Memories of North-Eastern North Carolina

January 15th, 2010

I am not a native of North-Eastern North Carolina (I was born in California – but I’m an Army Brat – So this explains that).

Yet…

I consider it my home.. But I don’t live there. Being an Army Brat meant my Father met a wonderful woman in France – back then when NATO had a foothold in France – So I finally wound up there.

My father side ancestors migrated from the east coast – went all the way west to Kentucky – and finally landed where my heart belongs – North Eastern North Carolina. From Hertford County to Currituck, down to Beaufort and of course Hyde County.. Washington County, Bertie, Martin, Camden, Pasquotank, Chowan, Dare  and My late father even lived right on the edge of Pitt County..

Hertford county was always my first love. The mighty and beautiful Chowan River. Spending my youth on Tuscarora Beach where my grand mother was running the resort, going to see her and my grand dad, living on a farm on the edge of Potecasie creek – some old wooden house with just an old wooden stove that was providing “air conditionning”. Seeing all those deer tracks in the sand in the midst of the cord fields – And so many other memories.. Oh so many..

Then came the time with my father, a 21 year old US Army veteran who came here what he loved to do – commercial fishing.. Catching the all so elusive catfish with catfish pots – Then going to Parker’s Ferry’s Fish house and skinning the fish to try to make a bit more money out of it. And also the time catching the Snapping Turtles – lay reeds with a line and a 2/0 hook with a piece of eel – 200 of them – then come back and see them reeds bent – catch the turtle by the tail !

Then those ran lean – Catfish got better farmed, the demand for turtle meat dried out – so he went for crabs. The mighty Blue Crab – Callanictes Sapidus – and found the IDEAL spot : Engelhard, Hyde County, NC

And for a 17 year old like me (at that time) coming on vacation from France – THIS was paradise! Sit there near the crab house – all those juices coming out of the crab steaming was attracting all sorts of fish – and the owner there would let me pick a couple of jimmies (Large male blue crabs) so I could eat them on the spot while watching for my fishing rod to twitch under the pressure of a sorry croacker. It was SO BAD a good memory that even the scent of decaying fish mixed with the scent of boat fuel still makes me happy today.

This place was so much home to me, that I brought there my french bride – and married there – went to SQ to the register of deeds to get our wedding official – and had the most wonderful and intimate wedding there. In my dad’s trailer – with the strategically placed air conditioning vent going off right in the middle of the our vow exchange (that wasn’t intentional).

Unfortunately, the marriage didn’t last – but we had a daughter.. Later, I met someone else – here in France. So we went there – On the Outer Banks, made her visit Mattamuskeet, The alligator river and the good ole Pamlico Sound. And now my french girlfriend wants to buy some estate there ! And my daughter LOVES it all. She can’t stop asking when we are going back.. Fishing on the piers in Nags Head or catching Gar Fish in Bennetts Creek – os simply being around..

Where life is good !

–Ivan

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The Enterprise 2.0 coffee machine

November 26th, 2009

I’m quite certain every manager can vouch for how important the coffee machine is to their business. And for those that think they are just time wasters, well..

Because, not only does it provide the workforce with the much needed caffeinated brew, but first and foremost, it provides the necessary space for:

  • Exchange of ideas
  • Exchange of information
  • Social interaction (who does what ?)

But, there are some shortcomings:

  • The information is volatile
  • Ideas cannot be formally credited
  • The information is confined to those present at this particular time
  • The advent of anti-smoking laws has split the workforce into essentially 2 separate groups

And that’s where social media tools can help. Of course, no-one expects that it can entirely replace the coffee machine – at least because social media tools do not provide one with caffeine (yet), but some of the information exchanged during social interaction – basically “gossips” – is probably best kept “volatile”.

But most of the information exchanged and social networking should be seen as business assets, and therefore should be exploitable as such. Appropriate tools should allow anyone to feed the system using free flowing input such as informal textual information, pictures, sounds, videos and hints – and leave it to the system to organize, formalize, categorize, link, etc..

