From Wikipedia:

Visualization is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message.

Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics present complex information quickly and clearly^[1], such as in signs, maps, journalism, technical writing, and education.

These are techniques to deliver a large amount of data in a simple and quick way which will be easy to grasp the amounts of data involved.

The Concept seen above is the Microsoft’s Education Competencies representation,
It is showing the full set of skills a successful manger should hold,
The PDF can be found in Microsoft’s Education Competencies Website.
The Wheel lists all the different area a new manager should be trained for.

Periodic Table of Data Visualization

The Periodic Table of Data Visualization,
segments the different areas where data visualization has been efficient so far:

• Data
• Information
• Concept
• Strategy
• Metaphor
• Compound

Data Visualization collections

Some more good resources online about data visualization:

Smashing Magazine Data Visualization collection
A beautiful collection of modern approach to the subject, with many samples.

Gapminder Statistics Visualisation
The Gapminder stats tool can show you how your data changes inside a time frame

Creating your on Visualization Tools

Wheel-Like Data Visualization With MooWheel
MooWheel is a mootools based script which visualizes data and connections between items like a wheel.

TouchGraph google browser
free Java application to explore the connections between related websites

Technorati Tags: dashboards, Management, statistics

In the last half-year I have gone through a personal change,
Taking a new job has changed me and the way I work.
In my last Position I was doing 70% hands on and only the rest Team Leader work,
But now I am spending 95% of my time not doing Technical things any more,
And this has been a dramatic change for me.

I am a technical person, very technical, and actually even a Geek too,
and suddenly I work mostly with people, and my main function is to help them do their Technical stuff the best they can.

after 3 months I got my first Panic attack. I have stopped doing what i was best at and started doing soft skills things, In which I do not know yet how Good I am.
This was a scary moment, and I have started to question myself:
Was this the right change?
Is this really what i want? maybe going back is easier?
How can I become good at it?
what is really my new Job? what does it takes to succeed at it?

I have gone through the crisis after doing a lot of thinking and soul-searching,
and decided to push back harder, to do the extra mile and learn to be the best I can,
I have started reading managing books and listening to lectures and Pod-casts,
And all this have helped a lot.

but, I have read an Article this week that would have saved me a lot of anguish If I’ve read it sooner,
and I think every new manager should read it too as part of his early training – so you know what you are getting into.

“Becoming the Boss” by Linda A. Hill

This Article at hbr.org has resolved so many of my fears and helped me relax,
I’m not alone at this! I’m not the only one going through this process and having a hard time!
Most new managers find their first major Role filled with unknowns life changing decisions.
The new job is more demanding than what they imagined, and the skills and methods they have excelled at over the years are not relevant to what is needed to succeed in the new managing role.

The article talk about a “Gap between the current capabilities and the requirements of the new position”,
This is something I really resonate with,
it’s not learning new technologies or applications that I’m missing,
it’s a whole new set of qualities I need to develop within me, and this is 10 times harder.

Security Blanket is another term used in the Article – after switching to management,
The technical worker is no longer increasing his technical skills,
And this is a scary decision to take.

Another Hard change for the technical person when becoming a manager is the need for good people skills:
“Unless they identify and build effective relationships with the key people the team depends upon, the team will lack the resources necessary to do its job”,   so now it’s not only creating good relationships with the team, but important relationships with people across the organization is needed to succeed at the job.

I recommend reading this to everyone who has started a new managing role, or even thinking about it,
the managing role is not what it seems from the outside, this article helps to build a better understanding of what it is and what it isn’t, and what is expected of a new manager.

This Article can be found at http://hbr.org/2007/01/becoming-the-boss/ar/1

Technorati Tags: books, boss, Harvard Business Review, Management

Every one makes his one way in the world,
and every manager creates his own path,
but it is always helpful to get help from people who already walked the path,
and have research numbers to back them up.

So I’m searching for resources on the Managerial profession,
and Today I have listened to an interesting Podcast, or at least the first half of it,
Which talked about Staff Meeting, the importance of them,
The fact that they should be weekly – and that’s very important apparently.

I haven’t been running weekly staff meeting until now but scheduled random staff meetings,
but I will schedule them weekly for the next few months to see how that affects work.

the podcast can be found on the Managers Tools website

And another nice page I have found there New manager start from Basics page,
which organizes their important podcasts by the best order for new managers.
the main topics from their basics page are:

• one on one meetings
• feedback
• coaching
• delegation
• running effective meetings

I will be going through these podcasts in the coming days, be sure to follow the posts !

Technorati Tags: Management, meetings, podcast

I just got my own copy of the new Zappos CEO book -
Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose

I’ve read about Zappos for a while now, and they have an interesting Edge to their system -
Deliver WOW – I never understood slogans like that,
But I was happy to get my new copy of the “Advance Reading Copy – Not for sale”

Who doesn’t like to get things for free ?

It did bring a smile to my face – so maybe the delivering WOW does work ?

Book review will follow shortly

Technorati Tags: books, Management

I’m always searching for better tools to do my work,
and today I have found this nice DNS online testing tool made with Ajax,
It’s quite nice and fast, and its good when you do not have a Linux distro at hand,
or have a problem with whois test from a proxied server.

