Over the weekend, I helped a friend of mine buy a new laptop. What was
amazing was we actually went into a retail store, found the model she
was most comfortable with and was in stock. We actually left the store
with it under our possession.
What wasn't amazing was how hard it was to purchase it, and how much
Internet research I needed to do to enable this fabulous shopping
experience.
You see, my friend wanted to stick with Windows XP. And the moral of
my story, which I will provide up front, is that if you want XP on
your future laptops, you better buy it now because it is only going to
get more difficult.
According to Microsoft's own Web site, XP Pro will no longer be
available in the retail channel after July 1. Although OEMs and system
builders will have until Feb 1, 2009.
There is an exception -- for the immediate future the XP Home version
will be available for ultra-small PCs, but these are probably not the
PCs that you want to outfit your corporate fleet with.
Before heading to the Office Depot that is literally a block from my
house, I spent some time looking over the major PC vendors' Web sites
and seeing what they had. Here is where the story turns ugly. My
friend wanted to spend less than $1,000, have a 15.4-inch screen, and
a keyboard that was solid enough for a demanding typist. That seemed
easy to satisfy, until I started looking around.
None of the major PC vendors make it easy for you to buy a
pre-configured XP laptop. They all "recommend Windows Vista" and hide
their XP models several menu layers down or just don't tell you where
to find them. The two best vendors for XP are Lenovo and HP – possibly
because they have standardized on XP for their own employees, possibly
because they understand that this market segment isn't going away as
fast as Microsoft would like. HP sells actually two different versions
of XP Pro – one is called a "business downgrade" that sounds ominous,
the other is just the standard XP Pro. They cost the same, and they
have fairly wide support for XP Pro across their laptop line. Lenovo
has equally wide support. Both sites make it easy to figure out which
laptops can be configured with XP Pro pre-installed, even if you can't
sort by operating system directly.
The two worst vendors are Sony and Gateway. I couldn't find any XP
models on either site, and Sony makes it almost impossible to
determine what operating system is running on its machine until you
get into the details on each individual model. Toshiba's Web site
isn't much better.
I had better results going to Office Depot's Web site, which was
fortunate because as I said the store is very close by. There you can
quickly search on XP Pro and find a dozen models from several
different vendors, including Sony and Toshiba, which come with this
operating system. It is ironic and cruel that you have to go to a
retail vendor's site to find the details about a product that you
can't get on the actual vendor's site. This should be a lesson for
those of you designing Web sites, but I will leave that for another
column and another day.
In fact, the major PC retailers have done a much better job at finding
XP from their home pages – often a few mouse clicks is all that it
takes to narrow the field. BestBuy.com and CDW.com both will show you
which models come with XP: in CDW's case, they had nine results but
only two Toshibas were in stock.
So off we went to Office Depot. Amazingly, the Lenovo model they had
on display was the sole laptop running XP, and it was one that my
friend liked. We had to deal with a salesperson, who made several
mistakes and tried to get us to purchase the extended warranty, but we
left the store with product in hand.
Microsoft is making a mistake discontinuing XP to retail and corporate
customers. There are many people that aren't enamored with Vista, and
I have heard from many corporate IT managers that are going slowly on
its adoption. Buying a laptop is more of an issue, because many
vendors are making laptops that have network cards and other gear that
doesn't have XP drivers. If you have plans for major XP laptop
purchases this year, spend the money now while you still have a
choice.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Monday, April 14, 2008
Fail frequently
How many of us remember our failures more than our successes? My own divorce, the time I didn't get a research grant, the last job that I was fired from (come to think of it, there were some other messy situations that I still recall), the I time I rear-ended someone on a slippery freeway. The list goes on and on. You could say that I have had a full life.
Those of us in technology are fond of the line from the Apollo 13 book and movie: "failure is not an option." Back then, it was something to revel in, a bunch of NASA nerds working around the clock to figure out a strategy that would save the three astronauts' lives and get them back to Earth safely. It was a good story then, and still is.
But I wanted to talk to you today about a somewhat different point of view, that failure >is< an option, and in fact, those of us that fail frequently are better for it. The trick is to think of each failure as a learning and growth opportunity, especially how you can learn to triumph over your own business adversities. Easy to say now, especially as these failures are illuminated in the dim light of my faded memories, but still.
This isn't a new concept. For example, Jeff Atwood in his blog, Coding Horror, says, "Fail early and often." (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000576.html)
And Mitchell Ashley in his blog says:
"If you aren't seeing some failures along the way, it's a pretty good idea you're not stretching, challenging and really going for it. You're probably believing in your own assumptions and plans too much." (http://www.theconvergingnetwork.com/2008/02/fail-early-fail.html)
Other people have called this concept rapid prototyping: put something together quickly, barely working, to show your customers or clients. Then, based on this feedback, you go back and make small changes, get more feedback and sharpen your ideas.
And really, when you go back to our childhood, this is how we all learned a new skill, whether it is in playing sports, mastering the piano, or whatever. We took small steps, saw what worked and what didn't, and learned from our mistakes.
