Got backup?

Okay, I was coming back from grocery shopping the other day when I saw a giant poster on the notice board. Unfortunately my mobile's camera is not working, so I will just have to give you the gist of it: "I have lost my Ipod that had all my research, If you've found it please contact me! Very Urgent!!!".

Are you kidding me?

Losing an iPod is stupid enough, but losing and iPod that has your thesis is beyond any comment.... But I cannot hold myself, so I'll have my take:

Backup is underestimated by everyone. Nobody backs up, I don't normally (or regularly) back up and most definitely you haven't backed up for at least 2 months. That's fine by me because I know that even if my hard drive is screwed, I'd only lose my iTunes playlist, some photos and some cool apps I've discovered recently... I can live with that... (and come to think about it, I have my favorite albums either on CD or on my old iBook)

Nevertheless, I backed up x3 while working on my dissertation on a daily basis.

Since I HAD to work on the Windows partition of my Mac, every night I'd e-mail the day's work to two different e-mail accounts, and also copy them to my OS X partition. JUST TO MAKE SURE. Just because I knew that when you are doing something of vital importance, you can never be too careful. The only day I forgot to back up and went out, I was thinking about it all night long (okay, until I downed my second pint, but it still counts...).

There is a Greek saying that goes like that: "You sleep on the bed that YOU have made". It means that there are some aspects in life that you can control. And if you can control something, at least be good at it...

I really can't imagine myself prancing around and drinking with my iPod filled with my dissertation. As said before, losing an iPod is stupid enough, losing an iPod with at least 3-5 months' work is unthinkable...

I really feel sorry about this person and I hope she finds her iPod but it's only her to blame if she fails her MSc/Phd/etc...

Web designing or Web developing?

I was recently reading a blog regarding web design which was arguing why text has taken a back seat to design ...

First of all I need to clarify my perspective: I, myself am a DEVELOPER, not a DESIGNER. I do not have what people call "an artist's touch", and definitely do not long for it. I consider myself to be what makes a DESIGNER design, what makes a BLOGGER blog, what makes an ACCOUNTANT account etc. I am what makes a machine move if you want... Relatively speaking.

My experience and education has taught me one thing: If your product is worth it, it will succeed. Especially in the Internet world, if a company with the homepage of Google can succeed, everyone can...

The blogger goes on to talk about the way a designer should write his text, the style of narration etc. I'm definitely not in the bandwagon of good designing principles etc. But I also do not undermine the power of a good design. I do believe however, that:

- If you are a good blogger and do not have a template created by a 12-year-old, you will not fail.
- If you have a good product/service and do not have a template created by a 12-year-old, you will not fail.

- If you DO NOT know what you are doing, a good design will not help you.

I am firm about the "IDEA" factor. it's all about what you have to offer. If you like what you offer and pay attention to it, you are bound to get a chance. It is when what you are looking for is immediate success and/or do not really care about your service when you go looking for presentation styles...

Perhaps talking about design is out of my range. Perhaps I have grown up so as to respect functionality rather than presentation (thank you mum!).

If you go 50 years back, newspapers and magazines would NOT be as good-looking as they are now if they didn't pay attention to DESIGN.

But then again... They still deliver the same service, don't they??

Communication! Communication! Communication!

When Tony Blair first became Prime Minister of Britain, in one of his first speeches he underlined his administration's goal to improve British education by his (in)famous motto "Education! Education! Education!". Apparently, according to his judgement, British education was something that dragged the country down.

If I consider my work/school/university environment as my area of administration and decide to improve things that would be one: "Communication! Communication! Communication!".

I consider myself to be clever. Not "cleverly" clever, but "stupidly" clever. A "cleverly" clever person is one who is able to judge "on-the-fly" ideas and propositions and assess whether or not he is capable of executing what has been proposed. He is able to schedule his workload in such way as not to have to overload at any point. A "stupidly" clever person is one who believes that sky's the limit for him and will accept anything offered to him without hesitating. "Hey, how hard can it be?". He ends up working 24/7 just because he wasn't smart enough to pre-schedule.

I believe this to be one of my greatest flaws and assets at the same time. I will take on anything only to find myself baffled in between projects trying to keep up with my schedule and not let anyone down. On the majority of the cases, I (and my projects) have survived this kind of situations without putting my reputation in jeopardy (and maybe even building it even more).

Today I realised that apart from a "stupidly" clever person, I am also a bad communicator. 50 days before submitting my dissertation, yesterday I e-mailed my supervisor regarding my progress so far. Apparently I did it in such a vague manner that the reply I received had me scratching my head puzzled. My supervisor was under the impression that I was far behind schedule and spent two whole paragraphs explaining to me terms in my dissertation that even someone remotely relevant to the subject is aware of (i.e. speaker IDENTIFICATION as in "the task of defining who the speaker is" VS speaker VERIFICATION as in "verifying that the claimed speaker is actually who he claims he is") and subtly urging me to be a bit faster.

