May 4th, 2008 |
By Joel Dehlin |
3 Comments »
A young man I was teaching in a Sunday School class today introduced me to ChaCha.
ChaCha is a question answering service for mobile devices. I tried it and it’s pretty cool.
You just send a text message with a question to CHACHA (242242). For fun, I typed my first question this afternoon: “How long is a marathon?” I got an answer in just a couple of minutes:
The marathon is a long-distance running event with an official distance of 42.195 kilometers (26 miles 385 yards) road race.
Wow. That was interesting, I figured, but it’s still pretty lame because it’s a bot (a computer) and therefore can only answer common questions. I asked another common question: “Who is Gordon B. Hinckley?”
Gordon B. Hinckley is the 15th President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
The Church is represented. Nice! I can forgive the capitalization error and the missing hyphen. I figured I would ask an uncommon question next: “Who is Joel Dehlin?”
Chief Information Officer for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Huh. At this point, I was starting to wonder if was actually a bot or maybe a human. I tested it: “What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?”
That depends, is it an African or European swallow? A swallow needs to beat its wings forty-three times every second, right?
I was a little dumb-founded. Either the computer was trained to interpolate Monty Python quotes, they were really good at planning for what stupid questions someone like me might ask or I was texting with a human. Later I found out that ChaCha is, in fact, staffed by humans and you can ask just about anything and get a reasonable answer (directions, movie review, sports scores, restaurant recommendations, etc.). The answer is limited to 160 or so characters of text so you’ll want to avoid questions like my friend Eric Denna’s favorite: “Define the universe and give three examples.” But for simple answers to a surprisingly broad set of questions–basically anything a reasonably smart person can find on the Internet in a few minutes–it’s a really neat service I’ll be using often.
And it’s free–at least for now.
April 24th, 2008 |
By Joel Dehlin |
2 Comments »
Freakonomics is one of the blogs I track that I actually try to read. Recently, Fred Shapiro (Yale Book of Quotations) has been blegging to find quotes that sound outlandish and are attributed to famous people.
For example,
“There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home” is attributed to Kenneth Olsen, founder of DEC.
And
“I think there is a world market for about five computers” is pinned to Tom Watson of IBM fame.
You’ve heard these kinds of quotes before and they’re typically accepted as fact. Most of them, including the reported Bill Gates 640k comment, are not not direct quotes. They are heresay, often with the only verified quote several layers removed from the original author.
One can easily imagine seeds of truth in some of these sayings. Maybe the purported authors were joking. Maybe they said something close, or were using hyperbole to make a point. Maybe they were being sarcastic. Regardless, someone remembered it the way they wanted to and these guys got stuck with the quotes.
How often does this happen to you? Recently I was in a meeting with a sharp member of my staff who quoted me completely erroneously. I corrected him and he argued with me about what I had said. I was amazed that he and I had such a different recollection of a comment I had made. While I know what I meant, what matters is what he thought I said.
Be careful what you say! Repeat yourself. Be consistent. And tell the truth!
It’s too easy to be misquoted.
April 23rd, 2008 |
By Joel Dehlin |
2 Comments »
At the Web 2.0 expo today, Tim O’Reilly (a keynote speaker) quoted a wonerful poem, written by Rainer Maria Rilke. I felt moved and wanted to share.
Click here to read it.
How many of our battles are big ones?
April 13th, 2008 |
By Joel Dehlin |
2 Comments »
Last week brought a most excellent event: pinewood derby.
Oh yes. Pinewood derby.
Pinewood derby is a cub scout event where dads cub scouts take a block of pine wood, four nails, and four plastic wheels and create a car. They then race the cars along a track against all of the other dads cub scouts. Dads Cub scouts look forward to this event all year long.
Talk about a rich environment for potential blog entries!
We got the car painted the night before (an improvement over past pinewood derbies) so we planned to wait to put the wheels on the car until the next day when I would “get home early.”
Of course we had a late meeting the next day. I live almost an hour away from the office so I called Lani to let her know I would barely make it. We decided that she would bring Alex, the car pieces and a hammer to the event.
A hammer. Not a sledge hammer–a hammer! The axles for these things are tiny little pieces of metal. If you’re not familiar with pinewood derby, there are tons of legal tricks you can employ to make your car faster: lubricate the axle, use a drill press to drill new holes closer to the edges, make one of the holes a little higher off the ground than the other three, carve out most of the body and add weight to the back, etc, etc, etc. But no tricks will compensate for bad wheels or bad axles. And in my hand were four tiny little nails and a gigantic hammer. Since we seemed to have no other choice, we lay the car on its side and prepared to insert the axles by pounding them into the soft wood.
A friend stopped us and held up a tiny little hammer. “Try this,” she said with a smile.
Back in November I wrote about matching great systems with great people to increase effectiveness. The point, in the conext of this metaphor, was that if people aren’t getting the job done, check that you’ve got the right tools before you blame the worker.
Unfortunately, we often try to do too much with tools and process. We use a sledgehammer for a small job.
In our shop, we have a process we use for accomplishing projects. Most feel the process is too cumbersome and slow. However, when faced with some kind of persistent problem the same people who complain about the burden of the current process want to add more steps or controls, making it even slower or bureaucratic feeling.
If you assume people have good intentions, you can often accomplish the same things through simple training. In our department, we have a number of requirements for software development projects:
- Language must be Java or .NET.
- Code coverage for unit tests must be a certain percentage.
- All of the functional disciplines (like interaction design, development, QA, database, etc.) must be consulted on the plan.
- Resources must be freed up and ready to go.
When we began implementing process in Church I.T. we had a tendency to put controls and process in place to make sure all of these things happened.
However, process shouldn’t be used as a gate unless it’s absolutely necessary. Rather, people should be trained to understand expectations and they will, more often than not, comply!
Why use a sledge hammer on a pinewood derby car when you can use a tiny little tapping hammer?
Assume people are well-intended and teach them what they need to do to be effective!
March 14th, 2008 |
By Joel Dehlin |
No Comments »
Mormon Scientist: The Life and Faith of Henry Eyring is the latest book I’m reading. Henry Eyring was a pretty remarkable scientist, garnering many of the most distinguised prizes for scientific contribution, and was a faithful Latter-day Saint. He spent a great deal of energy convincing people that science and religion are fundamentally different pursuits and can therefore co-exist peacefully.
The book is written by his grandson, Henry J. Eyring, who takes an interesting approach to detailing Erying’s life. Rather than proceeding through a chronology, Eyring divides the chapters by attributes he might have gained from his forefathers.
Here’s a quote from the book:
“The lesson of Henry Eyring’s life is that simple people, people just like you and me, can change the world. We do it a little bit every day. And we have the potential to change the world much more, if we can better understand and use our unique gifts.”
March 2nd, 2008 |
By Joel Dehlin |
14 Comments »
In this post over at CIO.COM, Susan Cramm makes the point that the average I.T. professional who feels he is ready to be a CIO isn’t ready at all. She makes a call to CIOs to inform their people that they need to get more “business experience” and to develop “senior level relationships.”
Her charge is noble, necessary and terribly difficult. Many I.T. professionals lack skills critical to being successful in a C-level role. To many I.T. professionals, a vertical career track requires technical depth and specialization. Consequently they spend a disproportionate amount of time developing technical skills and not enough time on skills that would help them get into and navigate within the boardroom.
Skills like:
Communication. My department works on hundreds of simultaneous projects. In addition, we operate hundreds of different products and services continually. It’s critical that we keep our customers and our management aware of what is going on in the shop. I plead and beg our engineers and project/program managers to write very simple, understandable status reports. It is a constant struggle. A member of my office reviews (and in the past has typically re-written) every one of them. We have a hard time talking without jargon and acronyms.
Relationship Management. When I worked in computer games at Microsoft I often had to “check out the competition” and so played an awful lot of games for a couple of years. I remember telling my wife, Lani, about this great new game called Everquest where you could meet new people, develop friendships and have fun together, all in a virtual world. She said, “Gee Joel. It sounds almost as fun as real life.” Hmmm. Sarcasm. The fact is that relationships are easier on line than in real life. If things aren’t going well, you log out or you just “block” the other person. You don’t have to co-exist in a meaningful way–the biggest source of conflict is deciding who gets the +4 magic, +4 intelligence mace you picked up off a monster your party just clobbered. I know I.T. guys who get along socially just fine in on line games and who struggle to go out to lunch periodically with their customers. “I don’t really have anything to talk about with them.” “I’m too busy.”
