I have been on holiday in the meantime… but the T-Shirt had arrived and was waiting for me in my letterbox in the office !! How cool is that???
So today I am walking around the Rome office in it… and I am looking at people’s faces: you need to understand that Italian dress code is more or less the opposite of how people usually dress in Redmond… Italy is historically more formal, and it would be the norm to dress fancy… one would definitely look BAD here if he would show up in sandals in the office… and VERY bad going on sandals to a customer… 🙂
“I have not posted in a while” …well you certainly will have read tons of posts beginning this way, right? But that’s the truth. One of the reasons is that you can follow very well a lot of what I do and write elsewhere on the Internet by using my lifestream RSS feed, which includes much more than just what I post on this blog. Our minds are not stuck on one subject matter only, but our thoughs just go around in many different directions. I mentioned the integrated feed/lifestream in a previous post, but I found that the concept gets explained very well by Yongfook in this post:
“[…] We interact with various websites and create content on them – why should I then have to come to my own website and reconstruct, repost or repackage the same content? It already exists out there on the internet, and it’s grabbable and usable. This is not to say I think conventional blogging is dead. I do however think it is evolving. The pace at which we consume and create content – photos, videos, links etc – is getting faster, more frequent. If we wanted to republish everything manually on our blogs, we’d just run out of time. […]”
So at least even if this SITE does not get updated often you can see I have quite a busy digital public life on the web.
Very interesting to also read this post by Scott Hanselman on the subject. He rather just focuses on twitter/microblogging as an evolved form of blogging which was getting boring and time-consuming to people:
“[…] The rise of blogs brought conversations on the ‘net more out in the open. Blogging enabled conversation via essay, but as blogs have matured, posts have gotten longer and longer and threads more difficult to follow. Now, most posts are jumping off points for the more interesting conversations that inevitably move to the comments. […]”
He then goes into more detailed/structured analysis of what you can or could do with Twitter. While his analysis is pretty good about the many ways you could use Twitter as a broadcasting tool (and in fact loads of companies do already), I rather use it as public instant messaging. Or maybe not just. I don’t actually know and to be honest I am not too much into classifying things, really. For example, if classifying what this blog is… I really am not sure I know myself what this blog is. It has been very funny when other people have tried to classify it… one said it was about “programming” (that would be nice, if I really was a better developer!), other people said it was “personal”, other thought it was just about “IT” in general… Heck, there is no classification possible I am afraid. Therefore, not knowing what this blog is, I at least think that I know what this blog is NOT:
it isn’t a marketing blog
I am not here trying to sell anything
I am not promoting anything, anyone, or any brand
It isn’t just focused on one subject, on one area of interest
…and so are all my other “expressions” on the Net. Just me. Sprinkles of me all around. No special industrial plan for it. Just be myself. You might like me sometimes. You might hate me. You might not care at all. It’s all good, anyway. Sorry for wasting your time.
I don’t know about other people, but I do get a lot to think when the end of the year approaches: all that I’ve done, what I have not yet done, what I would like to do, and so on… And it is a period when memories surface.
I found the two old CD-ROMs you can see in the picture. And those are memories. missioncritical software was the company that invented a lot of stuff that became Microsoft’s products: for example ADMT and Operations Manager.
The black CD contains SeNTry, the “enterprise event manager”, what later became Operations Manager. On the back of the CD, the company motto at the time: “software that works simply and simply works”. So true. I might digress on this concept, but I won’t do that right now.
I have already explained in my other blog what I do for work. Well, that was a couple of years ago anyway. Several things have changed, and we are moving towards offering services that are more measurable and professional. So, since it happens that in a certain job you need to be an “expert” and “specialize” in order to be “seen” or “noticed”. You know I don’t really believe in specialization. I have written it all over the place. But you need to make other people happy as well and let them believe what they want, so when you “specialize” they are happier. No, really, it might make a difference in your carrer 🙂
In this regard, I did also mention my “meeting again” with Operations Manager. That’s where Operations manager helped me: it let me “specialize” in systems and applications management… a field where you need to know a bit of everything anyway: infrastructure, security, logging, scripting, databases, and so on… 🙂 This way, everyone wins.
