Random footnotes of Engineering

Whew!

I must admit I had some trepidation making the long journey to Scotland with a 10-month old baby. It actually turned out to be ok. Ally screamed the most in the shuttle on the way to SFO, for almost the whole rest of the journey he was as good as you could expect a baby to be. We didn't have a melt down with nowhere to hide.

Since arriving in Scotland it's just been relaxing and letting the Grandparents play with the baby. Plenty of eating, drinking, football watching and Wii playing. I'd better get back to it.

What's a Nelson? It's a cricket term. It typically refers to 111 (one eye, one arm and one leg of Admiral Nelson).

So this post is clearly not trying to educate the unwashed masses on obscure cricket-lore. Today is the day the Honeycomb 1.1.1 RRs. I've already blogged about this a few times. But we are finally ready to release this to our customers.

The team has worked pretty hard developing this and digging into bugs and problems. i can confidently say that this is the best ever release of Honeycomb.

The software is available for anyone to download and play with. We encourage anyone to take this and contribute.

The title was a saying the Aussies used to have about the American soldiers who were in Oz following World War II. I recently came across an article in the Sydney Morning Herald discussing an incubator set up based in San Francisco for people and business from Australia.

To me this is of particular interest because I made the migration to Silicon Valley in 2000 to be part of the Tech revolution. It's also amusing that it mentions the common migration to London for Aussies as I lived and worked in London (for about 6 months) 10 years ago. I can also use this as ammunition against my brother since he's currently in London. He's clearly behind the trend curve ;-)

Well, not really ;-) I was videoed giving a presentation at CommunityOne digging into the details of COMSTAR. I blogged about it a while back. You can check me out below:

I just came across a great article which contrasts the "command-and-control" style of leadership, with a more open collaborative approach. It's a really interesting discussion pointing out that in the technology world we need to encourage more ownership and innovation from our team, and that a traditional leadership structure doesn't handle that well.

For me personally a big part of leadership is making the team work best together. It's why I enjoy team sports and ultimately why I'm doing my job. It's good to see that someone out there is validating my inclinations ;-)

I've just created a new mailing list for Honeycomb developers on OpenSolaris. You can subscribe to it. Make sure you let everyone you know about it. Let's build this community!

Today we posted the source code for the current 1.1.1 release candidate. This is a huge achievement by too many people to name. We are grateful both to the current folks who are working on Honeycomb today, and to all of those who have touched it in the past. This is a chance to re-engage as part of an open community built around Honeycomb and it's technology!

PASIG - Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group

This is a group of Libraries, Universities and archivists that get together to discuss technology around digital repositories. The group was created a little over a year ago by a collaboration between Sun and Stanford.

They held their most recent conference in San Francisco and it was covered in sfgate. We've presented information around Honeycomb at all three PASIG conferences so far.

We've done what is the release candidate build for Honeycomb 1.1.1. This is a follow on to our fairly major milestone feature release 1.1 late last year.

My whole team has been working very hard to get this out. We think we've killed the last bugs, but we still have some testing to get done.

It's not really slower, with more bugs, but I thought the photo was great ;-)

I came across an article that discusses leadership in times of trouble. It lists nine rules that it should be followed:

1. Establish no more than five clearly stated and measurable objectives.
   
2. Identify and remove the roadblocks that hinder your team's performance.
   
3. Reward your people for results not how hard they work.
   
4. Don't cut back on rewards and recognition during leaner times. Now more than ever, you need your core team to feel appreciated and important.
   
5. Be honest and tell your team what's needed to win.
   
6. Keep your employees well informed to help mitigate fear.
   
7. Be extremely hard on performance and easy on people.
   
8. Acknowledge success and reinforce the positive.
   
9. Maintain the proper balance between passion and optimism with realism and judgment.
   

In the article the author clearly calls out the importance of communication. All in all this is an excellent read and a very insightful article.