The worst way to go. http://www.flickr.com/photos/almaz73/3564244382/

I started my breathing, er, reading time today by digesting this post by Matt Zimmerman which analogizes (quite effectively) reading and writing to breathing air. His comment on deep understanding through sharing struck a cord with me.

I believe this is a key component of human interaction and the way our brains work.

When inside our heads, we condense information into shorthand. An Ubuntu developer has a deep understanding of what “maintainer scripts” means, and so we just use that term in our head as an assumption. When we make these assumptions, we must consciously decide to challenge them, and often then we challenge them with other assumptions.

This also leads to “groupthink” as he calls it, where a group of similarly trained/experienced individuals start to share ideas, but they keep the shorthand, and can’t understand why their idea goes in circles.

Divergent thinking, and true understanding, only come when an outsider, a novice in the field, enters the picture. These assumptions must be explained, and in the process, often our own brain is going to re-evaluate the assumptions naturally.

This is why failure leads to understanding. As upon failure, you must explain to those holding you accountable why you failed, which often gets you the “aha!” moment that you missed because you worked so hard in isolation.

I think this is the reason that community driven, open source development produces high quality software. Two years ago my C++ was pretty rusty, and I started modifying code in the Drizzle project based on their documented guides. It turned out that my novice questions exposed a few ambiguities in the guides, in their blueprints, and in the way they were thinking in general, exacting some changes and (hopefully) producing higher quailty software. In a less open minded project, I’d have been cast aside as a distraction or an annoyance, a road block on the way to the end goal.

So, the moral of the story is, meet confusion not with more deliberation and furrowed brows, but with a bull horn and wide open arms. Meet failure not with shame, but proud explanation. Find somebody who doesn’t know anything about what you know, and tell them a story. Listen to their questions. You might just figure it out..

This past weekend, I attended the 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show. I’m not a huge car buff. I do think that BMW’s are the bomb, and I like Honda’s common sense vehicles, but really, I am NOT a car guy. However, I thought this was an interesting chance to take a look at an industry that, in my opinion, isn’t all that different than the one I’m in.

Now, that may surprise some. Its pretty easy to think that I work for a super advanced company that has started a revolution and sits on the bleeding edge of innovation. I mean, at Canonical, we’re doing all kinds of amazing stuff with “the cloud” and building software that makes peoples’ jaw drop when they see it in action sometimes.

But really, I think we’re more like CODA. CODA has built what looks to be a sustainable, practical electric car. The car itself is not visually stunning, but the idea behind it is. Make an electric car that anyone can buy *and* use. Make it fun, and make sure the business is sustainable. But, in no way is CODA challenging the ideas and revisions that have worked for the 100+ years that the car industry has existed.

CODA is still putting a steering wheel, gas pedals, and gear shift in the cockpit for the driver. There are doors, wipers, lights, and probably floor mats. In much the same way, in Ubuntu, we’re still putting our software out there with the intention that, while its created differently, and affords the user more capabilities, it is basically driven in much the same way as Windows 7 or OS X, mostly as a web, errrr, cloud terminal.

The exciting part is that for $3 of possibly more efficiently produced electricity, you can drive 100 miles. Even more exciting is that the CODA might actually compete with sensibly priced  (but larger) Honda and Toyota sedans, rather than like the Tesla cars that compete with Lexus and BMW’s.

Given this way of thinking, the auto show was extremely interesting. The electric car (open source?) has “arrived”, and the established players are buying the interesting enabling technology like batteries (android’s linux kernel, darwin for mac, etc) from companies like Tesla, and putting them in their established products.

Whether consumers care about either open source or electric cars is another story.. maybe the 2011 LA Auto Show will have an answer for me on at least one of them.

Seth’s Blog: Validation is overrated.

“If you’re waiting for a boss or an editor or a college to tell you that you do good work, you’re handing over too much power to someone who doesn’t care nearly as much as you do.”

Just a bit of reminder that while feedback is great, getting it done is way better.

As of next Monday, I will officially be in the employ of Canonical as a member of the Ubuntu Server Team. Please come say hi if you’re going to the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Belgium, as I’ll be there all week (try the fish!).

