cmurray.org

Leadership Lessons From China

Today’s blog post by Matt McCalister resonates with me because of my current work in systems redesign. Motorcyle manufacturers in China have broken the mold of creating specific design specifications for products, drafting only outlines for performance and functionality and allowing the suppliers to be more innovative and cost-effective by creating those details themselves. This is pretty radical thinking. I apply this to software and systems development and it makes perfect sense. I could outline in a similar way performance and functional requirements and allow those engineers whom I trust (and who love to be creative and innovative) to deliver a product that would likely be superior to anything I would have designed. The more important part of this peice is that when you define requirements so tightly you can only meet, or fail to meet, expectations; allowing for that trust and freedom in a project, the contributors can create brilliant things. Powerful leadership and management lessons in there.

So many reasons to hate travelling on holidays … any holiday.

We stayed home. I opened the pool on Saturday to find not only an inordinate amount of algae, but also because of all the recent wind and rain, lots of leaves and sticks and dirt. I spent all my free time back and forth down there trying to clean up. The water temperature was 68 degrees on Monday, but that was not cold enough to keep my daughter and her friends out.

We also had company, a friend of my daughter and her family. Typical and delicious Memorial day fare: salads, burgers and dogs, and also my father’s Steak a la Rascal (London Broil marinated in garlic, onions, and red wine). Oh, and plenty of cold Belgian ales. So, a nice afternoon in the sun and heat, talking with my friend Alex about the downloadable music phenomenon (he highly recommends emusic.com for great jazz), the girls alternating between the pool (too cold) and the hot tub (too hot), and that undeniable flavor in the air that summer finally is here.

‘Big brother’ informs baby talk

This is a pretty impressive undertaking. Professor Deb Roy has outifitted his home with 11 cameras to study how his newborn child learns to speak. He’s going to record his baby for the next three years. What’s even more interesting is that the footage will not be studied by the human eye but rather by software. While it sounds like the ultimate family album, Professor Roy comments that “most of the recordings are pretty boring.”

I find it fascinating because I find my own baby fascinating. Sophia loves dogs, for example. She yelps with excitement when she sees one, “Daw!”. She also howls, “Baw” when presented with a ball. And she loves music and now has her own little dance when Salsa fills the air. And all this is amazing to watch because one day she does none of this and the next there’s something new. And where does that come from? Some of it certainly is from being with us, but some of it also is just her and her own personality. I thoroughly enjoy watching this emerging personality and sometimes am shocked to see myself and my wife in her displays. It’s so very strange to see yourself and your mannerisms and behaviour in your children.

I’m not sure what this study will reveal. But every parent goes through this passage of discovery with each of their children. I’m also keenly interested in what software can bring to this analysis.

Web inventor warns of ‘dark’ net

I don’t know … I still find it really odd that Sir Berners-Lee is so glib and unemotional about the whole Net Neutrality issue. I guess he can afford to distance himself, and perhaps it is old news to him. I like his comment, “You get this tremendous serendipity where I can search the internet and come across a site that I did not set out to look for …”, which is one of the best things about the whole Internet experience. Sure, new technologies hope to be more intuitive and bring you to your chosen content quicker, but there is that marvel of stumbling onto something new. But still, I want to hear more from him. This whole issue is so disturbing and angering. I wish he would come out and bash someone or some company about it, champion the cause. But I imagine he is a much classier gentleman than myself.

Miles Davis would have turned 80 this past week. Damn, where to begin …

Miles was one of my biggest influences in early life. (While I ended up in school as a pianist, I originally was a trombonist; my lack of vibrato and short, sparse soloing was because of Miles.) One of the first LPs I ever bought was Bitches Brew, a psychodelic trip of rock and jazz that was viewed by many at the time as a sell out. But on the contrary, it was the evolution not only of Miles himself but of Jazz and the fusion between it and rock. (I remember sitting in the dark with my big clunky headphones listening to this album over and over again, wearing out the vinyl and having to buy another copy.) These extended compositions also were more than just studio sessions; they recorded these pieces and then Miles and legendary producer Teo Macero went back to the studio and added more improvisations and effects like multi-tape loops and other multi-tracking techniques. Their affect on so many forms of music was epoch.

Miles kept changing and moving forward, whether people liked it or not. He constantly pushed himself and jazz beyond comfortable boundaries.

There’s so much to know and to say about Miles. Miles turning 80 this week was big play on XM radio, which was really cool because they played not only the obvious but the obscure as well.

Miles rules. Miles was a Mutha.

This was a big weekend for us. Our oldest daughter, Mia, performed in her first dance recital. She started taking the dance classes only four months ago, but on Saturday afternoon she got up there on the big stage under the hot bright, lights with her new friends and did a fabulous job. It really was something to see; we were more excited and nervous than she. Part of the program also featured much older girls, teenagers, and you could just see how quickly they go from five to 15. I was happy to return home to our tiny one-year old.

I want to post a picture of Mia here, but I am so creeped out by all the weirdos on the Net that I don’t want her photo out here. She’s only five, but for the dance, she’s all dressed up and wearing make-up and looking almost like a teenager. I don’t know. Maybe I’m paranoid … but seems like a good idea to instead post this lovely rainbow we saw that afternoon after a kicking thunderstorm. (A minute before this photo was taken the rainbow was twice as bright; a minute after, it was gone.)

FeedRinse

This is an interesting development and long over due. This actually speaks to what Jon Udell was describing with the Share Your OPML site. With FeedRinse, you can subscribe to the feeds you like and then filter out articles by keyword, author, and so on.

Here’s what I did. I signed up for a free account on their site (the only difference of value with a paid account is the inability to use regular expressions). I could subscribe to my feeds there, but instead I imported my OPML from an export of my BlogLines feeds. I then added some filters (filtering out an author and some keywords from a couple of sites), and then exported the result into a new OPML file. Because I didn’t want to mess with my BlogLines feeds just yet, I imported that OPML into Sage (a Firefox plugin that I tried and do not use). Sure enough, the feeds were cleansed of the offending author and keywords. (One downside I can see is that it appears I need to import my feed to FeedRinse each time I want to change or add a filter, and then export that and reimport into BlogLines.) Here is what the feed to my site looks like behind the scenes: They provide this rinsing in a similiar fashion to FeedBurner, whereby they pass your feed through their service before delivering the content. I gave up trying to post the code here because the browser insisted on interpreting it. But trust me, it’s just a couple lines of code pointing to the FeedRinse site and passing my site in as a parameter, something like this:

xmlUrl=”http://www.feedrinse.com/services/rinse/?rinsedurl=nnnnn … htmlUrl=”http://www.cmurray.org”

Pretty simple stuff. But again, as Jon Udell points out, it would be hugely powerful to combine a SYO service with a FeedRinse service to create the ability to search through and filter for better and more useful data and trends. I think that service is very close at hand.

I finally bought my first album from iTunes.

In my new car I have XM radio built in and received a three-month subscription when we bought the thing. I love some of the stations, especially the latin jazz and groove stations. But one day, while listening in the car, I heard this really beautiful ensemble, cool soulful percussion, driving rythmns, wailing saxophone. Really great stuff. All I could see on the display was the creator of the album, a guy named Manu Katche. Then, after that, I heard this great jamming thing by Herbie Hancock, one of my true inspirations.

I made mental notes to Google these guys and their albums when I got to work. Then I thought to check iTunes to see if perhaps that had something I could listen to as well. I was hugely impressed with their catalogue; enough so that I decided I would type in the debit card and try buying something from them. I was surprised how easy the process was; I entered my iPod login information, then added all my debit card numbers, and shortly was downloading the entire Herbie Hancock album I had heard for the first time just minutes ago. The sound quality is excellent and it loaded right into the iPod automatically.

The downside, and one which I assume others have written about, is that I can play this music on only five machines. I don’t really care about that. If I can play it on my laptop or home machine or iPod I am happy. I plan to buy one of those Bose iPod stations soon, and that should give me everything I would care about (those Bose stations are truly amazing!).

I love that I can find albums by people like Bill Frisell and Jack DeJohnette and Jan Garbarek on something so pedestrian as iTunes. I love that I can download the albums for 10 bucks. And I think it is just brilliant how Apple revolutionized the music industry while not even being a player in that space.

Rolling our own OPML mashups

This certainly is something to watch for. Jon Udell, Zen master of all things web, asks the simple question to Share Your OPML that if you are going to gather and aggregate all these great collections of feeds, are you also going to allow me to query that database and get better information than what I have had to script and scrounge for all these years? It seems so simple, and yet I’m not sure anyone is delivering the solution.

It is cool the way SYO provides the links to submitted OPMLs, but it would be much better to somehow parse these results and stuff them into a database for much more powerful querying and granularization. It’s one of those things where someone like Jon may have to intervene to get done properly. It’s hard to understand why what he asks is not yet available given all the attention to community and aggregation:

1. Who recently added my feed?
2. Who recently dropped my feed?
3. What clusters (interest groups) emerge from the data?
4. Which clusters are least like mine?
5. Who are the weak ties between my clusters and foreign clusters?

It seems like an RSS specific tool equivilant to something like Omniture (one that could also perhaps capture tagging) should be able to capture such metrics. I’m new in this space, so perhaps I’m mistaken, but I’m eager to see how this gets resolved. Because I am new, I’ll wait a while before posting my own OPML; I’ve got lots of great links but everyday I find more and better stuff to include.

This issue may actually push me to activism. I agree with the article author that Berners-Lee’s lack of insight and contribution is troubling, because this is such a fundamental issue. Put legislation in place that protects the freedom of the Internet. Punto. And vote everyone out of office who doesn’t get that, especially those sellouts like Orrin Hatch who get it and mean only to profit from it.

http://techdirt.com/articles/20060502/1736204.shtml

For more thoughtful writing on the issue, Ben Worthen has written an excellent series of pieces and updates that help navigate the complexities:

http://blogs.cio.com/node/200

It’s juvenile, I know … but I love this little clip from Ask A Ninja … It really does speak to the point, albeit in a very sophomoric way. Still, I laugh everytime.

Ask A Ninja: Net Neutrality