Mark's Musings

...fatal error: parser/kwlist.h: No such file or directory compilation terminated on Ubuntu

2012-02-11T06:57:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I was compiling and installing the latest source code for pgAdmin3, a popular Open Source administration and development platform for the PostgreSQL database, on my netbook with the Ubuntu 11.10 operating system and ran across the following error:

...fatal error: parser/kwlist.h: No such file or directory compilation terminated.

Earlier this month I had built and installed pgAdmin3 on two other systems and ran into the same problem. Because I had hunted this header file down and stored it on my Dropbox account, I had it handy and dropped it into the source code and went on my merry way with the build.

Therefore, for those who run across this issue I have linked the file here.

Simply drop the file into the /theSourceCodeDir/pgadmin/include/parser directory and reissue the make command.

Enjoy :-)

Build an adaptive culture that will invest in process only when it is needed

2012-02-10T17:10:00.001-05:00

I just watched a great video with Eric Ries, entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School and author of the book The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses.

Within the video he examines the technique of the "5 whys." In short, those involved in a lean startup will for each problem they must tackle (1) ask "why" at least 5 times digging further into a problem with each "why" questions. (2) Next they are to find the human problem behind every seemingly technical issue. And finally, (3) make a proportional investment in each of the 5 "why answer" layers. This will build an adaptive culture that will invest in process only when it is needed and not expend valuable resources.

For example, let us suppose you are part of startup X and one of the startup's main partners asked a software developer, "Why didn't we get that last feature into the release to show to the investors?" That was why number 1. The software developer answers, "Because I did not have enough time." The partner then asked, "Why didn't you have enough time?" Again, why number 2. "Because I can only add features to the application on week-day nights." "Why only on weekday nights?" Why number 3. I think you are getting this by now. "Because I have a full-time developer job that I work during the week and I want to spend time with my family on the weekend." "Why did we not consider your time limitation when prioritizing features and do the more important features first?" "Not sure, I was told to add the features in this order." "Why who was it that told you those features?" "The project manager."

We see the human factor here is both the developer resource limitation as well as with the program manager on how the priorities of the software program's features were determined.

Proportional investments into the first three layers could be addressed by adding development resources. The last two layers could be remedied by the full team collaborating on what the startup's software should feature. Simple and elegant.

Weblining - what you'll miss

2012-02-09T06:07:00.003-05:00

In the previous post I discussed how the use of the results of the analysis of individuals' aggregated data and what Lori Andrews termed "weblining."

Andrews sees the limitation of chance encounters as well when considering the results of a demographic segment's data analysis in targeted advertisement. "When young people in poor neighborhoods are bombarded with advertisements for trade schools, will they be more likely than others their age to forgo college? And when women are shown articles about celebrities rather than stock market trends, will they be less likely to develop financial savvy?"

In other words, media content tailored to the individual's preferences may lead to a lack of exposure to new products as well as ideas and view points. This area of negative impact from this use of data aggregation analysis is what I and others before me call the loss of serendipity. Dictionary.com defines serendipity as "an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident."

Lenny Rachitsky, in his TED Talk entitled Losing Serendipity shares that we may be denying ourselves our next favorite thing by limiting our exposure by what we like on Facebook or the narrow news feeds we select and hear.

Could it be that with targeted advertising and by following only those viewpoints and ideas with which we already agree and are comfortable with that we are losing out on what we may discover and/or may be beneficial for us? Could it be possible that a new type of food we will love could be missed if we always went to the same restaurant? What about that next song you will not hear because your current music tastes reflected in your Facebook posts limits what music advertisements Facebook provides to you?

Does this mean that we should not utilize data to target advertising? Of course not. Data analysis and the discoveries it provides offers too much potential to ignore. The question in my view is, how can we use technology to increase an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident?

Weblining--what you 'search' can be used against you?

2012-02-08T08:11:00.003-05:00

Anyone who has watched a law enforcement television show has heard the apprehending official state the Miranda warning to the person being arrested. "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say or do can and will be held against you in a court of law...."

According to Wikipedia, "the 'Miranda rights' was enshrined in U.S. law following the 1966 Miranda v. Arizona Supreme Court decision, which found that the Fifth Amendment and Sixth Amendment rights of Ernesto Arturo Miranda had been violated during his arrest and trial for domestic violence." Within this decision the court did not provide the exact wording of the warning but did set guidelines that law enforcement must follow:
"...The person in custody must, prior to interrogation, be clearly informed that he or she has the right to remain silent, and that anything the person says will be used against that person in court...."

In her recent New York Times article Lori Andrews provides a similar warning. She defines "weblining" as using the results from analyzing aggregate data to discriminate against individuals or groups of people. The term is based on the use of "redlining." Andrews explains:
"In the 1970s, a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University named John McKnight popularized the term “redlining” to describe the failure of banks, insurers and other institutions to offer their services to inner city neighborhoods. The term came from the practice of bank officials who drew a red line on a map to indicate where they wouldn’t invest. But use of the term expanded to cover a wide array of racially discriminatory practices, such as not offering home loans to African-Americans, even those who were wealthy or middle class."

For example, "Your application for credit could be declined not on the basis of your own finances or credit history, but on the basis of aggregate data — what other people whose likes and dislikes are similar to yours have done." "What?!?" you might ask, how can that be? Andrews goes not to explain that "If guitar players or divorcing couples are more likely to renege on their credit-card bills, then the fact that you’ve looked at guitar ads or sent an e-mail to a divorce lawyer might cause a data aggregator to classify you as less credit-worthy. When an Atlanta man returned from his honeymoon, he found that his credit limit had been lowered to $3,800 from $10,800. The switch was not based on anything he had done but on aggregate data. A letter from the company told him, 'Other customers who have used their card at establishments where you recently shopped have a poor repayment history with American Express.'"

Wow! While I do think that the analysis of data can and does provide the consumer with more useful, directed advertisements, this is not a proper use of individuals' aggregated data. So, here is your warning, what you search can and may be used against you. Now you know.

When creating Postgresql users....

2012-02-07T22:45:00.003-05:00

Being new to the Postgresql database server this is a note to self, in the future when creating postgresql users, remember the options precede the user name. For example, to create a user with an encrypted password issue the following from the command prompt:
$ sudo su postgres

$ createuser -e -P theUserNameHere

The first line logs you in as the postgres superuser. The next line is where the user is created. The -e option is so the password is encrypted and the -P option is so the password is requested before the user creation is complete. There, now I have it for future reference.

...more tangible, more linear and more contextual

2012-02-02T07:52:00.001-05:00

In her NY Times piece, The Dilemma of Being a Cyborg , Carina Chocano defines a dilemma of depending on memory extension devices such as smart phones: "It’s that we’re collectively engaged in a mass conversion of what we used to call, variously, records, accounts, entries, archives, registers, collections, keepsakes, catalogs, testimonies and memories into, simply, data. 'Data' has become the default word used to describe the constantly generated, centrally stored evidence of our existence. I wasn’t surprised to learn that the word “data” comes from the Latin for 'to give,' and refers to something that is given or relinquished. It also feels significant that data rests at the very bottom of the so-called knowledge hierarchy — below information, knowledge and wisdom."

Her tone is one of regret. She expertly details that as we move our digitally captured memories and experiences to silicon extensions of ourselves, we lose what biological memory is good at providing--an emotional context that was a tangible part of our space/time existence. "Data is weightless and characterless and takes up very little space. The more of it we save, the more we lose the ability to differentiate it, to assign significance and meaning."

At the end of the article she discusses the small revival of the use of physical media such as vinyl records or cassette tapes. "It strikes me that the current fetishization of analog technology has less to do with nostalgia than it does with an urge to slow down the transfer of data from the internal to the external, from the individual to the collective, and to make it all less instant, less ephemeral, less interchangeable, and more tangible, more linear and more contextual."

Given that we are all cyborgs now, what can we do to recover the richness of ourselves that is more tangible, more linear and more contextual? It is not as if we will abandon those devices any time soon. Could it be that we can find a way to use them in a more tangible, linear, and contextual fashion? Is this where the Facebook timeline can help a person as they look at their own and other friend's profiles? Perhaps looking at the timeline with a significant other as they remissness over those actual events?

While I agree with Chocano that reducing our contextually created memories to bits and bytes is not the same as "remembering," can we use binary data to create meaningful memories? I hope so.

Highly Specific Rituals

2012-02-01T08:06:00.001-05:00

I was perusing the Harvard Business Review blog site and came across the Why Don't We Act in Our Own Best Interest? post by Tony Schwartz. This should sound familiar to us in that we often hear the phrase that we are our own worst enemies.

Schwartz's answer to the question that he poses is "The most basic answer is that we don't make a connection between our current behavior and its future consequences."

Schwartz's remedy? "It's to rely more on our pre-frontal cortex, which allows humans alone to imagine the future consequences of our actions. Too often, instead, we use our pre-frontal cortex after the fact, to rationalize and minimize our short-term and ultimately self-defeating behaviors." While I agree, the problem here is literally easier said than done. So, what things can we do that reminds us to use our pre-frontal cortex and not the amygdala?

"Our own work at The Energy Project focuses on helping individuals and organizations institute highly specific rituals — behaviors and practices that eventually become automatic and serve sustainable well-being and effectiveness. We can learn to be far more conscious and intentional in our behavior, and less self-centered and short-term in our perspective. Doing so requires deliberate practice."

Again, I agree whole heartily. But isn't the trick here to not give in to the lizard brain and procrastinate on those "highly specific rituals?"

The Wake of the Intangible

2012-01-31T09:28:00.001-05:00

Last year I completed the book How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business by Douglas Hubbard and the concepts garnered from the book are still incubating. As the subtitle indicates, the challenge businesses face is in using the "intangibles" within measurement and decision making.

Dictionary.com defines intangible as something that is "Unable to be touched or grasped; not having physical presence." Okay, how if it does not have any physical presence, how can we measure its attributes and then gain any value from them?

In short Hubbard proposes that even intangibles provide observable effects. In my view it is as if an unseen boat just passed you quietly on the water. Because of the fog you did not see the boat and due to its distance you could not hear it, but you could still feel the waves in its wake. The question then becomes, how can I use the waves to inform me about what just passed me through the water? While not the same as having the ability to visually track the passing boat and calculate the time and distance and its dimensions, the waves do nonetheless provide some data that one could use. The challenge is, how can we get value from the waves?

Within the book Hubbard details his Applied Information Economics (AIE) to assist in this challenge. See the diagram below:

See the Everything Is Measurable table below for more.

Product of Negative Integers...Easy as -1, -2, -3

2012-01-20T12:04:00.001-05:00

I have been reading One, Two, Three: Absolutely Elementary Mathematics by David Berlinski. While the topic is basic mathematics, the book's content is not elementary my dear Watson.
In a side discussion of negative numbers he presents a proof of a rule that has baffled students since the discussion of positive and negative integers began--namely if when you multiply two positive numbers the product is positive and when you multiply a positive number to a negative number you get a negative outcome, how is it that when two negative numbers are multiplied together the result is a positive number? Berlinski eloquently details the proof on over two pages with this conclusion:

[xy + x(–y)] + (–x)(–y) = xy.

[xy + x(–y)] + (–x)(–y) = –x–y.
Therefore, xy = –x–y.

Berlinski, David (2011-05-10). One, Two, Three: Absolutely Elementary Mathematics (p. 153-154). Pantheon. Kindle Edition.

I thought it would be good to do this in Ruby for fun. And sure enough, the proof stands true.

Vagueness: the path to the adjacent possible?

