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We have an old Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop with 1GHz Pentium (M?) processor, 384MB of ram and a 20GB hard disk. It had been struggling for a long while under the weight of many years’ of Windows XP creeping senility before it was unceremoniously dumped by J in anticipation of her receiving a shiny new MacBook.

The 8100 had sat around neglected for a while with out of date virus scanning software and pent-up demand for Windows updates. Mr 4 occasionally took “Green Eggs and Ham” for a ride on it whenever we forgot how long that laptop took to boot.

I wanted to try installing a flavour of Linux to see if the laptop could be resurrected as a useful member of the household for kids’ use. My trepidation was that wireless connectivity wasn’t as seamless on Linux as it is on OS X or Windows. We’re also running a WPA-PSK wireless network at home and anything more than WEP seems to cause difficulty.

Having relocated the original Windows XP disks, as a safety net, I downloaded Ubuntu and set about my task.

I had heard good and bad things about Ubuntu. The install CD is just a CD (not yet DVD sized, like Fedora Core) and a live CD at that. The requirements are a modest 2GB of disk space and 256MB of RAM. I decided against Edubuntu to start with – just to make sure I gave myself the best chance to get wireless going with a mainstream distribution.

It installed flawlessly. The installation detected the ATI graphics card, high resolution 14″ screen, sound device, and even the funky media control buttons above the Inspiron’s keyboard. The reborn laptop even feels snappy again.

As expected, wireless didn’t work on the Netgear WG511 PCMCIA card. I spent about 4 hours trolling forums and trying different things before I stumbled upon the magic recipe for making wireless work: summarised here.

With wireless working the Inspiron is a useful kids’ computer. I have installed a bunch of educational and games packages. The default Firefox browser is what the kids are used to and Adobe Flash is behaving itself sufficiently well to make Club Penguin and Lego sites as tolerable an experience as they ever are.

The not-so-good parts of the story are that VLC DVD playback is a touch too stuttery to be useful, and laptop hibernation is a one-way ticket. Green Eggs and Ham has been relegated to other computers.

Altogether it has been a very successful transition and an excellent use of an old clunker of a laptop. The new owners haven’t complained.

A game that makes me wish I had a strangely addictive epidemiology experiment post category. Almost.

I subscribe to the view that if you use a piece of free demo software a lot, and there is a means to donate or pay for the software, then once in a while you should take the plunge and pay. For a (usually) small amount of money you can reward your favourite developers, feel good inside and occasionally get access to useful new features only available in the paid-up versions.

EverNote is software I install on my regularly used Windows machines. EverNote provides me with an always-on alternative to notepad.exe that understands text formatting and graphics, and keeps track of where things were pasted from. The downside is that it doesn’t have an official online sharing site (apparently there is one in beta) to compete with Google Notepad’s webby ubiquity. A synced EverNote database on a USB drive — or (previous to owning the sync feature) remembering to use Google Notepad to save data I need to access from somewhere unpredictable yet Internet-enabled — serves much the same purpose for me. Unlike Google Notepad, EverNote works offline. I don’t have a pen device, but EverNote seems to be the darling of tablet PC enthusiasts for its ability to capture and manage pen-entered text and graphics.

EverNote stores notes in a searchable, indexed, tagged and otherwise categorized virtual endless tape. I’ve never seen it crash, and never seen it complained about by Windows at shutdown. It’s fast and easy to get used to.

The price was US$49.95 to upgrade to EverNote Plus, which I did out of loyalty to a couple of years good service and access to the the sync feature.

Tomato is an alternative firmware for Linksys WRT54G Linux-era routers. It’s reliable, fast, simple and sexy.

I had stuck with Sveasoft firmware for 2 years waiting for specific features to turn up. I gave up too long after its history of never achieving promised functionality or feature release schedules should have sent warning signs that even a $20 subscription was too much. I dabbled with a few alternative firmware releases before settling on Tomato and making a donation.

A while back I was bemused and intrigued when I received a flyer for www.nowwearetalking.com.au included with my cheap-ass Telstra mobile phone bill. The flyer made much of its status as a grass-roots movement, intended to beat up the Federal Government so they de-claw the ACCC somewhat. Once the ACCC is out of the picture Telstra would finally be free to gernerously wash all of Australia’s telecommunications problems away with their big AU$4 billion bucket of broadband infrastructure money.

