Amateur Innovators Construct Hand-Held Thermal Detection Device

Sick of living in a poorly-heated apartment? You can now expose draughty trouble spots by building your own thermal flashlight and painting colourful heat maps on your walls.

The do-it-yourself technology developed by the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, a non-profit group based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, lets homeowners and tenants document the temperature around their home to reveal inadequate insulation.

Last month, during a hacking session at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, students with little electronics experience gathered to make their own flashlights from a multicoloured LED, a thermal sensor, a circuit board and wire.

A programmed mini-processor was used to control how the unit responds to heat. One student exploited the hackable nature of the tool to develop a wand design as an alternative to the standard exterior made from a VHS tape case.

By the end of the afternoon the flashlights were ready for testing. The students waved frozen water bottles in front of the device while capturing a time-lapse of the light painting with the online webcam program Glowdoodle.

To find out more about the device and potential applications for environmental monitoring, read our full news story: "Thermal flashlight 'paints' cold rooms with colour".

Brain Technology can improve their visual performance

Scientists discovered that brain technology can help people learn new things and it doesn’t require much concentration at all.

In theory, if a person were to use the new method, he could look into a computer screen and learn a new language.

ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratory and Boston University researchers used brain technology to help people improve their visual performance in areas such as memory, motor, and rehabilitation.

For example, if a person wants to be a good athlete, then his brain pattern should align to those seen in a professional through real-time feedback. Or if a person needs to be treated after an accident, his brain patterns could be changed to match the baseline. That’s all in theory for now, but the study shows promising results.

To do this, a person could look at computer screen to obtain a specific activation pattern in their brain. Furthermore, this study found that the subjects improved their performance without actually being aware of what they were learning.

Wait? Really? The experiment used decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to improve the subjects’ ability. The subjects also participated in neuro-feedback training so they could match their brain activity to the desired visual performance.

The study was published in the journal Science.

“So we have to test if the method works in other types of learning in the future,” ATR’s professor Mitsuo Kawato said in a statement. “At the same time, we have to be careful so that this method is not used in an unethical way.”

Juno to Jupiter: This week @NASA - YouTube

Harness the disruption or become obsolete: Forreste

Disruptive technology is changing the way we do business. It is perhaps the CIO's greatest challenge. And, according to Forrester vice-president and research director, Mark Mulligan, the opportunities lie not in the disruption itself, but in how you respond.

“Companies lose control of their customers when disruptive technology enables them to interact with their products and services on their terms,” he told CIOs at Forresters Empowered event in Sydney. “When this happens, revenues are threatened and companies — unless they harness this technology and develop new products and services — fail. It’s really quite simple.”

Mulligan calls this process disruptive renewal. And although it is often rapid, it doesn’t happen all at once. There are three key stages:

1. Disruptive empowerment

“This is what happens when your customers have technology that enables them to use products and services on their terms,” Mulligan said. “Think the rise of the internet, or home broadband, or smartphones and the iPad.”

2. Discontinuous change

By this stage, according to Mulligan, the new technology hasn’t just opened up new behaviour patterns, it has permanently, and irrevocably, changed the way in which customers interact and engage.

3. A choice

“Either companies harvest this disruption and learn how to build and use these new paradigms into their products and services or they fail and face terminal obsolescence”.

Mulligan argues the most important factor in consumer technology in 21st Century is connectivity. And he is quick to point out that dramatically disruptive technology hardly new; witness the rise of radio and television.

“We don't have an exclusive on rapid technological change,” he said.

The problem for organisations is that as technology improves, people expect more from their products and services, often for less money sometimes for nothing at all. And, in the age of disruptive renewal, the customer has control.

“Good enough is just not good enough anymore,” Mulligan said.

If companies fail to respond to disruptive change, the can quickly find their traditional cannibalised by non-traditional competitors. Mulligan cites the music industry, which over the years has spent the majority of its time and effort fighting online music technology instead of trying to harness it.

“In just 10 years the disruptive of ‘free’ shattered the revenues with disruptive change — because of their response.

