This book is about crowdsourcing; taking a function traditionally performed by a company or closed-group and having it produced by a generally undefined large group of people (wikipedia).  It’s all the rage.  It’s also a lot of hype.  Yes, there are specific opportunities to leverage the crowd… things like information gathering and creation (think wikipedia, Amazon’s review system, LibraryThing) and maybe open source software development (Apache, Linux,  Firefox, Wordpress) but some the idea that a crowd can consistantly and reliably create specific value, especially value from next to nothing, is unproven and highly dubious (in this authors opinion… the mob may disagree).

The book itself isn’t worth buying unless you’re writing a thesis on the topic and need a few examples of attempts at crowdsourcing (wikipedia article provides more examples).  The last two chapters, C-We-O (ed: I think I just threw up a little in my mouth) and Lead from the Rear are the best of the bunch.  C-We-O is good because it basically says “crowdsourced” solutions don’t work without leadership and direction.  Lead from the Rear is the most practical of the bunch offering some tips on how to use the crowd and how to build a community that produces values… even there it’s light on details.

There is a place for distributed decision making and acknowledging that large systems are too complex for a single person or group of people to consistently make the right decisions, so I do believe we’ll see more of a shift, particularly in busienss, from large monolithic decision making systems… and the communicative power of technology is going to help that, but it’s not going to happen on a large scale without clear direction and focused resources.  Business that set a clear strategic direction, allocate assets to achieve those directions, and enable their employees or quasi-employees to be directly compensated for contributing towards those goals.

If you want to learn more about crowdsourcing and want to buy a book it looks to me like Wikinomics or Crowdsourcing would be better options, although I haven’t read either yet.

For week 3 I read The Stranger by Albert Camus.  I read this while backpacking in the Grand Canyon, reading by headlamp under a warm and clear starlit sky or by sunlight beneath the very rare desert waterfall.  The book was a short 154 page novel.  It was an interesting read with a flawed premise.

The basic idea is that a sociopath indiferently attends his mother’s funeral, happens in with the company of a questionable fellow, murders a man for no reason, and is put on trial and eventaully sentenced to death.  This sociopath is Camus’ hero.  He’s Camus’ ideal man, although Camus may see him as flawed in that he doesn’t recognize the situation he has gotten himself into, he casually passes through the world making decisions that suit him best.  His primary motivation is personal pleasure and ease.  He has not great aspirations.  He cares for no one but himself.  He doesn’t really look ahead, look behind, or do anythign but live in the now… it’s appealing in one sense, honest in another in that it recognizes a facet of how people are.

The fatal flaw is how incredibly stupid this character is.  If all he does is care about himself, why can’t he see the obvious… that he’s going to be put to death for the calous killing of a man.  Camus is attempting to point out the absurdity of life, the absurdity of ascribing and even socially requiring certain emotions… but in so doing he creates a character and an ideal of a foolish man who places truth to Camus’ storyline above personal preservation.

A character calls this man ‘antichrist’ and he is right.  Camus’ man is the opposite of Christ, he is self-centered, interested only in himself.  Everyone else is inconsquential unless they impact him directly and then they are only of value if they provide him with pleasure.  Christ lowers himself for all mankind.  He died for men.  This man, died for his own foolishness and lack of self control.

I’ll read more of Camus’ work, mostly because I think his nihilistic viewpoint is absurd but he tries to be honsest about it and I hope that in his other work he can be.  That said, once he’s honest the absurdity of any sort of society that allows for a nihlistic sociopath… no a society of nihilistic sociopaths is so absolutely absurd.

Camus died in a car accident three years after recieving a Nobel Prize for Literature, sucks for him.

A Life Well Spent: The Eternal Rewards of Investing Yourself and Your Money in Your Family by Russ Crosson was a pleasant surprise.  Russ is the President and CEO of Ron Blue & Co., a financial planning company.  Russ’ basic premise is that our time and money should be invested in our family’s, not just blindly socked away in retirement accounts or spent on luxeries.  Russ calls the book a “why-to” manageme your finances, not just a “how-to”.

