Category: Practices

You are an admin and you do need these lists

We're all admins today. Worthwhile stuff to know.

If you are a network or systems administrator, you’ll want these two lists from the
SilentNight Network and Systems Information Pages (their
descriptions, not mine).

The Default Password List: Here you will find a list with default usernames and passwords to Routers, Printers
etc. This list is useful for system engineers and administrators, and let them easely find security holes, and provide
unknowing customers with a little bit tighter network. If you have one of the items in this list, check it out and be
sure to change user/pass to something not known by every hacker on this planet.

Most Used Passwords: This is the list of passwords you dont wanna use, In fact you would be quite stupid using
one of these combinations cos the use is so widely spread that if anyone would try to compromise your system this will
be their first try.

Hint: If you have a broadband connection and cable/DSL router on your home network, you’re an admin (and if you
don’t, you’re vulnerable to a huge array of attacks)! If you run a WiFi access point, you’re an admin!

Help build the GTD Wiki

Looks as though it's just getting off the ground, but it could easily develop into an important resource. Check it out.

Help build the GTD Wiki. Jeff Sandquist and some of his buddies at Microsoft just had a visit from David Allen.
Coming to the realization that there are so many sources of information
about the Getting Things Done system scattered about the net, they
decided a wiki would be a good idea. And they also decided that keeping
it tucked behind a firewall at Microsoft would limit the potential
value it might offer. So Jeff has issued a public call to help build
the GTD Wiki he's hosting.

I know many readers of this blog are avid GTD'ers. Please stop by Jeff's Wiki and see what you can contribute. [Marc's Outlook on Productivity]

How to read a business book

Solid advice from Brendon on how to get the most out of any non-fiction
book. Some tips and tricks I will want to incorporate into my habits.

How to read a business book.
I'll be honest here, this isn't just for reading business books. What
I'm going to cover ought to suffice for pretty much any physical text
from which you wish to squeeze maximum value. This isn't a how-to on
studying though…there… [Slacker Manager]

UPDATE: Through a cut and paste error (mine) the original title on this made no sense – so I fixed it

More on the IT cultural divide

I agree. This is a pointer to an excellent piece on technology and business change, full of insight and good advice.

Spooky Action: Seldom updated, often re-readMi…

Spooky Action: Seldom updated, often re-read

Mike DeWitt is a guy who needs a kick in the ass. He writes such good stuff, then gets taken prisoner by work for 6 months at a stretch.
(Disclaimer: We chat from time to time, but I’m serious, this is not blogrolling.) This here
post alone will sort the boyz from the men, girlz from the women on an executive mangement team. And – gasp – it’s fun to read.

Spooky Action Predicts: Nick Carr has your number! (.8 probability)

If you re in IT management or consulting, your blood pressure is now 40 points higher than before you got here. If you re a CEO/CFO/CXO whose span of control includes IT, you may have one of those wry, one-corner-of-your-mouth-turned-up smiles on your face. If you re none of the above,

a) Hi Mom kids!, or

b) thanks for stopping by randomly; I hope I make it worth your while….

[8Fouroboros]

Contracting, clarity, and requirements

I’ve certainly been guilty of this kind of approach at multiple points throughout my career. The best techniques I’ve encountered for dealing with these challenges are the “contracting” conversations that Peter Block advocates so strongly in his excellent Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used. Regardless of which side of the table you are on, you had better become more adept at Block’s contracting or you will be building or paying for
entirely too many custom-made drywall saws.

Clarity, Junior Engineers, Requirements, and Frustration.

There’s an amazing essay at The Spurious Pundit on “Picture Hanging.” It’s an allegory that explores how simple requirements in software aren’t that obvious to folks who may not have context. The writing is wonderful, do check it out, it’s worth your time. Subscribed.

A highlight:

You tell him to hang the photo of your pet dog, and he comes back a week later,asking if you could “just double-check” his design for a drywall saw. “Why are you designing a drywall saw?”
“Well, the wood saw in the office toolbox isn’t good for cutting drywall.”
“What, you think you’re the first person on earth to try and cut drywall? You can buy a saw for that at Home Depot.”
“Okay, cool, I’ll go get one.”
“Wait, why are you cutting drywall in the first place?”
“Well, I wasn’t sure what the best practices for hanging pictures were, so I went online and found a newsgroup for gallery designers. And they said that the right way to do it was to cut through the wall, and build the frame into it. That way, you put the picture in from the back, and you can make the glass much more secure since you don’t have to move it. It’s a much more elegant solution than that whole nail thing.”
“…”

This metaphor may be starting to sound particularly fuzzy, but trust me – there
are very real parallels to draw here. If you haven’t seen them yet in your professional
life, you will. [Spurious Pundit]

[ComputerZen.com – Scott Hanselman’s Weblog]

Edward Tufte on presenting evidence

More insights from Tufte on how to be an intelligent consumer of data.
At the same time, you would do well to take Tufte's observations with
at least a grain of salt.

The tools of rhetoric precede those of data analysis by more than a few
centuries and Tufte is a master of both. Tufte appears to see malice
and venality in settings where I see predictable organizational
pressures of time and cost. With the luxury of tenure, Tufte can find
the all too real flaws in analyses prepared in the face of these
pressures.

Tufte's guidelines and analyses are all worth contemplating. What would
be intriguing is to understand what tools he would substitute for those
(such as PowerPoint and Excel) he criticizes so harshly. Further, once
we've learned to recognize the analytical flaws he identifies, what do
we do next in order to learn to commit them less frequently?

Tufte's new chapter, Corrupt Techniques in Evidence Presentations, from his forthcoming book Beautiful Evidence, is now online for a month.

“Here is the first of
several chapters on consuming presentations, on what alert members of
an audience or readers of a report should look for in assessing the
credibility of the presenter.”

Pro metadata will lose to folksonomy

Not only does Shirky nail it, but Cory hones in on the money graf s for
us. This is clearly one of a class of problems where scaling issues
overwhelm other factors and force solutions to be somehow distributed.

These are much like the situation in the early days of long-distance
telephone service that needed operators to complete all calls. Analyses
at the time predicted that the services would fail because your clearly
were going to need to hire so many operators that the system would
collapse. The solution, in that case, was to effectively make everyone
an operator by inventing direct-dial long distance and area codes. Of
course, we've now reached the point where area codes are an anachronism
and have little predictive value about where the phone in question
exists in the physical universe.

Shirky: Pro metadata will lose to folksonomy. Cory Doctorow:
Clay Shirky continues to just totally nail the questions of metadata,
authority, and user-created content. Today's installment: why crappy,
cheap, user-generated, uncontrolled metadata will win out over
expensive, controlled, useful, professionally generated metadata:

Furthermore, users pollute
controlled vocabularies, either because they misapply the words, or
stretch them to uses the designers never imagined, or because the
designers say “Oh, let's throw in an 'Other' category, as a fail-safe”
which then balloons so far out of control that most of what gets filed
gets filed in the junk drawer. Usenet blew up in exactly this fashion,
where the 7 top-level controlled categories were extended to include an
8th, the 'alt.' hierarchy, which exploded and came to dwarf the entire,
sanctioned corpus of groups.

The cost of finding your way through 60K photos tagged 'summer',
when you can use other latent characteristics like 'who posted it?' and
'when did they post it?', is nothing compared to the cost of trying to
design a controlled vocabulary and then force users to apply it evenly
and universally.

This is something the 'well-designed metadata' crowd has never
understood — just because it's better to have well-designed metadata
along one axis does not mean that it is better along all axes, and the
axis of cost, in particular, will trump any other advantage as it grows
larger. And the cost of tagging large systems rigorously is crippling,
so fantasies of using controlled metadata in environments like Flickr
are really fantasies of users suddenly deciding to become disciples of
information architecture.

If you want to trace back to some of the items that launched this most recent disscussion, here are some of the key links:

Buzz with an example of high-stakes word-of-mouth

Do you suppose that the people who pay Bob have the slightest clue how many early adopters and influencers and other folk that Marketing types would kill to reach are waiting for Buzz to out them so that we can safely eliminate this company from any consideration now and in the future? Or do you think their golden parachutes are such that they really don’t care?

An open letter to Bob and the guys that pay him…from a formerly happy customer….. A number of months ago I wrote a blog post about “Millie” in Manila. Millie worked for Dell, and dealing with her was such a nightmare that I basically resolved to never, ever do business with Dell again.This one will be… [buzznovation]

Blogs, tomorrow’s learning, and why I blog

I’ve been gradually trying to whittle down an extended backlog of items in my aggregator. One side effect with the aggregator in Radio is that posts begin to bump into one another in interesting ways. Patterns suggest themselves and I’m on my way to one answer to why I blog .

