Passionate about your development

…lots of time to find my data.

Last week I decided that my private laptop needs a clean-up – a very thorough one. I backed up my data; basically I copied a few directories to my external HD, amongst them “Application Data”. Then I reinstalled Windows. Of course, I wanted to get my data back but what a scare as I could not find the “Application Data” directory on my external HD anymore. So I installed some recovery software to look for the data on the main drive. This takes a while and so one week was lost trying to recover my data.

Ok, I don’t know why I haven’t done the following earlier: this morning I had the great idea of starting a search over my entire external HD for “App*”. Of course, there it was… The settings in the Folder View of the reinstalled Windows Explorer hide systems folders and apparently “Application Data” is a systems folder… How stupid of me not to think of this earlier – how stupid of MS to be so rigid.

Anyway, I am glad to have my data back as I feared the worst, namely that I lost a few years worth of email. Now I can also continue to install some of the essential programs again and put up the pictures from my trip to Canterbury soon. Though, this will still have to wait for one week as I have to get some work done. Great weekend in the office – here I come.

So I’m back in Vienna but what happened in Canterbury after Monday?

On Tuesday I went around the different departments I used to work in. I spent hours of talking to the people, catching up with the recent news. It is great to still feel part of it. I had a longer conversation with Simon about students coming to Vienna for a placement year and about other possibilities of cooperation. Unfortunately, due to the Easter vacation, I couldn’t meet with everyone I wanted to. On the other hand, it gave me more time for those I met. For example, it gave me time to enjoy a lovely lunch with Nadia in Origins Bar. In the evening we had another BBQ and I retreated early.

Wednesday I decided to travel to the factory outlet in Ashford. I wondered about the presence of the police at the Asda supermarket but heard later that just an armed robbery happened there. I then walked through most of the shops but wasn’t very decisive on the day so I ended up with only two t-shirts. On my way back I decided to drop by TK-Max in Canterbury and it was worth it – three more pieces of clothing. I like shopping in England as it can be cheaper, offering better quality and also a different kind of fashion. In the evening Matt, Carrie, Brad and I went to The Ancient Raj for a nice meal out. All in all, I had a quiet and relaxing birthday.

Thursday, Matt and I went to Biddenden Vineyards. I wanted to drive the car and we “needed” some good Cider. We had a nice walk around the vineyard and tasted some of their apple juice before buying some of their Strong Kentish Cider (Medium and Dry) and Special Reserve Cider. I took a bottle of each home to Vienna. We also purchased a crate of a nice local Ale. On the way to Canterbury we passed Headcorn where I used to perform my first parachute jump. So I took Matt around the Headcorn Aerodrome and the Parachute Club.

Thursday evening we had a bigger BBQ event at 3WW. This was part of Matt’s announcement:


I think we're going to BBQ this Thursday. You should, by now, know the
time. You might even know the routine. In case you don't...


WHERE: 3 WW
WHEN : Thursday, April 20th, 19:00ish
WHY : Come say high to Ralph
WHAT : Bring some food and beverage


Many followed this invitation. It was nice to have half an hour to talk to Keith – all the best for finishing up your dissertation. Also, Nick came along with a bunch of friends. The food was good as ever but we realised again that two BBQ’s are better than one and that we need a second. I forgot to prepare the dates wrapped in bacon (you can fry them up in a pan too) – shame on me.

Friday I had to leave again – I can’t say I wanted to leave already. The place changes and more is to come. However I don’t come for the place but for the people. Once everyone is gone I feel Canterbury will be like an empty shell. Pictures will be up soon, I hope. But more about that endeavour in a different post.

Many thanks to all in Canterbury that made my stay so pleasant!!!

Hi, I mentioned before that I use Google Reader for reading some blogs. Today I found that Google allows me to share my “starred items” with you. Thus, I made them publicly available and also added a script to this site showing the last 10 items in the sidebar.

Today I spent a lot of time on the web and I stumbled upon a lot of things:

First, there is the “Get Things Done” line I followed. Starting from the book by David Allen I quickly came to Sylvia’s GTD Homepage and then to the GTD with Gmail Whitepaper. I was previously looking for a tool to manage my to-do lists online. This seems to be a good way.

Next, I checked out a few things to organise myself better using Outlook – the preferred tool at work. First, there is David’s little booklet. Then there is this post on Tickling email in Outlook. I still need to work through this during the weekend.

