Friday June 25, 2004

skype.com - internet phone I just heard about SkyPe. Sounds pretty interesting. Anybody out there tried it yet? SOunds like free phone conversations to me! I will have to install it over the weekend and give it a shot? I guess all I need is someone to call :-) (2004-06-25 13:31:31.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Thursday June 24, 2004

Edward Tufte Today I attended a course by Edward Tufte in Portland. What can I say but it will change the way you look at presentations for ever more. I don't know if this is true across all organisations but I suspect that the all too ubiquitous "Power Point" style presentation, has in the last couple of years resulted in bad decisions being made in the company. It's just my opinion but after attending this course I can definitely see how inappropriate and limiting the "Cognitive Style of Power Point" or Office presentations is. Why should you limit yourself to 6 words per line and 6 lines per slide, just because you have to project it onto a wall. Just write a doucment and include the data and text in context and discuss that instead. At least you can say what you really want to say rather than having to dumb it down for the sake of the medium. One of the many lucid and common sense points he makes is don't let the mdeium dictate the content. If you've worked hard to analyse some data, and have a good story to tell, why spoil it will a presentation when you could write a real story in a document. You can write complete sentences to explain yourself, as opposed to half baked one liners and annotate data clearly. Ever felt like you never really got to the point cos you couldn;t fit it on a slide in a big enough font to make it legible and then decided to leave it out!

Edward Tufte'sWeb page is definitely worth visiting and the course at $320 is possibly the best value day's training I have had at Sun in a long time. You get three first rate hard back (value $150), content heavy books, about his work and the pleasure of listening to a very fine presenter educate/teach you about the content.

I feel like a changed man and I don't say that lightly. (2004-06-24 20:10:59.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Monday June 21, 2004

What do I do? I work in High End Operations Engineering, inside our world wide operations organisation. I manage a team of SW Engineers who develop factory automation software to test our products globally. I am responsible for everything from F25K -> E4900, and the testing of the uniboard for all platoforms that support it. Working with Big Iron is fascinating, it presents many interesting challenges as these products are so phenomenal, powerful and also very complex. Our goal in the factory is to ensure our customers receive the best quality product they can, when they wan it. Our test environment relies primarily on Java Servlets to execute and schedule tasks, and then uses perl and tcl/tk to interact with our products, execute code and check results.
In reality what we do is manage a Data Center, but unlike traditional Data Centers in which the hardware remains constant or perhaps grows over time, ours is constantly changing, we have hardware coming in and then going out all the time. It is an incredibly dynamic environment.
We work very closely with many different aspects of the company and of course we use Sun products to test Sun products. We are a showcase for what you can do with Sun Technology in a manufacturing environment.
Anyway, that's what I do. (2004-06-21 12:07:07.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Thursday June 17, 2004

Squirrells (sp) and Deer More on the WFH front. I just moved (evacuated) from the bay area to Portland Oregon as part of the manufacturing site consolidation, oops, I mean plant closure. Anyway, great move, I love it up here. Weather is not as bad as they say it is, especially when it's sunny! Also I bought a house where from my home office I can look out of my window and watch squirrels chase each other and the odd deer come by and eat the roses. According to my neighbour, roses are like candy (sweets in british parlance) to deer. They normally hang around till my daughter goes up to the window and bashes it to all hell cos she's so excited. Of course this does not distract me from my work at all, nor does blogging :-). (2004-06-17 07:55:53.0) Permalink

Wednesday June 16, 2004

WFH I worked from home today for the first time in a while, somehow screwed up my Ultra 5 Desktop, and had to reconfigure my Ultra60 home fileserver as my desktop. Now that I've switched I think I'll keep it that way, after all, two blackbird 450s and a Gig of RAM beats a Sparc IIi 360'and 384 MB Ram hands down. It's not a Jaguar Dual Core rocking machine, but it's good enough. I just need a second GFX card and I'll go double headed at home. Noice! (2004-06-16 20:43:51.0) Permalink