December 06, 2005

Wikis Suck For Serious Business

We've been kicking around using wikis as ad-hoc KM/collaboration tools for the firm. My boss and I discussed it at a bit of depth on a fine sunny day this last summer as we drove to one of our other offices. We both concluded that, as they stand, wikis are not ready for the sort of use we want out of them.

He made two points. One, current wiki UI is not lawyer-friendly. WikiWords are stupid, especially to a profession who trades in fine wordings. HTML-like markup and syntax are usable for only those who are already geeky enough to know the real deal. Once you can get the UI of a wiki to the level of Word, then we can talk. Hmmm, I smell open source project idea. Two, wikis are knowledge sinkholes. Getting data into them is kinda easy (see One), but getting data out of them is hard. I know Jotspot is working on that, for one, but when you are trading in PDFs and Word docs, XML export doesn't cut it (at least not currently).

I made a single point that sort of gets at both of his. Wikis are great for ad-hoc arrangement and re-arrangement of data, but they don't respect existing data. And with 2-million-plus documents in dozens of formats sitting in our document management system, we need to respect existing data. Wikis will be useful to the extent they enable us to re-use, remix, reorganize, review, and extend those documents. What is needed is a wiki that is created, edited, and saved in Word.

Posted by Noel at 05:38 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 14, 2005

Technical Managers, or, Why I Like My Job

"Technically competent, technically current managers are rare. If you work for one, do whateer you can to keep your job. It's an unusual treat."

--Steve McConnell, Code Complete, p. 686.

Posted by Noel at 05:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 08, 2005

Seven Lessons Learned From Outlook/Mailsite Migration

This summer, I helped migrate our firm to Interwoven's Mailsite/Worksite Web product, magically turning our KM into a matter-centric maven. Here are seven lessons I learned, in short snappy form.

Posted by Noel at 05:31 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 09, 2005

The Partners, They Are A-Changin'

It occurs to me that I am working with perhaps the last generation of lawyers (and any other white-collar, services-based type of person) who are technologically disabled. When these guys (yes, males, as a rule, except for the few members of the pioneering generation of women in law) die off, there will be no one else to ask what 'copy and paste' means, or not be able to accomplish the same abstract task using different programs. I won't have to show another Of Counsel where the Reply button is located in Microsoft Outlook, having changed locations and icons from Lotus Notes. There will be no more web-based evaluations printed out, hand-filled, and sent across cities and time zones to the evaluation supervisor to input into the 'Internet'.

Heck, the amount of paper consumed by law firms everywhere will drop by 75%, at least. In my mind, there's the diminished, hoary, antediluvian lawyer who says to his young paralegal, "Do you know anything about this 'Internet', son? I heard Old Crotchitkins mention it to Knoobly-Knees at the [Ye Olde Closed-Membership] Clubb yester-evenin'. Said you could find out just about anything on it regarding my favorite pass-time of dominos. Also said that his son even found out the Anneballon's secret mint julep recipe. I've been trying to get that out of that son-of-a-gun for years." The bow-tied-one coughs. "Could you go and print out that 'Internet' for me so I can read up on it?"

But that just might be the last time that request is ever made. Strange to think that we might have to shift from dealing with an extreme lack of savvy to an extreme over-use of savvy, like those enterprising Stanford applicants who are now calling up their 2nd-tier schools. Just something to think about.

Posted by Noel at 05:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 15, 2005

Further Reflections on "Zombies in St. Elmo Redux"

I allowed my brain to cogitate upon the matters brought up in addressing the zombie threat to St. Elmo over these intervening nights, after arriving home in exhaustion and chemical ease from Scott Borger's bachelor party, and our Mailsite/Outlook migration Long March.

I had concluded, "The dead become undead cannot become dead again". I stand by this conclusion. But two more matters press themselves upon my mind as I lay a-sleeping.

First, my just-quoted conclusion is true, unless you could destroy zombies utterly. You know, something like the Greek "diapthairo", sending them to Gehena or Sheol of the Hebrews. If you could somehow hit them with a double-existence whammy and destroy completely their body and their being, then that might work. By destroy utterly, I mean the universe must lose the sum of their atoms. I suppose they could become antimatter or dark matter, and that would work too. And you'd also have to metaphysically destroy their evil animating spirit (the demon in Josiah's account). The point is, the body must be gone as well as the zombie demon.

A Holy Hand Grenade might do the trick.

Second, in the beginning of my last essay, I believe I glossed over an important conundrum regarding the ontological status of zombies. I said, "it seems perfectly reasonable to believe that if a zombie bites you, you become dead, and then undead, joining their ranks." I think there's something lax here. Does the zombie actually kill you when it bites? Or does it transform you straight-aways into the dominion of the undead? Alive -> Dead -> Undead, or the more straightforward Alive -> Undead? I must confess my ignorance upon this point, and kindly beseech my readers who are more educated in matters regarding the undead to guide me to a correct understanding upon this point.

Now, to address additional points brought up in Josiah's generous reply to my first post regarding zombies in St. Elmo.

Josiah's obsession with the dichotomy of spiritual redemption and heavy weapons is appreciated, and explicated by him as, "In this purpose there is the assumption of the living returning to righteousness in this life, and I can see that occurring in no other way than with somehow killing the undead." In this he seems to combine the ideas above summarized in the Holy Hand Grenade, but I am afraid that Josiah has actually done little to clear up my misgivings, save for the reassurance that we may, in fact, kill zombies as a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. But their ontological status, which for me is the more important question, remains unknown, a rather mysterious, dare I even say zombie apparition shrouded in philosophical must. Faith in what might be seen as a type of Plantiga's Great Pumpkin Return is not epistemically tenable with the waving of hands and unwavering belief. Just because I really believe that zombies are sent as instruments of redemption does not make them killable if that is not in fact their ontic aim.

His note regarding the difference between Halo's Flood and a proper Zombie Attack on St. Elmo is noticed and accepted. May I propose that we focus further studies on this important matter, because as biomechanically-enhanced soldiers enter the battlefield in the near future, they may be thrown into a similar situation as Master Chief, and require the proper set of tactical and philosophical guidelines as we are now laying out for a zombie attack in Stelmo. Shotguns, the moral and physical high ground (as noted by Duffey), and a stiff upper lip. Because my goodness, observe at how quickly those zombies can take over! Is Mayor Littlefield's office running these same simulations for the City's disaster recovery plan?

The comments by Mr. Davidson, OTOH, are greatly appreciated and do begin to excavate the definition of a zombie. In particular, he stated, "You don't "kill" zombies, you dismember them to the point that the enchantment/ensorcellment/possession that has caused their peculiar appetite for the brains of the living can no longer function." Though this does not jive with Josiah’s account, it at least seems open to an inquiry from the faculties of reason, an opening that Josiah’s more pietistic account does not allow. If zombies are reanimated dead, the simple bodies unanimated by the Divine breath of life but still twitching muscles and firing low-level cerebral cortex neurons, then there is no question of whether they may be killed. They may be killed just like a robot, a machine, a vegetable. By anyone’s definition, they are no longer human, nor alive, and so may become fodder for Model 87 shotguns with no moral harm to the shooter. Animated by an evil entity, but lacking human status, a zombie should be blasted apart with whatever the most suitable weapon on hand might be. St. Elmo is not their home.

Posted by Noel at 06:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 13, 2005

Where Did My Technology Mojo Go?

Not much blogging on the normally fecund science/technology front lately.

Part of it has been the tension at work over our immenent Worsite/Outlook conversion. I think I've been subconsciously escaping and distressing with the silly posts about the NBA, Airwolf, and Zombies. And then I took a vacation.

I've been fairly blasé regarding most news of the last month. Google Earth caught my eye, and was good for a hour of fun with the wife and the "volcano" layer on Maui, but everyone else will probably talk about that. iTunes 4.9 with built-in podcast support is cool too, but being that the only podcast I listen too is Matty's, this is neither affective nor notable.