2012-01-11T17:15:00.001-05:00

In his Wired article entitled In Praise of Vagueness, Jonah Lehrer writes, "According to an experiment led by Catherine Clement at Eastern Kentucky University, one way to consistently increase our problem-solving ability is to rely on vague verbs when describing the problem. That’s because domain-specific verbs–actions which we only perform in particular contexts – inhibit analogical reasoning, making us less likely to discover useful comparisons. However, when the same problem is recast with more generic verbs – when we describe someone as 'moving' instead of 'sprinting,' for instance – people are suddenly more likely to uncover unexpected parallels. In some instances, Clement found that the simple act of rewriting the problem led to impressive improvements in the performance of her subjects."

Apparently, vagueness allows one to move to the adjacent possible more easily. Therefore, when stuck back away from specificity and get general.

Why we study history

2012-01-09T21:47:00.002-05:00

On my run today, 1-9-12, I was listening to the This Developer's Life podcast that spoke of the value of looking at older programming languages and technologies and what can be gained from looking back at the refined algorithms of older programming languages and the efficiencies of other older technologies. One thing that stood out to me within the discussion is the long life of the Fortran language. Fortran developer David Sokol stated that Fortran is largely supported by academic institutions and research. While software companies come and go, one thing that stays is the need to teach, study, and learn. This reminds me of the concept of "the root produces the fruit." In other words, information does not emerge from nothing. With continued use, refactorings, and adaption older languages can provide the context for gaining old ideas for new platforms and technologies.

"Compliant sergeants rarely become great generals."

2011-09-13T18:08:00.001-04:00

In Seth Godin's recent blog post Confusing obedience with self-control he spoke of the value of obedience. He also stated that, “obedience transforms into self-control. That at some point, people start obeying themselves and become leaders.”

In other words, to be a leader, you must think for yourself and be obedient to what you know is correct. Your creativity and ideas should be your guide as you understand and comply with others such as your employer and civil authorities for the common good.

In short, we must not confuse self-control with mindless adherence.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

It is OK to not know it all.

2011-08-02T20:40:00.002-04:00

Recently, when I upgraded from my first generation Motorola Droid to the new Droid 3, I called by the local Verizon store and asked if the chargers, cradle, and car mount that I have with my current Droid would work with the Droid 3. I was told that all the hardware that I have with my droid would work with the droid 3. Well...not so. Both the cradle and the car mount will not work. As the buyer we always need to do our homework and understand the stipulations, etc. with the purchase. However, if as the vendor or service provider, you do not know for certain an answer to a question, please do not respond as though you do.

I understand that the phone store personnel are good people. Nor do I think anyone is trying to deceive or bait and switch. With that said I do think that being clear and complete with the customer goes a long way. In other words, if you do not know then state that as far as you understand this or that is true but you really need to meet face-to-face to discuss all the details or research the question further and then you can make a determination. It is OK to not know it all.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Random Rebooting of the Droid 3-Synced WIFI Settings?

2011-08-01T17:48:00.001-04:00

Since I updated to the new Droid 3, I am finding that the phone randomly reboots every now and then. While I love the response time of the phone and the crisp view screen, the phone deciding to restart on its own is not OK. After a quick search I found a series of messages that show the issue may be tied to how WIFI networks are restored from Google during the syncing of your previous WIFI settings.

Here is a blurb from Google:
Further testing & confirmation from other testers on forums correlates this crash strongly to the restoration of wifi settings during provision of the phone & sync to google. Users who have factory-reset the phone and disabled google syncing have solved the problem, and users who have deleted all restored wifi networks have seen similar benefits. The twitter account in the 'my accounts' manager was indeed a red herring and does not seem to be related to the bug, as removing it has not re-introduced the problem. Workaround: Delete ALL wifi networks after provisioning phone, and recreate them using the Droid3 UI.

This was found at: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=18460. I really do not want to go back to factory settings so I am hoping a simple removal of the WIFI network settings and manually rebooting the phone will cure the random reboots. Thus far, since doing the above steps no more reboots.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Review of Programming HTML5 Applications: Building Powerful Cross-Platform Environments in JavaScript by Zachary Kessin

2011-07-31T21:15:00.006-04:00

With the emergence of the popularity of HTML5 many books are quickly hitting the shelves. Here is an offering that provides both a high-level overview along with example code.

The first chapter, The Web as a Platform for Applications provides an historical backdrop for the HTML5 standard by reviewing the founding of the web, JavaScript’s history, the emergence of DHTML and AJAX, and laying of the ground work for the present environment.

The second chapter, The Power of JavaScript, reviews some nice aspects of the language such as functional programming, closure, being able to expand objects, and functions with prototypes.

Chapter three, as the chapter title implies covers the JQuery, “a JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development.”

The next chapter details ExtJS. While ExtJS is another JavaScript library, this library provides more than a DOM manipulation and event handling. ExtJS has several objects that provide the developer with several tools to create rich internet applications. The chapter contains good content but still needs another “proof-reading pass” as there are several typos and even a “TODO” or two.Chapter 5 details using QUnit and Selenium to test JavaScript. This chapter provides good code examples using these two test frame works. Chapter 6 shows the developer how to use the browser’s localStorage and sessionStorage objects as well as consider browser-based databases.

The next chapter, Take it Offline, deals with using HTML5’s new manifest file from which a user can load multiple files. Chapter 8, Splitting Up Work Through Web Workers, takes the reader through use of web workers to do, as the chapter title suggests, a division of tasks.

The reader is then brought to the topic of Web Sockets where bidirectional data can be established over TCP. Finally the chapter Internet, 2017 takes the user through the consideration of new and future technologies, of which HTML5 is a part.

In summary, while this book does provide a good overview of the above topics, it may not provide the detail that some developers desire. Also, at least in its early release stage, as of July 2011, the text shows many signs of a draft in progress with missing punctuation and various TODO’s sprinkled in some of the chapters. However, it does provide a quick and basic overview of the concepts and parts of HTML5 and JavaScript that are necessary to move forward.

Review of An Introduction to Machine Learning with Web Data by Hilary Mason

2011-06-16T18:45:00.002-04:00

An Introduction to Machine Learning with Web Data by Hilary Mason; O'Reilly Media.

The video itself is presented in five sections: (1) Introduction, (2) Classifying Web Documents - The Theory, (3) Classifying Web Documents - The Code, (4) Clustering , Recommendations, and Probability, and (5) Conclusion. In short, the video Hilary uses web based data to show the audience how to work with data to solve problems you may have by using basic machine learning techniques. The video is particularly directed at programmers who do not have statistical training.

The viewer will sit with a group of a few other students and feel the imtimate setting of a small classroom. For myself, a video where you can re-watch segments, stop the video to reference a suggested resource, or pause to experiment with a variant of the code is both helpful and handy. For example, in the introduction, Hilary references a link (http://bit.ly/9RYQEF) that explans the concept of "data science." At that point, I paused the video and browsed to the link and found it quiet informative. By the second section, Classifying Web Documents - The Theory, the audience is gently taken into statistical techniques such as naive bayes and shown a step-by-step approach in how the math is applied. In the Classifying Web Documents - The Code, the participant utilizes python code and the New York Time API to classify words from the New York Times web site. Within the Clustering, Recommendations, and Probability video the viewer is taken through code that demonstrates how to take data with which little is known and learn from the clustering results. Finally, the conclusion section deals briefly with the concepts of probability and then reviews the entire sessions content.

While being able to navigate around in python is beneficial and by following along with the running of the code one can learn and retain more information, the participant can just view the video content as both the code and concepts are displayed and explained. What is nice is Hilary provides the code used in the video from her Git repository at https://github.com/hmason/ml_class. If the viewer wants to participate she will need to make sure that they have the proper python modules installed.

In conclusion, the software developer that has little more than the required stats college class would do well to purchase this video. Seeing the actual application of code to the basic statistical algorithms is extremely informative and applicable in various problem domains.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Playing my Daily Healthmonth Turn and to Posting to 750words via my Droid

2011-05-19T11:43:00.001-04:00

For over the past three months I have been using a few sites that help me to reach my personal goals within a "gamified" process.

The first site, healthmonth, is according to its creator Buster Benson, "an online adaptation of a game some friends used to play every year right after New Years."

The second, 750words also created by Benson, is a site that encourages the daily writing of...you guessed it, 750 words. The site provides an online, private space to compose an essay, journal, or just write what is on your mind. As you type, the site saves your work, tracks and displays your word count, and lets you know when you've passed the coveted 750 word mark. The fun aspect is in the fact that 750words keeps a score card of points for the days you enteract with the site. 750words also keeps track of the consecutive number of days (or streaks that) you submit completed posts. You can also see how others are doing point and streak-wise to fuel your competitive nature.

My wife and I were away from home for a few days and I was not certain if we would have reliable wifi access to play my daily healthmonth turns and to post to 750words to keep my 100 day plus streak alive. So, I wanted to find away to use my Droid to utilize the sites.

I was able to play my turn on the healthmonth site easily with the Droid via the native web browser. However, posting to 750words was a little more tricky. While I could type a 750 word submission with the droid keyboard, I found it more feasible to create the post on my desktop, laptop, or netbook and import them into the Droid via a text app I use, AK Notepad. Then, once in AK Notepad I could copy and paste the text into the 750words site via the web browser. Note that any text editor should work in a similar manner in your Smart Phone. Specifically, here are the steps I took:

First you have to import your 750word posting into the AK Notepad. To import text (.txt) files into the Andriod AK Notepad app you will need to do the following:

1) Have a folder that is created during an export. You will need to use this folder as AK Notepad will not see folders created manually. If it is not there, create a directory to use by selecting and holding down a note from the list of notes, then select the "Export to text file" menu option.

2) With the droid connected to a computer via a USB cable place the files that you desire to import into AK Notepad in the directory in step 1 above.
3) Disconnect the USB cable and opened the app on the phone.

4) Select "Menu" and then "Settings"
5) Under Import/Export section select "Import notes" and then browse to the folder in step 1 above. NOTE: each file in the selected folder will be imported.

6) Select and hold the folder and then from the popup menu select "Use this folder." This should import all the files in the folder.
Next, open the note that you want to post on the 750words site and select and hold down the text until the popup menu is displayed and select the "Copy all" option. Now that the text is copied to memory, open the web browser, browse to the 750words site, and paste the text into the site page. The site will auto-save the entry.

Now, if I plan to be away from reliabe internet access I can still play my daily healthmonth turn and to post to 750words to keep my streak alive.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Not Being the Expert

2011-05-18T08:11:00.001-04:00

It is interesting to note as you move throughout your day, we are fearful to appear as not being the expert. Why? Perhaps there is an expectation that you are to be the person who is considered the expert in this or that? Maybe you have a self-image that you are the go-to-person on this subject or that topic?

Regardless, why is it OK to not be the expert? Isn't there value in just being the person that is trying to learn as much as he/she can and enjoying the journey? What is more important, being seen as the person that is the expert or being known as the individual that is open to learning, realizes that there is always more to understand, and is known to be gracious to others who lack their level of knowledge? I think the latter.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Where's that taboo when I need it? To Social Media I go....

2011-02-27T07:58:00.001-05:00

Historically, communities with their various cultural taboos, acted as societal controls and helped its citizens curb harmful behaviors. Granted, while come taboos were used as instruments of oppression, others did and do help one restrain oneself unto positive outcomes.

