Cogito, Ergo Sumana

Categories: sumana | Work

Volunteering, fulltime jobs, etc.

(2) 05 Feb 2010, 11:48PM: Another Change: I'm no longer working with Collabora Ltd.

In the first several months after I joined Collabora in April 2009, I served as lead project manager, got the new website up, and started putting some new project management processes into place, especially in research and development. Then I shifted to personnel management, and created and began implementing a performance assessment system. All the while I gardened the wiki, aggregated and edited weekly internal reports to keep the company on the same page, blogged about our work, and generally gave people the information and the nagging they needed to make informed decisions. (In retrospect, I played facilitator, historian, and journalist a lot, plus mentor to 50+ Collaborans.)

Collabora's a different place than it was ten months ago; I helped move them from a startup to an enterprise footing. Management structures change as needs and capabilities become apparent, so the directors and new hires (including the awesome Martin Barrett) will carry this work forward, and I offer them my best wishes. I'm happy to talk more in detail about what I did at Collabora, especially if you're interested in what I can do for your organization.

In the near future, I'm taking some time to relax and take care of existing obligations before I incur new ones. Then, starting in late February or early March, I'll be volunteering fulltime on some open source/free culture projects for several months. I haven't yet decided which ones, or in what capacity, so feel free to recruit me.

Filed under: Management and LeadershipWorkWork:Management and Leadership

03 Feb 2010, 04:18PM: Change of Plans: I'm not going to FOSDEMImage nicked from Leo Antunes. (I thought about creating some sort of Belgian-waffle-with-a-NO-sign-on-it but this services.)

I'm not going to FOSDEM this year; change of plans. Perhaps next year.

Filed under: Work

(0) 26 Jan 2010, 06:11PM: Tacky, Metacity, Encryption, tp-qt4, and Maemo: A few things Collabora folks have been working on recently (along with the constant stream of Telepathy-related releases):

Daf Harries released tacky, a simple python-based paste web app. Basically it's like a simpler version of pastebin, and you can install it on a private server in case you're talking about something confidential in private chat/IRC.

Thomas Thurman is looking for new contributors to mentor to help with Metacity (a window manager).

Cosimo Cecchi posted his TODO list for "a Telepathy implementation of the XTLS protocol, an end-to end-solution to crypt communication over XMPP". Cosimo and Eitan Isaacson are both working on encryption; Eitan has been plugging away at interactive certificate verification.

Andre Moreira Magalhaes is blogging to raise awareness of Telepathy-Qt4, a convenience library for people who want to use the Telepathy framework in their Qt applications.

And we've all been playing around with our N900 devices (Collabora company gifts). Tollef Fog Heen provides scripts & procedure to move SMSes and contacts from iPhone to N900, Felipe Zimmerle wrote an inclinometer, Jonny Lamb released a file transfer app and extra goodies to help you chat with people on lots of networks, and Thomas asks for testers for his new version of robotfindskitten.

Because we're hacking around, some of our apps you won't find in the default software repositories in the N900's applications manager. Here's a short guide:

Maemo Extras contains quality-controlled applications written by the community. It's installed on the device, but disabled by default.
To enable: Within App Manager, select "Catalogues" from the menu, find "maemo.org", and untick Disabled.

Maemo Extras Testing contains the applications developers are preparing to update. There are lots of applications here and all need help in testing and validating. People can vote good applications up by visiting the application list; once enough people do that, an app moves to the regular Extras repo.

Still, these are not quite ready for prime time, so be cautious! One colleague offers this tip: "if you want to just find good quality applications within Extras-Testing, review this packaging list and find those with the most QA votes."
To enable: Within App Manager, select "Catalogues" from the menu. Click "New" and add the following details:

("Fremantle" means Maemo 5, the version of the Maemo operating system that the N900 runs. "free non-free" tells the manager that you want both open source and closed source applications; change this if you want.)

Maemo Extras-Devel: contains untested and wildly variant applications that might harm your system. Use this repository sparingly since the applications are unstable.
To enable: follow directions on the maemo.org wiki.

Filed under: Work

(2) 24 Jan 2010, 11:06AM: Upcoming FOSDEM & UK Travel: I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting, the first weekend in February. (Something like twenty of my Collabora colleagues will be there, including some I've never met before.) I've been to England & to Russia, but you can waffle around as to whether those are really Europe. But FOSDEM is in Brussels, Belgium! Very European, and makes its own waffles. I'll be arriving in Brussels a day or two before the conference proper. After it ends, I'll ride the Eurostar train (!) to England and see my Cambridge colleagues for about a week.

This is a management discussion trip and a seeing-people trip; as helpful as occasional facetime is for developers, it's essential for a manager like me. So, if you live in a bit of Europe or England such that it's easy for you to visit Brussels or Cambridge, I'd love to see you. And if you're giving a FOSDEM talk I absolutely must see, let me know! I'm interested in checking out:

(I'll have to put together a list of all the Collabora talks soon.)

