Conceptual Models of Collaboration

Researching Web 2.0 concepts and ways of collaborating; some interesting links, hopefully I will get to refine this post.

How People Harness Their Collective Wisdom And Power to Construct the Future

Excellent treatise addressing the problems of interpersonal communication, group collaboration, and the limits of "participative democracy." Most interestingly, the author presents a language-based system (the Structured Design Process, or SDP) for resolving complex problems as a group.

In leading technical teams for various enterprises over the years, I've often thought that one of the single largest barriers was the lack of a set of clear conceptual models: so many issues are caused simply by the fact that people are on different pages. It's why we have the fields of law and mathematics (among others of course), each of which works to express concepts in a concise, well-understood formulation (the "language" of the field).

A few excerpts:

"As human evolution is experiencing the complex challenges of the Information Age, humanity cannot take responsibility for guiding its evolution without the capacity to surface the will and wisdom of the people by engaging them in meaningful dialogue in the context of the emerging Agoras (meeting spaces) of the 21st century Global Village."

"Participative dialogue is the essence of democratic design. Its origin in the Agora of Athens is the iconic forerunner of the Structured Design Process (SDP). SDP is a designing process that updates participative democracy so that it can function in the agoras of the Information Age.

"Governments, corporations, and other groups have failed to master the participative democracy and interdisciplinary dialogue that they espouse. This failure trumpets the need for an effective structured dialogue process that will enable stakeholders to design their futures. The largely unstructured dialogue in the Greek agoras was a wonder for its time, but it had great weaknesses. When we try to guide our Information Age organizations with the same unstructured dialogue, those weaknesses increase exponentially."

Maintaining a Fine Cherry Countertop

We installed a fine Brazilian cherry countertop on the kitchen island as part of a major kitchen remodelling in 2005. When properly maintained, the cherrywood has beautiful, deep warm glow to it; but over time this glow had faded a bit. The countertop is supposed to be cleaned and recoated monthly with a quality tung oil finish, but the vicissitudes of a hectic life with two kids have pushed this off for over six months.

Usually I just clean the counter with hot soapy water, dry it well, then rag on the a Waterlox sealer. But I thought it needed a fine-grit sanding to remove all the (admittedly minor) scratches and restore the like-new glow. I was definitely worried about putting sandpaper to this fine surface, so I Googled the web for things like sealer countertop oil sand grit fine waterlox.

After putting the kids to bed, I took the plunge.

Update 12/09/2008 (four days later): after three coats of finish, the cherry wood now has a beautiful shimmery depth, almost like a semi-liquid pool. (It actually looked pretty fantastic after the second coat.) The wood is positively glowing -- I will post pics when I can -- see album links below.

Details: After all my research on grit, technique, etc., I started by thoroughly cleaning the countertop with warm soapy water and a sponge, using a mild abrasive pad as necessary to remove anything that wasn't coming off easily. I dried the wood, then sanded it carefully with a rubber block and 240-grit paper, making sure to keep downpressure light and even, and stopping frequently to knock clumped-up dust off the sandpaper surface. While I light-sanded the entire surface, I tried to identify visible scratches and evenly take the countertop surface down enough to sand them out. When I was done, I used a tack cloth to remove most of the dust, then executed final cleanup & surface prep with odorless mineral spirits.

I then put on three coats of Waterlox Original Sealer/Finish, letting each dry overnight (the can said 6 hours). I ran the kitchen island fan on low to vent the minor fumes. I made sure to put each coat of Waterlox on a little heavy -- a little more than just coating the surface. I put enough on to ensure coverage without pooling. I used a single sheet of Bounty paper towel, folded a couple times, as the applicator: a rag soaks up too much of the sealer.

Between each coat, I used a fine steel wool (#00 or #000) to lightly sand down the entire surface, removing slight imperfections (swirls, bubbles, or hair!), resulting in a glassy smoothness. Even strange little discolorations in one area I sanded all but disappeared with the application of the sealer.

Conclusion: I was cautious about putting sandpaper to a cherry countertop that cost almost as much as my wife's car, but the results looked stunning. Total time invested over three days: about 5-6 hours.

Links

See the counter I'm talking about in my Picasa album: http://picasaweb.google.com/KeithBluestone/CountertopRefinishing

More links from my searches here: http://delicious.com/KeithBluestone/waterlox

We chose Craft-Art (in Atlanta) to supply the countertop (link). For the Waterlox, rather than try to run around & find it in a store, I actually just clicked it up from Amazon:

Research

This was one of the more helpful articles, from the Environmental Home Store who appear to be fine hardwood installers (http://www.environmentalhomestore.com/pdfs/totally_bamboo%20installation.pdf):

[After surface prep] you are now ready to apply your choice of sealer. Select any of the great finishes currently available... We do not recommend any water based finishes, as they tend dilute the natural colors and appearance of depth; nor do we recommend plain mineral oil or chopping block oil as they tend to dissipate quickly and require weekly re-oiling. We highly recommend Waterlox (www.waterlox.com) a tung oil/resin finish. This is very easy to apply with a brush or rag. It is best to apply two or three coats of the sealer and two or three coats of the topcoat. The top coat is available in gloss or matte finish. One of the best features of this finish is the easy upkeep, simply recoat every three years, or as needed. Follow the instructions on the can for best results.

Also: http://www.signaturecustomwoodworking.com/waterlox-tung-oil.html

Going Green: Amplifier Trigger for my PC

Here's how to automatically turn on & off an external audio amplifier with your PC...

For audio in my new office, I have a 1000-watt Rotel RMB-1075 5-channel THX-certified amplifier that's hooked up to a pair of extremely capable Hales Revelation Three speakers. I connected the output on my computer audio card to the pre-amp, and voila! listening to music on my PC from my 120 gigabytes of music is a delightful experience.

Using a Kill-a-Watt meter, I found that the amp consumes 80 watts of power whenever it's on. So while in general, I just turn it on and off when I come in and exit, I remembered that it has an "external trigger" on the back. I wondered if I could somehow have the PC turn the amp on and off automatically.

After a few Google search revisions, the search for "trigger pc audio amplifier" found this excellent article:

turning on power amp via pc -12v
http://www.avforums.com/forums/computer-systems/396700-turning-power-amp-via-pc-12v.html

Fan extension cable (for connecting to the fan header/supply on the mobo):
http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=37058

It's simple enough: take a 12V source off your PC (in this case from a connector on the motherboard fan), wire this up to a female 1/8" plug (which is attached to a hole on a chassis plate), then just run a standard male-to-male 1/8" cable out to the amplifier's "trigger in" port.

I will try this and post results when I have them.

Collaboration

Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action -- and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/howard_rheingold_on_collaboration.html

"Rise of Collaboration" home page:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/themes/the_rise_of_collaboration.html

Networking

Looking for an 8-port gigabit switch for my home office, to connect and network all of the computers... after a bunch of surfing and review-scanning, I decided to kick it up a notch from an ordinary "desktop" switch to a "managed" switch.... the NetGear GS108T. It seemed that all but the most technical network gearhead reviewers thought that the GS108T is a great value in a switch. Although it's only about US$110, one can't go throwing a tenth of a grand around -- especially when there's so much else to buy with US$110. What tipped the scales in favor was my interest in distributed commodity computing (a la Google's computing clusters made up of cheap, second-generation computers). Not only is a managed, "smart" switch more similar to a real production environment -- the smart-ness referred to is the switch's ability to send network traffic directly to its destination, vs. the standard of broadcasting all network data to all computers -- but it gives a much more detailed view of network traffic. I'll learn how to monitor traffic on my own home network, detect problems or bottlenecks, and maybe prototype a distributed computing cluster of my own.

NetGear GS108T product link

PC to HD TV

Looking for how to hook up a PC to a HD TV and get great results. This way, you could leverage investment in an HDTV. I have a 720p Panasonic Plasma 42" and hooking up my PC via the supplied VGA input was abysmal.

Here's a chart showing all the various video and computer resolution "standards."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Video_Standards.png

This writer has a Sharp Aquos LCD, suggests simply getting a TV that advertises compatibility with PC resolutions, and connecting using a DVI cable (since it's a digital signal). Note that full HD, or 1080p, contains 1920 x 1080 pixels. It also has some advancing tuning advice using PowerStrip software.

How to Connect Your TV to Your HDTV (Engadget)
http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/02/08/how-to-connect-your-pc-to-your-hdtv/

Update: found this article, very good, argues that 720p is fine for most (vs. 1080p), with the exception of those choosing to use it for a computer monitor:

720p vs. 1080p HDTV: The final word (David Karney, CNet, December 2007)
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6449_7-6810011-1.html

HDTV Resolution Explained (David Katzmaier, CNet)

http://www.cnet.com/1990-7874_1-5137915-1.html

What's in Your Bag?

