Month: September 2005

What do you do in a dull teleconference?

Jonathan

Like many people these days I spend a lot of time on teleconferences these days. The thing with teleconferences is that the level of involvement can often be very low. You need to be sitting listening and adding value when required, but the involvement can often be low enough to enable you to do another activity. There is something about teleconferences which make them particularly poor at time keeping (perhaps it’s because we are all doing something else as well).

You can’t do something requiring a lot of thought, ideally it is something you can leave and come back to with ease. There are, therefore, a number of things that I find myself doing while on a teleconference.

One of the things that I do is to browse flickr pictures in the groups that I am interested in. I particularly like to look through sunsets and sunrises, or UK pictures.

It’s also a good time to catch up on feeds that don;t really need reading. It’s surprising how many of these there are. There are loads of feeds where it’s sufficient to know that it exists, a prime example of this is the Microsoft Download feed. I don’t get an RRS feed for news because there is too much of it, so I also spend some time looking at the BBC News site.

Every now and again someone will send me a silly game to play. My attention span for these things is not very high. The latest one pokes a bit of fun at Steve Ballmer and his (reportedly) throwing a chair at news of one of his employees leaving to join Google. I can’t do games like the Pit Stop Game because that requires my attention, and part of my brain is still listening to the teleconference.

I have, from time to time, also used the time to sort through my task list.

The other thing I do is to write blogs.

I have considered whether it would be possible to do some exercise while sat listening but concluded that it would be difficult to sound calm and convincing while riding an exercise bike.

The question I am not particularly clear on is whether this actually adds to or removes from my productivity.

Small Well-Focussed Teams

Bringing the Sheep In

Jeffrey Philips over at Thinking Faster exposes a philosophy that I have exposed myself for a long time:

Note though, that I am advocating making your team, your hierarchy, your organization as small as possible.  That’s counter-intuitive in a time when we are evaluated on how large a team we manage.  Frankly, I’d rather manage a smaller team that has greater focus and higher commitment.  I guess it’s a question of guerilla tactics versus the armed frontal assault.

Put me into a small team focussed on a task and we will together each miraculous things, put anyone (including me) into a large, diverse, physically separated team and the level of productivity will diminish into nothingness.

This morning I have attended a conference call with a cast of thousands on it (well not really but I think you get the viewpoint) and the call followed the age old rule on productivity – a meeting will only move at the pace of the slowest person. Small well-focussed teams don’t work like that, everyone knows where they are going and agree how to get there. What’s more small well-focussed teams allow for a much better division of responsibilities. In large teams you quite quickly get to the point where you rely on individuals to answer questions because the team isn’t of one mind. This is counter-intuitive, but having been the individual that others rely upon on more than one occasion I can tell you that it’s true. Questions don’t get answered in a timely manner in this model. What’s more questions are normally asked more than once. This happens because the trusted individual isn’t always available, so a semi-trusted individual is asked who may or may not answer the question correctly. It doesn’t actually matter whether they answer correctly or not, because they are semi-trusted the question will get asked again of the trusted individual. This wastes everyones time.

Small teams behave like a pack of dogs – large teams behave like a pack of sheep.

FeedBurner Feed and Link

Memory

I have added a feedburner feed to this blog and to happenings. It’s purely a selfish reason. Typepad doesn’t give very good statistics on the number of subscribers you get and the other logging tool I use doesn’t show you RSS downloads either.

Anyway, if you wouldn’t mind being really nice to me, could you please change over to the feedburner feed if you are subscribed.

I won’t fall out with you if you don’t.

I’m also considering putting together a master feed of my del.icio.us feed, my flickr feed, oak-grove and happenings. One feed would give you everything, but may just be a huge overhead. Let me know what you think?

Count Your Blessings #21 – Meeting Interesting People

Fringe Dancer

I find that I am schizophrenia in many different aspects of my life. There are things which I know I enjoy, but I don’t do them. I enjoy a trip to the gym; but struggle to get myself motivated. I enjoy turning the television off and reading a book; but don’t do it very often. I really enjoy meeting new people; but I worry about it and avoid doing it. I think that this particular worry is really a fear of what people will think about me. It’s an irrational fear that has been there for for a very long time. I’m actually writing this in a room full of people, but I wouldn’t dream of talking to any of them so I’ve got my headphones on looking industrious.

Even though I worry about it, meeting interesting people – which for me, is most people – is a blessing.

There are billions of people on this planet, and they all look different. But looking different is only the surface of the differences. These people all think differently. They all eat differently. They all have a different heritage. Each of these and the numerous other differences aren’t small incremental nuances they are deep and they are profound.

On a person-to-person level I have rarely come across someone who didn’t interest me in some way.