I just happened upon a site that mentioned bubbl.us as a way to brainstorm. Cool tool. I played with it and decided I wanted to keep the data I had put in it to play with later, but was annoyed that I had to create yet another user id+email+password combination on yet another site that I probably won’t visit again for a long while. Plus, say I want to add it onto my facebook wall. Facebook might be able to extract the images, but they might now. How lame is that?

My current solution for the login problem is less than ideal. I use the java program Password Safe to save my accounts+passwords, which it generates randomly. The pass phrase for my password safe is pretty complex, and I change it on about an annual basis. The program re-locks the safe after 5 minutes of inactivity, so this is reasonably safe against casual compromise. Of course, keyboard shoulder surfing and a subsequent theft of my machine (or temporary control) could render it useless, but I’m willing to accept those risks and do what I can to maintain control of the laptop. If somebody steals my laptop, unless they can crack the encryption quickly, I feel pretty good that I’ll have enough time to restore from backup, change all the passwords, and set a new combination.

However, this is basically as good as our current “status quo” of online fractured identity can get. And I still don’t have anything to bring all of my online presence together.

I recall with fond memories watching Dick Hardt’s amazing Identity 2.0 presentation from the audience at OSCON 2005. I came away thinking to myself “oh good, somebody is on it.” I put it out of my mind as a systems administrator with a lot of things to think about on the backend, and no real concern for the frontend.

Fast forward 5 years, and I see that we’re not much better off now. Dick Hardt’s company Sxip produced Sxipper, which is pretty cool, but still puts it on the users to safeguard and manage their data. Oh and really, I never heard about it until I went looking for Sxip again, and I don’t know anybody using it, I think its just a cool curiosity, not a solution.

This really is an issue that affects people, but they may not know it. Look at the trouble this guy went through to make google accounts useful for people with multiple email addresses. As we start sharing and sending and moving data, our identities clearly can’t be defined as email addresses anymore. I have 3 that I use a lot, and a couple of others that just refuse to die for whatever reason. Changing them means trying to find every site on which I’ve used them. UGH.

OpenID was, and still is, a promising direction. There are some definite security pitfalls in the way its been done in the past, but I think they’ve solved most of them. It doesn’t really satisfy Dick’s Photo ID requirement where the issuer doesn’t get to know what you’re using it for. Still I love when I sign up for a site and I can use my OpenID login. I use my launchpad.net account for this, mostly because it was the first site that had a very clear “this is your open ID url” link.

FOAF-SSL or “WebID” also seems interesting as a way to promote social credibility and utilize existing technologies rather than try to invent the whole thing. Even twitter seems to have rudimentary support. But its still a long way off from being in control of our identity. Given the meager number of relying parties, I’d say it may not ever get there, which is too bad.

So now I’m just confused. How and when are we going to get this done? When can I say “this is me, here’s some proof that this is me, now lets get something done.”?

Social networks sort of try to do this with the social proof of many friends. But at issue there is how closed off those social relationships are. Facebook wants me *on Facebook*. They don’t want to enable me to also use myspace or my Ning community seamlessly.

Until we as users know why we’d want that, and somebody is able to provide it, I guess I’m just stuck with my password safe.

Seth Godin’s recent post about responding to discussions about things you don’t understand has got me thinking about hiring people.

When involved with a staffing decision, I look for one trait in particular above all others. If you don’t know how to say “I don’t know”, and ask for an explanation or help, then you’re not really smart. You don’t have a good process for learning. You may have a mountain of knowledge in your head, but it is surrounded by a huge, impenetrable ego shield, and so, cannot ever be added to. Its like you took the sum of what you knew, and stuffed it into a snow globe. When people shake you up.. sure.. its pretty, but thats all there is to it.

I’d rather work with people who are open to having their entire belief system about certain subjects shattered by a better idea. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t stick to your guns and assert your own ideas and beliefs. It just means, when challenged, be like the Zen Buddhist Aikido master and flow with the force of the attack, and when possible, use it to your advantage.

(No google will not help you with the “trans-doran complex”. I’m hoping that upon seeing it you were curious, and after googling for it and finding nothing of substance, considered asking what it is..

I love Seth Godin’s blog. Its technology aware but focuses people, which is why we have this technology, right?

Anyway, he makes the point in his latest post titeld “I need more time” that more time doesn’t necessarily lead to better decisions.

