agent of change

I recently got a Verizon USB720 for my MacBook Pro and installed the software that Verizon provides. I frequently use the Cisco VPN software to connect to my clients’ networks to do work and I also use Parallels to test software on Windows.

There’s a little known (as far as I can tell) interaction between the three, where the Cisco VPN won’t allow you to connect anywhere and if it does, only for a few seconds. To get this feature back, all you have to do is disable the network ports that Parallels creates for NAT networking when you’re connecting to the Verizon card.

Go to System Preferences > Network > Network Port Configurations and uncheck the boxes that say Parallels like the image below.

Once you do that, you’ll be able to connect to the VPN just fine.

I just got a support request from someone today for a web application that I helped to write in college. It was my first Rails project and it was made as a senior class project. We had a client who was a professor from another department. We had to write our own version of backgrounDRb, used an early version of Rails, and wrote Flash as the front-end to an annotating engine for documents.

It was a great success for us using Rails and Ruby for the first time. We easily exceeded all expectations set in the beginning of the 10 week class. We had demo screencasts, a professional looking site, a great code/test ratio (first time ever for me), and a very happy customer. Some departments in our school were seriously considering using it for their document collaboration needs, and apparently, the software found its way around the world entirely by word of mouth.

I haven’t touched the code in several years and the machine that housed the subversion repo is long gone. It got me thinking about how software never really dies. I had no idea these people were using it to this day, but it still lives out there. I don’t even have the original site up anymore, so there’s no place to download the code.

It’s sort of cool and strange knowing that something that I wrote as a class project is being used by people to actually get work done. Maybe I’ll pick it back up and polish off the old code and breathe some new life into it someday. It’s just weird to think of a Flash/Rails app I wrote a few years ago as “old.” There’s going to be more of that in the future and it’s a refreshing reminder that everything old is new again and software never truly dies.

MacPorts is my preferred way of installing, managing, and upgrading much of the software I have on my Mac.

I’m setting up a new work machine today and I need to install ruby 1.8.5 on my machine for Rails to be happy.

Unfortunately, you can’t do something simple like specifying the version of the port you want to install unless it’s in a local repository.

Fortunately, my friend Stephen Chu had this problem about a year ago and has a nice procedure on how to do it. I’m going to update it for MacPorts and ruby 1.8.5 here.

1) Find out the svn revision number of the Portfile that has 1.8.5 by looking at:

http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/macports/log/trunk/dports/lang/ruby/Portfile

In my case it is 21127.

2) Set up a local port repository. In the file /opt/local/etc/macports/sources.conf, add this line before the rsync line:
file:///Users/Shared/dports and create that directory.

3) Install the port into your local repository.

cd /Users/Shared/dports && svn co --revision 21127 http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/trunk/dports/lang/ruby/ lang/ruby/

4) Run portindex so that ports now finds your new (old) version of ruby.

portindex /Users/Shared/dports

5) Now you should be able to see ruby @1.8.5-p12 in addition to @1.8.6 by running:

port list

6) Install Ruby

sudo port install ruby @1.8.5-p12

You should be up and running now, so to check, run:

ruby -v

You will see something like this:

ruby 1.8.5 (2006-12-25 patchlevel 12) [i686-darwin8.10.1]

Now, if you want versions of ruby that MacPorts doesn’t have (later patchlevels for instance), you can modify the portfiles by hand, but I’ll leave that for another post.

Update: There is an “official” MacPorts HOWTO on installing older versions of ports here. It may be updated in the future, so I’m linking to it here: http://trac.macports.org/wiki/howto/InstallingOlderPort

This law is something that I have been burned by in the past, but can be turned into something good. I think the only real defense against someone with malicious intent is to remember something that a teacher told me some time ago: Consider the source. More after the jump.

I was involved in a discussion recently about books that were good for Business Analysts. Here’s a list to get people started.

The Inmates Are Running The Asylum by Alan Cooper

About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper

Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition by Steve Krug

Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software by Eric Evans

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition by Edward R Tufte

Writing Effective Use Cases by Alistair Cockburn

Patterns for Effective Use Cases by Alistair Cockburn & Others

The Responsibility Virus by Roger Martin

You’ll notice that most of these are design books. As an analyst, it’s often the case that you are going to have to look at an old business process or application interface and design something new. It helps to know the limits of the technologies you are working in, but it is better to get a general understanding of design principles in general so that you’ll never be caught off guard.

Note: All Amazon link proceeds go to charity. If this turns out to be popular, I’ll write up some more book lists my colleagues and I think are good to have on your bookshelf as an Analyst, Dev, QA, PM and consulting in general.

Another consultant recently told me that she doesn’t believe Agile works for backend-type projects. She said that Agile just introduces too much change and she can’t keep up with the process. She also mentioned that there were studies emerging that said as much, but when pressed, she couldn’t find any.

Now, I’m all for Agile taking criticism. It’s about People over Process, so if there’s some process hurting people in that equation, then it needs to be examined and possibly fixed. I also believe that building working code iteratively is vastly better than talking about it for months and then sitting down to write code.

Our client, like all clients, likes to change their mind about what features they want in the application we are building. This other consultant and I are on two different teams within the project and she’s doing legacy integration work and we’re doing essentially greenfield development that will have to hook into her systems. As our client changes their mind, it’s pretty easy for us to keep up while she struggles to make changes to database models, ETL processes, and other bits of code in her work.