If I may paraphrase Telstra — “Shame if anything were to happen to that money. Someone might get bored and accidentally go and invest it in some non-monopoly assets. Then where would your broadband future be?”

Quite apart from its arrival in the same package as my Telstra bill, the tenor of the message was a bit of a giveaway. But beyond a stark claim of being a grassroots movement, Telstra’s backing is not hidden at all. The About Page features a surprisingly lucid Phil Burgess — someone I’ve noted before for his inability to work on radio — talking about the genesis of the site from a new “grassroots” shareholder friend he made in a restaurant:

The conversation closed with my new shareholder friend saying, “We need more information that we can use. The stuff we get from Telstra is all about numbers and finances. The stuff in the newspapers is about politics. We need information that helps us know what is possible and what we are missing and how life could be better if we all had broadband and the new services you talk about – and if we could find a way to fix the systems we have now, because some don’t work the way they should. So keep it going.”

Well done friend of Phil! You can see how this got him thinking. This completely not paraphrased account points to a desperate need for new “stuff.” The “stuff” Phil’s friend was asking for was apparently the Astroturf Phil’s recounting of his grassroots encounter is printed on. Get on the phone to the office “Quick, register keepitgoing.com.au … oh, that’s taken? How about nowwearetalking.com.au? Ok? Good!” Sure, keepitgoing.com.au isn’t taken. This is my apocryphally salient story. Go knock yourselves out domain squatters!

Alan Kohler has an excellent article in today’s SMH about Telstra’s recent very expensive campaign to convince the government to let it sidestep regulations and roll out a Fiber to the Node (FTTN) broadband network before Optus and co. get the regulatory go-ahead to roll out a Fiber to the Home (FTTH) network.

Kohler laments that something that I considered an essential precondition to Telstra’s privatization — retention of public ownership of Telstra’s “natural monopoly” assets. He also explains Telstra’s preference for FTTN and not the more capable FTTH.

In the world of fibre to which we are now moving, the copper wires and the exchanges that operate them are obsolete, valuable scrap metal. FTTN preserves the need for copper over the last mile to the house for a bit longer, which is presumably one reason Telstra is sticking with nodes and heaping scorn on FTTH.

But its network of ducts is a true monopoly asset: no one can viably duplicate them and the alternatives – overhead poles or sewers – are not suitable.

Telstra ducts were “declared” long ago, which means Telstra cannot withhold access to them and the price of access is regulated.

It would have been far better if that part of Telstra had not been privatised, or at least sold separately as an infrastructure fund, but too late for that.

Kohler then makes the point that the Government is playing catch-up to Labor’s announced broadband policy/immunization against Coalition raids on the Future Fund, and is vulnerable to Telstra’s waving around of $4 billion that they could drop on an almost modern FTTN broadband roll-out if only the government would let them bypass the ACCC and sure up their monopoly infrastructure.

It’s a bold play by Telstra. I think they are counting on a naive public with weak opinions to pressure the Coalition Government into waving this deal past the ACCC. That would work both ways. The public might not feel strongly either way on regulation, but the large number of Telstra shareholders might appreciate having their company’s share price given a boost. I can only hope that Helen Coonan and John Howard have the patience to develop at a policy that won’t restore Telstra to a position of competition-stifling monopoly as an election fix.

I can’t recall the random link that led me to this song, so just pretend that It’s my instinct for quality novelty hip-hop that led me there.

Unexpectedly sophisticated and funky.

This is a list of the printers I have owned in reverse chronological order. My recent purchase caused me to ponder just how universally crappy my printer experience has been, except for the laser printers I have owned. I might have been much better off saving $10,000 and buying a laser printer when they first became “available” to SOHO users.

Samsung CLP-300N.

