antipaucity

Recently came across a seriously funky issue with one of HP’s products (don’t laugh – I know there’s loads of funkiness in HP tools).

HP Cloud Service Automation allows you to schedule requests in the future. It also allows you schedule end dates for subscriptions.

That’s neat.

Here’s the problem: if you delete a Service Offering (which allows something to be requested in the CSA catalog) while an active subscription is using it – any active subscriptions get delinked, and become unmanageable with the tool.

Now the dopey scheduler comes into play.

CSA’s scheduler works by putting all future items into a FIFO queue. What this ends up meaning is that if you have an item that fails (because, for example, you’re now past a scheduled end date, but the subscription is unlinked from an offering, so it can’t unprovision it), all other pending items fail, too. Even ones that should happen “immediately” – because “immediately” is still added to the scheduling queue… behind the erroring item(s). And since those items have errored, nothing can move forward.

This is stupid. (And yes – RFEs have already been filed over these problems in the product.)

Instead, have the scheduler put all items into a table – at the appointed time, iterate through the table and run everything you can – if it won’t run, flag it as an error, and move on.

This is how cron works. Why would you not use a commonly-accepted, reliable way of doing things? Oh yeah – you’re HP.

If you’re planning to write something for your product/software/tool – see if anyone else has done it before, and then try to mimic methods that work… please!

I learned recently that my wonderful wife was never taught how to use a dictionary, thesaurus, almanac, or encyclopedia as a child in school.

Not all of that can be because she went to public school whereas I was homeschooled. Nor can it merely be that she grew up in KY and I in NY.

I’ve seen myriad others younger than her that can’t use those resources, either

Most people have the basics of how to search online down – but barely the basics^*. In many ways, I think online tools are killing our ability to think critically in some areas – learning to ask questions well is one of those areas..

Why are these tools still important in a digital age? Well, what do you do when you need to find something and you don’t have your iPhone, Android, tablet, laptop, etc handy? Do you wait until you have internet access again?

What about when you are looking for something at a library or book store – do you exclusively rely on the staff’s knowledge to help you find what you want, or can you start to locate it yourself?

Part of the problem is that schools, because of the misguided legislation that is NCLB, all teach to the test. Tests can be wonderful tools – but they have no bearing at all on the “real world“. Your ability to score a perfect ACT, ASVAB, GRE, SAT, etc means precisely bupkis.

Being able to find what you need when you need it once you’re out of school, however, will be your daily lifeline to keep from drowning at work and in life.

I remember many times having to learn how to use new reference materials – and how to use ones I already had been introduced to in better, more efficient ways (I still look for better ways to find what I need with tools I have). I remember an entire class day devoted to learning what an almanac is (the Information Please, to be specific), and then doing “information scavenger hunts” through it (for prizes, mind you – yes, my team won first place).

I remember learning how to use the Funk & Wagnalls and Britannica Encyclopædias (my aunt owned the Britannica, my parents the F&W). I remember learning how to use World Book at the library.

I also remember my first semester at HVCC in 1999 where we went to the school library to learn how to search for materials online for our English class – and no one knowing what search engines were … nor even how to use the catalog the school had!

I think that was my first worry about the state of education and how ill-prepared most people are out of high school to be ready to function in further schooling. And I have only seen it get worse.

There is a fundmental breakdown in the education system in the United States. Is a solution redecentralizing? Homeschooling? Montessori? Private/parochial schools? Eliminating teacher unions^{^}? Performance pay for teachers?

I think all of those will play important roles in improving the future of the country.

Something needs to be done – because the state of education today is very bad.

For the record: my wife does know how to reference materials at least at a cursory level – but those skills weren’t learned until she had to have them in college.

^{* _{search is broken, but that’s another problem}
^ _{specifically, abuse of power, lobbying, etc}}

Law 6

Everything is judged by its appearance; what is unseen counts for nothing. Never let yourself get lost in the crowd, then, or buried in oblivion. Stand out. Be conspicuous, at all costs. Make yourself a magnet of attention by appearing larger, more colorful, more mysterious than the bland and timid masses. –Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power (review)

One of the biggest issues facing Western societies is that they are all consumption-oriented.

Not enough time is spent creating – all [most] people want to do is consume: entertainment, food, money, fun…

We all want shortcuts. We all want to be at the level where we don’t have to think to accomplish work. We all want to have fun instead of working. Some of us have fun while working, but most people just want the day off.

One of the biggest drawbacks to a consumption-based economy (like most western economies – and certainly how the United States’ economy is currently structured), is that consumers feel compelled to consume ever more. We have to have the next best thing out there. Keeping up with the Joneses.

I think far too few people create in our society, because it is so much easier to consume.