Family continuity note: Seven years ago, Leonard went to Belgium for the European Python conference. I helped him brush up on his French, he hung out with Jarno Virtanen & Taina Prusti, etc., etc., etc.

Filed under: Work

14 Jan 2010, 03:49PM: Some Recent Collabora Open Source Development: Has it been three months since I provided a snapshot of Collaborans' open source work? Too long! Here's a taste of our work from the end of 2009 & the start of this year (and there's a lot I'm leaving out, like a bunch of Maemo work, because otherwise this entry would go on forever! I'm already several days out-of-date): a few Collabora folks at dinner at Gran Canaria

The photos here are all from the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit last year, which was warm and fun. January (here in the Northern Hemisphere) is a good time to remember how nice that was.

Filed under: Work

(6) 19 Dec 2009, 07:54PM: Everything I Knew (About Battery Care) Was Wrong: Today I learned that I've been working from an obsolete understanding of how to keep my cellphone and laptop batteries from losing gobs of capacity over time. A simplistic summary follows for your benefit.

The batteries in my phone and my work laptop are lithium-ion batteries. Check yours -- the "Li-Ion" abbreviation means it's lithium-ion. As detailed sources explain, charging/discharging battery care for lithium ion batteries is the opposite of the conventional wisdom I had in my head, left over from the old days of nickel-based rechargeable batteries.

It used to be that you'd want to run batteries all the way down before starting to charge them again, because otherwise the capacity might get messed up. That's not true with lithium-ion batteries; it's recommended that you only rarely let an Li-Ion battery run down below 10% of its charge.

Lithium-ion batteries lose capacity, in the long run, if they sit overcharging a lot, or if they run hot a lot. So don't let them sit plugged into a charger all the time, and if you usually run your laptop plugged into AC power, think about removing the battery and setting it someplace cooler.

The moment a lithium-ion battery gets manufactured, it slowly starts losing capacity. So buying a primary battery + a spare battery simultaneously might be a worse decision than using a primary battery, then getting the spare battery years later, when your capacity has substantially degraded.

This came up because I assumed I should let my new N900 run down completely (on the partial battery charge from the factory) before plugging it in, and I was annoyed that plugging in the USB-to-microUSB cable to transfer files meant it was getting juice while the battery hadn't totally discharged. But I was wrong to worry! Thanks for straightening me out, Sjoerd.

Filed under: Work

23 Nov 2009, 06:03PM: Can't Play Tour Guide Without A Map: GNOME Journal just published my Telepathy overview, and my colleague Danielle Madeley's "Telepathy, Empathy and Mission Control 5 in GNOME 2.28".

I'm not a developer, but I can at least help create accessible documentation. Telepathy world domination depends on accessible documentation: like the Telepathy book, but even more so. Newbs likely have trouble finding comprehensive overviews of some aspects of Telepathy: design issues, misconceptions, and the status of various efforts. They come to #telepathy (on irc.freenode.net) and ask us questions, or just drop the idea of developing with Telepathy, or struggle in silence and make mistakes.

Danielle's book and article will help. I hope my article helps. I've made a small list of areas where I think a concise "here's the deal as of today" blog post or article or mailing list post (or wiki page clarification) would be cool. Basically, they're what I've had to learn to grok the direction & momentum of the project. I hope to create, improve or encourage friendly overviews of the following (in my Copious Spare Time):

(a) the major connection managers & their state of readiness/stability
(b) the up-&-coming CMs and their potential promise (e.g. yafono)
(c) mobile, Moblin, maemo-extras
(d) encryption/privacy/OTR/SRTP issues
(e) Muji/wocky work
(f) expanding our reach to KDE
(g) testy stuff like telepathy-ashes & echobot
(h) Teamgeist
(i) Python bindings

Anything to add to that list?

Filed under: Work

(8) 10 Nov 2009, 01:26PM: Here It Comes: The Queen has approved Leonard's dependent partner's visa, so it's now official: in about a month, we'll be moving to Cambridge, England, so I can work side-by-side with colleagues at Collabora headquarters. Many more details to follow.

Filed under: Work

(3) 20 Oct 2009, 05:51PM: Collabora Open Source Development Overview, 4-20 October 2009: Collabora, my company, does open source development. We don't just build on top of open source frameworks; every day, Collabora developers are hacking in the open on multiple projects.

I decided to blog about some of what we've done in the last couple of weeks.

First, our flagship project, Telepathy:

Collaborans also worked on Tubes, Teamgeist (part of Zeitgeist), Maemo packages, GStreamer, Farstream, and other projects. Just a few items, because it would be exhausting to cover everything:

Collabora also encourages its staffers to go to conferences to talk about open source. Last weekend, participants in the GNOME Boston Summit and the Amsterdam Maemo Summit led several discussions (Marco Barisione's Telepathy on Maemo slides are especially valuable).