The argument is that success, in America, is defined materially, by how much we own.  Russ argues that financial success should be measured by providing for our children, families and others.  Russ suggests the counter-approach is to carefully manage our time, avoid debt like the plague, and educate our children about work and money.

Time, create margin, avoid overradding too many things into your schedule so that you cannot spend time with your children, or handle an unexpected requirement.  Russ begins to make the case that money isn’t everything (shocking coming from a financial planner?!).  You cannot buy time, you cannot pay to fix your kids.  His basic principle is to lay out your obligations and only add new obligitations when you can remove others.

Like Dave Ramsey and other financial advisors, Russ argues very strongly against debt.  He suggests you should be focused on eliminating debt, including your home mortgage.  You must live within your means.  Other books explain the how’s, this book just makes the point that if you don’t control your debt by controlling your wants and your spending your time is going to be out of control.

Russ spends several chapters elaborating on how to teach children how to live successfully with finances.  Not overproviding for them, teaching them the value of work by showing them that you work, explaining that yo uwork to provide for the family, explaining your financial systems, investments, and decisions so they can understand them and model them in their own lives.

A Life Well Spent is 246 pages long.

Jesus Wants to Save Christians:  A Manifesto for the Church in Exile
Rob Bell and Don Golden
ISBN: 978-0-310-27502-2

This book leaves you scratching your head, thinking about it.  I don’t have a neat answer about whether this is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or all right or all wrong.  I’m not even sure the book could stand alone and defend itself or if it really needs to.

Regardless, this book is for you, for me.  It’s a popular level ‘manifesto’ for the Christian church about what God has done, what He’s doing, what He’s called us to.  It’s accessible for someone who doesn’t know anything about the Bible, but has some level of curiosity about Christianity.

This book is also seriously flawed if it’s left to stand on its own.  Bell and Golden make a passionate and compelling argument for Christians to love their neighbors, to make change in the world, to question the social systems many of us (those reading this blog) have grown up in and have just come to accept.  They cite scripture and provide end notes for their scriptural and extra-scriptural citations.  The general argument resonates as true… but the constantly shifting word-pictures, the conversive style, the obsession with symbolism leaves you asking ‘really?’.  They also are careful to exclude or linguistically dilute things that might cause the casual reader to balk… prophets don’t necessarily speak to God, Israelites are necessarily the same as Hebrews, and Jesus is not risen… He “survived death… to experience the worst a human can suffer and then came out the other side alive.”  Heaven and prophesy aren’t mentioned.  This isn’t about that, this is about now, it’s about the practical… and maybe that’s okay, as a part of a bigger picture.  From what I know of Rob Bell I don’t believe he denies any of the core tenants of the Christian faith, I think this book just focuses on emphasizign the elements that are important to their point… that Christians are called to change the world through love and living differently then the world.

I’m challenged.  Challenged to do more, to drop my complacency, to recognize the blessings I have and the excess I indulge in.  I’m challenged to study more so I can filter out weak arguments and wrong arguments to clearly and reliably discern truth.

This book relies heavily on an understanding of the Bible called “New Exodus Perspective”, whose primary champion seems to be a guy named Dr. Tom Holland (Contours of Pauline Theology).  As a complete Theology, I think it may not stand up… it seems to understand the Exodus and the redemptive symbolism (maybe too much on the symbolism) in the Bible, but lacked, at least in Bell and Golden’s use, integration with pre-Exodus covenants or or violence (genocide?) carried out at God’s request.  As a perspective, it may hold up… but like a movie about the European front in World War 2, you may get a good understanding of part of the story, but not the whole complete story.

If you’re looking for a fresh way to present the Gospel to jaded Americans who may have had negative experiences with the church or who will tune out at the first word about miracles, but will listen to the truth of a world that is broken the narrative in this book may be a good guide to help with that conversation.

This is one of those books that I may end up renouncing as heresy and deception upon further review or information or may love… I just can’t tell right now… which is a good thing, more to think about.

Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Maverick’s, and very successful entrepreneur wrote up a brief essay on how to get rich over at his BlogMaverick blog.  Here’s the core:

• There are no shortcuts
• Save your money in 6-month CDs so it’s liquid and ready to apply and make a deal
• “If you use a credit card you don’t want to be rich”
• “The greatest rate of return you will earn is on your own personal spending”
• Get smart!  Invest in yourself and study/work-in the area you’re passionate about
• Get a job in that area
• This is going to take months, maybe years… it’s not short term
• Wait for times of uncertainty… that’s your opportunity

The behaviors and disciplines here are a great barometer of your current willingness to take the risk and put the time in to get rich.

I have a graph problem with 190k+ nodes and at least that many edges.  I need to model it in 3D… so I started googling.  I found Ubigraph… which is awesome… which led me to NetworkX which led me to Python and Graphviz.  My problem crushed Ubigraph and Graphviz… but I learned a bit.

Ubigraph - Pretty cool 3D graph renderer.  It uses a XMLRPC interface (don’t worry I didn’t know much about XMLRPC either) which means you can use just about any language to create 3D visualizations of graph data.  It’s quick, has a decent set of options in the API for formatting the graph output and only took a couple of hours to figure out.  Downsides, it’s not open source, although it is free.  It seems like a project that is looking for momentum and live-testers so it can go commercial.  It also couldn’t solve my problem.  It completely choked on 190k nodes.  It did OK with 5k nodes.  With a bleeding-edge processor it might have scaled up to 10, 20, maybe 50k nodes… but 190k… I doubt it.  Ubigraph plays nice with NetworkX and Python, which led me to…

NetworkX - Oh wow, this is absolutely awesome!  It works.  It works great.  it works with 190k nodes and as many edges.  It works in Windows and Linux. It can tell me how many connected components I have in my node-set.  It’s open source, it’s free, and it uses Python…

Python - Python is an easy to learn, very useable, and generally understable language (if you work in C/++/#, VB, Java, Ruby, perl, etc… if you use OCaml… I have no idea, it may be obtuse).  I, despite many reservations, was able to work in Pythong and NetworkX without much headache.  Yeah, you have to ident your code, but that’s about it.  I was able to get a working graph modelling system up and running, reading from CSV files and outputting to Graphviz, in less than two hours.  I’ve always sort of harbored a resentment towards Python… not sure why, maybe I just tought I’d be a perl or ruby guy… anyways, no longer.  Python works and when it comes to NetworkX I may continue exploring.  All of this led me to Graphviz, which I broke…

Graphviz - Graphviz is a library that can take graph data and ouptut a visual representatiion of that graph. It has several visualization algorithms available.  It can handle pretty complex stylings.  It can output to just about every relevant format available.  It’s good software.  It broke with 190k nodes.  I modelled smaller datasets and Grahviz produced very useable and interesting graphs showing how the nodes were connected, but it couldn’t handle a complex and massive set of nodes and edges.  ‘dot’ didn’t crash, but I don’t believe it would have actually produced a useable model (it ran for 3+ hours w/o producing anything).  ‘neato’ and the other engines just crashed.  I’ll use Graphviz again, especially for smaller models, but for 190k nodes ther doesn’t seem to be an open-source solution availabe (I didn’t test any commerical options, if they even exist).

Final Thoughts

Ubigraph is pretty cool, and would be even cooler if it optimized it’s rendering engine to allow allof the data to be loaded before trying to render it.

Graph Theory is very interesting and can be applied to many day-to-day business problems.  Adding graph logic to common IT operations software would enable proper data-modelling and actual efficiency due to accuracy for IT shops.  I’m sure there a re a series of other intersting problems out there that graph theory can solve.

NetworkX is a superior library that doesn’t seem to have any equivalent in any other language today.  That’s a real shame, because I think my company is going to make me use .NET.

