you were sent a photo from someone’s Facebook page, but their profile or photos were set to private, I don’t think Google Images or Tineye.com can peer into those private accounts and match your photo to the one available in the Facebook profile.

One of the best things I’ve found about Google Images is that if you want to know where a photo originated you can do a search, then sort the results by date and find the oldest search result to get an idea of where it was first used and thus possibly find its origination.

Another great use is when you have a low res version of a photo and want something bigger you can search using the low res image and then sort the results or filter by image size in Google.

I’ve heard of people using it for dating purposes, someone you have found online sends you a photo and you can search to see where else that photo might appear…interesting possibilities there.

In all, these tools become more and more useful once you realize you have them at your disposal, you will think of reasons and ways to use them.

The benefits/downside of a Linux desktop are fairly straight forward. Linux is free, doesn’t get viruses (yet…some argue once market share is high enough viruses will come) and takes much less horsepower to run.  On the downside, it won’t run most Windows based programs. There are myriad other pros and cons to go on the lists, but these are the main things customers notice and care about.

So what does this have to do with the cloud and Windows?  It’s pretty simple really, most of our customers are moving to a Linux desktop OS because the cloud allows them to do so. Their applications and data are going to the cloud, which runs almost exclusively on browsers. Browsers run GREAT in Linux. So once your local Quickbooks, email and other Windows only programs have been replaced by cloud based services you really don’t have much tying you to a Windows desktop anymore. And thus no more viruses, paid upgrades and slow performance from a bulky OS.

The second and less common reason is virtualization. Many customers are seeing the light of terminal services or remote desktop solutions. Your local desktop machine is connecting to a terminal server or virtual desktop service and all of your data is being delivered from there. What local OS you run is a non-issue since you now use a browser or terminal services client to connect, which once again run GREAT in Linux.

All that being said, from a business perspective at least…Windows is waining in relevance for many of our customers since they no longer are running their applications on their local machines.

DNS is the glue that makes the web work. It translates a name (www.InterlinkSpokane.com) to an IP address that tells which web server is hosting the website. It also tells other email servers where to send email for a domain name using what is called the MX record.

Without DNS, when someone types in www.InterlinkSpokane.com in a web browser, there is no conversion of the name to an IP address and your web browser will return an error. Even through your website may be running fine, without DNS the web browser doesn’t know where to go to get to the site.

In the simplest terms, DNS let’s us use names like Yahoo or Google instead of strings of numbers like 74.125.224.18  Think of it as telling the Internet to “call Bob” instead of “dial 555-123-4567″

Hosting:

Website hosting provides server storage space and an IP address for your website. The website on that server can then be accessed from a web browser. Your web hosting provider is who gives your website the IP address that is entered into DNS. When someone types www.InterlinkSpokane.com the web browser goes to the hosting providers web server to pull up the pages for your website that you have stored on the server.

Registrars:

Domain registrars register a domain and enable it’s use on the rest of the internet. There is an annual recurring cost for this service. The one and only thing this service actually provides is to tell the rest of the web which DNS server to use for your domain.

Web hosts provide DNS hosting with web hosting accounts and will usually register domains for you at their preferred domain registrar. The upside to having your webhost provide DNS registration is typically they will renew the Domain for you each year at the registrar and send a bill with your hosting bill. So you will get nice fast reliable hosting, with friendly service, and a convenient all-in-one billing for your website and domain name needs.

You also have the option of managing it all yourself, or choosing a combination of options, like the webhost only hosting the website and the registrar providing DNS hosting.

Current Problems/challenges:
1.Constant virus and malware issues
2.Aging computers
3.Multiple versions of Windows (XP, XP Pro, Vista Pro, Vista Home, Vista Media Edition, Win 7 Home, Win 7 Pro)
4.The CPA who works on their Quickbooks comes to their location once a week and displaces someone from their workstation in order to do the books
5.No real server, just a Win 7 desktop computer with file-sharing and no permissions structure
6.No Firewall
7.No Remote Access
8.No centralized printing
9.Employees often want to work from someone else’s workstation or desk
10.No off-site backups of data

Solution:
An LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) multipurpose server with a virtualized XP instance on top.

