Month: February 2006

Productive Meetings – Restating Common Sense

Sometimes it’s worth pointing people to common sense – in order to reinforce the common sense.

I rant rather a lot about meetings, I get invited to so many poor ones. As a way of being constructive I am linking to “9 tips for running more productive meetings” – now there’s common sense.

If any of these are a surprise to you perhaps you should consider phoning each of your colleagues and apologise to them for all of the poor meetings you have run in the past .

Time is our most precious asset. Don’t go wasting your’s or other people’s, it’s the worst kind of theft. You can’t give it back.

Kernel memory exhaustion hotfix available – for Exchange 2003 SP2

When is a ‘fix’ not a ‘fix’? When it’s actually reducing the issue rather than actually ‘fixing’ it. It’s a little unfair but true .

If you run a large Exchange environment then you should be having a good look at the Kernel memory on your servers, especially if the users are members of lots of security groups. There are a whole load of posts from the Exchange team about this issue here, here and here.

A hotfix is now available with details here, linking to a KB article here. This ‘reduces’ the issue by about 30% – so not really a ‘fix’ but that was expected because the real constraint is the 32–bit architecture on which Exchange and Windows runs (for now) .

Skiing Holiday

Skiing in Bansko, Bulgaria

We have just got back from a very nice skiing holiday with some wonderful friends. We went to Bansko in Bulgaria – a very interesting place.

The pictures are here – I may get around to annotating them properly at some point but until now you’ll have to make do with the generic names.

Stu talks Notes and Outlook

Stu talks about Notes and Outlook – his observations are similar to mine.

He goes further on Notes/Domino as an application platform. I’m still unsure as to whether (for most customers) Notes/Domino as an application platform is a good or a bad thing. Many customers that I talk to regard it as a problem rather than a solution, but many of these customers are the ones unhappy with Notes/Domino anyway so perhaps my view is skewed. It certainly works as an application platform, but would anyone choose it as the preferred application platform if they were starting in a ‘green filed’ environment today? I don’t think I would.

Skiing and Nails

IMG_3238

I’m struggle to type today. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first, and main reason is that the old brain is a bit addled from being in a different time zone for the last week and from the physical exercise expended during a week a skiing. The second reason is that I actually have finger nails. Finger nails are a sign of a really good holiday. Biting my nails is, for me, a visible sign of stress. When I’m a little stressed I bite my nails, when I’m really stressed I make them sore.

I have now been back at work for only a few hours and one of the nails is already gone and another is on the way – ah well. Is my job making me ill, or is this just a habit built up over years – who knows?  Do I ask these questions every time I get back from holiday – yes!

How do you do homework?

Don't go any further Jimmy, you'll fall in

There is a theme that comes up in the newspapers regularly and it relates to our education system. It tends to go something like this: “education is not relevant to work”; “young people not given the basic skills for work”. The basic premise being that education doesn’t prepare our young people for the real world.

It’s early evening now – I’m still working and will be for some while – again.

In his bedroom my son is also ‘working’ – I think (he was earlier anyway). They still call it homework but the Internet and IT in general has changed it to be something radically different to what I remember. At least it has for the privileged teenager in our house who has grown up regarding a whole set of technologies which I would have regarded as dreams as normal.

For the most part I did my homework in isolation. I lived a good bike ride from any of my school friends the need to collaborate wasn’t strong enough for me to be bothered. As we speak Jonathan is talking to two of his friends over Skype, they are using MSN for IM and file sharing. The barriers to collaboration are so much lower, in terms of effort, that they are choosing to collaborate. It’s part of their culture. It’s how they do it. They will be so disappointed if they start in employment and their employer doesn’t allow them to interact in this instant rich way.

The other day the three of them worked online and produced a flash animation on World War I as a response for a history question that they had been asked.

They regularly collaborate on a presentations and present them to the class.

So here is my question – are employers ready to release all of this fresh new employees into the rich collaboration experiences that they are used to? Are they going to provide them with the flexibility that goes with it? Or are they going to be subjected to the endless boredom of poorly structured meetings running at the pace of the slowest person with little or no value.

Name in the Guardian

Jmmy and Grandad wonder where the smell is coming from

Just a quick pointer to an article in the Guardian which mentions yours-truly .

Comes from this post.

(It’s shame I don’t have a picture of Jimmy and Grandad reading a paper – don’t have time to take one now)

Count Your Blessings #52 – Poems and Poetry

Beverley Snow

I thought about leaving this post until tomorrow being Valentines day and all; but actually I’m not talking about the romantic type of poetry. The poetry I like is the type that paints a picture in your head that draws you to imagine.

Today someone pointed out a web site with lots of the type of poetry I really like. This type of poetry takes you out of yourself and shows you the bigger world and even beyond.