Don’t misunderstand me, this does not mean I want to know everything. One cannot possibly know everything, and the more I learn the more I believe I know nothing at all, to be honest. I don’t know everything, so please don’t ask me everything – I work with mainframes 🙂 While that can be a great excuse to avoid neighbours and relatives annoyances with their PCs though, on the serious side I still believe that any intelligent individual cannot be locked into doing a narrow thing and know only that one bit just because it is common thought that you have to act that way.
If I would stop where I have to stop I would be the standard “IT Pro”. I would be fine, sure, but I would get bored soon. I would not learn anything. But I don’t feel I am the standard “IT Pro”. In fact, funnily enough, on some other blogs out there I have been referenced as a “Dev” (find it on your own, look at their blogrolls :-)). But I am not a Dev either then… I don’t write code for work. I would love to, but I rarely actually do, other than some scripts. Anyway, I tend to escape the definition of the usual “expert” on something… mostly because I want to escape it. I don’t see myself represented by those generalization.
As Phil puts it, when asked “Are software developers – engineers or artists?”:
“[…] Don’t take this as a copout, but a little of both. I see it more as craftsmanship. Engineering relies on a lot of science. Much of it is demonstrably empirical and constrained by the laws of physics. Software is less constrained by physics as it is by the limits of the mind. […]”
Craftmanship. Not science. And stop calling me an “engineer”. I am not an engineer. I was even crap in math, in school!
Anyway, what does this all mean? In practical terms, it means that in the end, wether I want it or not, I do get considered an “expert” on MOM and OpsMgr… and that I will mostly work on those products for the next year too. But that is not bad, because, as I said, working on that product means working on many more things too. Also, I can point to different audiences: those believing in “experts” and those going beyond schemes. It also means that I will have to continue teaching a couple of scripting classes (both VBScript and PowerShell) that nobody else seems to be willing to do (because they are all *expert* in something narrow), and that I will still be hacking together my other stuff (my facebook apps, my wordpress theme and plugins, my server, etc) and even continue to have strong opinions in those other fields that I find interesting and where I am not considered an *expert* 😉
Well, I suppose I’ve been ranting enough for today…and for this year 🙂 I really want to wish everybody again a great beginning of 2008!!! What are you going to be busy with, in 2008 ?
This post is to write down some thoughts before Christmas, along the lines of what I have written yesterday in an email to a lot of colleagues (and I definitely forgotten some of them because there are too many great people I’ve worked with… so if you are one of the forgotten ones and you are reading this: I’m sorry!).
The last few months have been very busy with work. As much as I enjoyed them anyway, and learned a lot in the process and from the people I worked with, I now really want to enjoy these few coming days of Christmas holidays and RELAX and spend some quality time with my family and friends.
So I wish the same for all of you: that you may spend a Merry, relaxing Christmas, and have a great start for a grand, brilliant new year!
As a side note, having been very busy I have blogged a lot less. Blogging implies that I already have a sort-of-well-formed thought, that should span a few lines or paragraphs, otherwise I don’t find it worth it. That does not mean I don’t have small ideas or other things I like to share when I come up with them. That is why I am using microblogging and Social Networking a lot lately, so I remind you that even if this blog’s builtin feed only includes the REAL FEW blog posts, then I also have another (very “chatty”) feed that you can use to “follow me” and that one includes all of the following combined feeds: my status messages from Facebook, my Twitter messages, my pictures on Flickr, the stuff I read somewhere else and then share on Facebook, the places I visit and mark on 43Places and the goals I achieve, want to achieve, or I simply talk about on 43Things, as well as the REAL posts on this blog. It is my implementation of what has been called a “lifestream” by other bloggers.
Facebook Terms of Service state that it is forbidden to “[…] use automated scripts to collect information from or otherwise interact with the Service or the Site […]”
I am quite sure there are a lot of people writing “official” applications (that is using the “platform API” and so on) that are collecting A LOT of information about users who install their applications. They are being sent the info about the visitors by facebook, they are storing them, they might do whatever they please with (study it, sell it to spammers, to marketers, to making-money-assholes) and nobody will ever notice because it is on their servers and nobody can check that.
But a script that changes your status from remote – since this is not a functionality they CHOSE to expose in their API – then THAT is a big issue. Doh! It’s just plain ridiculous, but that’s it.
[…] 4) Except as provided in Section 2.A.6 below, you may not continue to use, and must immediately remove from any Facebook Platform Application and any Data Repository in your possession or under your control, any Facebook Properties not explicitly identified as being storable indefinitely in the Facebook Platform Documentation within 24 hours after the time at which you obtained the data, or such other time as Facebook may specify to you from time to time;
5) You may store and use indefinitely any Facebook Properties that are explicitly identified as being storable indefinitely in the Facebook Platform Documentation; provided, however, that except as provided in Section 2.A.6 below, you may not continue to use, and must immediately remove from any Facebook Platform Application and any Data Repository in your possession or under your control, any such Facebook Properties: (a) if Facebook ceases to explicitly identify the same as being storable indefinitely in the Facebook Platform Documentation; (b) upon notice from Facebook (including if we notify you that a particular Facebook User has requested that their information be made inaccessible to that Facebook Platform Application); or (c) upon any termination of this Agreement or of your use of or participation in Facebook Platform; […] You will not directly or indirectly sell, export, re-export, transfer, divert, or otherwise dispose of any Facebook Properties to any country (or national thereof) without obtaining any required prior authorizations from the appropriate government authorities; […]
Are we sure everybody is playing by these rules, when every facebook “application” really runs on the developer’server ? How do you know that they are really storing only what you want them to store, and deleting what you want them to delete ? Everybody knows how difficult it is to really “delete” digital content once it has come into existance… who knows how many copies of this database/social graph are floating around ?
Of course that is not an issue because people don’t talk about it enough. But a script that changes your status – now, THAT is a very terrible thing.
I just don’t get this “politically correctness”. It must be me.
Oh, no… look! It’s not only me! I had read this post of Dare, but I problably had overlooked the last bit of it…. because he did point out this Hypocrisy going on:
[…] Or (5) the information returned by FQL about a user contains no contact information (no email address, no IM screen names, no telephone numbers, no street address) so it is pretty useless as a way to utilize one’s friends list with applications besides Facebook since there is no way to cross-reference your friends using any personally identifiable association that would exist in another service.
When it comes to contact lists (i.e. the social graph), Facebook is a roach motel. Lots of information about user relationships goes in but there’s no way for users or applications to get it out easily. Whenever an application like FacebookSync comes along which helps users do this, it is quickly shut down for violating their Terms of Use. Hypocrisy? Indeed. […]
[…] I will point out that 9 times out of 10 when you hear geeks talking about social network portability or similar buzzwords they are really talking about sending people spam because someone they know joined some social networking site. I also wonder how many people realize that these fly-by-night social networking sites that they happily hand over their log-in credentials to so they can spam their friends also share the list of email addresses thus obtained with services that resell to spammers? […] how do you prevent badly behaved applications like Quechup from taking control away from your users? At the end of the day your users might end up thinking you sold their email addresses to spammers when in truth it was the insecure practices of the people who they’d shared their email addresses with that got them in that mess. This is one of the few reasons I can understand why Facebook takes such a hypocritical approach. 🙂 […]
Thanks, Dare, for mentioning Hypocrisy. Thanks for calling things by their name. I do understand their approach, I just don’t agreewith it.
I did pull my small application off the Internet because I have a family to mantain and I don’t want to have legal troubles with Facebook. Sorry to all those that found it handy. No, I cannot even give that to you per email. It’s gone. I am sorry. For the freedom of speech, especially, I am sorry.
I got tired of using FeedBurner, really. So I made a much more flexible and “Complete” integrated feed that includes posts on this blog, my photos on Flickr, my Status Changes on Facebook and Twitter. Please update your aggregator if you were using the old feed (which still works btw, but will keep having less information in it).
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