One year Sue, Jonathan, Emily and I went to Florida on holiday, and to visit my brother’s family. On the way back we were sat in the airport opposite another British family. This family fascinated me. There was Mum, Dad and two teenage children. These people had been on holiday, the same as us, but they had obviously had a completely different experience to us. We were chilled; they were anything but chilled. The teenage son didn’t even need to say a word for his mother to chew his ears off; “don’t you start”. Once the mother had said her piece the father would have a go and then the father and the mother would have a go at each other. What needs to happen for family communications to get that bad. It’s a mystery, to me anyway.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realised that things that I found dull and boring actually enlivened others. My job is predominantly project based, start, execute, complete, get out. I have a work colleague whose job it is to keep things running once I have been in and done my stuff. He didn’t choose this job because he wasn’t good enough at the project stuff, he chose it because he is good at it. It’s the thing that gets him going in a morning. If you asked me to do that job I would be bored in less than a week, he does it with a passion. I have known him for a long time and I still can’t get my head around it, it’s a mystery to me. It’s the mystery that is the thing that makes him so interesting.

This summer I sat and listened to a man who had been lead by God to do some amazing things. He wasn’t a particularly good presenter, but his passion and his heart shone through. That passion and that heart reached across a tent of thousands and entered my chest and struck right into my heart. It’s a mystery how someone’s heart and spirit shines through. He could probably have talked about his cat and I would still have communicated his heart.

At our church we meet regularly in small groups where we discuss different aspects of our faith and it’s impact on our lives. Sometimes one of the quieter members of the group will spark into life and go for it. There heart for the particular topic will spill over the top of their shyness and they will reveal a fascinating insight into their relationship with Jesus. A relationship which is personal to them. The thing that is a mystery to me is the thing that lights the fuse. It is often something that you wouldn’t associate with the individual at all. That regular interaction with that small group of individuals enlightens my own existence and experience in a way that only the interaction of people with people can do.

Strange Search

Fish

The Internet is a strange place. Yesterday I got a few hits on my site from people searching MSN for the words “happy” and “bunny”. Having looked on MSN today I seem to be 13 in the list for this particular search. It’s a phrase I think I have only used the once, but there were eight different people in about two hours who came through. These people were all over the place – one was even in Tunisia.

Did I miss out on some major world event yesterday which involved lots of jolly white tailed rodents, or is it just one of those things. It shows how far we have to go with search technology, because I suspect that the context in which I was using the phrase “happy bunny” was completely different to the context in which they were using it.

(Now, of course, I have just made the problem worse by using the phrase a number of times in this post )

Count Your Blessings #20 – Having Enough

Castle Howard

This blog is written primarily to myself – listen to yourself Graham.

I have enough material wealth – there is absolutely no question about that. I have more than enough personal wealth actually, yet my action and many of my thoughts struggle with that concept. I am, therefore, writing this blog to remind myself of that fact.

There is never any question as to whether or not the Chastney family can afford to eat each day; there is often a question as to whether we will eat too much.

There is never any question as to whether or not we will have somewhere warm and cozy to sleep at night. We have a beautiful house, which is dry and warm with beds that wrap us up and make us feel safe. Sometimes we choose to sleep in a tent; but that’s our choice.

There isn’t even a question, normally, whether we can afford to do something that we really want to do. We can normally afford it and normally we do it.

We can afford to go to the cinema, the theatre, on holiday, visit friends, go out for meals. We can afford to run two cars. We can afford electricity. We can afford fresh water. We can afford insurance for all of the things which we have. We can even afford to insure ourselves. I’m not worrying too much about my financial future in old age, because my pension provision is very good thank you. In short – I have enough, we have enough, we have more than enough.

Unfortunately “I have enough” is a logical statement that I can make but it’s not one that gets through to my inner thoughts or inner spirit. I have spent most of my life struggling to get to my current financial position, and now I have got here I am struggling to turn off the urge to earn more in order to get more. This is of course a curse. It’s a double edged curse. On one side of the curse there is the urge to get more money. In order to fulfill this urge I need to work ever longer and harder, a strive to get into good positions at work. On the other side is the urge to get more things which don’t satisfy, actually the more you have the less they satisfy. It’s a deep seated curse which only the few manage to escape from. I’m not sure I could ever fully escape but I am determined to get it into a much clearer perspective.

How am I planning to deal with the curse? Well there are already a couple of things that I am doing. One, of course, is to make it public that I have enough, and that’s the purpose of this particular muse. The other is to get intentional about giving more money away. Giving money away is a great way of realising that other people can get so much more value out of it than I can.

We have sponsored a child in Africa for a long time; a boy who is sponsored in Jonathan’s name. We have recently started sponsoring a girl too; who is sponsored in Emily’s name. For a terrifyingly small amount of money those two children get so much more value than we would. The way that Emily has connected with this concept has been amazing. Even though all we have is a picture of this girl, Emily has identified with her and her situation in a remarkable way. We also give away to other things – but that’s between us and God. My intention is to keep down that track, giving it away has to be a good way of keeping the curse under control.

I’m trying to decide what else I should do, there are a couple of ideas but they haven’t quite crystallised yet.

It is a real blessing to have enough. It’s a curse not to realise it.

