Archive for January, 2009

Sometimes you have to dig in for that something extra

This past week has been rather encouraging despite all the news of record unemployment. I’ve had additional VC meetings that went very well. I’ve had analyst meetings supporting what I’ve built in a company. And I’ve had conversations with some of the largest companies wanting to use the products I’ve largely designed. What’s not to like? Well, during the course of the meetings, I’ve realized that my currently philosophy of do as much as humanly possible is a good one to have right about now.

Let’s see what I’m currently doing:

  1. Designing new version of our company’s OS
  2. Testing the new User Interface
  3. Tweaking business plan
  4. Redesigning company website
  5. Testing and working on deployment of new update tool
  6. Designed and now testing new de-duplication tool
  7. Working on file-system enhancements
  8. Looking at new backend storage options for a potential consulting client
  9. Fleshing out details for a new email company I’ve had floating around in my head
  10. Fleshing out designs for a new social networking site
  11. Family man, father and husband, etc.

Anyway, you get the idea. You can’t simply trust that different people will take care of their areas. And you can’t underestimate your ability to do more than one thing. I am convinced that we’ve really become lazy in America. We don’t want to really work. Give us a list of tasks and let us work 9 to 5 and only 5 days a week and we’re happy. Well, that attitude hasn’t worked well for me since doing my first real startup company, NetAttach. Back then I was still primarily a marketing person. My engineering expertise was mostly tied to designing hardware. I got pulled into doing software by accident. We were designing the industry’s first NAS appliance based on Linux and open-source and my sales guy wanted to see Appletalk supported in the first release. Well, my VP of engineering told us both that it wasn’t possible. This was one of those open-ended impossibles. It wasn’t just impossible for the first release, but also indefinitely. Ever get that type of news, only to feel rather dissatisfied?

Well, I went away over the weekend and came back that Monday to demonstrate the feature. This was rather difficult for me back then. I had tinkered a little with software back then. But doing kernel work was a little over my head. But I got the point across, though. And the example was sufficient for my VP of engineering to have a path to get Appletalk designed into the first release of our product.

This wasn’t my first example of having to undertake such work to prove a point. I think the first real example of doing this with software was when I was hired to run product marketing for a company called HolonTech. I can’t even recall how many weeks went by where our engineering team failed to show any progress on our management software. We wanted something that would be cross-platform capable and Java looked to be the tool of choice back then. The primary topic of debate was the inability to create drop down menus in Java. Seriously! This was back in 1994. So, that week I went and bought myself a copy of Visual Cafe’ and I came back with a rudimentary GUI for one of our products, complete with drop-down menus. It was crude, but I didn’t get pushed around again in that Monday’s meeting.

Now, there are a few different spirits with which to do things like these. Back in my earlier days, I did things a little out of spite. I have always hated to be told what couldn’t be done. These days I do it with a much different attitude. I’ve been around a little longer and have hence seen things that others haven’t. This provides me a unique perspective. I can visualize a problem and a solution. I do my work with the intention of allowing others to visualize what’s in my head and to see a path to the solution. Sometimes what I do is very sufficient. Sometimes it needs to be enhanced a bit. And that’s something that I have had to learn to deal with– giving something up so that others can own it. Otherwise, you risk alienating your engineering team. And no company can afford that.

Well, these times are a bit more challenging than some of the ones I’ve previously lived through. And I believe it’s necessary to dig into the extra reserves. I’m absolutely resolved to make my company successful. And to do this, it’s going to require diverting every little bit of capital to sales. And that means taking on additional personal work to ensure that can happen. When you consider the fact that there are 168 hours in a week, it’s amazing how most people operate on the notion of merely working 40 hours per week. When you get rid of all the unnecessary breaks, chewing the fat, going out to lunches, etc., it’s actually quite easy to find the extra time to do more than one job. But it requires an excessive amount of determination and discipline. This reminds me of an old skit from In Living Color. Remember the Hey Mon family? Take a look at this clip and enjoy!

2009
01/11
CATEGORY
Encouraging Bits
Mike Stuff
Misc. Rants
Storage
TAGS










Write comment

Have you tried the social music experiment?

Here's a sample playlist and what the player looks like.

If you’re fairly active on Myspace, which I am not, then you’re probably already familiar with Playlist.com. For the rest of us, I’m finally getting around to using this little gem. My wife uses is non-stop. Every time I walk into the bedroom and she’s getting ready after taking a shower, I’m sure to find her laptop on the bed just going down her song list.

Some of you may wonder what’s the point of something like this, which has certainly been my attitude. Well, I travel a lot and my iTunes library is sufficiently large enough that I have to keep it on my server because I don’t want to afford the disk space any longer. And, when I travel, I’m in no mood to carry around some sort of lousy-sounding external speakers to connect to my iPod. This makes for a perfect solution. My Macbook Pro has great built-in speakers, better than most of those iPod attachments, and it’s pretty easy just to pop to my page since I’m always working on my laptop anyway.

Lastly, ever hear a song on the radio and think you might like to get it? Ever wish to share a song with a friend because you think he might like it? Well, this is the perfect solution for that. You can actually listen to whole albums before you buy them. So, there’s value in this, trust me. While I’ve only just created my first playlist, I’ve been using it for a while to checkout new music.

Check it out and hope you enjoy.

2009
01/10
CATEGORY
Mike Stuff
TAGS





2 comments

Um… that’s a lot of pictures!

Remember just a couple of years ago when digital cameras came with just 16MB SD memory cards? Well, I’m pretty happy with a 4GB card in my SLR camera. I can pretty much store 993 very high resolution pictures on it, which is plenty when I go on vacation. Only once have I come close to feeling as if I might actually run out of space. Nevertheless, I’m a techy or a geek and I like bigger, faster, better things. I found something that actually seems excessive to even me. Imagine a 2TB SD card. Well, apparently someone is working on them. Take a look here.

2009
01/08
CATEGORY
My Friends
Techy Stuff
TAGS




Write comment

Don’t get hijacked

If you’re like me, you’ve already advised your family members against clicking on those emails from the bank that want you to confirm your security settings, which are about to expire or which need to be increased. While some of these emails are legitimate, it’s just easier to do this than it is to teach people to check the url the link is porting to. After all, if you let your mouse hover over this link to bankofamerica.com, you’ll find that it’s really just directed back to my site, which is hopefully considered nonthreatening. Now imagine that underlying link going to a site that’s really a spoof of the bank’s. You enter your id and your password and guess what? Nothing happens. Yet.

Well, there are other things to be concerned about. And most of the time you’re relatively safe. But sometimes, especially when you’re busy researching things out, you come across a link in a news thread that looks as if it could be informative. So you click on it. And it looks like dribble. But what you’ve secretly done is downloaded some cookie or installed some malware that is tracking and reporting all of your mouse clicks and keystrokes back to someone who wishes to do you harm.

Then there’s cross-site scripting where someone illegitimate has hacked into some legitimate guy’s site to install malware there. You happen to be on a trusted site, but they’ve secretly been compromised, which now leaves you compromised. Think these things can’t happen? Think again.

I recently had one of my customers let me know that their server was being used as part of a botnet attack on someone else’s domain. I took a look and sure enough, the server had been compromised. Of course this was easy to fix and measures were put in place to tighten things up. But you get the idea. He had been compromised. It could have been much worse.

There are things that you and I can do to protect ourselves. For example, we can use some common sense. I don’t view porn and I don’t download pirated software or music. That right there is a huge step forward in protecting myself. Furthermore, my systems tend to be Mac OS X or Linux. I don’t use Windows. That again is a great step forward since much malware is written to execute on Windows platforms. But there’s more.

Typically when I go perusing in parts unknown, I use an onion router. Ever watch a movie where the cops are trying to trace back a cyber criminal through various internet hops? Well, imagine going through hundreds and possibly thousands of hops. Well, you can if you’re using an onion router. To learn more about them, click on this link. If you’d like more info on them, drop me a note and I’ll either post more on the subject or answer you directly. Basically, an onion router isn’t just for allowing you to spy on sites while avoiding detection. It also keeps sites from tracking down what sites you frequent and when, etc. Basically, we all have certain routines. And the more your computing routines are predictable, the more likely you are to be compromised.

There are so many things that can be couched between links on sites that unless you’re browsing them in source code, you could be left fairly unaware. There’s a tool for Firefox that can help with some of these risks, on top of these other measures I’ve mentioned. Basically, by adding the noscript plugin, you can designate safe zones and non-safezones. And within each zone you can have various levels of protection against embedded scripts. Just don’t disable the statcounter script when you visit my site as I’d like to record the visit please. :)

Whatever you do, don’t let this post turn you into a cyber agoraphobic. That’s not my intention. I actually spent part of Christmas day in conversation with someone convinced the internet is evil, e-commerce is evil, and… well, you get the idea. They aren’t. But there are evil people as there are in all walks of life. So take a little precaution. Read up on what are valid threats. Make sure you apply security updates to your OS. Believe it or not, those companies you give your money to for your software, operating system, etc., typically have people dedicated to finding vulnerabilities and then patching them. And for goodness sake, if you see something that looks questionable, then question it. Either steer clear or ask someone more knowledgeable.

2009
01/08
CATEGORY
Misc. Rants
Techy Stuff
TAGS




2 comments

How important is free-will when it comes to loving God?

I was reading a post over at Tim Challies’ site about Free Will. Tim raises some good points concerning the subject and includes a nice little chart from Augustine of Hippo that describes the various states of man’s condition.

The key point of the post deals with a statement by C.S. Lewis in his book, Mere Christianity:

Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

Is this truly the case? Is it really free will that makes love possible? Consider this: did we love God first or did he love us first? Did we choose to follow God, or did he first choose us? Now, if you’re a Christian, I expect that you’ll refer to your scriptures to answer these questions.

As I commented on Tim’s site, we are told in 1Cor 2:14 that in our natural state, we are incapable of comprehending the truths or nature of God. They’re utter foolishness unto our natural, depraved state. Now, either this is completely false or it isn’t. And if it is true, then how can we properly choose that which we cannot see, let alone comprehend? And if this is assertion is false, then what’s the point?

My point is this: as Christians, we operate on the notions of faith and grace. We believe what we believe out of faith. But it was grace that gave us the faith to believe in the first place. Take either of these components away and we’re merely religious people, no different than any other religious people. It is the notion of an active God that really separates our religion from the others in the world.

Based on these assumptions, is our free-will really that important when it comes to loving God with any sort of quality? Do we really gain anything by asserting our free will? Let’s suppose I have free will and have an IQ of 70. Am I really going to derive something paramount to Einstein’s theory of relativity just because I desire to? We’re talking, here, about overcoming a deficiency of intelligence. And to a certain extent this is possible. But I have yet to see any person or creature over come its nature. Just because you can here a parrot talk, doesn’t mean it has the nature of a man. And while I like to think my dog, Barkley, is a better “person” than most people I know, doesn’t actually mean he’s human. He’s still a dog.

This concept is pretty important to professing Christians. At what point do you stop insisting on your own rights and start taking God at his word? Just because an unregenerate man cannot turn from his ways and turn to God, in his own power, doesn’t alleviate the responsibility from him. Nor does it make God a tyrant by calling on men and women to do so.

2009
01/05
CATEGORY
Theological Takes
TAGS




Write comment