RAJA AMPAT ISLANDS WEST PAPUA ISLAND - INDONESIA

The Richest Marine Habitat in the World

The Raja Ampat, or “Four Kings,” archipelago encompasses more than 9.8 million acres of land and sea off the northwestern tip of Indonesia’s West Papua Province. Located in the Coral Triangle, the heart of the world’s coral reef biodiversity, the seas around Raja Ampat possibly hold the richest variety of species in the world.

 

The area’s massive coral colonies show that its reefs are resistant to threats like coral bleaching and disease —threats that now jeopardize the survival of corals around the world. In addition, Raja Ampat’s strong ocean currents sweep coral larvae across the Indian and Pacific Oceans to replenish other reef ecosystems. Raja Ampat’s coral diversity, resilience to threats, and ability to replenish reefs make it a global priority for marine protection. 

 

 

Survey Confirms Highest Marine Biodiversity on Earth

 
In 2002, The Nature Conservancy and its partners conducted a scientific survey of the Raja Ampat Islands to collect information on its marine ecosystems, mangroves, and forests. The survey brought Raja Ampat’s total number of confirmed corals to 537 species— an incredible 75% of all known coral species. In addition, 899 fish species were recorded, raising the known total for Raja Ampat to an amazing 1,074. On land, the survey found lush forests, rare plants, limestone outcroppings, and nesting beaches for thousands of sea turtles.

 

 

Though human impacts here are less severe than elsewhere in Indonesia, Raja Ampat’s natural resources are endangered by over fishing and destructive fishing, turtle poaching, and unsustainable logging. The Indonesian government recently established Raja Ampat as a separate administrative unit, which will give communities a greater say in managing the natural resources upon which their livelihoods depend. This structure also offers an important opportunity to include conservation in the spatial planning of the newly formed local government.

 

Ensuring Conservation through Partnerships
 

To address these issues, the Conservancy launched a new project to protect Raja Ampat, working in close partnership with the government and communities to: 1) contribute to a comprehensive conservation action plan to protect Raja Ampat’s reefs and forests; 2) help incorporate marine protected area management into long-term planning and policy; and, 3) establish a network of marine protected areas for Raja Ampat.

   

 The Conservancy’s ultimate goal is to protect Raja Ampat’s magnificent reefs while sustaining the livelihoods of local people. Raja Ampat includes the four large islands of Waigeo, Batanta, Salawati, and Misool, plus hundreds of smaller islands. The archipelago is part of an area known as the Bird’s Head functional seascape, which also contains Cenderawasih Bay, the largest marine national park in Indonesia.

By Unknown with 1 comment

25 years of Windows Desktop

See how the world's most popular operating system has evolved over the last quarter century.

Twenty-five years ago, on Nov. 20, 1985, Microsoft introduced its first version of Windows to the world. Not many people outside the technical press or the tech industry took notice. Product launch events that cost hundreds of millions of dollars were still years away.

What's changed in Windows in the last 25 years? Plenty. In this image gallery, we take a look at the various faces of Windows over the past couple of decades and clue you in to what happened at every stage of the operating system's development.

1985: Windows 1.0

 Windows started in 1981 as a project called Interface Manager and experienced a series of delays getting out of the gate. When it was finally released in late 1985 as Windows 1.0, it made a ripple, not a splash. It had to be run on top of DOS, few applications were written for it, and application windows couldn't be overlapped (they had to be tiled).

Still, the OS allowed for multitasking of Windows apps (not DOS ones) and, even though few knew it at the time, it would eventually become the foundation for the Microsoft empire.
 Windows 1.0 shipped with a handful of apps, including the Notepad text editor, a rudimentary calendar and the long-lived graphics painting program Paint. The operating system required MS-DOS Version 2.0, 256KB of memory and a graphics adapter. It could be run either from a hard disk or on two floppy disks running simultaneously -- in other words, you couldn't swap the disks in and out of a single drive.

1987: Windows 2.0

 Windows 2.0 was released in the late fall of 1987, two years after the debut of Windows 1.0. New features in Version 2.0 included the ability to overlap application windows and improved memory use. Also new: Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE), which allowed Windows applications to automatically share and update data. For example, DDE allowed information in an Excel spreadsheet to be automatically updated when data in another Excel spreadsheet was changed.

Windows 2.0 also included expanded system requirements: It needed 512KB or more of memory and required DOS 3.0. A later version, Windows 2.11, would require the use of a hard disk for Windows for the first time.

With Version 2.0, more applications written for Windows began to appear, including Microsoft Excel and Word. Aldus' PageMaker, originally written for the Mac, was also ported to Windows.
Windows 2.0 was notable for another reason as well -- on March 17, 1988, Apple Computer sued Microsoft, claiming that the look and feel of the Macintosh operating system was covered by copyright, and that Windows 2.0 violated that copyright. (Several years later, the case was resolved in Microsoft's favor.)

1990: Windows 3.0

 Windows 3.0, released in 1990 -- and its successor, Windows 3.1, released in 1992 -- offered the first evidence that Windows might become the world's dominant desktop operating system. The interface was revamped, and although it looks awkward and kludgy today, at the time it was widely considered clean and sleek.

Icons were redesigned to use the VGA graphics standard with 16 colors. Memory handling was improved, and enhanced mode was added, which sped up memory access and allowed DOS programs to run in individual virtual machines. Windows 3.0 also allowed Windows applications to use more memory than was available in RAM by swapping RAM temporarily to the hard disk.

Thanks to enhanced mode, DOS programs could be multitasked and run in their own resizable windows for the first time (previously, they had to run full-screen). Windows 3.0 required 640KB of what was called conventional memory and 256KB of extended memory. Version 3.00a of Windows was built to support multimedia, and it supported CD-ROMs for the first time.

Windows 3.0 also included what may be one of the greatest productivity-sappers in the history of computers -- the game of Solitaire.

Windows 3.1 introduced TrueType fonts, for better on-screen reading and higher-quality print output, as well as Object Linking and Embedding, which improved upon DDE for exchanging data between applications. Version 3.11 added support for networking using the dominant networking standard of the time, NetWare.

 1993: Windows NT 3.1

 Windows NT 3.1, released in July 1993, was built for businesses rather than consumers and was designed to be more secure and stable. It used a 32-bit rather than a 16-bit architecture. Version 3.1 was the first release of the NT operating system; earlier version numbers were skipped so that the numbering for this business OS would match that of the consumer OS, Windows 3.1. NT required an 80386 CPU, 12MB of RAM (16MB was recommended) and 90MB of free hard disk space.

The enterprise-oriented operating system went through three more releases -- Windows NT 3.5 in 1994, Windows NT 3.51 in 1995 and Windows NT 4.0 in 1996 -- before moving to Microsoft's year-based version numbering convention with Windows 2000.

1995: Windows 95

Windows 95, released in August 1995, combined DOS with Windows for the first time: Rather than installing Windows on top of DOS, you installed only Windows 95, which included both DOS and Windows. It was also the first consumer version of Windows that began moving away from a 16-bit architecture and toward a 32-bit one; in other words, it was a mix of 32-bit code and 16-bit code.

The operating system introduced many interface improvements, including several that live to this day, such as the taskbar and the Start menu. Support for file names longer than eight characters was added as well. It was far more stable than previous versions of Windows and was the first to support Intel's Plug and Play standard, which was designed to make it easier to add hardware and peripherals to your PC; the idea was that Windows would automatically recognize and configure attached hardware. It was a step forward, but it didn't always work -- some people referred to it as "plug and pray."

