Memoirs of a Bystander

Persistence

2008-05-11T19:14:07-05:00

Whew....I'm going to start off my first blog post in 7.5 months with a quote from Calvin Coolidge:

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race"

It's with that that I explain my absence a bit. About 2 years ago, when I first started working for TrackAbout, I made the decision that I would use the opportunity of working from home to the fullest extent. That meant I would go back to school and finish the bachelors that I had been working on for the better part of a decade. My new bosses were on board with the idea, as long as it didn't hamper my ability to deliver at work. After transferring from Aurora University, where I was double majoring in Mathematics and Computer science, in the spring of 2001, I enrolled at the University of Illinois at Chicago ( UIC ), with a declared major of Statistics and Operations Research. I spent a year at UIC, going to school full time. In the Summer of '02, I decided that I would work full-time instead of going back to school. I made the decision that I wanted experience over education. Over the next few years, I took a class here and there, but nothing major.

Finally, after leaving Mobitrac and starting at TrackAbout, my decision was made. I was going back. I decided I would get it done as quickly as I could, while still fulfilling my duties at TrackAbout. Since I had ~30 hours left, that meant taking ~10 a semester for 3 semesters. Because of a scheduling goof, I actually didn't enroll in classes until the Spring of '07.

When explaining my decision to people, they often ask "Why go back?". After all, I have a good job & a pretty successful career which hasn't been hindered by a lack of a degree. So why do it? Well, I bounced things around in my head until I came to this final conclusion:

In the end, the degree was something big in my life that I started and I wanted to finish it.

That's not to say that every person needs to get a degree to be successful. Far from it. If I never started college, I doubt I would have gone through it all. I know several very successful people who are 10x smarter than some college graduates I know. Life is all about what you make of it and a college degree is just one optional component. In the end, I didn't want to look back at my life and see something I quit at. Especially something so big. That's why I went back.

Well, after 1.5 years of intense studying, I am happy to say that I am now a college graduate.

That's where the quote comes in.

Going back to school while maintaining a normal, 50-hr a week full time job was going to be tough. Unfortunately, around Nov '07, the TrackAbout engineering team lost a team member and our head count went from 4 down to 3. As if that wasn't bad enough, we were staring down the barrel of a Jan 1st deadline for not one but TWO very large, company changing projects. They were:

The roll out of a new order integration system for one of pilot customers. This is an end-to-end, completely paperless system of placing and delivering orders.
The first customer of our brand new partnership with TECSYS, a supply chain management software company, was going live on Jan 1st. They were going live with our standard tracking solution, rental bill generation module and the TECSYS EliteSeries Distribution Management Systems (DMS) offering. We, TrackAbout and TECSYS, were completely replacing their exiting system(s). Needless to say, a sizable chunk of our targeted vertical was going to be watching the rollout and we needed to impress.

Whew....there was a lot to do and I had to balance work and a school curriculum that included classes like:

Applied Statistics for Engineers
Intro to Mathematical Probability
Nonparametric Statistical Methods

Needless to say, I felt like quitting SEVERAL times. I tried to come up with every excuse I could think of. "I didn't need the degree", "I could finish up next semester", "I can go back another time", etc....

But I didn't quit. I sucked it up, quit my whining and pushed through. Which brings me to the quote I started this post with. Looking back at the past 5-10 years of my life, the one thing I can point to that made me successful isn't intelligence, upbringing, luck or chance.

It's perseverance.

I succeeded simply because I didn't let myself fail. Initiative and hard work will get you ahead of 70% of the people out there. A lot of people are plagued by procrastination, laziness or simply a reluctance to sacrifice. I meet lots of people in my life who think I'm lucky or that I am in a good field and being in computers makes it easy to be successful. However, people don't see the hard work that goes into being employed in the tech industry. Sure, they see the cool toys or the nice paycheck, but they don't see the support phone that you have to sometimes carry. Nor do they when you have to cancel plans because of some problem with work. Or how about the difficulty in scheduling a vacation? People don't realize that when tech people go on vacation or take days off, our work doesn't go away. It's there for us when we get back. Only now, we've shortened the time we have to get it done :)

In the end, I'm extremely happy I went back and finished. I'm also extremely happy I am done now. I now have free time again and just in time for the summer. Especially since I hear the Cubs are winning the world series :)

Well, I can dream, can't I ?

Links for 2008-05-09 [del.icio.us]

2008-05-10T00:00:00-05:00

Joshua Flanagan - Readable Regular Expressions
Introducing LINQ To Regex - ISerializable - Roy Osherove's Blog
useit.com: Jakob Nielsen on Usability and Web Design
Indigo 3.0, increased geekiness for your home - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
The new ParentDish: helping raise kids of all ages TUAW PHOTO GALLERY ENGADGETDOWNLOAD SQUADJOYSTIQBLOGGINGSTOCKSGREENDAILY TUAWWEB SEND US TIPSRSS FEEDSMACWORLD COVERAGE Indigo 3.0, increased geekiness for your home Posted May 7th 2008 6:00PM by Bret

Links for 2008-05-08 [del.icio.us]

2008-05-09T00:00:00-05:00

Julius Eckert - Projects
Nice set of UIs for QS.

Links for 2008-05-07 [del.icio.us]

2008-05-08T00:00:00-05:00

11 MORE VISUAL STUDIO SHORTCUTS YOU SHOULD KNOW | Dev102.com
LogicielMac Update
Nice auto-update mac app

Links for 2008-05-06 [del.icio.us]

2008-05-07T00:00:00-05:00

Mac 101: use a tab to navigate dialogs - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
GREAT tip! Been looking for this for a long time.
Information Design Patterns

Links for 2008-05-05 [del.icio.us]

2008-05-06T00:00:00-05:00

Links for 2008-05-04 [del.icio.us]

2008-05-05T00:00:00-05:00

Links for 2008-05-02 [del.icio.us]

2008-05-03T00:00:00-05:00

Professional Web Design Forums | How-To | Smashing Magazine

Fusion Performance Tips

2007-09-30T19:39:42-05:00

Several people have been emailing me wondering when I would start to post tips about my VMWare Fusion experience. They wanted to know what performance tips and tricks I have found out to make Fusion faster and/or more stable.

Here's the strange thing. I haven't written anything because, frankly, I've been too busy using Fusion with no problems at all. Not only is Fusion is faster and more stable that Parallels, but it puts less of a strain on my mac overall.

In the end, that's all I really need. My previous postings on Parallels performance were simply tips I found that made Parallels usable as a .Net development environment. With Fusion, there are no tips. It Just Works.

One of the nice things about Fusion is the ability to take advantage of both cores from within windows. Fusion allows you to select the number of processor that your VM has access to. In the case of my MacBook Pro, it's either one or two. I'm not sure if you run Fusion on a Mac Pro if you get access to more than two processors or not. The only hiccup for windows is that to take advantage of "multiple" processors, you need to have the processors set to 2 before installing windows. Apparently, the only time the multi processor files are available is during the install. I am sure I would like it more if Visual Studio.net supported background compilation on different threads. Eh, maybe in VS 2008.

Surviorship Bias

2007-08-30T22:58:26-05:00

I read a lot of books. I probably average a book every two weeks during the year. I tend to read almost all non-fiction, as I have found that I don't have the attention span for fiction. As a result, I tend to read a lot of technology, business and management books.

Unfortunately, I am starting to scale back the types of books that I read in these genres. What I'm finding is that since many of these books focus on showing that some idea or trait proves to be successful, they tend to all fall prey to the same basic flaw.

Survivorship Bias.

Typically used to describe the mutual fund sector, survivorship bias occurs when failed companies are excluded from studies due to the fact that they no longer exist. This is the case with most mutual fund portfolios. In terms other studies based on finding common properties of successful ideas or companies, survivorship bias simply means focusing those that are still around and hence, successful.

For example, let's say that I'm writing a book about how Aeron chairs contribute to running a successful company. Being a good researcher, I go find a dozen or so companies to see what types of chairs they use. Right there, I've made a critical flaw: by finding companies that are still in business, I'm ignoring all of those companies who are already out of business. They could have all used Aeron chairs. Because of this, it would be easy to dismiss my findings.

The latest book that i read that falls prey to this is Made To Stick by Chip & Dan Heath. In Made To Stick, the authors put forth a simply acronym, SUCCES, that represents the 6 essential qualities that an idea needs to have in order for it to stick. They prove that successful ideas exhibit these qualities, but unfortunately, they don't really make the case that ideas that don't have these qualities consistently fail. Without the latter, the former is kind of incomplete.

I guess i'll have to work hard to find books that present well researched and complete ideas.

As for how survivorship bias relates to the financial industry, that's the topic of another post.

The Essence of Language

2007-08-30T21:52:19-05:00

I found this quote when reading the excellent Ambient Findability by Peter Morville:

"Narrowly circumscribed groups develop coded languages that optimize communications between insiders at the expense of transparency to outsiders."

I think that's a great way to describe what's going on with Domain Specific Langauges.

BTW, I highly recommend reading Ambient Findability. Though it was published in 2005, it's coverage of then emerging technologies like GPS, semantics and search as it relates to people seem prescient now.

It's a quick read too. Under 200 pages with lots of pictures :)

CruiseControl for the Mac

2007-08-21T19:20:16-05:00

This is just awesome. One less thing that I need to run in Fusion.

Adios Parallels

2007-08-06T16:30:08-05:00

Well, there will be no more Parallels Performance tips coming from me. I have completely moved over to VMWare's Fusion. I have been using the RC1 release of Fusion for about a month and it's rock solid and fast. Today, 1.0 came out and it's even faster.

Amen.

Ironically, the biggest reason for switching wasn't even the laughable stability of Parallels 3.0. It was their customer support. A while back, I started a thread on their forum stating that I would be moving back to 2.5 from 3.0 simply because i didn't feel 3.0 was stable enough or fast enough for my usage. I simply hoped they would improve with news builds. What happened next floored me.

They had the stones to remove my post ( as well as any replies ) from their forums. When I brought this to the attention of the administrators and the other community members, I was told that they would look into it. Nearly a month later and still nothing.

Regardless, I don't care anymore. Fusion is here, it works, and it's FAST. I don't care about fancy features such as opening documents in either os or running my windows apps alongside my mac ones. If I was that in love with windows, I'd be using a windows box.

Add the fact that Fusion lets me still use QuickSilver from with it's VM and I'm sold.

It's sad really, though. Parallels was the quirky upstart with first mover advantage, but they messed it all up by going after the flash. A simple search through their forums revels post after post after post about how shoddy their latest builds are and how unresponsive their customer support is. In fact, people who complain are often dismissed or told "tough, parallels works for a lot of other people."

Oh well. Stay on the look out for VMWare performance tips though.

Collecting Friends

2007-07-09T20:22:00-05:00

With the recent explosion of social networking sites, something has always puzzled me. First, consider this excerpt from Robert Scoble's blog:

"Twitter is still ahead, but growing far slower. Just today I added another 120 friends to Pownce for a total of 839. More than 4,400 on Twitter and more than 1,200 on Facebook."

My question is this: Is there any value actually garnered from adding an obscenely large amount of random people as your friend on various social sites?

Honestly, if a social networking site it meant to enhance you life through discovery of new interests, music, recommendations, etc..., is that easily done by wading through thousands of people?

At what point does the quality of a social connection come into play and if you have thousands of social connections, how can you possibly assess the quality of those connections?

Arrogance in the W3C Thought Process

2007-07-09T18:11:47-05:00

I like the idea of the W3C. They're the group responsible for managing some of most widely used standards in computing. Among the hits:

* HTML ( and XHTML )
* XML
* CSS
* SVG
* XSL

The strange thing is that all of these standards are several years old. Plus there are a slew of other standards that haven't been used or adopted. Their success rate for standards is dismal. Yet, despite this, the W3C still has the stones to act like they are doing everyone a favor by setting the beat for the semantic web.

Exhibit A:

RDF has been around for years and year, yet no one really uses it. Hell, I've even tried to understand what RDF is all about and see if it could actually be useful but to no avail. That hasn't stopped the W3C though. OWL, RDFS, SPARQL, GRDDL are just a few of the standards that have failed to take off in the semantic space that are all connected to RDF and aim to bring semantic information to the web. While W3C has been drafting, recommending, and re-versioning it's ivory tower specs, people out there have been busy actually creating the semantic web.