I had to retire a pair of really good boots today.  I’ve had these boots for at least four years.  I’ve worn them all over the North Georgia hills, up and down The Smokies, through the Grand Canyon, in Yosemite, and through the French and Swiss alps.  They’ve been dependable, comfortable, and generally just a really great pair of boots.  They were really the first pair of decent boots I’ve ever owned (I’ve had boots before, but not a good sturdy leather pair).  The tread was fantastic and still in great shape…

Unfortunately, the seams on the outsides of the uppers began to come apart last year during a hike through the alps.  Duct tape held them together and kept most of the water and snow out, but they needed to be repaired.  I delayed… hoping they’d recover on their own.

I needed a good pair of boots for an upcoming trip so I took them back to REI.  They said they’d have to call out to repair them and to check back later.  I left the boots.  I checked back today and they suggested that instead of repair they could just give me credit.  Over four years and a few hundred miles later they offered to give me a refund.  I took it.  REI is awesome.  Oddly though… as I realized that they’d have to keep the boots I felt a little twinge.  A real sense of loss.  These boots were still in ok shape.  A little repair work… they’d been good to me… what would happen to them?  Would the repair them and give them to a young unshoed sherpa?  Would they bury them in a boot graveyard?  Build a small raft and set it aflame in some sort of secret REI boot-burning ritual outside of Seatlle?  I don’t know what I expected and I don’t know why I actually cared… well, I didn’t care enough to turn down a $125 refund and a new pair of Vasque’s.

Crenshaw would say “There are lies, damn lies, and multitasking.”  This short little read makes a case for focusing on a single thing at a time in order to be effective and efficient.  There are bits of science sprinkled in, several Ph.D’s telling us that actively concentrating on two tasks is humanly impossible, but mostly it’s just a common sense argument for why we should reduce the number of interruptions in our lives and focus.

This book is in story form, a la The One Minute Manager, and reads very quickly.  If you’re already mostly convinced that multi-tasking doesn’t work then you’ll be able to skim through this in an hour or two without any trouble.

Crenshaw does offer a few tests to demonstrate how difficult it is for our brain to switch tasks and how much damage multitasking does to your schedule.  For example, time yourself writing the sentence “I read The Thought Collector everyday.” and each time you write a letter write an increasing number on a line below it.  So write ‘I’, then below it write 1.  Once you’ve done this, time yourself writing the sentence again straight through and then write the numbers straight through… this time not switching between the two tasks.  Your brain has momentum on a single task and switching tasks loses that momentum.

Changing your work patterns is the real challenge.  The Myth of Multitasking is light on implementation strategy.  There are a few good tips like scheduling reoccurring meetings with people who are accountable to you or who have regular questions, and limiting your voicemail (and email) checking to specific times a day while also setting expectations w/ colleagues that you will consistently check and get back to them.

Worth reading if you like productivity books, want a method for convincing others about the evils of multitasking, or aren’t convinced yourself.

The command ’sleep’, available on many Linux systems, is useful for scheduling a command to run at some predefined time in the relatively near future.  For example, I was running a script to convert several MPEG to AVI, it wasn’t scheduling to finish for 15 minutes, but I wanted to go to bed and still needed to kick off another script to run an MPEG to h.264 conversion to run during the night.  With ’sleep’ I could schedule the second conversion and head to bed to actually get some sleep.

The syntax for ’sleep’ is:

sleep NUMBER[SUFFIX]

NUMBER is the amount of time you want to wait and SUFFIX indicates the unit of time; seconds, minutes, hours or days. The default for SUFFIX is seconds.

To run ’sleep’ with another command just separate sleep from the second command with a semi-colon.

sleep 30; ls

This pointless example will list the contents of the current directory in 30 seconds. To wait 30 minutes, just use

sleep 30m; ls

The ’sleep’ command isn’t something you would use everyday, but it is a simple and helpful addition to your UNIX command line toolbelt.

I created a simple little app that will show all of the IP addresses on your Linux box.  It works great with Conky to display the IP addresses on your desktop.  The app, iplist, is available for download.  I have only tested it on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron).