Dave Jenkins

Posit: All software becomes commoditized over time.  Either the original developing company reduces its price point to maintain market share or extend into ubiquity (MSWindows), goes freeware to maintain format hegemony (Adobe PDF), or more often– gets reverse engineered and released into the wild by those communists in the Open Source community.

Posit: The online user community has swung from corporate-driven top-down groups (slashdot, classmates, espn.com) to individualistic spewing (blogs), to childish connected networks (friendster, myspace, facebook) to now swinging back somewhere in the middle of all three: new corporate startups using grass roots networking to tie together individuals within their tribes with a more complex purpose than just zombie biting and superpoking each other.

Posit: This evolution is the result of the combination of those two points: facebook-like social networking software is now commodised and freely available.  People will no longer blog in their separate spaces, but will collectively blog within their tribe.

Just today I signed up for another social network: www.planetetail.com — a network limited to ecommerce professionals with only one apparent rule: no job postings (not sure why, but okay).  Last week I signed up for www.geni.com — a social network with all my in-laws, sisters and their extended families.  Literally, my blood, my tribe.  It is no longer enough to just be a random collection of people, it now must be a social network with some purpose.  Ironically, this may actually hold some value for MySpace if they took a draconian step: kick off every person who doesn’t play in a band.   That network was supposed to be a place for indie rockstars to get their message out.  But just like MTV, it soon became cursed with tweens, hangers-on, and the dredges that read gossip magazines.  If MySpace kicked them all of, and required people to submit just one original MP3 recording of their band/song/rap/whatever to get back on, the site could retake the high ground, and become the network of musicians.

At a recent conference in Las Vegas, everyone was yaking on and on about social networking and tapping into “web 2.0″ (which shows you how far behind the marketing people are).  There were plenty of vendors there to try and sell me such packages, but every last one of them suffered from three fatal flaws:

1. These software services wanted money– a lot of money– stupid corporate big software-like numbers.  Nope.
2. No one could explain to me what/how it would work, other than to simply try and stick something on at the bottom of every page with all the other suckerfish.
3. Online communities hate corporations (just like someone else I know) telling them what to do and how to think.  If anything, the only real communities come up by themselves with two 15 year-old kids hacking things together in a basement somewhere.

I’ve got a couple of ideas myself cooking up on some network sites.  Now, thanks to Drupal and the other freeware packages out there, I can build my social network concepts with just two turntables and a microphone.

Well, I told ya so.  The iPhone isn’t doing so well in Japan, and has an uphill climb ahead of it.  As reported in a poll conducted by the Nikkei Business, 59% of respondents had “no intention to buy”, and another 26% had “no interest.”  That left 2.5% who intend to buy, and another 13% who may think about it.

Apple just doesn’t have the juice in Tokyo– almost everything there is either clearly wabi-sabi and traditional, or slick-plastic-wonderland-emotive.  This goes for cars, buildings, magazines, shows, and even the girls in Harajuku.  The iPhone’s sex appeal that is so compelling to clunky plaid-shirted Americans is just another plastometallic toy to the Japanese.  Even at that, the iPhone comes up short in functionality– no terrestrial TV, poor kanji anticipation, and an underdeveloped app market.  Japan, like Europe, has fierce competition amongst calling plans and contracts; they don’t have the Faustian vendor plans like in the United States, so iPhone’s lock in with Softbank is a big turn off.

I don’t have an iPhone.  I think I want one, but at the same time, I find myself using a cellphone less and less.

Meh.

(thanks to Gen Kanai and Joi Ito for the photo)

An old college roommate once took a job somewhere in the South, where Dixie was certain to rise again.  He sent us a postcard showing a statue of some confederate general on his steed, sword raised defiantly about to charge into glory.  The only thing my friend wrote on the back was “The War was over long before it began“.

It was one of the most cryptic, and yet compelling messages I’ve had.  It left the whole war– and by extension– his contemporary experiences up for interpretation.

To this day, whenever I meet my friend (once every few months or years now), my first statement is “The war was over long before it began”.  I am not sure he even remembers the postcard at this point, but invariably I am then treated fantastic insight in to the current war (local, state, national, ethical, economic– you name it) or core philosophical challenge that lays before Western Civilization.   Mind you, this isn’t the Wolf Blitzer tripe about what Obama vaguely promises or who McCain’s brother slept with or all that shit (the masses can read People or Time or Teen Beat for that).  No, my friend is much more concerned for the complete and utter lack of advanced discourse,  attainable rhetoric, or salient policy toward anything real.  This time, the war was for the remaining scraps of liberal democracy– and no one seems to really care if it slips out of our fingers.  I am left with the impression that we are working on a millennial scale– my friend mentioned that 600 years of The Enlightenment was at risk.  The war was over long before it began (sure– but which side?).

I promised myself I wouldn’t delve into mindless political opinion on this site– I just liked the phrase, and the internal struggle that it triggers in the heads of all of us– our jobs (or lack of them), the landlord, that fuck-up of a middle manager in your office, the middle east (Gulf War II, Gulf War I, 6-Day War, Suez Crisis, Lawrence and the boys, or the crusades led by St Louis– take your pick), or just the jealousy of those who make a fortune off of writing blogs.

The war was over long before it began.  Discuss amongst yourselves.

Most IT execs try to boil down their decisions to simple dichotomies: build vs. buy, distributed vs. centralized, minimum ante vs technology leadership, good vs. oracle, freedom vs. microsoft. This pattern repeats amongst the developer crewmates: visual studio vs. rational rose, DOM vs. script, cron vs. UP, and the most ancient of wars: vim vs. emacs.

Now that I am on the business side, and not held directly responsible for the tactical stuff, I can see why the business suits always simply stare at IT people in agogged wonder– these tight decision trees have nothing to do with the real world. Developers and engineers live their whole day in an artificial construct of reference hash tables, primary keys, routing diagrammes, and copies of 1s and 0s that need to be shephered from here to there and back safely. The engineer’s job consists of either a) building more of that artificial construct, b) cleaning up someone’s poor interpretation of that same construct, or c) defending their version against someone’s proposed revision.

Business people think in analog– sales are way up, slightly up, break even, almost to goal, a little off, under plan, or ‘in need of budget revision’. Notice the complete lack of any diacritical statements next time you talk to marketing– it’s all shades of orange (the new gray), very little black and white. Notice how the IT guys will pepper endless questions trying to make some logical tree out of statements like “make it cool”.

So what? Well, I don’t know yet. I’ve spent several years trying to come up with the magick formula, the correct set of questions to ask, the right analogy to frame things for the business owners. I hve learned the following points (in no logical order):

• never start with a stark choice– it scares the business types, and makes them inherently defensive
• when picking your analogy, try something close to the listeners’ heart: cars seem to be popular here in the midwest, while history worked well on the east coast. Japanese like to use organic metaphors: seeds, vines, roots (nemawashi), etc. Be careful with chess– your listened either has no clue about the game, or is a grandmaster– either way, they’ll start asking questions about your analogy for which you don’t have answers (you didn’t think that many moves ahead– oh the irony!)
• When laying the groundwork for your eventual “this vs. that” question commital point, make sure you attribute all the incoming data to someone else: bonus points for attibuting the background research/material to the same person you are about to ask for a decision– they feel smarter already.
• multi-variate choices are much better in terms of quick understanding, but they usually require a whiteboard to lay out the different factors involved (i.e. cost and complexity, time and ROI). At this point, the best you’re gonna get is to have your decider play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey somewhere on the whiteboard. This is a false answer– it is still analog-y and relative to their opinion. You still don’t have a hard decision (maybe that’s enough?). Warning: do not attempt multi-variate using only verbal communication. Double Warning: don’t try this with a metaphor, as your listener will forget the question and only answer their opinion about dogs/cars/football teams/naval battles.
• Whenever possible, practice your Fractal Management.

We all get attachments from vendors via email: proposals, MSAs, SOWs, NDAs, Ammendments, Contracts, etc.  Some people leave these attached to their email– trusting that the email server won’t go boots up.  Some people download attachments to their desktop, which soon fills up the entire screen (unless you can arrange them in a nice pattern).  The real type-a nutjobs create a separate folder for each set, which we all know we should do, but we’re too busy to spend the 15 seconds.

I fall in the second category– everything goes onto my desktop until I clean it up every Friday afternoon.  The problem I have is that it requires me to open each file and read the first paragraph to know which vendor sent me the doc.  Why?  BECAUSE EVERYONE ALWAYS SENDS ATTACHMENTS WITH REDUNDANT OR NON-DESCRIPTIVE TITLES, DAMMIT.  I work at Brown Shoe.  I know that,  the vendor knows that.  Why, for hell’s sake, does the vendor from Google or Akamai or Accenture or IBM or Pete’s Bait Shop always send me a document titled “brown shoe.doc”?   It doesn’t tell me anything, other than to remind me where I work (Thanks, genius!).  I know why: because on their file system inside Salesforce or whatever, they have organized things nice and tidy, they have a doc for Brown Shoe, for GM, for Budweiser, and for the Department of Corrections (”doc.doc”).  They’re not thinking about me, the customer.  They’re only worried about brownie points for cleanliness inside their own sales department.