In the New York Times article by Stephanie Rosenbloom, I Resolve. World, Don’t Fail Me Now, Rosenbloom deal with New Year's resolutions:

Certainly, you don’t need cyberspace to share your resolutions. But the potential humiliation of failure is more potent online. Social networking sites also enable you to formalize and, in many cases, regularly track your goals, which makes it harder to blow them off. Some sites reward you with a badge on your Facebook page or a congratulatory message. Nearly every site makes it easy to tell friends about your ambitions as well as to help find strangers who share your goals. The latter is useful if you don’t want to discuss your resolutions with friends and family.

A site that I started using recently, 750words, has assisted me in journaling daily. The site, create by Buster Benson offers stats and analysis of one's writing. This feature is what drew me to use the site as I am on a year long personal data collection and analysis venture to test the value of personal data analytics. In addition to the 750word site, starting in March I will be using another site created by Benson, HealthMonth.com. There, one can set up rules to help change behavior in either a public or private manner. This site, along with others on the web, act as both a daily motivator and reminder of the goals.

In summary, the visible nature of these sites assist with self-imposed, virtual taboos that help motivate me.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

The Future of Business Intelligence--Everyone a Data Analyst?

2011-01-07T23:29:00.001-05:00

I follow a local LinkedIn group, Cincinnati Regional Business Intelligence Networking Group, where the question “Where do you think the future of Business Intelligence is headed?” was posted. My response was:

Personally, in addition to the normal predictive data analysis, I see a real strength is to have everyone that deals with data, the administrative assistant to the CEO, understanding how to properly interpret the data that they deal with. Therefore, everyone in the organization has the ability to provide insight into better decision making at their level.

Another member of the group then asked in response, “Mark, what data tools do you see being developed or expanded upon to reach this goal? I believe that total company comprehension of corporate data could also be the way of the future.”

This caused me to further reflect and consider how enterprise wide data analysis, by most if not all employees, might look. I replied:

Foremost, standard data understanding needs to be basic training for employees. For example, training them how to: disassemble complex problems in order to better evaluate and solve the issues, develop hypothesis and experiment with the data to find unknown causal relationships, use of current common tools such as spread sheet apps (for example, using the Solver function for data optimization) and free tools such as R, understanding how to use data visualization, understanding and using Bayesian rules, etc.

Along with the standard extract, transform and load (ETL) and reporting tools, apps that can assist in the above would be very valuable. Given that the above are really processes that can be applied to various situations, tools that shorten the steps is what I would consider. To be honest, I am not sure that the tools would be as valuable as training employees to understand and do basic data analysis with the data they work with.

The consideration of the importance of understanding data and how to interpret it came from an interesting and informative talk by Danah Boyd at Gov 2.0 entitled "Transparency Is Not Enough." The talk is available at http://goo.gl/GraT

Per Boyd, "The #1 goal of transparency is to empower people, to give them an opportunity to be informed as citizens, to allow them to be a check to power. But when those in power release data in a way that allows them to maintain power, we've got a huge problem....We must also help people develop the skills to interpret data.....Information is most useful to people when they have the skills to interpret it....Because of this, making information available alone is not the great democratizer. It must be coupled with enabling people to have the skills to interpret it."

Applying this premise to the Business Intelligence arena, having access to terabytes of data in and of itself does not result in helping the organization make better decisions. “It must be coupled with enabling people to have the skills to interpret it.”

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Lending Kindle eBooks Now Enabled

2010-12-30T12:42:00.001-05:00

You can now lend Kindle eBooks. It is still controlled by Digital Rights Management set by the publisher, etc. but it is a next step!

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

HTML5 Canvas Tag Basic Example II - Gradients and Images

2010-12-16T07:30:00.002-05:00

Per my previous post, working with the canvas tag in HTML5, here is some more code with gradients and an image.

Thanks again to Mark Pilgrim and his wonderful Dive into HTML5 site.

Enjoy:

Loving Posterous' use of Github Gist to post code

2010-12-15T11:09:00.001-05:00

Loving Posterous' use of Github Gist to post code in your Posterous blog. Just paste a Github Gist URL on its own line and Posterous pulls in the contents automatically, even for your RSS feed and autopost sites.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

HTML5 Canvas Tag Basic Example

2010-12-15T10:02:00.003-05:00

It has been a while since I posted any example code. Was messing with the canvas tag in HTML5 and thought I would post it up.

Thanks to Mark Pilgrim and his wonderful Dive into HTML5 site, I was working through the canvas tag page and put this together (only got as far as the gradient section though). Enjoy:

"How good software makes us stupid"-You're still smart, what does that say about your software?

2010-10-02T13:53:00.001-04:00

In his post to BBC News Technology, Dave Lee writes about "How good software makes us stupid." Like it or not, the research outcomes consistently show that the tools we use to learn also shape our ability to learn. The premise of the article is that good software makes things easier and us more stupid.

In retrospect, I know, hang around, and work around a lot of smart people. Therefore, their software must not be that good! Gaaa! I develop software! Must get better at making people dumber...or I a mean make things easier for them!

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

RSS - The Really Unknown Syndication

2010-08-31T12:49:00.001-04:00

At work, on the corporate intranet site, there is a daily survey question. Today's question was, "Do you use an RSS feed to capture news or similar info from websites?" The possible responses were:
Yes – I like that it sends me news I request.
Yes – I’m just learning how this works.
No – I’ve never used it.
No – I don’t know what that is.

With most survey components, you do not see the tabulated results until after you answer the question. Before I answered I thought that the response rate would be about 60% answering either "Yes – I like that it sends me news I request" or "Yes – I’m just learning how this works." Wow, was I off. Here are the actual results as of the time of this post:
The "Yes – I like that it sends me news I request" had 719 out of 13,856 or 5% of total.
The "Yes – I’m just learning how this works" received 300 responses out of 13,856 for a 2% affirmative rate.
The "No – I’ve never used it" got a 2,766 out of 13,856 or 20% of the total.
Finally, the "No – I don’t know what that is" answer received a whopping 10,071 out of 13,856 for a 73% response rate.

Again, wow! 93% of the respondents are not using RSS even though it has been broadly available since 2005. Given that the RSS acronym means Really Simple Syndication there are a good many of my fellow employees that have yet to discover the convenience and pleasure of using RSS to gather and consume their news and information.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Wired Mag is bumming me also!

2010-08-25T07:22:00.001-04:00

From his August 23, 2010 blog entry, Nicolas Carr states that "he is bummed." Why? Because of Wired magazine's statements over the last 5 years:

Wired magazine cover story, August 2005: "We Are the Web"
Wired magazine cover story, September 2010: "The Web Is Dead"
Unavoidable conclusion: "We Are Dead"

He is right. If we are something and that something is dead, then irresistibly, we are dead. Wow! I could easily become bummed too!

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

The Citizen Developer

2010-08-22T14:41:00.001-04:00

I have been thinking about the rise of user friendly development tools. Recently, Google released the Android App Inventor tool which according to Google, "App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app's behavior."

In addition to the Android App Inventor, Microsoft as released their beta version of WebMatrix, which "is for developers, students, or just about anyone who just wants a small and simple way to build Web sites."

So I did a search for the phrase "Citizen Programmer" or "Citizen Developer" to see what was out there. I found where last October, Gartner Group posted an article where they shared that by 2014, 25% of business applications will be done by these citizen developers. Interesting! The article defines a citizen developer as "a user operating outside of the scope of enterprise IT and its governance who creates new business applications for consumption by others either from scratch or by composition."

Historically, CASE tools were to enable the business person to do basic application development. In fact the programming language COBOL was meant to provide that ease of use and comprehension given its verbose and common-language structure.

I consider myself to be an example of a Citizen Developer as my educational background shows that you do not have to have formal development training to be a software developer. Since I received a B.S. in Education from Ohio University in 1993, I have basically learned to program by taking the time to learn to think computationally while learning and using the various interpreted and compiled languages and database systems.

The pattern in the past has been that tools that were marketed to enable business line personnel to create business applications actually required some development skills (such as Microsoft's WebMatrix discussed above). The result was that the tool was moved into the development teams as another tool in the software programming arsenal, leaving the users still depending on the software team to produce the programs.

However, it is my hope that tools such as Android App Inventor will proliferate and result in the growth of the Citizen Developer.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Lions, tigers, tracking, oh my!

2010-08-05T12:03:00.001-04:00

Just looked at a Wall Street Journal Blog article What They Know. While I agree that apps that record and retrieve keystrokes are evil, in my view, most tracking is for data purposes to better serve customers with more relevant advertisements. Agreed?

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Time...between compiles

2010-07-10T12:01:00.001-04:00

Remember in the first Jurassic Park movie, Dennis Nedry the programmer who attempted to sell/smuggle dino-embryos off the island? He stated that it would take several minutes for the section of the software that he had just added code to compile, and that certain systems would be down during this compile. It was during this gap in time that he attempted to smuggle the embryos.

Anyway, I often have 5 minutes here, 15 minutes there waiting for compiles to complete. During these times I refuse to be involved in illegal activity! My employer will be glad to know that I am sure. But seriously, I try to get other things done such as planning the next section of code to write, consider more optimal database queries, and complete emails, etc in that time.

The point is that I have to plan the break or I catch myself surfing the net and wasting time. What do you do with your time in between tasks to stay focused? A list of items to complete? Does your type of work govern the web and flow of the day for you?

Oh... the build is complete...got to get going...bye!

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Future of Tech: Mobile or the Living Room?

2010-07-10T09:55:00.001-04:00

Was listening to the Pipeline podcast, episode 20 where "Dan Benjamin interviews Clayton Morris, self-described casual geek and anchor of Fox and Friends about inspiration and creativity, authenticity online and on TV, the way we as viewers are changing the shape of media, pursuing your dreams, balancing work and personal life, and more."

Towards the end of the show the discussion arose as to where the future of technology would be focused. The two spaces discussed were the mobile space and the living room. I aways thought that while mobile and home based technologies would have there own areas of products and services, the two would converge together into a "personal, electronically assisted living" that was not restricted by location but existed and functioned in your home as well as transportation.

We shall see.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Never Trust a Programmer

2010-07-09T07:12:00.001-04:00

"Programming is a bit of mystery to people. It breeds a lot of distrust in an organization. In general, when you don’t understand what it takes to make something, anything seems plausible. You might think a house can be built in couple of weeks...." Good stuff! The rest here.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Who is the "Bitsmith" in your domain?

2010-07-08T07:01:00.001-04:00

Harvard Business Review's Management Tip of the Day today (Thursday, July 8, 2010) is Get Yourself a Bitsmith. A Bitsmith is defined as, "a person who understands both the work content and the tools needed to support the job."

One thing that organizations need to understand is that IT is more than a group of code and reboot monkeys that can be simply plugged into a position like a warm body in the Matrix. Successful IT in any company understands the objectives of the business and what it needs to do to see it happen. "By understanding the domain and the technology, bitsmiths can quickly take an idea from concept to implementation, speeding up productivity. Find someone on your team or bring someone in from IT who can serve as your bitsmith."

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Ubuntu Lucid Lynx DVD Watching...ba da bing, ba da boom

2010-07-01T10:16:00.001-04:00

Got my new Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage movie DVD the other day. I wanted to watch it on my Ubuntu Desktop. Alas, I did not have the proper libraries loaded. Solution, query the smart and generous Ubuntu community. A quick search yielded How to play video dvd Movies in Ubnutu 10.04 Lucid Lynx.

