Blog de Joe Freeman

How do your devices connect to the Internet?  How does that connection get to the information super-highway? The only way to know is to have some general understanding of how a connected device gets to the remote web site or service. ISP service levels are sold at performance levels, bits per second.  That does not guarantee you that level of performance from your mobile devices all the way to your internet services. Your network configuration combined with your neighbors and your ISP configuration can have a real impact on your effective throughput. People often say their wi-fi is slow when they talk about their internet experience.  Do they really mean it is wi-fi or the internet or somewhere in between?   We talked to someone in a beach neighborhood during the summer and they complained that their wi-fi was Slow .  They then said that a lot of neighbors had wi-fi problems.  These were single-family homes far enough apart that wi-fi may not...

Regular structured communication between workers and their closest management can motivate people, help them overcome obstacles, and create tighter tracking between goals and what people are actually executing on. Regular communication is important during a pandemic or when more people are telecommuting.   Try the 10:10:10 and other techniques to create regular 1-1 communication between managers and those that report to them. These tools work at all levels of an organization. Video Talk References and Links https://toggl.com/blog/one-on-one-how-to-manage-up https://www.payscale.com/career-news/2015/12/productive-one-on-one-meetings https://www.inc.com/tomasz-tunguz/structuring-one-on-ones-to-maximize-your-team-s-success.html ...

Capture as much temporal information as you can in today's Information Systems.  Storage is cheap and there always seems to be a need to understand just a bit more about what happened and when it happened.   Make sure you do not lose time data when streaming data into aggregating stores or other down-stream systems. Add event and activity information at every stage and as part of every process.  Video This talk walks through different areas that you may wish to think about. Talk Notes <not yet captured>

My pitch here is that you should find a good wired headset for corporate videoconferencing.  It is embarrassing when you waste people's time because your mic doesn't work, your wireless set ran out of battery power or someone wrings you on your multi-paired device and it switches you out of your meeting. Watch the YouTube video! There are a bunch of different microphone speaker combinations you can use when in your many video meetings. We all want comfort and convenience without the hassle of microphone malfunctions. I like the wireless experience but tend to use a wired setup if I have back to back sessions or am involved in more than 4 hours of sessions per day. They are super reliable and inexpensive compared to many wireless solutions. It seems like people with wireless headsets have to do more fiddling with their sound settings. Inexpensive  USB / headphone adapters Computer speaker jacks are often missing the extra connector for an integrated microphone. This means we ne...

Understanding the unofficial power centers and the embedded interests in an organization can you understand why things work the way they do in a corporation.  It can also help you understand why certain organizational changes succeed or fail and why corporations flip back and forth between two different organizational structures. This blog page is really just the blog home  for a YouTube video and will be eventually fleshed out as speaker notes. Power Center Matrix Cross Communication is good Cross business unit communication is good Communicating outside the vertical leverages the work of others Cross org power plays may not be as good Organizational power plays Geographical alignment Technical or Vendor allegiance Culture and Group / Patron affinity Sub-surface Influence: <to be documented>  T...

Linux on Windows via WSL 2, has become a great development environment when targeting cloud containers and functions.  Windows has a shot at becoming the favorite desktop for users building Linux applications. Visual Studio Code (VSCode) is a great IDE. VSCode can run in a split GUI/Server fashion with the GUI in Windows and all the full SDLC executing on Linux. Development happens inside the Linux, WSL2 leveraging VS Code Server The GUI happens as a real part of the Windows Desktop and connects to Remote  VSCode servers, in this case in WSL Linux Ooh A Video Java Development VSCode's Java integration is built on top of Java 11.  This means you probably will end up with Java 11 JDK installed in WSL2 Linux and in Windows.  By default, applications will be Compiled with Java 11.   You can target  application compilation against versions other than the one used by the IDE. This is done by installing the needed Java versions on the Linux side and adding th...

The industry has done a poor job of educating the public or making it clear to the public various cybersecurity risks. The high level of trust the public has in the software installed on used purchases is one of those areas. Would you use a dirty plate in a restaurant if the server took someone else's plate, wiped the food off with their rag, and then put the plate in front of you? Basic Security People have no qualms doing the computer equivalent of the dirty plate when buying used computers. They buy a used computer with an operating system already installed.  They boot the machine and start using it.  The buyers trust the installation and use that computer for their most private transactions. We have plenty of evidence that people receive machines with malware, bot-ware, or intrusive software that sends data back to some other servers.  The same people would never log into their bank account on some random machine they find sitting unlocked in a coffee shop. Risks...

Co-workers and I were recently trying to tease out whether our rules were event-based or state-based.   Was the predicate, if clause , written to be based on an action that occurred, an event?   Was the predicate, if clause , written based on the current state of the business data? Were our rules a mix of event-triggered  and state-driven? We started poking at this with the business users. We showed them both styles and described the side effects.  It turns out our business users were thinking in a specific and simplifying way. This meant we could increase the reliability of our design by pushing rule definitions mostly into a specific style.  Business Rules can be written in an unlimited number of ways and syntaxes.  We'll ignore most of that for this conversation and instead focus on how we define the  if clause  that determines if action is taken. Video Transition vs State Based Simple Example A person loses their driving permit for a...