This is something I’ve tried to implement in my life, and I think it boils down to “decision versus precision”. Basically, precision is required sometimes, and the need for it will usually delay a decision. But at some point you lose value in the decision by working too hard on making a perfect measurement.

These two things are tangent to one another. The “sweet spot” for any decision is where they meet.. the right amount of precision, with a good firm decision, will generally produce better results. Making choices without accuracy is “wild ass guessing.” However, obsessing over the details is likesitting at home reading books about the museums of Venice, the culture of Venice, even learning the language of Venice, to the point where you know the routes of the canals better than the gondoliers themselves. The problem is, it might mean you never actually *get* to Venice. Of course, you might actually hasten your decision on when to go, if during your reading you learn that the city is, in fact, sinking into the sea.

Likewise, wild ass guessing can be fun, but you might miss something great. Any good negotiator knows not to take the first offer, that its just to be used as information to help you understand the other party’s position.

I think ultimately, its better to make decisions as soon as you have enough information to satisfy a few criteria. One is risk tolerance, and another is urgency. These really boil down to an examination of your goals. If your goal is to get a man on the moon, you need a lot of precision before you can throw a fishbowl over his head and run him up the ladder into the rocket. You are risking at least one person’s life. Getting there isn’t really that urgent (though it was for NASA in the 60′s..). On the other hand, if your goal is to capture the latest media market craze, you *must* take risks, and if you don’t capture it soon, someone else may do it. The iPhone is a great example of this, where Apple took the time to do the smart web enabled phone concept right, but still took some big risks in releasing it without GPS or Copy & Paste ability.

For me, I struggle with precision more than decision. Often times I end up changing my mind a bit too much because I set off in one direction without all of the facts. If this sounds like you, then you might need to rethink your process, and get into the habit of gathing a little more information. However, I think most people fall into the category that Seth talks about in the linked article. If you find yourself researching, and not really “doing”, maybe swallow your reservations once in a while, and make a wild ass guess. You never know, it might be fun!

Holy cow, did you read about this company “The Linkup” losing 45% of its customers’ data?! How about they change their name to “The @$%! Up”.

First off, let me say that these guys didn’t have to be retarded to lose this much data. In fact, there are (were?) probably a lot of really talented people who designed and built this system to avoid such things.

I’m an optimist, so I have to believe somebody raised their voice at a meeting when data was shipped off to some loosely linked company from some past relationship. The finger pointing going on now is exactly what nobody ever wants to see happen to something they built.

Nirvanix says it has not deleted any customer data, and promises that its Storage Delivery Network is immune to the problem that plagued The Linkup. At The Linkup, a “system administrator ran a script that misidentified active account data and disassociated physical files from their owners,” Nirvanix says. “This led to files being marked offline in the old Streamload/MediaMax file system when they shouldn’t have been.” Iverson, meanwhile, claims it was a Nirvanix engineer who caused the data loss.

Hiring managers beware.. if you receive a resume of a Systems Administrator from the San Diego area with a couple of years missing and immediate availability, you might want to ask him if he knows what the -f argument to rm does.

We’ve all been there at the meeting that produces this type of situation though. Somebody finds some amazing 3rd party vendor that will do for the company what now takes a little resources, but will, when the company gets successful, take a lot of resources. Rather than scale our business up, why not just jump onto the coat tails of some other already successful business and rake in the dough, not needing any real technology, just gluing things together.

This is the essence of things like Amazon S3 and EC2, and Google’s AppEngine. These companies have built massive clusters to deal with their biggest days.. and somebody over there got smart and said “hey, 1% of our architecture is 200 times the power of most startups. We should sell it to them.”

The problem is, one day Amazon will need that power, and they won’t think twice about cutting off their tiny little source of revenue to make sure they can sell copies of Oprah’s latest selection. Their core business is selling stuff over the web, so why should they care if EC2 and S3 go slow, stop working, or function better than most people’s multi-thousand-dollar-a-month contracts with ISP’s.

So, if something is key to your success, even if its not “your core competency”, I say build it into your business model to gain that competency. I wouldn’t pay somebody to pack my parachute if I were a sky diver. I’d pay somebody to teach me, maybe even to check it for me, but I want to know that I packed it right when I pull the cord.. I don’t want a little flag to fly out saying “Sorry, We gave up our parachute packing business 2 days ago. Might want to start praying..”