In short, do the following from the terminal prompt:

$ sudo wget --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list

$ sudo apt-get --quiet update

$ sudo apt-get --yes --quiet --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring

$ sudo apt-get --quiet update

And, ba da bing, ba da boom...I was watching the DVD on my Ubuntu Desktop.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Free Ubuntu 10.04 Manual

2010-06-26T12:04:00.001-04:00

For those of you who are using Ubnutu Lucid Lynx (10.04) or are at least considering it, check out the free Ubuntu Manual. The Ubuntu Manual is available in many languages! Very nice!

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Posterous auto-posting to Google Buzz

2010-06-25T22:18:00.001-04:00

Posterous now auto-post to Google Buzz...sweet!

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

"Yee haw" instead of Yahoo?

2010-06-24T11:16:00.001-04:00

"Yee haw" instead of Yahoo? Got a tweet from @BenABaker that pointed to a collaboration of 13 companies from Eastern Kentucky working together to solve the region's technical challenges. You've heard of Silicon Valley...now introducing Silicon Hollow. Go Silicon Hollow!!

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Posterous - from Pipe to Post Point

2010-06-24T10:48:00.001-04:00

Originally, I was using Posterous as an entry point for blog and social media posts. Posterous enables you to have a single point of entry to various blogs and social media outlets via e-mail or the web.

Now Posterous is attempting to attract users of sites such as Ning and Tumblr. What I did this morning was import all my old blog content from my Google's Blogspot site from February 2005 to the present into my Posterous blog. It was a matter of point, click, and wa-la.

So, that is my rationale for stating that Posterous is moving from a pipe, or a single point of entry, to a post or end point for user-submitted content. It will be interesting to see how successful they will be in attracting rival blog site users.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Linchpin Quadrants of Discernment

2010-06-22T10:49:00.001-04:00

Recently I finished Seth Godin's book Linchpin. Along with many good sections, there is a discussion on an effective combination of passion and discernment. Here, discernment is the ability to understand, in a nutshell, that things change and what area(s) are in the scope of one's influence and/or ability to affect the circumstance(s) . A discerning, passionate person, a.k.a. a Linchpin understands that things change and knows what she can effectively do in the midst of that change.

Looking at the diagram used in the book below, quotes explaining the quadrants follow (from Kindle Locations to 3061 to 3083).

In the bottom right is the fundamentalist zealot. He is attached to the world as he sees it....Change is a threat. Curiosity is a threat. Competition is a threat. As a result, it's difficult for him to see the world as it is, because he insists on the world being the way he imagines it. At the same time, he has huge reservoirs of effort to invest in maintaining his worldview. Fundamentalist zealots always manage to make the world smaller, poorer, and meaner. The RIAA's campaign to sue people for listening to music online is the work of a fundamentalist zealot.

The top left belongs to the Bureaucrat. He's certainly not attached to the outcome of events, and he definitely won't be exerting any additional effort, regardless. The bureaucrat is a passionless rules follower, indifferent to external events and gliding through the day. The clerk at the post office and the exhausted VP at General Motors are both bureaucrats.

The bottom left is the corner for the Whiner. The whiner has no passion, but is extremely attached to the worldview he's brought into. Living life in fear of change, the whiner can't muster the effort to make things better, but is extremely focused on wishing that things stay as they are. I'd put most people in the newspaper industry in this corner.

And that leaves the top right, the quadrant of the Linchpin. The linchpin is enlightened enough to see the world as it is, to understand that this angry customer is not about me, that this change, in government policy is not a personal attack, that this job is not guaranteed for life. At the same time, the linchpin brings passion to the job. She knows from experience that the right effort in the right place can change the outcome, and she reserves her effort for doing just that.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

The future of IT: Data Centralization, everything else...Decentralized

2010-06-16T23:11:00.001-04:00

Interesting article by Kishore Swaminathan, Chief Scientist at Accenture, IT 2015. In short, decentralized hardware and data access with centralized data.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Who Are You (on Twitter that is)?

2010-06-14T07:54:00.001-04:00

Within a retweet by @prblog from @EmpowerMM that provided a link to various social media graphics. One in particular caught my eye that categorizes twitter users. Based on these categorizations, who do you follow? Do you tolerate the "smore" and/or follow the "maven?"

It appears to be a matter of one's interest. Some like to hear others complain so they will follow the "b1tch." Also, one's maven is another's smore.

How do we as twitter users become more like the "mensch" who observe the flow of information until others need our expertise and then come to their aid?

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Text Data Mining/Visualization - Did I really say it that much!?!

2010-06-11T13:16:00.001-04:00

Was poking around looking at text data-collection and analysis tools since a lot of our data is not in standard database or data file formats but in text. I ran across Wordle, an on-line text mining / analytic tool that generates "word clouds" from text . The clouds give greater visual prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. To create your own word cloud simply copy and paste your text into the tool or point your website/blog to Wordle via the same tool and it will formulate the word cloud.

Often, data mining/visualization will show unexpected patterns in the data that enable you to sometimes verify, or at least postulate, the cause of what the data displays. Ideally, the analysis will assist you in predicting future customer buying habits, upcoming income/expenditure levels, etc.

Anyway, pointing my blog to Wordle produced the image below. In looking at the word cloud, I know I have been discussing Ubuntu a good deal lately but I was not aware to what degree. Again, data mining/visualization shows that I need to move on to other topics in my blog!

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Imitation over Innovation?

2010-06-10T10:42:00.001-04:00

Browsed to Google's search page and thought I was looking at a Bing screen for a few seconds. Google is, at least for now, showing a large background image as Bing as been doing since its onset.

Reminds me of a recent article, Defend Your Research: Imitation Is More Valuable Than Innovation by Oded Shenkar which argues that, "In all cases, he found imitation to be a primary source of progress, even though that progress often went unrecognized by executives and scholars. He also discovered that good imitation is difficult and requires intelligence and imagination."

Yet, Google imitating Bing?!?!

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

What Should You Be Measuring?

2010-06-09T10:38:00.004-04:00

Dan Ariely, Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University wrote an interesting column entitled, You Are What You Measure. He states:

If we want to change what they care about, we should change what we
measure…..It can’t be that simple, you might argue— but psychologists and economists will tell you it is. Human beings adjust behavior based on the metrics they’re held against. Anything you measure will impel a person to optimize his score on that metric. What you measure is what you’ll get. Period.

Okay. With that said, what are the numbers that I should measure? My thinking is that in addition to the day-to-day numbers that are normally applied to me in my job, metrics such as these are good: how often do I help co-workers, what is the level of my customers' (manager, business line(s) I code for, etc) satisfaction, how many times do I take ownership of problems that are not mine, etc? Can you think of other numbers?

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Ubuntu Lucid Lynx with Windows XP Dual Boot

2010-06-01T19:21:00.001-04:00

After getting my replacement hard drive for my Dell desk top I compromised between the need for a Windows Operating System and the desire to mainly use Ubuntu by setting up the system to dual boot to Ubuntu by default and Windows XP implicitly.

For an example of Ubuntu niceness, I had to update an Excel 2007 spread sheet. I was currently in Ubuntu and really did not want to shutdown Ubuntu and restart in Windows to make the update. I browsed to the the Places section in Ubuntu and noted that there was a File System that was separate from the Ubuntu install. Sure enough it was the Windows partition. And what do you know...I was able to browse the Window's partition files and select the Excel spread sheet. It then opened in Open Office's Spreadsheet application, which comes free with Ubuntu's Desktop install, from where I was able to make my change and save the updated file.

Okay, that seemed too easy. I then rebooted to check to see that the Excel file would still open in Excel and sure enough, it opened and had the changes that were made while in Ubuntu! Lucid indeed!

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

To Ubuntu or not to?....now that is a good question!

2010-05-28T12:08:00.001-04:00

Last weekend my desktop hard drive went kaput. So instead of using my laptop until I got the disk rordered, received, and replaced, I literally dug out my old desktop from the garage. After blowing off the dust I hooked it up, and then installed the new distribution of Ubuntu Linux, 10.04 (also know as Lucid Lynx).

This operating system fits on one CD. That's right...you heard it correctly folks...not one DVD...but one CD! And even better--the price...wait for it....wait for it...FREE!! Moreover, it is easy to install, contains the Open Office Suite, the Firefox Web Brower, etc. right out of the box (or rather ISO download in my case).

Since I have been using it this last week I have noted that everything is running well. I even installed the TweetDeck Desktop and had it rolling in no time (see below).

The only issue is, some of my applications that I need to run (QuickBooks) require Windows (and no I don't want to use QuickBooks in the Cloud, yet anyway). All is not lost as Ubuntu comes loaded with VirtualBox, a virtual machine that can be used to run Windows XP from which I can install QuickBooks, etc.

I just got the new hard drive via UPS and have it installed. Go with Ubuntu with a VirtualBox of Windows XP? Go with Windows XP? Thoughts? What would you do?

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

OK, I think I have posting to Posterous with Markdown down

2010-05-27T12:19:00.002-04:00

Here is a message with Java syntax highlighting on Posterous.
Get specifics here.

Here is a syntax highlighting and formatting Markdown example of philosophic Java code:

1 if(!succeed) {

2      try();

3  }

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Increasing Serendipity to Increase Understanding

2010-05-27T08:17:00.001-04:00

Serendipity is defined as "the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for." In other words a serendipitous event is when you find something good that you were not expecting. But how do we do this with ideas and solutions to problems? One may think the answer is to randomly scour books and journals in the hopes of discovering new and helpful information. While this is valuable, I am finding that the most valuable information comes directly from people and not just the literary works they produce.

Serendipity therefore requires you to move outside your comfort zone concerning encounters with others. Take a chance and risk looking foolish. Introduce yourself to someone you do not know but may frequently see at work or on the bus. Find out what interests them. In a word, learn.

To me, this concept reminds me of the progressive rock group Rush's song, Hand Over First. A section of the lyrics go:

Take a walk outside myself
In some exotic land
Greet a passing stranger
Feel the strength in his hand
Feel the world expand.

Feel your world expand indeed!

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Exponential (or Collective) Minuteness = Big Outcomes

2010-05-26T18:21:00.001-04:00

Last Friday, May 21, 2010, got a tweet from @justinrains informing his followers that Google search page had a small version of Pacman that you could play. Of course, I browsed to the popular search page and began playing that classic game. The beauty now was that no quarters required! I spent about two minutes playing and then moved on with my day.

My thinking was that this was not much time wasted. However, what if that two minutes is multiplied by millions of users? According to Tony Wright, the founder of RescueTime Blog, just seconds viewing or playing pacman the other day cost 120 million in productivity. How? "The average user spent 36 seconds MORE on Google.com on Friday....$120,483,800 is the dollar tally, If the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate)."

Wow! Small amounts multiplied results in large outcomes. What if everyone could contribute small amounts of attention and brain power to solve problems? This is what happens with CAPTCHAs:

About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.

What is notable is that technology enables this "collective minuteness" that yields large results. The question then becomes how can we further use it to solve problems? Can collective involvement via social media help in the search/discovery/creation of alternative energy sources? Is there a way we can use mobile computing to assist healthcare? These are not questions for the sake of a blog posting! What are your thoughts?

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Early location-based, social media..."Breaker 1 - 9, how about that south bound Kenworth at the 151 mile marker, ...."

2010-05-26T07:01:00.002-04:00

This last weekend we traveled into south-central Ohio for a family gathering. On the way, I noted a truck driver talking on a mobile phone. I commented to my wife that the days of the CB Radio (those who are in the forties and older know something about CB Radios) are more than likely declining. She stated that while drivers will communicate via mobile devices, the CB is probably the tool of choice to gather and share local information and socialize. After I considered it I realized that as usual, she was correct.

In fact, I would call the CB Radio "the early location-based, social media." To use this tool all one had to do was be on the conventional channel, channel 19 for most truck drivers, and you were able to send and receive messages. Truckers would ask the channel for information on road conditions and traffic from those who were there or had just been there (location based services), ask general question, or just share stories and socialize (social media content).

Finally, with concerns over texting while driving, the CD Radio is offers an "eyes on the road" media utilization.

"Do you gotta copy on that?"

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Please, Look at the Data

2010-05-21T12:33:00.001-04:00

Clive Thompson looks at why we should understand how to read and draw proper conclusions from data.

Thompson states:

Statistics is hard. But that’s not just an issue of individual understanding; it’s also becoming one of the nation’s biggest political problems. We live in a world where the thorniest policy issues increasingly boil down to arguments over what the data mean. If you don’t understand statistics, you don’t know what’s going on — and you can’t tell when you’re being lied to.

One thing for certain, the "don't bother me with the facts" attitude will not work here.

Consider the economy: Is it improving or not? That’s a statistical question....Or take the raging debate over childhood vaccination, where well-intentioned parents have drawn disastrous conclusions from anecdotal information....There are oodles of other examples of how our inability to grasp statistics — and the mother of it all, probability — makes us believe stupid things. Gamblers think their number is more likely to come up this time because it didn’t come up last time. Political polls are touted by the media even when their samples are laughably skewed.

Of course, not everyone is a trained statistician. However, one does not need to be. We write while not being trained journalist. We use basic math while not being mathematicians.

For starters instead of looking at short term data, learn to consider long term trends with larger amounts of data. Also, understand that when there are correlations between trends or events, this does not mean that one is the cause of the other. In short, please look at the data.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

"Betterness" does not just happen.

2010-05-21T11:14:00.002-04:00

In this post, Umair Haque looks at eight ways to begin "betterness" in your life: Invest, Allocate, Cut, Work, Live, Civilize, Support, and Reflect. To summarize, the post informs the reader that to have a generally better life, one must not simply "settle" but get up and get busy on making a difference for both themselves and others.

None of this is easy. And no, it won't magically create a paradise overnight, or possibly ever. These aren't the only paths to betterness, or even the best ones. This is just a blog post. Here's the point. It is only by accepting the hard truth of personal responsibility for yesterday that each of us can begin to create a better tomorrow.

Related to this post, I am currently reading Linchpin by Seth Godin that drives a similar message. More on this book later.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Is the Motorola Droid Commercials Scary?

2010-05-20T20:06:00.001-04:00

Is it just me or is the Motorola Droid Commercials a little scary?

In my view, the roving red eye of the Motorola Droid looks like a cross between the robotic eye of the Cylon of Battlestar Galactica fame and the Dark Lord Sauron's all seeing eye from The Lord of the Rings.

Motorola Droid Screen on Bootup

Cylons

Sauron's Eye

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It is the Cloud not the Clock

2010-05-20T19:08:00.001-04:00

In the current Wired Magazine article, Breaking Things Down to Particles Blinds Scientists to Big Picture, Jonah Lehrer states:

Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.” The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.

In both business and software development we must understand that the latest tool and/or theory is not the final Utopian answer but rather a step in further understanding.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Google I/O - Web is killing other media

2010-05-19T14:51:00.001-04:00

According to Google’s Vic Gundotra, the web is killing other forms of media.

I remember speaking to a Kiwanis Group (in circa 1996) and sharing that at some point the web "may," in the immediate future, effectively compete for the attention of the public as other forms of traditional media were at that time. When I stated that, some yawned and others looked at me as if I was crazy at worst and overly optimistic at best.

I have to admit that in the early days of the public internet I was not sure how popular the web would be. Again, that was when access from home was accompanied by the screech of a 9600 baud modem. Not the most optimum throughput for audio and video.

In any event, that is the case now.

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Definitions and clarity matter

2010-05-19T11:40:00.002-04:00

http://ow.ly/1N0A6 What we have here is a failure to "communicate." Definitions and clarity matter.

via Ping.fm

Posted via web from Mark's Musings

Time to Think...Oh, the Humanity

2010-05-18T07:40:00.001-04:00

In his blog post The Productivity Myth, Tony Schwartz states, "We need a better way of working. It's not about generating short-term, superficial productivity gains by using fear as a motivator and then squeezing people to their limits. Rather, it depends on helping leaders to understand that more is not always better, and that rest, renewal, reflection, and a long-term perspective are also critical to fueling value that lasts."

I often make the argument, we need to give all workers in all types of fields time to reflect on what the business is doing and how it can do it better, for not only the customer but also the employees and organization.

What we do not need is primitive instincts operating the company. "If you operate at high intensity, under high pressure, for long hours, you inexorably burn down your own best resources — your energy reservoir — and you begin to rely instead on the physiology of fight or flight — adrenalin, noradrenalin, and cortisol. The prefrontal cortex shuts down in fight or flight, your perspective narrows, and your primitive instincts begin to take over."

We need humanity, not just machinery.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

What is a More Effective Conversation?

2010-05-17T21:02:00.003-04:00

What is meant by "conversation?" We see this term used a lot anymore with the advent and use of social media. GMail calls each thread of email a "conversation." And indeed, it may be. Being curious as to what others thought about the use of the term, I did a quick search on the word “conversation” and ran across this image from Brian Solis’ blog:

My assumption is that many of you use many of these tools. While these tools certainly facilitate "virtual conversations," is that the most effective form of a conversation? Certainly it scales better. It is more geographically dispersed. But, is it the same as face-to-face encounters where you are in the same location with the person(s) interacting?

Perhaps these e-tools can be used to initiate or setup face-to-face conversations? I for one am determined to have more face-to-face, and therefore, a more effective conversations.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Gut Based Decisions - A Cause of Heart Burn?

2010-05-13T09:53:00.002-04:00

"Tell Your Gut to Please Shut Up," Please? In this blog post by Michael Schrage, the misnomer that intuition or gut-level decision making is statistically effective and sound is challenged. In fact, it is often touted that one's experience is enough to provide the foundation of sound decisions:

Leaders and managers are encouraged and exhorted to rely more on their intuition and judgment. Everyone knows that "Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment." Ha ha ha. But where does bad judgment come from? My answer — and the replicable answer from Nobel Prize winning research: Trusting gut instincts and feelings.

He continues on:

The entire field of behavioral economics has been built on the intensifying recognition that people, particularly smart ones, are suckers for cognitive illusions and heuristic biases that pretty much guarantee that "gut-trusting" will, on average, yield heart burn.

What is the answer to this dilemma of intuition or gut-level based direction? Data. Making decisions based on actual information and not what you "sense" or "feel. "
While this is not new, Michael Schrage turns this from the enterprise to the individual:

What gives this issue great urgency and good timeliness is the nascent phenomenon discussed in Gary Wolf's excellent New York Times Magazine piece on data-driven introspection. He describes his cast of anal-retentive compulsively computational cast of characters as uber-geeks. To me, they're the uber-introspects: a new cultural class that values the ability to relentlessly act upon obsessive self-knowledge....Instrumenting ourselves, our thoughts, our actions, and — yes — our networks of colleagues and acquaintances, simultaneously transforms both self-awareness and situational awareness.

This has been personally demonstrated to me as I have recently lost 30 pounds in the last 4 months. In short, I simply monitored both my daily caloric intake and the burning of those calories by measured exercise with the help of the SparkPeople website. This tool made it easy to search the foods that I would eat that day and plan my meals while tracking the daily exercise. Moreover, what was most empowering was that when I knew the actual calories I had already consumed, in the evening, it made it easier for me to resist the desire to eat more. By knowing where I actually was with calorie intake and not having to guess in the midst of being hungry, I was able to say "NO" to more food.
Finally Schrage challenges the reader with a self-examining experiment:

So here's a simple, cheap experiment: the next few times you make a snap decision or judgment where your gut is your best friend, take 20 seconds to send yourself an email or text briefly describing what you did and why. Quit after doing it maybe 20 times. Then look at those messages from the vantage of a week later. I promise you'll be surprised. (I did a version of that exercise when I was having a nightmare time with a client. The resulting review left me biting my tongue and forbidding myself from sending substantive project emails without sleeping on them first.)

More on coming soon on the data-driven life.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Crowd-Sourcing Gone Too Far with Digg?

2010-05-12T07:49:00.001-04:00

Michael Arrington brings up an interesting point in his Digg’s Biggest Problem Is Its Users And Their Constant Opinions On Things article. When designing a product, at what point is crowd input too much?

The piece brings out several good points. For example, "Product should be a dictatorship. Not consensus driven. There are casualties. Hurt feelings. Angry users. But all of those things are necessary if you’re going to create something unique."

Even as interesting, in my view, is the picture with the article:

The feel of the image is very much like the artwork for the Black Sabbath Album cover, Mob Rules:

Perhaps the lyrics of this album's title song are appropriate for Arrington's article, "...if you listen to fools, the mob rules."

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Social Tech Tools - Distractor or Emancipator?

2010-05-10T07:58:00.001-04:00

I was perusing the Guardian web site looking for updates on the UK election and ran across a commencement speech by President Obama at Hampton University. In the talk he stated, "With iPods and iPads; Xboxes and PlayStations – none of which I know how to work – information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation."

This was the jist of my previous post, Multiple Information Streams, Self-Motivation, and the Outcomes where I ask, "...are the content streams you consume beneficial for you let alone society as a whole?" Well? What do you think?

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Programming: A Social Activity

2010-05-08T23:11:00.001-04:00

Here is a repost from almost two years ago. With all the discussion on social media and crowd sourcing of information, I thought a repost of this was timely:

I have been listening to a weekly podcast, Stackoverflow with Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. Podcast 15 features a question that asks what the most effective code review methods are. On the podcast site, the show notes state,

Joel and I both agree: one of the most effective coding practices you can adopt on your team is interactive, sit-down-with-your-coworker code review. 90% of the things you will learn have nothing to do with the code. I believe programming is a far more social activity than most realize. If you write code, and nobody but you ever sees that code — did you really extract all the benefit from writing that code?

HEAR, HEAR!

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Followers Don't Equal Influence-->Distribution and Expansion Does

2010-05-08T12:21:00.001-04:00

I enjoyed a discussion with local technologist Clint Greenwood this morning at my local Panera. We were talking of the need to be aware of one's personal brand or online reputation and I mentioned that I had recently read a tweet from HarvardBiz that read, "On Twitter--Followers Don't Equal Influence." Interesting read. In short, one of the ideas the post communicates is the need to not just count how many follow you--the real indicator of influence is how many re-tweet your ideas and/or expand on them and redistribute them back into the social-information flow.

The article also stated, "We were surprised by how only a fraction of Twitter users actively tweet. And this small fraction of Twitter users provoke responses (mentions) and initiate information cascades (retweets). I guess many people use Twitter to browse others' messages rather than generating a lot new messages themselves."

As I have often stated, I really have no original ideas. Mainly they are mash-ups and extrapolations of existing thoughts and mental frameworks. Perhaps in the midst of those musings I get threads of new ideas? But then again, I am sure that has been thought of and shared before. Right Clint?

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Test upload of video via Gmail to Posterous

2010-05-07T17:33:00.001-04:00

Download now or watch on posterous

video-2010-05-07-17-21-31.3gp (252 KB)

This video was just shot at the Pub at Crestview Hills.

Thank you,
Mark McFadden
www.markmcfadden.tel

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Is Yours a "Hunch-Friendly" Environment?