The site offers:

• Live DNS test
• whois search
• IP whois
• HTTP headers

and more tools like it, very handy tool and works fast.

I do appreciate it when someone thinks of the GUI also and not just the functions in a tool.

Technorati Tags: DNS, Online Tools

Changes are good.
Changes are bad.
Changes are scary.
It is time for a change.

My posts to the site have changed, I have started the site as a Linux how to,
but started writing about WordPress when this wonderful platform became very interesting,
and switched to talk about Solaris, when I started meddling with that OS too.

I have changed jobs, started doing different things, and now its time to slightly shift the focus of my blog too,
apparently soft skills are not easy for this Linux girl.
and I have a lot to learn, a lot to understand and some thoughts shifts to carry out,
and I will follow this learning experience here,
with my thoughts of the process.

And ill start with the first Management book I’ve read which was very good:

The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You

This  book goes over the main laws of leadership,
it talks about qualities a leader should have and lists out the points each of us should check if we need to strengthen them in us to get better results.

After reading the book I started to get an Idea of how much more i need to learn, and how much more I still don’t know that I don’t know

wish me luck – this is going to be a life long journey …..

Technorati Tags: books, Management

Some people just know how to write better,
I’ve read this blogger – http://blog.cubeofm.com/
He doesn’t exactly talk about how to make money of the internet,
although he had mentioned he is making a nice sum of money out of a few internet based projects,
he does talk about some of the methods he uses.

One of these was discussed in this post: The subtleties in outsourcing using RentACoder
where he talks about what the site is offering, what kind of different coders are available there,
which is best for which project and how to best work with the site.

Another very good post – and judging by the amount of tweets the post is showing one of his best is
Your high IQ will kill your startup where he talks about skill vs. intelligence and explain in great writing,
why you need to keep practicing.

this touched a cord in me when thinking about my early school days and how easily being good at everything turned arround on me when i had to really sit down and studying – which i never actually done before,
and then my grades suffered.
this post also connected well to the book i’ve just read – Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
where he also talk s about the importance of training, and how no wonder talent just got there by strolling,
but only with a lot of years practicing behind him.
Gladwell talks about the 10,000 hours rule – practice and learn something for 10K hours – And you will be
a World class talent at it.

Highly recommended – go read the posts and the book

Under the Solaris 10 system – or the open Solaris as well,
the service management have been upgraded, and there are great new tools to handle the sysadmin
work on the services.

The long detailed explanation can be found here:
Solaris Service Management Facility – Quickstart Guide

But for the fast paced sysadmin – here is the short version

To see the detailed boot sequence with all the services notices use:

boot -m verbose

Stopping and starting services

stop a running service as well as make sure it wont come back after booting the server:

svcadm disable service_name

Bring the service back up and make sure it starts after boot as well:

svcadm enable service_name

The new and improved services system will also watch over the service, and restart it if it suddenly stop.
but don’t worry – if the service loops and can’t start, after a couple of time the SMF will stop trying to bring it up, and will send you an error for the service.

To stop or start the service temporarily without impacting the startup status of the service use:

svcadm -t enable/disable service_name

Getting information about the services

List all active services:

svcs

List all available services:

svcs -a

List all failing services:

svcs -x

to get more details on a specific failing service, use:

svcs -x service_name

to add verbosity to the svcs commands just add “-v”

the services logs are located at:
/var/svc/log
or:
/etc/svc/volatile

List all the processes this service is running, even if they have a different name:

svcs -p service_name

Viewing Dependencies

List all the services this service is depended upon, if any of these services fails, our service will fail too:

svcs -d service_name

List all the services that depend on our service, if our service fails, they will fail too:

svcs -D service_name

Service Names

the explanation for the service names im taking straight from the SUN bigadmin site:

Solaris uses a URI string called an FMRI (Fault Managed Resource Identifier) to identify system objects for which advanced fault and resource management capabilities are provided. Services managed by SMF are assigned FMRI strings prefixed with the scheme name “svc“, as shown in the following examples for the Solaris service syslogd(1M):

• svc://localhost/system/system-log:default
• svc:/system/system-log:default
• system/system-log:default

Notice that these service FMRIs used by SMF can be expressed in three ways: first as an absolute path including a location path such as “localhost“; second as a path relative to the local machine; and third as simply the service identifier with the string prefixes implied. The SMF administrator tools described in the rest of this document typically describe services using the third form, as they are assumed to be operating on local services. Other management tools that operate on multiple types of resources or across machine boundaries may use one of the other forms to describe services. The SMF tools in the current release of Solaris can only manage services on the local host.

Solaris RunLevel

There are no longer run levels setting on the Solaris server, now this is called milestones.
Milestones are a group of services, which defines a state the server is in – just like single user, or multi user.
you can bring the server into a specific milestone with:

svcadm milestone milestone/single-user:default

to permanently set the server in a specific mile stone , use:

svcadm milestone -d milestone/single-user:default

and again – to list what services should be running to reach a specific milestone, use:

svcs -d milestone_name

and that’s the short explanation

next time ill explain how to add a service of your own to the system.