Jim Collins at Educause09

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great gave the keynote address at Educause 09 in Denver. The video of his presentation wasn't made available on the educause site, but he does have a number of videos on his site if you're interested. Here's an educause podcast featuring some highlights. The following are just some of the notables that he covered that i was able to scribble down:

Good is the enemy of great.
Don't study the successful, study the contrast.
What's the difference there?
Greatness is a function of conscious choice and discipline.
It's an interesting study like studying train wrecks
How do the great fall?
Why do some great lose it, while others do not?

The Five Stages of Decline
1 Hubris born of success --- the moment you think you're great, you're not
2 Undisciplined pursuit of more --- great ones fail because they reach too far
3 Denial of risk and peril --- Stockdale Paradox the optimists didn't make it
4 Grasping for salvation --- think fly wheel, not silver bullet
5 Capitulation to irrelevance or death --- can't come back from here

It is those who are consistently disciplined who are most open to change.

The signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency.

Stop spending your energy on being interesting, work on being interested.

Be rigorous in getting the right people on the bus, not ruthless.

The right people ...
... don't have to be managed
... don't have a job, they have responsibilities
... do what they say
... window mirror maturity, credit through window, blame themselves
... bring passion

Ten To Do Items
1) Do your diagnostics on your team, free tool at jimcollins.com
2) How many key seats do we have on our minibus? what are plans to get to 100%
3) Build a personal board of directors, people you admire for their character
4) Get young people in your face, we may be cultivating a level 5 generation
5) Turn off electornic gadgets, create pockets of quietude. You cannot have disciplined thought with e-mail/phone/twitter.. THINK
6) Can you question your questions to statements ratio? The number of questions you ask compared to the number of statements you make. Great leaders don't have all the answers, they have experts who they ask questions. Can you double your ratio in a year?
7) Start your "stop doing" list, work is infinite, time is finite.
8) Suspend titles, articulate responsibilities "i am the one person ultimately responsible for x,y,z"
9) Discover waterline risks and take them away, risks below waterline can sink you.
10) Set BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals), Peter Drucker was asked which book are you most proud of? His response, "the next one i'm about to write"

We aren't imprisoned by mistakes, cards we're dealt, staggering defeats, we are freed by our choices.

Creating and Enabling Web Mashups

On November 3rd, I attended Raymond Yee's seminar on Creating and Enabling Web Mashups. Raymond wrote this book on mashups, which is available online. He also maintains this blog.

Here are some notes and links from my talk last week at Lightning Talks.

What is a mashup?

A mashup, in the words of the Wikipedia, is a web site or web application “that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.”


Here are some sample mashups:
- Spell with Flickr
- FlickrSudoku
- Housing Maps
- Chicago Crime Statistics


Advice for getting started
- Look at what other people have done to see what is possible.
- Don't rely on the screen scraping capabilities of data sources like dapper or yahoo pipes, these will create fragile mashups which break easily.
- Instead choose API, a good directory is programmableweb
- Choose popular API, ensures a better chance of it being supported.

Other links
Yahoo Pipes

• Tweets Nearby
• Twitter Conversations
• Local Traffic

YQL Yahoo Query Language
Google Code Playground

In praise of Wubi

Running Windows 7 on my laptop has been a mostly positive experience. Definitely a better OS than Vista, however it starts like a slow-running truck and a lot of times i need is a sports car. I don't completely understand the Windows Experience Index, but perhaps my 5.1 rating on a scale of 1.0 to 7.9 should be telling me something about what i should expect from it.



Last week, midway my connection flight to Educause09 I decided to crack it open and catch up on my various newsfeeds. I powered up and waited, and waited and waited. All the while watching other laptop users in the cabin type away. BTW, most of these were on XP and apparently very happy.

Within minutes of logging in, waiting for all the various start-up processes to engage, and opening up Chrome, the flight attendant chimed in, "Just to let you know, the Captain has begun our descent into Memphis International, the use of all electronic equipment is prohibited at this time." :( There had to be a better way.

What i wanted was Ubuntu on my laptop.

Running a VM within Win7 was pointless.
A dual boot was what i needed but i didn't really want to roll the dice adding a new partition to my drive.
Hanselman often sings the praises of VHDs which might be the ticket for running multiple Win7 instances or WinServers but for Ubuntu it seemed as though the simple answer coming back from the forums was Wubi.

Wubi installs Ubuntu into a folder (c:\ubuntu\disks\root.disk to be specific) on your Windows partition. It then modifies the boot loader to recognize this folder. So booting to Ubuntu is just the same as with any other dual boot, but there is no need to create a new partition.