Networked colour laser printer. I picked up the 300N last week for about AU$1.10 per N. This is the first colour laser printer I have owned, and certainly provides the best $/kg value of any printer I have owned. It takes four toner cartridges which are rated at 2000 pages, and cost around $70 each. It’s fast, and while it isn’t the world’s best colour printer by a long shot — it works with Windows, Linux and Mac, and doesn’t require turning on a PC to use. So far, for the 5 pages it has printed, it rocks.

Dell Photo All-in-One Printer 922.

USB-connected Windows-only, colour inkjet, scanner and copier. This printer cost me nothing. It was practically thrown at me when I was buying a Dell laptop for a relative. While discussing the hilarious prices ink cartridges sell for the salesperson cannily told me I’d probably be ready to buy a new laptop next time I ran out of ink anyway, so why quibble over cartridge prices. That didn’t end up being true, as the “introductory pack” of black ink ran out very soon after it was set up and I felt the touch of Dell’s conveniently located “buy more ink” service right alongside the friendly graph showing just how out-of-ink I was. Buying one black cartridge was a complete rip-off, and buying two lowered the unit price by 40% or so, so I planned ahead and got two black cartridges for marginally less stupid prices.

Eventually, my kids’ readily accessible source of paper for aeroplane construction, drawing, and origami boulders grew tired of having the paper ripped the wrong way past its feeder rollers. It began its rebellion by feeding between 0 and 10 pages at a time, with 0 and 10 being the most likely values decided. Out of warranty, I declared the printer dead. Does anyone want to buy some ink cartridges?

Having a scanner and copier on hand was undeniably useful. I’ll have to find a reasonable replacement for the scanning capabilities at least.

Panasonic KX-P6100.

My favourite printer ever. Purchased in about 1999 and still going strong. The KX-P6100 is small parallel interface Windows GDI-talkin’ monochrome laser printer that inspired the “toaster” building at Sydney’s Circular Quay, I’m sure. It’s about the size of two reams of A4 paper and stands “upright.” Panasonic no longer have a printer division — this was the printer that broke the mould. Panasonic apparently didn’t “get it” like other printer manufacturers do. They seemed to think that there was nothing magical about their toner so they didn’t use much and sold it cheap! $25 per ~2500 pages cheap.

Unlike a bubblejet, the KX-P6100 can rest for months without printing and work perfectly when you pull it out of mothballs. I still have it waiting in the wings, but driver support is getting a bit shaky with the arrival of Vista.

[...Time passes, and Chris & Jessica own a series of anonymous colour bubblejets...]

Canon Bubblejet BJ-10 & Apple Stylewriter

When Bubblejet technology hit the big time and Canon released the BJ-10, I was employed, relatively flushed with funds, and eager to torture my dot matrix printer collection to death and dance on their grave. I had been dreaming about bubbles and jets since I read about them in Byte magazine so I snapped one up as soon as I could.

The BJ-10 was a dream — relatively fast, black, laser-like printing on ordinary paper with a little bucket of ink which it could inform you was empty (or could it?) and no nasty ribbons. Sure bubblejets need to be used constantly or they jam up. And they need to be used sparingly or they fuzz up. But they were still way better better than dot-matrix dinosaurs.

Owning a Mac meant owning the Apple-branded equivalent of the BJ-10: the Stylewriter.

Epson LQ-500 & Epson LX-50. 24 and 9 pin dot-matrix printers.

I’m guessing here. I think I was the proud owner of two ribbon-chewing, mis-feeding, very rugged and noisy Epson printers during early university days. The two features I recall being impressed about are speed and price. Not having to wait a week to see hard copy of a 500 word essay was pretty novel. I recall printers being staggeringly expensive for something that you rarely used, and paper and ribbon prices seemed sky-high too. I guess the people I shared my university accommodation with probably recall an overwhelming sense of knowing which very early mornings I had assignments due, from the fantastic cacophony that accompanied the completion and near-completion of any assignment. I bet they marked the date when graphical fonts extended the printing time on dot matrix printers nearer to the upper thresholds of noise tolerance.

I marked the advent pf graphical fonts by allowing several times the printing time to get my assignments in on time. Sitting for hours between midnight and dawn waiting for the printer to jam, or screw up the feed hole alignment so you could restart the page over and over is not a fond memory. These were awful, awful printers.

