132 replaces 42 as the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

I wonder if FrankArr has picked up on this little bit of trivia. Tonight at midnight, in one hour and forty two minutes Foxtel in Australia will be launching their local SciFi Channel. This is the single event that I hoped would happen ever since I subscribed to Foxtel on cable back in 1998.

You can download the program guide for the SciFi channel in PDF format, and for those of you who need to be able to flick to the SciFi as soon as they walk in the door – the channel designation is 132. Since watching the SciFi channel is going to take up so much of my life I thought it would be fun to divide the number 132 by 42 – guess what, the result is π (Pi), or at least as close as you can get to it when all you can deal with is whole numbers.

Is this a coincidence? I don’t think so, I think that there is a geek hiding somewhere in Foxtel which has “made it so” – and I think that this bodes well for the SciFi channel here in Australia.

Hugo on Dr. Neil’s Notes

I am listening to Dr. Neil and Hugo Ortega on the Dr. Neil’s Notes podcast. I was disappointed to hear that Hugo hasn’t made the leap to Vista on his day-to-day Tablet which is the same as mine (Fujitsu Lifebook T4210 – actually I note that the T4215 is out and can take up to 4GB of RAM!).

Anyway – Hugo – I’ve been blazing the Vista trail for you mate. I’ve got screen rotation working, the only thing missing for me now is Bluetooth stack support from Toshiba, and I think that is out in December. If you have a JasJar you could use this driver to get USB modem support going.

Fantastic article on “managing upwards”.

I was reading James Snape’s blog and found this link to “training your IT manager” by Phil Factor (what a cool name) over on the simple-talk site. In my experience you need to help make the people around you successful, that includes your manager. You can shine brightly yourself for a little while but at the end of the day it takes a team to do the job properly – especially in this industry where the body of knowledge is HUGE.

Amazon Web Services, don’t forget about BigSafeBox.

I found this great article on the Amazon Web Services platform including their queuing, storage and compute cloud facility. The focus was on how companies are making successful businesses using these services. Mentioned were a few companies that are providing backup services which use the S3 storage system. I thought it was a crime that BigSafeBox wasn’t mentioned in the article.

BigSafeBox is the brain child of Akshay Luther who is based here in Australia. What I liked about Akshay’s solution was how brain dead simple it was to use. The fact that it is a .NET application is also a bonus!

Three years blogging.

Yesterday was my third blogiversary – you know, the anniversary of when I started blogging. Ironically I didn’t manage to squeeze a post out yesterday, mostly because I was on tour with the Ready Summit and had to catch flights and respond to other e-mails. Enough excuses!

Since I started blogging three years ago I have made 1,329 seperate posts with a total of 2,039 comments. This year saw me move from my first blogging engine (.Text) to WordPress, and I suspect in the new year I will probably change blogging engines again – in fact, I might even change the name and focus of my blog, or maybe I will just do two blogs (maybe I am already but you don’t know?).

10 minute e-mail addresses.

Greg Low sent around an e-mail today pointing to this NetworkWorld about a free site that has been setup to send and receive e-mails for addresses that only last for ten minutes. While not new, it is a pretty good idea, especially when you need to provide your e-mail address to someone. There are a few possible uses for this, one is being more anonymous, another is limiting the amount of spam that you receive.

Actually, I have a friend called Adrian McElligott who has built a piece of software that generates unique e-mail addresses that only differ by case. The idea is that unless the incoming e-mail has the address that uses the right capitalisation scheme for the sender address, then it is routed to the spam folder. He also does spam filtering based on the geographical location of the sender. The theory is that a large number of people only receive e-mails from people within the certain geographical radius (wouldn’t work for everyone – but if it works for you then it rocks).

The eleventh reason jubling reckons everyone should learn C.

I found this link to ten reasons every programmer should learn C. Some of the items on the list are inaccurate, or misleading at best. Given that I decided to add to the list:

You should learn C because that is what I learnt and I don’t want to feel like a dinosaur when 80% of the worlds programmers have moved on to more productive pastures.

Did I just light a fuse?

 

Storing gigabytes on a piece of paper.

Wow – is this for real? Looks like this chap is using symbols and a printer to generate a sheet of paper with a large amount of information embedded onto it. It will be interesting to see if this catches on. As a read-only format I guess it needs to run the gauntlet just like all the other formats do. I think that the cost of read-only media hasn’t been an issue for some time, but the cost and availability of drives seems to be more of an issue.

Update: Related link.

Online RSS Reader Usage

Stuart Brown over on the “modern life is rubbish” site/blog/whatever has posted up an article about who is using what to read RSS. He shows a breakdown of he readers (mostly online).

I think that one thing that will start skewing these results is applications that sit on top of RSS platforms like the one built into Windows Vista. I think when developers start targetting that technology a lot of this stuff is going to look like it is coming from Internet Explorer 7.0.

Controlling Processes vs. Facilitating Outcomes

I wonder how many people in the workforce know the difference between controlling processes and facilitating outcomes. My guess would be not many. If you look at how people are introduced to a role today they tend to be given a walkthrough of the processes that they have to follow to get their job done – the outcome might be mentioned but the important thing is “the process” – you know, that thing between you and the outcome.

Let us imagine that we have the following grid which represents the start of a process, and he outcome, along with some intermediate steps.

The steps in the process have been wired up such that each piece is executed sequentially, even though it is possible that some of those steps dont need to performed – the have just “always been done that way”.

Along comes your impatient person and identifies that they can have the outcome that they want just by bypassing the other steps in the proces – they are outcome focused.

The problem with being outcome focused is that process steps can sometimes produce outcomes in their own right. For example – lets say that I have just gone out and purchased a laptop outside of the standard corporate procurement process and have expensed the device. The problem is that the standard procurement process included steps to notify the accounting department that we now have a new asset.

So – who is right? The process controller (procurement officer), or the outcome facilitator (the person with the credit card). You will probably never get agreement on which way is best but what is for certain is that there is a perception that “the process” is too slow and long winded.

What if it was possible to optimised the process? Over years of operation many processes explicit steps which are no longer required, yet the people executing the process don’t know that (especially common where there is no feedback mechanism). Through a process of continual refinement it may be possible to eliminate uncessary steps in the process.

One way to do this is to be explicit about the outcome that each step involves. For example – if we take the ficticious laptop procurement process we could spell it out like this.

1. Identify laptop the purchase, this ensures that you are getting the laptop that meets your requirements.
2. Send laptop cart to procurement officer who will then check the order for minimum specifications and make the purchase on the corporate card, this means you don’t have to use your own credit card.
3. When the laptop is received send the serial numbers to the accounting department. This will allow them to depreciate the asset over time and arrange any necessary insurances.
4. Enjoy your new laptop!

I think that this helps everyone because unless you can explain why a particular step in the process is performed and what value it adds then it is a candidate for being dropped.

Now – with systems like SharePoint 2007 natively supporting Workflow we need to be careful not to turn the entry points into our processes into a black hole. A workflow should be as transparent as possible so that when someone kicks it off they know when to expect a result and what they can do if they need to try and make it go faster.