And more FLOSS conferences are coming up soon: Gustavo will be at a WebKitGTK+ hackfest in Spain in December, and Helio will be at Latinoware 2009 later this week in Brazil.

Sorry to those I left out or didn't link. This list is obsolete even as I hit Post...

Filed under: Work

(4) 08 Oct 2009, 11:44PM: An Oversimplified Cliffs Notes To Telepathy:

Lots of people have never heard of my company or its projects -- even fairly plugged-in geeks often say "who?" or say "Oh yeah, the Subversion people." (No, that's Collabnet, where Leonard used to work.) So this post is specifically for my friends, to help explain one thing my company is doing that is cool. I'm going to simplify a lot so I hope my colleagues and other hard-core geeks don't wince too much.

It is annoying to have to log in to a bunch of different chat services to reach all your friends. MSN, Google Talk, AOL Instant Messenger, Bonjour, blah blah blah. You may not think this is related, but it's also annoying that if I want to work with someone on a document and we're at different computers, I can't use my regular word processor, I have to load up a web browser with Google Docs. And it's annoying to have your cell phone text messages (SMS) in a different place from your other chats.

These are all aspects of real-time communication. As my colleague Danielle put it,

The Telepathy project is helping solve all these problems. Telepathy is a project aiming to give desktop applications (like word processors, jukeboxes, CAD programs, and games) a way to painlessly integrate instant messaging and VoIP (voice over IP) telephony features. In more technical language, in Telepathy, Collabora aims to develop a real-time communications framework for the desktop and embedded devices.

My boss, Rob McQueen, was one of the Telepathy inventors, and I work for Collabora, the company he co-founded. We hope programmers will use Telepathy to improve your computer and cell phone and get rid of the annoyances I mentioned above, and create neat applications and services. We've already gotten started.

Here's one way of viewing the Telepathy framework. It has three essential parts:

  1. a bunch of Connection Managers, each handling the interaction with a protocol, such as Google Talk, XMPP, various VoIP (internet phone call) services, or AOL Instant Messenger
  2. Mission Control, managing accounts and channels (the individual protocol-bound pipelines that your messages go through)
  3. a specification, telling all the parts how to interact (very technical)

This design gives Telepathy a lot of flexibility. If a new interesting service comes along, like Facebook chat, we can just write a new Connection Manager for it and bam, anything that uses Telepathy can now interact with it. And there are a lot of text, voice, and video chat networks! Who knows what other interesting collaboration or communication networks might hook into Telepathy someday?

Another important aspect of Telepathy's architecture is D-Bus. Telepathy is primarily a project for the open source Linux operating system. It's built on D-Bus, a piece of Linux infrastructure that lets applications, frameworks, and low-level system components talk to each other. So that means Telepathy can act like a wormhole, not just between two different people's computers, but between unassuming regular ol' apps on their desktops. You and a friend can collaborate on writing a paper together right in your word processor, or play a game against each other. And you can do it without having to deal with a slow, limited web app in a web browser.

In case you are a geek and find this interesting: There's an entire online book with more detail, and a system overview with a pretty graphic. And of course we're an open source project and you're welcome to join us.

In the real world, even regular folks like you and I are getting the benefit of Telepathy with (for example) the new N900 smartphone. Evidence of Telepathy's awesomeness is in the addressbook -- it combines your friends' various text chat, phonecall, and other contact info in the same screen, rather than making you use separate programs.

I use Telepathy every day, because I use the Empathy chat program to talk to my AIM and Google Talk friends all in one tidy window. Telepathy has made some other cool applications possible; I wrote about them for the new Collabora website, and if people want, I'll post a little about those.

Note to self: in future posts, explain GStreamer, Farstream, WebKit, Electrolysis, and how we make money.

Filed under: Work

08 Sep 2009, 11:24AM: Three Great Marketing Moves:

  1. Leonard and I attended a preview screening of the Coen Brothers' film The Man Who Wasn't There and got a promotional comb. We still have and use it, several moves later.
  2. I was chary of jumping into Battlestar Galactica without seeing the miniseries and all the episodes in order. Then one day, at the cash register at Midtown Comics, I saw a stack of free DVDs. Battlestar Galactica: The Story So Far. The iTunes store gave it away for free, too. I watched the clip montage summary and got sucked in, and from then on watched each new episode
  3. My colleague Thomas Thurman is blogging a tutorial on developing applications for the Nokia N900 smartphone.
Filed under: Work

03 Sep 2009, 05:30PM: First: I'm in Boston for a couple of days, co-working with my colleague Andres Salomon, a.k.a. dilinger. He's been hacking on oFono on Collabora's dime, and last night's 0.4 release included work by Andres to add support for HTC G1 (the Dream) modem devices.

The oFono project is trying to be a well-designed interface to all the cell phone goodies -- texting, making cell phone calls, etc. Developers will be able to integrate their applications with the oFono architecture. With Andres's work, oFono now has its first working full-featured (voice calls + SMS) driver on a handset.

In case this interests you: Andres has uploaded a Debian package for oFono -- you should see it wend its way to the public soon. The future will also include a Telepathy Connection Manager for oFono; stay tuned.

Update: package accepted.

Filed under: Work

(1) 29 Aug 2009, 09:22PM: Blog Move And Thunderbird Tip: I've now moved from my old webspace at the Open Computing Facility (at the University of California at Berkeley) to space on a server that Leonard controls. So this is a test post to mark the divergence of those old archives and this now-canonical space for the blog at harihareswara.net (redirecting from brainwane.net once the DNS propagates, etc.).

Let's have some useful content to keep it interesting: let's say you're using Mozilla Thunderbird as an email client, perhaps on Ubuntu Linux, and let's say you want your email replies to include the date of the email you're replying to. I found this tip helpful:

  1. use the Edit: Preferences dialog box
  2. go to Advanced
  3. click the advanced configuration editor
  4. type 'reply' into the filter box to search for configuration entries that include the string 'reply'
  5. click on the reply header type line
  6. double click that
  7. change 1 to 2
  8. close/OK all the windows, you should be set
Filed under: Work

(2) 20 Jul 2009, 07:45AM: Found Poetry: Inadvertently lyrical lines overheard at the virtual water cooler:

and if that package doesn't build, I'll need to give it another poke

and when we get the screen, we test and choose

I'm back in New York City.

Filed under: Work

(3) 17 Jul 2009, 11:34AM: More Notes From The Office: Sure, it's usually true that a job interview is going well if the conversation goes swimmingly, with no 90-second interruptions for explanations. But not if I'm interviewing a Brit. What's a second-class degree? What's a "supervisory" in this context? And so on.

From today's IRC conversation, after I pointed people to IKEA tumbler hacking:

* sumanah kills the entire company's productivity; secretly working for [competitor]
Filed under: Work

(1) 14 Jul 2009, 10:15AM: Obvious Tech Talk Q&A Prep: A certain species of tech talk goes like: "Here's a product/methodology/tool I hack on, here's what it's good for and how/why you should add it to your toolkit." It's an honorable and useful presentation topic. As you prepare your talk, think about the questions your audience will have in the back of its head. If you can address them in the talk itself, great. If not, prepare answers for use in the questions-and-answers session.

Common questions:

The most important question is the one you hope no one asks because the answer is embarrassing. What would your smartest enemy ask?

(List developed while helping Youness practice his libnice talk last week.)

Filed under: Work

(1) 14 Jul 2009, 07:13AM: The Home Office: I am finishing some berry tea from a ninja-logoed mug. I am in an office a few floors above the ground, across the road from King's College. I see English summer light and the college spires through the open window. We laugh out loud when someone says something funny on IRC, and then laugh again at someone's one-upping reply. It's Tuesday, so we're going to eat pizza at the two-for-one Tuesdays pizza place. The noon chimes just rang. I have a huge TODO list. Two of those items are making proper TODO lists from meeting notes.

I am happy.

Filed under: Work

10 Jul 2009, 11:39PM: My Standby Joke: A few times in the past year, I've taken the risk of leaning over to an English-speaking stranger in the airport, one who's wearing a suit or the like, and saying, "Ah, the glamor of business travel." It hasn't yet failed to get a laugh.

Filed under: ComedyWork

30 Jun 2009, 07:57PM: Gran Canaria Talks by Collaborans: I think this is the complete schedule of talks that my colleagues are giving at the Desktop Summit this year.

Sat. 4 July
"QtScript bindings for Telepathy" - lightning talk by Ian Monroe, 15:30-16:30

Sun. 5 July
"The location-aware desktop" by Beaudoin, Pierre-Luc with Henri Bergius: 11:30, Room 2

"Profiling and Optimizing D-Bus APIs" by William Thompson: 12:30pm, Room 1

"Integrating VideoConferencing into Everyday Applications" by Olivier Crete: 12:30, Room 4

Tues. 7 July 2009
"Let's make GNOME a collaborative desktop" by Guillaume Desmottes: 11:00 - 11:45

"How to play libnice-ly with your NAT" by Youness El Alaoui: 15:00

"Pitivi Video Editor" by Edward Hervey: 15:45

Thurs. 9 July 2009
"Introduction to GStreamer development Tutorial" by Wim Taymans: 15:00

Fri. 10th July
"Tools for Authoring Awesome Docs" by Davyd Madeley: 11:00

Filed under: Work

29 Jun 2009, 04:15PM: Getting (Irrelevant) Things Done: I am bikeshedding my own yak-shaving. This should win an award.

Filed under: WorkWork:Management and Leadership

29 Jun 2009, 03:04PM: Travel Schedule: I'm going to the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit next week. Developers, managers, and other free software enthusiasts in the GNOME and KDE communities get together on the Canary Islands, which are technically part of Spain but sit off the coast of Africa. Then I spend a week in Cambridge, England, working alongside my fellow Collaborans. Yup, it's all for work, and I won't even think about bringing a suit (other than a bathing suit).

