Category: Solution Architecture

PowerPoint: Video White Screen of complete nothingness

A Trip to Hadrian's WallI came across a “feature” of PowerPoint today.

I added a video to a presentation and played it – but all I got was a lovely white screen of nothingness.

So I started Windows Media Player – and it the video was full of lots of lovely sound and motion.

Perhaps it’s a problem with this particular MPEG file, I thought. So converted it the file to WMV. After several minutes of waiting for the transcoding to take place I was amazed to get the same white screen of nothingness.

I tried it one a newer version of PowerPoint (2007), but still the same white screen of nothingness.

After a little searching around the internet using the google I came across the answer. I must admit to being somewhat stunned that I could get caught out by a problem that I thought had been mostly eradicated.

And the answer: the path to the file is too long

Yes, really.

It’s apparently been around forever, perhaps I’m the last to find out?

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Telepresence voice

Grandma in GrizedaleI’ve just witnessed a bunch of people using a high definition video conferencing system for the first time. It was only a single screen system, so not the fully fledged thing, but I noticed an interesting phenomena – telepresence voice.

We all recognise people’s telephone voice, so I was interested to see this move over to a telepresence system too.

One of the reasons that we have a telephone voice is that most phone calls are working at a reduced frequency range so we have to speak a bit clearer. When phone systems were first available people tended to speak loudly because they knew that someone was a long way away – and so you speak up.

The microphones on telepresence system are also high definition and will pick up a full spectrum of sound and yet the people in this call all spoke loudly and deliberately clearly.

The other thing they did was to treat it like a synchronous communication device where only one person can speak at a time. It was almost like they were talking to someone on a satellite phone waiting for the person on the other end to respond before continuing. It was definitely not a fully fledged conversation.

I wonder if it will change over time as they become more comfortable, or perhaps some of them will permanently have a Hyacinth voice.

That's obvious – isn't it?

One of the lessons that I am learning in my meaningful conversations is that the obvious isn’t perhaps so obvious.

Today I noticed these instructions on my deodorant. They’re obvious – aren’t they?

We all have a wealth of experience that defines how we see things, influences how we interact with things, defines our perspective and gives us the framework for what we regard as obvious.

I’ve been using spray cans most of my life, so of course it’s obvious what to do.

I’ve been driving in the UK for nearly 20 years, so of course it’s obvious that I drive on the left.

I’ve been to airports hundreds of times, so of course it’s obvious what I can, and can’t put into my hand luggage.

The amazing thing is, there are hundreds of things that are obvious to me, that are not obvious to anyone other than me.

Having discussions with people changes my framework of obviousness. It sometimes extends the things I regard as obvious and sometimes it makes me realise that I’m one of the few people that think something is obvious.

It’s only common sense after all .

Citrix Community Verified: Engaging the Community

A Trip to Hadrian's WallThe IT landscape is composed of millions of moving components that we plumb together to create thousands of applications. We then take the thousands of applications and plumb them together to make systems.

But how do you know what works with what, how do you find out what the problems are. You’d think that this was a simple question, but it’s not. There are many reasons that it’s not simple, one of the main ones is the relationship between organisations. It’s very difficult for one organisation to validate the work of another organisation without a lot of work. Lots of the larger vendors run verification programmes but they can be expensive especially for the smaller application vendors.

Citrix has recently taken a different approach – community verification.

The IT community is integrating applications and components all of the time and Citrix is hoping to tap into all of this knowledge, but also to make it available to everyone else.

“The Community Verified site is a platform in which third party products are added and verified by community members. Community members are helping each other by posting and voting on third party products known to work in their environment.  These products do not get any Citrix Ready program benefits.”

There’s no warranty involved here just the knowledge that someone else has gone ahead of you and managed to succeed, a very valuable asset. The voting system also enables you to put some weighting behind your confidence.

In my experience it’s not integration of applications from the large well known vendors that cause the problems, it’s integration of products from smaller companies. These companies have less extensive experience and who would be struggling to undertake a formal verification activity anyway. A community based approach gives a very valuable middle ground.

My Tools: Keyboard Shortcuts Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallI feel a little embarrassed writing this post because I feel sure that everyone who reads this blog must know about these shortcuts – but I’m also constantly surprised by what people don’t know.

So for those of you who didn’t know:

  • Ctrl+X is Cut
  • Ctrl+C is Copy
  • Ctrl+V is Paste

The first thing that I want you to notice is that these three keys are right ext to each other on the keyboard right there almost next to your Ctrl key – XCV.

The second thing I want you to know is that these are universal shortcuts, they work everywhere.

