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Book Review: The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

I have a new perspective on both the importance of the Supreme Court and the Presidency after reading this book. I now get why the abortion topic is so important and controversial. I now get why Supreme Court nominees are put through such hell before nominations. And with the upcoming Presidential election, I get more than ever why it's so important to understand where the candidates stand on topics such as abortion, separation of church and state, Miranda, etc.

I really enjoyed this book because it focuses on the most recent 15 years of the court. I remember all of the big cases that are studied in the book, which made it a very entertaining read at times. The book does a good job of studying the backgrounds of all of the recent justices and their voting ideologies.


Thanks to Toobin, I will never look at another Supreme Court case or nomination process in the same way again.

Book Review: The Kite Runner

I rarely read fictional books, but with the start of the new year, I thought I would try to expand my library beyond non-fiction. I landed upon the book "A Thousand Splendid Suns" as one of the top 2007 books on Amazon.com. It was the sequel to the book "The Kite Runner", which also got rave reviews, so I decided to buy it first. It was a good decision. This is by far one of the most fascinating books I've read in a long time. I couldn't put it down and breezed through the 400 pages in just two weeks. An amazing feat for me because I only have time to read about an hour or so each day.

The book reads like a memoir. At times I would completely forget the book was fictional. He gives a great portrayal of what Afghanistan was like before and after the last 30 years of turmoil. Learning about the culture of the Afghani people was a great side-effect of reading the fascinating and wonderful novel.

I can't wait to read the sequel, it will definitely be part of my next Amazon.com book order.

Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking

I read blink on the plane ride to San Antonio and back this month. It's a page-turner that made the flight go by super fast. My favorite parts of the book are related to racism. The book talks about a great study being conducted by Harvard researchers. There is a test online that is fun to take that will provide a lot of insight into your own personal racism:

Race ('Black - White' IAT). This IAT requires the ability to distinguish faces of European and African origin. It indicates that most Americans have an automatic preference for white over black.

Racism is just one of several interesting topics covered in blink. If you liked "The Tipping Point" you'll love this book.

Book Review: Now, Discover Your Strengths

I actually read this one a long time ago. Every book comes with a code to take a test to discover and learn all about your strengths.

Here are my signature themes:

Achiever: People strong in the Achiever theme have a great deal of
stamina and work hard. They take great satisfaction from being busy and
productive.

Maximizer: People strong in the Maximizer theme focus on strengths as a
way to stimulate personal and group excellence. They seek to transform
something strong into something superb.

Arranger: People strong in the Arranger theme can organize, but they also have a flexibility that complements this ability. They like to figure out how all of the pieces and resources can be arranged for maximum productivity.

Relator: People who are strong in the Relator theme enjoy close relationships with others. They find deep satisfaction in working hard with friends to achieve a goal.

Learner: People strong in the Learner theme have a great desire to learn and want to continuously improve. In particular, the process of learning, rather than the outcome, excites them.


How closely do you think they describe me?

Worst Thanksgiving Ever

I was looking forward to a full 5 days of getting things done...and then I was hit hard by a stomach bug that is just now clearing up. Thanksgiving and I can't eat?!? Terrible. I had plenty of time to think of random things though:

My new Blackberry 8830 kicks butt. I love it. If you need 24x7 access to your email, get one. Sprint is my new provider and I'm just as happy with them as I was with Verizon.

The Apple iPhone is for real (Velvet has one), a really great phone thanks to the awesome browser and zoom capabilities. I like the real keyboard on the Blackberry though.

I've been on Facebook for about a month now. I can see why they are so successful...automated emails. Their core is picture sharing, tagging, and commenting; all of the other stuff is just fluff.

I've been running Vista on my desktop at work for months now. I still get asked frequently "How do you like it?" I have to say that there's not one feature in Vista that is so awesome that would make me recommend upgrading from XP. But, it's not a bad OS. It doesn't crash, but all of the security pop-ups are quite annoying.

On the other hand, the latest version of Office is awesome. I highly recommend dumping Open Office or anything web-based.

And finally, we won the fall softball co-ed league C championship this year. If you remember last year's end of season blog post, I had a few suggestions on how we could get better. Well, we implemented all of those suggestions and we kicked butt. OK, maybe it wasn't my suggestions that took us over the top, but whatever it was we did awesome. We only lost 1 game all year, and we won almost every game by run-rule. It's amazing how far everyone has come and we'll be back in the B league starting next spring. We had a great time celebrating our wins at Buffalo Wild Wings after each game.

Antennas Direct

One of the annoying things about DirecTV is that local channels (NBC, CBS, FOX) are not available in HD. You have to receive them over the air with yet another antenna. You can either buy an indoor antenna that looks like the old rabbit ears and the signal rarely comes in reliably. Or you can buy an outdoor antenna and climb on the roof, install it, ground it, kill yourself, etc....a real pain, something I haven't been willing to take the time to do.

