Facebook, Twitter light up with Hurricane Irene data

Officials, residents take to social networks to talk about how to deal with impending storm
Computerworld - As people up and down the East Coast of the United States prepare for Hurricane Irene, social networks are being used to get the word out about its path and how best to deal with it.

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Federal agencies, disaster relief organizations and state governments have taken to Facebook and Twitter to warn people about the track of the approaching storm. The organizations are also using social sites to announce evacuation plans and discuss how best to safely ride out the storm.

This should come as no surprise -- earlier this week the American Red Cross reported that people are increasingly turning to social networks for information about approaching storms and other natural disasters.

The Red Cross report also noted that people are increasingly using sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to make pleas for assistance during a crisis, as well as to alert loved ones that they're safe.

And as Hurricane Irene approaches the East Coast, the Red Cross has created a Facebook photo album of people are preparing for Hurricane Irene.

And Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell today used Facebook to warn residents to take "seriously the need to prepare for this significant storm and to ready their families, homes and communities for possible evacuation." Similarly, Newark, N.J. Mayor Cory Booker posted on Facebook a video of a press conference he held to talk about the storm.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie turned to Twitter to alert his constituents that he was planning a news conference on hurricane preparedness.

And the New York Times is using Twitter to show a list on Twitter of hurricane-related information and resources. The list includes links to weather forecasts, lists of evacuation centers and bus service changes and delays.

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at Twitter@sgaudin, or subscribe to Sharon's RSS feed Gaudin RSS. Her e-mail address is sgaudin@computerworld.com.

Remembering Windows XP

First in a series. It was an innocent time. There was fun, fanfare and pride. Thousands of people worked together to complete something that would affect billions of lives -- that would be the most successful product of its kind. Ever. Eighteen days later the world they knew changed.

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Ten years ago today, Aug. 24, 2001, in Redmond Washington, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Jim Allchin, then vice president of the platforms group, officially released to manufacturing Windows XP. The RTM marked a huge achievement for Microsoft, which finally had a consumer operating system based on the NT kernel. Windows XP marked the end of the DOS/Windows 9x legacy and the beginning of a new lineage of Microsoft operating systems, continuing the path paved by Windows 2000 some 18 months earlier.

Dark clouds hung over Windows XP, however. In April 2000, US District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered Microsoft to be broken into separate desktop software and operating systems companies. A year later, an appeals court rescinded the breakup order but returned the case to a new judge. Some kind of penalty awaited Microsoft.

Meanwhile, the United States was griped in recession, following the dot-com collapse and Enron debacle. PC sales plummeted. If Microsoft was looking for about the worst time conceivable to launch Windows XP, this was it. Gartner sales projections for Windows XP were downright glum, for example.

Microsoft's Pride

But on this sunny day, one where stereotypical Seattle rain threatened to ruin festivities, those dark clouds seemed distant. Gates and Allchin gathered with other Microsoft employees, OEM partners and loads of journalists (Bloggers? Forbid! Not in 2001!) -- there was the ceremonial signing of gold code, placed in a briefcase and flown off by helicopter. Gates and Allchin looked hopeful during the RTM event, like proud fathers sending children off to the first day of school.

Timing was not coincidental. Microsoft had drawn a straight line from August 24 to September 24 to October 25 -- the latter two dates, respectively, when the first Windows XP PCs would go on sale and the software would officially launch in a big gala. That's right, new XP PCs preceded the official release by a month.

Microsoft and its partners planned to spend $1 billion promoting Windows XP. There would be multiple launch events around the globe, with the main one in New York City.

But darker clouds loomed unseen. On Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists flew highjacked jetliners into the World Trade Center's Twin Towers and into the US Pentagon. The collective American psyche entered a period of shock and mourning. An economy already ravaged by recession tumbled into despair. Microsoft couldn't respectively or in any way conceivably continue the big Windows XP launch event as planned.

Event organizers wisely chose to keep New York as the launch venue. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani welcomed Microsoft warmly. The city needed something to cheer the gloom, and revenues and tax sales dollars couldn't hurt either. So Giuliani joined Gates on Oct. 25, 2001, to officially launch Windows XP. There was a muted and respectful celebration. Microsoft's most important operating system ever debuted in the midst of uncertainty -- about America's future, the state of its economy and even Microsoft's fate before US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.

A Reliable, Workhorse

Windows XP wasn't an exceptional operating system so much as a reliable one. Particularly after the release of Service Pack 2, which was more of a new release than an update, XP found its place as the world's workhorse operating system. SP2 appeared in early August 2004, nearly four years after Windows XP RTM.

"Old Reliable" brought tremendous stability to the PC marketplace. No Microsoft operating system stayed in service so long without a replacement. Two-and-a-half years would pass before successor Windows Vista launched, in separate November 2006 and January 2007 events. By then, Windows XP was so widely used, so widely supported by applications, peripherals and other third-party products, Vista struggled to find support from anybody.