When I read the whole correspondence between me and my supervisor I realised what the whole misunderstanding was about. So what I did was spend a whole hour to precisely define what I have done without using abbreviations and try to show him that I have not been slacking around but working my a$$ out lately. It was then when he replied saying that I am actually on a good way and pointed out some hints about what to do next.

You must be able to COMMUNICATE what exactly you have been doing in a project. Show off if you must. Market yourself and pay a little more attention to how you COMMUNICATE what you have been doing. As David Brent (played in a unique manner by Ricky Gervais) in "the Office" once said: "A company runs on efficiency of communication". At the end of the day if you are not able to COMMUNICATE in today's world, you are bound to build bad reputation or worse. So there you have it: COMMUNICATION! COMMUNICATION! COMMUNICATION!

Keep your utilities close and your users closer.

As I have mentioned before, I am working for the network team of the University. It is not the most exciting job, but at some points trying to figure out what's wrong with the user's PC can be as interesting as traveling to the moon. The last user could not browse with her IE, but could connect with her Skype account. Visiting the user, I had the suspicion that checking her settings and firewall would do the trick. I was very wrong, however. Her computer (an XP machine by the way) was running about 20 applications at start-up, was incredibly slow and did not allow commands given in command line to be executed (ipconfig /all, ping etc). Wanting just to see if it is an IE-related problem, I disabled the firewall, installed Firefox and tried to run it. It did not however run. My next easy step was to install my favorite antivirus program and run a full system scan. This took me about 40 minutes. 40 boring minutes where we both tried to break the silence with smalltalk. The user told me that she had recently visited Cyprus, by the way ("beautiful country"). When the scan was finished, so was the awkwardness. The results however troubled me. Not a single virus found. Once the computer restarted I gave the firewall rules a thorough inspection. Nothing weird found there. I ran firefox and this time not only it ran, it also allowed browsing. That's were it hit me. It turned out that when the user had visited Cyprus, she was given a proxy in order to browse. She had meticulously hidden this fact from me. Naughty user. I restored this setting and she was ready to go. Everything running as smoothly as an overloaded XP machine can handle. Total time taken: 50 minutes of which wasted: 40.

At the end of the day, all that matters is correct communication with the user. Our whole conversation was around her skype account and the potential viruses she might have gathered rather than the last time she had to "change something as small as 4 numbers in a box"...

Note to self: Both MSN messenger and Yahoo messenger uses the "Internet Setiings's Proxy server", while Skype does not. That's bad for Skype. Even if it has a Proxy settings pane in it menu, it should all be centralized.

Think Different

I am what you call "Apple-fanatic". I am in the "cult of Mac". I am one of those who'll spend hours arguing with you about what is better: a Mac or a PC.

My whole adventure with Apple started about 2.5 years ago. I was leaving for Iceland as an exchange student and I had to get a laptop to do my work when at home. Until then I was a "PC-fanatic". Not having used a Mac in my whole life, I was under the common impression that only artists would use a Mac, that it would be a pain in the a** to connect it to a network, that compatibility issues must be in the daily agenda etc. A friend of mine that had been somehow lured into the world of Macs introduced me to his iBook. It was a 12-inch G4 PowerPC running OS X Panther. The first thing that I thought when I saw it was "God it's beautiful". Just comparing the look and feel of a Mac running OS X to a PC running Windows XP (I've heard that this also applies to Vista, but I haven't seen the latest MS OS, so I'm not going to comment) makes you think how had you been using the Windows machine without injuring your eyes somehow.

I have to admit I was very skeptical at the beginning. "What about office?", "What about firefox?", "What about development?", "What about games?". The only question that wasn't completely satisfied by the answer it received was the last one. OS X has it's own version of Microsoft Office, OS X has the fastest browser called Safari, but firefox and Camino are also available. With the exception of .net, any major IDE has an OS X version plus OS X has XCode built-in. Games was an issue regarding Mac, but a number of the most popular games were being ported for OS X (mainly by Aspyr).

I have to admit I was feeling like gambling when I decided to buy my iBook. After using it for 2 years I was completely satisfied, except for the times when I wanted to play certain games and I found out that they were not ported for Mac.

2 months ago I bought my second laptop. My second Mac. A MacBook Pro. Now THIS is 100% satisfaction. Thanks to BootCamp, I have installed Windows. A move that when I completed felt like betraying my own beliefs. Now, a month later, I have all I could ever ask from a laptop:

1. Battery that lasts up to 5 hours (when working with OS X)
2. The most advanced OS (OS X)
3. The ability to boot with Windows and run that game/application that hasn't been yet ported for Mac

I could go into details (which I'd love to) and point out the advantages and disadvantages of having a Mac, but I'd lose my point: be flexible, think different. That's what matters