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Tuesday April 29, 2008

Interview with the GSE Divas

Candace Maria The GSE Divas are Maria and Candace from New Jersey who work for Sun's GSE (Global System Engineering) organization as communication managers.

If you're into communication, you can hardly live without to blog, and so they keep the GSE Divas blog. One of their blog traditions is to interview GSE people and feature them as "Sun STARS" on a regular basis.

Today, I'm their victim number 15. Feel free to read their interview with me. Thanks!

This is probably the closest thing to an "about me" page for now. Every good blog seems to have an "about me" article somewhere, I should probably sit down and write such an article sometime soon.

Meanwhile, check out the other entries and Sun STARS in the GSE Divas blog, there are a lot of interesting people there, indeed!

P.S.: And yes, it's a pleasure to blogroll you :).

"Interview with the GSE Divas" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2008-04-29 00:54:46.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
aboutme blogging blogs gse interview life
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Tuesday November 20, 2007

Foresight Vision Weekend 2007

About two weeks ago, two colleagues and I had the inspiring pleasure of attending the Foresight Vision Weekend 2007. This was the weekend before our annual TS Ambassador Conference at Sun, so we happened to be in the Bay Area where this unconference was held.

Ever since the year 2000, after I heard a talk from Eric Drexler on Nanotechnology during another Sun event, I've been fascinated by this topic and so I loosely followed the activities of the Foresight Institute. This event was a great way of catching up with recent developments - and an opportunity for me to have a reality check on how real all of this is, and can be.

Limited by our flight schedule, we only attended the second day of the conference. It started with a few motivational speakers as an introduction to the second half of the day which was held in the now popular unconference format.

A Systematic View on Anti-Aging

The first talk about anti-aging was given by Chris Heward, President of the Kronos Science Laboratory. He explained their very systematic approach to analyze the effects of aging and what factory play what role in the process. The great thing about this talk was that there was no esoterics, no magic, no BS, just plain, number driven science full of hard facts about what aging actually is (a decrease of bio-functional abilities due to decaying body functions over time), a fresh view on the subject (we're already becoming "unnatually" old, so why not figure this out once and for all?) and some reality-checks on popular health myths (If fats are so bad, why is the US population becoming fatter and fatter despite all that non-fat food?).

So the systematic approach is quite simple, but effective: Figure out the primary causes of death (heart disease, skeletal dysfunction, cancer) and find ways to prevent them from happening as early as possible. The "as early as possible" part is the most important one: The earlier one starts to work on preventing these factors, the longer the life expectancy.

My takeaways:

Drink lots of water,
a BMI of 22-26 is a good place to be (I'm at 23),
avoid eating empty calories (all the "white" stuff that is not meat),
eat colorful veggies,
some supplements are actually really good (he especially mentioned Vitamin E and Omega-3 fatty acids),
exercise regularly. Actually, this is the biggest factor, capable of even compensating for a fat or a smoking lifestyle! I really need to start jogging again...

One interesting but not well understood factor in aging is hormones. There's a strong correlation between dropping levels of male and female sex hormones and their negative symptoms in ageing (obvious, isn't it?), but it is not understood yet if and how taking hormon supplements really helps you overcome ageing symptoms. Plus, taking hormones as pills is likely to produce other problems (as in liver overload...).

Anyway, this was a fascinating talk and I now need to understand more on this subject, although separating the wheat from the chaff is difficult if you're not a doctor or a biochemist...

Productive Nanosystems Roadmap

This conference covered a great variety of topics, so the next talk by Pearl Chin was on a completely different topic: The Productive Nanosystems Roadmap. What's a productive nanosystem you might ask? It's a machine that operates at the molecular level to create things in an atomically precise way. Watch this short movie to see one in action.

The Productive Nanosystems Roadmap is all about the "How do we get there?" aspects of Molecular Nanotechnology. Similar to, but more challenging than the semiconductor business, this involves a huge amount of interdisciplinary work by physicists, chemists, biotechnologists, computer scientists, mechanical engineers, process technologists and many more. By synchronizing and bringing together different fields of research and development, the Nanotechnology Roadmap facilitates the creation of Productive Nanosystems.

Can't wait to having one of these replicators in my home...

Open Source Security

Yet another interesting and completely different subject: Open Source Security, by Christine Peterson, a founder of the Foresight Institute. The current physical security mechanisms, as implemented by major governments are hugely centralized (as in DoD-centralized), not transparent (who knows really what happens inside the NSA, or behind the doors of your friendly airport security operations?) and they have a huge impact on privacy (Did you know that "they" know what you read on an airplane?).