Filed under: Work

(3) 16 Jun 2009, 02:30PM: On Dentistry: I went to the dentist last night, specifically at the NYU College of Dentistry. I actually prefer the dental school experience to many private practice dentistries. The wait in the waiting room is shorter (2 hours per appointment actually spent in the chair, rather than an hour in intermittent waiting plus an hour in the chair), I get treated by eager-to-learn dentists in training rather than bored, laconic hygienists, and the student dentists are thorough and communicative. And they offer a 6pm-8pm slot. Very few private practices do.

Young student dentist Stringer was the one to phone me up to set up an appointment. He was more deft, gentle, and patient than several DDSes I've patronized. "Oh, you build up a lot of calculus here, because of your salivary gland. I have that too," he confided. He checked in with me about whether the ultrasonic cleaning dealie was running too hot and hurting me. "I don't like to use it, I don't think it's gentle enough," he said. He handed me the suction wand: "Raise your hand if you need me to stop so you can suction."

In further stereotype-demolishing, Stringer does not play World of Warcraft (nor does he wear Ira Glass glasses). My cousin-in-law-in-law Aaron, husband of Kristen, is on the road to full Dentistdom and enjoys WoW-style games. [pun about grinding omitted]

I told Stringer what his last name means in journalism; in retrospect, he has a new occupational surname, like Smith or Cooper.

I get curious about others' occupations. Firefighters, CAD designers, directors, transcriptionists, silversmiths, pastors, teachers, full-time caretakers, taxi drivers, deli owners, X-ray technicians, soldiers, construction workers, dentists. How does doing your job change the way you interact with others?

Filed under: Work

25 Apr 2009, 07:56PM: Translation Of A Truth: I reread much of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon a few weeks ago and found this passage:

"We're businessmen," Avi says. "We make money. Gold is worth money."

"Gold is the corpse of value," says Goto Dengo.

"I don't understand."

"If you want to understand, look out the window!" says the patriarch, and sweeps his cane around in an arc that encompasses half of Tokyo. "Fifty years ago, it was flames. Now it is lights! Do you understand? The leaders of Nippon were stupid. They took all of the gold out of Tokyo and buried it in holes in the ground in the Philippines! Because they thought that The General would march into Tokyo and steal it. But The General didn't care about the gold. He understood that the real gold is here--" he points to his head "--in the intelligence of the people, and here--" he holds out his hands "--in the work that they do. Getting rid of our gold was the best thing that ever happened to Nippon. It made us rich. Receiving that gold was the worst thing that happened to the Philippines. It made them poor."

--p. 858, paperback

"Our wealth is work," the man said.

More decade-old Stephenson analysis coming later tonight.

Filed under: Work

(4) 23 Apr 2009, 06:45AM: Learning: In the last two weeks, I have learned rather a lot about configuring and troubleshooting usage of Empathy, Telepathy, Synaptic, PPAs, git, TeX/LaTeX/dvi, gtimelog, IRC and bip, RSA SSH, and XMPP. Well, it was a lot to me.

I've also learned that if I want to get up around 6am consistently, I have to go to bed around 9 or 10pm consistently, and that if I work in a windowless rented office then I won't know till I leave that it's raining. So I'll just be making a cameo at the io9/Tor.com shindig tonight, and I'm trying to pay attention to the weather symbols in the clock gadget in my taskbar.

Filed under: Work

18 Apr 2009, 08:04AM: Ramping Up: In my first week at Collabora, I've learned that I can stand to poke at .conf, .rc, and similar files for at most two hours out of my working day. I've also learned that the Ubuntu version of Firefox doesn't give me a warning if I hit Back after typing form data on a webpage; not sure how to fix that. The Lenovo x200 ThinkPad is light and small, and I'm adjusting well to the nub-mouse, but there's a dedicated Back key right where my fingers think the left arrow key is, which gives me a few "arrghs" a day. I may dedicate some fiddling time next week to disabling that key. And I renew my grief that IRC is not a common feature of every office environment.

As lead project manager I'm to keep on top of all the work we do, for clients and for the community in general. So this week I've been drawing diagrams of technology stacks and who's doing what, and memorizing thirty real name/IRC nickname pairs. If I were Juanita from Snow Crash I would be developing face-based avatars for all my new colleagues, but since I am not perhaps I should get a bunch of Dungeons & Dragons figurines and set them up on a campaign map representing VoIP, embedded Linux, mobile, etc., etc.

