Wednesday, October 30, 2002

All too familiar

Rick has tapped into the vast swirling maelstrom of big egos, big salaries, big bonus and all that is repulsive about firm's like big law. (Hint, my 'BigLaw' isn't mentioned in Rick's blog). Thanks. I'm amused and sickened at the same time.

posted by Christopher @ 8:46 PM

Monday, October 28, 2002

Frequency ...

is on right now. This is one of those movies that I can watch over and over again. Thanks encore!

posted by Christopher @ 10:08 PM

Sunday, October 27, 2002

Weinberger on Palladium

Good overview by David Weinberger. This topic really influences blood pressure in a lot of people. A few thoughts.

Weinberger seems to think that MS can't make a secure operating system. And yes, most MS servers out there are woefully vulnerable. This idea is mainly due to the fact that the people that install and maintain these servers don't know enough to secure them properly. It takes a degree of professionalism to build and maintain a server environment - in any OS! MS, historically has created an OS that is very easy to build, but very insecure. MS is trying to correct this in their next version. I think the other vendors have done a much better job of insuring that people responsible for a server know how to secure it.

Regarding the 'evil alliance' between MS and Hollywood. This may be smokescreen of sorts. I think MS is completely aware of how much money it is losing due to non-compliance to licensing of its own software. By making it harder to 'share' a music and films, they are also making it harder to share office... The potential recovery in lost income is huge. If the consumer doesn't like it - go download linux. Great opportunity for Linux.

Just an opinion campers - remember, none of this is as important as our friends and family.

posted by Christopher @ 10:27 AM

Saturday, October 26, 2002

.Net

I'm working my way through Microsoft Press's self paced exam preparation for vb.net. The book is good, but the real fun is finding the code errors. It's kind of like an Easter egg hunt. I've been posting my findings to MS's support site for the book. I'm curious to see when and if they'll publish them.

I've always been fond of the MS certification program. This stems from the years I spent in consulting. It was my job to tech interview all the candidates. It's true that passing the exams does not necessarily mean you're a good technician. But it usually means you've been exposed to all the parts of a toolset, not just the ones that you used on your most recent project. It's particularly useful for someone who needs to interview 30 programmers a week.

posted by Christopher @ 8:40 AM

Thursday, October 24, 2002

You know you're too much of a geek...

When it actually cracks you up when someone describes a colleague as 'one server short of a cluster'.

posted by Christopher @ 9:09 PM

Inappropriate use of technology

OK here's one for the book. A college of mine stopped by my office last Friday and mentioned that he was going to 'sick' some vendors on me who had a question about putting an application on our intranet. Supposedly the project had partner approval and they were interested in moving quickly....

A few hours later my phone rang, and the guy immediately said he was going to conference on his technical guy.... No introduction, no request - he just charged ahead. So, I'm on a conference call with Mark (the technical guy) and he starts asking for network diagrams and data structures. I guess I was tired because all I could do was say ' this conversation isn't going anywhere' and hung up the phone.

A little research revealed that the project was to put card readers on all of the turnstiles coming and GOING OUT of the building and then to write an application that would let a manager view the comings and goings of his/her people. It's a big brother project.

My job is to show the partnership that the 75K they spend on this is probably not going to be recovered by the amount of OT they don't spend on secretaries that leave early. Also, there's a great chance that people will react poorly to having to swipe out on the way home. It'll feel like prison.

posted by Christopher @ 6:33 AM

Wednesday, October 23, 2002

Installing sp3 on my home win2k machine. Cross your fingers....

posted by Christopher @ 8:34 PM

Tuesday, October 22, 2002

Doonsbury's blogging

OK now we're on the radar. Thanks rick. I wonder if there will be a lengthy discussion on the relative merits of blogging as a KM tool?

posted by Christopher @ 6:21 AM

Saturday, October 19, 2002

Attention

Everyone check out EmptyBottle.org for links to contribute to a friend in need. NYC is pulling for you Rick.

posted by Christopher @ 12:16 AM

Friday, October 18, 2002

KM

We're giving groove a whirl. Way cool so far. I'm on a different floor from most of my people, and we have a tendency to work offsite frequently, so it could be a good fit.

posted by Christopher @ 11:54 PM

Legal tech trash...