But, after helping my brother install his HD antenna I realized that the antenna he bought actually works really well indoors. We went ahead and installed his outdoors, but last week I bought one for myself to stick in my attic. As I'm sitting here watching football on FOX in HD I would have to say it works really well. The antenna wasn't hard to put together and is now completely hidden from view both inside and outside. I'm really pleased with the reception on all channels.

If anyone else is interested, I bought the "DB2" bundle found here:

http://www.antennasdirect.com/bundles.html

I can't wait for the Red Sox game tonight in HD!

Why Zappos is kicking butt

Velvet sent me this the other day...

http://www.zazlamarr.com/blog/?p=240

Amazing customer service. Word of mouth marketing at it's best.

Book Review: Differentiate or Die

Of the three Trout books I have read, this one is my least favorite. It's a good book, but if you have read "The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing" and "Trout on Strategy", this book very much reads like a broken record. If you haven't read the other two books, I think you will like this one immensely. Perhaps part of what makes Trout so good is that he is very consistent in his messaging.

My favorite chapters:

Chapter 4. Quality and Customer Orientation are Rarely Differentiating Ideas

"You can indeed use this as a strategy. But only if your competition is dumb enough to let you."

Chapter 6. Price is Rarely a Differentiating Idea

"But when price becomes the focus of a message or a company's marketing activities, you are beginning to undermine the chances to being perceived as unique."

Chapter 9. Differentiation Takes Place In the Mind

"First, the specialist can focus on one product, one benefit, and one message. This focus enables the marketer to put a sharp point on the message that quickly drives it into the mind."

Chapter 11. Attribute Ownership Is a Way to Differentiate

"Attribute ownership is probably the number one way to differentiate a product or service."

Chapter 12. Leadership Is a Way to Differentiate

"Leadership is the most powerful way to differentiate a brand."

Chapter 14. Market Specialty Is a Differentiating Idea

"People are impressed with those who concentrate on a specific activity or product. They perceive them as experts."

Book Review: The Tipping Point

How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“A fascinating book that makes you see the world in a different way.” - Fortune

“The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.”

Here are my notes on the first three chapters:

Chapter 1 – The Three Rules of Epidemics

1. Law of the Few

• “When it comes to epidemics...a tiny percentage of people do the majority of the work.”

2. The Stickiness Factor

• “Unless you remember what I tell you, why would you ever change your behavior or buy my product or got to see my movie?”

3. The Power of Context

• “Human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem.”

Chapter 2 – The Law of the Few

In order to start an epidemic you need three types of people:

1. Connectors

• Connectors are people with a special gift for bringing the world together. We rely on them heavily to bridge social circles. Connectors know lots of people. “They are the kinds of people who know everyone.”

2. Mavens

• Mavens figure out how to get the best deal, and they want to tell you about it too. Mavens want to solve other peoples problems, generally by solving their own.

3. Salesmen

• “The essence of Salesmen is that, on some level, they cannot be resisted.”

Chapter 3 – The Stickiness Factor

This chapter was a huge case study on the differences between Blues Clues and Sesame Street. It was fascinating and well worth the read. It shows the importance of stickiness and how small changes can make all of the difference in the world. As an avid watcher of both Blues Clues and Sesame Street I loved the examples.

The rest of the focuses on “The Power of Context” and some case studies.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who is in sales, marketing, or is an entrepreneur.

Flow

Today I saw my favorite "away message" of all time:

Auto Response from anonymous person (11:29:54 AM): getting stuff done dnd

Which reminded me of a section of the Peopleware book that talked about "flow". Every developer knows when they are in the flow. They are hammering away tons of code, knocking things out, getting what would normally take days, done in hours. Flow basically means you are on a roll, watch out. Getting into flow can be tricky. Most developers would admit they are better at getting into a flow early in the morning, late at night, or on weekends. Why? Because during normal business hours small distractions happen all of the time and prevent you from getting into the flow.

Email is heavy during business hours, and we all try to keep up with the flurry of messages flying around, but it prevents flow. Hearing about John's night out on the town is fun, but it prevents flow. Collegehumor.com prevents flow. And the #1 thing I think prevents flow: Instant Messaging. "Hey Bob, check out this link...", "Did you see what Mary's wearing?", "Going out tonight?", "Lunch is here", "You see those sales figures?", "I bet I can do more pushups than you.", "The yankees kicked butt last night". I'm sure you get the point. People IM tons of stuff they wouldn't bother wasting time sending an email about. And these type of messages happen more frequently during business hours. That's why weekends are so productive, nobody is around to email, IM, text message, or call you.

I LOVE instant messaging because it's quick, you can see if someone is available, you know that you'll get feedback immediately, and I would never want to get rid of it. BUT it prevents flow. I'm glad to see someone else agrees with me and is trying to "get stuff done".

How much memory is free?