The hard part is to figure out the right feedback loop so that you aren't micro-managing everyone. This isn't good either: you have to give people the responsibility to make their own mistakes, so that they can really learn from them.
I got to witness this first hand this past weekend. I was attending a professional speaker-training workshop, and got to see first-hand how really good speakers can still fail and how they can tune their craft. It was like drinking from a firehose, but extremely worthwhile as I try to move into that orbit.
Part of the notion of frequent failure has to do with corporate culture, and the acceptance by management of a certain level of risk. After all, who wants a bunch of employees that don't produce? The other thing to figure out the right amount of freedom to try out new ideas and experiment, and to make these adjustments without a particular timetable or schedule of "deliverables."
This is the philosophy of many innovative companies. For example, last week I met Keith Sawyer, a professor here at Wash U. His Group Genius book talks about the culture at WL Gore (the makers of GoreTex and other products less famous). Employees have ten percent of their time that isn't allocated for particular billable projects. They are free to experiment and fail, as long as the other 90% is actually producing results. This is how they come up with some of their most profitable products, and failure at Gore is tolerated within this guideline.
So really, why I can understand why NASA says that failure is not an option, because after all they were talking about actual lives at stake, what we are usually dealing with in our lives is a bit less critical and threatening. Instead, may I suggest a replacement motto, on the order of "Failure is not an only option, but should always be encouraged."
Now I am not talking about promoting your least productive employees. What I do mean is that you want to give your self the permission to fail, and in doing so foster innovation in your company and make you a more agile business. But unlike the astronauts, by making it easier to fail you can avoid the bigger mistakes, and make smaller steps towards progress.
Start thinking about promoting the culture of frequent failure at your shop. It is the first step along the path towards being more innovative and agile. And if you are looking for some inspiration, it is worth renting the Apollo 13 movie if you haven't seen it in a while.
Those of us in technology are fond of the line from the Apollo 13 book and movie: "failure is not an option." Back then, it was something to revel in, a bunch of NASA nerds working around the clock to figure out a strategy that would save the three astronauts' lives and get them back to Earth safely. It was a good story then, and still is.
But I wanted to talk to you today about a somewhat different point of view, that failure >is< an option, and in fact, those of us that fail frequently are better for it. The trick is to think of each failure as a learning and growth opportunity, especially how you can learn to triumph over your own business adversities. Easy to say now, especially as these failures are illuminated in the dim light of my faded memories, but still.
This isn't a new concept. For example, Jeff Atwood in his blog, Coding Horror, says, "Fail early and often." (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000576.html)
And Mitchell Ashley in his blog says:
"If you aren't seeing some failures along the way, it's a pretty good idea you're not stretching, challenging and really going for it. You're probably believing in your own assumptions and plans too much." (http://www.theconvergingnetwork.com/2008/02/fail-early-fail.html)
Other people have called this concept rapid prototyping: put something together quickly, barely working, to show your customers or clients. Then, based on this feedback, you go back and make small changes, get more feedback and sharpen your ideas.
And really, when you go back to our childhood, this is how we all learned a new skill, whether it is in playing sports, mastering the piano, or whatever. We took small steps, saw what worked and what didn't, and learned from our mistakes.
The hard part is to figure out the right feedback loop so that you aren't micro-managing everyone. This isn't good either: you have to give people the responsibility to make their own mistakes, so that they can really learn from them.
I got to witness this first hand this past weekend. I was attending a professional speaker-training workshop, and got to see first-hand how really good speakers can still fail and how they can tune their craft. It was like drinking from a firehose, but extremely worthwhile as I try to move into that orbit.
Part of the notion of frequent failure has to do with corporate culture, and the acceptance by management of a certain level of risk. After all, who wants a bunch of employees that don't produce? The other thing to figure out the right amount of freedom to try out new ideas and experiment, and to make these adjustments without a particular timetable or schedule of "deliverables."
This is the philosophy of many innovative companies. For example, last week I met Keith Sawyer, a professor here at Wash U. His Group Genius book talks about the culture at WL Gore (the makers of GoreTex and other products less famous). Employees have ten percent of their time that isn't allocated for particular billable projects. They are free to experiment and fail, as long as the other 90% is actually producing results. This is how they come up with some of their most profitable products, and failure at Gore is tolerated within this guideline.
So really, why I can understand why NASA says that failure is not an option, because after all they were talking about actual lives at stake, what we are usually dealing with in our lives is a bit less critical and threatening. Instead, may I suggest a replacement motto, on the order of "Failure is not an only option, but should always be encouraged."
Now I am not talking about promoting your least productive employees. What I do mean is that you want to give your self the permission to fail, and in doing so foster innovation in your company and make you a more agile business. But unlike the astronauts, by making it easier to fail you can avoid the bigger mistakes, and make smaller steps towards progress.