One only has to peruse LinkedIn, Cord'd, Upcoming and a slew of other sites to see *gasp* semantic information exposed, ready to be consumed. Using microformats, the semantic community has done what the W3C has proposed to do in about 2 years. Plus, it shows no signs of slowing down.

In fact, microformats have become so popular, they've inspired, SURPRISE, another working draft from the W3C, RDFa. From the RDFa abstract:

"Current web pages, written in HTML, contain significant inherent structured data. When publishers can express this data more completely, and when tools can read it, a new world of user functionality becomes available, letting users transfer structured data between applications and web sites. An event on a web page can be directly imported into a user's desktop calendar. A license on a document can be detected so that the user is informed of his rights automatically. A photo's creator, camera setting information, resolution, and topic can be published as easily as the original photo itself, enabling structured search and sharing."

That sounds an awful lot like the the purpose of microformats. In fact, give a look over the RDFa examples. You'll notice they look a lot like microformats.

Exhibit B:

If that's not enough arrogance, think about the whole SOAP & WS-* fiasco. It's pretty safe to say that SOAP, as a proposed standard for web service communications, has failed. Craig Andera recently wrote about "The Failure of SOAP" and echoed something that I have noticed for a while: SOAP is just too complex for almost every scenario except for the edge cases requiring extensive security. WSDL is maddening to deal with. In fact, there's even a rumor that SOAP et al... were made so complex specifically so that tool vendors could step in and supply easy to use tools to encapsulate that complexity. I know, it's a big reach of the mind seeing as though the W3C is made up of a lot of tool vendors.....

Oh, Let's not even start to dive into the plethora of WS-* "standards" that no one actually uses.

What does this have to do with Semantics? Well, let no one say that the W3C is not persistent. They've just introduced a new proposed recommendation:

Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema

From the abstract:

"This document defines a set of extension attributes for the Web Services Description Language and XML Schema definition language that allows description of additional semantics of WSDL components. The specification defines how semantic annotation is accomplished using references to semantic models, e.g. ontologies. Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema (SAWSDL) does not specify a language for representing the semantic models. Instead it provides mechanisms by which concepts from the semantic models, typically defined outside the WSDL document, can be referenced from within WSDL and XML Schema components using annotations."

I'm quietly shaking my head.

Parallels 3.0 Thoughts

2007-07-03T18:39:48-05:00

When Parallels announced that version 3.0 of their Desktop for Mac product, I was eager to hear what new features would be included. When I got an email offering me an additional discount to upgrade before June 6th ( $39.99 pre June 6th vs. $49.99 post June 6th ), I was torn. On the one hand, I am married to running Windows on my MacBook Pro. I develop day in and day out in .NET, so i need to run Visual Studio 2005. On the other hand, I haven't been impressed with the more recent builds and with VMWare Fusion development proceeding at a rapid pace, I wasn't sure I wanted to dump another chunk of money into Parallels.

In the end, I decided to give 3.0 a shot and see if Parallels can blow me away with their new features.

After running 3.0 for almost a month, my verdict is decidedly "meh".

I don't play 3D games, so that support didn't matter to me at all. I could only hope that those enhancements would also fix the excessive graphic driver flushes that I talked about before. Doesn't seem like it did.

The new SmartSelect functionality also didn't appeal to me because i already did everything in OS X and had no desire to use more windows functionality.

I'm only interested in one thing: speed. Unfortunately, parallels is quickly losing me on that front by adding in all sorts of features that I won't use.

In fact, overall, 3.0 seems slower and more buggy than the previous 2.5 builds. I'm not the only one who thinks so. A cursory glance at parallels forums are revels a lot of people having similar complaints.

I have to say, without a significantly upgraded build, I'm not going to pay for another Parallels release. In fact, as soon as VMWare fusion goes gold, I'm going to give it a serious look.

Get your act together Parallels.

Anyone want a MacBook Pro ?

2007-06-12T09:51:24-05:00

I've decided to upgrade my laptop to one of the new MacBook Pros just released. That means my existing MacBook Pro is up for sale:

* 2.0 Ghz Intel Core Duo
* 15.4 inch LCD screen ( 1440 x 900 max )
* 80 GB HD
* 2 GB PC-5300 RAM
* DVD RW

Right about a year old. No dents, scratches or damage to the unit.

Ping me if you're interested: griffin at 1530technologies dot com