When I first started working at the Commonwealth Bank, I was given a tour. My guide showed me a large room which was wall-to-wall dot-matrix printers making paper copies of every ATM transaction made in the region for dispute resolution. Even as I stood in the door to that room, watching two operators fumbling with printer ribbons or jammed paper, I estimated I could see 5 or 6 other printers with similar problems.

Commodore 1520 Plotter. Centronics-connected 3(4?)-pen plotter.

I didn’t own one of these, I just convinced my school to buy a few of them for the (don’t laugh) Vic 20 lab. They had fantastic text quality and quiet operation. This made the 1520 stand out very favourably from the early dot matrix printers that were common at the time. It was trivially easy to apply basic maths to generating colourful spirographs and other sophisticated-looking graphics. The downside was the paper was a roll that was only about 3 inches wide and had to be ordered from Commodore. The pens held a minuscule quantity of ink too, and guess who you had to talk to about acquiring new ones.

A while back I purchased and read a book by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton called “Hard Facts Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense” subtitled “Profiting from evidence-based management” which seeks to examine many deeply ingrained business-related beliefs that aren’t necessarily backed by any study or evidence.

I have had an interest in performance management programmes and software engineers for a long time. This is probably because all of the systems of assessing and rewarding performance I have participated in over the years have seemed flawed in different ways. This post is an examination a random walk through the Hard Facts chapter on incentive programmes.

Performance management programmes typically consist of processes for goal-setting, development, performance appraisal and reward. While the reward is expected to be commensurate with the amount performance exceeds expectations, when the objective is not met a program of correction cane be undertaken instead of a reward system. As carrots are said to be a better control of behaviour than metaphorical sticks, most companies opt for a system of financial incentives to reward good performance.

In their book Hard Facts Pfeffer and Sutton examine the question “Do Financial Incentives Drive Company Performance?”

Fundamentals

Hard Facts lays out the theory of how organizational performance can be improved with incentives.

1. Motivation effects: Even though incentives don’t have an immediate effect on ability, individuals will work harder if they know they will be rewarded for harder work.

2. Information effects: Incentives inform individuals about what the organization considers important.

3. Selection effects: An incentive program can help drive away the wrong type of person and attract the right type for the organization.

Motivation

In IT and related fields, financial incentives are the norm. Hard Facts makes the point that not everyone is motivated by money. Additionally, people motivated by money aren’t necessarily the right people to have in an organization. Undeniably, it seems humans are motivated to apply more effort to their work by money.

It turns out that most people wildly overestimate the effect of financial incentives. Hard Facts quotes a General Social Survey of US citizens where the same people who rated pay as the third most important aspect of their jobs (”important work” and “a feeling of accomplishment” were first and second) thought other people were much more motivated by pay than themselves. “73 percent thought that large differences in pay were necessary to get people to work hard…”

Information

Software Development industries are filled with knowledge workers, whose day-to-day activities are a mix of engineering practices and inspired invention. The activities necessary to release or service software are complex and are often subtly inter-related. Setting easy-to-measure goals that have a surface-level relationship with the behaviour to be encouraged is both seductive and commonplace, but it is rarely able to define broader organizational goals.

Most software developers have a story that parallels the legendary Dilbert Cartoon above. A decision is made to set goals or provide incentives in a way that was intended to solve a problem, but introduces disastrous side-effects; You’ve been told that you need to write more code so you set up a cron job to generate zillions of lines of perfect template code each day and check it into source control; or you’ve been asked to cut down on software costs so you’ve illegally copied software rather than raise a purchase order.

The example that comes to my mind is when projects in my part of an organization were measured based on how long problem reports stayed open. Developers would take emails and phone calls and write problem details in their journals, working on the problem off the books. When the problem was fixed, they would report the problem in the problem reporting database and shortly after they would close the problem with the fix they had prepared earlier. While this made for some very impressive metrics, it was not the most efficient use of developer resources. Hard Facts summarizes this problem as “Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it.” The question is, is there a better way?