For the workforce, there are multiple incentives

  • They get credit for new ideas
  • They can track their own progress
  • They can track other people’s progress

For the business and management, it gets even better

  • They can track their workforce progress
  • Individuals have easy and intuitive access to information
  • Individuals have easy and intuitive access to the people who possess the relevant information
  • From a HR standpoint, it becomes possible to get candid information about morale and such
  • Information fed into the system becomes persistent asset
  • Information can be fed quickly without the hassle of looking for specific forms and whatnot
  • Information can be fed even by those who do not drink coffee, smoke or either/both

–Ivan

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Selling 2.0 internally

November 21st, 2009

On the same day we had our seminar, I went directly to my company’s boss – who happened to also attend the seminar I was talking about in my last post.

My intents here were simple : Get a candid view and eventually to start getting ready the field for our OWN implementation!

Unfortunately, he hadn’t seen the whole pitch (can’t blame him – a CO line of work hardly allows sitting down for hours listening to someone explaining concepts) – so some work had to be done – and that’s within the allotted amount of time he could spare for me.

So when I came in his office, with all my high hopes and renewed interest in the matter, I was slightly put down when he merely brushed away the whole concept – and pretty much gave me the “unbeliever” look. “Nah.. I don’t believe in this whole 2.0 thing”

But Enterprise 2.0 is not a matter of faith ! It’s a matter of business and hard facts.

And his first rebuttal was actually my anchor : Basically, he was stating that he couldn’t get his employees (yours truly included) to file reports or transmit simple facts to the rest of the team. He gave me an example of what happened when one of our partner’s salesperson changed – and no-one was aware of this because the information wasn’t spread around. So his objection was : How can we expect our people to sign onto blogs, wikis and whatnot when we can’t even get them to fill in simple forms ?

So it hit me. This is *exactly* what 2.0 is about ! How can you expect a busy person to browse through a hierarchical file structure, find the right form, fill it with intricate and (mostly) useless details when all you are asked to convey is something it would take you 20 seconds to just “say”. The answer is simple : Just allow the people to enter their information the way they would “say” it! And leave it to the 2.0 tools to sort it out for you.

Not only is it more simple for the employee to fill some non-formal report – without having to search the whole internal document hierarchy to find the appropriate form (something that will never get done unless under duress), but instead just feed it to the information bin. The tool is there to classify this for you (and if you can give hints, so much the better !). And not only this, but when the critical piece of information has been fed into the system, it now becomes part of the whole. The next time someone needs to know about “Salespeople at partner XXXX”, not only do you get the latest news, but you also get *who* brought it up (and you may then be able to ask for more details if necessary)

So it goes from 10 minutes searching the forms, and 3 minutes filling in the form – for some information no-one will read to a 30 seconds quick type in a text box, adding a couple of tags – for some information that is easy to find and that can be relayed to you so you can give details if people are interested.

At this point, my boss started looking fairly intrigued. He hadn’t thought of it that way. He didn’t give me the go to start implementing a whole 2.0 infrastructure in the company. Although I might have convinced him – or at least – given him food for thoughts, there are other considerations to take into account (some way more political than I care to even think about !).

But it was a step forward !

–Ivan

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A helpful 2.0 seminar

November 19th, 2009

Today, as part of my pre-sales software engineer job at bestware, I was attending an Enterprise 2.0 1/2 day seminar which I had a small part in setting up. Our primary goal here, of course, was to help our partners understanding the ins and outs of the 2.0 mindset and, consequently, help them sale the Lotus Connections software suite to their customers.

Although 2.0 makes everything more simple to the end-user, justifying the benefits of some non-trivial management readjustment is far from being a simple affair. So we hired the services of Nextmodernity, a consultant firm in the 2.0 area to explain this to our partners. The plan was to start with explaining what “Enterprise 2.0″ means, then presenting Lotus Connections as a capable social tool, and finally, start an open discussion with the audience to see how this could be all made to fit together.

Nextmodernity dispatched one of their top-notch individuals, and as expected, Marc de Fouchecour was up to the task delivering a simple yet effective What/Why/How speech, using simple laymen terms (after all, this is also what 2.0 is about !) to lay down the foundations.

Now, the expected objections were raised. These partners are essentially “IT” companies, so having to deal with the higher execs to explain them how the whole management concept can benefit their business seemed to some of them as something of an extraordinary task – or at least – something they were possibly not ready to do just yet. Here, the implied answer was simple : Just as we weren’t competent to deliver the appropriate 2.0 message, we hired competent consultancy, so could they !