I suppose it must be fairly self evident as a blogger who mainly writes that I like words. I actually see words as a means to an end, I don’t love words because they are words, I love words because they have the potential to communicate something that takes me to somewhere else. I’m not talking about escaping, I’m talking about travelling and in travelling experiencing something new that broadens who I am.

The other thing that poems can do is to express something that we struggle to express ourselves. Last night one of the young guys in my Cell Group got baptised. In our church people who are getting baptised say a few words before-hand. It’s a daunting task to stand up in-front of a few hundred people and talk about yourself. So what does a young guy do – he reads a poem; it was great.

Anyway, here’s one that I really liked:

Performance for an Audience of One by Gerard Kelly

If you had been the only one:
Yours the only ticket sold;
Your solitary bottom
Spoilt for choice
In an ocean of empty seats.
If you had been
The only one:
He still would have staged
The whole show.

The brooding, hovering chords
Of the overture
Unfolding
For your ears only:
Stars spinning out like Catherine wheels
Across a dark but lightening set,
Until dawn was uncorked
On green home.

Act 1: the building of a nation:
A people wooed and won
And lost
And won again.
For you alone the whole cast
Weaving and turning through dances
To fill a joyous expanse of stage.

Act 2: the cry of a child
In a vastly empty universe;
The adventure of hope and betrayal;
The seat-gripping climate:
Triumph diving, death defying,
Through the fiery hoop of tragedy.
The clamour of the crowd scenes
Building
Toward an unimagined finale –
A cosmos, purged of guilt
Restored,
Dressed for dancing.

If you had been the only one,
Your grimy pounds
The total take:
He still would have staged
The whole show
And wept for joy
At the warmth
of your applause.

Single-Point to Multi-Point

Jimmy and Grandad play hide-and-seek

One of the concepts that has been most pervasive within IT since it’s inception has been the idea of the cursor or the pointer. We have had over all these years, almost exclusively, a single point of focus on our screens. The mouse has then been the universal interface to this concept. This concept was developed in the days when computers could only cope with doing one thing on a screen at any one time. Many of us prefer the keyboard because it allows us to get an approximation of a multi-point interface but really all we are doing is driving a single point interface as fast as we can. It’s a bit like a virtuoso pianist using all of their fingers but only pressing one key at a time.

This video and this link show the way it could be; bi-manual, multi-point and multi-user interactions on a graphical interaction surface. It’s one of those videos that makes you think about the way it could be. It would mean a completely new way of looking at software, but it could be so much more productive.

We will communicate, we will communicate

Grandad has a dream

An inability to step outside of one’s own head may be behind e-mail miscommunication, according to recent research.

So starts an article in the American Psychological Association: Monitor

It would appear that we grossly over-estimate our ability to communicate, especially when we write (oh, dear):

The participants then listened to or read their partners’ statements, guessed the intended tone and indicated how confident they were in their answers.

Both the e-mailers and those who recorded their messages were highly confident that their partners would correctly detect their tone–both groups predicted about a 78 percent success rate. The speakers weren’t too far off–their partners got the tone correct about 75 percent of the time. The partners who read the statements over e-mail, though, had only a 56 percent success rate–not much better than chance.

What’s more, the participants who received the messages were no better at predicting their own success–both the listeners and the readers guessed that they had correctly interpreted the message’s tone 90 percent of the time.

I suppose that means that half of you reading this have absolutely no idea what I am talking about, but I believe that nearly all of you get it.

Rubyard Kippling: “Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”

Via CMS

Windows 2003 R2 Single Instance Storage

Grandad consults the gnome

Some interesting articles from The Filing Cabinet on Single Instance Storage

  • Part 1: Introduction

  • Part 2: SIS Design; creating links, assessing links, breaking links

  • Part 3: The SIS Common Store and Common-Store Files

  • Part 4: Backup and Restore Support for SIS

It’s definitely very interesting.

The Guardian Causes a Storm with it's Article on Notes

Grandad nearly flicks Jimmy off the Seesaw

The Guardian today: Survival of the unfittest.

Lotus Notes is used by millions of people, but almost all of them seem to hate it. How can a program be so bad, yet thrive?

Ed comments:

With a kickoff paragraph like this, you can only guess where the article is going…

He then goes on to complain about how the article was constructed and he does seem to have a point.

I’ve written previously about my opinions and others have responded.

IBM really do need to get on the front foot on the client. We’ve heard a lot over the last couple of years about the changes in the Domino infrastructure, we’ve heard a lot about Workplace, all this meant that we heard (and by this I mean listened and took in) little about the changes in the Notes client. Personally I have had numerous discussions with IBM in which I raised the issue of the users disliking the client – their response was nearly always to minimise the issue. I have left many a discussions with IBM with no answer to the question, “What are you doing for the end-user?”. Ed is starting to stand up to the mark but there are a lot of minds to change and a lot of technology to deploy.