“It's not the disruption that decides what happens to your company. It's how you respond to it.”

Most companies do not respond effectively enough or quickly enough to disruptive environments and discontinuous change. Forrester asked product strategist across around the world about the issue, and 92 per cent said they think disruption will seriously challenge their products.

Open source Razorback - Attacks Malware & Zero-day exploits

Sourcefire, best known for its Snort intrusion-prevention technology, Tuesday is unveiling a new open source project called Razorback that's designed to spot malware and especially zero-day exploits.

Sourcefire says Razorback is designed with a "defense routing system" that monitors for certain traffic types, such as HTTP, Web or SMTP-based e-mail, in order to forward mirrored data to any means of security analysis system that can be plugged into it.

Security tools supporting Razorback could be either open-source or proprietary.

Razorback monitoring could be integrated directly into security gateways as well as deployed on standalone servers. A typical place to put the main Razorback monitoring component would be directly behind an antivirus filtering point, according to Sourcefire, which also shepherds the open source Clam A/V toolkit. Razorback could also work with security information and event management products.

Razorback "knows the resources in the organization that might have a specific interest in files, such as PDFs, for example," which could have malicious code embedded in them, Watchinski says. Razorback-monitored PDF files could be sent to a forensics tool that could analyze them for zero-day vulnerabilities or possible exploit code.

Razorback's "defense-routing system" is not necessarily real-time and it's not yet designed to directly block suspicious data.The underlying idea of the open source project is to set up multiple paths to simultaneously transmit any mirrored data of specific security concern onward to designated security points for analysis, output and feedback to Razorback.

On a more advanced level, these third-party Razorback-supported tools, after security analysis, could in theory assist Razorback in recommendations to take protective blocking measures or update threat determinations.

Today, Razorback has been developed to work with open source Snort and Clam A/V as well as other open source code, such as Postfix.

Sourcefire has no publicly stated intention as of yet to launch a commercial product based on Razorback. The company does say the defense sector is interested in development of the kind of defense-routing system that Razorback seeks to foster through open source.

Razorback will be licensed by Sourcefire under open source GPLv2 license. In general, Sourcefire expects the code to be available for free to users and vendors -- but if Razorback is modified with the intent to sell it as a commercial product, discussion about licensing fees can be expected.

Does Disruptive technology always lead to Disruptive Innovation?

Disruptive technology and disruptive innovation are terms used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, e.g. lower priced, designed for a different set of consumers, new materials or technologies.

Disruptive Innovation
Disruptive innovations can be broadly classified into low-end and new-market disruptive innovations. A new-market disruptive innovation is often aimed at non-consumption (i.e., consumers who would not have used the products already on the market), whereas a lower-end disruptive innovation is aimed at mainstream customers for whom price is more important than quality.

Dusruptive Technology
Disruptive technologies are particularly threatening to the leaders of an existing market, because they are competition coming from an unexpected direction.

A disruptive technology can come to dominate an existing market by either filling a role in a new market that the older technology could not fill (as cheaper, lower capacity but smaller-sized flash memory is doing for personal data storage in the 2000s) or by successively moving up-market through performance improvements until finally displacing the market incumbents (as digital photography has largely replaced film photography).

Sustaining Innovation
In contrast to "disruptive innovation", a "sustaining" innovation does not have a changing or disruptive effect on existing markets but instead it has a developmental, supportive and/or complimentary effect.

Sustaining innovations may be either "discontinuous" (revolutionary) or continuous"
(evolutionary) but in both cases they are based on the original mindset, framework or concept.

Revolutionary Innovation
Revolutionary innovations are not always disruptive or certainly not immediate in their disruptive effect i.e. they have a long term effect not a short term one.

Although the automobile was a revolutionary innovation, it was not a disruptive innovation, because early automobiles were expensive luxury items that did not disrupt the market for horse-drawn vehicles. The market remained intact until the debut of the lower priced Ford Model T in 1908. A similar example would be the rise in technological investment into space tourism.

