Jun

25

Change Management

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Gerry Riskin, in his article entitled “The Seven Immutable Laws of Change Management” does bring up some thought-provoking and valid points:

In summary, these are the 7 laws:

  1. Propose imperfect change initiatives. The point here is that in life, the outcome of an initiative is not always guaranteed, e.g. you won’t know the outcome of the initiative until you have actually executed it. Therefore, you won’t know what the “right thing to do” is except in hindsight — and hindsight is too late.
  2. Create a vivid picture of where the initiative leads. The appeal of being vague is that you are not committing to anything — which means that you can’t be held accountable for any outcome, cleverly avoiding scrutiny and criticism. However, that also means that it’s tough to get people to support your idea, because they just can’t picture it.
  3. Paint the “first step” in vivid colours. Get the ball rolling! Define what the first step is (define action items), and decide what the outcome of the first step should be for the first action to be considered complete.
  4. Create cult-like internal promotional communications. “Selling” internally within the company. Advocate to others why the initiative will benefit the company.
  5. Ask for commitment — not agreement. “Commitment and Doubt“: Commitment does not require the absence of doubt; often commitment means acting despite your doubt. This is the “leap-of-faith” component, if you will. e.g. My company’s CEO has more experience in being a CEO than me, therefore I will execute the tasks I am assigned, doubt or not, because I have committed to the CEO’s initiative.
  6. Tell the world. Why do couples say their vows in front of friends and family? To let the world know about their commitment (and to be held accountable).
  7. Turn a spotlight on your initiative and leave it on. Often as a side effect of time and absence of any visible accomplishments, people forget about what the initiative was about, or worse, naysayers begin an “I told you so” compaign. The solution to this is to constantly monitor for progress, find out what others are struggling with and help them move ahead (including delegating tasks), and sharing problem solving knowledge within the company, so that nobody has to reinvent the wheel.

Here’s an interesting analogy from Law #1 –

As a result, most good firms are paralyzed by the tedious, never-ending and totally ineffectual process of divining the perfect strategy accompanied by the perfect tactics. These firms are ships tied so firmly to the pier that no matter how well steered, they go absolutely nowhere. In fact, their biggest claim to fame is that they hit no icebergs — few ships do from the pier. Such firms may do “industry-average” well, but they are not going to consistently break out of the pack.

The question is, are you happy with being “just OK”? I know I’m not. “Just OK” is just not enough for me.

Jun

21

Best way to wipe hard drives clean

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The best way to wipe hard drives clean is still to use a big ‘ol lunkin piece of magnet, so researchers say:

Erasing a hard drive usually takes hours using special procedures that repeatedly scramble information on a disk drive. Still, given unlimited resources and time, special magnetic snooping techniques can often recover at least some of the original information.

The researchers concluded that permanent magnets are the best solution. Other methods, including burning disks with heat-generating thermite, crushing drives in presses, chemically destroying the media or frying them with microwaves all proved susceptible to sensitive, patient, recovery efforts.

Thinking of selling the old computer on eBay? Scrub your drive clean first — lest there be known, what you have seen on the Internet, what you have bought, and the credit card number used.

Full article here: http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=97378

Jun

20

Success is moving from failure to failure

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Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm

– Sir Winston Churchill

Jun

18

Happy Father’s Day 2006

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It’s Father’s Day today, have you wished your dad yet? That reminds me .. I have to call my dad.

Jun

18

Getting back to your feet

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It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up.

– Vince Lombardi

Well said, because everyone has at some point in their lives felt like they have been knocked over. Hey, if it doesn’t kill ya, it’ll only make ya stronger!

Jun

13

Cell division and multiplication

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So I logged on to my FreeBSD box this morning .. and saw this joke (warning: geeky humor),

“Biology is the only science in which multiplication means the same thing as division.”

Happy Toosday Mawnin!

Jun

12

Mobile web servers

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Now isn’t this a cool hack? Nokia has successfully ported the Apache httpd web server to their cell phones running the Symbian OS (Symbian is an operating system for mobile devices owned by Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens AG, Panasonic, and Sony Ericsson). This is possible because of Symbian’s POSIX layer that provides some of the UNIX hooks needed.

And the obligatory cool pretty diagram from Nokia’s page:

Historically, web servers are huge clunky machines — loud, noisy, and live in a cold “server rooms”. Imagine now the possibilities: that the website you view, being served up in real-time from a mobile device, say a cell phone .. owned by someone running across the street to grab a bite at Subway for lunch. Imagine the web server also telling you in real time where it currently is, the location of its owner. Granted, it is ripe for abuse by stalkers, but some form of security/access control would be implemented.

Neat stuff.

Jun

12

China’s double standard

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For a country that censors its citizens from public information, keeping them in the dark in the age of information — they shouldn’t throw tantrums when their homegrown wireless encryption standard WAPI wasn’t favored by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for wireless networks.

ISO members voted 17 to 8 against adopting WAPI as an international standard and selected IEEE’s 802.11i as the winner.

The Chinese delegation walked out from the 2-day meeting in the Czech Republic crying that it was “meaningless for the Chinese delegation to continue in the meeting” whose atmosphere was “extremely unfair”. They even went as far as to accuse the IEEE backers of “using a lot of dirty tricks”.

Gee .. if I lived in China, I would feel that being censored from information is also “extremely unfair”, and the act of preventing me from getting the information I want by building the Great Firewall of China is also a “dirty trick”. Heck, it is also “meaningless” for me to search the web in China, because of the “extremely unfair” censorship.

Jun

4

Winners bounce back

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How many times have you met failure and just embraced the fact that you are not worthy of success? I love this quote from Laurie Puhn. Real success happen to people who put their sweat into it. Winning the lottery is dumb luck.

Keep in mind that everybody gets burned. The difference between the winners and the losers is that winners bounce back. And that’s true in every aspect of our lives. Winners aren’t luckier. Winners are persuasive. Winners are resilient.

— Laurie Puhn, author of “Instant Persuasion”