Perfect siliconn valley day

Only in the valley...today was typical silicon valley. Early morning meeting at work, interviewing someone at Peets in Willow Glen, then a taqueria lunch at adelita's. Then a leisurely stroll through the components aisle at frys for 90 minutes. Perfect.
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CIA CIO: We Were Headed To Cloud No Matter What

The most anticipated talk of the day, at the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo, was by the deputy CIO of the CIA, Jill Sanger. Her talk was entitled, Enterprise Cloud Computing, the Infrastructure’s Final Revenge.

She acknowledged the problem with defining Cloud Computing, and then went on to give her paragraph-length definition of “the cloud”. Her talk focused on the part of the Cloud behind the firewall.

“Today’s CIO must increase the flexibility of the infrastructure,” said Sanger. “Today’s CIO must manage cost to free dollars for [other purposes] …and work to improve the competitiveness of the larger organization.”

“Faster, Better, Cheaper, and Safer” was the overall theme of her talk, and she pointed out that the good CIO should be able to get all four out of a cloud computing environment.

She then made parallels between an adaptable businesses and the various arms of business, comparing the business that responds to new realities quickly to FEMA, and businesses which reach out to customers in need like the US Department of State responding is with aid to countries that experience earthquakes and tsunamis.

She then followed with a definitions of clouds within clouds: “You need a storage cloud and a compute cloud on top of your network cloud,” said Sanger. All of this needs to be build on top of world-class processes and governance.

The CIA had been heading to an enterprise cloud whether it knew it or not. The agency, said Sanger,  has also been working on evolving an SOA architecture for 7 years. Gartner first published the notion of SOA back in 2003, which implies that the CIA was a very early adopter of the set of architectural principles.

Sanger focused on IT, but occasionally her CIA background came through. “The internet is the most perilous of attack vectors,” she said. She also used government-speak by using words like “Exfiltration,” which is the leaking of data outside an organization.

In a talk filled with cloud boosterism, Sanger was asked about what happens after the “cloud” craze.  She mentioned that they have been talking about “cloud” for about 18 months and the Cloud craze has not run its course, and will likely be around for at least another 18 months. She offered no indication as to what the CIA might use as an infrastructural organizing principle after cloud mania has run it’s course.

Long lines, No Parking: A Good Sign?

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Day One of the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo is in full swing. First off, it took me nearly 30 minutes to find parking. For some reason the top level of the parking structure of the Santa Clara Convention Center was closed off. Not sure why. Then I walked through the San Jose Hyatt. At that point, I ran into the lines. The lines for registration we’re 50-100 people deep. And there was no special “press” registration. I waited 42 minutes to get my badge, and so did everybody else.

Was this an example of poor planning, or was there something deeper going on? Many people are touting “Cloud” as the next big thing. Larry Ellison not withstanding. The day 1 keynotes were over-full and there were overflow rooms for keynotes from Oracle, Amazon and Intel. There seems to be a lot on interest in this from both technical and non technical types, judging by the number of suits in the crowd. The always stand out. This is Northern California after all.

Could this be a sign that the Great Recession is over? Could be. All over Silicon Valley there are signs of hope. While SunOacle is laying off 3000-4000 this week, there are other companies are hiring. Companies are still having trouble hiring engineers, and VCs are doling out money to worthwhile companies.

That said, the more things change, the more they stay the same. In the afternoon, Oracle’s keynote was a standard Fusion pitch which mentioned cloud several times, all apparently irony-free. Intel’s cloud evangelist Jason Waxman give Intel’s vision of Cloud Computing, which seems to be very close to their virtualization story in years past.

It seems that while Cloud may be hot, it is not revolutionary, or even revolutionary. Or it could be I am jaundiced from having trouble marketing and having to wait 42 minutes to register.

Policy idea

I am sitting in the Decatur Township (Indiana) democratic meeting. There was a good speech by a doctor from purdue med. The idea is to have non-mandatory, school based annual flu immunization. It tuns out kids with flu infect 2 others, whereas adults only infect 0.8 people on average.

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Today's lessons

I am in ohio now, and you can learn a lot driving across the country. The first is that somehow West Virginia is between Pennsylvania and Ohio. The second is that this is a big country and nearly uniform, at least from pa to wisconsin. Third is that there is a starbucks about every 50 miles. Thankfully.
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Slideling hill, pa

Great call colors here, though this starbucks tastes kinda hinky. An hour into Lost Symbol.
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Today’s Nerd-out: Wiping a Blackberry Bold and deleting an old IT Policy

 

Just a quick post for those of you who get a Blackberry Bold (9000)in an company, and then leave, like I did. The problem is that Blackberrys(Blackberries?) have sophisticated IT Policy mechanisms that allow your company to route your internet traffic, deal with your email, and also things like disallow you from using a media card.

I have a Bold (9000), and my former employer had a weird policy around internet routing. So I did some research on how to delete that policy.

It turns out, no matter how hard you try using normal means, you can not delete an IT Policy. You have to use special means, and an extra scary hack to do it. Something hackishly named JL_Cmdr.

I got it working, and here is what I did. Special thanks to the authors of this article, and this one.

Several easy steps:

1. Download JL_Cmdr. I used the installer.

2. Run the utility according to instructions.

Warning: The JL_Cmdr utility is a command line  hack, and I have no doubt that under certain circumstances it will mess your BB up completely.

In other words, you are on your own. Don’t blame me if you end up with a doorstop. It worked for me.