If you are a complete mouse junky then you are probably not working in the most efficient way that you could be. There are some things that are just quicker with a keyboard and cut, copy, paste operations are definitely more efficient with a keyboard.

Select with the mouse of you have to, but even that can be better done with a keyboard.

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Meaningful Conversations Day 2: Breakfast with a friend

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallOn day 2 of my quest to have a meaningful conversation every day, today I had breakfast with a friend.

The conversations were all personal so I’m not going to detail them here.

It feels like a different conversation to business ones but they still require the same set of communication skills. So I’m not sure that I want to consider them as different conversations, just different subjects. I need to think about how Powell’s five levels of communication apply.

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Meaningful Conversations Day 1: Web 2.0, blogs, wikis, etc..

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallLast night I decided that I needed to have more meaningful conversations to hone my communications skills.

I have, at least, managed it for one day.

Today’s conversation was on Web 2.0, blogs, wikis, etc. with a colleague who has been asked to write some short opinion type papers for a customer on the subjects and is only just learning themselves.

It was a good conversation because it turned out to be a real communication challenge. How do you communicate this stuff in a couple of pages and give some value. it’s easy to write a lot and still not give any value. How do you even talk about it without using buzz-words and meaningless acronyms?

It made me realise that I need to invest more time in making this stuff simpler so that any communication can be of real value. The conversation felt a bit like I was putting someone under a waterfall and asking them to drink it all in which is never very effective.

One day own, discovered some challenges, now I need to turn them into lessons.

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Word of the day: Maven

Grandma in GrizedaleI like knew words and occasionally write something about them. This one is a new one to me, and quite new in word lifespan terms too.

The definitions seem to wander about a bit as is often the case with relatively knew terms.

Here’s one definition:

Maven

n.   A person who has special knowledge or experience; an expert.
[Yiddish meyvn, from Hebrew m?bîn, active participle of h?bîn, to understand, derived stem of bîn, to discern; see byn in Semitic roots.]

Although I think prefer this one:

A maven (also mavin) is a trusted expert in a particular field, who seeks to pass knowledge on to others.

It’s the “who seeks to pass knowledge on to others” that I like, especially as it’s a tipping-point idea. A maven/mavin isn’t just an expert, they are one who seeks to connect and to pass on.

I’m sure that many of us can think of many people are like that, I’m sure that we can think of just as many experts who are the opposite. I suppose I’m more likely to be maven than not. I’d rather people made use of the knowledge that I had, it’s normally not that much use to me otherwise.

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Is Flickr losing its Creative Commons roots?

Grandma in GrizedaleI’m a big flickr user, I post all sorts of stuff and I post it all as Creative Commons licensed. I’m even generous and license at quite a low level of Creative Commons control – Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic. in simple terms, what this means is that someone can use my pictures as long as they use them for non-commercial work and they give me credit. I’ve even had people asking to use pictures for commercial work, which I have given without fee.

There was a time when I could search through flickr and be reasonably sure that what I was looking at was also licensed as Creative Commons. It was the place that I would go to to get hold of good quality photos for a project I might be working on, as long as I respected the Creative Commons license I could be confident in using the pictures.

I have no statistics to support this, but my perception is that more and more of the content on flickr is now locked down to “all rights reserved”. Flickr does a really good job of protecting these pictures – you can’t download them and you only see one size.

I fully understand a couple of reasons for locking down content in this way:

  • You wouldn’t want anyone messing about with your personal pictures.
  • You might not want anyone using all of your pictures when it’s your business.

But there are many, many pictures that are locked down which aren’t either of these, they are pictures of scenes, or of items and events which are not of any value to them, nor that much value to anyone else.

What value does locking them down have? It just takes value away. if it’s locked down you can only see a small representation of it; no-one gets to enjoy the real full fidelity picture, no-one gets to download it and use it as a background or in a screen-saver, no-one gets to use the picture in a project to create something new and exciting.

Perhaps I’m just being some kind of liberal creative commons open source hippie but it feels like flickr is loosing its roots, loosing its sole? (did I really just say that, oh dear)

I feel like turning my stuff to “all rights reserved” – why should I share my stuff if no-one else is willing to share their stuff? “I’m not sharing my ball if you won’t share yours”. Perhaps that would be a good feature – my stuff is licensed as Creative Commons to everyone who’s pictures are also Creative Commons, if your stuff is “all rights reserved” then, to you, so is mine.

Why do people have to be so protective of stuff? Do they really think it has a value that people are willing to pay? Do they not realise that sharing is good for them.

Gosh I’m grumpy for a Friday.