Start thinking about promoting the culture of frequent failure at your shop. It is the first step along the path towards being more innovative and agile. And if you are looking for some inspiration, it is worth renting the Apollo 13 movie if you haven't seen it in a while.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
It takes a village to build a Web site
I am old enough to remember that Web sites started out being one-person operations, using simple, easy-to-learn HTML codes that didn’t take much beyond a text editor and memorizing about a dozen commands from Laura Lemay’s book. There were plenty of Web servers to choose from, and it didn’t take much programming skill to get one installed and up and running.
Now it seems like it takes a village to get your site updated and maintained. There are content management systems, advertising serving systems, Flash and streaming content delivery mechanisms, caching servers, databases, and more. So my question to you today is how many people does it take to update your company’s Web site? If the answer is more than two, maybe you need to rethink whom you have and why you need this entire crowd.
Sure, having a modern Web site is more than just putting up a couple of pages of text, and writing the right codes for paragraphs and bold face. I know that. But Web sites should be agile, should be frequently updated, should be easily updated, and shouldn’t take “approval cycles” or long food chains to get from the person that creates the content to the final stage where the world can view it. You want the content to be as close to the original thinker and creator as you possibly can.
Where have we gone with the Web? What happened to make it so difficult? Was it function creep, or security issues, or the marketing and legal departments getting mixed up with this technology? Was it because no one cares about what Web server you are running anymore (really it is a simple choice between Microsoft and Apache)? Was it because static pages of text with just a few images are so over and we have to embed video and Flashy objects to get anyone’s attention? Or because the browser is now everyone’s mission critical, must-have application and so much of what we do everyday involves going to various Web sites? Or because everyone is now a professional blogger and the average Web site designer has a bucket-full of tools to use? Or because everyone is using RSS feeds to keep track of new content and the actual site that contains this information is no longer really all that important?
It probably is some mixture of all of the above. I don’t mean to suggest that we want to go back to the really olden days, when we had command-line browsers that didn’t do much (remember Lynx?). I just think if you have a corporate Web site, take a moment to look at your chain of command, and see if you can streamline it. Let’s see if you can set a goal to update your site at least once a week, or even once a day. It doesn’t need to take a village, and your customers and your staff might really appreciate it, too.
Now it seems like it takes a village to get your site updated and maintained. There are content management systems, advertising serving systems, Flash and streaming content delivery mechanisms, caching servers, databases, and more. So my question to you today is how many people does it take to update your company’s Web site? If the answer is more than two, maybe you need to rethink whom you have and why you need this entire crowd.
Sure, having a modern Web site is more than just putting up a couple of pages of text, and writing the right codes for paragraphs and bold face. I know that. But Web sites should be agile, should be frequently updated, should be easily updated, and shouldn’t take “approval cycles” or long food chains to get from the person that creates the content to the final stage where the world can view it. You want the content to be as close to the original thinker and creator as you possibly can.
Where have we gone with the Web? What happened to make it so difficult? Was it function creep, or security issues, or the marketing and legal departments getting mixed up with this technology? Was it because no one cares about what Web server you are running anymore (really it is a simple choice between Microsoft and Apache)? Was it because static pages of text with just a few images are so over and we have to embed video and Flashy objects to get anyone’s attention? Or because the browser is now everyone’s mission critical, must-have application and so much of what we do everyday involves going to various Web sites? Or because everyone is now a professional blogger and the average Web site designer has a bucket-full of tools to use? Or because everyone is using RSS feeds to keep track of new content and the actual site that contains this information is no longer really all that important?
It probably is some mixture of all of the above. I don’t mean to suggest that we want to go back to the really olden days, when we had command-line browsers that didn’t do much (remember Lynx?). I just think if you have a corporate Web site, take a moment to look at your chain of command, and see if you can streamline it. Let’s see if you can set a goal to update your site at least once a week, or even once a day. It doesn’t need to take a village, and your customers and your staff might really appreciate it, too.
The power of Pi
I have been doing some seminars on IT asset management for a client and as a result I have been talking to a lot of IT managers of some fairly large organizations. One of them mentioned to me his rule of π that I thought was worth sharing. As in the Greek letter that is a geometric constant of 3.14159. (I used to know more decimal places, and yes, I was one of those kinds of people back in high school.)
His rule is simple: anytime a consultant or an employee gives you an estimate of what something costs or how long it will take to complete, he multiples the estimate by π. Someone says a project will take two months, it really will take a bit longer than six. And so forth.
I got a good laugh out of his π rule, but then I got to thinking. Why are IT people so miserable at estimating costs and time to complete work? Maybe they are the worst group of people – certainly I have had general contractors who weren’t the best at this, but then I guess I should consider myself lucky that they were only a few days off schedule rather than by such a huge factor.
Sure, we’ve all read the mythical man-month and other works talking about how the more developers you add to a project, the longer it will take. But this isn’t just about that.
Maybe it is because IT people really want to serve their clients, and set themselves up for unreasonable expectations right off the bat by underestimating their work product. Or maybe it is because the work product is so ephemeral to begin with. I mean, it isn’t like a construction crew trying to rebuild a bridge or erect a new office building.
I guess I am overly sensitive to this because so much of my job revolves around hitting particular deadlines that are very definite. If I miss one, someone else along the editorial production process has to make up the slack, because the magazine has to be printed at a specific time or the article has to be posted online for a particular moment. I am proud to say that I hit all of my deadlines except for some unusual circumstances.
But when it comes to IT projects, a deadline is more a guideline than something hard and fast. The report isn’t done? Oh well, we can wait another week, not to worry. Or how about the opposite, when your boss gives you an artificially early deadline, you actually deliver the work on time, and then he tells you that he was really not counting on getting it today and will be too busy to review it until next week? Boy, does that make you feel like you really moved heaven and earth to get the work to him as agreed.
Sure, things are sometimes out of your control. People make mistakes, code has bugs, equipment takes longer than anticipated to configure, the dog ate my homework, etc. Some of the delay can be explained by developers who want to add “just one more feature” before they lock down the code for production purposes. Did anyone ask them to add the feature? Probably not, they just took it on their own initiative because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
When I taught high school computer networking, believe me I heard it all when a student was late with his homework. (And you should know, I didn’t let my students slide. A deadline is a deadline, after all. Most of them only made that mistake the first time, and then cooperated quite nicely afterwards.)
If we are going to move towards more realistic estimates, we need to do a better job of anticipating the problems with our projects, and also need to be able to communicate up and down the food chain when the first hint of delay or feature creep hits.
Think about the rule of π the next time someone asks you about when you will be done with something you are working on, and try to give it some thought before you commit.
His rule is simple: anytime a consultant or an employee gives you an estimate of what something costs or how long it will take to complete, he multiples the estimate by π. Someone says a project will take two months, it really will take a bit longer than six. And so forth.
I got a good laugh out of his π rule, but then I got to thinking. Why are IT people so miserable at estimating costs and time to complete work? Maybe they are the worst group of people – certainly I have had general contractors who weren’t the best at this, but then I guess I should consider myself lucky that they were only a few days off schedule rather than by such a huge factor.
Sure, we’ve all read the mythical man-month and other works talking about how the more developers you add to a project, the longer it will take. But this isn’t just about that.
Maybe it is because IT people really want to serve their clients, and set themselves up for unreasonable expectations right off the bat by underestimating their work product. Or maybe it is because the work product is so ephemeral to begin with. I mean, it isn’t like a construction crew trying to rebuild a bridge or erect a new office building.
I guess I am overly sensitive to this because so much of my job revolves around hitting particular deadlines that are very definite. If I miss one, someone else along the editorial production process has to make up the slack, because the magazine has to be printed at a specific time or the article has to be posted online for a particular moment. I am proud to say that I hit all of my deadlines except for some unusual circumstances.
But when it comes to IT projects, a deadline is more a guideline than something hard and fast. The report isn’t done? Oh well, we can wait another week, not to worry. Or how about the opposite, when your boss gives you an artificially early deadline, you actually deliver the work on time, and then he tells you that he was really not counting on getting it today and will be too busy to review it until next week? Boy, does that make you feel like you really moved heaven and earth to get the work to him as agreed.
Sure, things are sometimes out of your control. People make mistakes, code has bugs, equipment takes longer than anticipated to configure, the dog ate my homework, etc. Some of the delay can be explained by developers who want to add “just one more feature” before they lock down the code for production purposes. Did anyone ask them to add the feature? Probably not, they just took it on their own initiative because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
When I taught high school computer networking, believe me I heard it all when a student was late with his homework. (And you should know, I didn’t let my students slide. A deadline is a deadline, after all. Most of them only made that mistake the first time, and then cooperated quite nicely afterwards.)
If we are going to move towards more realistic estimates, we need to do a better job of anticipating the problems with our projects, and also need to be able to communicate up and down the food chain when the first hint of delay or feature creep hits.
Think about the rule of π the next time someone asks you about when you will be done with something you are working on, and try to give it some thought before you commit.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Beware of online scams
I have had the dubious expertise of selling a lot of stuff via Craigslist, both here in St. Louis and also in Los Angeles. Over the past couple of years, I have come across some interesting scam artists who are fairly easy to spot. But today's email arrived with a new exploit.
Usually, we are selling furniture. My wife is an interior decorator, and we have been through a few decorating changes. Now, when you sell a bed or some other large piece, you are not going to get too many people from out of town who are interested, unless they are moving into town. So the first tip off that something is amiss is when someone from overseas responds to the ad and says that they will pay for it sight unseen, matching your price. This violates three principles right off the bat:
People like to negotiate prices, no matter how good a deal you are giving them. Anyone who is paying your price is suspect right there.
People want to kick the tires and make sure that your item exists. Doesn't matter what it is, but especially for furniture, because no photo can do any piece justice.
Craigslist is hyper-local. Someone from out of town is suspect.
The legit customer is also going to want to think about his impending purchase, even for a few hours. And they will also pay cash, if you ask. (And you should demand cash, just because checks are so easily forged. Remember Frank Abagnale?) The con men are going to try to send you some kind of check, and mention that right off the bat in their initial email.
So my wife and I have developed our own parsing filter for these email responses, to separate the real offers from the fakers. All well and good, until we began advertising our apartment for rent this week. Today's email brought the following:
I am highly impressed with the information in the listing. I don't have any question at the moment. I wanna go ahead in renting the place from you. I'll be the only person in the property. I work as a Researcher for my company (GLOBAL LINK) and I am coming to the area to carry out some research. They will be responsible for the first month rent and security deposit. I wish to sign the lease agreement in person and will be signing a year lease as soon as i get to the States. I'll be moving to the States on March the 30th and i want the lease to start same date because I will be moving into the property directly. Kindly get the ad off from all listing because am taking the property for sure.
In the main time, I will like to secure the property asap so that i can attend to other important things for my move to the Country.
In order to proceed with payment, I will need the following information so that we can continue from there.
(1) FULL NAME AS IT WILL BE ON CHECK,
(2) MAILING ADDRESS,
(3) CELL NUMBER AND ALTERNATIVE NUMBER.
Kindly get back to me with the above information and in case of any query, please contact me on my phone number 0044XXXXXXX. Await your response asap.
A few things struck me about this email. First, why is he so eager? Second, why would someone from the UK (based on his phone number) in a financial services firm, move to St. Louis? Granted, we are becoming a bigger banking center with Wachovia buying JD Edwards, but still. Third, why is he using kindly so much? There is nothing kind about this, it is a business transaction. Fourth, the ALL CAPS is another tip-off. Fifth, the email came from Yahoo.com, rather than a corporate email account. Finally, why ask to remove the ad from Craigslist? Something didn't add up.
A quick check online found the managing director of GlobalLink.com in the UK, and about an hour later he was kindly replying with the fact that the gent didn't exist in his office. So case closed. But I just wonder how many people are less suspicious, or who don't check out their potential buyers, fall into his trap?
Craigslist is a great site, and we have sold lots of stuff over the years on it. And they do a fairly good job of warning you about the con artists. But this just shows you that the bad guys are getting smarter all the time, which means you have to, too.
Usually, we are selling furniture. My wife is an interior decorator, and we have been through a few decorating changes. Now, when you sell a bed or some other large piece, you are not going to get too many people from out of town who are interested, unless they are moving into town. So the first tip off that something is amiss is when someone from overseas responds to the ad and says that they will pay for it sight unseen, matching your price. This violates three principles right off the bat:
People like to negotiate prices, no matter how good a deal you are giving them. Anyone who is paying your price is suspect right there.
People want to kick the tires and make sure that your item exists. Doesn't matter what it is, but especially for furniture, because no photo can do any piece justice.
Craigslist is hyper-local. Someone from out of town is suspect.
The legit customer is also going to want to think about his impending purchase, even for a few hours. And they will also pay cash, if you ask. (And you should demand cash, just because checks are so easily forged. Remember Frank Abagnale?) The con men are going to try to send you some kind of check, and mention that right off the bat in their initial email.
So my wife and I have developed our own parsing filter for these email responses, to separate the real offers from the fakers. All well and good, until we began advertising our apartment for rent this week. Today's email brought the following:
I am highly impressed with the information in the listing. I don't have any question at the moment. I wanna go ahead in renting the place from you. I'll be the only person in the property. I work as a Researcher for my company (GLOBAL LINK) and I am coming to the area to carry out some research. They will be responsible for the first month rent and security deposit. I wish to sign the lease agreement in person and will be signing a year lease as soon as i get to the States. I'll be moving to the States on March the 30th and i want the lease to start same date because I will be moving into the property directly. Kindly get the ad off from all listing because am taking the property for sure.
In the main time, I will like to secure the property asap so that i can attend to other important things for my move to the Country.
In order to proceed with payment, I will need the following information so that we can continue from there.
(1) FULL NAME AS IT WILL BE ON CHECK,
(2) MAILING ADDRESS,
(3) CELL NUMBER AND ALTERNATIVE NUMBER.
Kindly get back to me with the above information and in case of any query, please contact me on my phone number 0044XXXXXXX. Await your response asap.
A few things struck me about this email. First, why is he so eager? Second, why would someone from the UK (based on his phone number) in a financial services firm, move to St. Louis? Granted, we are becoming a bigger banking center with Wachovia buying JD Edwards, but still. Third, why is he using kindly so much? There is nothing kind about this, it is a business transaction. Fourth, the ALL CAPS is another tip-off. Fifth, the email came from Yahoo.com, rather than a corporate email account. Finally, why ask to remove the ad from Craigslist? Something didn't add up.
A quick check online found the managing director of GlobalLink.com in the UK, and about an hour later he was kindly replying with the fact that the gent didn't exist in his office. So case closed. But I just wonder how many people are less suspicious, or who don't check out their potential buyers, fall into his trap?