The New New Thing in IT: Consumerisation

One of the newest trends in IT is consumerisation, and if you don't already know about it, you soon will. It's the idea that new technologies, the cool stuff people want, will become available for the consumer market before they become available for the business market. What it means to business is that people -- employees, customers, partners -- will access business networks from wherever they happen to be, with whatever hardware and software they have. Maybe it'll be the computer you gave them when you hired them. Maybe it'll be their home computer, the one their kids use. Maybe it'll be their cell phone or PDA, or a computer in a hotel's business center. Your business will have no way to know what they're using, and -- more importantly -- you'll have no control.

In this kind of environment, computers are going to connect to each other without a whole lot of trust between them. Untrusted computers are going to connect to untrusted networks. Trusted computers are going to connect to untrusted networks. The whole idea of "safe computing" is going to take on a whole new meaning -- every man for himself. A corporate network is going to need a simple, dumb, signature-based antivirus product at the gateway of its network. And a user is going to need a similar program to protect his computer.

Bottom line: antivirus software is neither necessary nor sufficient for security, but it's still a good idea. It's not a panacea that magically makes you safe, nor is it is obsolete in the face of current threats. As countermeasures go, it's cheap, it's easy, and it's effective. I haven't dumped my antivirus program, and I have no intention of doing so anytime soon.

Technology and Romance

Technology is very like a stormy romance. When everything clicks, you’re on top of the world — but every now and then, something goes horribly wrong, and your heart gets broken.

Like when your hard drive dies, or your new gadget becomes obsolete after two weeks, or you find out that that gorgeous iPhone runs only on a limited T-Mobile service.

Inexpensive Training for your Employees

We all agree that ongoing education is important because it helps keep technical workers interested, thinking innovatively and motivated.

Unfortunately, training programs and educational conferences can be very pricey and, given the state of many corporate budgets today, such offerings are simply out of their financial reach.

It's unfortunate that training is always the first thing to fall under the budgetory axe, because if you're not investing in your people, you and they, are falling behind.

Your workers know this and will remember it too when the good times are back, and they will be back, but at that time, when you need them most, your employees will be packing up to leave.

So, what can an IT executive do? The only thing you can do. Stretch your training budget as far as you can and as best you can, through efficient, yet effective, innovative arrangements.

1. Rotate your employees

Cross-training has long been an important way to help people learn new skills, you can take it a step further by rotating roles and responsibilities using other assignments involving different technologies and projects.

You don't want people to feel like they're only working on a care and maintenance basis. So, everyone needs to get the opportunity to be exposed to or work on the new products. This keeps everyone moving into new technology areas, so that they don't get stale and complacent. Skill stagnation and atrophy is the danger.

It allows people to grow, expand and diversify their skill sets and this kind of training can actually be far more effective than a typical classroom based session. You get to partner with someone who is hands-on with the application, so you can see the reality of what they actually do every day. It also creates a different perspective on issues and problem-solving techniques.

2. Establish Skills Forums

Two or three times a month, your employees can spend their lunch breaks hearing from colleagues who have developed expertise in particular areas.

Getting this innitiative started and off the ground is the biggest hurdle but once you have it going the program should become proactive and popular enough so that participation is truly voluntary. Half the session can be focussed on tech topics, with IT workers presenting and the other half can delve into known issues affecting other departments, with involvement from the employees in those areas. Better still if they can lead the discussions.

This gives us the ability to share more information, not just at a technology level, but also better insight into the business side. All for the cost of a finger buffet lunch.

3. Collaboration with Internal Partners

Don't ring fence the training that you would use for your business managers. That training is very much less expensive than techie IT training and the technologists are expected to understand what the business units do. They need to learn business analyst skills to understand the business.

Remember, if the company's accounting department want an application taht will better deal with commercial real estate bankruptcies, the IT workers are required and encouraged to attend. Encourage and co-erce business executives to give presentations to IT employees but specifically tailored for their perspective.

Select and use your best presenters and speaker, no matter where or what they represent. Teach them to talk to a wider audience. If someone in marketing runs the best meetings, tap that person to teach IT how to do the same. They can observe the marketing person in action and then have a follow-up session for questions. The technologists are quite bright, they can be quick to pick things up, normally.

4. Buddy up workers

Encourage IT workers to collaborate and pair up. To teach one another through "buddy learning."

You can take an RPG coder who really wants to learn .Net, or a SQL coder who wants to be better at Cognos, and partner them up. That way they learn from each other. Again this approach will work equally well in IT and across other departments.

Of course, employees could tap colleagues for one-on-one training on their own, but they need your authorisation, to allow, enable or permit this to happen. They are often very tied up in their daily duties and let the opportunities slip away. Your support and an established structure are critical for the program to succeed. Also some IT types need to be taught how to 'share' or 'play well' with others.

5. Collaborate with External Partners

Do you meet regularly with other comapnies in your busines sector? Have you established an information exchange forum with them? If not, why not? If you have, then well done. You need to meet regularly with your business counterparts and other local companies to discuss key issues.

The group can be expanded to incorporate any amount of relevant comanies, in your area and can become a pressure group and a support team for change. Also consider exchanging employees on a temporary basis. Build a model of collaboration and sharing with their staff. Sending workers to one another's companies for brief stints to learn from what's happening in the rest of the world, will produce and enlightenment within your employees and a big boost to morale.

Of course you can also use this forum to ensure that poaching of key staff members does not occur. Establish some ground rules and 'gentlefolf' agreements, at least so that you get some awareness of an employees dis-satisfaction.

6. Create Mentoring opportunities

Mentoring is a staple of career development that all executive coaches will recommend and yet many working professionals find it hard to implement. Meanwhile, formal programs using outside consultants can cost companies a huge slice of their budgets annually. The smart executive can start in-house mentoring sessions for virtually no money.

Pick 5 - 10 of the company's best leaders from among a group of volunteers to be dubbed mentors. Then ask your employees to sign up to the program, if they are interested in being mentored. Select the 5 - 10 candidates who show the most potential and could be best matched with a mentor.

Conclusion

Make it easy for your employees to learn, grow and develop and show them every encouragement to do so. Establish a technical library with up-to-date materials and online learning facilities. Publicise the schedule. Refresh it regularly and keep it alive. Record training sessions on DVD for people who could not attend.

The Unwritten Laws of Luddite Technology

What are the Basic Luddite PC Tech Laws?

Let's start with the so-called 'Brains of the Outfit', the 'Nerve Centre' - The PC, Laptop, Mac or 'computer'

• Law 1: For every fix that a Windows Update patch fixes, the update will break two other things on your PC
• Law 2: The risk that Windows will need to automatically install time-sucking critical updates on your PC, is directly proportional to your need to get your PC started
• Law 3: The hard drive always fails just before you were going to back it up.
• Law 4: Your data will get corrupted just before you plug in your new backup external drive or will be corrupted when plugging in your backup device..
• Law 5: Your backup plan is only as good as your last successful restore.
• Law 6: The number of USB ports on your PC or Mac will always be one less than you need at any given time.
• Law 7: Feeling the time pressure on you to fix a computer quickly, will cause you to take longer.
• Law 8: If you close the PC case and tighten all the screws before testing it, it won't work; If you test it before closing the case, it will be OK.

What are The Luddite Tech Support Rules?
Now that you've mastered the basic technology traps, you think you're ready to move on to Tech Support.

• Law 1: If you fix a computer for a friend or family member, you'll be their tech support for life.
• Law 2: If you Build a computer for someone else, then he/she also owns you for life!
• Law 3: Recommend a product that you've used with no problems, and the friend/family member who buys it will immediately descend into some sort of product return hellhole of retribution.
• Law 4: Show any smart or handy IT skills at work, and your company's IT department will start referring all their difficult coworkers to you, the Mr Fixit Guru Guy!
• Law 5: If it's broken and you call tech support, it will immediately fix itself while you're on hold or are still trying to press the correct buttons to get through the responding call centre's phone system.

What are The Luddite Internet Ordinances?
You can find a world of trouble online.

• Law 1: Within a month of agreeing to be "friends" with your boss on Facebook you will regret it, big time.
• Law 2: The crappier the Web site, the sleazier and sketchier the ads.
• Law 3: When entering "Captcha" verification codes on a Web site, you'll always type in the numeral 1 when the site wants a lowercase L, and a capital O when the site wants the number 0.
• Law 4: Just before taking out the boss in a WoW raid, your Internet connection will die.
• Law 5: The difficulty involved in redeeming a rebate is directly proportional to the monetary value of the rebate.
• Law 6: The safe draft of a nasty e-mail, will always somehow find its way to the (unintended) recipient.

What are The Luddite Precepts of Mobile Tech?
Desktop technology isn't the only source of inevitable woe in your life. All those shiny mobile devices can cause pain, too, since the freedom of untethered technology doesn't extend to immunity from rank on rank of frustrating unalterable laws.

We report 10 master Luddite Mobile Laws here.

• Law 1: The charger for your current cell phone will not work with the next cell phone you buy.
• Law 2: Your laptop's charger weighs half of what your laptop weighs and doesn't fit easily into the laptop carry bag.
• Law 3: A laptop battery will drain at twice its normal rate whenever you leave home without your power cord.
• Corollary: Your laptop's battery life is inversely proportional to the amount of work you need to get done on a single charge.
• Law 4: Your iPod or iPhone will be on its last burst of power just as the plane door shuts.
• Law 5: A replacement battery charger will cost 70 percent of the original purchase price of the whole device, including the laptop bag. For phones, the figure is 140 percent!
• Law 6: Your cell phone will inevitably break before your two-year contract is up, forcing you to overpay for a new, less-cool model.
• Law 7: The proprietary charging plug (cost to produce: 50 cents) for your device will disappear within two weeks and will cost you $40 to replace.
• Law 8: On any vacation, a) the memory card for your digital camera will be safely lodged in the card reader on your desk at home. b) The camera's proprietary re-chargeable battery will be dead, with the charger sitting next to the card reader.
• Law 9: A cup of coffee or fizzing drink on your desk, is guaranteed to render your laptop utterly useless.
• Law 10: Your MagSafe adapter will always come unplugged precisely when you need to charge your Mac laptop's battery.

What are The Luddite Software Statutes?
Finally, if entanglements with hardware principles don't leave you bound and gagged, there are always software standards to render you helpless.

• Law 1: Your software provider's online support pages contain explicit instructions for troubleshooting every conceivable problem, except yours.
• Law 2: Nine times out of ten, tinkering with your Registry to fix a system issue will create a new and more severe problem. Did you back it up before you started? Unlikely!
• Law 3: Ten times out of ten, downloading a spyware product will create hidden processes/services more insidious than the original malware/adware encroachment you set out to stop.
• Law 4: The performance increase you can expect from running a Registry cleaner can be calculated as z(n + y), where n is the number of Registry entries cleaned, y is your system CPU's clock speed in gigahertz, and z = 0, or near to it.
• Law 5: The larger the number of people who want your attractive iPhone app, the likelier Apple is to reject it.
• Law 6: iTunes will crash. That's it. No, really.

Change and Business Analysis

What makes a good and effective Business Analyst in these days of economic storms, tightened belts and changing political tides.

While strong abilities in communication, collaboration and analysis will always be the mainstays of strong business analysts, our changing technology environment is altering the world in which business analysts commonly work and therefore, their skills have to change in line with this and meet current business requirements.

While a Business Analyst's traditional skill set is still king, those decidedly non-technical leadership, communication and business-process understanding traits, the changes in software delivery methods have altered what business analysts need to offer right now.

The Rise of Agile Methodologies and Lean Concepts
It's the end of traditional software delivery as we know it, thanks to Agile and Lean. A recent survey found that 41 percent of respondents are using Agile techniques and 10 percent are exposed to Lean concepts.

Organisations are planning and implementing new, lighter-weight software delivery processes on a large scale, and this is largely changing the world of the business analysts. The BA's need to stay up to date with recent approaches and changes in methodologies, understand the subtle changes to their roles, and modify their practices accordingly.

Agile Approaches Change the Business Analyst Role
Requirements look very different in an Agile project than they do in a traditional waterfall endeavour. With Agile, the team typically describes requirements at a high level early on in the process and only elaborates on them when it's time to implement them.

The team uses different artifacts such as user stories, and the requirements definition process is much more collaborative and iterative.

Agile Methodologies

With an increase in the adoption of Agile methodologies inside businesses today, BAs need to understand what's changed and what's different in the methodologies so that they can help guide the transformation of their role and practices.

If their CIOs and business-unit leaders aren't already adapting the business analyst role to new software delivery methods and process changes, then the BAs might need to do it themselves.

Cross-Functional Knowledge

Business analysts need to obtain cross-functional knowledge and experience by being exposed to new technologies and different business units. Cross-training in project management, software development and quality assurance would help.

As with most roles in technology, it's never safe to rely on the skills you already possess. Effective business analysts are constantly seeking to improve their core skills and staying up to date with technology changes to add the most value to their organisation.

Bluetooth is now as fast as Wi-Fi

Let's talk about how Bluetooth got as fast as Wi-Fi.


Bluetooth 3.0
High Speed Bluetooth has stopped being chained to the low-power, low-throughput radio that has been both its strength and its weakness. Newly developed code lets Bluetooth applications now run over 802.11g wireless connections in the 2.4GHz, with a throughput jump to 20M to 24Mbps, from 1M to 3Mbps.

One of the key creators of this bit of wizardy is Kevin Hayes, a technical fellow with Atheros Communications, who has worked in more than a dozen task groups around the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN standard, and in Wi-Fi Alliance projects such as Wi-Fi Protected Access.

Hayes was the technical editor for the 802.11 Protocol Adaption Layer (PAL), one of the big changes in the just-announced Bluetooth 3.0 specification, a two-year project. PAL, together with the 802.11 media access control (MAC) and 802.11 physical (PHY) layers constitute the Alternate MAC/PHY or AMP, enabling a Bluetooth profile (such as file transfer) to run over a Wi-Fi link.


It may be the beginning of "Bluetooth everywhere," according to Network World blogger Craig Mathias but make sure you look for the full formal designation: Bluetooth 3.0 + High Speed (or HS). (For some uses, vendors can deploy 3.0 without the ability to use a Wi-Fi connection but they can't use "high speed" in labeling it).


Is this such a big change?
It's a generational change. The Bluetooth SIG wanted something a) that would deliver five to ten times the performance of current Bluetooth b) that would be available to customers in a short timeframe and that was proven technology.

Gartner analysts picked Bluetooth 3.0 as one of eight hot mobile technologies to watch.
With 3.0, the Bluetooth stack exploits whichever radio link is best. Firstly, it would only be used if both sides support it, in silicon and software. Some of the classic Bluetooth profiles, such as the headset profile or the hands-free profile for a car kit, will never use high-speed [Wi-Fi] silicon.

There are many object and file transfer protocols and profiles that would happily use it. Things like file transfer, object push, printing, imaging: all these would involve taking some object or file from one device and moving it to another. The new standard is appropriate for almost all of these.

What happens when the new Bluetooth code is deployed on gadgets with a Wi-Fi radio?
There's a generic Bluetooth framework, that rides over the classic Bluetooth radio. There are a set of protocols for doing things like discover and negotiation and so on. Some configuration variables are currently handed over to the new software module, called the 802.11 PAL, which translates those variables from the Bluetooth domain to the .11 domain. It translates the sent data packets from the Bluetooth stack, and broadcasts these over 802.11.

How does it do that?
It removes part of the Bluetooth stack header and replaces it with the 802.11 header, and sends this to the 802.11 MAC for transmission. And it reverses this process when you're receiving a Bluetooth 802.11 packet.

How complicated was this?
What was the most challenging or puzzling thing about creating this translation layer? Bluetooth, as a stack, does have a different set of expectations in its parlance, compared to IP. For example, the idea of "best effort" in transmission. In IP, best effort means "this channel gets no advanced quality of service." Bluetooth is not quite like that. In Bluetooth, best effort means it doesn't get any advanced priority service, but it is a reliable channel anyway.

Another example, is the way Bluetooth defines certain channels, for example, for audio streaming: Bluetooth will send packets and retry if they get dropped, but after a certain amount of time has passed, it will stop retrying. While 802.11 also does retries, it doesn't use time measurements, but a configurable number of retry attempts.

The PAL layer adapts the intentions of the Bluetooth layer to the capabilities of the features in the 802.11 MAC and PHY physical layers.

How does this mess up existing Bluetooth applications or usage?
This process is very clean: the Bluetooth stack itself is unchanged. That was very important. The "profiles" in the Bluetooth stack are really the applications. That was a very clear mandate from the Bluetooth SIG that none of these would change in order to support this alternate MAC/PHY. They didn't want to have to test all their profiles all over again.

How does adding this new translation step affect performance?
There's no performance loss, because there's no need for any queuing in the adaptation layer and this is normally where you lose performance in a network stack. The 802.11 stack can accept packets at 20Mbps to 25 Mbps: that's more than 10 times as fast as the classic vanilla flavoured Bluetooth.

What about the reverse? How does the Bluetooth stack receive packets at 20Mbps to 25 Mpbs from the 802.11 stack?
That part of the Bluetooth stack is not standardised. So if a mobile phone manufacturer did nothing in their 3.0 implementation to address this, you might have performance issues. You must make changes to this layer to perform at high speeds with 3.0, by adding resources for queuing.

How big a problem is that technically?
It's well within the developers capabilities to address these issues.


What parts of the stack do I have to look at to optimize performance?
This is simply the same exercise you would go through for Bluetooth as you would for adapting your network stack for gigabit Ethernet. You are on familiar ground here.

What will users see?
Clearly, to benefit from the high speed connection, you'll need two devices with the new 3.0 silicon, e.g. a smartphone trying to send five to ten jobs to a PC. Users will be be shown a simple menu option on their smartphone, saying "send to Bluetooth" or a simple Bluetooth menu. They would go through the same motions as they do now, in transferring data but it would just happen faster.


When will they see it?
Nine to 12 months is the time frame, according to the Bluetooth SIG. If you are wanting a smartphone with Bluetooth and 802.11, you'll have to wait for the next version of the phone to come out. I am sure the manufacturers and providers will rush to get these on the shelves as quickly as they can when the technology is available.

Staying afloat - develop buoyancy

Straighten up and Fly right!

With the economy said to be all at sea, what can an IT professional do, to stay afloat?

1) The first step is the easiest one of all. Keep your technology skills fresh and take advantage of every training opportunity, e.g. there are plenty of free online courses and certifications. "Free" is important, this is no time to ask your employer for money but also you may want to consider investing a little of your own cash on yourself, and your future.

In fact, you will find that when you are employing your own cash to buy training, you will become more discerning about the content, as well as the real relevance and necessity of attending a particular skills training course. Now suddenly you see it from your boss's position. Where is the payback? Do you have th ecourage to put your money where your mouth is? Are you willing to pay for the training and have the company reep the benefit. It would make you more secure and your boss would see you in a different and better light.

Something that is strangely inexpensive. You can always gain knowledge and get a head start on a new techie subject by 'reading a book' or three on the subject. I know, I know, its not very techie or 'out there' to be 'reading' and it will make some of your nerdy friends point at you and laugh, 'Oh, look guys! We've got a reader!' but tough times call for tough measures.

2) You could always leverage your technology expertise to help the company perform better. Wow! Is that possible you say? Yes! You might want to develop an application that helps the company's sales professionals (the suits), unlikely but possible. It's important not to be afraid to take the initiative. Develop your ideas or speak to the suits and see how their needs could be better met, especially if there is a techies slant to it.

Look seriously at mutually beneficial options, for both you and the company. Structure a rough 'business' plan showing how, by the use of new technologies (tools/ applications/ whatever), that you are willing to develop and learn the company can readily,

• save /make money or
  
• reduce overheads /wastage or
  
• get into new markets / challenge their competitors, or
  
• out manouvre them entirely by implementing more innovative approaches.
  

Some study in advance and a bit of prior knowledge here would be helpful in re-enforcing your pitch. Also brush up on your presentation techniques and I don't mean the Powerpoint style tools. I mean the, well dressed, standing at the front of an auditorium and speaking clearly and assertively, presentation skills.

These skills are some of the most important ones that you will need for the future and its vital that you get help with them. Your public performance can be easily made more structured, effective and carry more impact if you seek the advice of a professional tutor or toast master. Unfortunately by the sheer nature of this skill, it cannot be done online. You will have to go into the real world to speak to people about it. They will be wearing suits and maybe by that time, so will you.

Remember, you are the one best placed to know what new tools and technologies are out there and how best to apply them to the benefit of your company. So, why don't you tell them and put yourself forward as the co-ordinator and developer for the project. Cometh the hour, cometh the geek.

3) Be sure to stay up and alert. Be positive (B+) and become high profile and very visible. Throw off your cardigan and come out of the server room, turn your back on the Zen-like hum of the air-con, look your manager in one of his crazed bloodshot eyes and tell him how you are going to help him and lead him out of this mess. Then step back quickly, because he will become very emotional and may reach out and try to hug you. Not that this is a bad thing but it doesn't help your street cred with the guys.

4) Ensure that you stay busy by volunteering for new initiatives and by not turning down high profile assignments. Qudos and assignment selection is a story for another day, but be careful of being handed a dying star, a runaway horse or a poisoned elf.

Keeping fully occupied is good advice at any time, good or not so good but it is easy to get complacent in the good times and then find yourself out favour and out of position when times are difficult. Ask yourself, 'Am i doing enough to help me keep my job.'

Simple rhetorical phrases like "stay positive" are all very well but it can be tough to put into practice, especially in an oppresive or negative environment. Avoid the negative people in the office they will be the first ones targetted and then fired. Remember that negativity and cynicism are contagious. Therefore, turn off the news during the day. It is a drain on your spirit. Plug it or it will only drag you down and distract you from your chosen task.

If you do all that and you still face losing your job, what next?Who is moving my cheese?

Dust off your old resumé and make sure it is up-to-date, accurate, attractive, concise, well written and contains all of your updated contact information. Then, make sure it is optimized for keywords by describing your skills precisely. Post your résumé on all the job boards, such as Dice, LinkedIn and Monster, as well as the niche job boards, for jobs in financial services, media, etc. Check that the language used in your resumé is in synch with today's recruiters and job market.

If it is not 'reader friendly' it won't get read!

Take advantage of recruiting firms. Remember, when you meet with a recruiting firm, treat everyone with copious respect, because these are the 'gatekeepers'. The people who could help you land an interview and a job. Good recruiting firms and consultants will also work with you to optimize your résumé for the job boards and so also will good friends i.e. the suits not the geeks.

Finally, in this highly competitive dog-eat-cat job world, if you do manage to land an interview opportunity, let the prospective employer know you are available immediately. Don't say that you will be on vacation or only do interviews on Mondays. Make sure you are easily available and show a strong interest in the job; otherwise, you will lose the interview opportunity.

Remember the new mindset that you developed and all those new exercises that you carried out, just to make sure you didn't get fired, well these are the very ones that you can use to sell yourself to your potential employer, at the interview.

When the going gets tough, the tough will be the survivors. Build a plan and Make your own luck!

Develop yourselve into;

• a stronger, leaner and fitter condition to
• maintain, strengthen and consolidate your current position,
  
• study, re-train and supplement your skills,
  
• search out new opportunities inside and outside your present environment
• GROW!