ConFigures

Shorter ConFigures posts of a sort at Twitter

I’ve been writing about tech and CM mostly behind the company firewall at my job for a while now, particularly this last year since I’ve been writing for the company newsletter.  However, I’ve also built up a body of short notes at my ConFigures account on Twitter. I got a Twitter account once I got my smartphone and texting/reading was easier.  Looking at my Twitter cloud as reported by TweetStats, I’ve written there most about the Palm Pre, library stuff, Linux, my town / local matters, and miscellaneous geekiness.  I also see the words love, yay, and yes being used, but not hate, boo, or no.  This is reassuring, since I prefer accentuating the positive to dwelling in negativland.   I think my heart really belongs to longer pieces, but it’s fun trying brevity.  A fair number of my tweets have been social, replying to or retweeting others.   With the good but busy year I’ve had, longer responses might never have made it out of my head.

Posted in usability | No Comments »

Almost 2 Months on the Palm Pre Smartphone

I picked up a Palm Pre the first day it was available, June 6.  I’m very happy with it overall. It works very well as a phone (both sound quality and override of other apps), and I love the easy flow and integration between the different apps and underlying software.  Designers put a lot of thought into usability.  Also, it feels good to hold (my sister was surprised by how much difference it made to hold it rather than just look at it), and it’s pretty.  The 3 megapixel camera is *great*.  Upgrades have come out pretty frequently, improving the battery performance and adding more functionality each time.  I don’t care so much about the M$ Exchange and enterprise security stuff that came out with the 1.1 release last week, but it’s probably good for folks who want to read their work Outlook email on their phone.

Right now I’m listening to my Classical Gas station on Pandora on my Pre, checking my calendar (without having to pause/close Pandora), and charging off my OLPC  XO laptop (where I’m composing this entry — the Pre keyboard works fine for me to compose short replies, up to a paragraph, maybe, but it’s not great for long compositions).  In a pinch, it works ok as a primary computer (there’s even a way to hack it to run a terminal window for command line/ssh joy, though I haven’t done that yet). I had pretty minimal wifi access on a recent beach vacation with my family, but I was able to keep up with my usual Web hangouts via the Sprint network my Pre  sees.  I’ve been able to read my email on my Pre inside a concrete auditorium.  Web rendering is fast and the landscape rotate and pinch/zoom and double-tap snap zoom (scrolling stays in the column selected) make it pretty easy even to read busy websites with 3 or more columns.

This is my first smartphone, but it’s hardly my first Palm — I started with a Palm IIIx pda, then moved up to a Zire after I dropped the IIIx on its corner.  I might still be on the Zire, but it started flaking out in March and pretty much went into a coma in April.  I was able to migrate my data each time.  The Classic emulator lets me run my favorite tools from my old Palm.  The Pre also syncs with my contact info from GMail and Facebook (after I enabled that), “stacking” the info from the different accounts so I can see it all together (automatically in most cases, but easy to link if it misses a connection between friends’ accounts). Most contact info is in the cloud, but there’s also an automatic backup of data I add to the Pre (though I haven’t had to restore from it yet, and it *doesn’t* save customizations such as settings tweaks to apps).

The Pre costs about $200 with a 2-year contract (Sprint, $70/mo for 450 minutes + unlimited data/texting/gps navigation).  With taxes and the insurance I signed up for, it’s running about $87/mo.  It’s not a must-have, but I’m having fun with mine.

Next, I’ll review the apps, and then the accessories.  In the meantime you can check out very detailed reviews and videos on PreCentral.net.  I’ve saved the most interesting articles from there and elsewhere in my links library with the Palm tag.

