B’musings

January 29, 2010

Bold 9700, Garmin GPS, DAOS scare, and Blink!

Filed under: BlackBerry,Lotus,Reading,Technology — Mike Burford @ 7:53 pm
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Okay, so whilst I’m on a roll (and the baby’s asleep and nobody’s telling me to come in from the office):

Bold 9700: Recently upgraded from my Curve 8310 and am loving the 9700.  It’s taking a bit of getting used to the new keypad but the screen is very impressive, WiFi is great, I reckon the trackpad is an improvement over the ball, and overall I think it’s a great device.

Another new device is the Garmin GPS my father got me.  It’s a nuvi 1390 and although I don’t have a great need for the navigation assistance around Christchurch on a day to day basis, with the recent law change on the use of phones in vehicles the bluetooth connection and phone functionality works really well.  I’ve only used a TomTom GPS when in Australia so I’m not an expert on GPS units, but the ease of use, software integration, and look and feel of the Garmin will have me recommending it to anyone who’s interested.

I’ve been going through a bit of a nightmare with DAOS at a client site over the past week.  Over Christmas the mail server started generating a whole bunch of “nsf directory manager pool is full” errors, but we couldn’t reboot the server as the customer has a change freeze over the holiday period so we had to wait until that ended.  So when that lifted the weekend before last I connected in and rebooted the server and after it came back up again initiated the upgrade of the ODS of the mail archive databases.  The archives are on a separate server to Domino so when the server was upgraded late last year we left the archive databases to last whilst we fine tuned everything else.  What I didn’t realise at the time was that the archive databases all had the DAOS setting enabled and the ODS upgrade kicked off DAOS in the background, but this became rapidly obvious when I got a frantic call to say that the server was losing 100Mb/minute of available disk space.  The archives are on a separate server, the DAOS files aren’t!  The organisation’s primary mail server dropped to 6Gb of available disk space and daily email consumption is just over 1Gb of disk space!

Easy fix I thought, stop the compact process, restart it with the “daos -off” option and when all the attachments are back in the archive databases, prune DAOS to just the other side of the backup.  Not so easy, every time the prune tried to run it would stop because the DAOS catalog wasn’t synchronized, even if we had just “successfully” completed a three and a half hour resync and daosmgr reported that the catalog state was synchronized!  IBM support helped and running a log analysis on “DAOS object count” identified a bunch of mail databases to run fixup against, but three and a half hours later the prune task fell over after only running for a minute so we’ve got a corrupted DAOS catalog.  The only fix for that is to shut down Domino, rename/remove the catalog and cfg databases, restart Domino and run another resync.  That’s tomorrow (Sat) night taken care of, if I pick up any more tips I’ll post them in here.

And just to finish off in case this is the last post I make for another 6 months, I really recommend “Blink”, another great book by Malcolm Gladwell:

It’s a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, “Blink” is a book about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good.

He describes this ability as “thin-slicing”  and as per Wikipedia:

Gladwell gives a wide range of examples of thin-slicing in contexts such as gambling, speed dating, tennis, military war games, the movies, malpractice suits, popular music, and predicting divorce.

There’s plenty of info about it on gladwell dot com and Wikipedia so I won’t repeat it here, but I found it to be a fascinating book, easy to read, and some of the examples he gives are really eye-opening.

Time to head inside and see if I’m still entitled to dinner.

June 3, 2009

It sure has been a while!

Filed under: BlackBerry,Lotus,Reading — Mike Burford @ 1:12 pm
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It’s a bit like the confessional thing: “Forgive me for it has been a long time since my last blog …”  I’ve been on a non-Notes/Domino project doing some business analysis work for a client looking at implementing an ERP system.  I’ve spent the last few months interviewing staff and documenting the current and proposed process models for various departments using Tibco Business Studio – quite a cool program.  The thing is, I spend most of the day doing that then have to spend the evenings and weekends catching up on my “normal” work so with that, a sick 10-month old granddaughter at home, and taking on the treasurer position for a church start-up, things have been really full on.  And probably why I’m now sick at home myself.

But it’s been an interesting few months, I’ve set up Sametime and Quickr demos and rolled out a Quickr implementation as a result; I’ve done my first BlackBerry BPS implementation in a Windows 2008 environment (on Exchange 2007); I’ve completed – well, me and the customer’s project team – a year long Notes/Domino 8 roll-out project; and this weekend I upgraded a server with 1,300 mail files to Domino 8.5 and implemented DAOS (Domino Attachment and Object Service) which resulted in 163 Gb of disk space saving – a reduction of 43.5% of disk usage – and there’s still 12 Gb of mail files that couldn’t be compacted so we’re probably looking at a 44-45% saving.

I’ve also read “Now, Discover your Strengths” and completed the online “StrengthsFinder” questionnaire and found it interesting reviewing the various jobs I’ve done, positions I’ve held, projects I’ve worked on etc, in light of what are (apparently) my top five strengths.  I look forward to seeing whether focusing on those strengths in future work/projects makes a noticeable difference to the outcome and my enjoyment of the work.

So that’s me for now, time to go and lie down again.

