Part of being older, be more patience with yourself

It is easy to be in a competitive driving mode.  When I was program manager on products, I learned to drive from some of the best.  Keeping dates in your heads easily, action items tracked, when to push harder.  A tip I learned from a friend is when you want to ship really hard products you need to be an "ass" and piss off people.  One manager I had said if she is not getting regular complaints about her team, they aren't pushing hard enough.

I have long past stopped being a program manager.  No really desire to be an "ass" and ship.  Part of the problem being so driven is it easy to think patience is a waste of time.  "I want it now. If it doesn't work go get another one."

Here is an example.  I bought a Wacom Bamboo Stylus for my Galaxy Note 8 to make it easier to take notes than using the built in stylus.

I bought it from Costco so I knew I could return it if I had issues.  Got it tried on the Note 8. Didn't work.  What could be wrong.  Tried it on my Galaxy Note 1, worked fine.  Went back to Galaxy Note 8, didn't.  Built in stylus works of course.  What is wrong, doesn't make any sense.

Most likely the problem is pilot error, there is a mistake on my part.  What is wrong?  Pick up the stylus a few weeks later, let's try again.  Doesn't work.  Then another week or so later, I am using the Note 8 and see the UI for Battery Saving in S Pen.

• Battery saving: disables the pen detection feature while the pen is attached to save battery power.

When "Battery Saving" is on, the galaxy note pen feature is turned off.  So, the stylus, any stylus doesn't work unless you remove the pen when you have battery saving on.  Turn "battery saving" off, and the Bamboo Stylus works.

I could have gotten mad, frustrated at the device, returning it to Costco.   I had the data though that the pen worked on one device. It is a simple device. There must be something I don't see.  It is my mistake.

When I was a driven program manager, I would have been mad, "stupid device" doesn't work.  Taking a bit more time, having patience, got the Bamboo Stylus working, I understand Battery Saving feature.

Taking your time, relaxing and having more patience allows you to figure out more things.  On the other hand, it can look like you are not a driven over-achiever. I don't know about you, but I feel more satisfied having patience with myself than being a competitive driven ass. :-)

Finding behavior over time in locations, Bank Thiefs caught with Cell Tower Dumps

Arstechnica has a post that will get you thinking.  How bank thieves were caught with cell tower dumps that provided the list of phones numbers in a location with specific times.

Fishing for phone numbers

To find the High Country Bandits, the FBI asked a federal magistrate judge to approve four of these cell tower dumps. Investigators picked the "four most rural [robbery] locations in order to minimize the amount of extraneous telephone data that would likely be obtained through such a court order," including the bank in Pinetop, said the FBI. The judge approved the request.

Tower dumps aren't like going after targeted cell phone data on a known suspect; they are more like casting a limited dragnet, pulling in the phone numbers and (rough) location of everyone in the vicinity of the event. And tower dumps are usually obtained without a warrant, instead utilizing a "court order" with judicial oversight but a lower burden than "probable cause." This could potentially mean the government getting warrantless location information for hundreds of people who are not being investigated for any crime.

The article goes on to describe the finding of a phone # that was in each location which happens to be at the time when there was a bank robbery.  You get the idea.  With the phone # they traced more, etc, etc.

The FBI then went back to the judge and obtained more particular court orders covering these specific phone numbers. The phone numbers came back with subscriber names attached: Joel Glore and Ronald Capito. And the location data returned showed that these two phones had been present at most of the 16 bank robberies under investigation. Further, the data showed that both phones tended to travel from Show Low, Arizona, to the location of each bank just before each robbery.

It's tough being a Server Vendor, who would have thought Amazon.com is your competition

WSJ has an article on companies buying from Amazon Web Services instead of from a server vendor.

The Lafayette, La., company, has been shifting a growing proportion of its computing chores to computers operated by Amazon.com Inc. AMZN +0.65% In the past year, Schumacher purchased just one server from Hewlett-Packard Co., HPQ -0.04%says Douglas Menefee, Schumacher's chief information officer.

Five years ago, the company may have bought 50 such servers for as much as $12,000 apiece. "We don't really buy hardware anymore," says Mr. Menefee.

End users are dumping the old way of buying IT hardware then attempting the integration in-house or with IT services.  Users in the past were so happy it worked whether it was efficient and effective was many times not an issue.  Remember when you had a performance problem and the answer was to upgrade or buy more hardware?

Now end user want IT services that have been marketed by amazon.com, google, microsoft, salesforce, and others.  Enterprises want Big Data environments and high performance compute (HPC) solutions.  Here is an example of one solution for those who want to buy IT gear, but want an integrated deployed solution.

Microsoft says Best of Times are ahead which means the past and present are the worst

Microsoft corporate PR has a response to the media coverage of Steve Ballmer's retirement.  Part of what Microsoft says is there are different ways to see the facts of the situation, referencing Tales of Two Cities and Rashomon.  The ending line is where the point is trying to be made.

So when people see the “worst of times” while we see the best still ahead of us, we know it’s simply because we’re not looking through the same frame or the same time horizon.

So, if the best of times are ahead it means that at the present and/or the past is the "worst of times."  And part of what the media has had is an uncontrolled response is pointing out the worst of times at Microsoft during Steve Ballmer's CEO time.

One of the worst times at Microsoft which was before my time at the company. When Microsoft was totally behind OS/2.  Here is the history of David Weise, the god father of Windows 3.0 and savior of Microsoft going down the path of partnering with IBM.

 You see, at this time, Microsoft's systems division was 100% focused on OS/2 1.1.  All of the efforts of the systems division were totally invested in OS/2 development.  We had invested literally tens of millions of dollars on OS/2, because we knew that it was the future for Microsoft. 

Yes Microsoft was committed with hundreds of people developing OS/2.  Windows was not a priority.  Windows was less important than the future bet on OS/2. What saved Microsoft from these dark and worst times of the company was David Weise.  It was sad to see DavidW leave in 2005, but I, DaveO left one year later in 2006.  (One of the geeky left overs from the early days of Microsoft is we called each other by our e-mail aliases.)

DavidW with a small team built Windows 3.0 and beat a team much bigger who was using IBM's software development process.

And here was this little skunkworks project in building three that was sitting on what was clearly the most explosive product Microsoft had ever produced.  It was blindingly obvious, even at that early date - Windows 3.0 ran multiple DOS applications in virtual x86 machines.  It ran Windows applications in protected mode, breaking the 640K memory barrier.  It had a device driver model that allowed for development of true 32bit device drivers.  It supported modern displays with color depths greater than had been available on PC operating systems. 

There was just no comparison between the two platforms - if they had to compete head-to-head, Windows 3.0 would win hands down.

...

The rest was history.  At its release, Windows 3.0 was the most successful software project in history, selling more than 10 million copies a month, and it's directly responsible for Microsoft being where it is today.

And, as I mentioned above, David is responsible for most of that success - if Windows 3.0 hadn't run Windows apps in protected mode, then it wouldn't have been the unmitigated success it was.

David's spent the last several years working in linguistics - speech generation, etc.  He was made a distinguished engineer back in 2002, in recognition of his contribution to the industry. The title of Distinguished Engineer is the title to which all Microsoft developers aspire, it is literally the pinnacle of a developers career at Microsoft when they're named DE - other DE's include Dave Cutler, Butler Lampson, Jim Gray, Anders Hejlsberg.  This is unbelievably rarified company - these are the people who have literally changed the world.

From the worst of Microsoft's times came a heroic brilliant effort to invest in Windows 3.0.  The story of what DavidW did is knows amongst the old time Microsoft and probably remembered as some of the darkest times when the company was young and a servant of IBM to develop a future OS.  If you tried to do what DavidW did it would get you fired at most companies.

It is interesting to see how some of the most innovative products come from those who don't follow the direction of executive leadership.  One way to view how innovative companies are is whether the smart people can survive within the official corporate heirarchy.  If you look at many of the companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon there is a separate innovative ecosystem that works across boundaries.  Most executives will squash this innovative ecosystem.  If Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates had they would have killed Windows 3.0 to support the development of OS/2.

Case study of Washington Post using AWS

Jeff Bezos bought Washington Post, and there is speculation Washington Post would use amazon.com technology.  Here is a case study that was released a while ago on the Washington Post using AWS.

AWS Case Study: Washington Post

Peter Harkins, a Senior Engineer at The Washington Post, heard the news spread through the editorial department as the National Archives announced the release of Hillary Clinton’s official White House schedule. The data was going to be released to the public on March 19th at 10am. 17,481 pages of data as a non-searchable PDF.

The documents included Hillary Clinton’s daily activities as a First Lady during President Bill Clinton’s two terms in office, from 1993-2001 that were being made public under the Freedom of Information Act after multiple requests from journalists and watchdog organizations.

Harkins knew that reporters would be very interested in this data but it would take hundreds of man hours to pore through the document’s low-quality PDF files. So, about 45 minutes after the release, Harkins started working with the data, trying to find a way to convert the images into usable, searchable text and deliver them to the newsroom within the same news cycle.

Harkins first tested various PDF and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools to convert the images into machine-readable text. With these software tools, he estimated that it would take about 30 minutes per page to process the sizable document including reformatting, resizing, and scanning each page.

Working against time, Harkins moved the project to the cloud—Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). With Amazon EC2, he launched 200 server instances to process the images to his specifications. With a processing speed of approximately 60 seconds per page, the project was completed within nine hours and sent to the eager writers who began searching against the data. Then, Harkins and team created a polished web interface and made their searchable database available to the public 26 hours later.

Harkins ruminates, “EC2 made it possible for this project to happen at the speed of breaking news. I used 1,407 hours of virtual machine time for a final expense of $144.62. We consider it a successful proof of concept.”