At a minimum, Windows 95 required an 80386 DX CPU, 4MB of system RAM and 120MB of hard drive space -- although it was sluggish on a computer that just met those requirements. An 80486-based PC and 8MB of RAM made for a much better experience.

Windows 95 was notable for another reason as well -- the massive marketing campaign that accompanied its launch was said to have cost $300 million and included purchasing the rights to the Rolling Stones song "Start Me Up" as the Windows 95 theme song; draping a 300-foot Windows 95 banner over Toronto's CN Tower; lighting the Empire State Building with Microsoft's corporate colors of yellow, red and green; and creating a promotional instructional video that featured Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry from the hit TV show Friends.

1998: Windows 98

 Windows 98, released in June 1998, was as not as big a step forward over Windows 95 as Windows 95 had been over Windows 3.1. Rather, it made incremental changes to Windows, although there were a few significant additions.

The most notable had to do with Internet support. For the first time, the Winsock specification -- which provides TCP/IP support for Windows -- was built directly into the operating system, rather than having to be installed as an add-on. Also for the first time, Internet Explorer was included as part of the operating system, which eventually led to the U.S. Justice Department's prosecution of Microsoft for antitrust violations.

Windows 98 offered considerably better USB support than Windows 95 did. A feature called Active Desktop was supposed to deliver live Internet content to the desktop, but it proved to be buggy and was dropped from subsequent versions of Windows.
Windows 98 required at least a 66-MHz 486DX2 processor, 16MB of RAM (24MB was recommended) and 500MB of hard disk space.

2000: Windows 2000

 Windows 2000, the successor to Windows NT 4.0, released in February 2000, was intended for business rather than home use, and it was available in several editions, including multiple server versions. It brought many features of Windows 98 into the NT line, including Internet Explorer and Plug and Play. Windows File Protection, which protected important system files, was introduced along with the Encrypting File System, which improved security by encrypting files automatically, and Active Directory, the enterprise technology used to provide network and domain services.

System requirements for Windows 2000 varied depending on whether the server or desktop version, called Windows 2000 Professional, was being installed. Windows 2000 Professional required at least a 133-MHz Pentium microprocessor (or the equivalent), 32MB of RAM (64MB was recommended) and a 2GB hard disk with 650MB of free space.

2000: Windows Me

Windows Me (also called Windows Millennium Edition) was released in September 2000 and quickly became one of Microsoft's most criticized operating systems because of installation problems, bugs and hardware and software incompatibilities. It introduced Windows Movie Maker. Critics maintain that it was introduced only for marketing purposes, to give Microsoft something to sell for the 2000 holiday season.

Windows Me was the last version of Windows that included the DOS architecture. It lasted little more than a year, until Windows XP was introduced. Windows Me required a 150-MHz Pentium processor or the equivalent (a 300-MHz model was recommended), 32MB of RAM (64MB was recommended) and 320MB of free hard drive space (2GB was recommended).

2001: Windows XP

 Windows XP, released in August 2001, was a breakthrough in several respects. It was the first version of Windows that did not use DOS as part of its underlying architecture, and the first to be offered in both 64-bit and 32-bit editions. XP combined the desktop version of the secure and stable enterprise-oriented Windows NT/2000 line with the consumer-focused Windows line. (The Windows Server OS line has continued separately from the desktop line.) 

It was far more stable than previous versions of Windows and featured a significantly revamped interface that was brighter, more colorful and more contemporary-looking. Drop shadows were added to icon labels, windows were given a more rounded look and visual effects such as fading and sliding menus were added. Windows XP introduced a slew of new features, including background themes and remote desktop, which allows a PC to be controlled remotely via the Internet or a network.

Windows XP shipped in multiple versions, most notably Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional. Even though it was introduced nine years ago, XP remains the most-used version of Windows, and it's still available as a downgrade option on new PCs that run the Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate editions. Windows XP requires a Pentium 233-MHz processor or the equivalent (a 300-MHz model is recommended), at least 64MB of RAM (128MB is recommended) and at least 1.5GB of available space on the hard disk.

2006: Windows Vista

 Windows Vista, released at end of 2006, may well be the most criticized and disliked version of Windows of all time. Released more than five years after Windows XP, Vista faced widespread hardware incompatibilities upon launch and wouldn't run on older hardware.

Vista's interface was significantly different from XP's interface. Most notably, it had a new feature called Windows Aero, a set of visual enhancements that included transparent windows and animations. There were also a variety of other new features, including the Windows Sidebar, Desktop Gadgets, the Windows Photo Gallery and improved search. Some people disliked Vista's resource-hungry user interface, and those who did like it couldn't always get it: Many PCs that were sold as "Vista-capable" couldn't run the full version of Vista, leading to a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft.

Windows Vista was available in six different versions. Most PCs were sold with Windows Vista Home Premium. It required a 1-GHz processor (either 32- or 64-bit), 1GB of system memory, 15GB of free hard disk space and a graphics card that was able to support Windows Aero.

2009: Windows 7

Windows 7, released in October 2009, is Microsoft's current desktop operating system. Many people feel it's the OS that Windows Vista should have been. It retains the Aero interface and other enhancements from Vista, but rather than adding a slew of new features in Windows 7, Microsoft focused more on fixing the shortcomings of Vista. Windows 7 is generally considered more stable than Vista, and most users upgrading from Vista to Windows 7 did not experience the kinds of hardware problems that they encountered when they upgraded from XP to Vista.

Windows 7 did introduce a few new features -- notably an enhanced taskbar, a slightly redesigned Start menu and a trio of nifty navigation shortcuts known as Aero Peek, Aero Snap and Aero Shake. Some features of Windows Vista were taken away, including the Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Mail.

Windows 7 comes in multiple versions, including Windows 7 Home Premium, Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate. It requires a 1-GHz processor (either 32- or 64-bit), 1GB of system memory, 16GB of free hard disk space (20GB for the 64-bit version) and a graphics card that's able to support Windows Aero.

What's next?

No one, including Microsoft, knows the shape that Windows will take in the next 25 years, because there's simply no way to peer that deeply into the technology future. It's a good bet, though, that the Windows of 25 years from now will be radically different from today's version.

In fact, it's reasonable to expect that there will be greater changes to Windows in the next 25 years than in its first 25 years. That's the case because, despite all the changes in technology, for the past several decades the personal computer, whether desktop or laptop, has been people's main computing device. It's not clear that that will be true in the next 25 years, given the prevalence of smartphones and the increasing popularity of tablets.

Several questions spring to mind: How will Windows accommodate the increasing role of cloud-based software and services in computing? Will operating systems even matter in the future? Will Windows move to a modular model, with pick-and-choose components?

For now, Microsoft isn't saying. In the meantime, we'll have our first peek at the future of Windows when the first Windows 8 beta is released sometime next year.
Want more Microsoft history? See Microsoft turns 35: Best, worst and most notable moments
.
Preston Gralla is the author of more than 35 books, including How the Internet Works, Windows XP Hacks, and Windows Vista in a Nutshell.

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Phinisi from Bugis

Phinisi merupakan kapal layar tradisional Suku Bugis dan Suku Makassar di Sulawesi Selatan. Pinisi adalah sebuah kapal layar yang menggunakan jenis layar sekunar dengan dua tiang dengan tujuh helai layar yang mempunyai makna bahwa nenek moyang bangsa Indonesia mampu mengharungi tujuh samudera besar di dunia. Kapal Phinisi umumnya memiliki dua tiang layar utama dan tujuh buah layar, yaitu tiga di ujung depan, dua di depan, dan dua di belakang; umumnya digunakan untuk pengangkutan barang antarpulau. Diperkirakan kapal pinisi sudah ada sebelum tahun 1500an. Menurut naskah Lontarak I Babad La Lagaligo pada abad ke 14, Pinisi pertama sekali dibuat oleh Sawerigading, Putera Mahkota Kerajaan Luwu untuk berlayar menuju negeri Tiongkok hendak meminang Putri Tiongkok yang bernama We Cudai.

Dalam proses pembuatan Kapal Phinisi, para pengrajin pembuat kapal harus menghitung hari baik untuk memulai pencarian kayu sebagai bahan baku. Biasanya jatuh pada hari ke lima dan ke tujuh pada bulan yang berjalan. Angka 5 (naparilimai dalle'na) yang artinya rezeki sudah di tangan. Sedangkan angka 7 (natujuangngi dalle'na) berarti selalu dapat rezeki. Setelah dapat hari baik, lalu kepala tukang yang disebut "punggawa" memimpin pencarian kayu. Untuk jaman sekarang, kayu dicari dengan membeli kepada tukang penjual kayu.
 
Setelah kayu didapat, proses peletakan lunas (kayu dasar) kapal dimulai, dengan meletakkan lunas menghadap Timur Laut. Balok lunas bagian depan merupakan simbol lelaki. Sedang balok lunas bagian belakang diartikan sebagai simbol wanita. Usai dimantrai, bagian yang akan dipotong ditandai dengan pahat. Pemotongan yang dilakukan dengan gergaji harus dilakukan sekaligus tanpa boleh berhenti. Itu sebabnya untuk melakukan pemotongan harus dikerjakan oleh orang yang bertenaga kuat. Demikian selanjutnya setiap tahapan selalu melalui ritual tertentu.

Ada 4 suku besar yang memiliki keahlian dan tradisi terhadap Kapal Phinisi (pinisi) ini yaitu :

1. Suku Konjo disekitar daerah Ara, Bira, and Tanah Biru
2. Suku Mandar disekitar daerah Sulawesi Barat dan Utara
3. Suku Bugis (Bougies) disekitar daerah Wajo dan Teluk Bone
4. Suku Makasar (Makassarese) disekitar daerah Makassar

 Ada dua jenis kapal pinisi

1. Lamba atau lambo adalah Pinisi modern yang masih bertahan sampai saat ini dan sekarang dilengkapi dengan motor diesel (PLM) atau Kapal Layar Motor (KLM) atau "Motor Driven Sailing Vessel" atau "Motor Sailor." Penggunaan mesin (diesel/vessel) terjadi sekitar tahun 1970-an ketika kecepatan kapal perlu ditingkatkan dan ketepatan waktu dalam pengantaran barang ke seluruh Indonesia.
2. Palari adalah bentuk awal pinisi dengan lunas yang melengkung dan ukurannya lebih kecil dari jenis Lamda.

Kapal Phinisi dibangun dengan cara tradisional yang seksama dengan menggunakan kayu pilihan yaitu Kayu Besi/Kayu Ullin/Ulin/Ironwood (Eusideroxylon zwageri) dan Bangkirai atau Shorea spp. (mis. Shorea kunstleri King, Shorea laevis Ridley, Shorea laevifolia Endert) atau Hopea spp. (mis. Hopea celebica Burck, Hopea semicuneata Sym.). Kayu Bangkirai yang sering digunakan adalah dari jenis shorea leavifolia.

Nama umum Shorea laevifolia
Indonesia: Bangkirai, benuas, anggelam

Klasifikasi Ilmiah :
Kingdom: Plantae (Tumbuhan)
Subkingdom: Tracheobionta (Tumbuhan berpembuluh)
Super Divisi: Spermatophyta (Menghasilkan biji)
Divisi: Magnoliophyta (Tumbuhan berbunga)
Kelas: Magnoliopsida (berkeping dua / dikotil)
Sub Kelas: Dilleniidae
Ordo: Theales
Famili: Dipterocarpaceae
Genus: Shorea
Spesies: Shorea laevifolia Endert

Kerabat Dekat
Tengkawang, Tengkawang, Tengkawang Layar, Damar, Damar Mata Kucing, Tengkawang, Tengkawang Tungkul, Tengkawang, Tengkawang Layar, Damar Tanduk, Tengkawang, Tengkawang, Tengkawang Majau, Tengkawang, Tengkawang Terendak, Tengkawang, Gisok, Tengkawang, Tengkawang, Belangeran, Meranti Tembaga, Damar Pakit, Belangiran, Damar Kedontang, Damar Siput, Damar Buah, Damar Tenang, Balau Merah, Damar Tunam, Banio, Damar Munsarai, Damar Mesegar, Damar Maja.

By Unknown with 1 comment

10 Simple Marketing Strategies to Promoto Your Blog

If you run an online business, blog or website you know you need to be marketing. Maybe you aren’t sure where to start. 

These ten tips are things you can start implementing right away to grow your business and start getting the word out about your product or service. These tips should be used over and over to continually grow awareness of your blog/product or service. Use them weekly, but they are easy enough that you can start using them today.

1. Interact on related blogs & forums.
Simply find blogs and forums that are in the same niche or category as your site and start interacting with people. You can leave comments, offer helpful advice and suggestions or just get to know people.

2. Write and distribute to article directories.
Writing an informative article is something you can do today. There are many article directories that will allow you to post your article for free. Not only is this a way to give readers pertinent information but you also get a backlink in your bio or resource box.

3. Guest blog.
You may not get a guest blogging spot today, but you can write the blog post and start contacting blog owners to see if they are interested.

4. Create a compelling email signature.
You need to do this in your autoresponder signature as well as your personal email signature.

5. Create videos and put on Youtube.
Videos are getting more popular every day. You can create several short videos, upload them to Youtube and then share the links with your readers, in your email signature, on Twitter and Facebook. Don’t like seeing yourself on screen? That’s not a problem, you can create Power Point Presentations for the visual and then read from a script so all that’s “seen” of you is your voice.

6. Write a review.
You can write reviews on products you’ve tried, ebooks you’ve read, webinars, videos, books you’ve read, affiliate programs. The list is endless on things you can review to help your readers and give you exposure.

7. Tweet to your followers.
You don’t have to get on Twitter every single day and bombard your followers with tweets, but you can use Twitter as a strategic source to build your following, set up your personal brand and reach out to others looking for your information.

8. Share your stuff on Facebook.
You can set your blogs to post on Facebook through Networked Blogs, you can set up plugins that allow you and others to share your blog posts on social networks. Utitilize these tools for yourself too. Your readers aren’t the only ones who can use them–you can too.

9. Email your list.
This one is pretty self explanatory, you can email your list once or twice a week with updates, promotions and other stuff. If you don’t have a list, start a list building campaign and start sending people to your opt-in page.

10. Create a free report.
You can write up a report to give away that contains relevant information to your website, product or service. Brand it with your website address in the footer so people know where to go to find more information.
These are all pretty simple methods you can start doing immediately to grow traffic to your blog or website. Do you have any simple solutions not mentioned here that you’d like to share? We’d love to hear from you.