2010-05-07T12:25:00.001-04:00

Kathleen Carr, editor at the Harvard Business Review Blog, recently posted an interesting entry entitled, "To Innovate, Create "Hunch-Friendly" Environments."

Thought #1: Within the post Carr states, "...give your employees the latitude to explore their ideas and you'll be amazed what they come up with." I understand that you have core objectives that you must and should meet. However, does your company provide any time for your greatest asset, your people, to think of new processes, products, and/or services?

Thought #2: Carr also states that organizations and individuals should be "...thinking in terms of next practices instead of best practices." In other words, we must think not only about how to improve current processes but what would could be doing going forward?

Thought #3: The post also mentions "...the importance of respecting people and their ideas, and how people need to feel a human bond at work if they're going to feel invested." While we know the value of respecting differing views, how do we increase the sense of "human bond" among ourselves?

I think each of the above ideas take one thing that we all seem to have little of--time.

With that said, my assumption is that providing small amounts of time for innovative thinking will be be well worth the investment. After all, any company is really an information based organization--both formal information with customer data and informal information of ideas that could improve the use of that formal information.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Multiple Information Streams, Self-Motivation, and the Outcomes

2010-05-05T12:32:00.001-04:00

Dana Boyd in her Web 2.0 Expo talk Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media brings up some interesting thoughts as to the value of capturing shrinking attention spans by both businesses and individuals.

Within the rarity of sustained attention, other factors than limited time and having too many options come into play. When considering a more open access to data via the internet, one's attention will not always be placed on content that is most substantial or fact based:

We may be democratizing certain types of access, but we're not democratizing attention. Just because we're moving towards a state where anyone has the ability to get information into the stream does not mean that attention will be divided equally....Some in the room might immediately think, "Ah, but it's a meritocracy. People will give their attention to what is best!" This too is mistaken logic. What people give their attention to depends on a whole set of factors that have nothing to do with what's best.

She then goes on to say:

Our bodies are programmed to consume fat and sugars because they're rare in nature. Thus, when they come around, we should grab them. In the same way, we're biologically programmed to be attentive to things that stimulate: content that is gross, violent, or sexual and that gossip which is humiliating, embarrassing, or offensive. If we're not careful, we're going to develop the psychological equivalent of obesity. We'll find ourselves consuming content that is least beneficial for ourselves or society as a whole.

Boyd then goes on to discuss having multiple information options also results in selecting sources that look and think like we do, therefore limiting valuable, serendipitous encounters with differing ideas and concepts. However, that is a later post. :-)

Finally, I understand that what is considered "valuable" information is subjective. In my view, the determining factor is not "limited attention" but rather what motivates us to direct our limited attention to the information streams we select. Are we constantly drawn toward and given to the siren songs of gossip, violence, and sex? I think a valid question is, are the content streams you consume beneficial for you let alone society as a whole?

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Status Last Ten Facebook App

2010-05-04T23:59:00.001-04:00

I created this Status Last Ten Facebook application over a year ago and it is just starting to get some use. Display a list of your last ten status messages.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

"Killer" Apps...Humans to Blame

2010-05-04T10:32:00.001-04:00

CIO.com editor Thomas Wailgum provides a few scenarios of the darker side of the use of our data in his recent post The Killer Apps of Capitalism.

As he states, "Now, millions of customer records and corporate interactions can be examined with ease; seemingly disconnected swaths of data points can be mined, categorized, analyzed and presented to executives and line of business managers; and new trends and patterns discovered can show profit and loss at both granular and enterprise levels....But there is often a powerful human downside."

Wailgum then details how an insurance company used patient data to determine potential fraud cases and then canceled their customers' policies based on often unsubstantial information. A typical knee jerk reaction that calls for an abandonment of technology is not the correct response to it's improper use.

Finally Wailgum writes, "While technology is the enabler in all of this, technology isn't to blame. We must remember that real, live human beings are making decisions from the software's computational capabilities. We still have to hold the people accountable....Just because IT applications are dispassionate and without feeling doesn't mean we—the humans using the tech—have to be, too." (emphasis mine)

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

B2B - Twitter | B2C - Facebook (?)

2010-05-03T10:09:00.001-04:00

In a recent Harvard Business IdeaCast there was a discussion on the question of should every seek to utilize social media. The guest, Alexandra Samuel, director of the Social + Interactive Media Centre at Emily Carr University and the cofounder of Social Signal mentioned that for those companies whose customers are other businesses then Twitter may be the tool of choice. She then proposed for organizations that are B2C (business to customers) channels, Facebook may be the best tool. Thoughts?

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Redirect your hatred of Flash to the W3C

2010-04-30T08:08:00.001-04:00

TechCruch's article The State Of Web Development Ripped Apart In 25 Tweets By One Man details tweets by Joe Hewitt, a software developer currently at Facebook, that was in response to Steve Jobs' blog post on Adobe's Flash. Within the article Hewitt states:

"Redirect your hatred of Flash to the W3C, whose embarrassingly slow pace forced devs to use a plugin because the standards were so weak."

To this I say Amen and bring on HTML5!

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Testing inline images from Gmail post to my Posterous.com blog

2010-04-29T22:16:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago Gmail added support for inline images, so you can place photos anywhere in the text of your post. Posterous will support this, in addition to posting attached images and automatically creating a gallery view for multiple images in an e-mail post. OK, here is image one below:

Below is the next image for testing:

I will assume that this is working and say, SWEET!

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

One of the Best Things a Marketer Can Do....

2010-04-29T13:27:00.001-04:00

According to The Marketing Edge podcast, one of the longest running marketing and public relations podcasts, host Albert Maruggi, who weaves his 25 years of marketing and PR experience asks, "One of the Best Things a Marketer Can Do, Befriend A Developer." Indeed!

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Posterous already had the Facebook "Like" Button implemented

2010-04-27T20:02:00.001-04:00

Had just added the Facebook Like button IFrame code to my Google Blogspot blog and was wanting to do the same for my Posterous site but they had it completed for me. Very nice!

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Dilbert's take on the Lost (insert "Apple" here) 4G Phone in the Bar

2010-04-27T13:53:00.001-04:00

Here is Dilbert's take on the Lost (insert "Apple" here) 4G Phone in the Bar:

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Question--How to use data to predict and act to better serve customers and gain a competitive edge?

2010-04-27T12:29:00.002-04:00

SAS, a company that produces business analytics software and services pitches their new Social Media Analytics tool SAS Social Media Analytics states,
"SAS Social Media Analytics is the first enterprise solution designed to meet the needs of marketers in medium and large companies. It helps them understand, predict and act based on social media data." (emphasis mine)
This is what we must consider going forward with all data, including social media based data. How can we use data to predict our customer's behavior and then act on those predictions to both better serve them and gain a competitive edge? Now that is a question! I am not certain that this SAS tool can do that but as we consider the implementation of social media, how can we use the data to anticipate and act upon customer need?

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

It's about what it can do, not just what it is

2010-04-24T17:58:00.001-04:00

Often, within the technology sector it is the technologists that form the etymology of terms and phrases. We who make our living from technology need to understand that it is not just about the device or shinny new gadget or new programming language but really about what it can do for the individual, group, and society.

The term "Social Media" is no different. For example, we are enamored with the emerging use of location based services and tools. And yes, it is cool. But, what does this mean for you, your friends, family, and culture at large? How will it help? Indeed, will it help you and/or your business? We talk about and discuss Twitter's search value and Facebook's Graph API and this is great. Yet, what can it do to better help developers enable users with better and more convenient tools?

Rob Key just wrote a great article on that very question entitled, Why we need to kill "social media." Please read it.

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

Which is Smarter--Man or Machine?

2010-04-23T15:13:00.001-04:00

Which is Smarter--Man or Machine? Clive Thompson considered this question in his Wired Magazine article Advantage: Cyborgs. As the article title states, a blend of human and technology is the best senario. "The most brilliant entities on the planet, in other words (at least when it comes to chess), are neither high-end machines nor high-end humans. They’re average-brained people who are really good at blending their smarts with machine smarts."

Although, we are may not be sporting hardware hooked directly into our bodies like the Borg of Star Trek fame, hopefully what we do daily with our devices enhances our performance and brings enjoyment. After all, "resistance is futile" right?

Posted via email from Mark's Musings

LinkedHashMap, dynamic int Array, and an ArrayList in Java

2010-04-20T19:48:00.003-04:00

Needing to build some dynamic items today and threw together: LinkedHashMap, dynamic int Array, and an ArrayList in Java. Perhaps they might help. The first class is TestHashMap.java code:

Here is the TestHashMap.java output:

Here is the TestDynamicIntArray.java class code:

Here is the TestDynamicIntArray class output:

Finally, here is the TestArrayList.java class code:

And the TestArrayList output:

Posted via web from Mark's Musings

Pulling the Core to the Edge

2010-04-17T23:05:00.002-04:00

In a recent post I discussed a few aspects of the book The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion that I heard of during a Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture Series talk by John Seely Brown. Within the talk Brown uses the substantial and rapid knowledge growth and distribution among World of Warcraft gamers as an example of the efficiencies and scale of ideas that can be obtained in a pull based knowledge economy. Brown states “Look at the knowledge economy on the edge of this game.” According to Brown, the World of Warcraft gamers produce 12,000 ideas on average every night. The gamers have dashboards of data informing them and keeping them updated on new data and ideas, they review and critique submissions from other gamers, and they review game actions to improve performance! This was not in the actual core of the game but rather on the organized periphery where gamers interact.
Within the talk Brown also mentioned how that organizations need to “pull their core to the edge.” I thought, wow! Now that is interesting! Poking around on Google I found an article in the Harvard Business Review Blog entitled “How to Bring the Core to the Edge.” http://blogs.hbr.org/bigshift/2009/02/how-to-bring-the-edge-to-the-c.html by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison.

In short, the article states the:

Edges within firms represent early stage business initiatives with high growth potential, whether new market-oriented initiatives or new work practices, often generated by the born-digital generation entering the workforce…. The ‘core,’ by contrast, is where the money and resources are today, whether we are talking geographically about the developed economies of the US, Western Europe, and Japan, demographically about the older generations with greater income and assets or technologically about mature technologies driving today's revenue and profitability. At the firm level, the core symbolizes the inside of the enterprise, its principal capabilities and primary revenue streams…. Edges spawn significant growth opportunities but, to scale this growth, it is essential for edge participants to gain access to the resources and markets of the core. At the same time, core participants experience margin pressures as competition intensifies and become increasingly desperate for new growth platforms to continue to create economic value…. Disruption theory suggests it's by bringing the edge to the core.

The article then states, "The approach we suggest is to instead bring the core to the edge, to expose your company to institutional innovations and new management practices that emerge on the edge."

Now this is good stuff! Imagine bringing the creative edge of your organization into a symbiotic relationship with the company core. This would result in positive disruption for the organization in general and individuals in the company in particular.

Social Media and the Big Shift to a 21st Century "Pull" Economy

2010-04-17T11:51:00.001-04:00

During a morning jog, I listened to a talk from John Seely Brown where he discussed what he calls the "big shift" from the 20th century "push" economy to the 21st century "pull" economy. In summary, the "push" paradigm is largely the traditional command and control model while the "pull" based structure is a more dynamic interaction with what Brown calls "knowledge flows." Upon further investigation, I found an excerpt from a new book, of which Brown is one of the authors, entitled The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion at www.edgeperspectives.com. Here is what I see as the essential elements pulled directly from the text:

At the most basic level, pull helps us to find and access people and resources when we need them. At a second level, pull is the ability to attract people and resources to us that are relevant and valuable, even if we were not even aware before that they existed. Think here of serendipity rather than search. Finally, in a world of mounting pressure and unforeseen opportunities, we need to cultivate a third level of pull the ability to pull from within ourselves the insight and performance required to more effectively achieve our potential.

