I’ll be honest right up front, I use the SpaceNavigator more as a toy than a tool. But what a fabulous device to have if you work with 3D programs (like AutoCAD, Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth, etc.)! Let me begin by explaining the problem that this device solves, then I’ll talk about what the SpaceNavigator is and how it helps.

The Problem
In Google Earth, your view begins by staring down at the Earth as if from a satellite in space. You can use your mouse wheel  (if you have one) to zoom in for a closer look, and you can use your mouse to drag the planet under you to find the part of the world you want to see. As you move around, your view, or “camera,” is essentially stationary; it’s the world itself that you’re moving with the tools provided. It’s not very easy or natural to fly around as in a helicopter and view whatever you want. You have to drag the world, kicking and screaming, and zoom in etc., etc.

In Second Life (an online virtual 3D world, kind of a successor to the old online chat environments), you control your avatar with the keyboard (or use your mouse to click on some directional buttons provided in a little pop-up toolbox). The arrow keys propel your avatar forward, backward, left, and right. And you can use the Page Up and Page Down buttons to make your avatar fly (flying is one of the cool “advantages” of this 3D world). Controlling the camera requires another little pop-up toolbox so that you can tilt, pan, rotate, and zoom the camera.

In both cases, and with enough practice, you can get quite, um, handy with the acrobatics required to navigate and view these 3D worlds. However, I’m no acrobat, and find the default navigation methods frustrating and cumbersome at best.

3dConnexion SpaceNavigator

The Solution
The SpaceNavigator by 3dConnexion (pictured at right) is an alternate input device for your computer. In principle, it’s similar to a joystick. Except that its range of motion and sensitivity is far greater than your average joystick. Note, however, that like a joystick, the SpaceNavigator is only compatible with certain programs (see the website linked in this paragraph for full details). At the time of this writing, the SpaceNavigator is compatible with more than100 programs according to the 3dConnexion website.

Physically, the device is a heavy (surprisingly heavy for stability, but as you’ll find out when using it, only just barely heavy enough) round base that plugs into your USB port. Above the base is a fat rubber knob, bookended on either side by a small button mounted into the base (for a total of two buttons).

The knob, or controller cap, is pressure sensitive. You can push, pull, twist or tilt the knob just a wee bit to simultaneously pan, zoom and rotate 3D imagery. Increase or decrease your pressure and the adjustments will be greater or smaller, respectively. The control panel that you install when you buy the device allows you to adjust the sensitivity and many other settings. The two buttons’ functions can also be configured from this control panel.

The knob can literally be pushed down to move down, pulled up to move up, twisted left or right to move in those directions, or tilted. The features of pan, zoom, and rotate can be assigned to different axes in the control panel and may work slightly different from one program to the next. Typically, if you’re right handed, you control the SpaceNavigator with your left hand while you control your mouse with the right.

The main advantage of the SpaceNavigator over the old mouse and keyboard, according to their website (and my own experiences), ”is the ease of performing intricate adjustments to camera views and models without repeatedly stopping to change directions, zoom, or rotate models. With a SpaceNavigator you can do all three at once.”

3dConnexion offers three other versions of their device to suit more advanced users and laptop users. Again, check out the website for more information. The version pictured starts at $59 for personal use.

Full Circle
In Google Earth, the SpaceNavigator elegantly makes your camera fly like it’s mounted in a little helicopter. Once you’ve given Google Earth a chance to load the data for the local area you’re viewing, you can quickly and easily fly around and view the world from any angle. It’s the coolest thing ever!

In Second Life, the SpaceNavigator simultaneously controls moving your avatar and rotating the camera. In “joystick flycam” mode, you can fly your camera around your 3D environment just like you can in Google Earth. And, most impressively, since your mouse pointer is your “hand” in this 3D world, you can move your avatar with your left hand while you click on an object in the world with your right hand. An application of this would be the simple act of walking towards a door and opening it so you can walk through. This device makes this nearly effortless since you use the SpaceNavigator to propel your avatar toward the door with your left hand, while you click on the door to open it with your right hand which is controlling the mouse.

My last thought on this subject is that you can imagine the knob is your camera or avatar and that you’re physically nudging or propelling it along when you manipulate the knob. I’m seriously impressed with the device so far and hope to see it supported in more programs in the future. If you work with any 3D environments, you need this device! Just be sure to check the 3dConnexion site to verify that the device is supported in your program.

Craig Samson

Harry Beckwith’s Selling the Invisible reminds us of an old New England saying, “don’t speak unless you can improve the silence.”

Sage advice. Yet, even though we agree with the sentiment, we still go to prospects unprepared. A familiar scene plays out…we arrive without a top five list of reasons typical clients find value in our services, thus unable to summarize these points at the proper time (near the beginning of the conversation) we wing it. We make small talk, talk about the general business climate and then after 30 minutes (if we’re even interested in selling at all) we start asking pain questions and posture our company as the solution.

The question is…did we just inflict pain by wasting their time?

With colocation and MSP, it’s a trust sell. So step one? Earn their trust by delivering a valuable meeting!

1. Colocation saves the client from investing in the landlord’s building…why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a data center in Class A office space, only to move 3 years later?
2. Facilities management is not the client’s job.
3. Who is calculating the incremental loads on electrical and air conditioning each time you buy a new server?
4. How many times have you had all your employees without access to your servers due to power or network outages beyond your control? What was that worth?
5. Do your employees go on vacation? If so, how many people do you have that can back them up?

These are the business issues that can begin a conversation about value that goes well beyond the bottom line, “what will you charge me to reboot a server?” Start with the business definition questions and be immediately ready with a solid value statement for each of these questions to underscore that you know what you’re doing and you have actually done it before.

Remember, get to the point. Otherwise, you may not have time in the meeting to get your value statement on the table. If you don’t improve the silence from the start, you probably won’t get another chance.

John Boyd

One of the more daunting tasks for any business is building a continuity plan. We all play the “What If” game in our head, working out every disaster scenario, which is exhausting! For most, the issue is not determining what is important in a time of crisis or disaster; it is coming to terms with the reality that EVERYTHING cannot be important.

Focus and clarity can be obtained for each company’s unique situation.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) -The point at which you wish to restore to in the event of a failure or disaster situation. Do you want to recover to the last transaction or will yesterday’s data suffice? How much data are you willing to put at risk (a nice term for lose) or will you have to re-enter once systems return?

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) -The amount of time one needs to be back up and running. Common options include 24-48 hours ($$), 4-8 hours ($$$), 1 hour ($$$$), and real-time ($$$$$). When speaking to some companies it is quickly realized that a 1 day outage is okay when the cost of doing better is evaluated.

Cost of Downtime: This would be the cost of downtime to your top line revenues. This is easy to figure out using our calculator tool:

Find your cost of downtime. Use our calculator!

Once you have established your lost revenue per hour you can begin to calculate how much you will lose in revenue per day. This number can get very substantial…very quickly!

Return on Investment (ROI) - A commonly understood term; this is where most buying decisions are made. If you cannot get a return on investment then there should be no purchase. We would agree, most of the time, but in developing a continuity solution the hope is that the solution is never put into production. The reality is that you may never get return on the investment you make into a continuity solution, but use it once and it may pay for itself many times over because of “Reputation Risk”.

Reputation Risk - An intangible asset that cannot be measured directly in dollars and cents. The measure of damage incurred due to not being able to serve your clients in a downtime situation. Will they take their business elsewhere? Will they share the news of your troubles with other colleagues? Do they lose faith in your ability to deliver?

These are certainly concerns if an outage becomes a prolonged event which can cause long term impact to a company’s bottom line and its relationships with key clients.

The concepts above are meant to guide the thought process in developing your company’s continuity strategy. Don’t get too caught up in the details when considering all the variables for continuity. Put yourself in a post-event mindset and think of the outcomes you want to avoid. At that point identifying what’s important to protect will become crystal clear.

Brian Doyle

One of the best reasons to use Mozilla Firefox instead of Microsoft Internet Explorer is Firefox’s easy add-on functionality. Firefox supports simple add-ons that bring additional features to the browser that you want. This customization makes Firefox fit like a glove with such add-ons as ad-blocking, drag & drop, mouse gestures, tab management and more.

Internet Explorer isn’t so friendly. Just try to find all those add-ons for IE, and you will be frustrated. However, there is one free add-on for Internet Explorer that does all of the above and more. It’s called IE7Pro, and it adds these features all in one shot: better tab management, drag & drop of text for easy searching and of links for opening in a new tab, mouse gestures that make navigation a breeze, crash recovery that remembers your open webpages when IE crashes, ad blocking that cleans those annoying ads off webpages, user scripts (like Firefox’s GreaseMonkey) that modify page behavior, spell checking of text entered into online forms, and more.

IE7Pro is not by Microsoft, but a third-party vendor. My hat’s off to these folks for their hard work; I just can’t live without IE7Pro in my Internet Explorer. It downloads quickly from the link above, installs seamlessly, and adds a small icon to your status bar at the bottom of the Internet Explorer window. Right-clicking this icon displays the menu with all of IE7Pro’s features. [EDIT: IE7Pro also works with Internet Explorer 8.]

Easy to install, easy to use; this is a definite must-have. And it’s free! Check it out, you won’t be disappointed.

Craig Samson

The old saying is “everything that goes around, comes around.” It is perpetually true for IT. When I started in IT thirty years ago, the IBM representatives were trying to convince all of us young arrogant radicals that the distributed PCs were evil, and that the big mainframe was the only economic answer. They claimed that PCs only used 1% to 5% of the available CPU cycles and wasted storage by requiring us to have copies of everything everywhere. In addition, it cost more to store 1 MB of data on a PC ($20.65/MB in 1982) when compared to a mainframe shared storage system ($.63/MB). Yes, only 63 cents and the cost per CPU cycle was equally weighted in favor of putting the next set of applications on the mainframe with its cheap terminals. But we persisted in going forward with this PC technology anyway.

In the mean time, we spent the last 30 years educating the entire industrial working population on how to use the computer, re-invented network-based printing and spooling, re-invented shared storage—now its called a SAN (Storage Area Network)—and are looking at cheaper end user equipment called thin clients (we called them dumb terminals 30 years ago).

So the corporate culture is coming around again. Now, the corporate prestige of “everyone a PC expert” is gone. People are willing to release their personal grip on the physical technology, realizing that the real value is in what we do with the information. Analysis of information is what creates corporate importance for the professional, not controlling the hardware.

So here comes the full cycle. We are again realizing that centralized management of information is economically the best way of controlling the rising costs of IT, de-duplication of data is not only cheaper in a “mainframe”-like environment called a “virtual Machine” (VM), but it’s easier to control its safe keeping with centralized backup procedures. And all of this is more economic when managed with a centralized staff of professionals in a managed, secure data center.

After 30 years, it has come around! Oh yeah, 30 years ago they called “Virtual Machines”…“Virtual Machines.”

John Boyd