Da Vinci Code Quote of the Week

Da Vinci Code Quote of the Week

"...want to know more about the Da Vinci code... go to church on sunday, "

Leadership in I.T. - Not a lost art.

LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
As the Information Technology business has evolved so to have it's leadership challenges. Many companies realize too late that investing in the development of a good leadership team is often critical to thier success. With the speed of inovation in the Information Technology business the challenge to fill this key component often over shadowed by competing priorities. Before they know it many I.T. professionals find themselves in a leadership position they are ill prepared to handle or really don't want. ZuCom has developed a mentoring program to help I.T. leaders navagate the waters and strengthen what skills are inherient to all of us.


Leadership Development by ZuCom

Perfect Logic, Beautiful Loser

He wants to dream like a young man
With the wisdom of an old man
He wants his home and security
He wants to live like a sailor at sea
Beautiful loser
Where you gonna fall
When you realize
You just don't need it all
He's your oldest and your best friend
If you need him he'll be there again
He's always willing to be second best
A perfect (begin my edit) logic (end my edit), a perfect guest


- Bob Seger.... Composer...

Thanks to Jeff, Bobby, William, Detroit, Bob, and the Silver Bullet (not the beer)..

Sunday Morning Sermon

Sunday Morning Sermon

3/5/06

Sometimes inspiration comes from the strangest places, sometimes it comes from exactly where you expect. When you go to a leadership conference you expect to be inspired. When you go to church you expect to be moved. For that reason (and many more) the receivers "expectations" which may be set by a venues "aura" may put communications in those places at an advantage to others. Believe me though if you listen close enough you'll realize that the sermon of life can come from just about anywhere. Take for example Rocky and Bullwinkle. No not the 2000 film (although it had De Niro and some other great stars in it). I mean the 60's television show.

On the surface the show is based on a the adventures of a squirrel and moose (Rocky and Bullwinkle) from a town called Frostbite Falls, who battle the forces of evil (Boris and Natasha). When you look at the characters you soon realize that there is a very thinly drawn statement about leadership with an admitted dogmatic undertone. On the surface you have characters who portray two recurring roles. One role being confident but not so smart role and the second being a pessimistic but oh so cunning role. As is often the case in real life these roles play out under the guidance a character called the "fearless leader". What may be lost by only giving a cursory look, is the underlining statement that is made about management. As dogmatic as it may seem, you will often find the roles portrayed in people you see every day. It may not always be obvious but the reality effect of this show is probably what made it so popular during it's run. The interplay between these roles is where the rubber meets the road.

So what's the insight? Where is the inspiration? To this end I can only suggest that each individual find their own answer by looking within themselves.

What I see is a very close correlation to two different team management styles. The "fearless leader", who micro-manages Boris and Natasha and the self directed team management of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Save the good vs. evil undertone, both management styles are portrayed along with the benefits and pitfalls of each. If you find yourself leading a Rocky, Bullwinkle, Boris or Natasha (and we all do at times), you might find the answer to what you seek in the simple message a cartoon can send. Take what you will from this post, no doubt the venue of your "situation" will highlight what you seek.

Mac OS X Tiger & Linksys PCMCIA Card

Recently a friend brought over a TiBook (PowerBook G4 400). After playing with it for a while I noticed how limited the range was on the built in Airport card. The well reported limitation was actually worse than most of the published reports. After checking to make sure the AirPort card and antenna was plugged in properly it became apparent that the infamous limitation was indeed a design flaw and not a a hardware issue.

Not being one to leave well enough alone, I began a journey to resolve this limitation. After some research into the Airport card it became apparent that the drivers for it were loosely similar to the open source Broadcomm equivalent. Loosely similar might not be that accurate but it got me where I needed to be. A few years ago I ran to a problem trying to find a RedHat driver for my a Linksys WPC54G. Although Linksys didn't make a linux driver at the time, the solution was to modify a Broadcomm driver to fit the Linksys WPC54G card. Could that mod also work for Mac OS X Tiger?

To test the theory I inserted the Linksys card into the TiBook pcmcia slot and began to search for the files I needed to modify. Before I could launch Spotlight I realized that the Signal Strength meter was on full. After checking the Preferences it became apparent that the Linksys WPC54G card was supported by OS X natively. Tiger had disabled the internal Airport, enabled the Linksys WPC54G, copied the WEP key over to the new "Airport Port" and connected to the default SSID. Who could have known. NO MODIFICATION NEEDED! This BLOG is minutes from when the card was enabled but this seems REALLY strange. Who would have guessed that OS X Tiger had support for Linksys PCMCIA NIC adapters. Please post if you find out others that work as well. Either way I would think this is a boon for Apple. Linksys (now owned by Cisco) is a huge player in the NIC market. Gotta hope that the Intel switch won't effect the nougaty center of OS X by removing support for things like this.

Disclaimer.
I can only tell you that it worked for me. I've not tested it on other machines and I've not tested it with other cards. If you decide to try this you do so at your own risk. All readers of this blog must hold all parties harmless for it's content.

How hard do IT people work?

Just too darn funny not to add to the blog

Call us what you will: Systems Developers. Programmers, Engineers, etc.. It's our determination and tireless work that drives this technology world..

MacOS-Vista ;-)

Windows Vista Features - Spoof (MacOS X)


Link is now dead but file name was: real_vista_episode_1.mov

Stabilized Zapruder video footage?

Image-stabilized Zapruder video footage?

Not sure personally but worth a look...

Link Dead file name is: zapruder_stable.mov

NEW BLOG... SAFEGUARD AGENCIES ... CHECK IT OUT

Safeguard Agencies Vero Beach FL BLOG

Lawrence Lessig Free Culture.

'cept for the shameless plug for $$$ towards the end, this is a masterful presentation of the issues at hand surrounding DRM. Although a bit dated, it's still relevant today. The presentation must have given to a technology based audience as the references to the open source community are deliberate and welcomed by the crowd. If you have an opinion on digital use rights you owe it to yourself to hear this Macromedia Flash presentation.

Lawrence Lessig's Let Freedom Ring Presentation

'Hammonasset Line' - Lithic Sites

Ever hear about the line of Lithic Sites that leads to the Devils Tomb near Hunter Mountain? Even if your not a believer the mathematics and celestial coincidences are shocking... And the Turtle mounds are just too funny..


http://www.neara.org/PAUL/Hammonasset01.htm

http://www.neara.org/PAUL/Hammonasset02.htm


Thanks Steve!!

Vundo Virus.. PARTICULARLY NASTY

REMOVE VUNDO INSTRUCTIONS

The ZEN of Presentation..

Quintessential view of how delivering a message is more about mastering multiple communication methods than raw data. A talent not native to most IT leaders, (Steve Jobs the obvious exception).

Presentation Zen

Add Samba Shares to OSX.

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/03/18/samba.html


Handy article!!

9 Essentials to IT Management

Great article, shocking how some of the characterizations are dead on.


http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/25/geeks.html

SAW

"angry yet apathetic"

"to overcome something you have to understand what makes it a perfect engine"

"the ability to see past anger and fear, can set you apart"

PowerMac G4 DP Mirror Door Superdrive Replacement

After burning 20 or so DVD coasters, buffer underruns, and blank check failures a much balder version of me decided that the issue was looking more and more like it was the DVR-104a that came with the machine and not media, or software. Faced with the loss of being without burn support from all the iLife apps and iTunes I was at a crossroads. Upgrade to a non-Apple drive would mean that I loose all the integrated burn support, (right!) and spending $90 on a refurb'd drive that only burned at 1x was a little crazy. I went down the firmware path and really considered overwriting the Apple firmware but stopped short of that when a trip to a local office supply store sparked what can only be described as devine intervention. While in the store I mentioned the problem I had encountered to one of the techs. Amazingly enough this was a Mac friendly person, who as irony would have it had the same issue with an iMac. His solution was to replace the SuperDrive with a regular Sony CD-RW, DVD. All the iLife apps worked fine he said, since Tiger. Hmm... Could this be true.. Has Apple lightened up on the firmware check now that DVD-R's are more common? Hmm.. After all I have complete support for my Sony 195E CD-RW, and haven't had to play with the the devce-plugin file in over a year. Hmm... since Apple now get's the SuperDrives from many different manufacturers (not just Pioneer) could it be this easy? Well I was going to find out. $79.95 later I had a Sony DRU-810A, an hour after that I'm back in business. Everything works including TOAST!!. As of the writing of this the only thing I haven't tried is the DL (DUAL LAYER) support from Toast. All iApps work like a charm. I've only got 4x media and thus have only burned 4x in a DVD but heck it worked. I will mention that you don't want to try and reformat the old media you had problems with in the old Superdrive. Upon looking at the media it would appear that it was stripped (0's written to all sectors).


Results may vary, take this with a grain of salt and be realistic, not EVERY DRIVE will work. Not responsible for the info in this or any blog on this site.

For GREAT Mac support and consulting see ZuCom Services

Sometimes a list is just a list!!

The September 19 2005 issue of Information Week magazine has the 17th annual 500 Top Innovators in technology. This one managed to get me to open it while I was "in a meeting". I immediately flip to the alphabetical list and look to see where my favorites all landed. A's,....Amgen, Applied Materials, AT&T... WAIT ... Houston we have a problem and we're not even in the B's. NO APPLE COMPUTER? WHAT!! Admitedly my blood flows through Cupertino, but why is Apple not listed as one of the top innovators? . No GOOGLE, or even YAHOO..??

Top 5 reasons why a company wouldn't make the Info Week Magazine top 500 innovators list:

5) If your company is a leader in innovating things like online music and holds a 70% market share in that arena for hardware and songs sold.
4) If your company is the #1 or #2 portal on the planet offering new products every 30 days.
3) If your company is makes it cheaper, better and faster to do ANYTHING!
2) If your company was started in a garage and thumbed it's nose at corporate bean counters, and then proved them wrong.
1) If your company doesn't advertise in Info Week.

THAT WAS SARCASM FOR THOSE USING WEB SPIDERS!!


"average companies never want other companies to go beyond average"???

Unknown

It isn't wrong until someone tells you it's wrong.

John C. Maxwell

"Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple."

John C. Maxwell