Posted in OLPC, personal information management, usability | No Comments »

Fielded wikis and LibraryThing, a year and a half later

I’ve had some experience working with fielded wikis since I wrote disgruntledly about LibraryThing’s implementation of them in October 2007.  I knew at the time of their potential for being able to extract info for other purposes, but I had come into using wikis with a great appreciation for the way they fostered the organic organization of information, and fielded wikis go against that organic growth to a degree.   My thanks again to LT’s Tim Spalding for his response, which got me thinking beyond my initial reaction.  I had followed up later that month with this acknowledgement: I can see why an organization might wish to encourage certain kinds of contributions through structured fields and other input mechanisms. — Tagging, Ontology, and Structured Information

Since we started using the Confluence enterprise wiki platform at my current job, I’ve come to a better appreciation for the use of fields in wikis, particularly as I’ve worked more with wiki templates.  With hundreds of projects deployed on multiple tiers, it’s very important to have the information about the servers, infrastructure tools, and applications organized in a standard way, so we can find and share information more easily (especially when getting a 3 am page and troubleshooting a system).   Templates and field structures can certainly help with that.  For example, one could have a drop-down list of approved operating system versions to pick from on a server information page template.

I still think fields should be used judiciously (if at all) when trying to encourage wiki use.  When just trying to add some data, it can be very frustating to encounter a field mechanism that seems poorly designed, such as incomplete dropdowns or incorrect-seeming unalterable items (though sometimes these may be due to fundamental disagreements about the intended use of pages/information).   Some people will not have the time or patience to try to contact wiki admininistrators or other users to work out a fix to the field or a common understanding of the page; they may just give up and not make the contribution they were planning. I was happy to notice recently that LibraryThing had fixed the dropdown that had so annoyed me before.  There was a long stretch of time before that where I just wasn’t as enthusiastic about them.

Where there are wikis with multiple users and audiences, sometimes compromises will have to be made, or one path or another chosen in structuring input mechanisms.  Sometimes this just doesn’t happen fast enough to keep up with changes going on in the world.  Where possible, I recommend having some kind of an open notes section in addition to fields, so that there’s at least a hope of keeping the contributions flowing and finding the (up-to-date) info one needs.  Also, anyone with ownership of the page (or at least some feeling of responsibility towards its contents) should probably set up a notification so they’ll know if the contents change, and perhaps be able to address problems/disagreements in good time.

Posted in Knowledge gardening, LibraryThing, book, knowledge management, learning, usability | 2 Comments »

Magellan Roadmate 1212 GPS Review

I passed on my old Magellan Maestro 3225 (reviewed last year) not long ago to one of my sisters when I got exasperated with its inability to properly find my work location (I started a new job last May) or the library (we got a new downtown center in 2007), and she moved and started job-hunting.  My plan was the same as the last time I bought a GPS:  Get the cheapest reasonable-looking one at Costco (for their good return policy), and if it wasn’t perfect, at least it wouldn’t have cost an annoyingly large sum.  So I looked at their online store and read reviews of their cheaper models, and thought I’d probably get a Garmin running around $129 — sure, the last one I’d had froze up and then decided to live a rich fantasy life in Kansas (I could never get it to accept that no, we were still on the East Coast, not back where it had originally been manufactured), but their software was bound to be better by now, right?  and I could always return it to Costco if not, like before.  Certainly the reviews looked good.

However, when I got to my local Costco, I was seduced by another Magellan — the Roadmate 1212 was selling there for a mere $89.00!  Seriously!  I’ve been driving around with it for a few weeks now, and thought I’d share my impressions.

Pros: Good battery life, fast address entry, highly readable screen/display, clear voice, reasonably good directions for the most part.  The UI is pretty much the same as my old Magellan, as far as I can tell.  This Magellan seems to have more POIs pre-programmed in than the last one.

Best improvement:  The address entry is screamingly fast compared to the other three GPS units I’ve used before.  Type-ahead, looks locally first, and simply fast fast fast.  In the parking lot at the store, it fired up before I put it on the charger (the on button is on top, not on the side like the old one, oops) and figured out where it was very quickly.  I programmed in the first two names of my home’s town (one over from the town we were in at the moment) and it filled in the rest of the town name/state, bam!  and paused for me to confirm before going on to the street name.  As soon as I’d put in the first two letters of the street, it gave me a choice of the four streets that started that way; no waiting required.

Cons: power plug design, still doesn’t know where my job or the library are.  The latter is disappointing, but easy to get around by just setting map points and programming those in to my address book instead of the street addresses.  The power plug, however, makes the cable coming out of the GPS point straight back, stiffly, in a way that I can’t just fit it on the tiny shelf in front of a dashboard dial I don’t care about.  I don’t like fooling with the mounting gear, and the dial solution had worked fine with my old Magellan (it leaned back and never fell out).