Written by Patti Stafford

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Phinisi Sailing Boats are made from Sulawesi island, Indonesia

Now let’s flashback to the early history of phinisi boat at the southern tip of Sulawesi island, where local community build a maritime tradition for hundreds of years. The stories about the courage of the sailors of Bugis, Makassar, Mandar, and Konjo has become a byword to a distant country across the ocean. The beauty and resilience in the face of malignancy boat sea waves, has produced stories of heroism are admirable.

The story of the boat from Tanah Beru Phinisi and the sailors from the Bira, Bulukumba, who drove the boat, now is not an ordinary story. But not many realize the greatness of the sailors from the southern tip of Sulawesi, was built from a long tradition. This culture is based on the myth of the creation of the first boat by their ancestors.

Once Upon A Time in the mythology of Tanah Beru community, their ancestors create a larger boat for sailing on the sea, carrying merchandise and catch fish. When the first boat made, it’s been voyaged at sea. But accidents happen on the road. Waves and storm struck the boat and destroy it. Body parts dumped in the village of Ara boats, sailing and landed at Cape Bira landed in the Land of Lemo.

 

This incident seems to be a symbolic message to the village of Ara. They must beat the sea with their cooperation. Since the incident, Ara only as a special boat manufacturer. People who acquire the remaining special sailboat pleased to learn about astrology and the signs of nature. Lemo-Lemo While people are entrepreneurs who invested and used boats. The tradition of segregation of duties has been going on for years which finally led to the creation of a traditional wooden boat called Phinisi.

Now the mystical belief of the ancient mythology is still strong in every process of making Phinisi. Starting with a small ritual, boats Phinisi made after cutting ceremony in full. The ceremony was led by a boat handler called Panrita Lopi.

Various bidding requirements that they are not allowed to get behind in this ceremony as all snacks should taste sweet and healthy white chickens. Cake to generate the wishes of the owner of the boat will carry a higher profit. A little blood from white chickens attached to the boat hull. Ritual as a symbol of hope that there is blood spilled in the ship being designed. Then, his head cut off both ends of the hull builder and submit it to the boat-making leader. The tip pieces settled to the sea front in the exhaust as a sign that the ship can be fused with the waves at sea. Being back in pieces thrown to the ground as far as boats go to sea reminded that he must return him safely to shore. In the end, proclaiming Lopi Panrita prayers before the Creator.

 Parts of the phinisi:
1. Anjong, triangle in front of as an imbalance.
2. Sombala, main screen large reach 200 m.
3. Tanpasere, triangular small screen in every major pillar.
4. Cocoro pantara, auxiliary screen in front
5. Cocoro tangnga, maid was in the middle of the screen.
6. Tarengke, auxiliary screen behind.

Related to this story phinisi ship, not afraid of the people in Bulukumba, South Sulawesi, that phinisi ship design will be submitted by foreign patents. Given the manufacturing center of the boat or ship phinisi the largest in the world located outside Indonesia. Examples of centers that exist only in some countries such as Japan, Australia, Malaysia and Brunei. Previously, the ship was already well known as a producer Bulukumba phinisi first with the best quality.

PHINISI BUILDER AT TANAH BERU

This a place are famous phinisi boat, the phinisi boat called Phinisi Nusantara had sailed crossing the pacific ocean to Vancouver, Canada, Ammanagappa sailed until Madagaskar, Hati Marege sailed the ocean of south of east Timor until Darwin, Australia and Damar Sagara sailed to Philippine-Japan-Africa.

Bonto Bahari people combined their technical skill and magic to build the boat. People of area and Lemo – Lemo are expert of making phinisi boat but are not good sailors. People of Bira are expert in sailing but they don’t have skill to build phinisi. In this pleace you will feel amazing to watch people of Bonto Bahari skill building a phinisi with traditional tools. Each phinisi building holds a traditional ceremony.

 

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Free Open-Source Tools for Network Admins

By High Mobley
February 2, 2011 06:11 AM ET

Routing issues, slow network applications, DNS resolution problems -- a network administrator has to deal with a host of network nuisances on a daily basis. How do you survive when you're constantly under the gun to fix the problems? Like any other professional, you need a solid set of tools.

Not surprisingly, plenty of options exist in the open source camp. Excellent open source software tools are available to help you keep a close watch over your network, as well as meet many other needs of the busy network manager. From monitoring, troubleshooting, and security analysis tools to utilities for keeping track of IP allocations, passwords, and router configurations, here are my top 10 picks of the most essential open source tools for our network admin toolbox -- all free for the downloading.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of open source networking utilities available, and I've merely touched on their capabilities. Are there other free open source tools that you use regularly but we didn't list here? Leave a comment and let us know!

Dig

DNS problems plague us all, and they're easily overlooked when troubleshooting, so you need a reliable tool that provides detailed information about how users' DNS queries are being resolved. Why not use the tool made by the Internet Systems Consortium, the same group that produces the BIND DNS server software running the majority of DNS servers worldwide? That tool is Dig.

At the heart of it, Dig is a command-line utility that performs DNS queries. That alone is helpful, but Dig can also tell you most everything about the queries and replies -- you'll sometimes need that extra information to determine why you're getting a strange reply from a DNS server. The default output of Dig provides you with all the data you'll require for troubleshooting: reply/error codes from the server, flags used in the query, a reiteration of your query, the answer to your query, how long the query took, which server it received the reply from, and how much data it received in the reply. Dig can be quite useful when you're trying to diagnose slow network applications, by determining how long it takes a computer to get DNS resolution for the application server's domain name.

Dig can ask for a typical name query, replying with an IP address when you give it a domain name. You can also do a reverse lookup: By using the -x switch and giving it an IP address, Dig it will return the corresponding domain name for that IP address. The -t switch lets you specify the type of query you're making, so you can ask for mail server records (MX), name server records (NS), text records (TXT), and more.

If you are sporadically getting incorrect replies to your DNS queries, it's possible that one of your DNS servers has a different set of DNS records than the others. With Dig, you can run the same query against each of your DNS servers to find out which one is providing the erroneous replies. Just give Dig the DNS server's address with the @ symbol in front:

dig @4.2.2.2 www.yourdomain.com

Are you troubleshooting DNS problems with servers that use transaction signatures? Dig lets you specify a TSIG key to use for your queries. Dig also lets you tailor IPv6-only queries to help you troubleshoot IPv6-specific problems.

Dig is a part of the client utilities of the BIND project. It is not generally installed by default, but is readily available on all Unix, Linux, and BSD variants, including Mac OS X. A Windows version is available too.

Nmap

Carrie Moss used it in "The Matrix Reloaded." Crackers, hackers, and network admins alike rely on it, and every networking consultant better have Nmap installed on his or her computer. Nmap is available for nearly every platform imaginable and is amazingly useful as a network and security analysis tool.

Nmap is a lightweight security scanner that's heavy on utility. Nmap can perform tasks as simple as a ping sweep to see which IP addresses are active and responding, as well as carry off complex scripts to scan your systems for known vulnerabilities. Another fun feature of Nmap is the ability to analyze the reply packets it receives from a host to determine which OS the host is running.

Nmap is most commonly used to see which services or ports are open or available on a host. It supports both TCP and UDP scanning. You can give it a single host to scan or a CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing) block or an entire list of hosts and networks from a file. A dizzying range of options allows you to specify which types of packets to send out and to see which hosts are susceptible to various remote attacks. Additionally, Nmap provides several options to bypass firewalls and other network filters that would otherwise block your scans.

Nmap also includes the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE), which combines custom scripts with existing Nmap functionality to perform more specific discovery and attack analyses than Nmap does by itself. Fyodor and David Fifield gave an excellent talk and demonstration on the NSE at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas last year. In the demonstration, Fyodor showed the results of Nmap scans against Microsoft company computers that used some of the NSE's MS RPC discovery scripts. The scripts used rpcinfo to gather info such as share names and usernames from the Windows computers. There are 177 NSE scripts available from Nmap.org as of this writing, and because they are user contributed, the list of NSE scripts is expanding at an amazing pace.

If you're a longtime user of Nmap but haven't kept up with Nmap news and releases, you'll want to check out the Zenmap GUI's new network topology feature, which lets you create an interactive network map based on information gathered by Nmap. The map begins with localhost at the center and displays all discovered hosts in concentric rings around it, the rings indicating the number of hops away the hosts are. From there you can shift the focus to another host or get more info by clicking a host's icon in the map. The shape of the icon refers to the type of device, and the size indicates the number of open ports.

All this makes Nmap perfect for checking on IP address usage, scanning for security vulnerabilities, and ensuring your firewalls and routers are operating properly.

KeePass

Oh the passwords! How many passwords do we have for all the various servers, switches, routers, and other network gear we have to manage? And when we have to change a password, we must be sure to notify all of the other people who have access to that equipment. A good password management system can save valuable time and spare you a lot of hassle.

Enter KeePass, an encrypted database program to store all of your usernames, passwords, access URLs, and more. You can restrict access to the KeePass database with a password, a key file, or both. The password database is encrypted with either AES or the Twofish encryption algorithm, and not as one contiguous file but in 256-bit chunks -- decrypting a single piece of data nets a cracker little or no useful data. Plus KeePass encrypts all the data in its database, not just the passwords, so your usernames, URLs, and other notes are safe as well.

You can create groups for password records to help organize the info if you have a lot of passwords to track. Groups can have subgroups, subgroups can have subgroups, and so on. A search function helps you quickly find the password record you need.

How do you share the KeePass database with coworkers who are running Mac OS X or some other version of Unix? No problem. KeePass is ported to Windows, Mac OS X, various Linuxes, and popular mobile phone platforms, including iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. Because the KeePass database is stored in a single file, it's easy to distribute among your NOC team. Did I mention that KeePass is portable, needing no installation on Windows or Mac OS X? You can carry it with you on a USB stick or download it to a computer without leaving any unwanted registry entries or library files.

Already using another password manager? KeePass can import your existing password database in formats from a variety of programs such as Password Keeper, CodeWalletPro, and Password Agent. Other file formats are supported through KeePass plug-ins.

IPplan

We network admins must keep track of which IP addresses we have, which are in use, and which are available to be allocated to the systems administrators who always want yet another IP address for their servers. Are you tracking your IP addresses in an Excel spreadsheet? Well, stop! Get the benefits of using a real database with IPplan.

IPplan is not a generic spreadsheet or database application. It is tailored to tracking IP addresses, so it understands and enforces CIDR blocks. Each address record has support for contact info, hardware, DNS name, location, description, MAC address, NAT address tracking, and a generic "additional information" field. You can also upload a file to attach to the IP address record.

IP address records are organized into subnets (CIDR blocks), which are assigned to customers or autonomous systems. Subnets are further organized into network areas or ranges (supernets) within the customer hierarchy. Because IPplan is designed for use by ISPs, it works well for organizing enterprise addresses for companies with multiple locations and complex networks that use multiple AS (Autonomous System) numbers. If you decide to rework the subnets on your network, no problem. IPplan handles changes easily via its split and merge subnet functions, allowing you to split and merge subnets without losing any data.
You can import your existing IP allocation data via a CSV file upload. Alternatively, you can use an XML file created by Nmap to import addresses, or you can define the subnets yourself and have IPplan automatically fill in the DNS names for you. IPplan can import the DNS info via a zone transfer from your DNS servers.

You can set up multiple logins, so the entire network admin team has access to the IPplan database. You could even give the system administrators access to IPplan and require them to request IP addresses from you via the Web GUI.

IPplan is more than just an IP address tracking database. As you can see, you can also use IPplan to manage your DNS records, and IPplan implements "triggers" that allow you to run custom scripts based on actions taken in the Web interface.

 

Tcpdump and Wireshark

When things get really hairy and you can't figure out what's going wrong on your network, it's time to pull out Tcpdump. This utility lets you capture the network traffic on a network card and view the packets and frames in real time.

If you're wondering why a browser can't find the Web server, you can fire up Tcpdump and see what's happening. Is the computer sending out DNS queries? Is it receiving a valid reply from the correct DNS server? By viewing the query and reply packets with Tcpdump, you can determine if the DNS server is replying with NXDomain for what should be a perfectly valid domain name or if the user changed the DNS server settings because he thinks that Google's DNS servers "must be faster" than your company's own servers. Or maybe the DNS queries and replies are fine, but the remote Web server is not responding. Then you would see the HTTP request packet leave the computer, but no replies from the Web server.

Tcpdump is a great tool by itself, but pair it with Wireshark, and you have an unbeatable system for troubleshooting network application issues. You can save your Tcpdump packet captures to files and open them in Wireshark for easier analysis. Wireshark gives you a GUI to examine Tcpdump captures and sort the data for more thorough analysis. You can compare time stamps on individual packets to see how long it's taking for a reply to be returned after a request has been made. And if you've synced the system clocks on client and server computers, you can see how long it takes for packets to travel between the two.

If you have a slow internal Web application, you can use Tcpdump and Wireshark to locate the bottleneck. If you see a long delay in the DNS lookup requests and replies but the actual HTTP requests and replies are fast, then you know the trouble lies with the DNS system or the network links to the DNS servers. If the DNS process is working normally, then you'll want to examine how long it takes for client requests to reach the server and how long it takes for the server to reply back. Wherever your network problem lies, Tcpdump and Wireshark can help you put your finger on it.

Books have been written about Tcpdump and Wireshark. Read them and learn all about these two utilities. You'll certainly improve your network troubleshooting game.

RANCID

We've all had that horrible sinking feeling in the pit of our stomachs when we've copied and pasted a new config into a router or switch and it stops responding. Did I remember to back up my old config before I uploaded the new one? How late will I be staying up tonight to fix this mess?

RANCID (Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ) is a versioning system for your switch and router configs. It uses either CVS or Subversion to store each new version of your configuration files. As it gathers and stores the configs for each of your devices, it runs a diff against the previous version to see what, if any, changes have been made. When it detects a change, it sends out an email with the details of that change to an address of your choosing. With RANCID, you'll know whenever a change has been made by your NOC team.

Because RANCID runs via a crontab entry, you can control how often it logs in and checks your configurations. If you are a stable shop and rarely make changes, you might have RANCID check once a day. If you are a more dynamic NOC and make changes frequently, you can set RANCID to check hourly or as often as is appropriate for your company.
One of the neat features of RANCID is that it includes a looking-glass server. You can take a quick peek at all the routes in your organization and search for any elements that are out of sorts when you suspect a routing problem on your network.
RANCID supports gear from most of the big networking vendors, including Cisco, HP ProCurve, Juniper, Foundry, and several others. It is known to work on Linux, BSDs, Mac OS X, and Solaris.