Halley reposted something she wrote two years ago addressing the seemingly perennial question of what is a weblog. It’s all worth reading, but the reasons that caught my attention were:

….
4. It’s telepathic training wheels — that is, it’s a very early stage on the way to the REALLY big next big thing — brain-to-brain telepathic transfer. Bye bye telephone, bye bye writing, bye bye fortune cookies, bye bye every other way you used to communicate. Blogs open up people’s minds, you travel the road with them, see it all through their eyes. It’s all we’ve got now, but soon enough we’ll all be in bed with each other, embedded with each other I mean.
…

9. A weblog is my head, open to you, day and night, at your convenience. Come on in. Please take your shoes off at the door, I hate having to vacuum after you leave.

10. A weblog is watching brains at work, especially watching brains with the ultimate prosthetic device — everyone else’s brain and the whole net connected. Weblogs let you watch people learning at lightning speed. Awesome to witness.

posted by Halley at 3:28 AM | link

That links very nicely to several recent posts sitting in my aggregator, all pointing to a report from Australia on the internet and self-directed learning. Here’s one quick summary and pointer from Stephen Downes:

Linking Thinking: Self-directed Learning in the Digital Age

This is a remarkable report, much more revolutionary than it may appear at first glance, and worthy of detailed consideration. The author argues, in essence, that the internet enables a great deal of self-directed or informal learning, that learning in this way is viable, that there is an increasing demand for it, that government and institutions can do little to control it, but that it serves not only an economic role but also is a foundation for civil society. In order to support self-directed learning, two major things must be in place: universal access to the internet, access that goes well beyond merely placing computers in libraries and shopping malls, and access to knowledge and information, a vast amount of which is in danger of being captured from the public domain and commercialized. Via elearnspace. By Philip C Candy, Department of Education, Science and Training, August, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

OLDaily
Today 9:23 PM

One of the compelling features of blogging tools is that they virtually eliminate the barriers to publishing and to creating a record of what you are learning on your journey around the web and through life. Their organizing principles are “just good enough” to be useful and the collective norms loose enough to help most of us get over having to be perfect or having to have the right answer. That makes them potentially powerful tools for learning.

What we each need to learn is idiosyncratic. The trappings of formal learning environments need to be approached with extreme caution. Learning needs to get back to play to succeed. The simplest possible tools, i.e. blogs and wikis, are what we most need to dip into the learning stream and take part. Explorers keep journals primarily for their own benefit, but the rest of us get to benefit vicariously from their generosity.

I want to come back to this line of thought. For now, let me end by pointing to the range of possible learning activities that become possible with a access to the net. At one end we have:

The Wiki Game

Slashdot has the scoop on The Wiki Game.

Social Media
Today 7:20 PM

Nerdish to the nth degree, perhaps, but it illustrates the learning (and fun) the becomes possible when you make the links in an encyclopedia something you can click on and follow. I know that Ted Nelson still disagrees , but this is close enough to the Xanadu he wrote about to meet my needs.

At the other extreme (along some axis), we have:

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.

halpicture.jpg

If you want to learn computer programming you can’t go wrong with an education provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s “Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science“. Unfortunately, a MIT education isn’t available to everybody.

What if you could get a MIT education from the comfort of your Aeron?

MIT’s “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs” course is available as a series of video lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, and it’s all online!

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs has been MIT’s introductory pre-professional computer science subject since 1981. It emphasizes the role of computer languages as vehicles for expressing knowledge and it presents basic principles of abstraction and modularity, together with essential techniques for designing and implementing computer languages. This course has had a worldwide impact on computer science curricula over the past two decades.

The course leans towards the Lisp programming language, but the information presented in the lectures is valuable to programmers of any language.

The course requires a high level of commitment. There’s just under 22 hours of lectures spread across 30GB of MPEG video (DivX videos are also available).

Visit Site

It’s little wonder that so many institutions are flailing about trying to make sense of this world. It doesn’t take a major clue to realize that the established order is threatened from many directions.

A closing thought. One of the reasons that I have become an advocate of Personal Knowledge Management is this organizational and institutional disruption. It’s not that I disagree with Denham’s contention that knowledge is largely a product of social processes. It’s that I don’t think individual knowledge workers should simply trust that the organizations they belong to at the moment are willing and able to make the necessary investments in effective knowledge creation, capture, and exchange processes. If you happen to belong to such a farsighted organization, great. But you really need to be looking out for yourself as well.

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