So, what's in the future? When I finish that neural net project, I'll start learning Ruby. And when Apple introduces a new laptop, I'll buy that, upgrade to Tiger, etc. What has caught my eye for the future is writing AJAX-enabled apps for our intranet using ASP.NET 2 with Atlas and AJAX.NET. I've come to realize that we will never be on the cutting edge of research, the new-new thing, but we can be on the cutting edge of adopting the best tools for the new-new thing. In other words, some people make new things up, others make tools for those new things, and others use those tools to make the same old thing, except better.

There are some personal projects I'm working on, but nothing ready for a first-look unveiling. My bookmarks for neural networks and books should point out where I’m going, though.

At work, not much is bloggable currently. Middle of a political and technical storm for an email/matter-centric km rollout. My boss has been doing stellar write ups and examinations of it, and we're now poised to thrust the spear deep into the heart of bad workflow. Interesting, but not in my usual geek way.

Posted by Noel at 05:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 07, 2005

Hellfire.

"Well, hellfire!"

--Unamed Of Counsel (and ex-Judge), upon opening his new Outlook email client for the first time.

Posted by Noel at 05:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 21, 2005

What Are You Doing?

I'm creating business intelligence using this, after doing a lot of research.

We're designing lots using a new tool.

We're creating the next version of this.

I'm spending some personal time on something cool in a different language that I'll post soon.

I'm listening to the radio now, especially from 3-5pm est.

Posted by Noel at 05:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 13, 2005

Quantifying Work

I received an interesting email last week that prompted a much more detailed response than was probably anticipated. It is a complex question asked, though, and I will share it and my response with you (obfuscating certain details, of course).


To: Noel
Subject: question

I am working on the overhead calculations for the firm and need to know the amount of your time that you spend working for the other offices. For some of the other IT staff, we use 75% Magrethea, 15% Orion and 10% Betelgeuse. Would you all say this is accurate for yourself? If not, let me know how you would break out your time. Thanks!

Trillian



To: Trillian
Subject: Re: question

My main job is writing software for the firm as a whole, so I'm not sure I could quantify my time quite like you are asking. I make logical distinctions in the software (extra features for secretaries or attorneys, an application for Accounting, etc) that affect how much work I do, but I don't really do anything that is specific for an physical office. I suppose we could quantify the effect of writing software for more than one location (by the additional location and size complexities that multiple locations bring), but in that sense the offices are just a design specification along with everything else. What I write can potentially be used firm-wide, or just in one office location--the usage has little effect on my time.
My minor focus is giving occasional support to people for their software applications, and again, since everyone in the firm uses certain software for certain jobs, there's not really an easy quantification to make for splitting how that support time is spent by me.
I haven't answered your question yet.
Splitting equally between offices would seem the right way to interpret my work, so I'll say 33.3% each for Orion, Magrathea, and Betelgeuse. Another way to quantify would be to say that I spend an equal amount of time on every person in the firm, and since the distribution of people among the three offices is 24% Betelgeuse, 42% Magrathea, 24% Orion, and 0.42% Other, that is how to divide my work up as well. Another way to put it would be that I spend time in proportion to how much overhead is generated by each office. But then we have an infinite loop!
If you have a better way to quantify, go ahead and use that. I'd be interested to know if you do. Let me know too if you need me to explain my answer some more.

-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
Noel
Application Developer
x42

Posted by Noel at 05:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 06, 2005

Die Spam Die

After spending twenty minutes deleting 65 comment spams upchucked by louts who are catering to a particularly loathsome form of cretin, I'm hopping mad and ready to fight. Here's my beef and my idea.

I'm not mad because these are offensive comments per se. Moderating the conversations that occur on this blog is part of the game, and I enjoy or at least tolerate that admin duty.

What I am angry about is that certain parties are attempting to use my work, this blog, and my name for their own profit, without my permission, and further that their actions affect my reputation and cause me emotional, mental, finanical, etc., harm.

These spammers are hijacking my digital identity, swipping my google juice, and impinging my good name. See, I have spent a lot of time and effort constructing the reputation and character of this site, and by extension my person. These comment spammers are defaming me and libeling me by manipulating search engines to suggest that I am either involved in or engaged in uncommonly vile activities. My good name is violated by this.