I know I don’t create nearly as much as I consume – I wish I did, but I don’t … yet. One of my personal goals is to move that balance in my life more towards the creating end from the consuming one – little things along the way certainly help: mentoring, teaching, volunteering, growing a garden, etc.

What ways do you see that folks can create more and consume either less in gestalt, or at least less from others because they’re contributing themselves?

Law 5

Reputation is the cornerstone of power. Through reputation alone you can intimidate and win; once it slips, however, you are vulnerable, and will be attacked on all sides. Make your reputation unassailable. Always be alert to potential attacks and thwart them before they happen. Meanwhile, learn to destroy your enemies by opening holes in their own reputations. Then stand aside and let public opinion hang them. –Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power (review)

Knowledge capture, retention, and dissemination has been an interest of mine for a long time. I have written about various aspects of it before.

The most vital commodity any organization has is the knowledge of its members – it does not matter if it is a historical society, company, church, or school: the organizational knowledge base is vital to ongoing health of the organization.

I love the picture of the “Tree of Wisdom“: at the ground there is a meadow of data, from this data information roots are gathered, the roots grow into knowledge branches, and at the end is the application of that knowledge in wisdom leaves.

Data is easy to come by.

Information similarly so.

Knowledge, taking information and transforming it into a more-usable form, is important.

When to apply that knowledge – aka using wisdom – is the topic for another post.

Capturing Knowledge

There are a host of available tools for capturing knowledge – text files, brown bags, PowerPoint, SharePoint, blogs, Plone, wikis, etc. The “best” on to use is the one you use.

Culture

Getting team members to contribute to organizational knowledge pools can be difficult – unless it is an organizational priority .. a part of the organization’s culture.

Incorporating this culture switch (if it’s not already innate to the organization) needs to be done not merely as a top-down directive, but encouraged via bottom-up interest.

Retaining (Managing) Knowledge

Now that you’ve captured (or started capturing) the organization’s data, managing it becomes the next task of import.

For example, should the KB article written 5 years be updated, replaced, or left alone?

Who is responsible for managing all of the information that has been collected? Will it be self-managed and -directed, will there be a curation team, will it be a combination?

Who determines the process for taking “internal” knowledge and “promoting” it to “outside” knowledge?

How are these roles going to be managed as the team changes memberships through people leaving, entering, and shifting in the organization?

For extremely small organizations, formal curation may be unnecessary. Perhaps since everyone knows everyone else, or the knowledge domain is so small, everyone’s individual contributions will remain fairly static and the “promotion” path will merely be proofreading (eg a historical society’s archives – the archives may be extensive, but the material doesn’t ‘change’ all that much (excepting being added-to, of course)).

For very big organizations (like the MSDN documentation available on microsoft.com), many layers of curation are likely going to be needed – proofreading, formatting, verifying, etc.

Finding the right balance of self-direction and organizational management can be tricky.

Disseminating Knowledge – Getting The Word Out

All of the captured knowledge in the world is useless if you can’t find it – and knowing where to look is vital. A close second to knowing where to look is how to find it.

Where is it?

There needs to be a solid document, landing page, directory, table of contents, etc so that new members (or folks who forget) can find the tribal knowledge that exists ion the organization.

As a part of the new-hire\introduction\etc process\period, be sure to tell new members where information can be found, and who to talk to about certain major topics.

Finding it once you know where to look

“Search is a hard problem.” Google’s own Udi Manber said that. Anna Paterson at Stanford wrote, “Writing Your Own Search Engine Is Hard”.

Search in general may be hard, but many tools handle at least basic (and some fuzzy) searching well – OSQA, WordPress, Plone, Drupal, and many others. If, in addition to categorization, a tag taxonomy is employed, quickly finding content relevant to the searcher’s wants\needs.

“A tag is a keyword or label that categorizes your question with other, similar questions. Using the right tags makes it easier for others to find and answer your question.” {SO description}

Knowledge contributors should be the primary agents of tagging. However, consumers should be able to suggest additional tags. Administrators\curators should be able (under unusual, but well-defined, circumstances) to remove tags.

The human factor

For any given topic / knowledge region in the organization’s realm, there need to be established “experts” and “mentors” who will help guide new individuals through the fog to locate the buoys to be able to navigate themselves into a clearer understanding of the new world they have been made a part of.

Apprenticing upcoming experts into the organization is the single most vital aspect of the knowledge capture process – if it is not disseminated, it doesn’t matter if it is captured.

I have a very long-term interest in education.

As I look at the current public education “system” in the US, I can see a variety of major problems.

The biggest problem, endemic of any system built around the premise that the only people who should be together all day long should all be “similar”. Somewhere along the way, we decided it would be a Good Idea™ to split children into monocultures of more-or-less indentically-aged groups called “grades”, and then batch them into groups of 20-30 and herd them through a variety of subjects every day.