Also the usual fear of the rogue poster, whistleblower and no-good-doer were brought up and the usual rebuttal was given : not only are there not that many of them, but giving them a playfield may actually help mitigate whatever damage they may be doing out in the wild !

The proverbial foundations having been laid down, we could now deliver our own personal message on how Lotus Connections could be offered as a solution. The demo went smoothly – despite IBM having rolled out a brand new version on their internal servers, almost (but not quite)  throwing our resident IBM specialist off foot – demonstrating how all the pieces fit together.

The seminar ended with the mandatory luncheon – and – I make it it was a good sign – lasted well beyond the timeline we had set ourselves by more than a couple of hours !

Going back at the office with renewed perspectives and the feeling of having moved forward, I went to see the boss (not my boss. I mean *THE* boss), with the firm intentions of testing all of this on him.

Mind it, I wasn’t taking any risk. In my company we have a pretty liberal policy about what we can tell to our hierarchy.

But I’ll keep this one for next time !

–Ivan

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AF 447 – The internet response, how 2.0 responded and PROFIT !

June 2nd, 2009

I have to admit…

I was amazed at all the noise around the events surrounding the disapearance of flight AF 447.

Ok. Let me get this straight. I was about as curious as the next guy to understand what happened. So I looked around a bit, and eventually search for the #af447 hashtag on twitter.

About 30% of the posts were basically : don’t follow or click on any hyperlink proposed by @flightaf447 – because he is making money on the tragedy !

Now… Wait a minute !

A *load* of people are making money on this. News providers wouldn’t even exist if threadful things didn’t happen !

Granted, this particular individual probably isn’t offering any new information – mind it that ANY new information is probably out the door WAY before it appears on a mainstream news broadcast.

But now.. Everyone if focussing on that (and – shame on me – I’m meta-focussing)

And let’s put this into perspective. ~228 (presumably at the time of writing) lost their lives aboard a transportation mechanism – namely a scheduled passenger carrying air transport service.

People die in car crashes (no news here).. People die in wars (any *list* of Darfur casualties anyone ?). People die of diseases and people die of old age (again.. does any one have a list of casualties.. oh wait.. the passenger list is 6 billion people long !)

What I am getting to is :

- People focus on scam attempts (is it jealousy ? basically.. How come didn’t I think of it first !)

- People forget that scavenging is a lucrative business !

- People lose focus on numbers/proportions (yes.. 228 – or whatever the number – is sad business. But a WHOLE LOT more die everyday – and believe me – their families are in as much pain)

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Novell end-user conference debrief

March 18th, 2009

Yesterday, I was invited to the Novell end-user Conference.

It was a nice little conference, with 50 or so people attending.

After the general opening session, we had a demo presentation of Groupwise 8, Novell’s messaging solution. Some nice features in there !

We were also granted with a customer experience report from one of Novell’s Groupwise customer.

Then came Bruno Teyton of IDC which gave us a summary of IDC’s view on the economic perspectives for the next 4 or 5 years as well as how this would impact implementation of messaging and collaboration solutions. Of course, that was a bit grim, but overall, it wasn’t all that dark. There was some focus on messaging solutions as a cost reducing mean by achieving quick ROI. Long term prospects also put emphasis on reducing storage costs by deduplicating data.

After a quick snack, we were back for the afternoon session

IDC was back and gave us more prospects about the 2.0 world. That was probably the part I was the most waiting for. Again, the focus was more on the economic aspects of going 2.0 – with some strong emphasis on the actual management changes required. Overall, going to a 2.0 model seemed like the 2nd executives topmost priority (although I couldn’t get if this was from a global perspective or only for the large businesses). Some of the reasons given for that push was cost reduction (no surprise here) through use of telecommuting and remote communications – via instant messaging, webinars and videoconferencing. Other drives evoked were leveraging knowledge workers assets, being appealing to generation Y workers and increasing reactivity and turaround times – by somewhat shortening the chain of command.

Quite an interresting view on the state of affairs in that field, but – not to lessen IDC’s work on those analysis – it’s what they do anyway – I am personally always a bit cautious about the validity of long term prospects, especially in times like now when everything seems so volatile. Giving 5 years outlooks with 0.1 point accuracy seems a bit ambitious to me !