Using `top` to determine how much free physical memory a machine has available has always been confusing to me. It seems that you need a math degree and why doesn't it show values in MB instead of KB? I have found the `free -m` tool to be much easier to understand. In the image below I have circled the two numbers that really matter. The other numbers don't mean much unless you are a kernel developer. You want the number circled under the "free" column to be high and the number circled under the "used" column to be low. The first one is the amount of physical memory available. The second one is the amount of swap space used.

vmstat

Using the Unix`vmstat` tool can help you quickly figure out if a machine is using a lot of io wait time swapping memory to disk and back.





The 'swap' columns ('si', 'so') should almost always stay at zero. If those numbers are high, you are swapping and that will degrade performance dramatically.

MySQL Performance Tuning Tip

Set these values in my.cnf:

innodb_buffer_pool_size=128M
key_buffer_size=128M
query_cache_size=32M

I've seen big performance boosts by setting these values.

Outlook 2003 + Vista - Outlook 2007 Trial = DLL Hell

Installing Outlook 2003 on Windows Vista doesn't work if you have installed the Outlook 2007 trial, but here is a blog post with a fix that worked for me:

http://retrowebdev.blogspot.com/2007/06/windows-vista-and-outlook-2003.html

In case that blog ever goes away, here is the fix:

• Locate the file MSMAPI32.DLL in Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033
• Rename the file to something like MSMAPI32.XXX or MSMAPI32.OLD

Book Review: Trout on Strategy

From the same author that helped bring us the classic “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing”, Jack Trout provides another amazing book, this time focusing on strategy. As he puts it:

“It's all about having the right strategy. That's because strategy sets the competitive direction, strategy dictates product planning, strategy tells you how to communicate internally and externally, strategy tells you on what to focus.”

Book Review: Peopleware

This book is simply a classic and demonstrates that most software development issues are people issues, not technical issues. I should of read this book years ago.

“It is the one thing every software manager needs to read . . . not just once, but once a year.”

--Joel Spolsky

It's easier to manage technological issues than it is to manage sociological issues.

“Getting a new disk drive installed is positively trivial compared to figuring out why Horace is in a blue funk or why Susan is dissatisfied with the company after on a few months. Human interactions are complicated and never very crisp and clean in their effects, but they matter more than any other aspect of the work.”

Personally, I'd much rather help someone work through a tough algorithm than help them deal with their personal issues. The reality is that over the last seven years of managing developers I have come to realize that personal issues come up as often, if not more often than any technological challenges. This is very much the same topic covered in “First, Break All the Rules.” Care about your people and their personal issues. Help them where you can, but most importantly, just listen. It's just as important as helping them with the technological challenges they face.

Some Great Quotes From The Book:

• There Ain't No Such Thing as Overtime

• People under pressure don't work better; they just work faster.

• A policy of “Quality - If Time Permits” will assure that no quality at all sneaks into the project.

• The manager's function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.

• It's not the quantity of hours that are important, it's the quality. (paraphrased a bit)

• The final outcome of any effort is more of a function of who does the work than how the work is done.

• Get the right people, make them so happy they won't want to leave, turn them loose.

• Sociology matters more than technology or even money. It's suppose to be productive, satisfying fun to work.

• Process improvement programs don't work because they entice the play-it-safe behavior of low-risk, and therefore low-benefit, projects. (paraphrased a bit)

• Companies of knowledge-workers have to realize that it is their investment in human capital that matters most.

• A real working meeting is called when there is a real reason for all the people invited to think through some matter.

• And my personal favorite: The ultimate management sin is wasting people's time.

Office Space

The second part of the book focuses on office space:

• Quiet work environments = More Productivity = Higher Quality

• More square feet per worker = More Productivity = Higher Quality

• Stealth Development Offices are Great

• Walls and doors are good things.

• Appearance is not important, functionality is important.

If you manage software developers, you need to read this book.

MySQL Proxy

I stumbled upon MySQL Proxy today. It's in Alpha stages right now, but it looks like it's going to be great. Thanks to the keepalived project we have been able to load balance and fail over MySQL read queries for a long time now.

But this software has some cool new features:

• Query Analysis
• Query Filtering
• Query Modification

And they've even built in support for the Lua language. I first heard of Lua from Lighty and I'm even more fascinated now that MySQL Proxy has support for it too. Basically, you can add hooks at any of these stages:

• connect_server
• read_query
• read_query_result
  

to modify, rewrite, track, or do practically anything you want. Awesome stuff. Here are some example scripts.

'watch' Linux Command

Today I learned a new Linux command called 'watch'. watch repeatedly runs a command at a specified interval, showing the output of the command in full screen. The '-d' option is nice because it will highlight differences between each run. Looks like this little command was written in 1991 and updated in 1999.


watch -n 2 uptime

New Linux Command (tcpdump)

From the man page:

Tcpdump prints out the headers of packets on a network interface that match the boolean expression.

Example:

tcpdump -i eth0 -n dst port 389 and not src host 192.168.1.50

Dumps all traffic to port 389 that is not from ip 192.168.150

Awesome.