Please, please, please: if you’re going to send me something, title it well: “Akamai 2008 Proposal.doc”, “Google NDA.doc”, “PetesBait Price List.xls”.

I won’t even get started on the fact that these should be coming over in an ODF-compliant format…

So, we’ve all disparaged Waterfall software development as overly cumbersome and simply undoable in today’s go-go world.  Agile came along and promised to tighten everything up, but in reality most people just say the words ‘agile’ and they really mean ‘cram waterfall methods into 2 week segments’.  (”Manifesto“? Really? The last guys to use that word didn’t do so well.)
Here is my new proposal for software and project management: The Fractal Method.

The Fractal Method will take 3-5 core principles and apply them at all levels.  Just as a fractal equation takes 3-5 variables in some algorithm and applies them at any scale (kilometer or millimeter level), the Fractal Method for project method will take 3-5 core principals and apply them at large application development as well as small tasks.  This seems stupidly simple, but that’s one of my first suggestions for ‘Core Principles’: keep things stupidly simple.

To implement The Fractal Method, make sure of the following:

1. Get all the business people and developers in a room and tell them that we’re all going to follow the Fractal Method.
2. Explain that the method means that we’re all signing on to 5 core principles, and we’re going to decide them right now.
3. Make sure the Core Principles are short and simple enough to be memorized by EVERYONE
4. Play a game so that everyone begins to memorize them.
5. Go sing some Karaoke together, because everything will be great from now on

Anything beyond this, in my opinion, is hand-waving and/or bullshit project management fluff.  PMs make decent money, and for some reason it’s all too tempting for a PM to schmooze the bosses with fancy methods and drawings and charts to show that they’re worth all that money, when I would much rather pay them to actually get shit done.

With that, here are my Core Principles (if we were to deploy the Fractal Method):

1. Keep things stupidly simple.  Call bullshit on complex proposals and passive-voice responses
2. Write everything down in a common area.  Wikis are nice.  So are white boards in the hallway
3. Divide by 3. Divide each task into 3 subtasks until each item is less than 1 day’s worth of work
4. 20 Minutes. Meetings are never longer than 20 minutes.  If you didn’t decide everything, that’s okay, because you can meet again later, but 20 minutes was enough to give people things to do between now and the next meeting.
5. Results win. Results are worth more than estimations or plans

There ya go.  I think I’ll start writing a book.

Well, I’ve been here in Tokyo a week, and have yet to go sing karaoke. As it is, I’ve been back and forth between Japan, Korea, and China for 20 years now, and I’ve only been to karaoke 3 times. Here’s how it usually goes down: someone in the office [misguidedly] decides that Karaoke is a good idea, and books a room (a.k.a. “karaoke box”, and no that’s not a euphemism– get your mind out of the gutter). We all go, start drinking, and start singing. In general, it’s an okay time, if only because the office is buying all the whiskey sours you can drink and savoury snacks you can munch. Unfortunately, not all of us humans can sing, and even less of us can perform. But the kicker is: are you sure you want to perform in front of people you want to take you seriously in a meeting the next morning?

Karaoke Do’s:

1. Drink. Drink a lot. Don’t drink so much that you pass out, because your co-workers will draw things on your forehead.
2. Sing Japanese enka ballads. To be honest, they are the only songs that sound half-decent in karaoke.
3. That’s about it.

Karaoke Don’ts:

1. Don’t sing heavy metal rock songs. You’re not David Lee Roth, nor are you Steven Tyler. Even if Diamond Dave were to show up in your karaoke box (again, no euphemism), are you sure you’d want to hear him singing ‘Jump’ to a pre-recorded half-assed track 4 feet in front of you ?
2. If you’re a gaijin, and don’t understand Japanese/Korean, you’ll likely find your friends shoving the Elvis Presley or Beatles or Animals onto your lap. Resist this urge, unless you want to make everyone depressed. House of the Rising Sun is a kick-ass song, but only because that singer takes it that seriously and pulls if off, and that organ solo is the greatest organ solo of all time.
3. Don’t just sit there and thumb through the catalog looking for the next track. This is the most common death of karaoke night: 6 people with their noses buried in the song catalog, fearing what to sing when their turn comes around, and simultaneously embarrassed to make eye contact with the schnook up in front of the room belting out an off-pitch Madonna track.
4. Don’t stay for more than 90 minutes. You should be good and loaded by then, to the point where you’re willing to sing on the train with no backing music required. Why pay the room fee at that point?
5. Beware of the whiskey goggles. These are people you work with, and it doesn’t matter how much she seems to look like Gwen Stefani up there with the Mic– you’ll regret it later. Remember there are not enough people here to hide your flirting, like you did at that one Christmas Party.
6. When someone invariably passes out, don’t try to help. You’re blotto yourself, and you’ll just cause more trouble.  Just amuse yourself quietly by drawing on their foreheads and wait for the paramedics.

So, there ya go.

As goes Tokyo, so the rest of the world will follow. This is hard to swallow for women’s fashion, but it certainly holds true for cell phones, personal electronics, and violence comics. I’m in Tokyo, and here’s my prediction: the laptop’s days are numbered.

People want portable computing, no doubt. However, the market is quickly being divided into two camps: larger laptops for 20-something hipsters in studio apartments where the laptop really doesn’t go anywhere but cannot take up the entire desk, and small palm-tops that carry all the power of a “laptop” but actually fit in your pocket, aka, the palm-top.

My wife wanted a smaller (10 inch screen) laptop, but we are hard-pressed to find one at Yodobashi or Yamada Denki. My theory was confirmed by 3 different salesmen: either go bigger for the unportable all-in-one (with georgeous 19″ screens), or go down to the palm-top tablets.  It is worth mentioning that, here in Japan, this laptop comes with a TV tuner, and serves as the entire media center: DVD player, TV, mp3 player, and AV anime download-o-rama.  For what it’s worth, the Playstation3 also does all of these (including a browser) along with some kick-ass games, and just needs a nice LCD screen.
The only thing that may prevent the death of the laptop in the US is the college system that allows laptops (Japan does not)– students need something that fits on a desk, gets hauled from class to class, and has a big enough screen to watch ’scrubs’ or ‘chuck’ or whatever the kids are into lately.

Thanks again to my friend Matt, we now have a consistent basis to rank mediawiki sites on www.wikindex.com. The score is essentially a combined log(10) of the daily updates, number of articles, and user count. The philosophy guiding the score is that a successful wiki is really reflective of an active community, and would need a fair population of users, a critical mass of articles for a base reference, and maintenance/currency from daily updates.

If you have a wiki, please consider adding it to the wikindex. We will continue to work on gathering stats from the dekiwiki crowd and hope to add those rankings in as well. We are open to any suggestions for improvement. One that occurs to me: remove the google ads– maybe not worth it?

Some odd things to note from the rankings: World of Warcraft fanboys write a lot, but not as much as the Star Wars geeks (Triumph could have told you that). Both beat Star Trek. Superman and Batman are bigger than Final Fantasy (as it should be) but smaller that Yu-Gi-Oh (Wha-t3h-fu?). Just outside the top 50, however, is a wiki about furries (*blech**shudder* no link on purpose) and it’s bigger than the Conservapedia: a wiki for right-wing nutters.

The Average American moves every 7 years. Some people stay in one place their whole lives, which means that some of us move every three or four years or more. Within that group, some of us skip between countries. I admit to that wanderlust. I admit that I get antsy if I am in the same town for more than 4 years. As a result, I’ve got bank accounts in 5 cities across three countries. I’ve got IRA accounts from three different vendors from former employers. Yes– consolidation would probably be a good idea, but it’s nice to have that account ready to go in a foreign country when the shit finally hits the fan here in the Twighlight’s Last Gleaming.

Mint.com was made for this. It has a pretty easy interface and some cool juju on the backend to assure security. It downloads the current transaction records from your bank accounts, credit cards, investment portfolios, and savings all into one online screen. Moreover, it provides the fun Charts-n-Graphs on your spending habits that made Quicken so entertaining. This is no less secure than when Quicken accesses your accounts. In fact, it’s much more secure: the transactional records are only going one way, and between mint.com and your bank. With Quicken, those transactions are going from the bank to your half-assed ISP, to your wifi antenna in your basement, and to your windows-pc, where you’ve likely got a virus, a root-kit, and a keylogger installed by the Russian mob– not to mention the teenage neighbor who sniffed your WEP key last year and uses your network to share bit-torrents of Nelly videos.

Mint.com: thumbs up!