Archive for June, 2010
One of the great things about Twitter is that it brings articles to my attention that I wouldn’t otherwise have read. This blog post originated in one of those articles. It’s here - in it, the writer notes that managers and creatives tend to work on different chunks of time for getting things done – for managers hour diary slots are usually adequate, but for creatives an hour barely gives you time to get going. So far so good – I’ve written a Joe’s Jottings piece in which I mention that my own to-do list doesn’t deal in units of time much under half a day.
The writer then goes on to comment on how his organisation – a venture capital outfit – runs it’s diary slots on the ‘maker’ basis rather than the ‘manager’ basis. And turns the whole thing in to a selling point for their services. OK – at one level this is a good example of catering your working practices to your client base, but it started me thinking again about the increasing tendency I’ve witnessed in the last year or so amongst start up companies and those catering for them towards over-complicating what are really quite straight forward and, in some cases, old fashioned, good personal and business management skills and techniques.
I’m just getting a little tired of seeing things that are just this side of bleedin’ obvious being touted as if they were the bastard intellectual offspring of an orgy between Wittgenstein, Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci and Drucker.
I wear a number of hats in my day to day life; I’m a husband, cat-wrangler, consultant, software developer, charity Trustee, line manager, householder, social entrepreneur…you get the picture. Each of these activities requires me to operate in different ways – sometimes I’m working to someone else’s priorities, sometimes to my own. Oddly enough these things all get recorded in the same diary, with prioritisation and time-slots allocated to the job in hand. If there’s a day on which I want to do development work, I block it out in my diary – the things that will shift me from that are family or major line management issues. If I have a board meeting, I block out the morning or afternoon. It’s called time-management, prioritisation and flexibility. It’s an essential component of what is needed to get stuff done in a world that is messy.
It’s important for startups to get used to the idea that sooner or later they’re going to have to get used to dealing with the world the way it is, not the way they’d like it to be. Pandering from VC companies doesn’t help this; people in startups learning the basics of time and diary management and prioritisation will.
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 Ask most people in IT what the most irritating piece of kit in most PC installations is, and they’ll usually say ‘printers’ or ‘scanners’ – basically anything mechanical. I think the item in the house that generates the same degree of fear in me is the washing machine. To paraphrase ‘The Two Ronnies’ from my childhood – ‘It’s big, it’s white, it’s shiny and I be afraid of it’.
In our case ‘it’ is an Indesit WD12 automatic washing machine. Under normal circumstances it clicks, whirrs, buzzes, splushes, chugs, and gurgles for an hour or so, makes a final shuddering burble then falls quiet. Last week it changed it’s habits by simply ‘clicking’ through the programme set without actually doing anything.
At this point I did the rather unmanly thing of reading the manual. Apart from the bleedin’ obvious (is it turned on, connected to the water mains and drain and ensure you’re not trying to wash a bag of cement) the manual suggested very little. I then did what we advise 70% of support desk callers to do; turn it off, leave for a while, and then turn it on again. And after that didn’t work, I did what you probably shouldn’t do unless you want to scare yourself daft…typed the symptoms in to Google.
According to the various online sources of information about the problem I described, the washer was in various stages of terminal decline. Phrases like ‘replacement control board’ were bandied around. Quite what I expected to find that would be helpful I wasn’t sure – perhaps a little line or two somewhere that said ‘Turn the switch left 3 places, then right 4 places, and that will do it’. Well, by now I was getting pretty miserable about the whole affair, and had visions of calling out the repair man. So, I decided to do what any self-respecting software engineer would do – turned it off and forgot about it for 2 or 3 days.
I then decided to take one last look before calling out an engineer (who, I had no doubt, would show up, spend 2 minutes poking the inside of the machine before telling me it’s fixed and leaving me £50 the lighter) and thought that I would adopt a similar approach to that that I take when doing debugging of software ‘on site’.
First of all…assemble the source code and documentation
Well, in this case that was the manual and the washing machine itself. So far so good.
