Jimmy Z

I just got a new blackberry pearl for work. So far I really like it. It is amazing that you can type with such a small keyboard.

I’m writing this with my phone to practice typing with this little keyboard.

Maybe I’ll start to use twitter for more practice. Does anyone know of a good way to tweet from a blackberry?

If you find yourself falling behind in getting all of your emails read, like I have in the past week, you may find it useful to put the following in your Gmail search:

is:unread in:inbox

This will filter your messages to just those that are unread and in your inbox. Pretty cool. This help a lot for me because I have a lot of filters on my mail that mark some mailing list emails as ‘read’ and put others under different labels without marking them as read.

Tagged with: Gmail, tips

I just had to post this. Johnny Lee is doing amazing things with a Wii Remote. One of my favorites is the video on head tracking for desktop vr displays. It’s incredible! When you have a minute, it’s worth checking out.

[Wii Remote photo taken by Dave Minnich]

Tagged with: wii

I finally made it into the Beta of Grand Central! So far it seems really cool. I have 5 invites that I can give away to the first people who comment on this post.

If you haven’t heard about Grand Central, it’s a service that gives you a new phone number that you can use to route calls to any of your other phones. It offers Spam call filtering, a cool online voice mailbox, and click2call features.

One of the coolest features that I’ve seen is being able to seamlessly transfer a call from one phone line to another. So, say that someone calls you while you’re on the road, and you’re just getting home. You answer the call, begin your conversation, walk through your front door, press your * key on your phone and your home phone then rings. You pick up your home phone and continue your conversation on your land-line without using up more of your cell phone minutes!

It appears that most of the features will remain free after the Beta period, except for the click2call features, which will end up charging a per-minute fee.

Who else wants a Grand Central account?

I came to my blog today and saw that my first post showing was May 25, and I though, “Oh snap! I’ve been hacked!” Which is what Phil Burns thought he had experienced earlier this week when his blog’s database rolled back to April.

Then I realized I just hadn’t written anything since then and time has blown by too fast. I guess that means that I’ve been really busy.

I was about to lay down to go to sleep after an exhausting day, when I realized that there was a final that I hadn’t taken yet. Actually, the final is to write a blog post about what I learned during my Information Architecture class. So, I hope I’m not too late in submitting this last final of my college career. Here’s a wrap-up of what I’ve learned through the course of this semester.

One of the main things that I found unique about this semester is that we used blogging as a platform for discussion and class feedback. I think this was inspired by Paul Allen’s Internet Marketing class which also required class members to write in blogs. I had a great experience blogging in Paul’s class, and I also enjoyed blogging about Information Architecture related topics. I am also excited now to have time to blog more regularly about other topics of interest as well.

Service Oriented Architecture

We started out the semester talking about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). This was quite exciting for me, because I have been a big fan of web services, which has been one of the major components of the Web 2.0 movement. Previous to the class, I had worked on building small mash-up applications using Flickr, Geocoder.us, and a few other popular web services. I had created a few web services of my own, mostly following the REST style of web service. For this class, I created some SOAP web services using php5’s SOAP extension and Ruby on Rails’ ActionService.

I really think that web services are going to be powering more and more organizations’ enterprise applications. There have been interesting debates in the Ruby on Rails world about the decision that Rails won’t support database stored procedures. From the pro-stored procedure side of things, data architects argue that stored procedures are the way to keep data integrity among all of the accessing applications. David H Hansson, the creator of rails, says the following:

“We took a pretty radical stand: Stored procedures and all things that make your database clever are evil… If you tell a lot of IT shops that, they’ll be majorly offended, because that’s just the way they do things.”

Web services help a company maintain data integrity, because all other functional areas of an organization and their applications use the services to access and manipulate data, rather than accessing the database itself. This gives one more layer of abstraction, and serves a similar purpose to stored procedures. It will be interesting to see if Ruby on Rails’ CRUD-style REST web service library called ActionResource takes off in other areas of web development. For more details on this see the slides(pdf) and video.

Model Driven Architecture

The next topic that we covered in depth was Model Driven Architecture (MDA). My last couple of blog posts covered that topic, so I won’t write a whole lot here. I think MDA has made some major strides in abstracting development to a higher level and could prove promising in the years to come. I think it still has some hurdles to overcome such as designing a system based on user interface needs rather than on the data model that sits behind it. Again, I’m not an expert in MDA, and it’s quite possible that systems exist that more fully address my concerns.

Database Scaling and Optimization

Database design is something that I really pride myself in doing well. I had a good time working as a Teaching Assistant to Dr. Gary Hansen’s database design class a few years ago. Although I felt that I could design a solid database schema to handle complex needs, I wasn’t so confident in my abilities in optimizing queries and scaling a database beyond your standard db box.

This semester gave me the opportunity to bring my skills way up in both optimization and scaling. As a team project, we studied MySQL scaling, and set up a master-slave db server configuration. We studied more complex scaling set ups, and I’m confident that I could implement any of these if I needed to in the future.

Our database optimization project was a fun one. We took complex queries the Mountain Recreation Properties site and optimized them to achieve better performance. After studying up on query optimization, I was able to turn one query that took ~5 seconds to process to under a second just by rewriting it. Then, I took it to under .02 seconds by adding appropriate indexes. I feel much more confident in optimizing any crazy slow-running query to achieve faster results.

Logging

The last concept we covered was logging. As my previous post on Log4J mentioned, I never had put much thought towards logging in any of my applications that I’d built in the past. Now that my eyes have been opened to the world of logging libraries and APIs, I am actually performing more logging tasks.

Once again I’ll plug Ruby on Rails as a superior web platform, as it has logging built right into the framework. Rails uses the standard Ruby Logger class, which is really quite good. Maintainable Software wrote a nice article on logging tips for rails. One of the most interesting things I discovered from that article is that you can perform logging out to a Firebug JavaScript console to help debug your AJAX applications. Pretty cool!

Value Added to My Education

Overall, I feel that my Information Architecture class really added a lot of value to my education. As a systems professional, I need to have a solid background in all of these areas to be a successful systems architect.

I’m now done with all of my finals. And I’ll graduate on Friday! It’s been an awesome last semester!

Jim Collins and his team of researchers set out to find the top turnaround companies that made the leap from good to great. Good to Great is the result of that massive research project. The team started with 1,435 good companies and narrowed them down to 11 that became great, based on their performance over the last 40 years. Jim wrote an article for FastCompany on Good to Great back in September of 2001 which gives a really good overview of the Good to Great principles.

One of my favorite principles that Jim outlines in this book is the principle of the Flywheel. When companies make the leap from good to great, analysts and newspapers go crazy and wonder what big thing that they did to make their company great. The reality is that it took a lot of work and buildup over time.

All of the good to great companies had level 5 leadership, and had done things right. They had the right people on board, and had confronted the brutal facts. They had found the one thing that they could be the best at, that they were passionate about, and that drove their economic engine. In other words they had embraced the hedgehog concept. They had a culture of discipline, and used technology to accelerate their business, although technology wasn’t their driving force. All of these elements together were the constant pushes that they made the flywheel turn.

In his book, Jim describes the flywheel as a “massive metal disk mounted horizontally on an axle, about 30 feet in diameter, 2 feet thick, and weighing about 5,000 pounds.” He says that it’s your job to turn this wheel and get it going as fast and long as possible. Turning this flywheel is like moving a company in a way that it will begin to produce results.

Here is my Flash animation that illustrates this concept:

It’s been almost a year since I did any kind of drawing/animation with Flash, and this took way to long to do, but I think it makes for a good visual of the flywheel concept.