Graham Chastney

I’ve always been a bit of a fan of public debate. In the England we have Speakers Corner in Hyde Park where debate is encouraged. Other countries have similar things.

Today I cam across www.changethis.com where people propose a new manifesto, people vote on their proposal. If there is enough interest they get to write their manifesto. The thing about a manifesto, though, is that this is no short sound-bite about an idea. If you write a manifesto you have to think it through and provide your reasoning.

This is a great idea.

So much of our media is taken up with completely misleading sound-bites based on prejudice and assumption. We need to have these prejudices and assumptions challenged if we are going to change, and they aren’t challenged in 5 seconds on the news. It requires some effort on our behalf, but it has got to be worth it in the long-run.

I’ve noticed an increase in the number of hits on this site over the last few days. So I did a little investigation into where they were coming from.

It appears that I am now above Wikipedia on Yahoo UK for searches on Smashie and Nicey. I’m #7 with Wikipedia #8. All this from one post?

Google has it a little more accurate with me at #9 and Wikipedia at #4.

Are there really that many people still searching the Internet for Smashie and Nicey?

The things is – now I’ve commented on it, I’m bound to just get higher.

Apparently happenings is also a good match for ladies seeking house husbands #7 .

We still have a long way to go with making search relevant .

(Jimmy and Grandad went on a bit of an adventure last night – see flickr to find out more)

WinFS finally left the Windows stable (here, here) over the last few days for residence in a SQL Server existence. Being the insightful watcher of the industry that I am ,  I had just finished the preparation for a presentation I was going to deliver to some colleagues on the subject – now cancelled.

It’s not a surprise, but it is a disappointment.

Anyone who architects or manages a large scale file service knows that they are nearly always in complete anarchy and causing all sorts of problems at every tier in the business. There are compliance people all over the world who are losing hours of sleep every time they think about the file system because they have no idea what is stored there or how incriminating it could be. There are IT managers who would rather do anything other than be buying yet more disks. There are business continuity people who are praying that the feared fire in the computer room never happens, because they know that they have no chance of getting all that data back to where it should be. There are thousands and millions of end users who fear having to try to find a valuable needle among the haystack that is before them.

A number of people have proposed answers. These have normally required the syphoning of data off into another store or application. These additional stores have normally resulted in the data being available in more than one store, rather than the data moving into a the new store, if it got their at all. This hasn’t resolved the problem, it’s just made it worse.

WinFS, had the chance, however slim, of changing this for good. It had the chance to put the business back in control of the data while, at the same time, giving extra functionality to the end user. But alas it was not to be.

The move of the WinFS development work into SQL Server means that it will always be separate from the file service and will be met with the same level of adoption as Oracle iFS. As a Windows function the level of adoption might have been something significantly different, but I can’t see it having anything like the same impact as a SQL Server function.

I don’t think the Web has yet answered this question either.

Tags: WinFS,File System

There are some things you don’t think about until you work from home.

I will, again, be embarrassed today. Today the Window Cleaner will come and clean the windows on our house. Every time he comes he embarrass me twice.

The first time he will embarrass me is when he is cleaning the window behind me as I write this blog. I won’t hear him until he is there, he will make me jump and then I’ll be embarrassed .

The second time he will embarrass me will be approximately 10 minutes after the first when he knocks on the door demanding payment. I will be very embarrassed to tell him, again, that I have no money and that’s he’ll have to come back later .

I’m a man of the modern age and never have any cash. It has never been necessary for me to have cash. I have got up in a morning and gone into an office and not needed any cash. All of those years of conditioning make it a near certainty that I won’t have any money.

The things you have to deal with when you work from home .

Perhaps I’ll just have to put the days he comes into my diary and plan to be in the office on those days .

Stop, wait a minute, I remember now, let me check, I do have a £10 note in my wallet today. Perhaps I’ll only be embarrassed once today.

The consensus on the del.icio.us links seems to be that they were noise, so I’ve turned them off. Stuart W’s comments weren’t the only ones, even though his are the only ones on this blog.

If you are interested you could always subscribe direct.

• Google on Collaboration
  Self directed innovators?
  (tags: architecture collaboration)

My friend Stuart thinks that the link posts are too much noise – anyone else? It was an experiment to see how usable they were, I’m quite willing to turn them off.

