Ktn

Mediocre or not?

ktn — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 02:33:28 +0000

I read an article that came in the September issue of the Harvard Business Review named “How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity” containing a sentence that I’m not sure if Ed Catmull, the author, was the one who said it or not, but I really think it’s true.

If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up; if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works.

I agree that it’s not about good ideas but about the people, talented people. Be sure to surround yourself with them.

Apple, do you know what Atom is?

ktn — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 22:28:21 +0000

You would remember that several weeks ago I was asking if Juice will ever support Atom feeds because internally in IBM we have a huge repository of podcasts, videos, webcasts, presentations, etc., for which Atom feeds are provided to subscribe with a podcatcher.

So I tried to use iTunes to subscribe to the podcasts and at least when I was subscribed to just one feed it was working, not completely good but was working. Then I decided to add a couple more and that’s where things started to go wrong. When I added the third feed, iTunes was not able to retrieve anything about it. Well, it looks like it retrieved the name of the feed but it assigned it as the name for the first podcast I subscribed to. Yep, you read it right, it overwrote the original (and good) name of the first podcast with the name of the third I added.

To make things worse, since the date I added the third feed, it doesn’t retrieves any new file from any of the podcasts.

Could someone please do me a favor and send the Apple developers this link to the specification of the Atom format? I’ll appreciate if they can at least implement the basic stuff that is retrieve the files from where the enclosures point to. Well, no, I’ll really appreciate it if they also do not install, along with iTunes, ‘Bonjour’ nor the MobileMe thing that I don’t need at all.

The New Communications of the ACM

ktn — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 03:14:41 +0000

On Wednesday I received my July copy of Communications of the ACM and I have to say that it looks nice, and new! The content has always been very good, but now the feeling is like you really have in your hands a magazine that features and talks about the latest and greatest.

Kudos to the team that produces the magazine! Well done!

Global Virtual Teams

ktn — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 03:02:55 +0000

I have been very interested lately in articles, studies, etc., about Virtual Teams scattered in different locations throughout the world and their interaction. Primarily because I’m in one Global Virtual Team since several years ago working on the development and support of IBM Lotus Domino for System i (including QuickPlace, Quickr, Sametime, Domino Document Manager, etc.).

Recently I found the link to this white paper titled New Methods for Studying Global Virtual Teams: Towards a Multi-Faceted Approach where one of the different findings, not surprisingly, was that of trust. This same issue of trust is something that we know happens also between people in a team working in the same place.

Communication and collaboration tools are critical to the success of a project, and thus every member of a team needs to be educated so that he or she can make effective use of the tool at hand.

I don’t remember where I found the link, but anyways I wanted to share it here.

Juice, please meet Atom

ktn — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 02:30:13 +0000

Anybody knows if Juice will ever support Atom feeds? It has been sleeping for several years now that I’m sure there are not developers left doing anything with it.

Anyone knows how can I get the source code? I would like to take a look and see if I can add the Atom support.

Pride: What a shame

ktn — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 05:51:05 +0000

Some hours ago I read this post and it’s sad and unfortunate that when pride and you-know-who reign in your soul it’s obvious that you won’t believe in anything, in fact I have seen and heard people that say they are god. Success, happiness and wisdom are essential things that do not agree with pride and intelligence very much. Wisdom is something that only God can give you, unfortunately almost no one deserves it these days. And it shows.

I really feel sorry.

IBM Lotus Symphony 1.0 now available!

ktn — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 18:26:16 +0000

With great excitement I can tell you now that IBM Lotus Symphony 1.0 is available for everyone to download for free!

It has good support for ODF, OpenOffice, MS Office and Lotus SmartSuite documents, so you can get rid of all of those other office applications and have just one installed (as I’m gonna do next!).

No Agenda Episode 27 - China Syndrome

ktn — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:46:28 +0000

I just finished hearing episode 27 of the No Agenda podcast and the stuff about China is pretty interesting. Worth a look.

UNAM loses its Kan Balam “supercomputer”

ktn — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:48:27 +0000

I was just informed today that one of the few supercomputers that UNAM got last year partially burned. It never worked well, and when it reached the 50% utilization it burnt. Won’t mention here any of the strange things that seemed to happen in the deal between HP and the University ‘cause you can read them here (in spanish).

The question that remains is, was it really a supercomputer ever?

México 2007 IT Salaries survey

ktn — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 01:36:36 +0000

Some months ago I read a magazine that I would rather call Software Newbie due to the basic nature of its articles, it comes with some translated articles from some other sources but anyways I don’t recommend it much.

What was interesting, but not surprising, was the survey that they made last year on their website which gives some numbers related to salaries in the IT sector in México.

I’ll mention briefly few of the figures that were interesting to me. Depending on the type of job, the job functions that are better paid than “Development” are: Quality, Security, Consultant, Sales, Project Management, Architecture, and Directors (managers, I believe) at the top.

Salaries are also subject to age and degree of studies. This is obvious, right?

By programming language I’ll just mention that the best paid are those who do Cobol. In the Platform arena, the ones at the top are Mainframe, Unix and AS/400. Around databases the two at the top are DB2 and Informix as second place.

The last interesting figure is the one by certification. If you have a Project Management Institute certification then you’re at the top, then come IBM WebSphere, Security, SAP and IBM DB2.