Gretchen and I rode a 28 mile loop centered in Pescadero, CA on Saturday. It was a magnificent day along the northern California coastline and we were a bit surprised to have all day available because a couple other plans had fallen through. If you try to make time for nothing, something usually fills it, so it was cool to find ourselves - by accident - with empty time.
So we stopped by the San Gregorio General Store, which we had passed on our ride, because we thought it might be charming or unusual. Indeed. It is one of those places that needs to be experienced. Live music (bluegrass), interesting books, hilarious postcards, clothing, hats, aviator goggles and many other items you might expect to find at a general store down the road from La Honda.
Determined to drop cash in San Gregorio, I bought this t-shirt advocating the support of sustainable agriculture. There is a lot of green on the shirt as you can see, so what is there not to like? Moreover, my daughter will soon get her degree in Environmental Science and I'd hate to have spent all that money and not have a shirt to show for it.
Then it occurred to me - what if I'm wearing this shirt and somebody asks me what sustainable agriculture is? Would I be able to give them a good answer besides "It's what my kid is into."
And the power of the Internet did it again. UC Davis has a program called the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program and it has this excellent, comprehensive page describing what it is. People interested should check it out, but for the rest of you that don't have as much time, here are the basics:(quoted)
Sustainability rests on the principle that we must meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
Sustainable agriculture integrates three main goals--environmental health, economic profitability, and social and economic equity.
A systems perspective is essential to understanding sustainability. The system is envisioned in its broadest sense, from the individual farm, to the local ecosystem, and to communities affected by this farming system both locally and globally.
Reaching toward the goal of sustainable agriculture is the responsibility of all participants in the system, including farmers, laborers, policymakers, researchers, retailers, and consumers.
There is a cartoon video for this post, but there is no way to keep it from playing automatically, which can get a little obnoxious, so I moved the video to its own separate page here.
The blogosphere can be a lot of fun if you have the right approach. However, if you don't understand its nuances, it can be harsh and threatening. This guide is written for people who work for vendors and write blogs. Independent bloggers should also read it just in case they end up working for a vendor someday and find themselves with new, unexpected circumstances.
Chapter One: Thicken Your skin
One of the reasons people start blogging is that they like to feel important and relevant. Blogging gives them a sense of accomplishment. When their mother asks what they did that day, they can say: "I wrote a heart-felt, objective blog about technical minutiae". That is of course, unless they happen to be blogging for a vendor. In that case, they are better off telling mom that they are an Internet Security engineer and that she wouldn't understand even if you could find words for it.
Vendor blogging is not about pride because hostile bloggers will damage it when they can. The best way to protect your pride as a vendor blogger is to have none. If there is nothing to injure, it doesn't hurt so much. The best thing to do when you start vendor blogging is to engage teenage children at a shopping mall and start asking them stupid questions about things like cell phone etiquette and rap music. When you feel like you can't take another insult, make sure to ask "Is that all you've got, punk?" You'll be glad you did later as a full-fledged vendor blogger.
With your ego sufficiently trampled, you will have the proper perspective to vendor blog in earnest.
Chapter Two: Look good
Chapter Three: Get lots of help
Everybody thinks they know something about blogging. How hard can it be - right? Co-workers, including management come up with all kinds of suggestions of things that would make unbelievably good blog posts. The trick is that people with bad blog ideas will seek you out and the people with good blog ideas
hide from you when they see you coming. You may need to adopt Machiavellian techniques for getting what you need.
Rest assured, you will need help as a vendor blogger. Some bloggers suffer from writers block and others have too many other things going on to write new blog material. Vendor bloggers often need help arguing against a really bad idea from a really important person and sometimes they lose those arguments and need to subjugate their egos and write a bad blog. In such cases, the smaller the ego, the better. When that happens, the best approach is to seek help from others and turn the bad blog into a group project. Even though readers will think it came from your own addled brains, internally you can still garner major props for team building.
You may find yourself defending the flag when competitive bloggers attack it with flamethrowers. Co-workers can help you respond in several ways such as strapping you to a gurney until you cool down or sitting with you while you count to 10,000. Sometimes you may only need encouragement and re-assurance that your own flamethrowers are bigger and hotter than theirs. Sometimes you might need the assistance of competitive analysts who may be able to keep you from making outrageous claims about your own products. Naw, making outrageous claims about your own products is the stuff of legend and wins you a preferred seating at corporate functions.
Chapter Four: Find ways to not travel
Chapter Five: Dumb it down
The people with the best perspective for a vendor blog are the people in product development and product management. The problem is that they tend to use terms that are difficult to understand and have to be translated to industry-standard 10th grade English. Its unclear how the 10th grade level became the standard, but you might as well go along with the convention because it makes it much easier for the dropouts writing competitive blogs to know when you've insulted them.
Sophisticated vendor blogging is rarely successful. Pictures, animations and videos might add an air of sophistication to the blog, but make sure they don't remind people of a documentary or educational film. Better to keep people awake talking about nothing than to put them asleep droning on about some detail that they can't remember.
Chapter Six: Just joking
Chapter Seven: Apologize not
One of the biggest differences between standard blogging etiquette and vendor blogging etiquette (if you can call it that) is how you perform the mea culpa. As a non-vendor blogger, you want to be careful not to offend people and create an unwanted shitstorm. Its not much fun to be dragged through the mud in public for bad behavior. It's much, much worse to be threatened by some whacko who is stalking you or by a combatant of some anarchist, militant organization.
Think of vendor blogging as a battle royale of sorts - a cage match of verbal abuse. Would a luchador apologize after delivering a pile driver to his unconscious opponent? Of course not! So why would a vendor apologize to a competitive blogger after pointing out the ridiculous argument they made in a piece of shill writing?
As a vendor blogger engaged in online discussions with other vendor bloggers, it is bad form to apologize about anything, unless you use the apology to continue to insult. For example, am apology that saves face could be something like this: "Sorry to have depicted your argument as sheep droppings previously, because it was actually much more like the diarrhea from a a llama"
The only reason for a vendor blogger to apologize is for screwing up online and embarrassing your company and its products. (Remember the blogger has no ego left to damage). In that case, you may need to apologize to fellow employees and stockholders for besmirching the reputation of the fine organization you represent and the products/services that that generate the revenue stream that everyone so heavily depends on.
Appendix: Bloggers for hire
Special considerations need to be made for bloggers who are not employees of a company, but are paid to blog on their behalf. The hired gunslinger is sometimes likened to a prostitute, which some would say is unfair to prostitutes, but there is nothing wrong with providing a biased opinion and being paid for it -
even if the idea is to appear as objective as possible. In contrast, there is something decidedly rotten about a non-vendor blogger proclaiming themselves as a customer advocate when they are being paid by vendors.
Gunslingers need to have a long-lasting resistance to insults because non-vendor bloggers sometimes take offense to the gunslinger making what appears to be easy money and launch scathing attacks that can last many months. An attack from a non-vendor blogger accusing you of being a shill is always much more difficult to deal with than an attack from a vendor blogger, who is an obvious shill themselves.
The gunslinger has to be impartial because their tenure is tenuous. That instability means they can't afford to trash a competitor too much because they could end up being their next source of revenue. This, behavior disappoints their current boss, who wants the gunslinger to be more lethal than a mercenary can afford to be.
Ex-vendor bloggers that find themselves in a mercenary position blogging for hire need to be careful to avoid using insults that they may have been saving for months. It's your own fault that you didn't use them when you had the chance.
I just read an article about how the concept of infrastructure blocks is playing out on the SearchDataCenter site. The article presents several perspectives, but it's a bit confused. The concept is referred to as three different terms (pods, blocks and cells) and the comparison between a making your own and buying one are not clearly juxtaposed. Regardless, its a thought provoking article.
But is does raise the point what should we call these things? I think a better generic word for them is iBlock, short for infrastructure block.
I've been speaking to customers about this sort of thing lately and a number of them have expressed the opinion that rolling out their own iBlock would be a lot cheaper, more flexible and more scalable than anything they could buy from a vendor. I'm a big believer in the power of integration, but it's possible to get too far ahead of the curve.
3PAR customers have already been implementing iBlocks for several years using the 3CV design discussed in this ESG Labs report. That's one
approach. The question is, if you were going to build an iBlock, how would you do it - and why?
My wife brought home an iPad from the high school where she works this weekend because the school is trying to assess the iPad's usefulness as an educational tool. My son spent the most time with it and he likes listening to music and watching videos. He loves the thing. Honestly, I don't know why we didn't have one already, as I've been threatening to go buy one for several weeks now. I think it is an amazing concept - and still do, but I'm less crazy about the implementation after having spent a few hours with it. Here's why:
The first thing I wanted to do was check email on a Google Apps account I have. After opening the Safari browser, I went to login to my account and that's when my iPad experience started to sour. When you position the cursor to enter text on the iPad, a pop up keyboard appears on the bottom of the screen, but it doesn't have any numbers on the keyboard. There's a key that switches to a numbers view, but that version doesn't have any alpha keys. It's not that hard switching back and forth between the two, but typing a password that passes even minimal security standards becomes more convoluted than it ought to be. Yes, Mac fans, I know there are real accessory keyboards you can get for it, but you have to admit, the pop up keyboard is sort of a kludge. There is PLENTY of room there to do better and this is only going to encourage people to use flimsy passwords. Yes, I've seen the online videos showing clever iPad keyboard tricks, but none of them address this shortcoming.
Another thing that bothers me about the iPad pop up keyboard is that it displays password text in the clear before changing them to black dots. What's THAT about Apple? My guess is that they were concerned that people would not have confidence with their typing and so they decided to briefly display password characters as they are being entered. Are they trying to protect customers from the frustration of having virtual fat fingers by displaying what should otherwise be secure information? Hmmm, at this point I'm starting to think that security was given the lowest priority on the iPad. Not that I'm a big security guy, but the digital world is fraught with far too many threats to be so non-chalant about it.
That said, Windows Vista drove everybody crazy by going overboard on security, and it's not hard to see why Apple might have chosen to avoid similar "features", but the keyboard actually is very easy to type on and the keys seem oversized, if anything. There should be some way to show numbers and letters together, allowing people to easily create whatever passwords they desire and it shouldn't show secure information in the clear, even if it is for a brief moment.
Anyway, Safari on the iPad doesn't work with Google Apps, (and email accessed through it) something that took me some time to figure out. It apparently has something to do with the fact that the Safari browser used on the iPad is the same mobile version as on the iPhone, having certain functional reductions. I wasn't surprised to to find compatibility problems between Apple and Google and I assume this sort of thing will continue to be an annoying contest for years to come. I started using Google Apps years ago and the iPad doesn't get me there. That's a problem.
I was able to access my Google Apps email account using the integrated email app and selecting Gmail. This worked pretty well, the setup was straightforward and figuring out how to use Gmail on the iPad was a snap. Again, the thing I didn't like was that I was not able to access my Google Docs from this app. I tried a number of ways and finally gave up after diving into the forums and finding there would be no happy ending today.
So I decided to find another app, maybe something more fun. But first, I went to log out of Gmail and couldn't find the secret decoder ring. I figured this had to be pilot error - how can you not have a logout function for email? As much as I tried I couldn't find my way out of Gmail. Good lord! So I hit the forums again and found out, sure enough, there is no way to log out of Gmail on an iPhone- and by extension - an iPad. If you want to shut down access to Gmail after having set it up, you have to delete the account from the email application using the "settings" application. Seems a bit extreme if all you want to do is make sure people can't peek at your email.
Now, its important to lay blame at the right party here, which is Google in this case. And although I'm tempted to say this is probably some treachery waged against Apple by Google, the main issue is that Gmail on the iPad is just the iPhone version running on it's younger and larger sibling. A lot of people choose to keep their email access open all the time on their smartphones so they can stay on top of messages without having to constantly log in to see them. But there are also times when people just want to lock down their information so others can't see it. The iPad is a tablet and not a smartphone, and whereas smartphones are personal devices that you can hide in your pocket, the iPad - simply by virtue of it's size is more exposed to mischief. Not only that, but its also something that people seem to like sharing an awful lot. If we had one at home, I'm sure there would be some contention about who gets to use it.