A simple plan

Peter Drucker, in his essay on “Management by Objectives and Self-Control” talks about a device called a “management letter.” This is part of a system he used in his organizations to make sure there was a correctly-communicated understanding of what each person needed to do to help the organization reach its goals in a top-down manner, and allow each person in the organization to reflect the best way to achieve those goals back up the hierarchy — bottom up. Each manager’s subordinate writes a “management letter” twice a year to their manager.

“In this letter to his superior, each manager first defines the objectives of his superior’s job and of his own job as he sees them. He then sets down the performance standards that he believes are being applied to him. Next, he lists the things his superior and the company do that help him and the things that hamper him. Finally he outlines what he proposes to do during the next year to reach his goals.”

And so, at every level of the organization an understanding is negotiated, made, and remade every 6 months with useful information about what needs to change, and how the organization has been perceived to be changing along with some goal-setting in the language of the person that needs to reach them. The oft-forgotten part of Drucker’s title of this seminal essay is “…and Self-Control” which emphasizes the optimal state of an organization — one where supervisors understand their staff, and trust them to work with minimal supervision.

This kind of objective alignment and goal setting doesn’t lend it self to being put in an organization-wide database and relies on prioritizing effective communication and elimination of misdirection over measurable goals.

Mirror mirror

Another potential pitfall Hard Facts emphasizes is differential reward systems. Most reward systems divide the world into three groups of people; High achievers, people not worth mentioning, and people who need help. They observe that very few organizations fund their rewards significantly enough to provide substantial differences in the rewards offered to people in the three categories, but the social cost of this tiered approach is enormous. Small differences in salary can cause huge damage to self-esteem or counterproductive behaviour.

Summing up

Hard facts warns to be very careful about using financial incentives and to try very hard to use non-financial rewards. The origins of being blinded to other forms of incentive go back at least to Taylor in the 1900s and probably beyond. Simple goals and incentives can work, particularly for workers who perform tasks with a straightforward relationship between effort and productivity. Multi-dimensional roles like software and other knowledge work are very tricky to design performance incentives for. In both cases, incentives must be carefully designed not to diminish other important organizational goals.

Making goal-setting a meeting of the minds with understanding of goals flowing up and down an organizational hierarchy seems a good approach. This approach places a priority on subjective assessment against established goals and doesn’t make reward decisions any easier.

Hard Facts doesn’t offer a recipe for providing fair and worry-free compensation while avoiding the risks of poorly directed incentive systems, but it does highlight some significant issues to consider. No wonder there are so many compensation consultants available to regularly change an organization’s performance management and incentive programmes. This stuff is hard.

Do ya’self a favour and head over to GigaOM and get an invitation to Joost. Joost is an on-demand (centralized, but peer-to-peer-assisted) video service backed by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström — the folks who brought Kazaa and Skype into existence. I guess it is evident now that receiving US$2.6 billion for Skype didn’t slow down the flow of ideas.

So far, I’m just blown away by the response speed and video quality, if not the content. Take a look!

In a previous article I reviewed the RAZR and Blue Ant 3x Bluetooth headset. One year on, it’s time to re-cap how they’re going with some of the subjective reliability data I’ve collected.

The BlueAnt x3 wireless headset’s theoretical talk time of 7 hours is down to 75 minutes from a full charge. This doesn’t bode well for its remaining lifespan.

The RAZR V3x has an annoying problem when answered while charging. If you answer an incoming call and remove it from its charger — not necessarily in that order, but within a few seconds of each other — it will get what my spouse and I call the “beep of death.” In this state it beeps annoyingly over the top of all subsequent conversations, and then enters a “must-drain-all-remaining-battery mode” unless you power cycle the phone.

My suspicion that the clamshell design might be a little fragile seem to have been confirmed. Jessica’s RAZR died from the hinge up — both of the screens and the camera were dead — shortly before failing completely. My RAZR is still in good condition except that the side “dot” button has become very unreliable. This is a pain because, among other things it is used for changing in and out of silent & vibrate modes.

Time again, would I buy it? I don’t know.

With kids and our typical phone use any phone would take a beating. It’s hard to determine if the RAZRs have been any less reliable than a brick design or another manufacturer’s clamshell phone. Even with the glitches they’re very good value on our cheap-ass phone plans.