If, as I believe, blogs are a way of participating in a conversations, and one of the conversations that this blog is a leader in is my name, and if comment spam can be demonstrated to be defaming, libelious, or something else bad, then don't I have a civil case to make in court?

Can I sue comment spammers?

How does the copyright issue of blog comments affect me?

Are there other legal strategies that work towards the same goal?

Is this a matter that the Bloggers Legal Defense Fund would like to assist in? Seems up their alley. Blawggers, IANAL, but you are. Thoughts? Help?

Posted by Noel at 08:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 28, 2005

Web Host Wanted

Jumpdomain, who hosts my personal domain, finally struck out. I’m not picky, but if I do have a problem, I like to have it acknowledged and fixed, either in a timely manner or at all. Unfortunately, there's not another hosting company at-bat, so I'm scouting for a big stick to add to the roster.

If you want to share the name of a star in your stable, leave a comment below or fire me a pitch.

I have my eye on Dreamhost.

Posted by Noel at 05:37 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 09, 2005

More on Walker Percy, Terrorism, and English Languge Data Parsing

In the 1987 novel The Thanatos Syndrome, Walker Percy sketches a couple of scenes that seemed to me quite ludicrous from a software and data angle. In response to the inevitable crisis, the love interest (apparently with l337 h4X0r 5ki11Z) runs to her home in the marsh, boots up her pc, and interfaces with four different government databases to cross-reference and visually display a map that correlates the chemical elements in state water supplies with a map of the state.

Not that the hardware is silly, nor that the data is silly. Both were quite accurately described by the incomparable Mr. Percy. What my mind balked at was to believe that four different government agencies have databases that are so easily mined, and a visualization software that can scale so well (from chemical concentrations in water to maps of the state).

Now, I think, I can finally see where we could get this. Google Maps + XML + Web Services for databases + English language data parsing.

The hard part was never getting the data (though that's interesting). Nor was it matching one thing with another (that's pretty cool too). The hard bit is, how do you come up with a thing in the first place just from raw data? There's no ontology in data, it's just data.

From the article:


"We have guys who can crack hard drives," Mr. Alexander said. "Getting the information out is easy. The hard part is sharing it, and organizing it, so that everybody in an agency, even nonexperts, can use it."

The data has always been there for the terrorists to use, or for companies to, ahem, lose track of (a la ChoicePoint). It's just that there's no easy way to pull it together into something useful.

This post is partly in response to willas comment on my last post about English language data parsing.

Posted by Noel at 05:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 08, 2005

"The man took his dog to the park. After playing ball and seeing a duck he went home."

Intriguing approach to searching unstructured data in the Grey Lady last week. Taking advantage of latent meaning in documents by parsing syntax begs for wider dissemination in commercial software. That's business intelligence. Along with bottom-up metadata, I like where computer language analysis is going.

Posted by Noel at 08:45 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

January 10, 2005

Search and Discover

Reading up on electronic discovery issues at the moment. Will begin questioning & addressing the issues soon with the angles of "how does this impact how IT & projects are handled?" and "what does this mean for barely legal programmers & other software writers?" Interested? Resources? Comment!

Posted by Noel at 11:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 05, 2004

Is the IT Department the New Business Consultant? Part 2

I'm reminded of Rem Koolhaas, who, besides having one of the coolest names ever, is the founder of the architecture firm OMA, as well as the business consultancy AMO. The difference? One designs the buildings, the other designs the business that are housed in the building. Koolhaas found that his in-depth studies of how organizations functioned often were more useful to the business than the new building itself, so he spun off the study group into its own entity.

IT does the same type of studies. Because we use computers, we are forced to map how a business works in an unforgivingly logical fashion--we are ushering in the System of the World that Stephenson imagines. The hard part of designing programs, as Steve McConnell and Fred Brooks remind us, is defining requirements and developing a conceptual model that meets those requirements. Once that model is developed down to the pseudocode level, the work flows quite naturally.