I was putting together a list for this year's Jack Daniels Open in Mesquite, NV... a list of stuff to pack in my golf bag. You'd think the things to include in a golf bag would be fairly obvious, but it's been surprising over the years what I didn't have in my bag.

http://thesandtrap.com/columns/bag_drop/the_other_stuff_in_your_bag

My informal list:

• Tees - long and short
• Balls - 6-9 soft/feel, 6-9 hard/distance
• Tape (for fingers cracked raw after many rounds in the desert)
• Sunscreen
• Insect repellent
• Rain cover
• Rain gear - I keep a Microsoft Great Plains water resistant pullover
• Lighter, cigar punch, portable cigar case (with cigars, naturally)
• Ibuprofen / anti inflammatories / aspirin
• Eye drops. In case you have to play soggy ground and catch the ball fat -- and you get a blast of grit, grass, and mud in your eye.
• Ball mark repairer - and a spare one
• Ball markers / dimes
• Spare change-- be prepared - maybe keep a $20 bill stashed for emergencies
• Towel - maybe add a spare for rainy days
• Water - at least 28 oz/liter
• Energy bar - I carry an apple if it's hot or I had to jump out without proper breakfast
• Also great for high energy and protein is turkey jerky. Maybe some gum
• Whisky flask
• Um... clubs. I carry three wedges (Cleveland 56 sand, Cleve 60 lob, Titleist PW). My driver is a King Cobra, and my three-wood and five-wood are Callaway Steelhead Plus (love them).
• Spare pencils -- for scorecards
• Sharpie -- for marking balls
• Spare cleats and cleat tool... although in truth you should get any cleats replaced or changed at the pro shop prior to your round. And I have never had to replace cleats during a round.
• Glove and spare
• Bandages -to repair blisters
• Groove / club cleaner

Want golf balls with an image on them for a special occasion?
http://www.logoballz.com/golf_balls.html

Espresso and other links

http://coffeegeek.com/guides/howtobuyanespressomachine

"The grinder is an integral, necessary part of making good espresso in the home.
... a quality grinder to freshly grind the coffee to the very precise particle sizes necessary to good extraction. Often, the grinder is the rock star of their little espresso show."

I've often said that I can make a better shot of espresso with a $200 espresso machine and a $400 grinder than I can with a $2,000 espresso machine and no grinder (or a blade grinder)... and it's absolutely true."

[Later added: a good article on the size to grind for espresso, for anyone using a manual grinder or a cheap blade grinder: http://www.espressopeople.com/guides/grinders/grinderjob)

http://coffeegeek.com/guides/frothingguide

http://coffeegeek.com/guides/frothingguide/advancedguide

http://coffeegeek.com/guides/frothingguide/latteartguide
http://coffeegeek.com/guides/frothingguide/examples

http://www.coffeeresearch.org/espresso/potential.htm

Uninstalling Visual Studio 2005

In the aftermath of one of many hard disk crashes, I was determined to fix a problem that has long beset me. I had installed the then-cutting-edge-and-just-released MS Visual Studio 2005 on hard drive "F:". Well, drive "F:" bit the dust one fine day, and to make things worse, it was the entire hard drive which showed failure, and both drives E: and F: were housed on this single mortally wounded Fuji 36GB SCSI hard drive.

All this happening to my beloved development box (Dell PowerEdge 400SC). Eventually it was proven that the disk had not really failed; for some reason, the controller had failed to support the second disk. The first drive, C:, on a different physical hard drive, worked fine. So all this put a crimp in my efforts to replace the "failed" drive with another, working SCSI disk.

In other hardware puzzlings and in reviewing the official Dell technical specs for my two PowerEdge servers (400SC and 1600SC), I noted with surprise and growing delight that the slightly newer 400SC supported SATA natively, via a connector directly on the motherboard. Working with Acronis TrueImage (hard drive backup & restore and general disk utility software -- very good -- about $75 at Office Depot), and applying assiduous and diligent study to the science of hard drives, their mechanisms and physical characteristics (out of interest), SATA vs. SCSI benchmarks and reviews (Tom's Hardware), logical and extended partitions under Windows, boot and primary partitions, and backup and restore software, I managed to recreate and relocate the entire system image onto a single, newer, faster SATA 320GB Seagate Barracuda ES drive, their "enterprise extra-duty" version. (At $99 on NewEgg.com, this was a great deal.)

A side note of surprise on this migration to SATA: I was moving from a solid server-class Fuji MAP3367NP SCSI drive on a LSI Logic controller (the one that failed) to this Seagate Barracuda. It used to take the computer a good while to boot up; part of this, it's true, was the action of the SCSI controller interrogating the SCSI bus for devices (about 10 seconds alone). I would ballpark the total boot time at around 35 to 40 seconds. But with the new SATA drive, the boot and restore-from-hibernation is breathtaking: it's easily less than fifteen seconds from machine being off to booted and at the Windows Server 2003 login screen. Hibernation is equally inspiring, taking around 10 seconds to snapshot everything running to disk and shut down.

But I digress... I had vowed that tonight would be the night that I restored Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, which had been installed on the now-absent F: drive. It currently wouldn't run, and it wouldn't uninstall or repair -- I got an error about a program file directory that didn't exist -- so I was stuck. A few Googles later, I found a Microsoft article explaining how to do it, and though relatively tedious, was also straightforward, took about 15 minutes, and did the job.

How to Remove Visual Studio 2005
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/907965

Darwin Visits My Desk

Ever noticed how your electrical and computer cords always seem to become tangled? Especially the coiled ones like a headphone cord... this might be exactly the same mechanism by which DNA interacts; it's the well-known double-helix that "slides" against other DNA strands and other things.

The Zen of MP3 and other stories

Still struggling to get my 8,000+ music library synced to the newly endowed 120GB Zen jukebox... although it got through about 6600 of the tracks, WMP experienced an i/o timeout or something.

Dennis Burton's new Develop Using .Net blog:
http://developusing.net/

A good treatise on multi-booting OS's. Clears up the confusion between primary, extended, and logical hard drive partitions. Boot loaders as well.
http://www.vsubhash.com/writeups/multiboot_os.asp

PC World: Avoid Static Damage to Your PC
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,82184-page,1/article.html

"Static electricity is much more common than you might think... Walk across that rug and touch a grounded metal object, and the voltage can be in the 10,000-to-12,000-volt range.... But for PC upgrades, the important thing to remember is that while a static shock must be 3500 to 4000 volts before you can feel it, it's the voltage below that level that is common, and insidious. It's entirely possible that you'll open up your PC, plug in an add-in card or some RAM, never have any sensation of static, and still have zapped the electronics. That's because the integrated circuits can be damaged or destroyed by static voltages as low as 400 volts."

"What's worse is that the component you installed may appear to be fine, but days, weeks, or months later your PC may lock up or start acting strangely... it's essential that PCs be unplugged when you work with them."

Also:
http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/static-hard-drive/

http://www.build-your-own-cheap-computer.com/static-electricity.html

http://www.google.com/search?q=static+damage+computer+components+hard+drive&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

More storage tech...

Bicameral day... having firmware issues with the Zen Jukebox after failing to sync my library with it in a number of ways (WMP 10, NotMad). Tried updating the firmware to "Plays for Sure" and that for sure didn't play -- the Nomad boots into Rescue Mode and the computer won't recognize it any more to upgrade the firmware.

On the storage side of things, still trying to figure out whether I should invest in SCSI or SATA, as well as whether to buy a new box (e.g. with faster CPU, SATA RAID built-in, etc).

On storage: AnandTech's Server Guide Part 2, which explains seek time vs. latency, as well as compares a SATA drive with a SCSI drive:
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2859

FireWire vs. USB 2.0:
http://www.cwol.com/firewire/firewire-vs-usb.htm

Swapping out hard drives

The Zen JukeBox hard drive upgrade to 120 GB was as simple as pie... syncing my entire collection to it now...

Regarding upgrading my lowly 36 GB SCSI drive:

Swapping your board without so much as a reinstall
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/77909774/m/1400925745

http://www.mostlycreativeworkshop.com/Article11.html

How to replace the motherboard on a computer that is running Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, or Windows 2000
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;824125

Upgrading my Creative Zen Jukebox

Found out that I could upgrade my 40GB Zen Jukebox Xtra to 80, 100, or more GB via published "hacks."

http://www.aoaforums.com/forum/general-hardware-discussion/36570-upgrading-your-creative-zen-xtras-hard.html
http://monkeybum.pierceitshop.co.uk/2007/05/upgrading-30gb-zen-xtra-to-60gb.html
http://home.mchsi.com/~sallad/zen/tutorial.html

Bought a 120GB WD Scorpio for $70 + shipping from NewEgg.com:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136130

Hard drive wanderings

Explanations of hard drives and their use that reach down to the level of electronic ciruitry and rotational platter dynamics:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/op/cacheCircuitry-c.html

Cache size: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/perf/spec/other_Cache.htm

SATA vs. PATA: http://pcworld.about.com/magazine/2206p164id115629.htm

Basically the best hard drive overview I have ever read. It includes details about everything from heads, areal densities, platters, read-write mechanism, and more: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/op/index.htm

My Dell PowerEdge 1600SC server: http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/1600sc_specs.pdf

A guy taking apart his Quantum Fireball:
http://www.takeitapart.net/archives/quantum-fireball-ex-hard-drive/

A cogent post on why it's better to leave your computer on most of the time. I will have to put my power meter on my NAS (has 3 x 500 GB drives in it) to see how much it really does use.
http://www.pcguide.com/care/care/gen/power_PM.htm

But another opinion (from the same guide) that seems to suggest that even powering up & down 10x per day for years is not close to the duty cycle of most drives:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/qual/spec.htm

Canvas prints at Shutterfly:
http://www.shutterfly.com/shop/product_c10065-p2004/Prints_Posters_Canvas_Prints