The hope was to solve all of the problems with a long term solution for under $10K and under $300 proactive monthly maintenance costs.

How it worked and some of the challenges:

The first challenge in converting any Windows network (or group of workstations in this case since they had no domain controller, real server or managed network) is to see what will and won’t work on Linux.  One thing that has enabled us to do more Linux conversions is the popularity and growth of web based software. Their industry software for scheduling and CRM went 100% web based earlier in the year.  That, along with web based email meant we had little left in Windows only software to be run locally.

The 3 Windows based software applications left were Quickbooks, Microsoft Publisher and Microsoft Office.

First, the easy one, Publisher.  There are a few desktop publishing programs for Linux (all free) and we chose Scribus as the Publisher replacement.  They tried Scribus and didn’t really like it.  So we enabled Publisher on their virtual XP instance. (more about that a little later)

The second was Quickbooks…I will refrain from any IT negative comments on the monster that is QuickBooks, but alas almost everyone uses it and supporting it well distinguishes us from other IT vendors.  We had three options here, our virtual application server here in our data center where could give them a login to a virtual Windows desktop where their QuickBooks would be hosted, the second option was to create a Windows virtual machine on their LTSP server and the third to use QuickBooks’s cloud based offering where all data and computing is done on Intuit’s servers through a web browser.   We opted for the second, but just barely.  Really either of the first two solutions would have worked just fine, but keeping their QuickBooks on the in-house server was their preference.  QuickBooks’s cloud based offering is getting better, but still lacks some functionality and leaves you at the mercy of an Internet connection.  I would however speculate that this will become a more viable option very soon.

Along with QuickBooks installed on the virtual XP instance, we loaded a VPN onto the server so the CPA or the bookkeeper could log in remotely and work on QuickBooks or see anything else on the network.  This meant the CPA would no longer have to travel to the customer to do QuickBooks work.  (travel time the client was being billed for)

Third was Microsoft Office.  That one is fairly easy, Oracle’s Open Office has matured to the point where almost anyone can replace their Microsoft Office with Open Office and be on their merry way.  With a few exceptions in Excel and PowerPoint and the lack of Outlook, Open Office does everything Microsoft Office does, and with less horsepower required from the hardware.  Oh and it’s free…it never gets old telling clients we replaced something expensive with something free.

The switch from Windows Desktops to Linux is fairly painless for 90% of users.  A few things are in different places and like any conversion it takes a little getting used to, but there are generally no revolts or mutinies.

When we convert from stand-alone desktops to thin clients we will choose one of a few options for the desktop hardware.
1.We may just remove the desktop machine and replace it with a thin client, generally $250-$400 depending on setup.  $300 is the average
2.We may leave the desktop just like it is, even leaving the Windows OS complete in place and just tell the BIOS to net-boot from the server. (this works well just in case there are surprises like “oh I totally forgot we use Windows to XYZ” and you have to go back to Windows for something temporarily)
3.We may rip out the hard drives and strip the desktop machine down to essentially a bulky thin client with as few moving parts as possible.  (since the moving parts will die in a computer)

As the converted desktop machines die over time we replace them with thin client units and the savings  are substantial and more than just dollars.
1.The customer does not have to pay to have a PC built or configured.  Aside from the hardware savings, there is no setup, just add a user on the server (10 minutes of tech time)
2.The thin client unit itself is roughly one third the cost of a good desktop machine
3.The thin client lasts almost twice as long, so once again half the cost
4.It uses less than half the power of a desktop machine (you would be surprised how fast this adds up)
5.The thin client takes up about 1/10th the space of a desktop machine
6.You can extend the life of a 5 year old desktop that would normally be obsolete by converting it to a thin client
7.Any user can sit down at any desk, login and blamo it’s as if they were at their own desk
8.When a machine dies, you toss it and plug in your spare thin client, it’s a 90 second process

In the end the solutions works great and everyone is happy. It took us about two weeks to work out the bugs and little tweaks.  Not every printer wants to be plugged into a Linux LTSP server, so we made one printer change.
We did the whole project for under $6K with about $300 in monthly costs (including backup services)

Notes:
At one point we discussed housing their LTSP server here in our data center and having all work be remote login, but opted against due to flaky Comcast connection and no redundancy options for Internet.
We generally roll Debian based Linux systems and prefer Ubuntu for desktops.
Our experience is thin clients in general last anywhere from 8-10 years.  The average desktop is 4-6 with just under 5 being the average.

