Category Archives: Work

Alfred: Function and Style

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While there have been a few quick launch programs for the Mac (Quicksilver is the most notable), I’ve generally not bothered with them as I was satisfied with OS X’s built-in Spotlight function (the magnifying glass in the top right of the screen). With Apple’s App Store being released for OS X 10.6.6 recently, I was poking around looking for the cream among the collection and ran across Alfred by Running with Crayons, Ltd. My position has changed.

First, Alfred is a well-designed piece of software that displays a nice big dialog when activated by pressing the pre-defined hot-key (the default is opt-space):

The main Alfred dialog

That dialog is where you can perform application and file lookups like you do with Spotlight but the real power is the fact that pre-defined functions allow you to not only do searches of other websites (e.g., Amazon, eBay, WikiPedia, Google, Facebook, etc.) but the ability to add search for any other site that uses a URL-based search method. That is what has sold me. In only a few minutes I added search strings for many internal websites I use at work which will be most convenient.

The application is free but a ‘Powerpack’ add-on is available which adds even more functionality (iTunes control, file manipulation, terminal shortcuts, and others). I’ll be getting that but will wait for it to be available in the App Store. If you ever use Spotlight, give it a try. Plus, the developer’s a LittleBigPlanet fan which gives me even more reason to like it. ;-)

This time I’m headed West

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Tomorrow I’m going on a business trip to Tokyo for the week. It’s kinda exciting since it’s my first time but it is always tough to be away from my family (they don’t like it much either).

Two things come to mind about the trip. First, I’ve been taking Japanese lessons for almost a year. My confidence is rather low on my language abilities, though. I’ll have to force myself to use what I know when I can. If nothing else, I’ll keep my ears open in the hopes that immersion solidifies a lot of the vocabulary that I’m having trouble learning.

The other thing is what happened the last time I travelled internationally. Like with London, I wouldn’t mind an extra week in Japan, but coming back when expected is my preference.

Goodbye, Mocha

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Becky gave me a call today at work to let me know that one of our cats, Mocha, was behaving very oddly and had himself ‘stuck’ in a corner, crying, panting, and not terribly responsive to any interactions. Fortunately, I had already addressed the most important things to accomplish at work, so I was able to come home early. By the time I arrived, he was clearly not going to rebound so we said our goodbye’s and waited for the inevitable.

He was our first ‘child’ with us adopting him the Summer of ’94 shortly after we got married. He was a member of the family even before there was a family. Both kids grew up with him and we all have fond memories of his endearing style of aloofness. A few years ago, we joked that due to the relative ages, all four of our pets then might die somewhat close together. With our dog, Casey, dying last year on Brian’s birthday, it’s not so funny.

So now, we’re down to two. The big dog is healing and bounding around more than I would be if I had stitches in my butt just a few days ago. The other cat, Bella, is probably happy that there’s less competition.

Thanks, Mocha, for the memories. I’m glad he was able to enjoy one last Christmas (he always loved the tree).

For Christmas I gave myself nothing

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I’ve been doing the GTD things for a few years and am a major fan of OmniFocus by the Omni Group (they got my money for my Mac, my iPhone, and iPad). A similar concept pertains to email and that is of Inbox Zero. The concept is basically keeping your email inbox empty by dealing with or deleting each message.

I’ve longed wanted to get down to an empty inbox. About a year ago, I went from a few hundred down to about 100 but getting past was more difficult than I would have imagined.

The last few weeks, I’ve renewed the effort and today successfully got both my personal and work mailboxes down to zero.

The trick, of course, is keeping it empty. I get enough mail both personally and professionally so I will continue to leverage the power of OmniFocus to capture anything I need to deal with but can’t at that moment.

I like finishing the year with nothing. Merry Christmas.

A must-read book for IT

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I just finished a book that I would consider a must-read for anyone that works in the IT field. “A Sysadmin’s Guide to Navigating the Business World” by Mark Burgess and Carolyn Rowland. It’s #23 in the USENIX ‘Short Topics in System Administration‘ series (not yet listed at the time of this writing).

It’s a short book (64 pgs) which is good since I’m a slow reader and have a hard time finding time for print books but I’m glad I made the effort as it couldn’t have come at a better time. One of the primary points of the book is to get your IT shop out of the “rocket” mentality (major effort, one shot) and instead work more like a “747” (reliable, reusable). One of the best ways to do that is to learn more about the business and work to have IT be part of the business rather than just serving it.

Chapters:

  1. The Problem
  2. The Elements of Business
  3. The Science of Value
  4. The Key to Communication
  5. Building a Trusted Partnership
  6. Some Hints and Tips
  7. Conclusion

While it’s short, it’s meaty. I’ll be passing it on to others in the group as we all can learn something from it. For me, I’ll likely get my own copy as I’ll be best served by reading it regularly (at least once-a-year).

Managing IT: What RAID level is your team?

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Friday was the last day for one of the members of the team I manage at work. It was under good circumstances as he’s relocating and moving on to a new opportunity with new challenges to solve. Jokingly, I tweeted about the team now being in a degraded state as one ‘drive’ has been removed. That idea has kept percolating in my head and I’ve realized that rather than just a cute way to refer to an IT team, it really is accurate.