Anyway, the point is, not allowing somebody to log out of an account where there is sensitive, private information from family members, co-workers, financial accounts and other important sources is simply ridiculous. Not only can your personal, private information be compromised, but there is also the risk that somebody else can access your account and send fake emails on your behalf - without you knowing about it.
When I explored apps at Apple's online store, I definitely got the feeling that a lot of them were designed for the iPhone and didn't really translate all that well to the iPad. Opera's Mini Browser was a good example. The functionality it had was decent, but the scaling of it on the screen was far less than perfect.
On the positive side, I really liked the book reader, which I thought was stellar and might be the ultimate app for the iPad. But if all I want is a book reader, I'd probably prefer a Kindle, with its included wifi service. In short, the iPad is new - and I think it shows. I'm still interested in getting one sometime, but I have to figure out if I want it to be more like a PC than a smartphone. Today, I'm inclined to look for a tablet that is less of a computing toy than the iPad is.
By the time this is posted, I will be in a hospital having a fairly routine cardiac chatheterization procedure done to determine the level of blockage in my coronary arteries. Cardiologists do a ton of these every year, saving people from inactive lives and open heart surgery. Unbelievable technology, but I'll get back to that later.
No Chest Pain Symptoms!
The main reason for this post is to help people understand that symptoms for heart trouble don't have to include chest pains. I have had a little tightness of breath while exercising over the last year and I've noticed a drop in my cardio output, but I figured that's just what comes with aging. I've been bike riding, skiing and hiking/walking, but my pace has been slower and hill climbs on the bike have been harder. Still I can do them without experiencing symptoms that make me worry.
However, climbing stairs has become really weird over the last 4 months. I've always tended to bounce quickly up stairs for some reason, but in the last few months, this has made me feel faint. Once during the Christmas break and again about 5 weeks ago, I thought I was going to completely pass out after climbing a couple flights of stairs. I knew this wasn't just ordinary aging crap, so shortly after the second wiggy experience I went to see my doctor who referred me to a cardiologist.
Went there, got the stress test (wires and a treadmill) and failed. That was a few weeks ago. Today we'll be taking the next step, which is a little scary, but for the most part I can't wait to experience the whole thing.
A Very Specific Application
The other reason for this post is to help people understand what goes on and what the technology is about. Sometimes there is nothing better than analog technology and this is one of them.
Coronary catheterization is typically an out-patient procedure performed in a hospital. That way, if something goes drastically haywire, such as having a heart attack, you are in the best place possible to deal with it. If, during the process, the doctor decides to insert stents in your heart to push away the blockage, they'll keep you overnight for observation - and then it becomes an in-patient experience complete with institutional cuisine!
One of the positive things is that I'll have a drip bag with a variety of meds that should keep me chilled out while there is a tiny hose poking around the inside of my heart. I'll be prone on my back on the platform of a specialized imaging machine made just for me (and thousands of others). The doctor gives me a little local numbing balm and then punctures me near the privates and starts working the catheter up towards my heartland. Former patients say they can hardly felt anything during this process, but I imagine I'll be comparing it to a root canal, even if I actually don't feel anything.
It's a bit like a real-life video game for the doctor, who watches the catheter action on the screen of the imaging system. When when the catheter is finally in the right location, it squirts out a dye that is super visible and he watches how it moves through the arteries - all in real time. People tend to feel the dye and I'm assuming its one of the least special moments for the patient during the whole thing. My doctor has done this thousands of times and he knows what it looks like when there is a blockage. There are three arteries that they check out this way, and this is what it looks like: (not mine, just some guy's on YouTube).
If my cardiologist sees something that he doesn't like, he'll probably insert a stent made of surgical steel that resembles one of those chinese finger traps.
The stent is collapsed when they run it into your artery and up into your heart. When it gets positioned in the area where the blockage is occurring, they inflate the stent with a balloon of sorts (at least that's how I understand it) until it pushes the artery walls out and blood can flow more or less normally again. The stent has an inert coating that lessens the likelihood of it irritating the heart. Something I would certainly like to avoid.
There are a number of key technologies here: first is the catheter system that enters the body, follows the artery right into the heart, delivers the dye and puts stents in place. Next is the real-time imaging system that gives instantaneous feedback to the doctor as he plays the Fix Marc game, Last is the chemical technology used for the dye and the stent coating to mix with the blood, show up clearly on the imaging system and sit in your heart like it doesn't exist. Of course, there is a lot more technology than that, but that's how I'm breaking it down today and they are the things I'll be thinking about as all this work is going on. Amazing stuff - I'm completely impressed.
(A quote from Dieter Rams - former Chief of Design at Braun)
It's hard to think of a company that has had more success with it's product designs than Apple. When you look into how Apple did it, you find out about Jonathan Ive - Apple's lead industrial designer - and how his designs have followed the philosophy outlined by Dieter Rams, who was the lead designer for many years at Braun. When you compare photos of their designs, it is obvious that Ive has a strong appreciation for Rams' work.
What Ive and others have found compelling in Rams' work is nicely summarized in the design principles Rams used at Braun for many years.
Good design is innovative
Good design makes a product useful
Good design is aesthetic
Good design makes a product understandable
Good design is unobtrusive
Good design is honest
Good design is long-lasting
Good design is thorough down to the last detail
Good design is environmentally friendly
Good design is as little design as possible
The design goals for consumer products differ considerably from those for industrial products. For example, aesthetics and innovation tend to be less important than reliability and ROI - two characteristics that didn't even make it onto Rams' list of design principles. But there are also principles that certainly belong to both, such as making a product useful and unobtrusive. So, what should the 10 design principles be for information infrastructures products? Here's my list:
Good design makes a product useful (it solves customer problems)
Good design has recognized limitations
Good design is unobtrusive (needs minimal management)
Good design has an attainable ROI
Good design makes efficient use of resources
Good design is scalable (capacity, performance & management)
Good design is resilient (sustains performance through sub-optimal conditions)
Good design makes a product understandable (facilitates planning & changes)
Good design is long-lasting (and accommodates future innovations)
Good design is environmentally friendly
Producing this list was much more interesting than I thought it would be. For starters, it took me some time to get settled in a customer's perspective - as opposed to my usual vendor employee perspective. (l have this wonderful hammer you need). Also, to clarify a point, the idea of management scalability involves the number of people who can effectively manage and control a system simultaneously. That might not be a concern for smaller IT systems, but it certainly is for large-scale systems.
What would you change? Would you reduce or expand this list?
Lawrence Lessig is a noted expert on legal aspects of the Internet and a political activist working on changing the incentives that influence our government. He spoke at the Storage Networking World Conference last week with a presentation titled America's Broadband Policy and I had the opportunity to interview him afterwords, which will certainly be one of the highlights of my year. I think his work at FixCongressFirst.org is very important because it provides a realistic perspective on the problem of money in government and is working to bring change to something that many of us agree is broken. You can play the interview by clicking the little green arrow on the sound bar below:
Fremont CA: 3PAR, the leading Steering Wheel Camera Society of America (SWCSA) producer of Steering Wheel Camera Technology and Smart Car chase scene videos has come to an agreement with Storwize, a Steering Wheel Camera Society of America member company from Marlborough, MA for Storwize to acquire the assets of the Steering Wheel Society of America.
Marc Farley, founder of the SWCSA, said: "It kind of sucks to have the SWCSA ripped out from under my complete creative control," before blowing his nose and continuing "now I don't even know where to drive."
Steve Kenniston, Director of Driving at Storwize was only available to speak from his mobile phone from within Storwize's state of the art Studio on Wheels was quoted as saying: "mmmbblgurg, tan you he.. sshhhtdf... can you here me?" And then dropped this bombshell: "Were trying to pass legislation here is Massachusetts requiring everybody to make at least one SWCSA video per month."
Our expectations for how laws are made might need to be reset. The old adage, "you don't want to see it" doesn't really work any more in an increasing connected world. This one was hard to avoid.
FWIW, I think the democratic strategy of mostly ignoring the republicans was the best one because the republicans are apparently only interested in derailing any outcomes while the democratically controlled congress is in power. And this is how things are going to be as long as we agree to be elect representatives of the same two, entrenched parties. Not a great scenario for government productivity. No wonder there is so much cynicism surrounding politics.
In the aftermath of this, the republicans are going forward with a "vote the bums out" crusade. The democrats, on the other hand, will try to portray the republicans as log-jammers, a position that is much less appealing than the bum's rush approach. Of course, sweeping the floor of incumbents favors the republicans numerically because there are more democrats to sweep out. So what will change? The balance of power shifts, but the whining, bickering and polemics stay the same.
To me, the answer is simple, but making it happen is virtually impossible - and that is to get another national party off the ground. There are a lot of reasons why it won't work, but I'm a bit tired of hearing why things can't be done in politics. One of the ways to start chipping away at the two party system is to change the way primary elections work. Here is a link to a ballot initiative that will be on this year's June 20th primary ballots in California.
It's easy to get caught up in the excitement of new concepts in this business and it's one of the things us marketing people like the most. We also like love competition, (oh really!), which means there is pressure to be omniscient - or at least to appear to be. Whether it's bluster or public brainstorming, we've all listened to somebody who appeared to be very confident in what they were saying, only to find out later that they were pretty much clueless. Sometimes the industry plays a giant game of telephone, where there is a massive exchange of misspoken, misinterpreted and misaligned thought experiments.
One of the symptoms of mass-confusion is an abundance of definitions as people struggle to understand new terminology. Defining a legitimate new concept makes it easier to think about and puts it in a frame of reference where it can be scrubbed for financial and technical viability. Rarely, things like Twitter defy financial gravity, but most other half-baked technology concepts acquire a fish-belly patina under the harsh light of a CFO's or CEO's scrutiny. "Tell me again why you think we need this new capital black hole and when you figure it's going to recoup half the ROI - and why we are paying you to waste your time on it?"
Larry Ellison has proven himself over many years to have an excellent perspective on technology trends and he wonders what cloud computing is. To him, its an information service built from exisiting technologies, - not some new technology all its own. I've been trying to think of a good way to disagree with his perspective and have quite a problem justifying anything having to do with Private Cloud. Public Cloud, yes - Private Cloud - no defense.
The financial analysis for outsourcing IT functions to a Public Cloud service provider is easy to understand. You compare the costs of doing it internally with having a subscription with a service provider to it for you. There are a lot of details to collect, but its easy to see how the analysis lines up. The customer doesn't care much about the technology the service provider uses - as long as they get the services they've subscribed to. Does a customer care if their service provider is using Cisco UCS, HP Blade Center or Dell Servers, 3PAR, Netapp or EMC storage? Paraphrasing many others, the Public Cloud changes the way customers acquire information processing capabilities. Public Cloud is legitimate because it is a distinctly different concept than business as usual in IT.
But the Private Cloud? It's a different way to talk about building an internal infrastructure of software, servers, storage, networks, etc. The capitalization model is the same as it's ever been, the sales cycles are the same as they have ever been, the vendor selection process is the same as its ever been. What does Private Cloud change?
Some would say, the technology is changing to enable new business-driven processes, such as incorporating more detailed, fine-grained, usage-based billing for IT services. Really? - what is so cloud-like about that? It's just the application of accounting principles applied to a shared capital and operating expense. CEOs, CFOs and COOs would all agree that this information might be useful and then wonder why its taken so long to get it. Do you really want to look these people in the eye and say "That's the benefit of implementing a Private Cloud"? Wouldn't it be much better to say "We are improving our internal metering so we can assign costs to the various parts of the company." Yes, it takes longer to say it, but the communication is a lot less convoluted when the words "Private Cloud" are avoided.
Then there is the aspect of sharing infrastructure resources among many different applications and user groups. Is that really cloud-like, or is it a by-product of virtualization? That is all virtualization and it is a concept that CEO, CFOs and COOs can understand without hearing the word cloud.
Private Cloud is just a euphemism for the incremental improvements that are going on in technology infrastructures. Its business as usual - complete with all the hype. If you don't understand what's so special about it, don't worry, just picture yourself trying to explain it to your CEO and see if you can do it without using the words Private Cloud. It's not very difficult.
There was a ceremony at the 9-11 commemoration ceremony this morning at
the Harborside Financial Center in Jersey City. This fire boat was out
in the harbor providing stirring visual support for the event.