We did have a real issue with a couple models of HP desktops booting well from the LTSP server. Some of HP machines now are so proprietary it takes some bios tweaks to make them do anything other than run their native OS they were built for.

Converting a Windows Network to Linux Thin Clients:

We have a customer who works in the home care field, they have “caregivers” who visit residential homes and provide non-medical in home care. In total there are 70 people, about 10 in their corporate office and 60 caregivers in the field. We are dealing exclusively with their office network and those 10 users.

Current Problems/challenges:

1. Constant virus and malware issues

2. Aging computers

3. Multiple versions of Windows (XP, XP Pro, Vista Pro, Vista Home, Vista Media Edition, Win 7 Home, Win 7 Pro)

4. The CPA who works on their Quickbooks comes to their location once a week and displaces someone from their workstation in order to do the books

5. No real server, just a Win 7 desktop computer with file-sharing and no permissions

6. No Firewall

7. No Remote Access

8. No centralized print sharing

9. Employees often want to work from someone else’s workstation or desk

10. No off-site backups of data

Solution:

An LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) multipurpose server with a virtualized XP instance on top.

The idea was to solve all of the problems with a long term solution for under $10K and under $300 ongoing maintenance costs.

How it worked and some of the challenges:

The first challenge in converting any Windows network (or group of workstations in this case since they had no domain controller, real server or managed network) is to see what will and won’t work on Linux. One thing that has enabled us to do more Linux conversions is the migration to web based software. Their vertical application software for scheduling and CRM went 100% web based earlier in the year. That, along with web based email meant we had little left in Windows only software to be run locally.

The 3 Windows based software applications left were Intuit Quickbooks (QuickBooks), Microsoft Publisher and Microsoft Office.

First, the easy one, Publisher. There are a few desktop publishing programs for Linux (all free) and we chose Scribus as the Publisher replacement. They tried Scribus and didn’t really like it. So we enabled Publisher on their virtual XP instance.

The second was Quickbooks…I will refrain from any IT negative comments on the monster that is QuickBooks, but alas almost everyone uses it and supporting it well distinguishes us from other IT vendors. We had three options here, our virtual application server here in our data center where could give them a login to a virtual Windows desktop where their QuickBooks would be hosted, the second option was to create a Windows virtual machine on their LTSP server and the third to use QuickBooks’s cloud based offering where all data and computing is done on Intuit’s servers through a web browser. We opted for the second, but just barely. Really either of the first two solutions would have worked just fine, but keeping their QuickBooks on the in-house server was their preference. QuickBooks’s cloud based offering is getting better, but still lacks some functionality and leaves you at the mercy of an Internet connection. I would however speculate that this will become a more viable option very soon.

Along with QuickBooks installed on the virtual XP instance, we loaded a VPN onto the server so the CPA or internal accounting could log in remotely and work on QuickBooks or see anything else on the network. This meant the CPA would no longer have to travel to the customer to do QuickBooks work. (travel time the client was being billed for)

Third was Microsft Office. That one is fairly easy, Oracle’s Open Office has matured to the point where almost anyone can replace their Microsoft Office with Open Office and be on their merry way. With a few exceptions in Excel and PowerPoint and the lack of Outlook, Open Office does everything Microsoft Office does, and with less horsepower required from the hardware. Oh and it’s free…it never gets old telling clients we replaced something expensive with something free.

The switch from Windows Desktops to Linux is fairly painless for 90% of users. A few things are in different places and like any conversion it takes a little getting used to, but there are generally no revolts or mutinies.

When we convert from stand-alone desktops to thin clients we will choose one of a few options for the desktop hardware.

1. We may just remove the desktop machine and replace it with a thin client, generally $250-$400 depending on setup. $300 is the average

2. We may leave the desktop just like it is, even leaving the Windows OS complete in place and just tell the BIOS to net-boot from the server. (this works well just in case there are surprises like “oh I totally forgot we use Windows to XYZ” and you have to go back to Windows for something temporarily)

3. We may rip out the hard drives and strip the desktop machine down to essentially a bulky thin client with as few moving parts as possible. (since the moving parts will die in a computer)

As the converted desktop machines die over time we replace them with thin client units and the savings are substantial and more than just dollars.