Called OneSource today. We're big users of their services, we use them for regular company research as well as for a source of company news (xml feed) force fed to the lawyers via the portal. They are standardizing on SOAP and we're part of the early adopter program. Today's call was to request the inclusion of a method to return the corporate family information for a company via a soap request.

We have most of our clients matched to the equivalent Onesource ID. It would make sense that we could get quite a bang for the buck by pulling in the full set of corporate affiliations via a soap call. This is the reality of a web service architecture. Way cool!

posted by Christopher @ 10:23 PM

Thursday, October 17, 2002

Security

One of the little details to remember. Don't advertise your web server to the random telnet user.

posted by Christopher @ 7:21 PM

Monday, October 14, 2002

.net

Yesterday I had some time to kill while Andrea was in a sample sale. I stopped into the Chelsea Barnes & Noble and grabbed a copy of Ingo Rammer's book on .net remoting and vb. I read the first chapter and introduction and was very impressed. I'll probably grab a copy after I clear the reading queue a little.

posted by Christopher @ 6:29 AM

Friday, October 11, 2002

KM KISS

From 'Managing Professional Intellect' by James Quinn, Philip Anderson and Sydney Finkelstein, a great definition of Professional Intellect: (I'm paraphrasing here)
  • Cognitive Knowledge (Know - What) - basic mastery of a subject

  • Advance Skills(Know - How) - ability to apply skills to real world situations

  • Systems Understanding (Know - Why) - This is what separates the leaders. It involves the deep knowledge of cause and effect that manifests itself in intuition.

  • Self Motivated Creativity (Care-Why) - This the motivation that drives people to be the best.

    • posted by Christopher @ 9:28 AM

    Thursday, October 10, 2002

    CR as Knowledge Sharing

    Yes we have a Change Request system in place here at Big Law. Twice a week, the director's get together to discuss what's going to change, when is it going to happen, how is it going to affect our user base and all sorts of other stuff. It rests on a rather clunky application. But the system only serves as a focus for the conversation.

    I have to admit, most of the time in those meetings I'm really bored. Yeah, yeah, we're adding another connector to the Tokyo ISDN line so if the first back-up comes down... blah, blah, blah. Yes, a lot of interesting things are discussed. But there's a high noise to signal ratio.

    Question to self: How can I filter some of the noise?

    posted by Christopher @ 7:21 AM

    Tuesday, October 08, 2002

    KM

    Note to self... Write glamorous, accessible description of projects to take on in 2003 in order to obtain cooperation and budget from management.

    Precedent searching: Yes this is still going on. We have the existing precedent documents in a dm5 library with full text indexing. In 03 we'll add and interface that will allow a user to limit the scope of the search by matter geographic orientation, industry code or type of matter. This will greatly improve the accuracy and speed of searches.

    Precedent vetting. I've got to get commitment from the lawyers to put some effort into judging the value of existing and future precedent documents. This will be a process to remove bad, and highlight good docs....

    Other cool stuff... blah, blah, blah, blah

    posted by Christopher @ 11:03 PM

    Security

    I met with Alain Rossmann and his team from Pervasive Security today. They've got a very cool technology for automatic file encryption. Currently it's in beta. So much so that their web site is not yet up. Big potential though.

    posted by Christopher @ 2:11 PM

    Wednesday, October 02, 2002

    Developement

    Here's one for all you corporate developers out there... How many of you could take one of your intranet applications and put it out on the internet and feel confident that it could withstand a hacker?

    Recently we had a fluke happen that revealed a vulnerability that really shouldn't have been there. As a result, we're going back through all of our applications and holding them up to the standards that we have for our external sites. It's a good exercise. Painful, but good.

    It's like the old Fram oil filter ad. 'You can pay me now, or you can pay me later' We skimped on QA, Code Reviews and user testing and got burned. Damn.


    posted by Christopher @ 9:31 PM