On the whole, I would say the Magellan Roadmate 1212 is great value for money.

Posted in usability | 2 Comments »

Etoys in Space OLPC Usability

After my last post, a friend pointed me to usability big guy Jakob Nielsen’s online writings on Heuristic Evaluation, and I looked them over and passed specific links on to Mike Lee, organizing our “Code Jam”. I’ve mentioned Nielsen here before. I think the ideas they had did help some of us in testing the NASA learning tools on the XOs; I know the review beforehand was useful for me.

Mike Lee wrote up our day in email and I’ll link as soon as it’s online (photos are up already), but in short, we tested and provided feedback on 5 of their activities. I worked on the GIS activity.

Etoys are powerful. I can see the good they (it?) can be put to. They encourage exploration. I think I may generally prefer a more linear approach to master a subject than Etoys in Space offer, but I’m not the target audience. On this note, see also Greg DeKoenigsberg’s recent post about disruptive technology, learning, education (not always the same thing), and OLPC-esque possibilities. I’ve seen this positive use of “disruptive” more and more in the last year or so. GDK’s entry discusses ways to get around resistance to the disruption … assuming one buys into the goals.

Posted in OLPC, game, learning | No Comments »

My First Code Jam?

I’m going to my first-ever Code Jam next Saturday. We’ll be rating NASA Etoys for One Laptop Per Child. These NASA distance learning activities for children exist already, and the author has offered to adjust them for OLPC if we just step through them on the XOs and give him feedback. This will also get us more familiar with the Etoys learning platform, to build on for future jam opportunities.

OLPCLCDC NASA Etoys Jam

Anyone out there got any head-first usability testing tips?

Posted in OLPC, game | No Comments »

Creative Hacks?

As I expected, I’ve been blogging a lot more behind the firewall at my company than here.

Early in 2009, though, I’m going to post a Top 10 Creative Hacks entry — nothing to do with vandalism or theft, but instead about creative engineering coding/alternate engineering by individuals or small groups. I have 9 … want to suggest one for the #10 slot?

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Give One, Get One Solar Lantern/Flashlight (or Laptop)

At this month’s OLPCLCDC meetup,

• Mike Lee showed us the BoGo solar lantern/flashlight he got. This Buy One, Give One program benefits people in developing countries, but some US troops in Iraq are also using them (batteries can be harder to come by in the field than sunlight, and these rechargeable batteries have an estimated life of 3-5 years even with daily use). Charge one up and get 6 hours of use!
• Three people responsible for a new OLPC Activity (package) that will help researchers record periodic audio presented The Lives of Laptops and Bees. Their energy, knowledge and giving spirit, and the feedback from attending, was exciting to experience.

I’m also happy about the new One Laptop Per Child Give One, Get One opportunity now available in Europe as well as the US via Amazon, but I’ve read plenty of blog entries about that already. Here are two:

• dsd’s entry about his trip to Ethiopia, seeing the laptops in action in kids’ hands, and how to order
• The unofficial OLPC News G1G1 Buyer’s Guide (who should G1G1 and who should not, and why)

Tangential to OLPC: I enjoyed this picture former OLPC-er Ivan Krstić posted about the “proper” use of quotation marks.

[Update: Mike Lee’s OLPC XO and Bees write-up with links to video, photos, PPT]

Posted in OLPC | No Comments »

Memory Walk

On October 18, I’ll join the National Memory Walk in DC, a fund- and awareness-raising event to combat Alzheimer’s Disease. Here’s the page to sponsor me, if you would like, with more details.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

CM jobs and volunteer opportunity

I’ve been busy with work and family, but I thought I’d mention that I’ve been contacted about more than one CM position in the DC area this month.  Both look like interesting work (one from someone I’ve worked with in the past and would be happy to work with again; I don’t know the other source), so if anyone wants a job in Arlington or a block from Gallery Place Metro, comment here with contact info and I’ll send more details.  [Update: just got mail about a CM job in Linthicum, MD (near BWI)]

If I were still in between jobs, I’d be looking very seriously at an OLPC opening:  buildmaster

OLPC builds a lot of packages. They are looking to set up and maintain an infrastructure that will allow them to meet their own unique packaging needs. They need a volunteer with a strong understanding of the Fedora packaging process — one who either understands koji now, or can learn to understand it in fairly short order.