For the uninitiated, RAID, which stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a way to combining multiple disks into a larger collection to present one or more larger volumes, increase the performance, and improve the resiliency should one of the drives fail. Here’s an overview of the three primary RAID levels:

RAID 0 combines two or more disks into a larger volume splitting the contents evenly between them. The benefits are increasing the performance to much more than a single drive as well as increasing the overall capacity. The down-side is that if any single drive fails, all of the data is effectively lost.

RAID 1 combines two disks into a pair where data is written to both drives simultaneously. Capacity is no more than a single drive, but you can lose either drive and still have a complete copy of your data.

RAID 5 combines three or more disks where the data is split between the disks but parity data is calculated and also written to the disk. Performance is good as you can interleave reads between the disks. Resiliency is also good as if any single drive fails, the parity data from the remaining disks can be used to compute the data that is missing.

In any IT shop, you have a collection of skills and backgrounds provided by the members of the team as well as the collection of procedures, resources, and responsibilities that the team must manage. If your team is set up in a RAID 0 configuration, the responsibilities are divided between the members. Each member becomes more and more experienced in the skills they cover but can become more of a liability in the ones they do not. Like in RAID 0, if any one is not available, those responsibilities are gone.

Sure, you could have a team more akin to RAID 1 but I can’t think of any manager that would request (or director that would approve) having two people for every task with one acting as a ‘mirror.’

Personally, I try to strike a balance. Dividing the responsibilities between members, playing on their strengths, but ensuring that everyone is familiar enough with the other things the group-as-a-whole does allows for continuity. Sure, documentation can act as your ‘parity’ but it is exceedingly challenging to maintain complete, accurate, and current documentation.

The group is indeed in a degraded state at the moment, but I am happy to say that nothing should get dropped and it hopefully won’t last long. I’m truly fortunate to manage a group of guys skilled enough to take on almost anything thrown at them.

Measure Twice, Cut Once

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This past weekend was an opportunity to get to quite a few things that I’ve been neglecting for a bit. One of them was replacing the trim on the door in the downstairs bathroom.

(flashback, for context)

Our dog, Patrick (who we lovingly refer to as “Big, dumb, dork-dog”) likes to chase the cats. Years ago, while we were out, he tried chasing one into the bathroom and ended up closing himself in. Not liking enclosed spaces, he tried to get himself out. Without thumbs, of course, his only option was to scratch his way out. We got home not long after and let him out but only after he chewed up the door frame a considerable amount.

I’ve never done such a repair before so wasn’t in a hurry to try, but try I did. After going at it with a hammer and seeing how it was attached, I went to the hardware store and got the necessary supplies. Having been my first time, I wasn’t paying attention that I had the trim backwards so marked (and subsequently cut) the wrong end.

After coming back from the hardware store a second time, I was far more careful to mark the correct end before doing the 45° cut.

Last week, there was an email exchange that required a last-minute scramble that didn’t have to be last-minute. When one of my guys expressed his frustration to the user, the user’s manager wrote back in a considerably harsh and unnecessary tone. It was learned later, after calming down, that he did not feel quite as he wrote. If he had just taken a moment and considered his words and thoughts, I believe it would have been much more reasonable or may not have been set at all.

In both cases, I was reminded of the old adage “measure twice, cut once.” Please do yourself a favor and heed that in both such situations in the future. Thank you.

Ken Robinson on Education (AKA why we’re homeschooling)

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(Sorry for the false post earlier. I accidentally hit publish.)

I’ve mentioned before that we have decided to homeschool our oldest daughter. While in her particular case, the primary problem was the general disregard of her level since she wasn’t jeopardizing the results of the standardized tests that public schools are obsessed about.

I recently ran across two presentations of Sir Ken Robinson at the TED conference. The first is from 2006 and was an observation of children’s innovation and creativity and how that is trained out of them as they work through the system:

He again presented just earlier this year with additional thoughts the subject:

He recommends revolution of education system and not evolution. I couldn’t agree more. While I hope that those involved in the system (at all levels) take these thoughts to heart, but until things change significantly, I don’t think we’ll be alone in finding our home as the best place to learn.

But I’m a Night Owl

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Since I was a teenager, I’ve always stayed up late. Working over 50 miles away from home leaves me to not wanting to spend any more time in traffic than I need to. As a result, I head in to work early in the morning to beat the majority of traffic. That requires me to get up early to be able to get in early. No biggie, I’ve been doing it for years and it works out great. The problem is, I like staying up late. Having to get up so early for work, I only get the chance to do that on the weekends. That makes Monday mornings particularly challenging.

In addition to that, I’ve noticed that while I typically only get about 6 1/2 hours of sleep a night, the times I get 7 or 8 hours leaves me feeling more tired rather than more refreshed. Sleep studies have long busted the concept that 8 hours is required for everyone. Different people need different amounts so it isn’t terribly surprising that I generally get by with less.

Studies have also suggested that keeping the same sleep schedule helps which leads me to an experiment. For the next month, I’m going to get up at my normal time seven days a week. I’m not thrilled with the idea about getting up earlier than I need to, but this could work out well. Heck, the last time I did something like this I greatly reduced my Google Reader, Facebook, and Twitter consumption so part of me is looking forward to it, kinda.