Get your tools together
Rather than Eclipse and a debugger, the tools for this exercise consisted of 4 screwdrivers of varying sizes, a large quantity of towels and paper cloths (just in case there was a big pool of water just waiting to get out!)
Go take a look at the source code with confidence
Also known as ‘showing the system (washer) who’s boss. Took the back of the washer off and had a good look around for the hardware equivalents of messy code, mis-configured database connections, excess amounts of commented out ‘dead’ code cluttering the place up and hiding possible faults. Or, in the case of a washing machine…checked that all accessible connections were tight, that the belt was secure on the drum, that the drum could be turned by hand, that the inlet and outlet pipes were clear, etc.
I then took a look at the little drawer where the washing powder is introduced, and after taking it out noticed that it, and the channel under it leading to the washer, were crudded up with washing powder. Let’s say this is the equivalent of one of those bits of dodgy code you find that doesn’t ‘look right’ but you can’t see why it would cause the problem you’re having…
Tidy up the obvious errors
I washed the drawer and got rid of the lumps of washing powder from the channel. Actually, I was chipping deposits off with a screwdriver. I always thought that washing powder was supposed to be water-soluble…maybe not.
Re-compile and re-run
And so the moment of truth – you’ve done some tweaking, tidied up the obvious and we’re ready to give it a whirl. I put the drawer back in, screwed on the back-panel I’d removed (and in a special gesture to the gods of hardware, ensured I didn’t bother putting all the screws back in), connected the machine to water, drain and mains and turned on and stepped well back….and amazingly enough it works!
As Neo might have said in ‘The Matrix’ – ‘I know washing machine maintenance’.
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There’s an old saying that you can neither be too thin or have too much money. I’d like to add to that list – you can’t have too many web servers available on your PC. For the non-geeks amongst you, a web server is a program that runs on a computer to ‘serve up’ web pages. because I write web software for part of my living, I run my own web server on my PC. Actually, that’s not quite true…because there are two main web servers used today – Microsoft’s IIS and Apache – I have two. And today I decided that it would be really useful to have a web server and associated software on a USB stick that I could plug in to computers to demonstrate my web applications out on client sites.
I decided to use the MOWES installation – after all, it’s designed to run on USB sticks – and as well as the standard Apache, PHP and mySQL I decided to also install Mediawiki and WordPress. As well as being used for demonstrations, I decided that I’d also like to have a portable Wiki to use for note taking / book research when I’m on my travels, and run a demonstration instance of WordPress.
Installation
The simplest installation involves putting a package together on the MOWES website, downloading it to your PC and installing it. To get started with this, go to the MOWES Mixer page, click the ‘New Package’ radio button and select what you want to install. For my purposes I chose the full versions of Apache, mySQL 5 , PHP5, ImageMagick, Mediawiki, WordPress, and phpMyAdmin. This selection process is done by ticking the displayed checkboxes – if you DON’T get a list of checkboxes for the ‘New Package’ option, try the site again later – I have had this occasionally and it will eventually give you the ‘ticklist’ screen.
Tick the desired components and download the generated package.
Plug in your USB stick, and unzip and install the MOWES package as per their instructions. First thing to note here is that you may need to keep an eye on any requests from the computer for allowing components access to the firewall. The default settings will be Port 80 for the Apache web server and 3306 for mySQL. If these aren’t open / available – especially the mySQL one – then the automatic install of the packages by the MOWES program will fail miserably.
Once you have the files installed on your memory stick, then you can configure them.
Configuration
If you never intend to run the installation on any PC that has a local Web Server or instance of mySQL, then you don’t need to do anything else in terms of configuration. You might like to take a look at ‘Tidying Up’ section below.
If you ARE going to use the USB Stick on PCs that may have other web servers or mySQL instances running, then it’s time to come up with a couple of ports to use for your USB stick that other folks won’t normally use on their machines. The precise values don’t matter too much – after all, the rest of the world won’t be trying to connect to your memory stick – but be sensible, and avoid ports used by other applications.