Not sure if that would be in Boston (One Laptop Per Child Foundation), DC (which has a Red hat (Fedora) office), Raleigh (the job poster’s base, another Red Hat location) or simply anywhere with an Internet connection, but it sounds like challenges and fun (though probably unpaid).

Posted in OLPC, configuration management | 1 Comment »

Efficiency, Heart, and Vision

Jack Vinson wrote about the limitations of a focus on efficiency in improving productivity yesterday, in response to Sigurd Rinde’s post on Competitiveness  and Efficiency. There’s almost a romance with efficiency in some arenas.  As detective Lord Peter (Wimsey) says in Dorothy Sayer’s Strong Poison, “When I die you will find ‘Efficiency’ written on my heart.”  This is especially so in business, but not just there  (see efficiency re sports discussion in the the Competitiveness article and comments) .

When I first read the Wimsey quote, it appealed to me powerfully, bundling up ideas of a clear mind, no wasted actions, and excellence in form and function in one word, “efficiency”.  I still think there’s a lot to be said for efficiency (I’m thinking of meetings years ago that went around and around and around with no goals and no action items, resulting in nothing but frustration and rapidly declining attendance).  However, efficiency isn’t everything, and efficiency-uber-alles can actually be harmful.  Over-engineering for efficiency (e.g., a determination to eliminate all redundancy) may engineer out flexibility and responsiveness, making a process fragile.  Moreover, an over-focus on efficiency can mire one down in incremental changes, distracting one from innovations with great potential for the Big Picture.  Not an exact analogy, but I’m reminded of all the work being done to improve web map performance (turnaround for users) before Google came along with a new idea for web maps (drag the map with the mouse!), making online maps much more exciting.

Posted in book | No Comments »

XO flying on Firefox 3

See my installing-Firefox comment on the OLPC News Forum for technical notes.  Whatever they did re memory management seems very effective on the XO.  Yay Firefox 3!

Posted in OLPC | No Comments »

Laptop Bake-Off

A much friendlier term than my previous “laptop shootout”!  The Bake-off was held last weekend at a Friends (Quaker) school near Greenbelt, MD.  I brought my two OLPC XOs (there were several others set up there already for folks to try out), and got to try out a Classmate 2Go, several Macs, the Asus EEE 700 and 900 series, and a Fujitsu T-4220 Tablet.  The tablet was pretty neat, and I thought the Classmate exterior was pretty cute and came the closest to the XO’s ruggedness (still not there, but more so than the others).  We (some adults, more kids) filled out evaluation sheets on the different laptops as we went along.  Baked goods were also available for snacks.  :-)

Posted in OLPC | 3 Comments »

Participatory Web: Wachovia, Enterpise Sabotage, and Liveblogging

Jack Vinson’s impressions of a recent conference caught my eye.  I’m not crazy about the name (I so much prefer “participatory web” to web/anything “2.0″), but I know I’m fighting against the tide here. Anyway, several interesting bits:

