However, this article from Forbes makes interesting points about the temporary nature of the Web and how the next phase could de-emphasize those sites we “depend” on so much now.

I love the angular design of the rocket ship as well as the flat tops of the helmets.  Heck, the backback radios even look as though they may be covered in leather.

Though it doesn’t actually remove the problem it a least provides a starting point for peace of mind (or holly crap I’m infected!).

From the article:

In early 2010, the opportunity to radically change the computing model presented itself when TJSL began constructing a new facility to house its faculty, staff and 1,000 students. We began testing remote desktop virtualization solutions. However, while many solutions were capable of handling standard office applications, every one we tested failed to adequately support the multimedia experience required in our environment.

From the study:

This survey includes all United States law schools accredited by the American Bar Association. The site evaluation process in- cludes a combination of human assessment and automated analysis. To improve data validity, the source code for every site was evalu- ated using computer-based pattern matching to detect things like links to social media, use of HTML tables, and anything with pre- dictable text patterns. Much of this data was evaluated a second time.

The first year I worked here, tjsl.edu was listed as 80th of 200 rankings. The second year, we jumped to 35th place.  This year we’ve made it all the way to #13.  Watch out top ten, here we come!

Top 10 Law School Home Pages of 2011

The folks at ubergizmo have the full version of an interesting infographic.  The commenters make a good point though, these fights are far from over…

And the big solar array on our roof. (more on that below…)

As for my part in all of this, I had to consider how to ensure that IT was a part of the commitment to sustainability as well.  This isn’t always easy, PCs and servers by their nature are typically power hungry and full of toxins and heavy metals that are recycled frequently.  They also add to the cost of heating and cooling of the building over all.

To meet this challenge we virtualized our entire environment and managed to drop from 35 old school physical servers to only 4 and a storage array.  As for desktops, we eliminated 99% of them and now run over 250 virtual Windows 7 desktops on 4 servers. That’s means we reduced the number of machines from nearly 300 to 8 plus attached storage. All of this equipment now lives in a hot aisle containment system monitored and powered by an APC power management system. (and as an aside, when the power went out in all of San Diego county, we didn’t skip a beat)

What’s cool about this besides the fact that its just plain cool is that we can measure our impact on the environment in energy savings and in the fact that we recycle less equipment and do so less frequently.

Back to the solar array.  I just ran some sample numbers yesterday and it would appear that if we add up all of the power consumed by all of the servers, network switches, storage, security equipment, WAPs and phones throughout the building it is essentially a wash when compared to what we generate on the roof.

Talk about being green.

The most common passwords include ‘password’ and ’12345678′.  Even sysadmins have been caught using simple passwords.

Since removing humans from the equation is next to impossible, researchers have created a test scenario that uses PCs that supposedly behave like human beings in order to expose problematic human behavior that weaken security.  The Economist has an article describing the research a group of cybersecurity experts led by Jim Blythe of the University of Southern California are working on currently.

Attached is short story on the event.

It was a terrific honor and a wonderful event.  I look forward to going as a guest in the future!