I noticed yesterday an optional update to Windows Vista for the Tablet’s Wacom MiniDriver.

The tablet’s pen buttons weren’t working so I was making the changes through the Q menu, but now they are. It wasn’t what I expected to make the difference but it’s welcome all the same.

Slow Leadership picks up on an article in the Glasgow Herald on “Employees fear working from home may damage careers”.

I tend to work from home these days – so do I fear that is damages my career?

Fear is definitely too strong a word for starters, but I do have concerns about it.

My employer is very flexible and I work from home because it makes sense. I do a lot of collaboration work with teams where it is impossible for the team to physically meet on a regular basis. These teams often span continents and it’s just not practical to have everyone flying around all the time.

There are a couple of office locally and I could go and work in them, but that takes away my flexibility to work when it’s appropriate to work. I regularly receive calls early and have teleconferences late. Being able to work flexibly also means that I treat my home time flexibly too, I treat bloging in a similar way.

So what do I worry about? I worry that I’m not visible.

I don’t think it’s a good thing to be invisible at work. I never want to be in the position where someone is asking the question “what does Graham do all day?” I am trustworthy, I do work hard, I do put in the hours, but is that visible? My role is primarily consultative and advisory so I don’t actually produce very much physical evidence of my productivity and that concerns me. If I was in an office people would be able to see how much consultation and advice I provide, at home it’s invisible. As the consultation is often via IM, email and voice it’s difficult to provide quantitative measures of productivity.

The issue of visibility is largely my issue though. I have to make special efforts to make sure I remain visible. I have to make make special efforts to have those ‘water cooler’ conversations in some other way. When attending teleconference I have to make a special effort to add value and to be ‘seen’. I consciously make more phone calls because I know that anything written can be interpreted wrongly.

My ‘need’ to be visible need to be balanced though. I don’t feel the need to be online all of the time. I don’t get stressed about missing a call out-of-hours that I wasn’t expecting, but I am very conscious of responding to almost every call.

But, yes, I worry.

As we move to a world of self-directed innovators this is something that we are going to have to get used to though.

I use my mouse in my right-hand – I write with my left hand. No I don’t know why, perhaps just because I’m awkward .

As I wrote the other day I am experimenting with some working habit changes. These involve me doing far more reading on my tablet and getting to grips with a pen based interface.

It’s only a simple thing, but my ambidextrous working this has lead me to a couple of user experience issues.

When reading, which is clearly what I do a lot of I often need to scroll down, no surprises there. When I am using a mouse I use the scroll bar on the side of the screen or the wheel. The scroll bar is on the right, my mouse is on the right, no problems their then. When I’m using my tablet (in tablet mode) I have all sorts of choices and these are leading to some confusion on my part.

• If I use the pen and the scroll-down bar I cover the screen with my hand so I can’t free-scroll to get to where I want to get to. Not being able to see the screen makes free-scroll it a bit pointless as a feature. I have found myself doing a kind of contortion so I can do both but it doesn’t look very professional and certainly not cool .
• If I use the jog-wheel with my right-hand I often find myself scrolling the wrong thing because I haven’t clicked on the thing I want to scroll first. This is something I find myself doing naturally with a mouse, but not yet with a pen and the jog-wheel .
• If I use flicks I can’t free-scroll and flicks are a bit cumbersome anyway .

It’s a shame I like free-scroll so much.

I have a similar problem when I’m using hand writing for input. The words that are being interpreted from my spidery scrawl are shown on the bottom left of the window where my hand is. This means that I can’t do any kind of live check on the writing without lifting my hand off and out of the way.

I’m a bit bipolar on how this could be resolved though. Part of me would like the scroll bars (and other things) to be down the left of the screen so I can use my pen effectively, but I still use my mouse and it makes sense that they are on the right in that context. I’m not sure my brain could cope with having both . Like any western left-handed person I have dealt with the issue of things going from left-to-right all my life so this is nothing new it’s just a new take on an old issue.

The handwriting recognition in Vista is astonishing though. Like many left-handed people handwriting has always been a bit of a problem but Vista does a wonderful job of recognising it.

Tags: Tablet, Vista