January 29, 2009

The Wisdom of Crowds – James Surowiecki

Filed under: Reading,Social Networking — Mike Burford @ 9:59 am

I’ve been a bit slow with my reading lately, but managed to catch up on this book over Christmas.  There are lots of reviews of it on the Internet so I won’t go into detail here, but there’s some great stuff in this book for anyone who is interested in group dynamics. One of the key points that stood out for me was:

“The idea of the wisdom of the crowds is not that a group will always give you the right answer but that on average it will consistently come up with a better answer than any individual will provide.”

He discusses the importance of diversity in group decision making so that outcomes aren’t limited by subject experts; how strong leaders can negatively impact the decision making by encouraging the group to lean towards the leader’s perspective; and how too much information reduces the accuracy of the decision making process.

I remember the argument when Wikipedia started out that the contribution of everyday people to an online encyclopedia instead of leaving it up to the knowledgeable experts would result in the “dumbing down” of both Wikipedia and those who referred to it.  Surowiecki gives various examples of why this isn’t usually the case:

“A survey on the question of overconfidence by economist Terrance Odean found that physicians, nurses, lawyers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and investment bankers all believed that they knew more than they did.  Similarly, a recent study of foreign-exchange traders found that 70 percent of the time, the traders overestimated the accuracy of their exchange-rate predictions.  In other words, it wasn’t just that they were wrong; they also didn’t have any idea how wrong they were.  And that seems to be the rule among experts.  The only forecasters whose judgments are routinely well calibrated are expert bridge players and weathermen.  It rains on 30 percent of the days when weathermen have predicted a 30 percent change of rain.”

He presents some very good examples from business and industry and it was an enjoyable book to read.  I highly recommend it.

October 26, 2008

The Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell

Filed under: Reading,Social Networking — Mike Burford @ 4:14 am
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I’ve been churning through a few books lately, largely due in part to either having to fill in time whilst waiting for my turn on “late shift” to feed the baby, or unable to get back to sleep after being woken by aforementioned baby.  The Tipping Point wasn’t quite what I expected when I first heard about the book, but I quite enjoyed it.  Here’s the overview from a Wikipedia article on it:

Tipping points are “the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable.” Gladwell defines a tipping point as a sociological term, “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.” The book seeks to explain and describe enormous and “mysterious” sociological changes that mark everyday life. As Gladwell states, “Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do.” The examples of such changes in his book include the rise in popularity and sales of Hush Puppies shoes in the mid-1990s and the dramatic drop in the New York City crime rate in the late 1990s.

I had heard of the requirement for a combination of “Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen” for an idea or product to take off, but hadn’t understood how it all tied together, or in fact grasped all the concepts involved until reading the book.  He gives some good examples – the success of Paul Revere’s ride in comparison with that of William Dawes intrigued me – and discusses some fascinating projects such as the “zero tolerance” approach taken by the New York City Police to fight crime on the New York subway and the impact that had on crime throughout the rest of the city.  The Wikipedia article gives a good overview of the book and details some of the criticisms of Gladwell’s theories.

More >>

October 19, 2008

Fl!p

Filed under: Reading,Social Networking — Mike Burford @ 1:07 am
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Peter Sheahan was a speaker at the IBM Collaboration Summit in Sydney last month. I had never heard of him before so didn’t know what to expect, but I was instantly impressed with his energetic and enthusiastic presentation style and, shortly thereafter, the content of the presentation itself.

He was introduced as a leading expert in workforce trends and generational change, which sounds like a huge area to be an expert in and a large topic to cover, but that was soon narrowed down as he began to discuss the use of technologies such as MySpace, Facebook, instant messaging and other social networking tools in use by Generation Y, and the impact it is having on the business world.

It was a good presentation and I enjoyed it so much I wandered the streets of Sydney during lunch break the following day to track down one of his books that he had promoted: Fl!p (Random House, Sep 2007), or, to use the full title: Fl!p – How counter-intuitive thinking is changing everything-from branding and strategy to technology and talent.  He covers things such as: why “Fast, Good, Cheap, Pick

 Three” (preferably plus the ‘X’ factor) has become the price of entry in most markets; Superficial is Anything But; Business IS Personal; There is No Wisdom in Crowds (if you want to stand out or take a lead); how you Get Control by Giving it Up; and Action Precedes Clarity.  

It was a good read and within a couple of weeks of reading it we took an “action precedes clarity” step at work with an issue that had been on our minds for several months, but we were holding off making a decision until we had what we thought would be sufficient information.  We were at risk of over-thinking the situation and decided to step out and commit to moving on the idea and developing it as things panned out.  It was a good move and enabled us to get something in place before the competition stepped in and beat us to it. 

October 14, 2008

The E-Myth Revisited

Filed under: Reading — Mike Burford @ 6:22 am
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I recently finished reading The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber.  Good book!  With the challenges facing businesses at the moment, especially as I work for a consultancy business and we’re already seeing companies holding off on work or projects, it’s a good time to review our business practices and approach.  A lot of it is common sense of course, but he has some great ideas and it’s an easy read.  The franchise approach is excellent and we’re working at incorporating some of the concepts into our company.

I purchased a copy for my son who is in his early 20′s and has all sorts of dreams and desires for running his own business.  It will be a great book for giving him focus and direction.

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