Steve's Seaside Life

Steve's Seaside Life Blog

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Blogging at work

CollaborationI am desperately waiting to me able to blog at work!  I find it very frustratng that most of the technical blogs posts I want to post I am unable to, because they can only be released under NDA and even more frustrating that other people at work can not work with me in the collaborative, community building fashion that blogs enable.  We use Notes at work for email, document sharing, discussions etc and are deploying WebSphere as our collaboration portal, so the news that WorkPlace will include blog support is encouraging.  It seems very primitive at this stage, but its a start.

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Great motivator to start GTD

StepsI like the GTD methodology,  although I don’t follow it myself, although have I tried it.  I have found that after reading and absorbing lots of different approaches over the years that my natural condition is organised and prioritised (and I don’t need lists and flow charts to achieve it).  Every month or so I do need to write down a great big list of stuff to do and decide what needs to be at the top,  but then I can last a few more months quite happily.

For those of you who need more than me though I highly recommend this email interview.

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Skype and conference calls

I particularly like Skype for listencing to long conference calls,  I find the listening quality excellent, not quite so good for participating, and it’s better than my speaker phone because people can’t hear me typing.  I know it costs a few pence more because there is no freephne support in skype,  but still I like it.  The problem seems to be – isSkypen’t there always a problem – that somewhere in the Skype Out chain the DTMF tones get screwed up and this makes it almost impossible to actually get connected to the call, ie entering your PIN etc.   Other people have had this problem too.

 

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OneNote shared sessions

OnenoteMichael Sampson writes a great blog on collaboration,  its really a daily must check feed on new announcements in the industry and saves me a lot of time.  Sometimes he provides some great content himself, such as his 7 pillars framework which is a nice – technology focussed -framework for collaboration.

In his most recent post he discusses OneNote shared sessions which I would really like to try if it worked across firewalls more easily, however for now I will have to settle for this review.

Chris Pratley from Microsoft is one of the designers of OneNote and he has also written an excellent description of how the OneNote team use the feature and this post has an excellent set of comments.

For a bit of fun Eric Macks kids Amy and Wendy did a pod cast on OneNote shared sessions which Eric blogs about.

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Open Source and The Mythical Man Month!

This is a re-post of my original article, modified to reflect clarifications that I received from the author,  which were very much appreciated.  In fact the author spent some time developing a response which he kindly sent to me rather than posting as a comment.  However having read the comments,  I still thought that a slightly modified article had something useful to say so I made these updates and reposted.

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CollaborationNic just blogged on an interesting article published by IBM titled “Opening minds: Cultural change with the introduction of open-source collaboration methods”. 

It’s message centred around the concept that there are two cultural models, the Traditional Approach and the Open-Source Approach.  I mistakenly thought that the traditional approach was described by the classic book “The Mythical man Month”, the Open Source approach by Linus.  However the author has pointed out to me that only certain elements of the approach described in the Mythical Man Month are actualy being referred to in the article.  The following table from the article describes the key differences:

Traditional Approach

Open-Source Approach

Brooks’ Law

Linus’ Law

Hierarchy

Network

Experts

Peers

Teams

Communities

Cathedral

Bazaar

Perfection

Improvement

Construction

Evolution

…

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Social networking

Microsoft research have published the presentations from their Social Computing Symposium 2005, here is a taster,

Speaker Session: Social Metadata and Tagging
David Weinberger: From Trees to Tags (presentation)
Matt MacLaurin: Tesla, Tagging for the DeskTop (presentation)

Speaker Session: Global Social
Anne Kirah: When culture meets technology and when technology meets culture (presentation)
Genevieve Bell: Global Social

Speakers: From the Labs
MSR: Shelly Farnham and Marc Smith (presentation)
Intel: Ken Anderson and Eric Paulous (presentation)
IBM: Wendy Kellogg (presentation)

Amy Bruckman: What is “Community” Anyway? Cognitive Science Helps Provide an Answer (presentation)
Paul Resneck: Bonds and Identity: Navigating the Tension Between Attachment to Topic and Attachment to People in Online Conversation Spaces
Randy Farmer: Thirty Years of Social Computing: Are we finally ready to scale? (presentation)
David McDonald: Community Through Pictures (presentation)
Fernanda Vi

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Auto updating software

ClickOnce_thumbThere is a recent trend for software to auto-update, and if you are logged in as administrator then it works pretty well, and hopefully with Longhorn and ClickOnce the experience will be good for non-administrators as well.  What’s surprising is that its taken so long for the auto-update model to become popular.

About 13 years ago I developed my first distributed system on PC’s that was going to be widely deployed within an enterprise.  The first thing I did (initialy just to make testing easier) was to write a stub that checked the currently installed version of the program, against the manifest file version on the server defined in the last version of the manifest.  If the version was different, the stub downloaded the installer programme defined in the updated manifest and ran it, otherwise it started the application.  The stub was so simple that we hoped it could cope with any update scenario and of course the stub could be updated anyway.  Using this system we were able to keep thousands of PC’s up-to date without any manual intervention, other than publishing a new manifest and associated updates to the distribution points.  Of course there is nothing clever in …

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Find what you love

Stawberries2I am still on a journey of discovery to try and “find what I love doing”,  I am fairly content in my work, find it interesting and challenging, but I don’t feel I make a difference, at home I spend most of the time with my family – which is great – but very internal focused.  I would like both work and home life to change over time to be more community centred and to feel that I am giving something back to the world and that I live in a more natural and sustainable way.  My relatively poor health is currently the excuse I hide behind that stops me taking the risk associated with change.

I do however continue to be on the lookout for advise in this area and I recently cam across these two articles, one by Steve Jobs – You’ve got to find what you love and the other my Dave Pollard ‘Business’ Advice for Young Adults (and Their Parents & Teachers).  Check them out if you ever think about your work or worry about how you are preparing your kids to help them make good choices about their future work choices.

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The new world of work

WORKI recently listened to a lecture by Thomas Malone on the “New world of work”, I enjoyed the lecture although the material in it was not too surprising.  That said the implications on IT are considerable as the old concept of a single infrastructure for all of an enterprises employees starts to collapse as those employees become a fragmented mix of oursourced, contractors, suppliers, small isolated teams in internal markets etc.  Tom describes 4 models for the future of the distributed workplace:

  1. Loose Hierarchies — with flat organisation structure and substantial autonomy granted to individual business units, subject to overarching principles, review and budget control (e.g. consultancies, universities, technology developers)
  2. Democracies — where all employees, or all managers, get an equal vote on some or all key corporate decisions
  3. External Markets — where most of the non-executive jobs are outsourced to independent businesses and contractors, so all ’employees’ essentially become ‘suppliers’, with the commensurate rights and autonomy
  4. Internal Markets — where each business unit, and even individuals within business units, contract with each other as if they were dealing at arms’ length, so, every business unit and every employee acts much like an autonomous business

To get a good overview …