The first level of pull, access, is very powerful. But in a world of near-constant disruption, its value is finite. Many of us are increasingly finding that we no longer even know what to seek, even with the growing power of search. While it’s great that all sorts of information is indexed and sorted on the web, even a daily tour through ones Facebook newsfeed reveals many new people and resources that could be relevant.

How do we find out which ones? How do we specify, when we go to Ask.com, Bing, or Google, the areas of knowledge and expertise that would be most valuable? Show me the stuff that I really need that I don't even know exists, isn’t much of a search string. Access only truly works when we know what were looking for. At times like these, the cursor blinks in the search engines textbox, mocking us, asking the existential question: Do you even know what you are looking for? And even if we think we do, it’s guaranteed that unknown unknowns, as Donald Rumsfeld memorably called them, are waiting for us, both as opportunities and as barriers.

We must supplement search engines and their equivalents by exploring additional ways of pulling people and their knowledge to us. To address this challenge, we will need to master the techniques of attraction in both our personal and professional lives and learn to harness the power of serendipity, which is the faculty of finding people and things that we did not know we were looking for.

We need serendipitous encounters with people because of the importance of the ideas that these people carry with them and the connections they have. People carry tacit knowledge. You can’t learn brain surgery just from a text. You've got to stand next to someone who already knows and learn by doing. Tacit knowledge exists only in people’s heads. That means we must not only find the people who carry this new knowledge but get to know them well enough (and provide them with sufficient reciprocal value) that they’re comfortable trying to share it with us.

All of this might make attraction an effective form of discovering the things we didn't know we didn't know, but it also brings up a problem: How can we possibly have enough time to put this into practice? There are only twenty-four hours in the day.

To master attraction, we need two elements to come together in a powerful and reinforcing way. First, we need amplifiers that can help us reach and connect to large groups of people around the globe that we do not yet know (and may not even be aware exist). These amplifiers relate to our choice of where to live, what gatherings we attend, how we conduct ourselves online, and what we do to draw the attention of others. Second, we need filters that can help us to increase the quality as well as the number of unexpected encounters and ensuing relationships that are truly the most relevant and valuable. These filtering techniques help separate the wheat from the chaff in our interactions with others and become ever more crucial as we begin serendipitously drawing more people toward us. By simultaneously amplifying (to increase the sheer number of unexpected encounters) while filtering (to spend time only on those interactions that yield value to us and to others), we can shape serendipity in order to attract from the edges of our fast-moving world the people and knowledge we need in order to thrive.

The third level of pull: Achieve. Accessing and attracting in fact have diminished value unless they are coupled with a third set of practices that focus on driving performance rapidly to new levels. These practices involve participation in, and sometimes orchestration of, something we call creation spaces--environments that effectively integrate teams within a broader learning ecology so that performance improvement accelerates as more participants join.

Creation spaces differ in at least two ways from the learning organization approaches pioneered a couple of decades ago. First, they emerge as ecosystems across institutions rather than within a single institution, so they reach a much more diverse set of participants. Second, they are not primarily focused on learning their goal is to drive more rapid performance improvement, and learning occurs as a byproduct of these efforts.

The moral of the story? To get better faster at whatever it is you do, you've got to be supported by a broad array of complementary people and resources from which you can pull what you need to raise your rate of performance improvement.

This, in my view, is the goal of each of us. What I found of most interest was the concept of amplifiers and filters in the "attraction" step. Your social media tool(s) of choice can function as the tool to see these concepts become a reality. In the midst of your busy days of family, work, and various interactions please remember that social media tools enable us to both scale and sift our knowledge base to make us more informed and productive.

Organic...Better than Artificial

2010-04-15T21:44:00.007-04:00

I recently noted an blog submission from a co-worker discussing the Technology Adoption Lifecycle utilizing Everett Rogers' Bell Curve (below).

Within her post she discussed how that the curve demonstrates that technology users adopt technologies and tools at differing rates. Therefore, allowing the statistical rate of adoption to take place in an organization was better given that it was organic. She then stated that one would need to, "Trust that organic structures are stronger than artificially forced ones...." After reading her insightful, well written post I realized that she was correct. Anything that is "artificial" has a high probability of not working within an organizational ecosystem, just as it would not in a natural ecosystem. I then replied to the post with this comment, hoping to increase that trust by providing a quick look at, at least in my view, why organic structures are stronger. In short, I took a page from nature itself.

First, organic structures emerge by leveraging the objects in its environment and therefore better suit the environment. This is dramatically different than an imposed, artificial structure that attempts to change the existing DNA matrix and kills existing organisms (existing ideas and business competitiveness) in the environment.

Secondly, organic structures are more adaptive. Because it is built upon the attributes of its environment, when change in the environment happens it contains the elasticity to "bend without breaking" and can gain an advantage over competing entities.

Finally, because organic structures are more adaptive, more fit organisms (ideas/products/services) emerge more quickly. Artificial structures must first remove competing organisms and then take root in the ecosystem before it can produce the fittest organisms.

Therefore, in my humble opinion, we can rationally and confidently trust that organic structures are stronger than artificially forced ones.

html:checkbox gotcha

2010-04-08T08:59:00.000-04:00

Was in the midst of testing a JSP that utilized the html:checkbox form input and what I quickly noted was that the checkbox values that were unchecked were not calling the settter methods in the JSP's corresponding Action. Upon inquiring with the finer brains in my area, Ahmed, co-worker in the next cube, helped by pointing out that his experience was that unchecked checkboxes are ignored and to handle the default settings in the Form's reset method. Sure enough he was right. Here is an excerpt from Apache's Struts site here:

A problem with a checkbox is that the browser will only include it in the request when it is checked. If it is not checked, the HTML specification suggests that it not be sent (i.e. omitted from the request). If the value of the checkbox is being persisted, either in a session bean or in the model, a checked box can never unchecked by a HTML form — because the form can never send a signal to uncheck the box. The application must somehow ascertain that since the element was not sent that the corresponding value is unchecked.

The recommended approach for Struts applications is to use the reset method in the ActionForm? to set all properties represented by checkboxes to null or false. The checked boxes submitted by the form will then set those properties to true. The omitted properties will remain false. Another solution is to use radio buttons instead, which always submit a value.

It is important to note that the HTML specification recommends this same behavior whenever a control is not "successful". Any blank element in a HTML form is not guaranteed to submitted. It is therefor very important to set the default values for an ActionForm? correctly, and to implement the reset method when the ActionForm? might kept in session scope.

What Level Are You?

2010-03-11T09:20:00.002-05:00

With the advent of personal computer technology in general and social media specifically, everyone is a potential “media mogul.” The question becomes, what level of intimacy do you want with your audience? The graphic below, from http://loichay.tumblr.com/post/178728159/10-levels-of-intimacy-in-todays-communication, shows us 10 levels of intimacy using various forms of media available to us. Let’s look at each level starting with 1 and working up to level 10.

Levels 1 and 2 – These levels enable us to communicate with large amounts of people. In a nutshell, social media has made mass communication the purview of the individual. What was once the domain of traditional broadcast media, the common person can now take part and “social-media cast” to thousands. While this level allows one to scale to more people, obviously it is not intimate. The value here is casual contact with the masses. In this venue, clubs and civic organizations can make meeting announcements at virtually no cost.

Another value of levels 1 and 2 is the amount of either positive or negative“buzz” that tools such as Facebook and Twitter provide. For example, you purchased a product and it is not working correctly. You contact customer service but they are apathetic to your plight and give you the normal spiel that, “You can only return the product on the third Tuesday of each month between 1:35 and 1:40 PM with the receipt and a notarized statement promising both your right arm and first born child.” However, because of Twitter and Facebook you now have additional channels and leverage. You tweet (on Twitter) and post a status (on Facebook) about your less than satisfactory experience with the vendor. Others read of your situation and enter the fray. If the vendor is smart, they monitor the “twitterverse” and “facebookdom” looking to remedy what could be a potential run-away PR problem.

Levels 3 and 4 – I put these levels together given that both a Facebook message and traditional email are “push” technologies that do not require real-time interaction. The idea here is that you to not require an immediate response and can send or push the message to the intended recipient(s) and wait for the response at the convenience of the responder(s).

Levels 5 and 6 – Real-time communication is of a higher level of intimacy in that it requires your attention “then and there” and is therefore more intimate. The only difference in these levels is the media. Level 5 is with a mobile hand-held device and level 6 with a device (desktop or laptop computer) that provides a larger form-factor of view and keyboard input. While some would argue that the form-factor size is of no barrier, the larger form-factor, in my view, allows for a more intimate experience.

Level 7 – Here—the handwritten letter—appears to be a dying media. The fact that effort must be made to handwrite the message, the time it takes in forethought to prepare (given that editing a handwritten letter is not easy, especially with a pen), and the tangible properties of the letter (texture and smell of the paper) make this a more personal media.

Level 8 – While this level is difficult to scale, unless you are conferenced into a group or on a speaker phone with a group, this one-on-one media is real-time and auditory. You hear the person which provides a level of intimacy not achieved in the previous levels.

Level 9 – This level is considered more intimate than the lower levels given that the person or persons that you are speaking with are able to be viewed. With technologies such as Skype and an inexpensive webcam, we can achieve a high level of intimacy in spite of geographic location.

Level 10 – The most initiate level is face-to-face, physical presence. Here you have visual and an auditory exchange of signals as well as tactile contact. This results in a more direct attention to the person(s) with which you are communicating.

In summary, humanity has always operated on different levels of intimacy in various environments and settings. With the internet and social media, we have more avenues to operate within these levels of intimacy. More opportunities means learning which media is appropriate for which situation, is it good for personal or professional use, or what are the emerging social norms for the media. Again, what level are you?

Your Consumed Information--Useful and Valuable?

2010-03-07T20:37:00.000-05:00

With the torrent of information coming at us it is useful to ask, "Is the information I ingest beneficial?" Below is hopefully a helpful quadrant to assist in the determination of the use and value of your information:

Every Garage or Computer--an Industrial Player

2010-02-14T22:04:00.002-05:00

This month's Wired magazine has an interesting article, In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits. In this piece the magazine's editor Chris Anderson discusses how with the availability of free or affordable software tools and outsourcing, a home garage or wannabe inventor has the potential to be a viable industrial manufacturer. Good stuff!

Dynamic Java String Array

2010-02-03T18:25:00.003-05:00

A business needed to split data elements in the display to it's customers via a report. Since the data was returned from the Java Data Access Object layer as a String array, the quickest way was to detect an existing data item and then insert what the business wanted to display in the report for that data item.

