KM on another scale
most kidding aside. The speech the other night has got me thinking. One of the themes as I see it was too intimidate the listener. To make us afraid. The threat was 'we know that these bad people want to hurt you, and we're going to attack them to protect you'. OK, I'm keeping an open mind. So I ask, How do you know that? It's a KM issue in a very broad sense, and we're all involved with it on a global scale.
We're being asked to believe that the people in Washington have information, that when combined with context leads to the conclusion that this dire course of action needs to be taken. The problem is that the we're being asked to believe the conclusion without the supporting information.
Regarding the collection of information, I've lost most faith in the established news sources. Pre-9/11 I was an avid NY times reader. The things I saw and experienced first hand on that day were so widely different that I was shocked how inadequate and off base the media was. There is no way that print or filmed media can capture an event or the human impact of such an event. Since then I see the egos and maneuvering of the news media more than any real information. I read foreign news services and triangulate as best I can, but my general impression is that no-one is able to give a clear picture of what's going.
So what about a speech from a person in office. Again, I see the lies and the angles and don't see any substance.
Monday night, Court TV ran a 'Mug-shots' episode where they presented the corporate criminals in the Enron scandal. They aired Lay's speech re-assuring the employees that the company was doing just fine, and they had nothing to worry about. The voice over announced that this was the same day that he was selling off his stock. It seemed that Dubya was trying for the same deal on Tuesday night, except he wasn't as charismatic as the Enron thief.
Project Time
I'm adding the ability to enter notes for a given time entry. Incremental improvement... Link to follow.
Just in case
you missed last night's speach..
Here's the summary.
As expected ...
No answers, no truth, no thought from the bonehead. This pompous asshole won't be happy until he drives the economy into the ground and gets a lot of innocent people killed.
At least learn to pronounce the word nuclear!
Great shot of Kennedy napping during the speach though.
Information Services KM
within IS, whenever there's an outage of any site, the responsible party is required prepare an e-mail with an assessment of the problem, facts about its resolution and plan for prevention of future recurrence. This is sent to an e-mail list where it is largely ignored.
It's a classic case of the shoe maker's children going barefoot.
I whipped a quick little incident response system, that I'm going to run up the flag pole this week. We'll see what people think.
Tech note.
I've got a new xp machine in the office and I'm moving over a bunch of old vb6 applications. One of these apps grabs the news xml files from
Onesource and caches them locally. I re-wrote the app using vb.net, the resulting frustration and triumph warranted a tech note, hopefully easing the way for those to follow (boy that sounds pompous).
Anyway.
This tech note describes a pretty good way of reading xml from a provider and caching it locally. Hopefully It'll be useful for some-one.
.net Remoting
I'm going through
Ingo Rammer's book at the moment. A lot of deja-vu from the early com days... but obviously a lot has been learned by the collective pain we've all suffered since then. I'm not nearly smart enough to have insight into all the subtleties yet, but on first blush, this looks like something I can use.
I will say, this material is not for the beginner. You should have good experience with components etc. before jumping into this.
Web Services
It took a total of 10 minutes to switch from one weather web service to a second. A total of about 5 lines of code. And I'm now using a free service from
Innergears.com as opposed to a paid service. For my personal
site, that's just fine.
Farewell and Good Luck
Today BigLaw lost a tremendous resource in the KM trenches. Good luck and stay the course
Joy!
I heart the Internet
... when I can listen to live coverage of the LV cup on
New Zealand Radio!... Thanks
Sailing Anarchy 
Security
Downloaded and running Microsoft's
Baseline Security Analyzer tool. So far it's pretty cool. It seems like a good start. In the past I've had someone run around to all the servers running HFNetcheck. This will take care of that and go the next few steps....
If you were in China right now...
you wouldn't be reading this.
.net
Oh yes, we have to make it a holy war... Question authority, justify your exhistance etc. Just make it entertaining.
Note to self..
Convince the brain trust that makes the decisions here at BigLaw to create an RSS feed out of there pathetic 'recent news' page. Should be relatively easy.
Google trap
I added a simple
'sailing news & links' to one of my other sites. Google's sending 8 - 10 visitors a day. Mostly due to people searching on topics covered in the news section.
Time released ideas...
Finally we're getting to the point where the means of gathering firm-wide meta data about matters is integrating nicely with the full text search capability of our document libraries. It's been a painful ride - but well worth it. .... Can I be any more cryptic than that?
.Net
I'm working my way through Osborne's MCAD/MCSD XML Web Services and Server Components Development with Visual Basic .NET
As study guides go, it's not bad. The chapter questions are better than most. But the printed example code is wrong in many cases.
This does work to your advantage, in that you learn more from researching problems then from just parroting back information. Still, it can be frustrating.
Training Day
Saw the movie with Denzel Washington last night on HBO. Fierce! Really engaging. It gets my approval.
Flash
Every once in a while the appropriate business use of this
great technology comes to light.
Trust
When you copy a file from a network drive to a local directory do you always do a file compare to verify that the file copy correctly? If you copy an entire directory how much time to you spend verifying that files have moved correctly? How much do you trust your network/Computer/OS etc?
Why?
I ask this because I had an individual take a cheap shot at one of my people simply because of the incorrect assumption that an xcopy command would work correctly. I developer should trust that the network is working shouldn't he?
The same day, I had a programmer beating her head against the wall because files were mysteriously being copied over. She had created a terminal server session to the correct server, but DNS was incorrectly pointing her to an incorrect machine. She easily lost two days time.
ARRRRGGHHHH! It's the little things.
When I think about it, I trust quite a bit. I appreciated it when th infrastructure works well. I appreciate the people that keep in running smoothly. But, every time I get burned because it doesn't, it makes it harder to trust.
Irony's dead?
Doonesberry's on top of the situation
...
Sacrilege!
I don't like the Blackberry. Yes, I have one. Currently it sits in its cradle on my desk in the office (about 1.5 miles away). I'm very happy with it there.
But wait there's a reason.... I'm pretty much in front of a full-size keyboard, monitor and cup of coffee most of my waking hours. The only time I'm not connected is when I'm walking to and from work, or when I'm in meetings. (Yes, I'm one of the few people in the world who live close to work. Every day I enjoy a blissfully low tech commute.)
In meetings, others have there blackberry - but I find that if I entertain myself by paying attention, daydreaming or inappropriately cracking bad jokes, I don't need a Blackberry for entertainment. Sorry guys.
.net remoting
Spent a good amount of time wrestling with an example of .net remoting using http channels. Everything works beautifully with tcp channels, but for the life of me I can't get things to work with the http version. This is a great learning opportunity, but frustrating.