Of Bullies and Bobbleheads

In trying to refine my managerial style, I have taken to writing it down in order to force a clarification. Having been in the “world of work” for a while, I have been subjected to several kinds of management styles, from Laissez Faire to extreme micro-management. Some worked better than others for me. When it worked poorly, sometimes it was an issue with my managers, sometimes it was an issue with me. We all go through these phases. That said, I despise being micro-managed.

There is a lot of good writing on bad bosses. I am a fan of Jim Miller’s Best Boss, Worst Boss, which you can find on Amazon. I have been thinking about the parallels of two bad work environments I have been in, across the two decades of my career, lately.

In two notable cases, I have been in what I call toxic environments. These are work environments where the work and the management are punishing. In both cases, it involved bullies and bobbleheads.

Read the full article here...

What I Learned From Sun (and Others) DRAFT

 

I am feeling somewhat nostalgic now that Sun Microsystems is being swallowed by Oracle. Sun was a great place to work. But it was also a very hectic and unfocused organization. Sun was among the best and worst places I have worked.

That said, these experiences taught me a lot. In reflecting on the lessons I learned there, I have captured the following key points:

1. A Small Group of People Can Change the World(java)

2. Founder CEOs should have term limits of 10 year.

3. Bad executives do enormous amounts of damage.

4. Good executives can get organizations to achieve more than they were naturally capable of.

5. No amount of “vision marketing” can move you out of an uncompetitive position

6. Never take a job with “Strategy” in the title.

7. Bad organizations can make good people behave badly

8. Threats from Management Are Failures By Management

9. Beware the “game changing” new product release.

This is a preliminary list, and I will be updating each of these with a paragraph or 2 of exposition/explanation. If you are a Sun refugee and would like to add your 2 cents, please do.

Beware the cobweb

One of my favorite writers is Neil Stephenson. His book Cryptonomicon is brilliant at both the technical details and character development. I am a fan of his early work, too, written with J. Frederick George. One of his novels is a story about the intelligence community in Washington, DC. It does the unthinkable. It makes bureaucratic struggles entertaining.

The title of the book comes from a bureaucratic verb “to cobweb”.  To cobweb someone or some initiative is to throw endless reviews. presentations, and documentation in the way so you effectively kill it.

This can happen outside of the government as well. I have seen it happen several times in my career. It will often come about when a new idea, or a fundamental changes, is taking place. Those in senior management who are opposed to change will throw a myriad of things at a “change agent” in order to slow the process down, or defeat it. If you hear any of the following phrases, you are most likely getting cobwebbed:

• Operations Reviews
• Review or Control Boards
• The establishment of “Project Management Office”
• In software: anything related to CMMI level 2 or higher
• Strategic planning reviews
• RACI or Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed
• Work Breakdown Structure

It must be said that Six Sigma, for which I have a lot of respect, can be used as of the ultimate cobwebbing tools in the wrong hands/

There are rare occasions when these cobweb tools can be used effectively, but they should be used sparingly. Most of these are tools for large organizations, like government projects with thousands of people. I have not seen them used effectively in any organization of less than 1000.

In the end, the way to defeat a cobweb is to go around it if you can, or to get out of the organization you are in. It is important to think of any large organization not as a directed-graph hierarchy, but as a tree structure with cycles. The cycles are points in the organization which jump one or more levels, and may not always follow a linear hierarchy.

Read the book to see how the characters got out of their cobweb. While the book feels dated in its pre-September 11 America, its still a great read.

If you feel yourself getting cobwebbed, either break the web, or find something else to do. A cobwebbed environment is most surely a soul-sucking one. Life’s too short for that.

Prediction: Chicago will not get it

Watching MSNBC on selection day for 2016. My guess is the legacy of Bush and our current military adventurism will exclude us from consideration.

I would like to be wrong. I love Chicago.

Political Advertizing the in Philadelphia Market

One thing I will miss when I move back to San Jose is Philadelphia politics. Because of its proximity to DC, and the fact that it is a much more competitive state than California, make it a vastly more interesting place to watch politics.

Take for example the issue advocacy ads. The one running on MSNBC right now is one from Heath Care For America Now. The ad, which strikes me as overtly political, is actually from a 501c4 issue advocacy organization, the Health Care Action Network. Their key tag line is:

If Insurance Companies Win, You Lose.

Interestingly, no talk about a public option. They do not single out any politician or piece of legislation, but say “Call Congress….”.

Its a pretty good site. Its media rich, which makes it slow on my netbook, and they are using Google Analytics, which shows some sophistication.

Public Option Day

MSNBC is saying its Public Option Day.

Interesting fact, only Baseball and Healthcare have exemptions from the Sherman Anti-Trust act.

In my view we need a mild public option, like support for Kaiser-like co-ops.

We need to take an incremental approach. It seems to me that this year's healthcare solution should take the following form:

1. Eliminate pre-existing condition rejection
2. Some tort reform.
3. Either eliminate monopoly control in states where monopolies exist, or:
4. Allow healthcare companies to act nationally (with a limit on the martket concetration).

Key point being this is a big hard problem, and democracies can not often handle radical change without a non-existential threat.

Unable to Reach Google Tasks

 

I have been getting a lot of connection errors to Google recently, like from Gmail and Google Tasks. Anyone else seeing this?

Bill Safire, R.I.P, Vast Right Wing Conspiracy moves on

I mourn the passing of William Safire today. Like Nicholas Kristoff, I disagreed with many of his political views, but his writing was beyond reproach. His On Language column was amazing.

In other news,  President Clinton says the VRWC (Vast Right Wing Conspiracy) has moved on to attach President Obama. If this is the case, the VRWC is clearly fielding their second or third team. *Iam talking to you “Birthers”…..