Thursday, September 26, 2002

WTC

A subtle change is emerging downtown. Around the whole financial district you'll find freestanding placards that hold a poster of the area including a map that shows the buildings of note. Of-course the wtc was prominent highlights. Only this week have they started to replace the maps.... One year later. hmmm.

posted by Christopher @ 6:01 AM

Wednesday, September 25, 2002

Dreams

A new version of Dreamwalker Sailing finally! Lou's graphics look great. It still needs some work. But all in all, I like it.

posted by Christopher @ 6:10 AM

Monday, September 16, 2002

KM

I've been reading the nifty little 'Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management' during this non-work weekend. This entails, reading while leaning against a wall in Loehman's on 17th street as Andrea hunts for shoes.

This the first I've read by Nonaka, he's got some great ideas regarding KM at different levels of an organization. To sum up different levels have different relationship and needs for knowledge. The front-line worker has a very different perspective than mid and upper management. What hit home for me... The front-line worker cares about 'what is' the upper level of management cares about 'what ought to be'. Powerful, Simple.

posted by Christopher @ 6:08 AM

Saturday, September 14, 2002

Howling at the moon

I noticed that Chuck is moving from the anarchy to Howling at the Moon. Good luck with the move!

I suspect it's going to be an interesting budget season this year at BigLaw. While on vacation, the request for projects, status, people and projections came through. This usually rears it's ugly head in October.

Historically, it's a couple weeks of spreadsheets and creative writing. Whe you go to make a major purchase or hire during the year you have to do the work all over again, so it's kind of useless to spend much time on it.

posted by Christopher @ 11:13 AM

Sunday, September 08, 2002

.net and then some

I just put a tech-note up on my main site. It's basically the javascript for creating a ms access style drop down list box in html. Very good performance for long lists.

posted by Christopher @ 9:17 PM

Well, it is Sunday

Feeling pius? Thanks Lou.

posted by Christopher @ 7:06 PM

Get a Clue Amazon!

We ordered a book from an Amazon Z-Shop member several days ago. The book is extremely difficult to find and we were elated to find that someone had a means of getting it for us. Today we received an emails saying that the book was unavailable! Excuse me? We followed up and with Justin Cox the owner of www.bookconsignment.com. No book, no remorse. No info about why they were advertising the book was in-stock. And he wouldn't give us the info about supplier.

Justin - What about your 100% guarantee? We looked into Amazon's feedback mechanism and found that this clown had wasted other people's time as well. Google - grab this one and expose this clueless vendor please!

posted by Christopher @ 6:40 PM

Saturday, September 07, 2002

Application Center Re-Dux

Ran into a pretty funky issue with application center on our extranet this week. Files replicating across a cluster were not inheriting the permissions of the directory the were being copied into. The result is that when users hit the directory that contained these files they were prompted for nt authentication. In our case the file was a gif. The permissions were set to administrators and the application center id only. So users weren't allowed to see it no matter what.

After much searching, a search of the ms newsgroups on 'ACL' yielded the fact that the directory had to allow 'System' to have full access as well as the 'Everyone' having read and execute. I think that's solved the problem. Hopefully Google will find this and help the next poor sod through this problem.

posted by Christopher @ 12:50 PM

Tuesday, September 03, 2002

Just say 'Boo'!

Building on Joy & co's discussion of incenting knowledge sharing. Check out this Mark Frauenfelder article in Wired. Great material that holds up. It explains a lot of why I'm writing this today.... Why any of us our doing this.

posted by Christopher @ 11:35 PM

KM - Internal Precedent

Hit a milestone in the initiative to replace our internal precedent system today. The legacy application uses BRS as a full text search engine, it seems to be holding up OK, the problem is that there are WAY too many documents in the application with virtually no meta data. So we're in the process of rebuilding with web technologies.

We'll be using the latest web based flavor of Hummingbird's DM as the basis for this application. There's no need to re-write the document handling crap, and the integrated search engine should do fine. The first benchmark is to install this application and compare search results in comperable libraries between Humminbird and BRS. That we did today.

The next piece is to add hooks into our expert systems that will billed document filters to be applied to the libraries. This should substantially improve the quality of searches. More to follow....

posted by Christopher @ 11:11 PM

Also...

Added an Adeptec Firewire card into my good old Gateway. Works flawlessly with the Panasonic DV Camcorder - cool.

posted by Christopher @ 10:54 PM

It's Alive

All data recovered. Western Digital is replacing the job. Whew.

posted by Christopher @ 10:53 PM