Google and the Mac

From c/net Google gets serious about the Mac: "Google has long had a fondness for the Mac, with upwards of 6,000 of its 10,000 20,000 current employees opting to use the Mac over Windows." This is good news for people like me who use a mac as their primary development platform because it translates into more open source tools.

Engadget Interview with Jonathan Schwartz

Just read the Engadget interview with Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, on porting Java to the Google Android platform, and mobile platforms in general. According to Mr. Schwartz, not only is he using an iPhone, Sun's committed to delivering Java for the device. When asked about Google's Android platform, Schwartz turned attention to the upcoming JavaOne conference. Anyone who's used some of Google's developer products (GWT for example) already knows that Sun is working very closely with Google.

I have an iPhone also. I've been playing with the iPhone SDK, developing a couple of test apps. While I like the phone, I'm less excited about developing applications for the iPhone than I am about it having a Safari browser. I'd much rather use GWT to develop Ajax applications that can be run on IE, Firefox, Safari, Mozilla, and Opera browsers.

Think about it, developing rich client programs for browsers opens up a world of web enabled devices to you.

ComputerWorld Article on Leadership and WoW

I was recently reading a ComputerWorld interview of Byron Reeves, Revenge of the gamers: World of Warcraft is honing tomorrow's leaders. Reeves is the Paul C. Edwards Professor of Communication at Stanford University and a co-founder of Seriosity Inc. The article points to these reasons why business leaders should be playing online games:

Why play games?

• Pace: Leaders often have to make hundreds of strategic decisions during an hour of game play.
• Risk: The relatively mild consequences of failure allow players to test a variety of strategies.
• Revolving leadership: The temporary nature of many leadership roles allows people who tend to be real-world followers to try leadership opportunities and those who tend to be real-world leaders to get experience as followers.
• Scope: One World of Warcraft game leader, a former U.S. Army officer with a master's degree in human resource management, likened the leadership of an 80-person raiding guild to managing a midsize business.

-- Adapted from the Harvard Business Review

I've made similar observations, both as an occasional World of Warcraft player and as a parent of child who plays Runescape Now, I have to admit that when I play World of Warcraft I tend to go it alone as much as possible. I enjoy exploring the worlds, fighting the beasties, piling up loot, and increasing my skill level. I have also joined others on quests, helped those in need, etc.

My son, on the other hand, takes his Runescape playing to another level. He and his classmates often ban together to defeat other clans, build businesses, plunder, and share loot. They also pull pranks on each other and share their accounts to help each other gain the highest level possible. To boast of their conquests and brag on their bank accounts, they post YouTube videos.

As I've talked to my son about what he's learned from Runescape, I can see that, among other things, he's learned how to form teams to complete a common goal, how simple economies work, how to run a small business, and how to deal with risk. He and his friends are learning these skills in an environment where they can safely fail. He's also finding out that there are real economies attached to these MMORPGs; companies and individuals making real money by selling virtual items.

I agree with Mr. Reeves regarding the merits of online games and leadership development. There are plenty of essons in these virtual worlds. From the video game created with the help of Ben Duskin, a boy who had leukemia and used his Make a Wish wish to help other children with cancer, to Byron Reeves company, Seriosity, Inc. that has borrowed some of the concepts of online gaming to approach email productivity, there's no doubt that online (and video) games are having an impact our society.

CIO Dashboard

Recently I read the following InformationWeek article: Hunting the Elusive CIO Dashboard. As I read my heart began to race and I felt some panic. I didn't have a dashboard. Were other technology management professionals leaving me behind? Was there something I was missing? Did I even have any Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)? What was wrong with my leadership that I didn't have a nifty tool to peer into the inner workings of my organization? Then there was this statement "...when the CIO can't get a clear picture of the real-time data that underlies critical applications, infrastructure, and projects, IT too often ends up reacting to issues after users and customers are having problems." Man, that sounded too familiar.

Thus began my hunt for that elusive dashboard. I started with the question: "What are my KPIs?" I compiled a list of the things that keep me up at night namely: financials, resource allocation and workload, and network and systems performance.

My next question was "If these are the most important items to me, how do I track them today?" The truth is, I do track them. While I might not have a really cool dashboard, I do use multiple tools to get the information I need. I pull financial information out of our financial applications, I track resource usage and workload through our request system, and i track network and systems performance through our monitoring systems.

I began to think about how I could consolidate the data into a high level dashboard, and how I might want to organize one. This led me to do some research...by research I'm referring to googling variations of "CIO dashboard." I found several products that I won't list here, including some BI tools that are already in use in my organization. One thing that the majority of these tools require is for the data that feeds the dashboard to be in a database. Not a problem, 99% of the information I look at is pulled from a table.

The more I researched, the more I wanted to find a simple (and hopefully cheap) tool that would provide a front-end with the capability of linking to other applications for drilling into the details. Why reinvent the wheel? I eventually settled on an open source product called MarvelIT. MarvelIT is an Apache Jetspeed portal based product. It provides several cool little portlets that you use for building charts, reports, rss feeds, etc. It's MySQL based and also includes the drivers for Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle. As long as you, or someone on your staff, can create the queries and format some XML, MarvelIT will work for you. I really like that it's browser based a platform independent...translation it runs on Macs, Windows, and Linux machines.

As I mentioned earlier, 99% of the information I need can be pulled from an existing table. For the rest, mostly in the form of capital expenditures and internally developed software costs, I added some tables to the MarvelIT database (I could've created a separate database but I used MarvelIT's for convenience). MarvelIT provides some data entry portlet tools. I tied those into the tables I created so that I can update them from the site.

I organized my dashboard into two sections. The left side contains resource, systems, and network utilization. The right side contains my financial indicators. I set up URLs behind the charts and reports to the applications I'm pulling information from...well, at least those applications that have a web interface. I must admit it's really nice being able to track my KPI's in one place.

It took me less than a week to set up my CIO dashboard. If you're in IT management and you're looking for a dashboard tool without spending lots of money, I recommend MarvelIT. Click here to see a sample of my dashboard...before you ask it's using test data I loaded on my Macbook Pro.

Ubuntu/Tomcat 5.5 Issues

I've been running Ubuntu Linux, specifically Feisty Fawn, and Tomcat 5.5 on a server at my house for a few months now. So far I've encountered only one issue: Tomcat5.5 doesn't start properly. In order to start it (once the startup.sh script has run), I've had to go to the /var/log/tomcat5.5 directory and sudo cat the catalina.out file. Doing so jump starts the tomcat console and messages start displaying. Once the INFO: Server startup message appears, I ctrl-C out of the catalina.out file. While this workaround solves the issue, it causes me some extra steps every time I reboot the server or restart tomcat...not that I have to do that very often. But, it's a pain. Tonight I finally had enough and starting searching the web for a solution. I found an explanation and a solution here on Cefn Hoile's blog. Thanks Cefn! I've listed the solution below for those of you who find my blog first: the first time you startup tomcat you:

1. cd /var/log/tomcat5.5
2. sudo mv catalina.out catalina.out.old
3. sudo touch catalina.out
4. sudo chown tomcat55:nogroup catalina.out