The TeleInterActive Lifestyle

Today is my 52nd birthday. At lunch with my partner, Clarise, she surprised me with an iPhone. And I'm blogging this from the phone. This is going to take some getting used to, and some soul searching about my 10+years of loyalty to Palm. More later.

Update: I'm actually publishing this from back at my computer, as the mobile Safari couldn't show the scroll bar in the "Categories" selection area of our blog administration software. Ah well, and so it goes.

Update: On Saturday morning, I was able to make a phone call with the iPhone, 15 minutes later, when I "awoke" the iPhone to make another call, it was showing an error message that the I had an invalid SIM. After an infuriating experience with the Apple Idiot Genius, Lach, and his supervisor Robert, trips to an AT&T store to get a new SIM, this one being invalid, and a wonderful experience with the Apple Care representative, Rachel, I now have a new iPhone. I'll post another day on the full story. For now, you can read about my experience and others with similar experiences, on the Apple support forums, "Out of the Blue - Invalid SIM Card".

Over the seven years that Clarise and I have been running InterActive Systems & Consulting, Inc. we've used our 6D™ methodology to manage InterASC Professional Services project engagements. This methodology came about from Clarise's 20-plus years of working in the software industry, and her training and experience as a project manager for IT implementations at HP, Oracle, CapTech, Williams and KP. And she's a PMI certified PMP. In the 1970's & '80's I worked as a program, project and line manager in Aerospace, switching in the '90's and 00's to working in IT. We brought our expertise together first at Oracle, and over the 14 years since, have been working together on refining our approaches to managing IT projects implemented by and for distributed workgroups. Colleagues pointed out that our 6D™ methodology was becoming more and more Agile in its techniques. Over the past two years, as we've been working more with open source, IT appliance and SaaS companies, we've been experiencing more and more about the community approach to managing distributed workgroups.

Learning from the Beekeeper James Dixon, CTO of Pentaho, Susan Gasson of Drexel University, the Agile Alliance and various scrum practitioners, such as Todd McGrath of supergloo, inc. and our own experiences, we had been selected to speak at the PMI NorCal 2007 Symposium at the end of September. For a variety of reasons, we didn't get to present our mindmap of our current thinking.

We generally start our presentations with the mindmap collapsed so that only the first level of branches show, and then expand along the branches in which the audience seems interested. If they don't tell us what interests them, we ask. That's difficult to do through a blog, so we're just showing the whole thing.

As time permits, we'll be discussing our 7D™ methodology with it's Strategic, Tactical and Scrum tracks in this blog.

On my recent trip to D.C. I hooked up with an old college friend and his wife, both of whom are attorneys for different government agencies. The wife, who is the more technically astute of the two, was a regular telecommuter; the husband an occasional one. Neither do so anymore because the security restrictions have become overbearing, and the implementing technology confusing and policy restrictions on telecommuting have become onerous.

Most importantly though… The nail in the coffin of their telecommuting days… A new policy on "snow days"… Telecommuters must use PTO to not work on any days that the office is closed, and all non-telecommuting workers get a day off, due to weather making it unsafe to drive to work.

We know managerial resistance is still the biggest reason that distributed work is still the next big thing. And of course a good chunk of our consulting revenue comes from organizations needing help in developing and implementing distributed work programs. But it's still discouraging to hear that the message just isn't getting through the way it should. Could there be a leadership issue here?
-- Jim Ware, Managers Continue to Resist Telecommuting in the Future of Work Weblog

A leadership issue indeed, and all too prevalent.

... More or less. A week ago, Sunday, 2007 June 24, late in the day, we started a simple update to our hosting server's control panel software. It failed, and in a most horrible way, rendering the server unusable. While this is an unmanaged server, we do subscribe to both RedHat Enterprise Linux and SWSoft Plesk through our rack host, ServerBeach. They had approved the latest Plesk 8.1.1 for use, and upgrade from their last approved version, 7.5.4. After investigating our update woes, they offered two courses of action

1. They would swap out our four year old hard drive for a new one and apply the latest RHEL and Plesk disk image - instant upgrade but without any of our accounts, domains or data.
2. They would escalate to SWSoft, with no ETA for a response.

Hmm, a new drive, upgrade the OS as well as the control panel. What's the downside? Let's check our backups... Yep, they're all there from our night [really early morning] backup. We keep two days worth and the size of the backup files one day to the next seem right. Looking at older backup files that we've downloaded - yep sizes look right.

Go for it. Especially as ServerBeach will leave the old drive in place as a slave. Mount and copy. YeeHAH!!!

Oh, NO

Backups made with 7.5.4 aren't compatible with restore into 8.1.1 [or any 8.x]. There is a backup convert utility, but it has known problems with the system level restore, and is questionable with domain level. We have both, so let's see...

Yep, the system level doesn't work for us either. The domain levels work, but they are hinky. Maildir from the backups is placed under Maildir, so we have ../Mailnames/domainName/userName/Maildir/Maildir so the email MUAs [clients] don't see mail, just the administrative directories. Move, copy, domain by domain, rinse, repeat, and email is back. That took two days.

All web sites were inaccessible. CMS and wiki systems give errors, not at all liking the way the restore set up MySQL. Luckily, Clarise still retains some powers from her old title of Queen of the Databases. And, humbly, my past experiences as Lord of Chaos hasn't hurt either. Restore, edit, reconfigure, copy, rinse, repeat.

It has taken the full week, but all web sites, CMS, wiki and blogs are reading. Not everything is 100% operational, searchable, editable, but all is readable. Stacy and Jennifer of ServerBeach were especially helpful.

Let's see what happens here when I hit "Save".

Update: It worked the first time.

And you were wondering why a blog about the TeleInterActive Lifestyle™ wasn't drooling about the iPhone. Well, when the Motricity eReader Pro is available for it, as well as mind maps and a good outliner... open that SDK, Apple... wait, wrong rant.

A friend asks why he bought new licenses for Microsoft Office, when Google Apps have all the features he'll ever need. Todd, maybe you felt that you needed to suffer. There are so many alternatives now, though Microsoft Office is the standard in the business world, and if you must send editable DOC, XLS, PPT, etc files out, you need M$ Office, as true interoperability and format preservation are still dreams. But Todd, what about OpenOffice.org for your Windows and Linux machines, or NeoOffice for your MacOSX machines? What about Zoho if Google Apps left you longing for more?

I feel very lucky that we've managed to convince our latest customers to use open source and self-hosted blogs, wikis and collaboration software. We have an instantly updated knowledgebase and a record of how each decision was made.

Oh, well, Todd, remember, what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger.