How do you know that?
Wednesday, July 31, 2002
.net on Apache? Strange bedfellows?
O'Reilly OSCON should have an interesting announcement about Apache and .NET tomorrow . There were plenty of people of Slashdot who guessed correctly."On Better Living through Software via News Is Free
I have to admit the idea has passed through my head a few times that it would be fun to put up a linux server and write some stuff for Apache. Ufortunately I don't have that many spare cycles these days. It's looking like a more viable way to go.
Tuesday, July 30, 2002
We already have a wheel.
The director of legal HR requested a meeting with me yesterday. Discussion centered around information needs that weren't getting met, and work flow issues. Most of the discussion circled back around to the fact that they weren't using PeopleSoft to its full potential.We try to push all employee related information into the PeopleSoft world - I'm not that interested in re-building the wheel, and we have very competent people running that end of the shop.
Other requirements that came out of that meeting don't fit the model as cleanly. 'when a managing partner discusses an office re-location with an associate, we want to know about it so we can make the appropriate changes and coordinate with pay-roll' Interesting, workflow/communications issues. Definitely in the role of KM. Immediately integration with CRM, Messaging, threaded discussion and variations come to mind. First thing to do is bring the Peoplesoft group and see what the existing tool, correctly applied can do for us.
Monday, July 29, 2002
WTC
They started taking down the viewing platform this weekend. I'm happy to see it go. I always thought it ghoulish to facilitate the crowds. Next on my list are the vendors selling glossy books of photos of the carnage. I can't imagine who is buying these things. Why?Sunday, July 28, 2002
Stop me if you've heard the one about the...
Sex Charges for 2 New Jersey Priests. Church officials hate it when this stuff hits the press. They may have to do something about it.More .net
Re-writing the interface that lets lawyers customize the news feed into their portals. I added features that will allow them to select the number of headlines that will appear, as well as define the order.Saturday, July 27, 2002
Site Navigation
James Robertson once again adds to the collective brain by siting a U of Maryland study re. usability. Good stuff.How!
Doc does a great job of putting the latest resurgence of legislative stupidity in perspective. Even if the legislature manages to pass some kind of law, there is really no practical way to enforce the flow of technology.Thursday, July 25, 2002
It's good to be surprised
The former chairman of the firm was famous for his insistence that his office remain pc free. He retired from the firm two years ago, but he's still active in the firm. I wasn't exactly sure how active until I got a call from the head librarian with questions that the our former technophobe had about the news portion of the portal we recently introduced. Cool. It's great when something unexpected happens.Wednesday, July 24, 2002
Question
If an application is running, but the data is not up to date, nobody is looking at it and nobody knows where it is, Is it in production? It's kind of like the tree falling in the forest syndrome. Why do we need to burn resources making sure that we know when a tree falls if it has no impact on us, nor will it for some time.I'm in a bit of a battle where some individuals are losing site of why a process is in place. A set of restrictions have been put in place without consideration for how the procedures are going to be completed, who will complete them, and how much of a drag on an already overburdened staff they will impose. This angers me.
Monday, July 22, 2002
Be afraid
Yes John, W. shouldn't even have is learners permit, let alone be allowed to try and steer. You can bet he won't stop for directions.Groove + MS
I've been watching Groove for a while. I'm hoping this is a good thing. The people at groove seem to have the right idea.
Just today, our CIO was asking about remote collaboration solutions. Maybe...
Saturday, July 20, 2002
The great blackout of '02
Transformer fire billows smoke above Manhattan"Nando Times"
On New York City via News Is Free
We were without power until about 15 minutes ago. I took the opportunity to run some errands up above 14th street. Crossing Canal I was fascinated watching this huge cop directing traffic with a little too much zeal. As he finally let us pedestrians cross, a heavyset man asked the cop 'When are they going to fix the lights?' the cop didn't miss a beat: "There's nothing wrong with the lights, there's just no power going to them". I love New York!
asp.net
Solved yesterday's problem. Just had to mark the column as read only and the column was read just fine.Friday, July 19, 2002
asp.net
Having a problem referring to data in a bound grid this morning. When a column is visible, I can access it quite nicely using..CType(e.Item.Cells(0).Controls(0), TextBox).Text. But when I set the column to invisible this code does not work. Nor does e.Item.Cells(0).text , which should. I'm sure I'm missing something silly. I have to leave this for later.Meetup
Went to the blog meetup last night. It was pretty much as I expected. There was an underlying sense of curiosity that everyone was doing there best to punch through. I met Cameron from Camworld and found him to be very interesting. He's planning a trip to Siberia in the near future - I love that. I spoke with his brother Damien re the new Mac OS.Also met Tim and Melissa, Kristin and a few others. More links when I go through the scraps of paper that I left in my jeans.
Thursday, July 18, 2002
Collaboration
Met with our rep from WestGroup yesterday re. their iteration of eRoom. The product looks great, elegant, effective and relatively secure. My gut says that a certain part of our legal population will jump right on it.Features I liked:
Features promised but key:
We're in bed with intralinks at the moment, but we may start to introduce this into the mix slowly. Intralinks is just a bit too clunky to make it really catch on.
Wednesday, July 17, 2002
Hit storm
Message to all you people coming over from MSNBC... The link you've followed is the only two sentences I've ever written about Robin Williams... I usually right about technology, knowledge management, corporate politics, living in NYC, Web development, Sailing in the Virgin Islands and other more mundane stuff... Thanks for visiting, please feel free to come back and visit any time. Also check out all the people in my blogroll - lots of great minds.Adventures in luggage
Did you know that you can't take more than a certain amount of fluid on an international flight? True.Did you know some handicapped people are armed?
Tuesday, July 16, 2002
Mainstream vs. Backwater
Interesting... Chris Mathews plucked out my Robin Williams notes and linked to them on his site tonight... Suddenly my hits have doubled. Err... thanks Chris.A couple interesting things:
asp.net
Data binding? No seriously. Yes, we're all thinking 'oh no here we go again'. But this stuff actually works from what I've seen so far. And it's fast! OK I don't want to sound goofy because I know there's a bunch of anti Microsoft crusaders out there that would love to blast me about this. But there's tremendous potential in what I've seen so far.Understand my perspective - Most of what I do is fairly basic technically. N-tier applications that run on an intranet or extranet. Quick development time, good maintainability and good salability are the things that appeal to me in a set of tools. If databinding works - that just gets me further down the line.
Sorry, don't mean to gush. But when you learn a language you want to speak it as much as possible. Grant it, I'm probably at the 'Donde esta Susana?' stage. But it's fun.
Monday, July 15, 2002
This is nice but, can we have it in blue?
Tweaking the application that lets us know who's visiting our site. The utility that allows a human to review the name given us by the a 'whois' needs refinement. This is really the key to the whole thing - link the outside world's name to our internal name. Fun.Also adding a report that will categorize the pages that the incoming visitor is looking at. So we can say - who was looking at the litigation section of our site in the last x days...
Sunday, July 14, 2002
Def
Thanks Denise for pointing out Big Poppa E's site. He was outstanding on HBO the other night. I'd love to find a recording of that program. The whole night was great.Robin Williams on HBO
'W doesn't speak when Cheney's drinking water.' 'Ashcroft is a politician that lost to a dead man in Missouri.'Saturday, July 13, 2002
KM and Gaming
Wired has a status report regarding the state of computer vs. human gaming (sorry, couldn't find a link). Since IBM developed a computer to beat a chess champion a few years ago this has been an intriguing topic for me. In some cases, humans are still winning due to a games emphasis on intuition and interpretation.
Business is a game. The rules are much more complex than any of the games discussed in the wired article (chess, poker, go, bridge, scrabble). Computers are not capable of understanding all the rules.
'How do we know?' is a key question, but it assumes a definition of knowing something. I understand this as having access to facts coupled with having the experience and intuition to interpret them in a useful manner. Technology can help me quite a bit with the first bit of the problem - but the second part only comes from interacting with the carbon based world.
In computer game competition - this acquisition of experience is primarily done by data and rule development based on the rules of the game. In the real world - the rules change and adapt. Computers can't yet match the brain in there ability to do this on the scale that they do.
(A disclaimer - I'm not a gamer at all)
Friday, July 12, 2002
too much time on their hands
The people who maintain the disturbing auctions site obviously are suffering from this. But Andrea just reminded me that, I have the time to look at it.... hmmm Thanks.Thursday, July 11, 2002
Annoying XSL stories
Spent the afternoon wrestling with xsl - ie v6 works beautifully, ie5.5 doesn't work at all. yechh. Anyway I moved the processing to the server and I'm up and running. now.Wednesday, July 10, 2002
KM - Viral Adaptation
OK - here it is a new (or recently re-purposed) catch phrase 'Viral Adaptation'. In KM terms, I think of it as the way a process or technology is propagated throughout an organization. An initiative is passed from person to person and takes root because of it's own intrinsic value. This is the opposite of the notion that an initiative will succeed if it is mandated by a project sponsor. Examples:Nobody mandated that I use applications - the idea was planted, I went through a short learning curve and realized immediate value. KM applications have to do the same thing.
I'll probably flesh this idea out further. The other aspect of this is the nature of the knowledge worker. From my experience, they do not take kindly to mandates. Introduce an idea and let them draw their own conclusions. Then come back and get feedback and adjust. The more contribution you get, the more likely you'll succeed.
Time to get ready for work.
km
I'm continually impressed by James Watson's blog - very on topic and well written. It's inspirational..net
I created my first mobile web application. I never really believed the magazine articles etc. But now that it's happened to me I can tell you it's true - and addictive. Using
as a guide, I downloaded the appropriate browser emulators and within a half hour had a working application running on my simulated wap device - how cool is that? I know this is just surface. But this was way easy. The mind boggles at the possibilities.
Tuesday, July 09, 2002
Feedback...
If you're playing along with the home version of the game, you know that we released a portal as our intranet home page last week. One of the features I added was a 'Rate this page' button. The user is prompted to rate the page in terms of usefulness - and add any comments they desired. To date 80 people have responded and we're running 3.7 out of 5. I expected this. BigLaw resists change with passion. Most of the comments have to do with the page being 'too busy' or having 'too much information'. A few refer specifically to the ugly colors (yes they are pretty ugly). Anyway - you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette!The other feature getting a lot of use is the 'My Sites' applet. Approx 140 people have already saved a set of favorites for themselves - no support calls! cool.
Sunday, July 07, 2002
Consigliere running the FBI?
Frank Rich's (New York Times) piece in the time is spot on. Andrea has been mentioning Bush's Harken scam lately, but nobody's writing about. The cookie jar lid is nowhere to be found.There's a revolution brewing...
Saturday, July 06, 2002
Island time
Did some more work on Dreamwalker this AM. Oddly, the calendar on the availability page isn't rendering correctly for me when I view the page on the production web server. But when I view it from the office or elsewhere it's fine. I'll be looking into this.Friday, July 05, 2002
Interface forward.
Martijn van Welie lays out the world according to design patterns. Must refer back to this one in the future as a good way of calibrating interface approaches.A quiet fourth
I spent most of yesterday reading Moving to ASP.Net - Web development with Vb.Net by Steve Harris and Rob Macdonald. I'm enjoying it immensely. It does a really smart thing in terms of laying out the chapters and appendixes in such a way that you don't spend a lot of time going over things that you already know.
One of the things I like about technology is the counterpoint of always feeling like I'm behind in terms of my knowledge base, and then the satisfaction of really catching on with some new tools. This makes the job fun. But this is no secret.
Wednesday, July 03, 2002
KM
I finished the reporting end of the Internet Client traffic monitor. Lawyers will see the number of hits in the last seven days and the last 30 days appear in their portals when they log in. If they choose they can click on the client name and see which pages the visitor looked at. I also added a little subversion to the mix. I created a page that shows the top client hits - and I included the non-clients on the same page. In other words, handle your business ... but think beyond...We also went global with the portal today (2:30 AM). No technical problems. The comments have been relatively positive so far. A few people want to go back to the old static page with the picture of dead white guys... but that's not going to happen. I was impressed with how quickly, particularly the lawyers, took to the personalized link component. Nice job guys!
News Flash!
'You Go Girl!' uttered by msnbc anchor Ashleigh Banfield. Tom Brokow is believed to be working on a new vocabulary to match Banfield. Expect "Kick it, homes" to be sprinkled into tomorrows broadcast.
Remember when they used to have news programs on tv?
Tuesday, July 02, 2002
Irresponsible development efforts part II
I finished testing this bad boy today. It's actually quite fun! Go to your portal page, it shows you the clients where you're partner in charge and it tells you how many times they've visited our external web site in the last 7 and 30 days. Tomorrow I'm going to work on the add in for the client lookup utility that will include these stats for any client you choose to lookup.... Fun!And tomorrow is also the day we go firm wide with the portal! It's been released to 100 people in beta for about six weeks, so I don't expect we'll get any technical problems. Still - it's kind of fun to see the rubber hit the road.
Inane movie
'Hackers', among the silliest things I've ever seen. Tomorrow I'm going to rollerblade to work and play techno music really loud. Maybe that will make my job at BigLaw more exciting.
Monday, July 01, 2002
My siblings are insane!
My youngest brother is racing his pets. And my sister's family spends their time torturing them.Distilled six times for greater purity...
Yes, just when we thought we'd discussed justification for CRM to death, another request for more material to 'sell' the admin committee. Apparently it's not enough that they ask for it, say they want it and are willing to pay for it. They have to beg for it. And I have to tell them why they should be begging for it. My job is sooooo much fun!an excerpt of the coloring book I'm putting together:
| Business Function | Description | Benefits |
| Firmwide Rolodex | Single place for storing the information about the contacts at our
clients that everyone in the firm should know about. |
+Unified Client Communication: (eg. We all spell the contact's name correctly, we don't have to continually request fax numbers, mailing addresses, etc.) +Improved Internal Communication: Exposes relationships between S&C and contacts that are currently undocumented. Questions about contacts and relationships that use to depend on office hours can be addressed with the rolodex. +Increased Information Capital: Gather decentralized contact information into a single collaborative store that will survive the immenent departure of many of its contributors. +More accurate contact information: Integration with daily work flow (email, outlook contacts etc.) will ensure that information is current and accurate. |
Loosely coupled discussion about knowledge management, technology, humour, New York, .Net development, movies, People etc.
About Me
- Name: Christopher Smith
- Location: new york, new york, United States
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