Author Archives: Mark

Blank Mark

Thanks Emma.

So not only do I need to come up with three inspirational communicators but I also have to make Emma laugh out loud. Oh and she spelt my name wrong as well…

Ok, so let’s try and kickstart my empty brain which has been busy with meetings, “soft launches” and risk management.

Inspirational communicators …

Well I’ll go for 3 people who have have inspired me to change my perspective on life:

Nick Gurney was the first person to make me seriously think about what being a leader actually means and what the price of leadership can be. Nick’s leadership style is completely different to my own but the way he framed his experiences and his approach to tacking some really appalling problems was deeply inspirational to me.

My friend Sarah who once said to me, “Mark, you’re a people person”. That that came as a revelation to me is both an indication of how little I had thought about things before that and of the fact that a single comment or even just one word can change everything.

Finally Muttley who taught me that success often comes despite the best efforts of plans and management and that alas all too often success never comes at all so all that is left is the Zen of action and the empty mind.

Bad Mark! No qualia for you!

Something about dentists inspires existential thoughts. As I sat in the chair this morning I pondered on some of the deep questions.

For instance, why can’t we breathe through our ears? I mean the “Ear, Nose and Throat” department at the hospital is an obvious manifestation of their interconnectedness so why can’t I breathe through my ears? Is it the eardrums? The lack of suck from the lungs? The fact that it would interfere with hearing? Or just the possibility of your glasses falling off when you sneezed?

As various machina buzzed, clicked and whirled about me I wondered also about the total bandwidth of a human being.

We have 5 main senses plus about half a dozen other senses – kinaesthetic, pressure, temperature, pain to name some of them. Is it possible to overload the senses? I know people lazily refer to something as a sensory overload – “everybody nu rave!” – but can we actually overload them?

Not just in the sense of say not consciously seeing something, there are lots of experiments and the odd Derren Brown episode to show that but rather drowning out the sensation entirely?

Even if we can’t do that could we drown an unpleasant sensation from conscious regard? Pain is a priority interrupt and takes precedence over all other sensory inputs but could we pump enough down the other channels to obscure pain?

Or will they have to keep shooting me with a tranquilliser dart to get me through the dentist’s door?

Honey, I’m Chrome!

The internet has been full of stories since Google launched their own browser, Chrome, last week.

Some of the stories have been that Chrome marks the start of the desktop wars as applications and the OS move in to the cloud. Some have been about security weaknesses in Chrome. Some about Chrome as the burning eye of the panopticon. Some about Chrome as UI paradigm.

Well someone has got to keep the Internets burning. But so far no one has touched on the most important thing about Chrome.

It’s yet another browser to test against. 3 versions of IE, 2 of Firefox, Safari and now Chrome. And before you say “Webkit” I suggest you look at Chrome rendering vs Safari.

Citizens, we must stop this browser proliferation now before my team have to spend their entire lives testing browser/platform combinations. So, no to Chrome, no to IE8. Sigh, there’s many a true word spoken in jest. I blame the BLINK element myself, that’s where it all started going wrong.

Cello, Cello, now that was a browser…

Learning not grinding

Just back from the launch of The School of Everything at Channel 4.

I think that the School of Everything is a really interesting concept, it is simple to describe – “putting people who want to learn in touch with people who want to teach” while being really powerful. The idea that I can chose what I learn has real appeal. Education, like any craft industry, has until now been driven by the need to aggregate demand and structure supply. Now we can look at a more organic and direct delivery mechanism for adult, or rather, self-sought learning.

I also had an interesting conversation with Alice from Wonderland about computer gaming. After a brief chat about MMORPGs – I find them tedious as I am essentially modal in nature, if I am killing then I don’t want to be chatting, and because they lack narrative focus to me, I prefer something like Persona 3 or else something purely ludic like Bangai-O.

ANYWAY, after the MMORPG chat we got onto the relationship between gaining experience in online games and gaining experience in reality. There have been some crossovers but they have been limited. After the interesting piece on Weight Watchers considered as an RPG we wondered if there might not be more opportunities to drive engagement and interest in real world activities by adding a degree of experience points and rewards to them?

Who will be the first Level 70 Social Entrepreneur?

Makes you think #1 – oh am I guided or is life for free?

There are two schools of thought – either we have free will or we don’t. Fine, but why do people argue that we do not have free will?

After all if they are correct then there is no point trying to convert the rest of us. We are all preprogrammed.

So by arguing that there is no such thing as free will they in fact reveal their implicit belief in free will. Therefore their argument collapses.

QE and indeed D

Spreading tales like coffin nails

And no birds do sing

Someone asked me the other day why I was not on Twitter? I mumbled something about the fact that the last thing a fox needs is more sources of distraction.

But sitting in the Japanese takeaway waiting for my order I have had time to reflect.

As an outsider Twitter seems to do 4 things – it helps reduce the essential loneliness of existence and connects us with the rest of our species (which reminds me of Italo Calvino and Mr Palomar but that’s a fox distraction); it is a quick and easy way of broadcasting news and status to friends, assuming we have either news or friends; related to that it helps us socialise by allowing us to tell people which bar we are in; finally it acts as a web of connections, hares sit up and dart hither and thither and sometimes it’s a hare worth following.

All good things but again, as a fox, is the upside greater than the risk of vastly more shiny baubles cluttering my view and distracting me still further?

Hmm perhaps I should join but just go for a 140 character name?

Reflecting Surface

There is an interesting article on ReadWriteWeb about “11 Things Startups Should Know about Enterprise 2.0“.

I will not paraphrase it here but number 11 taps into some of the conversations we have been having about the tensions between the silo nature of the enterprise and the open nature of social media.

As a CIO I would say that the most difficult thing for startups to do is to be able to show that they can solve my problem. I like examples, real world examples, and so you get the chicken and egg situation where sales depend on having a proven solution but getting that proof requires someone to have bought the product/service in the first place.

This is why we need to be smarter around innovation and risk. Too often my world takes an engineering approach where we expect every solution to be a Forth Bridge and we assign process and overheads accordingly. There are times when this is absolutely right but not every problem is the Forth Bridge, agility and innovation require us to be smarter.

We also need to become much better at sharing experience and knowledge amongst ourselves. Things like Digital People are a start as is GovBarCamp but we need to be more radical. Perhaps we need a Government 2.0 Unconference? Hmm…

Battleship Row

I have just finished reading “Sacred Vessels: The Cult of the Battleship and the Rise of the US Navy” by Robert L. O’Connell. Naval history is not a particular interest of mine but I found the book fascinating.

Battleships, like dinosaurs, have an ability to capture the minds of small children. They are huge and dangerous and, without getting tiresomely Freudian, they do symbolise power.

The problem is the potential gulf between symbol and reality, the battleship as signifier rather than combatant.

And that brings me to IT and social networking.

The battleship was the logical consequence of decisions that were rational and coherent in their own world. The bigger the ship, the greater the firepower and the armour it could carry, so the only counter was an even bigger ship or even more ships of an equivalent size. This then led to a constant spiral of growth as battleships became larger and more numerous.

Battleships also had the benefits of being a visible symbol of national power, of keeping an industrial base and skilled workers in work, and preserving a rigid hierarchy of authority – naval officers would start out in a small ship and then work their way through an orderly career path of destroyer, cruiser, battleship.

The problem was that the world where the battleship made sense was a world where planes and submarines and torpedoes and fast surface craft did not exist. Experience showed time and again that the battleship was a target, much more than a successful weapon.

It would be easy to mock those who clung to the romantic vision of the battleship long after experience showed that it was just a very big target but we all do similar things. Letting go of beliefs when the evidence changes is a difficult thing to do.

I wonder if our current battleship is the office? Or rather the bureaucracy which we embody in the office?

The office bureaucracy has many benefits. It is a visible symbol of an organization’s power and status. It provides work for large numbers of people. And it provides a visible hierarchy for people, from the post room to the board room, there is a place for everyone.

Hmm, it all sounds kind of familiar.

So are social networks and IT things that fit inside that model or are we among the disruptive change agents that mean that the office bureaucracy will go the way of the battleship?

I din’t have the answer but I find the question intriguing.

The wheels on the bus go round and EPIC FAIL

Virtualization is a big thing these days as people try to save money and the planet. More and more of us run mission critical systems on virtual machines. Yesterday though it all went very badly wrong for some people running Vmware.

Now, I am not going to write about the disaster. It did not affect any of my systems though it has made us think very carefully about using Vmware in the future but rather I was intrigued by the cause of the failure. To oversimplify horribly the licensing system decided that that the software was no longer licenced so you could no longer run it.

Now the licensing of enterprise software is a topic worth writing about.

As a CIO I am responsible for ensuring that we have proper licences in place for all our systems. Now I am only a small organization so that just equates to ooh 700+ desktops, 200+ laptops, 120+ servers and assorted bits of other equipment, managed services, vertical apps and tin cans tied together with bits of string.

Add to that the fact that every supplier does software licencing in a different way and well, that’s why we outsource licence management.

If I were a cynic I might think that some suppliers deliberately make licencing complex and obtuse. I can think of at least one major enterprise software vendor where it is apparent that no one – not the supplier, not their ISV’s, not their partners – has any real idea how their product is licenced. Such confusion makes it hard to compare costs with rival products, makes negotiating complex and fraught, and makes dealing with them reminiscent of Cold War diplomacy.

Other suppliers offer what seems a more flexible approach where you just use whatever software you need and at the end of each year you “true up”, that is you add the software you have used to your annual licence fee. The problem is that you can never “true down”. This means it is a bit like having access to a car showroom, normally you drive a Mini but one day you decide to take that Aston Martin for a spin, just a one-off little drive. Well come year end you’d better have that £80k.

Others let you drive the Aston Martin for a whole week or even a month, and then it’s time to go back to the Mini. And you know, it’s very hard to persuade people to give up that Aston Martin. Surprising that.

Now of course there is open source which makes it all so much easier. After all all I need to keep track of is whether it is GPLv2, GPLv3, LGPL, BSD… And of course the key thing is the support arrangement, so is the support contract up to date? And do both we and the supplier have the same end date? Service scope? Helpdesk number?!

Still, ITIL will sort it all out. Now if I could just find the licence key for that CMDB…

When my Mac stands next to my Mac

Having a spare moment and idle hands I decided to try and network my Macs. I have an old PPC Mac Mini and a new Intel iMac. The Mac Mini had been sitting in the cupboard for a while so I connected it to my TV and decided to see if I could use it as a simple disk sharer for my network with one or more external disks connected to it.

1. I connected the Mac Mini to my network via wireless, so 11Mbps. My iMac is connected via 85Mbps powerline IP.

2. I upgraded the Mac Mini to OSX 10.5 Leopard and connected a Western Digital My Book 500Gb external drive via Firewire. The Western Digital drive was straight out of the box and formatted FAT32. I used the Sharing tool in System Preferences to add the Mac Mini hard drive and the My Book to the shared disks list.

3. FIRST PROBLEM – No matter the settings whilst I could connect from the iMac to the Mac Mini and see the internal hard drive I could not see the external My Book. Googling revealed that the problem is that Leopard will only share OSX formatted external disks. So I used Disk Utility to reformat the My Book.

4. Success. I could now see and connect to the My Book.

5. SECOND PROBLEM. I could see and connect to the Mac Mini drive and the external drive but any time I tried to write to either drive I got an error message “The operation cannot be completed because you do not have sufficient privileges”. I checked the settings, my account had full rights, I even added “Everyone” to the list and gave them full rights. No joy.

I tried repairing access rights, no difference, I could see the drive but I could not write to it.

I pondered and then wondered. The Mac Mini used to be my default Mac so when I bought the iMac I had used the transfer tool to copy over my account. Perhaps there was a clash somewhere between the two accounts – one old and one new?

So I renamed my account on the Mac Mini from “John Doe” to “Johns” and then added my iMac account name to the user list under “share drives” with my iMac password.

I remapped the drive and success, it worked. So watch out for that if you have migrated accounts from one Mac to another and then want to access the drives on the old Mac.

Of course wireless networking has some significant performance issues –

XBench for Firewire 400 WD My Book 500Gb via wireless:

Disk Test 2.01

Sequential 1.23
Uncached Write 0.62 0.38 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 2.54 1.43 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 1.35 0.40 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 1.98 1.00 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Random 5.51
Uncached Write 3.31 0.35 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 4.76 1.53 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 56.76 0.40 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 5.10 0.95 MB/sec [256K blocks]

XBench for 1Tb WD My Book Essential connected via NSLU2 USB port on same 100Mbps switch as iMacDisk

Test 9.37

Sequential 5.96
Uncached Write 2.99 1.84 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 8.63 4.88 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 7.52 2.20 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 11.31 5.68 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Random 21.98
Uncached Write 18.46 1.95 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 16.05 5.14 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 60.80 0.43 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 20.37 3.78 MB/sec [256K blocks]

So next step is to powerline the Mac Mini but not until I have had several large drinks.

UPDATE

I connected the TV Mac directly to my HomeHub and retested using the Ethernet link between the machines:

Disk Test 2.64

Sequential 1.68
Uncached Write 0.94 0.58 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 2.89 1.64 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 1.62 0.48 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 2.80 1.41 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Random 6.19
Uncached Write 5.68 0.60 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 5.20 1.66 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 60.76 0.43 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 3.82 0.71 MB/sec [256K blocks]