Craigslist is a great site, and we have sold lots of stuff over the years on it. And they do a fairly good job of warning you about the con artists. But this just shows you that the bad guys are getting smarter all the time, which means you have to, too.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
The technology behind Springfield's Lincoln Museum
I am one of those inveterate museum goers. Often on a business trip I will take some time to stop by a favorite gallery or seek out a new one. And so, when I had a chance to write an article for the New York Times about the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill., I jumped at the chance.
Alas, the story was cut from the paper at the last minute, but I thought I would share with you some of my experiences. What was interesting about the place, which has been open for about three years, is how it combines Vegas glitz and geeky gadgets to bring the scholarship of Lincoln's life and the Civil War years into a modern context.
I spent about three hours there on a day that was turning into one of those Midwestern snow squalls, and it was fun to tour the place with their IT manager and see how they built some of the attractions. They have a wide variety of tech in place, from the ordinary such as theatrical lighting to the unusual with very advanced digital holographic projectors. It is far cry from a dusty collection of artifacts in glass cases, and the museum designers have succeeded at bringing many parts of the Lincoln story quite literally to life.
There are dozens of video projectors used throughout the place, including playing key roles in two theaters that run short programs – one is about Lincoln's life, the other talks about library research where a live actor lip-synchs to the script and is part of a very snazzy special effect. The contrast of old and new stagecraft is fascinating, particularly when the actor told me that the technique used in his show dates back to Lincoln's time, when they used gas lamps instead of electric lights and fiber optics.
Underneath each seat in one theater are special Butt Kicker speakers that respond to the rifle fire and cannon blasts on the soundtrack, creating vibrations that make these scenes very realistic. What the designers told me is how computer-controlled video programming is being used as another theatrical lighting instrument, and is changing the way they work. All of the video is digitized and plays from terabytes of hard disk storage. All of the systems have sophisticated error-checking routines and emails the technical staff when something goes wrong.
One of the more interesting videos is a short four-minute film that shows a map of the US and the entire Civil War. You see the constantly shifting front line between North and South, the number of casualties, and the major battles taking place. It is a powerful reminder of how devastating that war was.
Another video-intensive exhibit is an interpretation of the 1860 election that was filmed in Tim Russert's "Meet the Press" studios in Washington, D.C. The exhibit shows various TV monitors as if the visitor is in the studio's control room, and the video clips and commercials are from the perspective of the four candidates running for office and their particular positions. This room alone uses three video servers and has 11 different TV monitors and runs under the control of a Windows NT PC. Yes, a version of Windows that isn't even sold anymore is at the heart of this wonderful room. (Another PC runs DOS, too.)
The lighting and even temperature of the various rooms are all under computer control all in the goal of providing the best visitor experience. The computers take into account the existing ambient lighting based on time of day and sun position, and one room that shows the deathbed of one of Lincoln's sons is several degrees cooler than the adjoining rooms, all to make it a bit more eerie.
Still, some artifacts are required to complement the technology. An antique stove that is part of an exhibit on what the White House kitchen of the 1860s looked like was purchased on eBay, and replicas of Lincoln's famous documents such as the Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg Address are in other rooms. And as a reminder of the contrast between Lincoln's legacy and his time in office, one room of the museum is devoted to a series of reproductions of political cartoons of the time, showing how unpopular Lincoln was during his presidency.
It is a great place, and well worth the visit if you ever have the chance. What I liked about the museum was how it combines the best of technology with ordinary museum practice to tell some great stories, and to teach people a little bit more about Honest Abe.
Alas, the story was cut from the paper at the last minute, but I thought I would share with you some of my experiences. What was interesting about the place, which has been open for about three years, is how it combines Vegas glitz and geeky gadgets to bring the scholarship of Lincoln's life and the Civil War years into a modern context.
I spent about three hours there on a day that was turning into one of those Midwestern snow squalls, and it was fun to tour the place with their IT manager and see how they built some of the attractions. They have a wide variety of tech in place, from the ordinary such as theatrical lighting to the unusual with very advanced digital holographic projectors. It is far cry from a dusty collection of artifacts in glass cases, and the museum designers have succeeded at bringing many parts of the Lincoln story quite literally to life.
There are dozens of video projectors used throughout the place, including playing key roles in two theaters that run short programs – one is about Lincoln's life, the other talks about library research where a live actor lip-synchs to the script and is part of a very snazzy special effect. The contrast of old and new stagecraft is fascinating, particularly when the actor told me that the technique used in his show dates back to Lincoln's time, when they used gas lamps instead of electric lights and fiber optics.
Underneath each seat in one theater are special Butt Kicker speakers that respond to the rifle fire and cannon blasts on the soundtrack, creating vibrations that make these scenes very realistic. What the designers told me is how computer-controlled video programming is being used as another theatrical lighting instrument, and is changing the way they work. All of the video is digitized and plays from terabytes of hard disk storage. All of the systems have sophisticated error-checking routines and emails the technical staff when something goes wrong.