• “The Wachovia presentation this morning appears to have opened some people’s eyes on how things could happen.”  Having been familiar with Wachovia since they were a small NC bank, I wondered what they were up to.
  • Steve Newberger wrote more about it:  [Fields’] analogy: Web 2.0 is this generation’s equivalent of his generation’s company picnic and bowling leagues. Additional critical rationale: mitigate the impact of the maturing, retiring workforce, i.e., the attrition of knowledge assets.  They’re using SharePoint (WSS/MOSS), with extensions for instant messaging (I miss using IM for work) and video blogging (we talked about getting that going at my previous employer — 2-minute service call how-to videos, viewable over mobile devices, anyone? — but didn’t get the resources to get it rolling in time).
  • More important than the technology is Wachovia’s attitude.  From a preview of the talk,  Wachovia’s collaborative environment is designed to attract younger Generation Y employees who expect access to Web 2.0 tools at work. […] “They’re coming to us with high enthusiasm but encountering arcane tools and bureaucracies,” he said, adding that many young workers’ engagement levels “fall off the table” after about a year on the job. “They are leaving Fortune 100 companies,” he said.  As I said at my previous employer and during my Knowledge Gardening presentation at Penguicon 2007, the ability to use modern, fun, low-entry-barrier collaborative and knowledge sharing tools is a recruiting advantage.
• The CIA presenters recommended starting small, such as with an acronym wiki page (I’ve had success with that approach!), and pointed to an OSS (CIA precursor)  manual from 1944 about how to sabotage organizations and production efforts: Insist on doing everything through “channels”, refer all matters to committees, haggle over precise wordings of communications,  advocate “caution”, and question whether a decision lies within the jurisdiction of the group.  The conflict such behavior would have with the architecture of participation is obvious (Note:  I do think precise wording and formal processes can be useful and important, but relative risks should be considered, and getting bogged down is a risk, too).
• “People get ticked off at twittering and live-blogging during an Enterprise 2.0 conference, just like they do at other events.”   They get ticked off?  I hope no one’s gotten mad at me for tapping on my laptop at presentations.  I guess I can see the negative potential (folks so busy twittering, blogging, taking pictures, etc. that they’re not engaging with the rest of the conferees), but I’d always had more of an attitude of “their loss” when it seems that they’re not fully there.  I suppose if a substantial proportion were doing so, that might take away a bit from the energy of the event (?).

Posted in Knowledge gardening, conference, knowledge management, penguicon | No Comments »

Blogging and Browsers

My new job hosts internal blogs (via SharePoint), so I’ve been blogging there some, and expect that to continue to take up some of my blogging energy (as I come up to speed on various matters).  I expect my ConFigures readers will have a better time keeping track of me via RSS feed readers than checking the site every day.

I did have some tabs open of things to blog about on Opera on my OLPC XO, but something happened and it froze up. Up until now, when I’ve had to reboot Sugar (the UI), Opera has been able to restore the previous session, but not this time.   It’s not like I have a lack of things to blog about (it’s more a matter of making the time), but it’s still annoying.  Anyway, I’ve been using Opera on the XO because they came out with an OLPC-specific version, but I may try FireFox 3 when it comes out, as they appear to have gotten better at memory-hog issues (more important on the memory- and CPU-tight XO than other systems).  We’ll see.

When I sat down to write this tonight, I noticed that spam keywords had been inserted at the end of my previous entry.  I’m concerned about this, but will wait to see if it happens again before I do serious digging.

Posted in OLPC, RSS | No Comments »

Laptops, Education and the Freedom to Tinker: The example of OLE Nepal

Along with a number of other One Laptop Per Child enthusiasts (software and hardware contributors, Give One Get One participants, wiki/forum answer-givers), I’ve been a bit dismayed by developments and revelations at OLPC. My experience as a configuration manager and occasional release manager tells me that large-scale deploys of software don’t “just happen” even if it’s completely off-the-shelf (no customization/localization required), whether the distribution is physical (tapes, CDs, DVDs, printers) or electronic. Whatever comes to OLPC, however, the project has accomplished some good, from laptop design re-thinking to the cross-fertilization between the open source community and open learning education efforts.

OLPC’s XO was supposed to be an educational and empowerment tool, with localization (facilitated by the open source approach) to make it more relevant to places where it went. OLPC (Negroponte) may have lost sight of that, but some organizations have used it as a launching pad for efforts that matter. For an example, look at OLE Nepal, which has worked very closely with Nepalese teachers to roll out customized OLPC laptops with software to help the teachers teach particular subjects.

Open Learning Exchange (OLE) Nepal

• http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLE_Nepal (overview from an OLPC perspective)
• http://www.olenepal.org/ (separate from OLPC)
• http://blog.olenepal.org/ (seems to have latest updates)

Bryan Berry (OLE Nepal External Relations Manager) gave a presentation to the OLPC Learning Club DC back in December (and hung around for discussion afterwards) which certainly sounded like they did their homework before aiming for measurable results.

• http://www.technorati.com/videos/youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DWVG4hSsIk_k
• http://www.olpcnews.com/use_cases/education/test_scores_olpc_teach.html
• http://www.olpcnews.com/countries/nepal/ (some overlap with above blog link)

OLE Nepal’s efforts are still moving along, with some hitches here and there, but the team is flourishing and has already shown what can be done with an open attitude and serious planning.