Installation is fast and painless. Booting into Ubuntu is fast. Connecting to wireless is more painless. Shutting down is even faster, which was a complaint that i had with both Vista and now Windows 7. When in Ubuntu you can reference your Windows partition via the /host and /media directories so you can reach anything on the drive.

If you're interested in Ubuntu but aren't ready yet to take the plunge, give Wubi a try.

For more reading, here's a forum post reviewing Wubi.

Educause Enterprise 09

TechEd Action Photos

Tech Ed 2009 Keynote Notables

First things first, Bill Veghte sounds like Owen Wilson. He doesn’t look like him but he sounds like him and while that doesn’t tarnish his credibility any, you do keep waiting for him to say something like “IT Executive well I don’t really like to be painted with that brush, but I dabble”.

Many things were mentioned I’ll point out some select notables:

This tech ed is about asking yourself “is this for the data center or for the cloud?” and Microsoft wants to make this decision seamless, ok.

SQL Server 2008 R2 will be released in CTP (Community Technical Preview) in H2 2009.

Office 2010 will be released as a technical preview in July 2009 and Tech Ed attendees will be given first dibs on that release.

Other major releases include: Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010.

There have already been 10 million device installs of Windows 7, and they’ve already begun logo testing.

Tech Ed 2010 will be in New Orleans.

Windows 7 features Direct Access (when paired with Win Svr 2008 R2) which is a seamless way to remote desktop without vpn through firewalls, etc.
Demonstrated jump lists in Windows 7, these “get rich overtime”. Good term, it means apps you use most often will fill in these lists.

Demonstrated snapping windows into docked positions on screen, then shaking a window above other windows to force them to minimize, minor golf clapping followed this.

Bill then turned over the microphone to Mark Russinovich of sysinternals fame who explained he was more than super-excited, he was hyper-excited about the new BitLocker features in Win7 which use policies to force data encryption on usb keys. Maybe golf-clapping occurred on this, can’t recall.

AppLocker improves on policies. Policy locked down executables so that newer versions of the same product could not be installed since they featured a different checksum-like identifier. AppLocker locks down by publisher or file version.

Best demo of the keynote yet was when Mark demonstrated the Problem Step Recorder, use this tool when a bug can be reproduced. Turn the recorder on, step through the bug. When you are done, the recorder generates a .zip file containing an html document which contains screenshots and verbiage of what was done step-by-step to produce the problem. Very slick.

Next Mark moved onto the improvements contained in Powershell Version 2 which features a new editor and debugger.

Next up was the XP Mode which comes in Win7. This looks exactly like the Sun VirtualBox transparent mode that I’m running on Ubuntu. You can configure an application to run in XP and it will show up in your start menu. It’s window looks exactly like an XP window b/c it’s running inside a virtual xp within Win7.
This is called MEDV Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization and it can be used for applications and websites. You can configure a website to launch within a different browser than IE8, not sure if you can change the default browser to Chrome then launch IE for specified sites. It wasn’t clear if this was a Windows setting or a feature within IE8.

The other V acronym being thrown around was APPV which extends roaming profiles to very quickly move a laptop’s settings to a new device, in the case of a lost laptop. Using this tool you can very quickly reload a new laptop exactly the way the other was configured (apps, data, bookmarks, desktop settings, wallpaper, etc).
Virtual Hard Drive management is greatly improved in Windows 7, Windows can now boot from VHDs. Mark uses this to test nightly builds of WinSvr2008, attach the VHD, boot from it, test.

Two elephants in the room, application compatibility and when will Windows 7 ship. Bill pointed developers to the application compatibility toolkit to test their apps then he revealed that Windows 7 … based on their telemetry (gotta remember that one) … wait for it … will probably have … wait for it … wait for it … holiday availability. I’m not sure if that was meant to drum up some sort of nostalgia there, EOY2009 could have worked, but they went with “holiday availability”. For me that invokes images of when I was a kid and my dad gave me that DOS 5.25 floppy. Good times, yeah wow thanks.

Next up was Iain McDonald who went into a lot of feature demos for Win Svr 2008 R2.
Some notable features
• file classification infrastructure which allows admins to tag files
• searches now use OCR to locate text within a graphic
• automated deletion or archiving of files meeting admin defined conditions

Exchange 2010 will feature automatic IRM for e-mail, for example e-mails sent to executives from R&D can automatically be assigned the corporate “DO NOT FORWARD” template.

OWA (Outlook Web Access) now features search which will go through attached documents, seems handy.

Tech Ed 2009 is also about being green, as a result, DVDs of presentations will no longer be created and mailed to attendees. Now you can watch them online via a Silverlight website.