Thankfully flickr advanced search enables you to search by license type, but I’m not sure why I should need to.

(Jimmy and Grandad are Creative Commons too)

I need a new bag

Jimmy and Grandma have a day outI need a new bag, the one I’ve got at the moment is falling apart. I made a massive mistake and went for a cheap option. This one is the third bag, the first two went back with broken zips in the first few days of owning them, this one has lasted a little longer but not much.

Now I’m a bit weary of investing my money in another dud, so I thought I would ask that great big world out there.

What am I looking for?

  • It needs to look good in the office.
  • Nothing too dull, but nothing too bright.
  • It needs to take a 15” laptop.
  • I move around quite a lot so need to be able to slot the laptop in and out quite quickly.
  • I always surprise myself with how much paper I carry around but I’m not looking for a mobile office.
  • I carry stuff too – iPod, pens, power packs, cables, USB sticks, etc.
  • I occasionally walk quite a way with the bag so it needs to be comfortable.
  • The bag itself shouldn’t be too heavy – if I’m going to carry weight I want it to be in the stuff that I need not in the bag (I picked up a Swiss-army bag at the weekend and it was so heavy I put it straight back down again).
  • It needs to be robust – I don’t want to buy another one in another few months.
  • It needs to be waterproof – I live in England.
  • I don’t really want lots of pockets – I’m not organised enough to put things in the same place every time so lots of pockets just become annoying.
  • I quite like to be unusual so would look favourably on something a bit quirky.
  • I’m not Roman Abromovich so it needs to be a sensible price.

I tend to prefer messenger style bags, although I would prefer a vertical style one over a horizontal style one. I’ve never seen a really stylish backpack bag, but could be persuaded.

A couple of sample things that look good to me.

Anyone tried any of these bags?
Does anyone out there have any other recommendations for me?

Help me, please, I’m in danger of becoming a bag fetishist..

My Tools: Word – CTRL+Shift+N

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallCTRL+Shift+N does something incredibly simple – it sets the style of the selected text to “Normal”. As simple as that.

It’s a key combination that I like to use every day, but seems to be one that other people don’t use much at all. How do I know other people don’t use it – templates.

Nearly every template I see has the “Normal” style configured as something different to the main style of the document. One of the first things I do is to make them the same.

I suspect that this suggests another thing – people don’t use keyboard shortcuts, which certainly means that they are working very inefficiently.

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Why Poor Performance is such a Productivity Killer

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallI am struggling with a system today that is going slow. It’s nothing unusual this particular system is always slow, or at least I perceive it to be slow. In other words, it works slower that I would like it to – but worse than that, it works slower than my attention can sustain.

I’m now multi-tasking – I’m writing this in the seconds in-between this particular system responding. I’ve lost attention on my primary task, which is to interact with the slow system and I’ve moved onto a secondary task; writing this blog.

Everyone should know that multi-tasking is not the most efficient way of doing anything, but I’ve fallen into the trap and my attention has now completely gone. It happens like this:

  • Interact with system – click.
  • Wait a few seconds.
  • Interact with system again – click.
  • Wait a few seconds – get bored, check Twitter.
  • System is now waiting for me to finish on Twitter.
  • Interact with system again – click.
  • Wait for no seconds – already expect a delay, check FeedDemon for updates, see an interesting one, read it.
  • System is now waiting for me to finish on FeedDemon.
  • I notice system has come back – take a few seconds to remember what the next step was.
  • Interact with system again – click.
  • Wait for no seconds again, start to write post, also try to keep an eye on the system coming back but I’m not very good at it. Now only writing blog post because I can do that without any waits or interruptions. Not doing blog writing particularly well either.
  • Look back at the system after several minutes, notice that it has come back. It’s probably been waiting for minutes but my attention is completely gone.
  • Realise that I’m not doing what I should be doing so agree with myself that I am going to go and finish the primary thing that I should be doing. Struggle to focus on it because my mind has got into a groove on the blog post.
  • Give up and go back to the post. Think that if I get it finished I will be able to refocus on the job at hand.

This type of attention conflict is completely destructive to my productivity. I don’t get any of the tasks done and feel guilty for loosing focus on the things I should be doing. In many ways it would be better that the system was unavailable than running slow. I’d rather focus on one thing and be completing that than trying to do multiple things poorly but it’s just not engaging enough to keep my attention.

Working, as I do, in IT service design and management most customers primarily contract in terms of availability. The system must be available all of the time. If the impact of performance can be even more damaging than lack of availability – perhaps we are measuring the wrong thing?

Perhaps I just have a very short attention?