Filed under: Work

11 Apr 2009, 07:50PM: This Retrospective, In Retrospect, Has A Theme: An abbreviated diary of the past few days, mostly for future Sumana's use:

Wednesday I went to Supper and the Sci-Fi Screening Room with a journalist who opines that it's his God-given right to drink scotch at his desk when he's on deadline.

Thursday I saw Tim Wu, Stuart, Jena, and Hailey as we hashed out next steps and plans for AltLaw. I stopped by Midtown Comics after; Hal had put aside the new Ambush Bug compendium for Leonard.

Friday night: Matt Weinstein, an old Berkeley pal, came to town, so I met him and some friends of his at The Silent H, a shockingly good Vietnamese place in Williamsburg. At Queensboro Plaza on the way there, I talked to a guy who was reading Cryptonomicon on the platform, and envied aloud that he's on his first reading. At the restaurant I met a Captain-Hammer-shirt-wearing friend of his who cemented his worth by trading Cryptonomicon references and quotes with me for twenty minutes.

This morning: breakfast and The Met with Anne and her sister Sarah, Anne being a woman I met online when I sought WisCon attendees who'd let me sleep on their floors. We got along great and I'm sure I'll learn a lot about scifi fandom from her. At my place, this evening, I did some career coaching with my friend Rebecca and helped her improve her LinkedIn profile.

In conclusion, dorkiness got me everything I adore in my life.

Filed under: ReadingWork

(3) 02 Apr 2009, 08:35AM: If You Read This To The End You Get To See Inside My Marriage: I watched the interview Jon Stewart did with Jim Cramer a few weeks ago. If you're the kind of person who loves Jon Stewart's work, you probably heard about it.

Stewart's key critiques of CNBC:

Financial news that focuses on short term profits and stock tips is an unhealthy market force. Financial reporting has a responsibility to be skeptical of too-good-to-be-true profits and investigate companies and trends that produce them. Finance experts who know about a house of cards have a responsibility to tell the public. It's irresponsible to cheerlead unsustainable bull markets, persuading laypeople to invest in "responsible" retirement plans, then blame evil CEOs and weak regulators after the inevitable crash. Saying people can get wealth without doing work to create value is disingenuous and possibly criminal.

Salon followed up on many of these substantive critiques, not just following the blast and noise of Media Titan Confrontation. "On "Mad Money," Cramer back to normal": he was contrite on the Daily Show, then the next day he minimized the whole thing and kept on doing his normal schtick. More insidiously, "There's nothing unique about Jim Cramer: The mindless complicity in disseminating false claims is not aberrational media behavior; it is, as they acknowledge, the crux of what they do." Greenwald compares recent finance reporting to prewar Iraq reporting.*

Stewart's most controversial point, and one that hasn't been discussed as much in the mass media, is in the last part of my summary: cheerleading unsustainable bull markets, and encouraging investment rather than work as a way to wealth, is wrong. His words:

But isn't that part of the problem? Selling this idea that you don't have to do anything. Anytime you sell people the idea that sit back and you'll get 10 to 20 percent on your money, don't you always know that that's going to be a lie? When are we going to realize in this country that our wealth is work. That we're workers and by selling this idea that of "Hey man, I'll teach you how to be rich," how is that any different than an infomercial?

"Our wealth is work...we're workers." I asked Leonard to help me figure out why, when a political candidate praises work and workers, it sounds like cant, but Stewart's phrasing felt subversive. He pointed out that the word "workers" and identification with the working class remind people of Marxism. Oh yeah, that. Also, "wealth" usually means earnings and/or capital -- cash, real estate, securities, some financial instrument or an item that can be sold in the open market for cash. But Stewart is saying that our wealth, the prize that we've earned, isn't money, but our ability to earn money. Our asset is the ability to create assets.

Again, identification with the working class. But it's a short step from that to rabble-raising populist demagoguery, which Stewart and Colbert make fun of. A lot. Possibly while engaging in it.

'You say ... I want to keep this homicidal fury forever!' [side-annotation: Hysteria, Our Only Growth Industry] 'But, Stephen, your Thunderdome idea will kill all the CEOs, and there'll be no one left to force through the man-sized paper shredder!' But I say: we will never run out of scapegoats. Because if we focus on pitchforks and vengeance, instead of the fundamental problems that got us here, soon, we'll have plenty of new criminal banks and irresponsible CEOs to start all over again. And we can cry 'Off with their heads!' -- and we'll never have to keep ours.