OpenNMS and Cacti

OpenNMS has a place in every enterprise. It's a highly scalable network monitoring system that is completely open source software. A single server can monitor hundreds of thousands of network interfaces and produce nice graphs for metrics such as bandwidth usage, CPU, memory, and more.

You can set thresholds that indicate when a device is busy or down and receive a notification via email, SMS, IM, and so on. Of course you can have separate logins for each of your NOC team, and you can set up an on-call schedule so that notifications go only to on-duty team members. OpenNMS also has an escalation handler, so if the level-one NOC techs don't take care of an issue right away, an engineer or manager can be notified to oversee issue resolution.

The Cacti graphing solution makes a good complement to OpenNMS. Although OpenNMS has the same graphing capabilities, Cacti's more intuitive Web UI allows nontechnical staff to build and manage collections of graphs that are interesting to them. For example, you could configure Cacti to graph data from your (SNMP-capable) HVAC controllers, and your facility maintenance team members could log in to Cacti and build custom views that display only the data they need to see. If one is watching fan rotation speed and another is tracking electrical power draw, they wouldn't have to view each other's data.

You can organize Cacti's graphs into trees, similar to the old Microsoft file system viewers used to display files in a directory structure. And with individual logins for each staff member, everyone gets their own view settings saved under their login.

My TraceRoute

My TraceRoute (MTR) is not quite as useful as it once was. MTR relies on ICMP packets to judge network latency -- and ICMP are the first packets modern routers will drop in favor of more important data traffic when they get too busy. However, I still find MTR a great tool for troubleshooting network links that traverse multiple routers. Specify a destination, and MTR shows you a list of routers that your traffic passes through on the way (as well as the destination itself) and the results of a continuous ping to those routers.

MTR updates the statistics of the pings as it runs, so you can see which routers are slow to respond or which are dropping a significant number of ping requests. The results include the percentage of lost packets, the response times from each router (average, best, and worst), and the standard deviations for those times. How many times have you heard a user complaining "the Internet is slow," only to discover that the problem is a particular website or provider upstream from your office? MTR is a great way to see whether there really is a problem and to get a quick idea of where the problem resides.

One of MTR's more commonly used command-line options is -n, which stops MTR from doing reverse DNS lookups on the IP addresses of the routers it pings. This is handy when you're having DNS problems and don't want to wait for the lookups to timeout. Another useful option is -r, which issues a single summary report after running a certain number of pings (specified by the -c option) to each router. This can be used with scripts to build regular reports to be printed, emailed, or even inserted into a Web page.

PHP Weathermap

Sometimes you want the 10,000-foot overview of your network traffic. PHP Weathermap provides exactly that. It shows a logical map of your routers and the links between them, using different colors to indicate how busy each link is. PHP Weathermap is a good complement to an application such as Cacti or OpenNMS.

PHP Weathermap does not handle its own data collection, so you'll need to pair it with another application such as Cacti, OpenNMS, MRTG, or RRDtool. PHP Weathermap has a plug-in that helps it integrate into Cacti, with some options available in the Cacti preference panels.

You will need to edit the map config files to adjust the appearance of your maps. You can do this by hand, though PHP Weathermap offers a GUI editor that runs within a Web browser. You can use the editor to create your nodes (routers and switches) and links, as well as produce a functioning map.

When you're ready for manual tweaking, you can add custom background images to the map and insert custom icons for your routers. You can also add subnodes, which allow you to display more information within the router's icon, such as CPU or memory usage. You can also insert parallel links or bonded links between routers.

Through further tweaking of config files, you can fine-tune the placement of router icons and the map's legend. If you have a more complicated map with plenty of router icons, you can create curved link lines between your router icons to help keep the map readable and less cluttered or cramped.

Top free open source tools for network admins: NtopNeed an sFlow or NetFlow collector to get a thorough look at your data traffic flows? Ntop will take NetFlow or sFlow data from popular switches and routers and display it in a Web GUI, complete with clickable links that take you to details about particular hosts or protocols or to actual conversations and flows.

There are interesting features to Ntop's output, such as identifying workstation users by their email addresses and (passively) detecting the operating systems of network hosts through packet analysis. Ntop will break down traffic volume on a per-protocol basis, helpful for comparing the traffic your network actually has to what you think it should have.

Ntop can give you a list of IP protocols, sortable by protocol type, as well as lists of traffic sources and destinations. Ntop also creates a matrix table of IP traffic, so you can see who is talking to whom and how much data is being passed between the two. Of course, data is not as useful if you cannot sort it. Ntop allows you to sort on both the traffic source and the destination.

Platforms supported include Windows and all major Unix types, such as Linux, the BSDs, Solaris, and Mac OS X. Although resource usage will vary by network size and the configuration options that you choose, Ntop should be very light on modern workstation and laptop hardware. Ntop's Web UI accepts multiple HTTP usernames and passwords, so each member of your NOC team can have individual access, and you can force Ntop to work with HTTPS.

Ntop supports a wide range of network protocol types, IP protocol types, and even network media types. There is support for several VoIP protocols, including Cisco SCCP, Asterisk's IAX protocol, and of course SIP. Ntop can even do protocol decodes on most common IP protocols. If you want the information for later retrieval and analysis, Ntop can record its network traffic data to RRD-style files on a disk.

By Unknown with No comments

Baby Kai Lan with Garlic

If you like vegetables, you'll sure like Baby Kailan (Baby Kai Lan or known as Chinese Broccoli or Chinese Kale).

There are so many different options to cook this delicious green and it's very simple and quick to complete as this veggie is young and light in taste. The more common ones should be the Oyster baby kailan  and Stir-fried baby kailan with minced garlic.


Serves 3 - 4
Ingredients:
300 - 350 grams of Baby Kai-Lan, trimmed and rinsed

2 cloves of garlic, finely minced
Pinch of sugar
Pinch of salt and pepper
1 tablespoon of cooking oil 

Optional:
Handful of canned Pacific clams
2 teaspoons of oyster sauce 

Method:
1) Heat wok with oil over high heat. Add garlic and stir-fry for about 10 seconds till fragrant, but not browned.
2) Add baby kailan and sugar, stir fry with spatula in quick strokes. Then, add in pacific clams, if opted for.
3) When veggie starts to soften, sprinkle salt and pepper (and oyster sauce, if added with pacific clams, or if prefer more enhanced flavour in the veggie). Stir-fry to combine well. Dish up and serve.

Tricks to reduce/ eliminiate bitterness in baby kailan dish:
* If you not wish to eliminate the bitter taste of this dish (if any), garlic is one of the key point. Do not fry garlic till browned or burnt, leave it pale with fragrance will do, before adding baby kailan.
* Adding of sugar helps to reach the same effect as well as to enhance the overall taste of the dish.

Tips:
* Do not need to add extra water as gravy is not necessary in this dish. Water from the baby kailan should be sufficient to moist the veggie till it's cooked. If really find it too dry while cooking, simply sprinkle some water with your fingers.
* Fry vegetables with high heat in short cooking time in order to retain its nutrients and keep veggie fresh and grossy bright green looking with more crunchy bites.

Thank to My Wok Life

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Cheesy Mass Potato

This mashed potato was just so fabulous, even without the instant mushroom sauce. It's simply smooth and exceedingly moist enough for the palate.