The real question at the back of all of this is the question of priorities. Is it important that I have more things? Is it important that I have more money? Jesus had some things to say about this:

“Don’t hoard treasure down here where it gets eaten by moths and corroded by rust or–worse!-stolen by burglars. Stockpile treasure in heaven, where it’s safe from moth and rust and burglars. It’s obvious, isn’t it? The place where your treasure is, is the place you will most want to be, and end up being.”


Matthew 6

Solution Architecture – Being One Step Away

Volume

One of the things I find challenging as a Solution Architect who delivers solutions to tens of thousands of users is that you know that they don’t understand what it is that you are trying to achieve, the constraints that you were working under, or the things that you had to go through to get there.

Today I was sat in a plane travelling to one of my customers sites and behind me were two individuals who had been given a new laptop as part of one of my projects. They were talking about their experience which on the whole was OK; but then the issue started coming out. There primary issue was with an application that they both used and had errors. In client refresh projects it’s always the applications which are the major problem. It doesn’t matter how much testing you do there is absolutely no way of testing all of the functions and combinations, so you always have problems. But then came the comment which demonstrated the lack of understanding which is my problem – “You would have thought that a professional organisation like that could deliver applications that worked”.

I wanted to jump up out of my chair and go and sit between them and explain the multi-tiered testing process that their application would have been through. I wanted to explain how their own organisation would have defined an application owner who should have thoroughly tested the functions of the application that they use. I wanted to explain that the main reason for application problems were security settings that were necessary to project their environment and to maintain their accreditation regime.

Being a reserved and polite British person I sat where I was and said nothing. Perhaps I should have given these two gentlemen some of my time and then they could have become advocates for the project in the rest of the business. But I didn’t. Instead I sat there and pondered the whole issue of complicated projects and our inability to communicate to people in a way that they understand that IT never delivers a perfect solution and that we would do our best to assist them. I also considered the ever increasing complexity in the infrastructure caused by more and more applications being deployed. I even considered how much the Internet revolution had so far failed to reduce that complexity for even the simplest task.

But then the plane landed and I decided that I would write something down and conclude with these words “you can please some of the people some of the time; you can never please all of the people all of the time”. My personal challenge is to get to the point where I am comfortable that I did all that I could to deliver the best that I could. It’s also about time people started to understand that they are really pioneers in the IT industry and pioneers need a sense of adventure – which allows for failure.

Extreme Data

Sound

This is just a link, because I think it’s worth one.

Extreme Data: Rethinking the “I” in IT

I’ve read the report and it’s really good at tracking the change in the IT industry that is occurring because data is now available everywhere and for everything.

Exchange Disk Performance Part 2 – and Correction

Outlook

The other day I posted an article on Exchange disk performance and something that was puzzling me. Stu assisted me in finding the correct answer (because the last one was a little flawed).

The flaw was in some information that I didn’t communicate, which lead me to a wrong conclusion. I concluded that the number of disks required was double what the calculation for RAID 0+1 had produced.

I think what I had done was to assume, in my head, that in a mirrored pair that it was only the ‘front’ disk in the mirror that responded to reads, which is of course ridiculous (for most modern hardware). On top of this I didn’t communicate where I got the RAID overhead ratios from.

Clarifying the RAID overhead ratios. For Exchange database storage the ratio of reads to write is something like 3 to 1 according the Optimising Storage for Exchange 2003.

In a RAID 0+1 infrastructure a write requires 2 IO’s. So for 4 IO operations you actually do 5 disk IO’s (3 reads and 2 writes) giving you the RAID impact of .8 (you get 80% of the performance from the volume of disks that you have).

In a RAID 5 configuration a write require 4 IO’s. So for 4 IO operations you actually undertake 7 disk IO’s (3 reads and 4 writes) giving you a RAID impact of .57 (you get 57% of the performance from the volume of disks that you have).

So my calculations were actually correct, but I made the wrong conclusion because of a false assumption – not for the first time, unfortunately not for the last either.

So in order to support 1000 concurrent users you need:

  • RAID 1 = 7 disks (well 8 actually because you can’t have an odd number)

  • RAID 0+1 = 7 disks NOT 14 as a first concluded (well 8 actually because you can’t have an odd number)

  • RAID 5 = 9 disks

“One pound of learning requires ten pounds of common sense to apply it”. Persian Proverb

No Sex Please, We’re Teenagers

Starting on 6th September at 21:00 BBC 2 is running a three part series challenging a group of 12 teenagers to stay celibate for five months.

In No Sex Please, We’re Teenagers, two Christian youth workers tried to get participants to swap “casual sex for old-fashioned courting rituals”.

They said the young people would be happier if they were in long-term, serious relationships.

“This is not a reality show in the Big Brother sense,” a BBC spokeswoman said. “It is a three-part observational documentary series.”

The teenagers, aged between 15 and 17 and from Harrow, north-west London, attended weekly “Romance Academy” sessions with the youth workers.