I eventually chose 87 for the Apache Web Server, and 4407 for mySQL – 87 fitted with my own laptop where I already have a web server at Port 80 and another one at Port 85, and I run mySQL at the standard port of 3306. NOTE that if you run the installation using an account with restricted privileges, you may not be able to open the new ports you use.
In order to configure the MOWES installation you’ll need a text editor of some sort – Windows Notepad will do at a push. You’ll be editing a couple of files on the USB stick, as follows:
apache2\conf\httpd.conf
Open this file up and look for a line starting with Listen. Change the number following it to the number you’ve chosen for your Apache Port – e.g. 87.
Now look for ‘ServerName’ – change the line to include the Port number – e.g. localhost:87
php5\php.ini
Open this file and find the line starting mysql.default_port. Change the port referenced in this to the Port you have chosen for your mySQL installation. E.g. mysql.default_port=4407
mysql\my.ini
Open the file and look for two lines like port=3306. Change the port number to the one you have chosen – e.g. 4407 – port=4407. There will be two lines like this in the file, one in the [client] section and one in the [server] section.
www\phpmyadmin\config.inc
This is the configuration file for the phpMyAdmin program that provides a graphical user interface on to the mySQL database. Look for a line that starts with : $cfg['Servers'][$i]['port'] and replace the port number in the line with (in this example) 4407.
And that, as they say, is that for the configuration files. You can now start up the MOWES server system by running the mowes.exe program. If all is working, after a few seconds your web browser will be started and will load the ‘home page’ of the MOWES installation. With the configuration carried out in this article, the browser will show the url http://localhost:87/start/ and the page displayed will show links to WordPress, Mediawiki and phpmyadmin.
WordPress Configuration
The final stage of configuration is to make a change to WordPress that allows WordPress to run on a non-standard Apache port. This needs to be done via phpmyadmin, as it involves directly changing database entries. Open phpmyadmin, and then open the wordpress database from the left hand menu.
Now browse the wp_options table. Find the record where option_name is ‘siteurl’ and change the option_value field to (for using a port number of 86) http://localhost:86/wordpress. Now find teh record with option_name of ‘home’ and again change the option_value to http://localhost:86/wordpress.
Tidying Up
You may like to put an autorun.inf file on the root of your memory stick, so that when it is plugged in to a machine it will automatically start the MOWES system (if the machine is so configured). The file can be created with a text editor and should contain the following:
[autorun]
open=mowes_portable\mowes.exe
label=Your Name for the Installation
And that’s that!
Enjoy!
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I came across this rather interesting article from the personal blog of a Pastor in the US recently in which he suggests that Tweeting in Church might be a good idea. Now, I have to admit that I was something of a late adopter with Twitter (and Facebook…and for that matter with SMS texting….yeah, OK, I’m a bit of a Luddite in some respects!) but I have to say that this suggestion surprised me. I’m afraid that when I’m in Church I’m focusing on my own engagement with God, via my participation in the collective experience of the congregation in the church. Which sounds more like an academic treatise than a celebration of faith, but that’s me!
the idea was that by tweeting ‘commentary’ on the sermon and other aspects of the service it could be regarded as a means of evangelising to the outside world and so bringing the Word to others – perhaps, but I think it’s one tweet too far for me. Which then led me on to business meeting tweets, conference tweets, etc.
Perhaps it’s a generational thing but despite having a Blackberry, a Netbook and enough technology at home to sink a small boat, I still go to meetings armed with a pen and paper for note taking. As far as I’m concerned, it’s reliable, no batteries to run out, makes no weird noises, doesn’t force me to think ‘How do I do that?’, will take text, drawings and doodles and isn’t ostentatious. Pen and paper is what I like to call ‘humble technology’ – it does what it says on the tin, no muss, no fuss. I’ve been in meetings recently where iPads have been deployed, tweets have been made (as I found out after leaving the meeting and looking at twitter) with no apparent damage to the business of the meeting…but…looking at my own notes taken in the meetings concerned, I’m wondering whether the meetings were actually needed / useful as my notes are pretty skimpy, and I take good notes.
We then have the recent debacle in the UK where some aspects of an industrial relations negotiation between British Airways and Trades Union representatives was tweeted to the outside world, resulting in a ‘pitch invasion’ of the building where the negotiations were taking place. I’m sorry…negotiations are supposed to be delicate affairs between the parties involved and any mediators. If someone feels they can’t negotiate without doing the equivalent of bellowing from the window, perhaps they need to be in different jobs.
As you can probably tell by now, I’m not a fan. My own rules of Twitter are pretty straight forward:
- If I’m in a meeting, focus on the meeting.
- If I’m at Church, focus on that.
- If I’m at an event and want to tweet, I’ll wait until a ‘natural break’ and do it then.
I recently read a good tip about the etiquette of Texting and Tweeting. Basically, imagine pulling out a crossword puzzle and doing it. If you wouldn’t do that in the situation, then you really should think hard about whether you should tweet / text (emergencies excepted, naturally!!) I was at a social event the other evening and I found that tweeting is sort of like smoking used to be (never smoked so maybe on tenuous ground here…) – it gives you something to do with your hands whilst you’re nervous!
In most meetings, unless you’re there as an observer or reporter tasked with providing a running commentary, I can’t imagine a need to Tweet that can’t wait an hour or so. So just focus on making the meeting effective.
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 Some weeks ago, a story broke about Google recording data about WiFi networks when they were wandering around taking family snapshots with their now infamous fleet of ‘Streetview’ cars. At the time, Google claimed that the information gathered was ‘accidental’ – that rang a few bells with quite a few techies. It’s alike me wandering the streets of Sheffield taking photographs and at the same time ‘accidentally’ running war dialling software so that I can log any WiFi activity in the area. There’s no ‘accidental’ link between digital imaging and WiFi networks, so what the heck were Google up to?
I intended to blog at the time, but life decided to intervene and so I didn’t do the post…which is a shame because of what’s reported here. Google have mapped every WiFi network that was detectable on the routes taken by their StreetView cars. In other words, if your house or office was photographed by Google, they also grabbed bits of data about your WiFi network, if you have one – MAC address, SSID, Channel in use. OK, it may seem that this is pretty much ‘small fry’ in terms of data and privacy, but let’s just take a wider look.
- First of all, Google have breached Data Protection Legislation in virtually every country in which they’ve done this; you’re not supposed to gather information up willy-nilly in this manner.
- Secondly, Google have shows the same sort of respect (or lack of same) for privacy that Facebook have been accused of. In fact, I’d argue that Google’s crimes against privacy are probably worse than Facebook. With Facebook I had a choice to use their site to share my data. Google just whizz along, photograph my property and grab my data whether I like it or not.
- Gathering and storing this data isn’t a by-product of any photographic process; the equipment and process to record and store this data must have been installed deliberatley in the Google Streetview vehicles. Now, no-one does this sort of thing for laughs – so we have to assume that Google carried out an action that cost money, was against Data protection legislation and that they might have suspected would upset people for a particular reason.
- And they actually patented the techniques / technology used. The last one’s a bit of a give away….
What could that reason be?
That, my friends, is the 64 dollar question. Google have ended up with the most comprehensive map of WiFi coverage in the UK that’s ever been compiled. Now, much of that capacity isn’t publicly accessible – i.e. it belongs to folks like me and thee – but it did start me thinking about what a gung-ho, conquer the universe by next Thursday company like Google might do.
What about….
- Gathering data on the different types of router / network in use in domestic and business environments to sell to marketing companies working for hardware manufacturers?
- Spotting ‘dark areas’ in towns where there is no public WiFi – where Google could fill a need, perhaps?
- Gathering information as to WiFi networks in towns that Google might approach to sell advertising to?
- Testing their technology – a dry run to see what they could get, the attitude of the relavant authorities, etc.?
- Testing the possibilities for WiFi network usage by vehicles?
- Checking WiFi security settings on the behalf of ‘other oragnisations’ to see how much effort someone would need to carry out a comprehensive mobile monitoring exercise for WiFi? A little like the TV Detector vans?
Anyone else got any bright ideas?
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