As time grows, more and more aspects of business are being so analyzed by IT departments. What they often find is ambiguity, incoherence, and inability to do the job well. Their job, then, is to clarify, cohere, and execute well the programs that replace processes or support tasks. As we do this, we are unintentionally forcing the business into a model that more closely follows the program--just like a good business consultant. In envisioning this scenario with my boss, we concluded that within ten years the IT department would have major say in business process decisions.

Although it seems that the success of the IT department in bending the business to their ways might have to do with how many bearded men it contains.

Posted by Noel at 03:39 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 18, 2004

"Handling by Lotus": From the Real World

At 4:30 in the evening, a week ago, a lawyer emailed my boss: "Why does my secretary's iManage search for matter-related documents turn up my private emails about the matter's client?" Oh.

My boss runs to my office, where I've been stuck migrating mailboxes from Lotus Notes to .pst files to iManage via drag'n'drop for the week (try doing that for lawyers that think it necessary to put the single monthly email about the firm's income/expenses into an individual folder...for every month of the past five years!). We gang up, and replicate her search. Yep, there they are, available for the entire firm to see, and boy, that's not baby-talk about the client in there. This is Real Business; this is bad.

How did this happen? It's definitely related to the mailbox migration that my co-worker and I are doing. But how? We test, and figure out that we are not misfiling those emails. Instead, it appears that individual, random emails are failing to get their public/private bits set by the DBMS in the iManage database. We are pounding the MS SQL server with nine boxes, all migrating mailboxes full-bore. Oh boy. We all decide to stay late and fix this. We begin to go through and search all thirty-six users migrated mailboxes for public emails. But then our SQL guru notices that not only are some of the emails mis-set public/private--they aren't filed into a folder!. They're in Never-Never Land, the flatspace. Double-plus ungood. The DBMS is failing transactions on random single records and not rolling the transaction back!!! We're losing data, and not being warned! Where's my towel?!

Tearing of shirts, weeping and knashing of teeth. Knuckle biting, turbo to iManage veep for tech support, pizza and beer for the team, ftp server logs to their tech support, argue about implications and timelines for conversion project. Our migration from Lotus Notes -> Microsoft Outlook/Interwoven Mailsite is coming to a crest, after a year of planning and work, and we're two weeks away from our planned switch. But now we've lost trust in the vendor's software, and two weeks isn't enough to get that back.

The next morning, we postpone our grand Lotus Notes -> Microsoft Outlook/Interwoven Mailsite conversion. It's been on the books for a year, we were two weeks away from rollout, and we had spent roughly two man-years preparing for the conversion to happen over Thanksgiving weekend. But because iManage's transaction manager goes flacky once it is pounded(?!), we have to postpone for another six months. The Inverwoven guy said "It's like taking a Ford Escort to 120mph. Somethings going to happen, but we don't know what." But an Escort has a speed-limiter. iManage is an enterprise-level knowledge management system--a Mercedes-Benz. And our network design is within their spec. It's their DBMS that is falling apart like an Isuzu with "Handling by Lotus".

Learned: test, test, test, before, during, after. We didn't catch the failure, but we did find out about it before we went live. It's better to keep user's trust and be late than to be on time and lose trust. We only have one chance to convince our attorneys that this is a Good Thing--lose some of their documents, and they'll be burned one too many times.

The project is on indefinite hold; the attorney's private "Joke" folders are still only visible to them; the matter-centric workspace will have to wait for another day to revolutionize the firm's workflow.

Posted by Noel at 09:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 12, 2004

Jotspot Beta

Just got emailed that I'm in the Jotspot Beta program. To quote from my application, I plan on using it "to take over the world." This post is more a reminder to myself to post a review in a couple of weeks, once I've set it up and begun using it. Hmm, what shall I do with my own personal knowledge wiki..?

As a side note, one of the Cool Features is that you can post to your wiki by emailing it's address. Which is the exact same feature promoted by our now-postponed (and as a collorary, arguably non-enterprise-class) Interwoven iManage KM software. I'll be blogging this topic in more depth later....

Posted by Noel at 09:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack