I attended the Web 2.0 conference last week. Well, I only went to one day’s worth. I found a few interesting things on Thursday, which were oriented at Ontologies and metadata and the like. I wish I had been there for this keynote on Wednesday by Clay Shirky about “Cognitive Surplus”; I suspect that he’s right.
Archive for the 'Work' Category
29
Apr
Web 2.0 Conference
Well, my pal Steve Skidmore (”Skids”) and I were on our own for dinner last week in London. I had a real jones for a true British fish and chips meal. Since we were staying in Kensington (a London neighborhood) we asked the concierge for a recommendation. “Earl’s Court”, they said. It was also a shwarma place but good fish and chips.
When Skids and I got there we weren’t thrilled so we started to wander. We came across two Bobbies and thought, “Eureka! Surely they will know of a good fish and chips place”. The answer to the question, however, was the start of the great dinner adventure.
“There’s no proper fish and chips around here”, said the first cop. “You know, they are disappearing from all over Britain”, said the second.
The first cop went on to say, “If you want a proper [he pronounced it as "prawper", of course] fish and chips, it’s pretty far; about 15 minutes from here. You’d have to take the number 74 or 430 nightbus. But that’s a proper fish and chips shop, which is a dying breed here. You go down two blocks to the light, turn to the right and take the 74 or 430 bus through two roundabouts to the third stop. The shop is called The Anchor and it’s a proper fish and chips, all right. Just next to the toy store”.
So off we went, down the street to find the nightbus. I had a vision of the Harry Potter movie in my head, of course. But the traffic was heavy, so the real bus wasn’t going very fast. We were clearly off the tourist map and in a residential area of London. After a bit, we weren’t sure if we had passed it or what, so we asked if anyone on the upper deck with us knew of The Anchor - no one had. But they knew the toy store, and that was the next stop, so we clambered down and jumped off at the next stop.
The Anchor, pictured here:
is a nice place run by Maurice and his wife 
at 131 Lillie Road, Fulham, London, SW6 7SX. And we had a fantastic meal.
30
Aug
Hype, hype, hype
Maybe I just need a longer vacation. Right now, I would just settle for an epiphany. I’m working on project about Enterprise 2.0 (who isn’t, in the software business these days?) and I’m still confused. After all, what is Enterprise 2.0?
One school of thought is that it is just the Web 2.0 (and what is that, you ask?) just slapped into the corporate enterprise. Man, I know it’s more than that. The problem here is that corporations are not the internet. Most of the collaboration that occurs on the internet is because groups of like-minded people got together and wanted to work on something. My work environment is not the same thing at all.
So I thought I would just nose around and see what other people think about Enterprise 2.0. I am underwhelmed. Or overwhelmed. Why? Because most of what’s out this is a lot of hype. One discussion topic seemed pretty useful so I’ll list it here and that’s from the JackBe guys.
I like their discussion so I’m going to let it lead me for a while. My sense of the overall issue is that most people think they can just slap Web 2.0 technologies together in the corporate business place and collaboration will occur. I doubt it will be quite that easy. Not everyone in a corporation is trying to collaborate - most people are just trying to get their work done so they can go home. Trying to add value to the corporations’ knowledge base is not in most people’s quarterly bonus objectives. And management teams are not trained to support people to foster this kind of environment. IT staff will worry about how to control the information. That sort of thing.
The issue here is that we are dealing with people, not technology.
I know the technology is cool, but that’s not the problem. People have to want to do this. And that’s the primary difference between the web environment and the enterprise.
From another site:Top 10 Management Fears About Enterprise Web 2.0 you can see a pretty good list of what I’m talking about. I’ll quote it here:
“What are some of the questions that organizational leaders are apt to be asking and any vendor who hopes to succeed will need to answer. This is by no means a comprehensive list and I welcome your additions and thoughts.
Technological Barriers
1. How can I be certain that the information that is gathered and shared behind the firewall stays behind the firewall?
2. How do I control who has access to particular levels of information and databases?
3. How do I protect the integrity of the information from malicious tampering by disgrunted employees or managers?
4. How can I be sure that information is being “tagged†properly for efficient retrieval later?
5. What kind of training do employees need before they can effectively use the technology?
Cultural Barriers
6. How can I monitor the system to make certain that what individuals are saying and sharing reflects company policy?
7. What are the legal dangers in saving and sharing so much loosely supervised input?
8. How do I distinguish “productive†use of the technology from horsing around?
9. How do I “manage†the gathering and disseminating of so much unstructured information?
10. How do I know if I’m getting my money’s worth out of the investment in technology?”
Well, I’ll have to continue this tomorrow.
05
Jul
Playing with XPlanet
After a while, I found that the some of the configuration files to make this project go are available from a gent named Michael Dear via a program/offering called Totalmarker. Totalmarker is a result of some perl scripts that create the cloud overlay; pull the volcano, earthquake, and storm data from the national sites; and also pulls the data from NORAD about the ephemeris for the Space Station and the Shuttle (when it up). This makes everything much easier. However, I quickly got tired of pulling the files every so often so I decided to see if I could script this somehow.It turns out that volcano data (for example) is only updated once a week, so there is not point in pulling it more often than that. Cloud data is updated about every 6 hours, so I could pull the cloud image every 6 hours. I needed something that I could schedule and windows scheduler was just too clumsy for me to figure out. So I did it the hard way, of course.The search for yet another capability led me to a new software program called nncron (lite), which acts as a cron service for windows. A cron service, if you don’t know, is something that runs in the background and checks to see if there is something it needs to do (like watching a folder for new files or emails that have been posted and then moving them to the appropriate location). I built a configuration file for nncron that schedules the various data pulls according to the frequency of their updates. (This is called a cron.tab file). Mine read like this attached file:
If you don’t speak ‘cron’, don’t worry. I didn’t either. I spent a lot of time on the website and with the documentation and figured it all out. All the lines above say is to download the appropriate configuration file (quake, cloud, etc.) at the times listed above. There isn’t much point in downloading more often, the files don’t change. So for example, the cloud file is built 4x a day. Downloading it more often than that wasn’t going to do me any good.So I loaded this up and, after a lot of testing, got it to work.
