In IT, Right is Might

Having previously written about management in "A Tale of Two Managers," I really liked this Computerworld article. Some quotes:

"Geeks are smart and creative, but they are also egocentric, antisocial, managerially and business challenged, victim-prone, bullheaded and credit-whoring. To overcome these intractable behavioral deficits you must do X, Y and Z."

"... my personal experiences working within IT groups have always been quite good, working with IT pros for whom the negative stereotypes just don't seem to apply.”

"Few people notice this, but for IT groups respect is the currency of the realm. IT pros do not squander this currency. Those whom they do not believe are worthy of their respect might instead be treated to professional courtesy, a friendly demeanor or the acceptance of authority. Gaining respect is not a matter of being the boss and has nothing to do with being likeable or sociable; whether you talk, eat or smell right; or any measure that isn't directly related to the work."

There's much more, and I encourage that you read it all, but this idea struck me: I've worked with arrogant people, but I put up with them and their arrogant attitudes because they were really, really smart. I knew that when I asked a question, I'd get the right answer every time, end of story. Sure, I may have wished these people were wrong occasionally, but it never happened. They were always right, and being right demands respect.

The article expresses it this way:

"While everyone would like to work for a nice person who is always right, IT pros will prefer a jerk who is always right over a nice person who is always wrong. Wrong creates unnecessary work, impossible situations and major failures. Wrong is evil, and it must be defeated. Capacity for technical reasoning trumps all other professional factors, period."

Fortunately, I have had the privilege of working with a few nice people who also knew their stuff. These people not only knew what they were talking about, they also patiently took the time to help others understand what they already knew. Yes, they were busy -- in part because they were constantly bombarded with questions from people who were unable or unwilling to find answers on their own. However, rather than berate their questioners, they took the time to help.

Are you a jerk who's always right? Are you nice but often wrong? Are you really nice and really good? Be honest.

Twitter: A Toy and a Tool

You may not be able to say much in only 140 characters, but you can still do plenty via Twitter.

I'm a late adopter when it comes to social networking. I dabble with LinkedIn but continue to resist MySpace and Facebook. When Twitter first launched, I went to the Web site and wondered, "What am I going to do with this?" But since I started "tweeting" and, specifically, running TweetDeck, I've found ways to make Twitter useful for me.

For those similarly wary of social networking, here's the rundown on Twitter, courtesy of Wikipedia:

"Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read each others' updates, known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters, displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to other users -- known as followers -- who have subscribed to them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter Web site, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications."

Through Twitter, I've watched people from all walks of life as they broadcast their thoughts and ideas. Many link to stories they find on Slashdot or Digg, though I don't follow these folks for long, as they aren't providing anything new or valuable to me.

I've followed companies. At least some of them seem to recognize Twitter's potential as a customer service tool. I watched employees from an airline help stranded travelers and inform customers about new cities or services that they're adding. I also watched Tony Hawk hide skateboards and tell people where to find them. And of course, in the aftermath of the recent Iran elections, Twitter became the primary means for Iranians to tell the world about the protests and violence.

I agree with those who say there are more followers than tweeters. In my case, I don't spend much time tweeting. I figure people don't care about what I'm eating or that I'm stuck in traffic. What I find powerful about Twitter is the ability to search.

Numerous Twitter-related clients are available for the PC or your smartphone. With TweetDeck, I can continuously run searches for things that interest me (AIX, POWER6, IBM, etc.). Whenever a tweeter comments on these topics, I'll see it. Often I'll check the person’s profile and recent tweets. If they interest me, I'll follow the tweeter. Over time you'll find information that you might not have otherwise uncovered.

Google helped me find ways to automate sending Twitter posts from the command line using "curl" and "split" on a Linux machine. To test the functionality, I downloaded information from different Web sites and used the split command to divide these into several files. Then I published them on Twitter. I was doing things like downloading weather forecasts or RSS feeds, splitting them into 140 character chunks, and tweeting them. People more creative than I am could find other uses for splitting data using cron and simple text parsing.

I'd read that someone posted the text to "Moby Dick" onto Twitter. I wanted to do something similar, but  on a much smaller scale, so I found the text from the Dr. Seuss' "The Cat in the Hat" and tweeted that file.

First I split it into 140-character chunks:

split –b 140 catinhat.txt cathat

This created files in my directory with names like cathataa, cathatab, cathatac, etc. To send them out via Twitter, I just ran:

for i in a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y; do curl -u
username:password -d "status=`cat cathata$i`"
http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml; done

Where the username and password were obviously real ones.

While for me this was simply an exercise in automatically splitting and posting large files, were anyone following me on Twitter, they would have be notified of my action. And anyone searching for the text of "The Cat in the Hat" would have been directed to my Twitter page. Granted, using this service to tweet "Moby Dick" and "The Cat in the Hat" is silly, but as I said, more and more people will find interesting things to do with Twitter.

Some argue that Twitter is a fad, and that it will soon be replaced by something else. That may be true. Nothing lasts forever. For now I'll use it until the next big thing comes along. Then I'll migrate to that next big thing--in due time, of course. I am a late adopter, after all.

Living in the Future

I've owned a BlackBerry smartphone for a while. I'm happy with it, to the point that the iPhone vs. BlackBerry vs. Windows Mobile wars don't interest me. The BlackBerry works just fine.

I was, however, unhappy to find that my cellular provider disabled the phone's built-in GPS. While this issue was remedied with the purchase of a small GPS "puck" that can be connected via Bluetooth, I now must be sure to have both the phone and the puck if I plan on using GPS.

I'm directionally challenged. One thing I liked about living in Denver is that if I knew where the mountains were, I knew which way was west. Once I left the Rockies, I found that printing directions from MapQuest or Google Maps helped me get where I was going. Of course, this isn't a perfect solution. I've been undone by getting the wrong address, making a wrong turn or having the meeting location change while I was en route.

Between these experiences and the fact that I'm constantly traveling to different locations and customer sites, I decided that I needed a GPS. Plus, using them in rental cars sold me on the functionality.

Initially I wasn't sure which device I wanted, but then I discovered that my phone could run GPS mapping software. It talks to my puck and uses the cellular data network to access the back-end servers that do the heavy lifting of calculating directions and routing. The phone gives both audio and on-screen directions to the addresses that I enter. Although I can only use this combination in cellular coverage areas, and I cannot be talking on the phone when it needs to use the data link to access the back-end servers, I find that this accounts for 95 percent of my usage patterns, so it works fine.

My first software package was a monthly subscription plan. The directions were accurate and I was happy with it. Eventually though, I realized that there was only one audio option--the phone’s built-in speaker. It was audible, but because cars can be noisy, I wanted to route the audio through the car stereo. (If you have an older vehicle that has a cassette tape player, you can get a cassette adapter and run the audio from your phone’s built-in jack through the car stereo. Otherwise, you can use small radio transmitters that will broadcast over FM to your car radio.)

Unfortunately, my software didn't support audio from the phone's built-in jack, only the built-in speaker. And after multiple interactions with support, I learned that the solution provider didn't plan on changing this any time soon. I was hardly the only one seeking this function. The provider's support forums were overflowing with posts from frustrated users/soon-to-be former customers who wanted this functionality added. I too wound up turning to a new GPS software solution. Now I can route the audio through the car stereo or an earpiece.

As I think about all the things I can do from my phone--make calls, check e-mail, play MP3s, update my calendar, use GPS mapping software, browse the Internet, ssh to servers--I realize that we are  living in the future. Wil Wheaton (you might know him from his books, his blog, the movie "Stand by Me" or the television series "Star Trek: The Next Generation") explains it well when he talks about attending a MacWorld conference many years ago:

"... Tim (Jenison, who's considered the father of desktop video) had this little slab of RAM that was about the size of a credit card. 'One day,' he said, 'you'll be able to put a whole album on something this size.'

"… the way Tim presented this thing to us — not like it was something awesome that could happen but that it was something awesome that would happen — made quite an impression on me. It was at that moment that I became truly aware of how rapidly the world was changing, and how lucky I was to be living in it.

"I wasn't mature enough to consider it then, but I wonder if people have felt the way I did throughout history, just for different reasons: mechanical flight, telegraphs, telephones, atomic energy and
weapons, home computers, stuff like that. ...”

Even in our jobs, where on a daily basis we work with technologies that were not long ago the stuff of fiction (virtualization, Capacity on Demand, hot swap of server components and live partition mobility, to name a few), it's still exciting to think of what tomorrow will bring. A decade from now, who knows what amazing things we'll be able to do with our servers and our phones?

No, I Will Not Fix Your Computer

You've probably seen this. It's perfect weekend attire for the IT professional. Maybe you don't go as far as wearing a T-shirt that says, "No, I will not fix your computer." But do you tell people to leave you alone when they ask for help?

If you work in IT, the world assumes that you can fix home computers. It doesn't matter if you're the network guy, the mainframe guy or a Web designer--people only understand that you work on computers, so you must naturally know how to fix their broken machines.

In an ideal world, home PC owners would fix their computers--or at least they'd know how to boot from media and run chkdsk. But in reality, people bring their computer issues to IT pros, either those they know or those they don't.

With that in mind, here's a story I've been following. Maybe you heard that the mayor of Racine, Wis., was recently arrested in Dateline-esque style sting.

Disturbing as it is that child pornography was found on his computer, what's interesting is the way he got caught. The (now former) mayor apparently "brought a personal computer to city hall and asked city workers to fix a problem with it. Whatever the workers found was turned over to Racine police,
who in turn passed it on to the state task force."

I also read that the technician who worked on this machine in August 2007 copied and saved the files, and then went to the mayor and suggested he delete them. It was more than a year before the computer tech turned the files over to the police.

If you ever do need to take your computer in for service, take caution. While you don't have illegal files or images on your PC, you may have personal data and files that you don't want others to see. And it's not uncommon for computer technicians to find--and make copies of--materials they find on customer machines. Keep that in mind when you're seeking help with your computer.

People really would be best off fixing their own computers, but in reality, their choices are generally limited to trusting strangers in a repair shop or trying their luck with the IT guy that they know. When you're that IT guy, and people come to you, what do you say? Do you try to help out, or do you just point to the T-shirt?