Coming back to GMail: To improve the usability of GMail even further, I installed scripts described in “Adding Persistent Searches to GMail” and “A Greasemonkey Christmas”.

And there was an article in the c’t magazine about Writer2LaTeX. So I installed OpenOffice and Writer2LaTeX. Now I still have to test the system.

Finally, I found out about the Google Reader – a tool to read RSS feeds – via persistent.info. I entered those feeds I read regularly. I noticed that it takes a moment to update the list – longer than the live bookmarks in Firefox.

Another couple of blogs that seem interesting: Lifehacker and 43Folders.

And some fun: Woogle – Words in pictures. Try, for example, “cool stuff in computer science”

First, a Happy New Year (2006) to all of you out there.

While an illness forces me to lay in bed I have some time to dig around for various things I am interested in. One of these things are systems of “Social Bookmarking”. Personally I have been using Spurl for a while and I tested del.icio.us briefly.

However, my professional interest rose while reading “Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise“. The article describes the experience at IBM to introduce a social bookmarking system within the company as non-intrusive knowledge management tool.

The post “Social bookmarks review” presents a document briefly comparing currently 19 social bookmarking systems. Furthermore, the article “Social Bookmarking Tools (I) – A General Review” presents a nice overview of some social bookmarking tools. In a second article they introduce Connetea in more detail.

“Connotea is a free online reference management service. It allows you to save links to all your favourite articles, references, websites and other online resources with one click. Connotea is also a social bookmarking tool, so you can view other people’s collections to discover new, interesting content. ” Connetea has in particular the academic community in mind and provides some special enhancements to support bookmarking academic articles.

The main advantage of Connetea is the availability of the source code under the GPL. This allows you to install Connetea on your own site, modify the code and release it to the public and to write plug-ins for whatever you need. Also, “Connotea Code is written in Perl, and uses MySQL as the data store. ” This should make it fairly easy to familiarise yourself with the code and the data is not held hostage in a proprietary format.

All in all, it seems my search for a social bookmarking system for my company comes to an end. Together with a colleague I hope to install the system, tweak it and then start using it.

Today our company invited the department of Computer Science at the Technical University Vienna to present current research topics and results as well as to discuss possible collaborations. I am curious about the result of this event.

In a workshop Alexander Schatten discussed issues of Agile Development of businesses as well as software and he mentioned the following quote:

Die Krisis des Wissens wird, wie gesagt, kognitiv getrieben von der neuen Relevanz des Nichtwissens, und sie wird operativ davon getrieben, dass es nun darum geht, die richtigen Fehler schneller zu machen als die Wettbewerber, um Lernprozesse zu intensivieren, die im Kern darin bestehen, Expertise im Umgang mit Nichtwissen zu entwickeln.¹

in English:

The crisis of knowledge ist cognitively driven by the new relevance of nescience. Operationally it is driven by the necessity to make the right mistakes faster than the competitors to intensivate learning processes, what means developing expertise in handling nescience.

Knowledge management typically deals with the knowledge of an organisation but I like the idea of managing what we do not know better. However, wow do we know that a particular topic, technology, etc. will be relevant in the future? A company basically only invests in knowledge it can utilise later.

¹ Willke Helmut. Dystopia, Studien zur Krisis des Wissens in der modernen Gesellschaft. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, Erste Auflage, 2002

We had the first snow today. After leaving the house and walking for ten minutes I looked like a little snow man. (Un)fortunately, it did not stay. However, the forecast promises more snow and cold weather.

I went to a cafe/bar/restaurant called “Rochus” to try their breakfast. Frankly, I was not too impressed, nevertheless my stomach feels much better. I felt the portion was rather small and I did not get everything that was mentioned on the menu. Furthermore, the Earl Grey I ordered seemed rather weak. I couldn’t tell from the smell that they gave me the right tea and frankly, I am still not convinced. I would have said it was a Darjeeling. So to test my nose I came home and brewed me an Earl Grey – it certainly smells much stronger of Bergamot.

While being in the “Rochus” I continued reading the previous issue of the ACM Communications (Volume 48, No. 10). Two articles caught my interest in particular. The one focused on “Digital Aids for an Aging Society” and the other on social networks – “Community: From Neighborhood to Network“. The following quote from the second article I want to repeat here:

Most community ties are now specialized, with different network members supplying emotional support, information, material aid, social identity, and s sense of belonging. [...]