1. The customer does not have to pay to have a PC built or configured. Aside from the hardware savings, there is no setup, just add a user on the server (10 minutes of tech time)

2. The thin client unit itself is roughly one third the cost of a good desktop machine

3. The thin client lasts almost twice as long, so once again half the cost

4. It uses less than half the power of a desktop machine (you would be surprised how fast this adds up)

5. The thin client takes up about 1/10^th the space of a desktop machine

6. You can extend the life of a 5 year old desktop that would normally be obsolete by converting it to a thin client

7. Any user can sit down at any desk, login and blamo it’s as if they were at their own desk

8. When a machine dies, you toss it and plug in your spare thin client, it’s a 90 second process

In the end the solutions works great and everyone is happy. It took us about two weeks to work out the bugs and little tweaks. Not every printer wants to be plugged into a Linux LTSP server, so we made one printer change.

We did the whole project for under $6K with about $300 in monthly costs (including backup services)

Notes:

• At one point we discussed housing their LTSP server here in our data center and having all work be remote login, but opted against due to non-redundant Internet connections

• We generally roll Debian based Linux systems and prefer Ubuntu for desktops.

• Our experience is thin clients in general last anywhere from 8-10 years. The average desktop is 4-6 with just under 5 being the average

The web firm will specialize in communications and audience assessments, design, and detailed programming.

For more information visit www.switchupweb.com

Kirt Runolfson is President of Interlink and CEO of Switch Up Web. Jennifer Ferrero is President of Switch Up Web.

Switch Up Web has launched a new website for Interlink Advantage today. Interlink Advantage, has now changed their name to Interlink, provides Information Technology support to the region.

Switch Up Web is Interlink’s web development partner that shares a common CEO.

The new site is focused on key services most useful to Interlink clients. “We hope that the service listings will provide customers with a robust view of our offerings,” says Kirt Runolfson, president.

The site is modern and more graphic than the former site. It contains search engine optimization by Unleashed Online Marketing.

Here’s what we did to get it going. Note: You will need to be connected to the Internet so the dictionaries can download.

1. Go to File -> Wizards -> Select your language -> Click the “Start dicOOo” button.
2. Now follow the prompts until it asks you to restart Open Office
3. Once restarted go to Tools -> Options -> Language Settings
4. Under Writing Aids verify/modify the settings and click OK.
5. Under Languages verify/modify the settings and click ok.

You should be good to go. I had to modify mine in one more spot because my Locale is different (long story).

1. Under Format -> Character -> Font the “Language” setting should match what you set in your Language Settings -> Languages

Now any new document you start will have spell check enabled.

We referenced this forum post, spell checker in openoffice.org, to get us started on the right path.

Download a copy and give it a try! OpenOffice.org

Hope this helps!

Well we assumed that it had to be because we changed the password. No problem right? Right, if your a printer tech for an office equipment firm. Well we went out there and logged into the administrator management to find the account settings and change the password. It wasn’t there so we called the firm that installed the copier and they told us where to find the scanner settings after explaining the problem. No problem, we found the scanner settings and no where is there any user account settings for the scanner. Remember this was a scanner problem.

We then second guessed our original theory and went to the windows server for answers. The first place we looked was the security tab in the event viewer. That is where windows logs successful/unsuccessful connections. No unsuccessful connections logged by the copier. It appeared as if the copier wasn’t even hitting the server. So we started at the physical layer and worked our way up.

The copier was definitely on the network and able to communicate. Users were printing to it as we worked. We could ping the server, the server could ping the copier. By IP and by name. Not a DNS problem either. We could print to the copier from the server. They definitely saw and could communicate with each other so back to the control panel on the copier. Nothing in any settings that could remotely relate to the scanner or network was helpful. All settings verified and checked out. The scan share was accessible by everyone so we made our second phone call to the copier tech.

He had me go under jobs and list them which showed a TX error. ED09C7. He looked up the error code and it was a user authentication error. So our original theory was correct. Changing the admin password broke the scanning. Ok, great now where do you find the user account settings? Why in User Settings of course NOT the administrator management. Ok, makes sense. The full path to find the user name and password is as follows.

User Setting -> FAX -> OneTouch -> -> Destination -> user password.

Well of course! Go to the FAX settings for a SCANNER issue. Wow! I believe I may never have found it without the call to the tech or some googling. FAX…… The copier was set to use SMB to talk to the server so of course a user name and password had to be used to authenticate on the server. The question then arises why was the failed authentication not recorded in event viewer?

We updated the password and bingo it worked. We hope this saves you a little time in fixing this error.

99% of these programs do NOT need to load on boot. Adobe updater does not need to load. Quicktime does not need to load. All those Dell support programs, yeah, definitely don’t need to load. All these programs that load on boot can be launched by you when you need them. It’s not necessary for the program to be always ready and taking up valuable resources. Disabling these programs from loading at start up will enable your computer to boot faster and run more efficiently.

Using MSCONFIG in Windows XP.

1.Go to Start -> Run
2.Type msconfig and click OK or hit enter. This fires up the Microsoft System Configuration Utility
3.Click on the Startup tab.
4.You now have a list of all the programs loading on startup.
5.Disable all programs you recognize as not needed. They are just wasting memory.

If you are in doubt if a program is necessary then leave it. Only disable those you recognize and don’t need to be loaded and running at all times. Do a Google search for any programs in question. The leaner you get your startup the more resources you’ll free up to use.

Cleaning up your startup will significantly increase the performance of your PC. Throw in another 1GB or2GB of RAM and it’ll feel like a new PC again.

Something else to look at when trying to speed up your computer is defragmenting your hard drive. Over time your hard disk gets fragmented causing it to work harder and inefficiently. Your hard drive has an arm that moves over the disk reading the data. When your hard disk is fragmented that means the files are not in one contiguous are. That one document you saved could have parts in 14 locations on your hard drive. You can see how that could cause performance issues.

We recommend JKDefrag. It’s much more efficient and quicker than the built in Windows defragmenter. It’s also free! Install and run JkDefrag once or twice a month and your hard drive will thank you with a performance boost.

There are a lot of factors that can cause a PC to perform sluggishly. More often than not it’s due to an infection of some sort. A virus, malware, spyware, etc… is eating resources causing the PC to seem slow for no reason. There are things other than viruses that can cause sluggishness.

Have you cleaned your temporary internet files lately? 80% of you are going to answer no! Temporary Internet Files are copies of the web pages, images, etc… you’ve browsed too. So every time you get online, a copy of the sites you visit is saved to your hard drive. Those files build up over time and bog down your system.

If you use Internet Explorer:

1. At the top of the browser click “tools”
2. click Internet Options
3. In the middle of that first tab(General) click “Delete Files”
4. Check the “Delete all offline content” checkbox
5. Click ok and wait. It may take a bit if you’ve never done this.

The next thing to look at is how many programs are installed and what truly is needed. Over time you download this, install that, and before you know it your overloaded. In particular older computers purchased via various online PC providers, cough Dell cough, come pre-installed with unnecessary software. If you also purchased it with the default base memory configuration then it’s probably not enough for todays software.

So now your lacking in RAM(memory) AND you still have that expired 30 day trial of Norton installed. You’ve upgraded MS Office from 2000 to 2007 and at boot up your computer is using 487MB of the 512MB’s of RAM installed. Yes, your computer should be slow.

512MB of RAM is barely enough to run Windows XP. So what do you do now?? Uninstall those unnecessary applications!

1. Go to Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs
2. Select any program you don’t use and get rid of it, like that 30 trial of Mavis Beacon or Norton Anti-Virus.
*If you are unsure then DON’T uninstall. Please ask someone you trust to be knowledgeable enough to know.
3. Uninstall any game or software you haven’t touched in forever. Sure you may want it someday but realistically will you ever use it?

Doing this and cleaning out your temp directories is a good start to speeding up and maintaining your PC. We’ll discuss how to prevent applications from loading into memory at start up and consuming resources in a future post.