The idea of this talk is: Centralized security has its flaws (what happens if someone takes out the central parts of a nation's security system?), obscure security measures are prone to becoming a security threat by themselves (In Germany there's a current debate about the police monitoring license plates on a big scale vs. privacy rights) and of course, there's no fun in living in a 100% controlled and watched Orwellian society. So why not try to create a security system that is transparent, distributed and still protects privacy?

This "Open Source Security" system could be everywhere (like a neighborhood watch), it would be open to anyone (so nobody can manipulate the system) and it would work without invading people's privacies (a neighborhood watch keeps the neighbors secure, but doesn't know a thing about, say, the next cities' neighborhoods).

Interesting concept and hopefully one that is going to be developed further. Sounds much, much better than what current governments would like to implement...

Mapping the Technology Landscape

I can't remember the exact title of this session, but this sounds like a good fit. The first of the afternoon sessions I visited (there were several in parallel and we couldn't visit all of them) was about finding the right way to categorize new technologies as they emerge and create headlines. It was run by Phil Bowermaster who has an excellent blog called "The Speculist" and an accompaining podcast called "Fast Forward Radio".

After blogging for a while, Phil came up with a 2-dimensional coordinate system for charting technologies, based on the axes "Impact on Society" and "Impact on Technology". While this seemed to work for charting "spot resistant nano-pants" (low impacts on both society and technology, placing it into the "fake" corner) vs., say, a desktop molecular nanofactory (now we're getting serious...), it didn't feel like the real thing for charting new technology.

So, Phil showed us his improved coordinate systems, this time based on the axes "transformation" and "disruption". It intuitively makes more sense, as it better models the impact of technology on the world as we know it. But every model is only good until the next one comes around, so Phil welcomes your suggestions, too. See his article on "Disruption and Transformation".

Self-Improving A.I.

No futuristic conference without at least one A.I. related topic. Artificial Intelligence may have had a difficult story in the past, but the truth is that people tend to dismiss any advance in A.I. as being "nice, but not the real thing", be it speech recognition, route planning or beating Kasparov at chess playing. What's going to be the next milestone that people will choose to treat as "not real A.I.?".

Ray Kurzweil observed that the development of technology happens at an accelerating pace. In fact, Moore's law only deals with advances in semiconductor technology, but it's pattern of modeling the increasing amount of available calculations per $1000 can be observed all the way back to early mechanical calculators. Looking into the future, semiconductor experts are confident that Moore's law will hold at least into the next 15-20 years - and there are some more exciting technologies waiting to be used for computations onces semiconductor chips become uninteresting. If the current rate of technological progress continues, then we will see a $1000 PC have the power of a human brain by 2025. Not a long time from now.

Steve Omohundro's session on self-improving A.I. dealt with the questions such as: What will drive self-improving A.I.s? What are the benefits and risks of self-improving A.I.s? What should we try to do right before they arrive? Read more about this topic at the Self-aware Systems website.

And for the lighter side of it, here's a hilarious comic on a very similar subject :).

Nanotech Literacy

Perhaps the most important aspect of nanotechnology right now is it's acceptance. As soon as you learn about the great powers of nanotechnology, you can't help but imagine the great peril it might bring. Bill Joy's famous article "Why the future doesn't need us" is only one example.

But is denying or opposing change a solution? Certainly not. If we refuse to learn about the next wave of technology, others will. So we better learn how to do it right from the start. One major focus of the Foresight Institute is to advance beneficial nanotechnology, partly by educating people about it's potential benefits to humanity.

Miguel Aznar's session on Nanotech Literacy focused on how to make Nanotechnology more accessible and understandable to children and students in schools. I think this is a great way of spreading the word, as it instantly will touch their parents as well. I used to teach my parents how to program our VCR, and I'm looking forward to my daughter teaching me how to operate our first family molecular nanotech factory :)

Conclusion

This really was a most inspiring event. My goal was to understand more about the reality behind Nanotech and other future technologies, and I got much more out of this day than I expected. I'm very proud to see that Sun is a corporate member of the Foresight Institute and I'm going to sign up with them as a senior associate soon. I'm convinced that every dollar spent in advancing beneficial Nanotechnology is going to save us more trees and more species, reduce the levels of CO2 more aggressively, provide more clean energy, cure more cancers and advance humankind more thoroughly in the long term than any other investment.

If you want to learn more about the subject of Nanotechnology, I recommend looking at one of these articles.

"Foresight Vision Weekend 2007" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-11-20 14:31:52.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
ai anti-aging extension future life nanosystems nanotechnology open productive security source technology unconference vision
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Thursday November 01, 2007

7 Tips for Enhancing Your Email Efficiency

I think I sent my first email in 1987. We lived in Rome, Italy and my brother and I shared a modem with which we collected our very first online experiences on a Commodore Amiga 500.

Today I receive about 500-700 emails a day on my Sun account. Not counting Spam (most of which is filtered by our mail system anyway). That's a lot, but over time I grew accustomed to dealing with more and more email as efficiently as possible.

Here's what helps me use email as a productivity tool rather than a burden, while still having fun. This is going to be a long post, but if your Inbox currently has more than 100 emails, possibly sitting there for more than a week or two, then I promise you an easy to use way of getting your Inbox to 0.

Zero mails in your Inbox. Once and for all. Still, you will be informed about what's going on and it'll be earlier, with less effort, and more reliably.

The Email Client

In my email carreer, I've use a lot of mail clients. During university days I started with the classic mail(1) on SunOS 4 and it's counterparts on VMS and on an IBM 3090 mainframe. Then I've used Elm for a long time, then Pine. When I joined Sun in 1998, one of the first things I did was to compile myself Pine so I could keep my habit of reading email on a terminal.

Why on a terminal? It's always quicker and more efficient than a GUI (Yes, I'm one of those old-schoolers that still prefer vi as their favorite text editor). It really is. So much that I'd like to make it...

Email-Efficiency Rule #1: Make sure you can use your email client with keystroke commands only.

When dealing with hundreds of emails, the extra time to move the mouse cursor and to click on some buttons etc. really adds up. Learning keystrokes might seem tedious at first, but it will quickly become second nature and you'll be amazed at how quickly you can scan through emails with just one hand sitting on your keyboard, while having your other hand free to drink coffee while reading email.

After a while, I migrated to another email client called Mutt. This introduced two major new features that made my email-life much, much easier: Threads and Filters.

A threading email client automatically groups emails that have the same subject (or that are related to each other based on the header information) into threads. Threads are more efficient to read because they contain all emails related to a certain subject or conversation in one go. And more importantly: You can delete dozens of "Please take me off this list" or "me too" emails and other uninteresting discussions with a single keystroke!

Mozilla Thunderbird supports threads very nicely, so does Apple's Mail and of course GMail, only they call it "conversations" (and they dig up all related mail from the past too, which is very nice).

Message filtering is another powerful feature of modern email clients. It lets you pre-sort email into folders or assign different colors/priorities/etc., based on simple rules. I don't feel comfortable with automatically filing away emails without at least looking at their subject. So I use rules exclusively to assign priorities to emails: Emails that are addressed directly to me or come from my management chain automatically get prioritized highest. Emails where my email address shows up on the CC line or that is addressed to working groups that are dear to my heart get the second highest priority. All other email gets normal priority. Emails from Sun get a different color than external email. Other similar rules are of course possible and can be very useful.

Using filters makes it easy to get a picture of what's going on when you only have a few minutes to check email in between meetings or when on the go, without risking to overlook any important email. Therefore, let's postulate...

Email Efficiency Rule #2: Let your email client do the reading before you do.

I now use Mozilla Thunderbird to read my Sun email. At some point, I just felt that there has to be a way to efficiently read email and still use a GUI, and Thunderbird is quite good at it: It supports keystrokes, threads nicely, you can program complex rules to pre-digest email easily and it is multi-platform, open source and contributed to by Sun.

With threading and rule-based priority sorting enabled, my 500-700 emails a day split into about 10-20 "Highest" and another 30-40 or so "High" priority emails. This is much more manageable as I can work through the higher prioritized emails with a more concentrated mind before quickly scanning through the rest just in case there's something interesting there.

For my personal email, I use Google's GMail, because it completely outsources my need to archive emails, has a great browser-based user interface that can be accessed from anywhere (even a mobile phone) while still feeling like a real application and of course it suppors keystrokes, has very nice threading support and it supports filters too.

After my company gave me a Nokia E61i so I can read email on the go, I had a new problem: Nokia's email client doesn't support threading nor message filters (please tell me if you know a better email client for SymbianOS), and hundreds of truncated sender/subject lines on a mobile phone aren't really useful. So let's have a look at the server side of the picture:

The Email Server

Today, the two main mail server protocols are POP3 and IMAP4. POP3 basically dumps all your email onto your client, then (optionally) forgets about it as soon as you connect to your mail server. Not good if you're on the go. And then you need to take care of all archiving yourself. And what if you access the same mail box from different clients?

IMAP4 on the other hand lets your client choose whether to only pull headers or the whole message, it supports server-side folders to sort your mail into and you can keep your mail on the server while accessing it from multiple clients out of multiple devices and still everything stays perfectly synchronized.

So, whenever possible, choose IMAP4. If you can't choose IMAP4, change your email service. Fortunately, Google just introduced IMAP4 support, in case you want to read your Mail with something else than their web interface.

Thanks to IMAP4, we don't have to organize our mails on our clients, instead we should go by...

Email Efficiency Rule #3: Keep your emails on the server, always.

Really. There's no point in downloading all your email to some client that can suffer a hard-drive crash or a virus infection or whatever. Chances are that your email server is a much more reliable machine than your email client and it minimizes the bandwidth needed to read and manage emails to what your brain can handle without downloading hundreds of emails that you'll never read past the subject line. You can still dump your favorite folders to disk or to a CD for archiving purposes, once in a while, if you want to.

Back to my mobile-phone-can't-thread-nor-prioritize problem. One feature of the Sun Java System Communications Server that we use is server-side filtering. It lets you forward, file or delete mails based on simple rules. Again, I like to be conservative here, so I never want to automatically delete anything, just file away what I know for sure is not important enough to waste my precious mobile phone's bandwidth with.

The utter majority of the emails I get are from internal and external mailing lists that I subscribed to or not or that otherwise find my email Inbox. These are natural candidates for "If the mail was addressed to <insert mailinglist alias here>, then file it to <some folder>" type of rules. Keeping it simple, I only use one folder for this purpose, called "ToBeRead". You could also name it "Inbox2" or "Later" but the important thing here is to actually treat this folder as a real Inbox folder the next time you have some time and a more comfortable client. Don't create a growing monster pile of unread mail because you started playing with rules, it won't really help you.

Email Efficiency Rule #4: Let your email server do some reading, too.

Sorting email on your server is different from sorting email on your client: The former gives you a bandwidth choice that enables the use of mobile devices or helps you quickly check email through a web interface (by pre-sorting email into folders), while the latter helps you look at your email in the right sequence (by threading and prioritizing it).

I just checked my Sun mail through the Nokia E61i after not having checked mail for a day (today is a bank holiday in Bavaria) and I have 47 new mails. I didn't check my ToBeRead folder, but I'm sure it has more mails than I can handle on a mobile device comfortably. Seems to work for me (and I've seen a couple of mails that will make nice new rules to my server-side filter).

I usually don't check emails after work hours, in the weekend or during bank holidays. I seem to be immune to the Crackberry disease, which I guess is a good thing. This brings us to the most important Email efficiency part of all:

Email Workflow

One of the first trainings that Sun sent me to after I was hired was about time-management. This is a fascinating subject by itself but it turns out that a lot of the principles taught under the umbrella of time-management can be applied beautifully to organizing your email.

If you're looking for a great blog on the subject of life hacks (a term for "when geeks start digging into time and self management") then check out Merlin Mann's "43Folders". If you prefer to read a book, then I can highly recommend David Allen's "Getting Things Done" (GTD).

Here's an easy but very efficient email workflow that is very similar to the GTD workflow:

Go to the next email in your Inbox and ask yourself:
"Do I need to do something because of this email?" (or: "Is it actionable?")
- If the answer is "yes", then you either have to reply to the email or do some action that is associated with it. Now ask yourself:
  "Can I do it in less than 2 minutes?"
- File away or delete the email. There's no more reason for it to sit in your Inbox.
Go to 1.

After a couple of iterations, you should have an empty Inbox. Really. 0 emails. Take a deep breath, celebrate and get used to it.

"But now I have this big and long to do list!" I hear you say. Well, that might be true, but a to-do list and an email Inbox are really two different things. Email is for communication, your to-do list is a way for you to organize your tasks. Never mix them up.

The important thing here is to get rid of all those emails in your Inbox. Feel the joy of hitting the delete key or filing away that email with the knowledge that it has been dealt with, once and for all!

Email Efficiency Rule #5: Develop an email workflow that helps you clean your Inbox.

You're invited to try the above workflow or you can develop your own. The point is to have a system that helps you get your Inbox to zero and free your mind for what's really important (Hint: It isn't email). Your workflow should be easy to implement, no matter how, where and when you read email. There should be no excuse left that prevents you from cleaning up your Inbox.

Having an empty Inbox has a great motivational power. You'll feel as if a big weight has been taken off your shoulder. You'll feel free to actually get some work done, instead of looking at all those emails. Try it out just once, but beware: Having an empty Inbox can be highly addictive...

Two things are left now: Dealing with that long to-do list and an easy and efficient way of filing those emails that you've dealt with already. As said, dealing with to-do lists is the subject of a whole science and I can only encourage you to check out one of the many sources on time and self management. This introduction might be a good start.

So what to do about filing emails? I know quite a lot of colleagues with elaborate folder systems that they use to file their emails and stuff in. One can base a filing structure on project names, client names, products, events, themes, priorities, whatnot. My easy answer to this problem is: File everything into one single folder, then let the computer find it when you need it.

Really, it works. Modern email clients are very good at searching through vast amounts of email. In fact, thanks to IMAP, it's actually the server that does it for you. I have just one single folder on my mail server that I use for filing mail away, it has thousands of emails and it is called "file". That's it.

You still think it can't be that simple? Well the ultimate test is: Will you be able to find any particular email quickly and easily? With an elaborate filing system, based on many different folders, this may or may not be the case. I've seen many colleagues try different folders while desperately looking for that one important email. Did I sort it into the client's folder? Wait, it was related to that project so it's probably in that folder. Or was it in "Pending"?

If you only have one folder to file stuff in, you rely on using your email client's search mechanism. This gives you at least four different ways to search for an email:

By person: If you're looking for a particular email, you probably remember its sender or recipient. Search for that person, then find the email in the results. Done.
By keywords in the subject: Think of one or two words that are guaranteed to show up in the subject of the mail you're searching for.
By time: Some study has found that the most brain-friendly way to organize stuff is by date/time. Try to remember the point in time you got or sent that email, then scroll back in time in your filing folder. This works best for emails associated with projects, stuff that is quite recent, etc.
Full text search: If all else fails, do a full text search. This shouldn't happen often, but works as a last resort. And it's reasonable quick on modern computers. Quicker than going through all those other folders...

Of course, combinations work well, too. Searching by person, then subject or time usually works for me 99% of the time. I only need to resort to full text search about once every 6 months.

Email Efficiency Rule #6: File away your email and let the computer do the searching.

Filing or deleting? When in doubt, file! Storage space has become cheap and search algorithms have become so powerful that there really is no reason not to file everything. Google has made this a major point when advertising their GMail service, and they're right.

So we now have found a good email client that supports keystrokes. We teached it how to thread and how to prioritize our emails. We like to keep emails on the server because they're really better off there and we let the server do some pre-work so we can deal with low-bandwidth situations. We've developed an email workflow that empties our Inbox in no time and an easy way to file all those emails too, relying on our computer's ever increasing power to always find what we look for.

We're almost in email heaven now, but we want to make sure to stay there and avoid going back to email hell after the next period of hectic activity or after a long vacation that filled up our Inboxes to DOS-inducing levels. We want to attack the problem at the root.

Remember those server-side rules that said "Email addressed to X should be filed into Y for later review"? Well, why did you subscribe to that newsletter/mailing list/discussion group in the first place? Is email really the right way to stay current on a certain subject?

The truth is: No. Email is a communication mechanism between people who know each other and have to say something to each other. It is not a news delivery mechanism (RSS can do that better and more efficiently). It is not a way to gather and harvest information (Google and other search engines on the internet can do it better). And it is not a discussion forum (Use Newsgroups, IM and chat or web based forums).

So let's go through our server-side rules and ask ourselves: Do I really want to keep subscribed to this service? Why don't I switch to a pull model for staying informed where I'm in control vs. being flooded by all those "informational" emails that I don't have the time to read anyway?

There's also email minimization potential with day-to-day emails to and from your co-workers. Do you really need to forward that email to your 30 or 100 other co-workers that may or may not be interested in that particular news item? Is that joke, video, URL really so funny that your entire office has to look at it? Do you really want to be "kept posted" on all minutiae of that process or just receive a short "done" notification at the end?

Email Efficiency Rule #7: Go on an email diet. Limit newsletters/mailing lists/mass emails to a necessary amount and write/forward emails only when necessary. Especially when addressing a large group of people.

I know that this rule is the hardest. But think of it. It makes sense. It may not be easily implemented everywhere (And I'm known for being an occasionally passionate participant in large email discussions myself), but using the right information resource/channel for the task at hand is often a very good idea.

Let me know if the above tips and rules are helpful to you. Share your own secrets of email efficiency. Let me know how large your Inbox is and whether you like it or not. What is your perfect way of dealing with large amounts of email?

"7 Tips for Enhancing Your Email Efficiency" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-11-01 15:56:50.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
effectiveness email gtd hacks life management time tips useful
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.
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