I get annoyed that the TDS/TCR audience cheers so loud, gilding the lily at every punchline. But sometimes their silence is a tell. When Stewart tossed off that key phrase, "our wealth is work," and when Colbert made his point about scapegoating, the audience was too stunned to clap. This reminds me of a similar moment from Colbert's interview with Daniel Gilbert, happiness expert, June 27, 2007, about 3:45 into the interview:

DG: "It turns out that kids have a very small effect on people's happiness, and the effect tends to be negative. But you'd be happy to hear-"

SC: "Wait wait wait..."

DG: "Well, it means that people with children tend to be a little less happy than people without them, and the more children they have, the less happy they turn out to be."

SC: "Now, are you confusing happiness with the feeling of the sublime? Because children are a pain in the ass. Okay, I'll grant you that. But the feeling that comes with children, I have found, is a feeling of -- that is superior to happiness."

DG: "Yeah, of course."

SC: "That is the sublime feeling. And the sublime comes from beauty."

DG: "The happiness that children give you is a little like the refrigerator light. Every time you look, it's on. Every time you think about your kids, you're happy. The problem is, they're a pain in the ass more often than you're thinking about them."

SC: "Well, that's interesting."

So this is a big shaggy dog story where I end up trying to convince Leonard, who enjoys Colbert but doesn't like to watch the interviews, to start watching the whole show. Because sometimes stuff like that comes out, where you see the real Colbert peek through, this witty improv-loving geek with a background in Catholicism and Tolkien. Basically, it's the Brendan Leonard show!


* Salon, ProPublica, New Assignment, and similar ventures are trying to do good journalism that avoids the inherent blindspots of traditional mass media. In a similar vein, I'm fond of Fred Clark's suggestion that a Work section replace the Business section.

Filed under: ComedyWork

(7) 01 Apr 2009, 09:17AM: New Awesome Work: Martin and I are co-founding a new firm to produce the PoTeaTo, a food-and-beverage convergence device targeted at the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Simply drop the PoTeaTo into a small pot of boiling water and watch the seam split, revealing two pre-blanched potato halves and one strong teabag! Boil them together and you'll have a meal and the drink to go with it.

Just kidding. Actually, starting in a couple of weeks, I'll be working at Collabora, an open source consulting firm. I'll be managing projects and helping them develop awesome tools like the Telepathy framework and the Empathy instant messaging/IRC/VoIP/video chat application. Yes, people are using the phrase "Skype-killer."

I'll get to telecommute (casual day every day!), advance the cause of Free/Libre/Open Source Software, and facilitate the work of dozens of geeky colleagues around the world.

Exciting! The PoTeaTo shall have to wait (in a dry, dark, cool place).

Filed under: ComedyWork:Management and LeadershipWork

01 Apr 2009, 07:40AM: The Long View: Throughout Jody Procter's memoir Toil: Building Yourself, a diary of his work helping build one specific house in a small Oregon city, Procter aches for the weekend, feels hopeful and buoyant working through Friday afternoon, and buys himself little treats at the 7-11 on the Friday drive home. The rhythm of building tension and weekly release thrums over and over again. The end of the March 17th entry:

I have been taking my watch off or leaving it in the car to try to keep from looking at it. 10:56. 2:05. Seeing those dead hours in the middle of the day demoralizes me. Now, this afternoon, I put my watch on, the better to savor the slow pace of the last hour and a half of the week. The sun has disappeared. The clouds rolls in. A few sprinkles fall and the air is cool and fragrant with the budding flowers of spring and the moist, freshly cut grass of the golf course. I am happier and happier as the final minutes of the work week tick by.

On my drive home I think, if you could only bottle that Friday after-work feeling and sell it to people, you could make so much money you could stop work and then you would never have that Friday after-work feeling again. Unless you indulged in your own product. And probably, after a while, you'd get addicted to it, it would lose its kick, it would turn out to have negative side-effects and all would be lost and in ruins. You would lose your fortune and have to go back to work and then some Friday you would be driving home and you would have that Friday after-work feeling all over again.

Filed under: ReadingWork

28 Mar 2009, 02:33PM: A Book Review About Leadership: I mostly wrote this book review in the fall of 2008.

On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

by Norman Dixon

1976

On The Psychology of Military Incompetence is 400 pages long, and worth savoring. Its fundamental question: Given that information is the reduction of uncertainty, how do leaders of different temperaments react to information? The author limits himself to cases of British incompetence in battle, but of course you can extrapolate from that.

Dixon clearly but steadily builds his case against the prewar British military. The one-line summary is: culture stagnates into convention, which drives out the unconventionality you need to succeed. More nuances ahead.

From Skeleton to Prison Cell

Dixon shows that to advance in the British armed forces, in peacetime, demanded rule-following and an authoritarian mindset. But the mission of a military is to win wars, and that requires fluidity and a willingness to take risks -- and offend superiors.

So, what happened when peacetime promotions hit a war zone? Disaster -- in the Crimea, in southern Africa, all over Europe in the First World War, over and over again. Soldiers' courage and tenacity get their generals out of the holes they dig.

In general, institutions get the leaders who fit into those institutions and succeed at the unstated goals (for example, avoid retreats at all cost, impress politicians, keep civilians uninformed and complacent). If the unstated goals don't line up with the institution's stated goals, then leaders will tend to do the things they've been rewarded for in the past, especially in moments of high stress and low certainty. Therefore, in battle, bad commanders freeze up, wait for orders, ignore new information to appear "decisive," give panicked and contradictory orders, lie to maintain their personal reputations, and so on. And disaster happens, over and over again.

In Dixon's view, the British military suffered from groupthink and valued particular upper-class traits over merit. It's astonishing that military personnel would need to be told that the map is not the territory, the signifier not the signified, but indeed they cared more about the signs and forms of morale and professionalism (such as clean clothes and polished brass) than about warm clothes, edible food, and working equipment.

Narcotic Assumptions, Lenses & Blinders

I'm in India as I write this and dealing with my own need for shiny appearances. I often forget, once I return to the States, that I find -- for example -- hermetically sealed bathrooms reassuring. My parents live in a home where the plumbing and electrical work aren't consistently hidden beneath stucco and sideboards, and it surprises me how much that bothers me. I haven't seen any marked crosswalks in their city, either; we watch for a lull in the bicycles, mopeds, and rickshaws, then rush over the dusty, rocky street. No accidents yet.

I consciously desire function over form, but that only works if I can convince myself to rely on an ugly-looking system to work.

I calm myself with a fallacious appeal to statistics: if something's wrong, it would have broken already. If other people depend on similarly rickety-looking setups, then they must be dependable. Or I just go straight to infantilism and believe my parents wouldn't put me in danger.

Seth Godin recently wrote about the "edifice complex". He reminded us that, in times of uncertainty and stretched budgets, when we can least afford the "organized waste" of facades, we find them most reassuring.

In good times, insecurities and rationalizations like mine are a luxury. In battle and competition, they're delectable poison.

British commanders, similarly, clung to the false clarity of their chain of command, "masculinity," pride, and privileges when they faced the mess of battle. They feared shame more than they minded losing men, and they scorned the "motherly" chores (or retreats) that would ensure troop survival and readiness.

Valiant forays are masculine, but feints and retreating are girly? Again, ideology got in the way of success, as when insecure commanders pooh-poohed nonwhite adversaries, self-improvement, and new technology.

The lesson: Real self-confidence doesn't need ideology as a crutch. The flipside: if you see someone leaning on received assumptions, and repeating them rather loudly, it's because without them he wouldn't know who he was.

Leaderships

The argument above takes up most of the book. In an aside, Dixon suggests that "senior commanders have often to fill a number of incompatible roles": heroic leader, military manager, and technocrat, plus politician, PR man, father figure, and therapist. This is of special interest to me.

I've learned models describing styles of leadership: authoritarian, democratic, and whatnot. These days I'm more interested in the balance among managing up, down, and sideways. Reading these books and thinking aloud about them helps me get perspective. What leg of that tripod have I been shorting?

Works thematically related to On the Psychology of Military Incompetence: Dilbert, the Harvard/NASA case study on the Columbia shuttle disaster, and John Le Carre's The Tailor of Panama.

Filed under: Work:Management and LeadershipWork

27 Mar 2009, 02:46PM: Ada Lovelace Day, Belatedly: I am abashed and thankful that Rachel and Danny thought to mention me in speaking of women in tech on Ada Lovelace Day. I offer a sidelong glimpse into a short list of my influences Right Now Today:

A woman, my manager at Exodus, a history major or something, whose career path reassured me that CS wasn't the only way into interesting tech jobs. I thank you, Jed, for making a similar point -- QA, tech writing, education, design, sysadmin, and management are damn cool.

Marissa Mayer at Google might be, among other things, Google's Steve Jobs, and inspired me to think more about product design leadership.

Rachel Chalmers, of course.

Mel Chua, who reminds me to learn about how I'm learning, and that my default answer should be "yes, I can do that."

And all my Systers. I thank them for daily popping up in my inbox, being the friendliest forum for questions stupid and subtle, and reminding me that we are legion, diverse, wage slave and entrepreneur bare-metal hacker and CIO and everywhere in between and sideways.

Filed under: WorkWork:Management and Leadership

09 Mar 2009, 04:13PM: Lego Learning: When I was rejecting submissions for Thoughtcrime Experiments, I told many writers that I'd give them suggestions for improvements if they wanted them. Some replied and took me up on the offer. Today I'm working on some of those critiques. Suddenly I am interested in litcrit theory and practice, because now that is a tool I can use to help people.

Filed under: Work

[Main]

Creative Commons License
Cogito, Ergo Sumana by Sumana Harihareswara is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available by emailing the author at sumanah@panix.com.