Yes, if you are looking for a slightly different mashed potato recipe, try this simple and quick to fix mashed potato dish at home. Good for an express lunch with greens salad, or to pair with nice juicy chop for a romantic dinner.

Serves 3 - 4
Ingredients:
2 medium potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks (Russet potato)
2 tablespoons butter
1 medium egg yolk
50 grams of cheddar cheese, grated

Topping:
1 packet of instant mushroom gravy, get it off the shelves


Method:
1) In a pot cover potatoes with water by 1 inch, and simmer over high heat, until very tender, for about 15 minutes.

2) Drain the potatoes and transfer to a bowl. Add in butter and cheese, mix and mash with a large metal fork. Do this quick while it's still pipping hot.

3) When potatoes are mashed until almost smooth, fold in lightly scrambled egg yolk. Continue mashing the potato till smooth, creamy and well combined. Set aside.

4) Empty the content of the instant mushroom sauce packet into a small saucepan. Heat sauce over low fire, for 2 minutes, or according to the directions indicated on the packet.

5) Final stage, scoope mashed potato onto a serving dish with the ice cream scooper. Make a shallow well in the middle of the mashed potato by pressing it lightly with the rounded back off the scooper. Pour heated mushroom sauce into the potato well. Serve immediately.

Thanks to My Wok Life

By Unknown with No comments

Should IT execs get MBAs?

By Julia King
January 10, 2011 06:00 AM ET

It takes a monumental commitment, both financially and personally, but an MBA could be the fastest ticket to business proficiency.

 The CIOs at Procter & Gamble and Microsoft don't have one. Neither does the CIO at Wal-Mart. So, no, technically, you don't need to have a master's degree in business administration to be successful in a top technology position at a world-renowned company.

But realistically, it's an extremely good idea, especially for pure technologists. That goes not just for CIOs, but for project managers, business analysts and virtually any other IT professional aiming to climb to the top of the corporate ladder. One big reason: No one is exclusively a technology chief anymore. Everybody's a business executive, whether they call themselves that or not.

"CIOs are no longer developing technology. Instead, they're finding IT and putting it together in ways that change the top and bottom lines of their companies," says Ralph Szygenda, former global CIO at General Motors, Bell Atlantic and Texas Instruments and now a strategic consultant at iRise, a business applications vendor in El Segundo, Calif.

Preparing for digital leadership

The CIO's job today is 10 times harder than it was 10 years ago, according to Ralph Szygenda, whose CIO career has spanned more than three decades at global, multibillion-dollar companies.

"Today's CIO is running processes across the world rather than across country units. The CIO is also at the intersection of personal consumer technology and corporate technology and has to make it all work," he says.

Given this increase in complexity, Szygenda believes a "pure business degree" is insufficient preparation for the up-and-coming IT professional looking to assume a leadership role. For the past two decades, he has been working with business schools, helping to design a post-graduate business curriculum that combines coursework in finance, strategy and other traditional business studies with "a strong curriculum of IT courses," he says. Schools he has worked with include Carnegie Mellon University's H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, American University and Missouri University of Science and Technology.

Szygenda says that while at GM, he never hired anyone into a CIO role who didn't have "a balance of both business and technology experience." He also sent dozens of his IT staffers back to school to earn their MBAs through an online program he helped develop at Carnegie Mellon.

The program was specifically designed for future IT leaders. "It's about integrating the business and digital worlds, which is very different than traditional accounting, marketing and branding," Szygenda says. "It's for business people who want to learn more about technology or for technologists to learn more about the business. It's about trying to get [students] closer to what the next-generation digital leader should be."

— Julia King

"In the last 10 years, you could get away with [mainly] technology knowledge because a lot of the things a CIO did were efficiency moves, such as consolidating data centers. It was a great period for the technology CIO," says Szygenda. "But now, everybody has done the efficiencies. Growth is the big thing."

Szygenda himself doesn't have an MBA, yet like virtually all CIOs -- with MBAs and without -- he says enabling your employer's growth requires a comprehensive knowledge of business, particularly finance, which an MBA certainly affords. But going back to school to earn a two-year MBA can cost $55,000 to $60,000 per year. Meanwhile, a generous uptick in salary -- especially if you stay at your current company -- is by no means guaranteed upon graduation.

Fast-tracking

But an MBA isn't the only way to acquire critical business knowledge. One alternative is rotating through various job assignments across business units to gain a first-hand understanding of processes associated with everything from sales and marketing to logistics, manufacturing and supply chain operations. The downside to that approach is that it can take years. Indeed, one measure of an MBA degree's worth, CIOs say, is that it is frequently the fastest way to acquire mandatory business knowledge.

"The traditional IT career path doesn't lend itself that well to building a mind-set and a skill set of how the CEO and CFO really think," says Peter Weis, CIO at Matson Navigation Co., an ocean freight carrier based in Oakland, Calif.

"Learning their language deeply by studying [business] cases and spending hours thinking about how other executives think is very hard to pick up in your normal work in the CIO role," adds Weis, who returned to school in his 40s to earn an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business.

Yet going back to school, especially while continuing to work, is no easy feat. "It was maybe the hardest thing I have ever done in my career," Weis says. At the time, he was a single parent whose daughter had just left for college. His employer paid his tuition and expenses, but Weis was required to use one vacation day for every two days he spent in school. He also agreed to remain at Matson for three years after earning his MBA.

For two years straight, Weis worked full time and attended classes every other weekend, all day Saturday and Sunday. "On my off weekends, it was absolutely studying full time Saturday and Sunday, which made it a seven-day commitment."

"You're constantly battling to strike the right balance, performing your job and hitting all of your critical obligations," Weis says. "It was important to me that there be no slip in my performance at the company. That led to a 24/7 feeling all the time."

As for the career benefits, he says, "An MBA doesn't translate into instant financial gratification." Nor did it significantly increase his prestige among executives in Matson's C-suite, many of whom had already earned advanced degrees from top-notch schools.

An MBA doesn't necessarily enhance one's innovation and leadership abilities either, according to Paul Glen, an IT career expert, a Computerworld columnist and the author of the IT management book Leading Geeks. Glen, who holds an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management and has taught MBA courses at Loyola Marymount University and at the University of Southern California, says that "case methods that are taught in MBA programs can help people to think in different ways, but I've never seen anything that would teach someone to think innovatively."

Timing is everything when earning an MBA

The ideal time to earn an MBA is after you've had three to five years of experience in the business world, according to CIOs, academics and career experts.

"An MBA degree is meant to be very concrete and very practical," says IT management consultant Paul Glen, who at 27 was the youngest member of his class when he earned his MBA in 1991. "To go for an MBA when you haven't had enough work experience is pretty useless, because you have no reality to connect it to." In fact, Glen notes that the top business schools won't even accept MBA applications from students directly out of college anymore.

Sun National Bank CIO Angelo Valletta says if he had it to do again, "I'd have waited a little bit" before enrolling in an MBA program. He enrolled at the age of 22 immediately after earning his undergraduate degree, which he had pursued while working full time at another bank. That was more than 20 years ago.

"But I went straight through because the company was paying for it and I thought I might as well just keep on going," he says. But again, Valletta continued to work full time, supplementing his classroom and case-study learning with on-the-job training in virtually all business processes associated with the financial services industry.

Throughout his years in school, "I worked in back-office operations, I sold IRAs, I supported the credit card business, and I supported the retail business from a customer service standpoint. I don't think I would be successful without having both an MBA and the formative years in operations at the bank," he says.

Matson Navigation CIO Peter Weis had been in a management role for several years after climbing the corporate ladder in IT when he started to pursue an MBA. He says one huge benefit of earning the degree while simultaneously working as a CIO is that he was able to apply what he learned immediately.

For example, armed with a deeper knowledge of finance, Weis overhauled how Matson's project management office works. "We set up a business office, which runs all of our budgeting, project costing, administrative processes and all nontechnology processes," he explains.

IT budget requests also changed dramatically. "Now we don't issue a capital request without a net present value, payback period and a sensitivity analysis," Weis says. "All of that is standard fare for us now. That wasn't the case before an MBA."

— Julia King

Leadership skills are similarly glossed over in most MBA programs, Glen says. "Leadership is about understanding the emotions of people. MBA programs don't teach that well. Most MBA programs are far more focused on rational thought. They try to teach you how to think like a rationalistic CEO, but then you go back in the workforce and you're not a CEO. You're a manager, and you know how CEOs are supposed to approach problems, but you don't know more about managing people."

However, you do know more about how others think, says Weis.
"The biggest thing it has done is connect me to the financial, marketing, sales and operations issues. I see the business better through my peers' eyes," he says. Also invaluable, Weis says, is the deep knowledge of finance he acquired in business school. This has served him especially well in managing a large portfolio of competing projects and in negotiating with IT vendors.

"One skill I developed that was a surprise to me was negotiation," Weis says. Fifty percent of IT spending is with IT vendors, but CIOs rarely get training in how to negotiate deals, he says. Prior to earning his MBA, he says he'd squeeze a vendor for maybe 30% and think that he had done a good job. "I'd argue that what I learned about negotiating at Wharton has paid for my MBA degree 20 times over," he says.

John Seral, CIO at GE Infrastructure, returned to school to earn an MBA at DeVry University's Keller Graduate School of Management in Chicago three years after joining GE and six years after earning an undergraduate degree in computer science at the University of Illinois.

"Three years into the job at GE Capital, I realized I had a gap trying to understand cash flow and the language of the business. There were a lot of things I didn't understand. I asked a lot of questions," he recalls. "My background was very typical -- light on business courses, as I had pictured myself in math, technology and computer science."

Today, what he learned as an MBA student directly impacts how he finances and manages technology at GE Infrastructure. "Going deeper into accounting and understanding how costs are managed gives you different ideas about how to finance your projects and sell them internally," he says. "You earn credibility, and you have a lot more confidence selling your ideas."

Jim Marascio, chief technology officer at 11Giraffes in Charlotte, N.C., admits to being somewhat myopic in his approach to decision-making before earning an MBA at the University of Maine. He returned to school to earn an MBA after working a few years in a more engineering-oriented role as a technical liaison, which he landed after earning an undergraduate degree in computer science.

"One reason I went back for an MBA is that I wanted to be in a business leadership role rather than in the trenches in a development role," he says.

He says that having earned an MBA, he has a much better understanding of the views and opinions of everyone on the management team, which is invaluable because "if I can't understand why the CFO is positioning something a certain way, I'm not going to be successful working with the CFO."

Marascio says that in his role as an officer at a small digital media and products company, "an MBA is pretty close to mandatory. On a day-to-day basis, I'm working with operations people and marketing people and creative people and technology people. The ability to bridge all of those silos and to be successful really takes someone who is much more strategically than technically focused. I find that since I went through the program, I spend much more time viewing things from alternate perspectives and much more holistically."

Pulling the Right Levers

James Dallas, senior vice president of quality and operations at Minneapolis-based Medtronic Inc., agrees with Szygenda that growth is today's No. 1 business priority. Growing the business, he says, comes down to "knowing what the [business] levers are and which ones to pull to have the maximum impact." In short, it comes down to strategy.

Prior to earning an MBA from Emory University's Goizueta Business School in 1994, "I knew technologies and I knew how to execute on projects," Dallas says. He had graduated from college more than 10 years earlier, and in the intervening years he had supported a wide array of functions at his then-employer, Georgia-Pacific. "I started out supporting transportation and logistics, and I ended up becoming the general manager of that function. I supported our distribution and operations, and I ended up running the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast regions of that business," he recalls.

But it was as an MBA student that Dallas says he learned "how to look at business models and the key questions to ask at an enterprise level. The MBA allowed me to get better at deciding which projects to do and when to do them based on the phase and evolution of the business model in the overall competitive environment."

Dallas says it was after earning his MBA that he started being asked to go on sales calls to some of Georgia-Pacific's largest customers "to talk about IT from a business standpoint, addressing technology from the point of view of the customer."

"I was also in strategy meetings to talk about overall business strategy, not just waiting for the IT part of the meeting to come up," he recalls. Now, if a business unit executive has a question about why his or her IT project isn't higher up on a list, Dallas simply traces how that particular project maps to the overall business strategy, and "if it isn't pulling on one of the specified business levers, it's not at the top."

The bottom line: "A CEO is looking for a CIO who will transform the business, not just implement technology. CIOs are being held accountable for their contributions to the bottom line, not just what they did to make things go faster," Dallas notes. "An MBA has allowed me to generate greater value."

MBAs lead to leadership roles

Make no mistake: An MBA might not be listed as mandatory in many IT job descriptions, but graduate-level management degrees are without a doubt preferred by companies seeking to fill business/technology leadership roles.

"All other things being equal, I'd give preference to the candidate with the MBA," says Jim Marascio, CTO at 11Giraffes.

At Matson Navigation, CIO Peter Weis notes that he just promoted an applications architect to a management role in software development, and "one of the primary reasons I promoted him is because he has an MBA," he says. Overall, about 5% of the professionals in Matson's IT organization hold MBAs. "I'd love for my entire project management office to have MBAs," Weis says.

"Absolutely you have to have an MBA if you want to be viewed as a strategic business partner," says Whirlpool Corp. CIO Kevin Summers. "In today's environment and in the future, there will be very few people at the VP-and-above levels without an MBA," he predicts.

James Dallas, senior vice president of quality and operations at Medtronic, says an MBA surely gives candidates who are up for leadership positions an edge. But what he's even more interested in is how and when the potential leader earned his MBA.

"If someone tells me they went to school at night while having a family and got their MBA, that tells me they can manage multiple priorities at one time, which is a key trait for an effective leader," Dallas says.
Moreover, Dallas advises his executive peers to be prepared with an advancement plan for employees with newly minted MBAs.

"Companies have to seriously think about what is next for the person" who is pursuing their MBA, Dallas says.

"Once you get your MBA, you want to apply your learning. I tell companies to be prepared once that person graduates. If you don't have a bigger role waiting for them, they will try to find one outside," he warns.

But a bigger role, additional responsibilities and a new title after earning an MBA don't necessarily mean more money, at least not initially. In fact, most recent graduates shouldn't expect to offset the tens of thousands of dollars they spent on tuition and expenses with a big salary increase in their first few years after completing school.

"I never did the calculation. In fact, I encourage people not to," says IT management consultant Paul Glen. "If people look at education only through the lens of investment, they are missing the point. It's about expanding your mind. If someone asks me about an MBA primarily as an investment, I tell them not to do it. If they want the credential more than the knowledge, they probably won't get the value from it."

That said, Glen estimates that he recouped the cost of his MBA within a few years. "But as they say," he cautions, "past performance is no indication of future performance."

— Julia King

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