Here is an example of what I did to dynamically insert items into a Java String array:


public class DynamicStringArray {
public static void main(String[] args){
 String[] originalArray = {"a","b","d"};

 System.out.println("----- Original String Array ----"); 
 for(int i = 0; originalArray.length > i; i++){
   System.out.println(originalArray[i]);
 }

 //create a fixed-size ArrayList from the String array.
 ArrayList oldList = new ArrayList(Arrays.asList(originalArray));
 //create an ArrayList to hold the inserted items.
 ArrayList newList = new ArrayList();

 //assume no "b" in the array
 boolean hasB = false;

 //check if the array has a "b"
 for(int i = 0; originalArray.length > i; i++){
   if(originalArray[i].equalsIgnoreCase("b")){
     hasB = true;//we have a "b" Houston
   }
 }  

 if(hasB){//the array has a "b"
   for(int i = 0; oldList.size() > i; i++){
     if(oldList.get(i) == "b"){//found "b"
      newList.add(i,"newB");//replace "b" with "NewB"
      newList.add(i + 1,"c");//add "c"
     }else{//not "b"
      newList.add(oldList.get(i));
     }
   }
 }

 //create new String array
 String[] newArray = new String[newList.size()];
 newList.toArray(newArray);
 //pass new String array to old String array
 originalArray = newArray;

 System.out.println("----- Updated String Array -----"); 
 for(int i = 0; originalArray.length > i; i++){
   System.out.println(originalArray[i]);
 }

}
}

The above code results in the following:

Security Management - Better to be loved or feared?

2010-01-03T18:46:00.003-05:00

Recently I created a fictional case study that discussed management styles when dealing with internal security threats.

Click here to read and then let me know your thoughts.

5 exabytes in the last 2 days. We better get busy!

2009-09-25T21:14:00.005-04:00

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, at a talk given at a forum jointly hosted by Google and the Pittsburgh Technology Council, stated that the amount of data generated from the birth of humanity to the year 2003 was 5 exabytes (point 8:30 of the talk). The date of the presentation was September 23, 2009. Schmidt, then stated that given the connectivity we now have the amount of data generated the last 2 days was equal to these 5 exabytes. What!!!???!??!?! An exabyte is one quintillion bytes. Just within the last year could you buy a 1 to 4 terabyte hard drive. An exabyte is 1,048,576 terabytes or 1,073,741,824 gigabytes, i.e a lot of data!

OK. We may have generated that amount of data the last few days. And do not misunderstand me. I realize there is intelligence in that data. And yes, let it instruct and assist us. But my thinking is that the 5 exabytes in the last several thousand years is of much better quality and substance that the 5 exabytes in the last 2 days, right? If not, then the quality and substance is hidden therein and let us get busy and mine it out!

Digital Utopia--Free?

2009-08-19T13:29:00.002-04:00

Was considering purchasing the Kindle version of the new book by Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price and looked for reviews (An ironic note is that I fully understood that I would have to pay for the digital version of the book). In my search of reviews, I did find the "free" review by Malcolm Gladwell at The New Yorker.

Gladwell discusses that Lewis Strauss, the former head of the Atomic Energy Commission, famously predicted in the mid-nineteen-fifties, due to the advent of nuclear energy, that “our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.” Gladwell then states, "It is pointless to wonder what would have happened if Strauss’s prediction had come true while rushing past the reasons that it could not have come true."

Strauss appeared not to consider the cost of the infrastructure of energy distribution. In a similar way, with the phenomenum of YouTube, "A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube’s bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars."

Time will tell but the Achilles' heel, at least for now, that I see for a Digital Utopia of "Free" is the "cost" of distribution. Bandwidth, batteries, e-readers all cost money.

@Erlanger911 offers a nice twitter service for Erlanger, KY residents

2009-08-03T12:50:00.001-04:00

@Erlanger911 offers a nice twitter service for Erlanger, KY residents in that it provides traffic and emergency service based tweets.

Posted via email from m2web's posterous

Look mom I sent this from Posterous.com!

2009-06-18T00:51:00.002-04:00

Here is a sweet service. Posterous.com. Send to Facebook, Twitter, and your Blogger blog from e-mail.

I uploaded the Sisyphus the Software Developer image via an attachment!

Posted via email from m2web's posterous

IBM's Many Eyes Data Visualization Project

2009-05-02T00:20:00.001-04:00

Per a previous post where I show my Facebook friend social graph, I mention that the social graph displays "more" information than a grid of your Facebook friends' pictures. In short, data visualization can help us analyze data and more easily notice patterns. IBM's Center for Social Software is doing this with their Many Eyes Project. Here is a blurb:

It is that magical moment we live for: an unwieldy, unyielding data set is transformed into an image on the screen, and suddenly the user can perceive an unexpected pattern. As visualization designers we have witnessed and experienced many of those wondrous sparks. But in recent years, we have become acutely aware that the visualizations and the sparks they generate, take on new value in a social setting. Visualization is a catalyst for discussion and collective insight about data.

Check it out

Twitter - knowledge or data?

2009-04-27T17:14:00.002-04:00

In a blog post entitled, Dull Networks? How microblogging might turn the wisdom pyramid upside down, Miguel Encarnação presents concerns that the brevity of microblog messages such as Twitter may circumvent the way we process data into more useful forms of knowledge. He provides examples:

Data represents a fact or statement of event without relation to other things.
Ex: It is raining.
Information embodies the understanding of a relationship of some sort, possibly cause and effect.
Ex: The temperature dropped 15 degrees and then it started raining.
Knowledge represents a pattern that connects and generally provides a high level of predictability as to what is described or what will happen next.
Ex: If the humidity is very high and the temperature drops substantially the atmosphere is often unlikely to be able to hold the moisture so it rains.
Wisdom embodies more of an understanding of fundamental principles embodied within the knowledge and is essentially systemic.

In my view, even with the 140 character limit, tweets can be and often are more than bits of data. In my view, they are bytes of knowledge. The example of knowledge in Miguel's post is: "If the humidity is very high and the temperature drops substantially the atmosphere is often unlikely to be able to hold the moisture so it rains" This is 146 characters. This can easily be shortened to: "If the humidity is very high and the temp drops substantially the atmosphere is often unable to hold the moisture so it rains" which is 130 characters and can be tweeted. Moreover, tweets can and often do contain links to other websites that contain full explanations on the topics referenced.

In fairness, Miguel is correct that information received on microblogs such as Twitter, as all information sources, need to be closely examined and verified.

In summary, tweets, if used properly can augment both knowledge and wisdom.

Facebook GreaseMonkey Scripts for a better view in Firefox

2009-04-05T23:40:00.002-04:00

Was scoping out my Twitter feed when I noted a tweet that I follow from Atul Arora. The link went to a Jeff Smith’s blog that discussed Facebook tweaks with GreaseMonkey. GreaseMonkey allows you to customize the way a web page displays using JavaScript. Via the highlighted scripts I was able to get a more desirable viewing experience on Facebook.

Click here for the full article with screen shots and links.

Fittest CMOs and Business Intelligence from Social Media

2009-04-02T20:39:00.003-04:00

Recently, in my Marketing Management class for the Master's in Business Informatics program at NKU I had to write two short research papers that were part of the course's two initial exams. In each of the papers, we were given three to five days to research and complete. Here is an excerpt from the first paper entitled Survival of the Fittest CMOs:

Given the rapidly "evolving" role of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), one paradigm to consider when surveying the swiftly changing CMO phenomenon is to look at natural ecosystems and how ever changing environment pressures facilitate the change or evolution of the organisms in those ecosystems. In this paper, we examine the characteristics of the "primitive" CMO, the new environmental pressures challenging the CMO, and finally the fitness factors that are involved in the survival of the fittest CMOs.

Here is Survival of the Fittest CMOs.

Here is a section of the second paper, Business Intelligence from Social Media:

Given the need for understanding the trends and patterns exhibited in data, utilizing the data in a way that can provide a competitive edge is vital. Three particular products or opportunities for this need are systems to store the data, systems to warehouse the data, and systems to mine the data for analysis and decision making. Data storage is a well understood concept of the use of computer systems to store customer information and transactions as well as other business related data. However, data in a data warehouse is different that the data stored by point-of-sale systems.

Here is Business Intelligence from Social Media.

Favorite Software Dev April Fools Joke

2009-04-01T17:03:00.003-04:00

Here is my favorite April Fools software developer related joke: The "Phails" Web Framework at http://phails.com/ . Released on April 1st of course!

Visual Facebook Social Graph

2009-03-21T23:57:00.006-04:00

Was reading about social networks in the NKU project management course textbook that I am currently taking and thought to myself there has got to be an application that you can use to login to Facebook and have it gather your social graph or "Friend" data and produce a visual social graph. A few minutes on Google and what I found was the Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform from Curl along with a sample application called CurlGraph.

Long story short, after downloading their Run Time Environment (RTE) and pasting a URL into the address field of my browser, I installed the CurlGraph application on my system. Then after logging into Facebook with the app, it collected my Friends network info and then produced the following social graph visualization.

Click on the pic to get the larger image.

The neat thing about the app is that I could select anyone represented on the graph and they would then move to the center of the display. You could drag your friends around on the display and sort your social graph by alphabet or by popularity. Note that your Facebook friends are represented as circles. Also the popularity, or size of the circle, is based on the intersection set of friends that you have in common with each friend not on their total set of friends. That is why my wife's circle is large as we have nearly the same set of Facebook friends. Also note that while the bold lines connect my friends to me, the web of relationships that exist from all the friends is visible. This changes when you select a friend with your mouse as the connecting lines from them to your other friends then become bold.

In summary, I find it interesting when finding different ways to visualize data. This certainly tells you more about your Facebook Friend network than a grid of pictures.

Here is Curl's press:

Using Curl, developers can implement a new class of complex, business-critical, Web-based applications that cannot easily be developed with Ajax or other smart client technologies.

Curl allows organizations with legacy client-server applications to move to Web-based delivery, increasing reach, improving processes, accelerating productivity and reducing cost.

Customer driven #marketing? Now that's an #idea! for #social products.

2009-03-21T15:43:00.001-04:00

Social computing as an interface between the business and their customers as a mechanism for product ideas and input? Go to http://ping.fm/f3ujg.

From Bill Taylor's Practically Radical Blog at HarvardBusiness.org. In lean times, there's nothing more valuable than a great new product idea. Why not invite your customers to share their creativity with your company -- and turn the best ideas into actual products! That's what legendary shoe designer John Fluevog has done, with a project he calls open-source footwear.

Status Last 10 List for Facebook

2009-02-25T21:11:00.003-05:00

Just finished the final touches on a new Facebook application I entitled, "Status Last 10."

In a nutshell, the app displays a list of your last ten status messages that you entered into Facebook. You can display the list on your Wall or Boxes Tab. Much of the blogoshpere speculates that Facebook opened their status API to compete with Twitter.

In any event, the app is coded in PHP. The next step will be to show the code once I get the refactorings completed and share the discoveries. More to come once I get the time.

People are not shapes on a diagram....they're people

2009-02-12T20:45:00.003-05:00

Was listening to the Manager Tools Podcast in which they were discussing the fact that while we may plan and plan we must, the aspect of managing a project is really about the people involved. Moreover, the various diagrams that we create during the project inception and elaboration may be neat and pretty, the reality of working the steps are anything but that.

During the discussion they cited a poem from Stephen Vincent Benét entitled John Brown's Body dealing with the U.S. Civil War. Here is the relevant section:

If you take a flat map
And move wooden blocks upon it strategically,
The thing looks well, the blocks behave as they should.
The science of war is moving live men like blocks.
And getting the blocks into place at a fixed moment.
But it takes time to mold your men into blocks
And flat maps turn into country where creeks and gullies
Hamper your wooden squares.  They stick in the brush,
They are tired and rest, they straggle after ripe blackberries,
And you cannot lift them up in your hand and move them.
--A string of blocks curling smoothly around the left
Of another string of blocks and crunching it up--
It is all so clear in the maps, so clear in the mind,
But the orders are slow, the men in the blocks are slow
To move, when they start they take too long on the way--
The General loses his stars and the block-men die
In unstrategic defiance of martial law
Because still used to just being men, not block-parts.