People move in multiple, partial social circles, with limited involvement in each.¹

Why did I pick this one? Recently I have been thinking about communities. Why is it so difficult to build up a new one at a new place nowadays? What was so good about the places I lived before? I feel this quote gives a partial answer – involvement. Previously, I think, I have been much more involved with the people at the different places. I took more time to listen to their problems, to provide support and to interact. While partially work is to blame for a lack of time nowadays, I think I do not commit emotionally as much as I used to. On the one hand, I spend a considerable amount of time and heart to keep in touch with my friends from the other places. On the other hand, I think the first part of the quote is important – specialised circles. My friends mostly offer the support I need and they are only a phone call, an IM chat or an email away. Once I discussed problems with them I leave it there and this means that people here do not get to know me at all. Similarly, since I do not share much with them, I do not ask about their well-being enough, leaving me emotionally disconnected from my environment.

Which brings me to another important thing of this week – “Fish!” ². This is a fictitious story “about finding the deep source of energy, creativity, and passion”³. I ordered the book and it arrive during the week. One night I thought I read a bit of it – I ended up reading the whole book and thinking about it for most of the rest of the night.

While working for the Unit for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching at Kent I have been introduced to the Fish philosophy. It is based on a story from the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle. (It is the first time I browse through their website and I think it is a great site of ideas and fun – there are even ecards, pictures and movie clips.) The book tells the story of Mary Jane transforming the “toxic energy dump” department into a thriving unit, exemplary for the whole company. She does it by learning some very basic but essential concepts from the fishmongers. These concepts are:

• Choose Your Attitude
• Play
• Make Their Day
• Be Present

Some might think this book has been written for the business world only, I think it applies to life in general. It provides some vital lessons on interacting with friends and every person you meet. Which brings me back to “involvement”. While it is much easier to write down these words than changing oneself, I will change my attitude to be more involved – more present.

There are a few more quotes I would like to share:

I will need to risk the possibility of failure. [...] [T]o take no action is to fail for sure.⁴

There is always a choice about the way you do your work, even if there is not a choice about the work itself.⁵

[...] my grandmother didn’t love dishwashing. She brought love to dishwashing,[...]⁶

Life is too precious just to be passing through to retirement.⁷

The past is history
The future is a mystery
Today is a gift
That is why we call it the present ⁸

In “Fish!” there is also a reference to “Moments of Truth” by Jan Carlzon. Basically, it is about the company-customer relationship. The first Google-hit “The CEO Refresher – Moments of Truth, Misery & Magic” by Shep Hyken introduces this concept briefly – it gave me enough information to get an idea. Another hit “Can you manage the ‘Moments of Truth’?” provided a compelling example of a “Moment of Truth”.

I hope you will enjoy Fish! A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results as much as I did and that it will give you some energy, too.

References

¹Barry Wellman. Digital aids for an aging society, ACM Communications. Volume 48, Number 10, page 54. October 2005.
²Stephen C. Lundin, Harry Paul and John Christensen. Fish! A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results, Hyperion, March 2000.
³ page 11 of ^2
4 page 52 of ².
⁵ page 36 of ².
⁶ page 38 of ².
⁷ page 57 of ².
⁸ page 95 of ².

In October 2003 I helped my dad to set up a Raid system using SuSE 8.2. I wrote up my experiences and published it on my old website. I was very surprised but also happy to find out that it also helped others. A few days ago I received an email asking me for permission to update the document and to publish it. Of course I did not deny this request. Frankly I am delighted to see this happening.

For reference I also included this Raid-Howto on this site under Misc. For backwards compatibility I also had to provide files on the original location as I want to move my site www.ralph.miarka.de to here too. Unfortuntely, I never managed to translate the document from German to English.

Yesterday we went to Linz on a departmental away day. There we visited the Ars Electronica center – a “museum of the future”.

This exhibition is a great playground. You are allowed to touch (almost) everything, to try everything out, to participate and to “change” the exhibition in that way. It was great. I was also very interested in all the different User Interfaces presented. I’m not sure but I do not remember to have seen a single keyboard in the exhibition although the visitor constantly interacts with computers. However, the aim is that the visitor forgets about computers. I am sure there are plenty of industrial applications hidden in this museum but I mostly thought about the children’s room of the future .

During the exhibition I had to think about a few people: Matt Jadud and the CSCS (cool stuff in Computer Science) group at Kent, Jonathan Roberts (who is interested in Visualisation) and Paul Mutton aka Jibble, whos Shakespeare social networks project was exhibited, too. I think all of them would be very interested in this exhibition. I strongly recommend it to you.

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)