Thinking about what’s going on, I think I’ve come to the reason why it’s hard for her to change and easy for us. We’re using tools and processes that allow us to change rapidly. Her tools are hindering her from making rapid and iterative change and her processes might be too rigid.

Notice that I’m not telling what tools each of us is using. I don’t want to get into a debate about what tool is better, only the type of tool that allows people to be empowered to change at a moment’s notice and then change their minds back again. My hypothesis is that her tools are hindering her from keeping up with our clients. She’s certainly capable of doing the work, but I feel like processes that her tools make her go through are getting in her way.

What advice can I give to someone in that position? I’ve mentioned stronger scope control to her, greater communication between our teams, and getting another analyst to help with the workload of deciphering the legacy systems she has to integrate with. These are all people processes because I’ve seen other consultants use the same tools in my Agile projects and fit in with the process relatively comfortably.

Agile may not work for all types of projects, but I believe it can work here. It may just be that we need better tools.

at&t just announced the pricing for the iPhone plans.

The pricing is inflated from the normal plans.

*iPhone Pricing*
| *Price* | *Talk Time* |
|$60/mo | 450 min|
|$80/mo | 900 min|
|$100/mo | 1,350 min|

*Regular Pricing* (Cingular)
| *Price* | *Talk Time* |
|$40/mo | 450 min|
|$60/mo | 900 min|
|$80/mo | 1,350 min|

The regular pricing includes rollover, unlimited nights/weekends, and unlimited mobile-to-mobile minutes. I’m not sure if you get those with the iPhone plan. You do get unlimited data access which normally costs around $20/mo.

And that is the whole point of calling this out. The iPhone plan comes with unlimited data access. So the first company that comes up with a VOIP web app for the iPhone is going to make a killing. I’ll bet it’s already in development.

Does anyone remember when you could get a good grade in school when you did some hard work? It never seemed right to me that all I had to do was show the teacher that I worked hard, but didn’t actually have to finish the assignment. Outside of the classroom, this doesn’t work. People don’t care if you worked hard to get a report done, get a sale, or whatever it is you do. They just care that you can get the job done.

I took a kayaking trip this weekend on a lake near my house and an old lesson popped into my head. While I was working at NeoTactix, we had little firemen bobble-heads with our pictures on them. It was an allusion to the fact that we were always fighting fires in our client companies. I remember asking for a new bobble-head in addition to my fireman. I asked for a lifeguard.

I was a lifeguard when I was younger and the lessons that I learned training there were unforgettable. As a lifeguard, you don’t just react to problems, you scan your water and look for potential problems. You are taught all sorts of strategies to minimize mistakes and keep everyone safe. While at work, I applied the skills I learned as a lifeguard to protect our clients from things I could see on the horizon.

Lifeguards overlap the areas they are watching so that there’s always a second pair of eyes on any given situation. This worked very well for us when we adopted this strategy. For example, if I had a press release I was working on, I made sure to always run it by the managing partners to ensure I got everything right before publishing it. Another example was to watch companies in our portfolio that could indicate problems for the other companies that were our clients. Because each of our clients were minding their daily business like they were supposed to, they couldn’t always look up and see trends that could affect them. Part of our job was to see these things coming and warn (or save) them if needed.

Lifeguards constantly scan the waters without focusing on one particular area. When you are sitting up in the tower, it can be easy to focus on just one person or a group of people. It’s called tunnel vision. The safest thing to do is to look for typical problem signs, make a quick head count, and move on to the next group of people. This lesson translates to business really well. As a CEO, you have a bunch of things you have to worry about. Payroll, internal initiatives, investors, competition, and growing the company are just some of the huge tasks you have to take on. Making sure you give each their due attention is important or you become reactionary and will never get to focus on looking forward for your business.

Lifeguards ignore unneeded distractions and maintain constant focus. If you’ve ever seen a lifeguard at the beach, they always have their eyes on the water. They will walk up their towers backwards to stay facing the water. People will come up to talk to them and they’ll rarely look at them, instead focusing on watching the water. It’s not that they are trying to be rude, but that they are focusing on their job, not someone who just wants to chat about Baywatch. In business life, there is plenty to keep you distracted from doing your real job. Surfing the internet can waste whole days of productivity. Worse yet, spending your whole day on something that _seems_ productive like rearranging the office furniture can make you feel like you are doing something good, but is usually just a way to procrastinate on something more important that could be done. When you learn to control the time you spend on unneeded activities, all sorts of time opens up and you’ll find much more time to run your business.

Lifeguards cover each other’s water when an emergency comes up. Emergencies happen; it’s a fact of lifeguarding as well as business. This is a hard lesson for some businesses to learn, especially in cyclical situations like cashflow or business development. Lifeguards typically have a phone they pick up or button they push to signal the other lifeguards that an emergency is happening in their water and they are taking care of it. The other lifeguards immediately respond by calling for backup and covering the lifeguard’s water while they are making a save. Some businesses will see emergency situations and rally their employees to help fight the fire. While this is good, they often leave other parts of the business unattended. That’s a quick way to becoming a firefighter and only reacting to your business instead of acting to control your business.

Lifeguards and firefighters have their place in business. Both serve useful functions, but if you have more lifeguards, hopefully you won’t need so many firefighers.

I haven’t done one of these in a while, but today seemed prescient for this law of power like so many other times I have opened up this list. It’s something I was told by so many other strong leaders I have modeled my own leadership on. More after the jump.