Kate's Blog

A Future World for Distributed Teams

My blog has been a bit quiet because I just spent 2 weeks in California. Since I work on a globally distributed team (see Working Around the World), it helps us to meet face to face once every 6 months or so to get the kind of interaction you just don't get over the phone. There are some problems that can easily be solved with a few hours in front of a whiteboard, yet take months of phone calls and emails - that's if we can negotiate the difficulties of remaining polite and considerate when it's 6:00 am for at least one of us. The PAO are the best team at working together remotely that I've been part of (I know they'll be reading this, but I'd say it anyway). I'm grateful for my colleagues' abilities at appropriately using the technologies available to us - email, IM, Skype, and of course the telephone.

Recently we had some discussions about whether Second Life could be useful to assist with team meetings, as Sun uses it for marketing events. But the public nature of Second Life seems a deterrent, and it's been a bit slow for some of us.

A side benefit of my trip to California was that this time - for the first time in a long while - I managed to attend the Open House at Sun Labs. Of course, it reminds me of how far I've strayed from R&D, which causes nostalgia rather than regret these days. There were lots of cool things to see. Paul Lamere is cataloguing music by analyzing its content (see Search Inside The Music), which could certainly help me manage my playlists better. There was some interesting work putting Java on set-top boxes, improving e-commerce security, and exploring alternatives to traditional HTML web interfaces. I didn't have enough time to see everything I'd have liked to see.

The project that I found most immediately relevant (well, once I have a faster broadband connection) was MPK20, a 3D collaborative work environment. Each person has an avatar that moves around the virtual building - the workspace. MPK20 combines high-quality audio with the ability to virtually walk around, listen in on interesting conversations, and share documents with colleagues. There are individual offices and team rooms, with whiteboards, web browsers, and other applications you can interact with. We could have a team meeting with a closed door, as well as open it to others when we want to share further, or we could post documents and websites outside our team room to allow others to comment. Perhaps we'd be able to leave notes for people, or teleport over to them if they're around. If they are in a public space (or a room with an open door), it's possible to listen in for a minute to see if the conversation could be interrupted or not. The avatars give a level of personal interaction (though not body language) that is not possible using IM and email. Of course, this is still a research project, and is not ready for our use yet. But I have hopes of being able to use it one day - sooner rather than later would be good!

Posted at 09:59AM 04 May, 2007 by Kate Morris in Sun  | 

back to blog

Well, I fell out of the blogsphere for a while there, but I'm back.

Here's what I've been doing:

Looking at web 2.0 (and CE 2.0) and how it will affect how we work both within Sun and with Sun Partners in future. Take a look at Peter Reiser's blog for more on this.

Reading "How to Survive a Robot Uprising" by Daniel H Wilson - now I've managed to get it back from my 7 year old son, who really should have better things to do. Daniel is a PhD candidate at CMU, according to the back of the book, and this guide is one of the better examples of PhD procrastination I've seen (as well as a serious introduction to robotics). Way to go, Daniel! And no, I won't be sharing tips the procrastination techniques I used while completing my PhD.

We went to see TEZUKA: The Marvel of Manga at the Art Gallery of NSW last weekend. It was great, and both my sons loved it (as did their parents). The exhibit does have some adult manga , so be warned if you are concerned about taking your children to it. It's interesting to contemplate whether manga could have developed anywhere other than Japan. It is far more complex than the Superman comics I used to borrow from my cousins when I was a child. The exhibit closes in Sydney soon, but it will travel to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco in June.

I bought a new bicycle, to replace one that we foolishly allowed to rust out after our second child was born and we were faced with the reality of trying to transport two young children on bicycles in a city. More about the bicycle another time.

Posted at 11:37AM 27 Mar, 2007 by Kate Morris in Sun  | 

You CAN take it with you - off-line access to a wiki

Wiki technology is a tool my workgroup has adopted enthusiastically. Sun has a number of wikis used internally by technical (and not-so-technical) staff to share documentation, best practices, etc. We use mediawiki, the software used by wikipedia, "the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet", as they say.

It is far easier to use wiki to update documentation than edit a file when you have many people authoring content. But let's face it, there are times when you just can't be on-line to edit your pages (I'll worry about printing another day...). I wanted a way to be able to take my pages with me, create new pages, and edit without needing internet connectivity. Export to HTML is good for reading, but I wanted to edit.