Business Acumen. Our shop is going through some growing pains this year as one of our focuses is on writing effective business objectives for a project. It’s hard. Engineers think about solving problems very naturally. We don’t always think about cost justification. Why does it make business sense to upgrade your application server? “Well, the cache is filling up and we’re queue’ing requests. That’s why.” Upgrading may make all the sense in the world to a technologist who understands what’s under the hood, but a business person might decide that the business consequences of not upgrading are acceptable in light of the cost of upgrade. This is particularly relevant at the Church where we have to take extra precautions to keep costs low. Many basic business skills like cost-benefit analysis, contract negotiation, and others are not even taught in computer science or information technology programs, and when those skills are taught, they atrophy in I.T. people who are not being required to use them.
In our department, we’re taking steps to help our professionals develop these skills. I’ll talk about those steps in the next post.
February 15th, 2008 |
By Joel Dehlin |
3 Comments »
“Man has, through the richness of the intellectual quest, become more knowing, more clever and more skeptical. But we have not become more profound or more reverent. Nor have we found a way to put our learning in the context of the eternal.”
Josiah Royce
February 9th, 2008 |
By Joel Dehlin |
14 Comments »
How many of you would take your home computer to a public place and leave it running?
Or make a list of every web site you browse (EVERY WEB SITE YOU BROWSE) and publish it in the newspaper?
Would you write your credit card number down on pieces of paper and pass them around large groups of people?
We are engaged in the digital analogs of these things all the time, and most of us don’t know it.
How many of you would take your home computer to a public place and leave it?
If you fire up a wireless laptop in my house you’ll see four of my neighbors’ wireless networks, all but one open to the world. I’m about as technical as the sole of an old shoe, but it would be trivial for me to hack into one of their computers and cause all kinds of problems: peek at pictures, read on-line journals, grab credit card numbers or snag on-line passwords stored in cache. Though I’m harmless, some are not. This type of cyber-tom-foolery happens regularly. Thieves drive around looking for wireless networks, discover them, break into them (usually trivially) and make off with the digital rewards.
Or make a list of every web site you browse (EVERY WEB SITE YOU BROWSE) and publish it in the newspaper?
If you think only you know the web sites you visit, think again. Your computer stores traces of where you go in cyberspace and, depending on the security settings on your browser, other web sites can get access to that data. Even if you’re careful on your computer, the ISP you use to connect to the Internet can store that data. Some of them are even starting to sell that data–in a way that is actually pretty ingenious. Let’s say you’re up on a web site reading a review of the movie “Bourne Ultimatum.” You might notice that the next web site you go to has an ad to rent or buy one of Matt Damon’s other movies. This is possible because some ISP’s are starting to provide data about the last place you browsed to the next place you browse and charging for that information. Read the privacy notice of your ISP carefully and I imagine that in many cases you’ll find that you can’t prevent it.
Would you write your credit card number down on pieces of paper and pass them around large groups of people?
If you send your credit card number over email or tell someone your credit card over the phone (land-line or cell phone) you might as well be writing it down on little pieces of paper and dropping them off a building roof into a crowd. Technology for “listening” to phone calls and “sniffing” emails on the Internet is basically mainstream. It’s easy to rationalize, “Oh, I’ll just do it this once,” but the first time you find big charges on your credit card that you didn’t make, you get serious about protecting yourself.
It’s interesting to me that we can be so much more careful about protecting our non-digital assets, when our digital assets can be stolen or undermined so much more quickly.
I’d love to hear what precautions you’re taking to protect yourselves.
February 7th, 2008 |
By Joel Dehlin |
4 Comments »
This is an interesting/sobering/motivational video on YouTube which offers some interesting factoids to think about.
February 5th, 2008 |
By Joel Dehlin |
3 Comments »
The activity on the Internet surrounding President Hinckley has been huge this and last week.
Newsroom has an article pointing to some of the major coverage.
BlogPulse ranked “Gordon B. Hinckley” as the third most mentioned person in the blogosphere on the day after he died.
As of 11:20am this morning there were 170 groups on Facebook created in memory of President Hinckley. 29,038 individuals belong to the largest group which is called “In Memory of Gordon B. Hinckley.” Over 90,000 people have subscribed to at least one of the groups.
There’s also a new web site called HinckleyChallenge. This is an unofficial web site which challenges people to read the Book of Mormon in 97 days (in commemoration of his age when he died).
Finally, there is a great video up on YouTube where young people share their feelings about the Prophet.