Posted in OLPC | No Comments »

Synchronicity and Traceability

Mark Shuttleworth wrote a post about the latest Ubuntu LTS (long term service) release, 8.04, and associated and upcoming release management (and his hopes for coordination of release schedules with other open source efforts).  His entry is interesting, and the comments are also interesting (balancing release dates v. stability, synchronicity, politics/competing interests between different open source groups, and so on).

I don’t always find much in the Communications of the ACM (mailed to me monthly, now with an online version for subscribers, too), but this May issue has several articles that drew me in.  ”Improving the Change-Management Process” talks about the connections and gaps between configuration management and traceability.  I agree with them that configuration management implementations do not always deal well with non-source-code information and artifacts. However, I would have preferred that their example tool had been a more modern tool than  Visual SourceSafe, or an integrated tool suite such as CollabNet’s SourceForge Enterprise Edition, or ClearCase/ClearQuest etc.  It would also be interesting to see more about process gaps and how different groups can approach issues of gaps and overlaps.  The ACM article (Kannan Mohan, Peng Xu, Balasubramaniam Ramesh) serves pretty well as an introduction to folks not as familiar with the issues, and I did like their charts and explanatory figures.

Posted in configuration management | No Comments »

Standby for Special Election; Pollbook UI problems

Nobody’s called me yet, but I’m on standby to act as a closing judge in a special election in Maryland tonight (Maryland seems to have these from time to time, no big deal; there was one in April, this one for a vacancy on the county council, another one coming up in June). I went to training on Friday for this, and was happy to see that they’ve already updated/clarified the training/procedures since I was a closing judge (and gave feedback) in February. The trainers, Tracy, Janet, and Keith, were friendly and helpful. The only thing I’d like to see changed now in the written training materials would be a little more emphasis on pairing with members of the opposite party (the trainers did express this verbally, at least).

However, at the training, I got my first crack at actually trying out the electronic pollbooks (Diebold machines where one checks to see if a prospective voter is registered in the district in which one is working). That interface is in serious need of improvement. For instance, when searching by address, it goes from saying “TOO MANY” (type in more letters to narrow), to listing only one name when the first digit of the house number is typed in, to “NOT FOUND IN STATE” when only some house numbers are typed in, to finally listing the selections again when all house numbers have been typed in. It seems likely that would-be voters will be turned away (or made to vote provisionally) erroneously, given the potential for confusion in the path for getting to their listings.

Posted in learning, security | No Comments »

Halting State

Almost midway through reading Charles Stross’ latest, Halting State, my heart went pit-a-pat as I came across the following sequence:

If you hadn’t had a devkit buffer open before the extradimensional mugging, you wouldn’t even have noticed the missing twelve thousand lines of code. […] 

“Who’s got access to your version control system?” you ask Venkmann.

“Huh?  What’s that got to do with it?”

“Plenty, I think.”

Version control!  In a fun near-future novel (international finance, spies and skullduggery, ubiquitous computing, and MMORPGs)! I was looking forward to seeing how the version control angle played out (and what tool was being used), but it was never directly mentioned again, just the larger security angle.

There are 15 reviews of this book already up at LibraryThing, so I’ll just mention a few more odds and ends:

•  annoyance at rushed ending was compounded by the realization that some of the interesting stuff that had been dangled before the reader in this book was just sequel set-up, like Stross did to The Family Trade
• but at least the romance was more believable in this book
• corporate and tech aspects were convincingly portrayed
• contrary to one reviewer’s confused account, the zombie flash mob was NOT the same as the zombie horde.  They were on/used by different sides, in different places, in different ways.  That was part of the *fun* of this book.

I enjoyed this book, but as a book, Stross’ Glasshouse was better, and one I recommend unreservedly.

Posted in book, configuration management | No Comments »

CM, Resources pages updated

A friend and former colleague asked if I could send her some information to help get their new junior-level hire up to speed doing configuration management.  It was a good feeling to be able to respond with a decent set of starting points in  just a few minutes.  I have now incorporated some of the newer info into my old HTML pages on configuration management and CM Resources.

It’s by no means a complete reference, but it should put their new person on the road to learning more.

Posted in configuration management | No Comments »