Novell then presented their own collaborative package – called Teaming and Conferencing. The “teaming” part is based on kablink and seems to offer quite a few nice features. It sports the basic handfull of traditional 2.0 tool facets : groups (or teams), blogs, wikis, tagging and profiles. It also contains some document workflow handling capabilities with a neat graphical workflow editor. They also presented the next version (still not released yet) which has a few additional featurettes and a slightly different look and feel.

The conferencing part was only briefly evoked – but it offers the usual web conferencing facilities.. Whiteboarding, application sharing, slide presenter, group chats, etc.. We didn’t get a demo of this one though !

We then had a presentation by a Novell partner who seemed pretty pleased at how easy it was to put the teaming part in production for one of their customer – managing to roll out within 2 weeks after the deal was made.

The day finished with some tapas and some wine tasting games to flush it all down !

I am not going to make any sort of comparison between the various 2.0 software packages at this point – not without having tested the whole bunch – and – this could take some time ! But Novell’s package did seem to me like a decent player in that market.

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Learning the 2.0 way !

March 16th, 2009

Well.. Call me a 1.9 user !

It’s taking me a whole lot more of time than I would have expected to get acquainted with the “2.0″ ways.

Of course (well.. it’s not *that* obvious), I’m kind of familiar with the concepts. Bertrand did initiate me quite thoroughly to the concept during endless hours of ‘live’ talks about it !

But getting to use twitter.. facebook (ok.. I’m staying clear of this one for the time being), linkedin, plaxo.. blogging (yes, I know.. that’s what I’m doing just now) – on a regular basis is *NOT* what I instinctively do.

I’m still an e-mail guy. Mailing lists.. oh yes !.. Newsgroups.. I read a few.. and post also once in a while.

But I find maintaining ‘web’ based communication more strainful than streamlined myself.

I always have my e-mail client open. So if I see something there that warrants (or maybe doesn’t) a reply, I’ll answer… To whoever is listening.

Using tools like twitter (again – I’m not denying it may be useful) is still like twisting my arm..

If I have something to say to a particular audience, I like this audience to be ‘identified’ (not necessarily by name though).. So just throwing out random ideas to a random crowd is still foreign to me.

..

But..

..

I’m learning !

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A-Rod took some steroids.. so.. what ?

February 10th, 2009

Ok.

I know this is going to make a lot of noise (not this note.. no..)

But My feeling about this is simple & straightforward :

These are professionals… Sorry, but we’re steadily going into a ‘bread, games & wine’ era.. And the original one had each other sportsmen *kill* each other !

What’s the message here (and the anti-doping gang’s message) ? Don’t do drugs.

Well.. If you want to *enjoy* sports.. sure.. don’t !

If you want to be a sports star … go ahead ! Do it ! man.. You chose it.. *YOUR* choice.

Sports is one thing (keeping fit (which I am not))… game for the crowd : do the drugs ! it’s more entertainment for the ‘people’ !

But.. please.. people.. stop treating people who are trying to excel in their job as if they were cheaters (I didn’t say Jeters.. (only the baseball crowd will figure that one out).. And mind it.. I am actually a fan of Dereck).

What am I saying here : Sports is one thing.. Entertainment is another.. please folks. make the difference !

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Hercules Switch from CVS to SVN

February 10th, 2009

To our beloved hercules user community (or anyone else really !)

To get the latest sources on hercules, you should now use SVN :

svn co svn://svn.hercules-390.org/hercules/trunk hercules

Alternatively, should Jay’s site have an issues, you may get a mirror copy at :

svn://svn.ivansoftware.com

Also, for those willing to closely follow hercules development, I have set up a SVN browsing service at :

http://www.ivansoftware.com/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/

Enjoy !

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More hercules performance enhancements !

February 8th, 2009

A little self pat-in-the-back…

I made a couple enhancement tweaks to hercules today.

One of the instructions – MVCLE -a memory copy instruction – was taking an inordinate amount of time to perform what it is intended to do.

After a quick study of the code, it came out that not only wasn’t the code ‘optimal’, but it was also somewhat wrong.

A quick fix later, and that particular instruction is now up to 250x faster than it was before.

Nifty !

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