We have lost the concept of learning as exemplified throughout history in the “apprentice” or “disciple” model.

Before the monoculturification of schooling, whole (but small) groups of children were taught together – it’s how my dad’s uncle was taught. From 1st (or K) through 12th all in one room. At any given moment, all ages were either being reminded of earlier work, or hearing about later work, or doing their own work.

This model is still used by the large segment of the population that homeschools (presuming, of course, they have more than one child).

What if we re-adopted this approach to school in the public system? What if, instead of having schools which housed hundreds of students in just a couple grades, we had schools in every neighborhood that had a few dozen students that represent all the grades of the community?

What if schools became “migratory” – in the sense that as the demographics of the community change, the location of the school ‘building’ can shift. Perhaps, for example, in a suburban community the school could be usage of a development community center – but if and when the community has fewer or no children, the school locale could be removed or shifted to a new young demographic area.

Some of the myriad benefits I can envision in such a scenario:

• reduced overhead for any given school in terms of hiring, maintenance, etc
• reduced school board / district overhead – elimination of now-unneeded positions
• increased teacher-to-student engagement
• lower student-to-teacher ratios
• increased student retention as they are continually being reminded of old concepts
• teachers becoming more generalized, rather than [potentially] myopic in their teaching
• team teaching – cutting across disciplines and seeing an integrated view of the world
• improved teaching flexibility
• reduced union strength
• improved connections between teachers and the community they serve
• more well-rounded graduates
• reduced / eliminated busing
• decreased prevalence of bullying
• increased likelihood of teachers living near/in the communities they serve

Some of the antibenefits I could envision:

• loss of school sporting teams
• forced generalization of teachers
• more complex IT support infrastructure (if managed by a central authority such as the board or district)

I eagerly anticipate your feedback – what do you think?

After several years of pushing all of my personal email into Gmail, I’ve decided that relying [almost] exclusively on one provider is just not the best idea ever.

Google is great. But, as with any cloud service, exclusively relying on just one provider is not the best.

Going forward, I am going to be relying on my own server (which I have been indirectly for several years), as well as Yahoo. And Microsoft Live for Domains (which is freely available the way Google Apps used to be).

I love cloud computing – right now, it’s a major component of my job function. But it’s not a panacea. Everything has its place, cloud computing included.

So, I am not saying “goodbye” to Google. I’m just saying “hello” to others

Shortcuts.

Shortcuts are great.

But only when you know the long way.

Without hard work, the short cut will seem hard.

Passive income seems to fall into this category.

Some people think panhandling is a form of passive income. It’s not. The panhandler works for his money – he talks to people, shakes a cup, whatever: he gets your attention, and tries to make you give him what he wants.

I have a Google AdSense account. I am also an affiliate with a few other places. I put Amazon links into some of posts. From those links, if any purchase is made, I get a small percentage back.

But they are NOT a business.

They’re a shortcut. They’re fantastic – but in the last several years of having an AdSense account, I have yet to see a check from Google. In the past several years of having an Amazon affiliate account, I’ve paid for about three books.

You hear of high-volume sites that make all their money off advertising revenue – advertising may or may not be “passive”. But to maintain a high-volume site takes work. Hard work. Lots of it.

You [generally] don’t magically get traffic just because you are the smartest person in the world (I should know, I get on the order of only a few dozen hits per week! )

You get – and keep – traffic because you have content or a service that people want to use. That they rely on. That they interact with in some meaningful way.

My friend Jay maintain[ed|s] AIMFix. For quite a while, it was THE best (and only) tool which would remove viruses which spread via malicious links across IM networks – dominantly AIM. I wrote a small library he used (at least for a while) in that program.

He put a metric butt load of effort into that tool, and made a little money from the “passive” advertising he had on his site.

Then traffic tailed-off, and so did his AdSense revenue.

So many businesses are started online with the premise that they’ll “make money from ads”… with nothing more of a business plan than that. They fail almost universally.

Businesses succeed when they follow the tried-and-true path of “work-deliver-earn”. And, “spend less than you earn” [ref].

If your only plan for earning money is to park a bunch of ads on a domain, you may make a little money for a little while. Especially if you’ve managed to register a reasonable typo domain (eg “antipuacity.com or “antipauctiy.com”).

But you need to have a reason for people to want to come back. To engage. To use what you offer.

Make something I want. Give me a service I need. Provide me with content I’ll return to.

Or maybe, just maybe, build something I can buy and hold.

Law 4

When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original it you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike. Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less. The more you say, the more likely you are to say something foolish. –Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power (review)

Proverbs 17:28

Even a fool, when he keeps silent, is considered wise;
When he closes his lips, he is considered prudent.