Fortunately, I found some help at the mediawiki site. What I did was to download mediawiki, and install MAMP. MAMP is a "Macintosh, Apache, Mysql, and PHP" bundle (for Macs, obviously - there are similar packages available for Solaris, Linux and Windows, but a Mac is what I use every day, so that's where I needed to run it). The instructions for configuring the database were a little opaque, but a few tweaks had it working (the trick was to use MySQL running from MAMP to create the database user and database, rather than doing so from the mediawiki installer).

Copying pages between wikis is still a manual cut'n'paste task - I would like an easier way to do this without mirroring the entire wiki to my laptop. But for now, I create a link to the page I want to edit from the main wiki page on my laptop. In one browser window I edit the page I want to copy, select all the source text, and in the second browser window, I paste the source into the wiki on my laptop. Generally I only need a few pages, so this isn't too bad. Of course I have to reverse the process to put my changes back, including any new pages I create.

In summary, it's a bit of a hack, and it'd be better if it could merge changes and do the import and export automatically, but it gets the job done for now.

Technorati tags: wiki

Posted at 03:04PM 15 Nov, 2006 by Kate Morris in Sun  | 

Working around the World

Work-life balance on a global team? I work in one of Sun's global teams. Since we support the Sun's field organization with processes and tools for solution delivery, being globally distributed means we are closer to our customers, and we can effectively cover Asia, Europe and the Americas. It means, though, that our team meetings are held at 6 am for me and my colleague in Sydney, and quite late in the evening for our colleague in Germany. Scheduling calls can be a challenge! So, here are a few things I've found that help:

Work in sub-groups. It is easy to schedule calls between any two locations on the planet, without requiring someone to be working much outside their normal working hours. Throw in a third location and it becomes much trickier.

Take advantage of geographical distribution. If something is required by Monday morning US Pacific time, and we only find out on Friday (US Pacific), remember that APAC has all day Monday to work on it, and Europe will be working for hours before the US Pacific starts work on their Monday.

Be available to the team, but not 24x7. We all need to sleep sometimes. It's not possible to get focussed work done without some time free of interruptions, or enough sleep and "real life" time. I don't set my email to notify me every time I receive mail - I check it every hour or so while I'm working, when I get to a reasonable time to stop what I'm doing. On the other hand, I usually sit on IM, and if anyone on the team need me urgently, they send me a quick message and we then move to the phone.

Work from home. None of this would be possible without the ability to work from home (or the airport, or a hotel room...). The Open Work program at Sun is great enabling technology for this. Sun saves real estate costs, and it means I don't waste time or energy commuting. I can fit late night / early morning calls around the rest of my life. It increases employee loyalty due to level of trust and autonomy given to employees.

The timezone ready-reckoner. We need to know the time anywhere in the world so we can schedule meetings. I use a little spreadsheet that I can print out, double-sided so I have one side for summer / daylight savings time in the Northern hemisphere and the other for the northern winter. There are numerous websites that do the same thing, but I like having a piece of paper that can sit on my desk.

Posted at 01:05PM 20 Oct, 2006 by Kate Morris in Sun  |  Comments[0]

CEC closing session

Sun's stock price and that ponytail...[Read More]

Posted at 04:13PM 05 Oct, 2006 by Kate Morris in Sun  |  Comments[0]

Partners and cryptography at CEC

On Monday I gave the presentation that paid my way to the conference - "Delivering projects with Sun's Partners". And, not surprisingly, a few partners turned up! Since I live in Australia, most of the presentations I do are delivered over the phone - no audience feedback, or very little. Because people can't see you, they tend to listen patiently and not interrupt with questions. Presenting live meant I could watch the body language, adjusting my presentation as I went along - much more energy, I was almost sorry when I reached the end!

The initiative I've been working on should make it easier for Partners delivering solutions with Sun to collaborate with Sun staff they are working with on projects - of course, with security, protecting both the Partner's IC and Sun's IC. Many people had good feedback for me, and overall it was very useful.

One of the highlights of the day, though (for an ex-techie like me... my manager is laughing at this point...) was attending Radia Perlman's talk on the use of encryption to protect your backups (ensuring that they are securely deleted when you are finished). You can read more about it on http://research.sun.com/minds/2005-0208/ . Crypto is about as geeky as you can get, of course - it's probably the best argument for teaching pure mathematics there is. I felt privileged to hear from one of the pioneers in the field. Radia was nice enough to skip over the mathematics slides - so, I didn't have to try and remember my university mathematics.

Technorati tags: cec2006

Posted at 11:28AM 04 Oct, 2006 by Kate Morris in Sun  |  Comments[0]

CEC welcome reception

or, how to impress people without spilling your drink.... [Read More]

Posted at 05:02AM 03 Oct, 2006 by Kate Morris in Sun  |  Comments[0]