Monday June 11, 2007

Do you publish presentations as Powerpoint or StarOffice files rather than flattening them to PDF, postscript or some other display format? If so, you should consider the possible ramifications of making those source document available, which could include inadvertently making confidential information available publically.

You might accidentally release sales figures, customer information, or in this case, the classified figures for the entire US national intelligence budget over the last 10+ years. Any comprehensive information protection program must take this sort of problem into account to be effective.

In StarOffice, use the "PDF" button to create a PDF version of your document or presentation. It can't get much simpler than that.

So, what happens when you bolt a loaded Sun Blackbox modular datacenter to a shake table and put it through a simulated earthquake? The Blackbox engineering team did just that recently at the UCSD Seismic Response Test Facility.

See the results in this YouTube video.