One of the more interesting videos is a short four-minute film that shows a map of the US and the entire Civil War. You see the constantly shifting front line between North and South, the number of casualties, and the major battles taking place. It is a powerful reminder of how devastating that war was.
Another video-intensive exhibit is an interpretation of the 1860 election that was filmed in Tim Russert's "Meet the Press" studios in Washington, D.C. The exhibit shows various TV monitors as if the visitor is in the studio's control room, and the video clips and commercials are from the perspective of the four candidates running for office and their particular positions. This room alone uses three video servers and has 11 different TV monitors and runs under the control of a Windows NT PC. Yes, a version of Windows that isn't even sold anymore is at the heart of this wonderful room. (Another PC runs DOS, too.)
The lighting and even temperature of the various rooms are all under computer control all in the goal of providing the best visitor experience. The computers take into account the existing ambient lighting based on time of day and sun position, and one room that shows the deathbed of one of Lincoln's sons is several degrees cooler than the adjoining rooms, all to make it a bit more eerie.
Still, some artifacts are required to complement the technology. An antique stove that is part of an exhibit on what the White House kitchen of the 1860s looked like was purchased on eBay, and replicas of Lincoln's famous documents such as the Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg Address are in other rooms. And as a reminder of the contrast between Lincoln's legacy and his time in office, one room of the museum is devoted to a series of reproductions of political cartoons of the time, showing how unpopular Lincoln was during his presidency.
It is a great place, and well worth the visit if you ever have the chance. What I liked about the museum was how it combines the best of technology with ordinary museum practice to tell some great stories, and to teach people a little bit more about Honest Abe.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Should you backup your blog?
Today we are getting hammered with about half a foot of snow, so it is a good time to curl up in my office with some concentrated time to do my backups.
Earlier in the week, when it was still above freezing, I was working with some friends who have a small development shop here in town. I was helping them figure out their own backup strategy. They are smart folks, doing some cool things with computers, and have plenty of technical expertise when it comes to writing code and understanding how PCs work. What was surprising was how long our conversation took to understand their requirements, figure out what products they wanted to continue to use, and chart a course that would cover their data assets with enough redundancy but still be something that they would actually use on a regular basis.
When you think about it, backups are still far too hard. You need basic anti-virus/anti-spyware/personal firewall protection on each machine. You have to create bootable images, in case your drive goes south or gets corrupted with something that that collection of products doesn’t catch. You want a shared network data repository and backups offside of this information, in case a meteor hits your office (or a tornado, more likely around these parts). You want a spare laptop in case someone’s tanks or gets stolen. When you add up all these elements, backups could be a full-time job.
I have a rather complex backup routine that I use for my own data protection, and there isn’t anyone else in my office (most of the time) and most of my data resides on one computer. So I fully anticipated that it would be a lot more complex for my friends who have multiple computers. The hard part is to make it easy enough so that they could be motivated to follow through on a regular basis.
I will admit that my own backups are a chore that I don’t enjoy doing and only motivate myself to do it because I recall the consequences of an office fire many years (in my building, luckily both I and my office were untouched) or a stolen laptop from the trunk of my car in a Seattle shopping center. And as I was describing my own processes to my friends, I realized that there is still one place that I don’t have adequate backups. Actually, two places, and both because I use Web resources for creating some of my corporate mission-critical content: my Wordpress blog and my Gmail address book. In the very unlikely situation that either of these companies go out of business or remove my data accidentally, I am totally toast.
Actually, part of my Gmail contacts did disappear for a little while last summer while the Google Guys were working on some update or something. For a day or so, I lost the use of the contact groups to organize my peeps. I could still see the individual contacts, but none of the group membership structure.
I realized then (and now) that there is no easy way to replicate this group structure, even if I do an export to a CSV of my entire contact list: all I get from doing that is just the contacts without any group memberships. After the disappearing group lists, I spent a few hours taking screenshots of each group list, realizing that I probably would never do that again and it was far too painful to be useful, but I did feel that I did something to prevent it from happening again. I was right: those screenshots were a one-time deal. I still don't have a solution. Google, please get this fixed soon.
But the Strominator.com Wordpress blog is more troubling, because there are lots of links and lots of content that I have created over the years and if that goes away, I don’t have much recourse and don’t even want to think about re-creating that stuff. So what to do?
One thought I had was to cross-post all my blog entries on another free blogging service, such as on Blogger or LiveJournal. It would be nice if one of them would be able to import an XML file or RSS feed and replicate the entire Strominator blog automatically, but alas that isn’t possible. None of the services will import the comments on my Wordpress site – which could be a benefit for those of you that want to start with a clean slate. None of them will import the static pages of content that I have created, which are essentially links to my published archive. I guess I could cut and paste the HTML and save it as a local file on my desktop, but that seems so 1990s.
Multiply.com does have the ability to import blog entries from a bunch of different blogging services (including Blogger and LiveJournal), but not Wordpress. Too bad.
