Making wikis work at Novell

Some uses of wikis behind the firewalls at Novell, via Portals and KM

Novell uses wikis in a variety of ways, both within teams and across their enterprise. At the team level, they have become an important and integral part of software development. The open nature of wikis, coupled with their security behind the firewall, has led to using wikis in the many development phases that involve collaboration such as requirements generation, documentation, and bug fixes.

Make 396 Friends In Your Life…But Lose 363 Of Them

Via Caterina.net, a ‘taxonomy’ of friendship patterns: Time Pressured Brits Make 396 Friends In Their Life…But Lose 363 Of Them

• Friendship Cultivators - friends mean a lot to them and they spend a significant amount of their time nurturing friendships. They’re always arranging get togethers and are in constant touch with friends online and on the phone
• Friendship Pruners - make and drop friends quickly according to how useful they are. Friendship Pruners name drop a lot - they like to be seen to be in social contact with the ‘in crowd’. They hate ‘dead wood’ so frequently prune names from their diaries, online buddy lists and mobile phones
• Friendship Harvesters - tend to have a very wide circle of friends that they get in touch with on a seasonal basis. They’re happy to leave long periods without contact and typically dedicate a set period of time every few weeks or months to a flurry of contact to keep up to date with friends’ news and gossip
• Friendship Gatherers - are quick to make friends but the least proactive at maintaining friendships. They gather friends wherever they go but are socially lazy and once friendship has been established they rely on the other party to keep it going. They often seek out Friendship Cultivators so they can ride on the back of their frequent social contact and arrangements.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure I fall into *any* of these…

One for the bookmarks bar

URL shortening services seem to have been around for a long while, like TinyURL and the like. But I’ve never seen one that’s easier to use than utlTea, mainly because of their IM integration. Add them to your googletalk or Jabber contacts list, then just IM them with the long URL and the shortened version is sent by return. About as quick as it can get, and another damn fine use of IM - it’s not just kids chatting…

Theory X, Theory Y

In the space of one day comes two posts which sum up the opposite ends of the whole “how does my working pattern fit into your culture” debate.

Web Worker Daily has come up with the concepts of busyness versus burst - or to put it crudely, bums on seats versus getting the job done. The core of this is that there’s a disconnect between the two - that if your corporate culture is based on busyness, or presenteeism, or clocking-in and out, or another form of “I care less about what you’re doing than I about the fact that I can see you”, then the ways of working of an always-on, always-connected pattern of activity are in conflict with the

In some respects this is just a Web 2.0 rehash of the Theory X, Theory Y debate, but some of the comments on the WWD article mention the age factor - that the over-45s are likely to want to see people in seats, and the under-45s are more comfortable in the “production economy”. That seems like a drastic oversimplification, but there’s a core of truth here - if you’ve grown up in an always-on world with ubiquitous mobile phones, IM and web, then moving into the typical corporate environment of locked down desktops, email and crippled read-only intranets is going to seem like a step into an alien world. The danger for corporates is that the brightest and the best simply won’t step into a world which has more in common with their parents’ working patterns than their own.

The other post is a fairly typical example of “dodgy research and press release masquerading as news“, but it’s worth some attention nevertheless - “Websites based on user-generated content, blogging, or participation are frequently visited by office workers, but content security firm Clearswift’s survey claims that firms are failing to see the risks of data leak posed by those sites.”

The alarm bells should start ringing as soon as you come across the words “content security”, because there’s a major vested interest here - security firms trade on corporate paranoia, and their major sales tactic is covering executives with copious quantities of FUD.

Euan Semple has a far better way of looking at this whole issue: “The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0?
DO NOTHING”

We were too damned lazy…

“If flying-saucer creatures or angels or whatever were to come here in a hundred years, say, and find us gone like the dinosaurs, what might be a good message for humanity to leave for them, maybe carved in great big letters on a Grand Canyon wall? Here is this old poop’s suggestion: WE PROBABLY COULD HAVE SAVED OURSELVES, BUT WERE TOO DAMNED LAZY TO TRY VERY HARD…”

– Kurt Vonnegut (via Doonesbury)

CBI says we’re all malingering skivers

The CBI seldom misses a chance to bang on about what a bunch of idle, work-shy layabouts the Great British Workforce is, and how we should all be boiled down for glue like the ungrateful skiving wretches that we are. (”When I were a lad we lived in a cardboard box and got the plague for fun. And we were grateful to live on coal!)

And they’re not shy of whipping up some dubious statistics to prove the point (and further cement their rightful position of the last bastion of true Victorian send-em-up-the-chimneys capitalism).

A constant refrain is how much worse public sector sickness absence is - apparently 44% more than the private sector. What they don’t point out is how distorted the figures are by the arcane rules of public sector sickness. If you’re a civil servant and your sickness absence starts on say, a Thursday until, say, the following Wednesday, the two days of the weekend count as sickness absence as well as the “working” days. That’s an automatic 30% inflation, straight away…

Oh, FFS…

BBC: Weblogs ‘need content warning’

Get a grip…

Connecting Rails to a SQL Server

To connect Rails to a SQL Server, you’ll need to edit the config/database.yml file:

development:

adapter: sqlserver
database: dbmydatabase
host: sqlserver.domain.com
username: user
password: secret

Replace the fields with the appropriate values for the environment, and away it should all go…

Five Steps to Get Yourself in a Mood to Work

Web Worker Daily lists 5 ways you can get into a work mindset if you’re a terminal procrastinator (or even just easily distracted:)

Here’s a five step process for putting yourself in a productive mood. Modify it to suit your needs and temperament.

There’s mention of a couple of noise-generating apps that you can use to block out your surroundings - one of the best one’s I’ve found for Windows is Aire Freshener which can play a whole variety of sounds from running mountain streams to heartbeats to helicopters.

Unfortunately it doesn’t do much to freshen the River Aire where it passes my office, but at least it drowns out the open plan background noise…