Microsoft made architectural changes that required developers to adapt their applications, but few seemed interested. Why should they? Windows XP's install base was enormous -- the OS paid the bills. Windows Vista was a marketing disaster, and for many reasons, but one of the most overlooked is Windows XP's success. The operating system had achieved the so-called "good enough" threshold, which coupled with the stable ecosystem created a competitive barrier for Vista like earlier Windows versions posed to other developers' operating systems. How ironic!

When Windows 7 shipped in September 2009, more than 80 percent of Microsoft's desktop OS install base was on XP. A stunning achievement.

All this started 10 years ago today.

Here at BetaNews we stop to celebrate Windows XP and to remember this remarkably successful workhorse OS. Today and over the next few, we will share recollections of Windows XP. Some are ours, some are yours and others'. If you have a Windows XP memory to share, there's still time -- in comments to this story or by emailing joe at betanews dot com.

A case against tools

3rd party tools don't do much for me, how about you?
One of the biggest businesses in IT is 3rd party tools. And the DB market has almost more than I can even count. We've got tools for everything from backups to security and defrag. It's amazing how many of those things there are. And one of the questions I'm asked the most when I get mobbed by users at conferences is which tools do I use in my shop. What do I use for backup? What do I use for monitoring? What do I use for maintenance? And much more.

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My answer is always the same no matter where I'm working. I use the Microsoft native tools. Now, I get ragged on sometimes for this because the MS tools are so base level, and don't offer hardly any advanced functionality so apparently I'm missing out on a lot. However, this is a topic I have a lot to say about and while I'm not going to launch into the full discussion, I am going to hit the highlights.

Ok so why don't I use 3rd party tools? Well, one of the biggest reasons is because they're typically not nearly as advanced as they would have you believe. Most of the time I find that whenever a company pitches an app to me it always falls just short of useful. So let's take for example a monitoring app that was pitched to me a while back. I'm of course, not going to mention any names here because it's not that kind of blog. It had a lovely interface with really nice graphs though. And it was fairly easy to configure and setup alerts. The historical piece of it was also pretty easy to work with and after learning just a couple tricks in the interface, it was fairly intuitive so I could narrow down the graphs to the exact time I was looking for very easily. However, it stopped there. On the surface it would seem like this is an excellent tool that any shop would welcome, but it isn't until you have enough experience to know what to look for that you realize that you don't want to manage your servers in this tool. For starters, while it's easy to configure, that's only for a single box. The configurations you setup for that box don't transfer to other boxes, so you have to configure each one individually. That's no way to manage a large environment. I don't know about you, but I don't have time to click through the same settings on all 700 of my servers. As well, while it is easy to configure and report on, you can't add counters to the collection. It comes with a set of counters that you can choose from, but if you're interested in a counter that's not included, you're out of luck. And I found that some of the counters I look at all the time for SQL Server aren't in the list. So I'd have to go outside the tool to get the other counters I'm looking for anyway. And what would be the point in that? And I really find that every tool has something wrong with it that makes me have to work around something.

The next big reason I use MS tools is that they're with me at every job. When I was young in this field I used to love the 3rd party tools. I would go out of my way to make sure my boss would buy whatever tools I liked working with. However, quite often I would find that the company either already had something in place (quite often one I wasn't that fond of), or they didn't have budget for tools. So now what do I do? I really love this one tool, but the company refuses to get it for me (for whatever reason). But whatever I write using the MS tools can be carried from job to job because they come with the products and they don't cost anything. So now I've got tools that I know how to use, and they can travel with me wherever I go.

Another reason is that even if the settings for a tool can be configured against groups of servers, your preferences can't easily be moved to another shop. So maybe you've got a specific set of counters you like to see by default, and specific thresholds. You have to set that up manually in your new shop. And if you're like me, you almost never use the default configs for any product so setting them up manually can be a chore. Personally, I like having to do as little as possible when I move to a new gig.

So while the MS tools don't have much to them, that only means that you can do whatever you like and actually keep your efforts. Whatever you do to manage your environment, you can use it in every new job, and your default settings stay intact. And now you've got a solid tool that you know inside and out and you can make any change to it you like. And one of the best aspects of it is you can write it in whatever you like. So if you're a C# guy, then do your stuff in C#. If you're a powershell guy, do what you like, etc. You're the boss. I've never failed to take my monitoring system to a new job and get it up and running in no time at all. I've had to completely rewrite it a couple times as I noticed I hadn't taken some big things into account, but that's what it's all about. It's all mine. And I can add features as I see fit. For me, managing an environment doesn't get any better than that.

Totally agree. I often find that these tools, at least when it comes to SQL Server, offer very little beyond a wrapper and new GUI around the built in functionality. I've even found it easier to set up certain things with the built in tools once you know how they work and have scripts written. The people who relied on these tools tended to use them as a crutch to analyze or do things that they didn't understand.