Sigh. So I will have to go back and copy and paste my posts, which is a tedious process considering that I have several hundred posts on the darn thing. I did replicate last year's just to see what it took, and I guess from now going forward I will cross-post for backup's sake. But which service should I use?
One thought I had was to cross-post my old content on sites that have some social-networking patina so I can get some leverage and readership out of the effort. Scribd.com is one such site, but they are more geared towards uploading documents rather than straight HTML – I not only lose the comments but the embedded links with this service. Google's Blogger is probably not going away, but do I want to trust Yet Another Googlicious Service for my content? Not sure about that. And LiveJournal has an extra step to get posts to be dated properly.
So nothing is perfect. I welcome your thoughts as always. At least my words are preserved on a few places around the Internet.
Earlier in the week, when it was still above freezing, I was working with some friends who have a small development shop here in town. I was helping them figure out their own backup strategy. They are smart folks, doing some cool things with computers, and have plenty of technical expertise when it comes to writing code and understanding how PCs work. What was surprising was how long our conversation took to understand their requirements, figure out what products they wanted to continue to use, and chart a course that would cover their data assets with enough redundancy but still be something that they would actually use on a regular basis.
When you think about it, backups are still far too hard. You need basic anti-virus/anti-spyware/personal firewall protection on each machine. You have to create bootable images, in case your drive goes south or gets corrupted with something that that collection of products doesn’t catch. You want a shared network data repository and backups offside of this information, in case a meteor hits your office (or a tornado, more likely around these parts). You want a spare laptop in case someone’s tanks or gets stolen. When you add up all these elements, backups could be a full-time job.
I have a rather complex backup routine that I use for my own data protection, and there isn’t anyone else in my office (most of the time) and most of my data resides on one computer. So I fully anticipated that it would be a lot more complex for my friends who have multiple computers. The hard part is to make it easy enough so that they could be motivated to follow through on a regular basis.
I will admit that my own backups are a chore that I don’t enjoy doing and only motivate myself to do it because I recall the consequences of an office fire many years (in my building, luckily both I and my office were untouched) or a stolen laptop from the trunk of my car in a Seattle shopping center. And as I was describing my own processes to my friends, I realized that there is still one place that I don’t have adequate backups. Actually, two places, and both because I use Web resources for creating some of my corporate mission-critical content: my Wordpress blog and my Gmail address book. In the very unlikely situation that either of these companies go out of business or remove my data accidentally, I am totally toast.
Actually, part of my Gmail contacts did disappear for a little while last summer while the Google Guys were working on some update or something. For a day or so, I lost the use of the contact groups to organize my peeps. I could still see the individual contacts, but none of the group membership structure.
I realized then (and now) that there is no easy way to replicate this group structure, even if I do an export to a CSV of my entire contact list: all I get from doing that is just the contacts without any group memberships. After the disappearing group lists, I spent a few hours taking screenshots of each group list, realizing that I probably would never do that again and it was far too painful to be useful, but I did feel that I did something to prevent it from happening again. I was right: those screenshots were a one-time deal. I still don't have a solution. Google, please get this fixed soon.
But the Strominator.com Wordpress blog is more troubling, because there are lots of links and lots of content that I have created over the years and if that goes away, I don’t have much recourse and don’t even want to think about re-creating that stuff. So what to do?
One thought I had was to cross-post all my blog entries on another free blogging service, such as on Blogger or LiveJournal. It would be nice if one of them would be able to import an XML file or RSS feed and replicate the entire Strominator blog automatically, but alas that isn’t possible. None of the services will import the comments on my Wordpress site – which could be a benefit for those of you that want to start with a clean slate. None of them will import the static pages of content that I have created, which are essentially links to my published archive. I guess I could cut and paste the HTML and save it as a local file on my desktop, but that seems so 1990s.
Multiply.com does have the ability to import blog entries from a bunch of different blogging services (including Blogger and LiveJournal), but not Wordpress. Too bad.
Sigh. So I will have to go back and copy and paste my posts, which is a tedious process considering that I have several hundred posts on the darn thing. I did replicate last year's just to see what it took, and I guess from now going forward I will cross-post for backup's sake. But which service should I use?
One thought I had was to cross-post my old content on sites that have some social-networking patina so I can get some leverage and readership out of the effort. Scribd.com is one such site, but they are more geared towards uploading documents rather than straight HTML – I not only lose the comments but the embedded links with this service. Google's Blogger is probably not going away, but do I want to trust Yet Another Googlicious Service for my content? Not sure about that. And LiveJournal has an extra step to get posts to be dated properly.
So nothing is perfect. I welcome your thoughts as always. At least my words are preserved on a few places around the Internet.
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About Me
- David Strom
- David Strom has looked at hundreds of computer products over a more than 20 year career in IT and computer journalism. He was the founding editor-in-chief of Network Computing magazine, and now writes for Baseline, Information Security, Tom's Hardware, and the New York Times.