(Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes)

Note: This article was first published on Oct 28, 2007 @ 19:21. The material is still good. I’m republishing to bring it forward for tax season, and for testing the behavior of RSS on republished material.

Undoing multiple reconciliations in Quickbooks may roll the internal opening balance for a reconciliation to $0.0, despite whatever value the initial register entry. Here is one way to deal that.

1. Go to the first transaction.
2. Note amount of first transaction.
3. Note that date of the first transaction.
4. Start the reconcile.
5. For an initial balance of 0.0, choose the
   date of the first transaction for the
   reconciliation date, and the amount of the
   first transaction as the Ending Balance.
6. There should be only one relevant transaction
   on or before the reconciliation date, viz.,
   the opening balance. Reconcile that.
7. Proceed as normal for reconciliation.
8. Field tested.

Note: Quickbooks only allows undoing the “last” reconciliation. What this means is that it only backs out reconciliations one at a time. This really threw me, and resulted in me hiring an accountant to square away a set of poor reconciliations. But it is possible to back out at least 8 months of reconciliations in an account, taking it all the way back to the beginning.

Post from: There Is NO Box

Reconciling Quickbooks $0.0 opening balance

(Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes)

Mmmm....

Since you’re surfing it anyway, surf it with a purpose instead of wasting time looking for Paris Hilton’s latest antics (we miss you Paris!). Use that time to check up on your personal and business status. Check bank account balances and sales figures. If you’re a software developer, do a pass through yesterday and last night’s commits.

A really cool way to make this easy is to set up Firefox (or any other tabbed browser) to automatically open all the web pages necessary for due diligence through a single bookmark, or even better, make the morning due diligence your home page.

Here are the pages that my “Home” page launches in Firefox:

• Gmail (of course)
• clicktime.com for time tracking.
• The Trac website for my main project. This is where I read through the latest subversion commits.
• My personal PBWiki.
• The BaseCamp page for the project above. This allows me to check up on overall progress of the project.
• Bank account page. I do most of my banking with one, large (and nameless) bank, which has an excellent web interface (making up for lack of customer service).

As I mentioned, all of these links open as a set of tabs as my browser “Home” page. It’s very convenient, and I highly recommend this to anyone who is going to be drinking their coffee first thing in the morning in front of the computer come hell or high water.

There’s more!

As it turns out, I have more than one project going. For each of these projects, I have a set of tabbed browser pages that are invoked by a single bookmark. For example, my other coding project is invoked with these tabs:

• Trac pages (I really like Trac).
• Basecamp
• The project web site.

Other projects include a writing project and Collab21. Having everything necessary collected in one set of browser tabs is incredibly useful, and really allows me to leverage my time. I find it a structure that is conducive to creativity, without imposing a large burden of overhead. Note also that these are mostly web applications as well. Very convenient!

Lastly, I ask myself: “Have I communicated with customers today?”

How are you spending your morning? Is this productivity technique useful to you? Why or why not?

Post from: There Is NO Box

Morning Due Diligence — Making that first cup of coffee count!

(Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes)

Here’s how you deal with emotional issues of getting tooled by self-appointed arbiters of the internet and the new social media applications. That is, when you get “policed” by the chattering classes.

First, let’s examine how the real world works. Consider:

• Fact: If Brad Pitt does it, he’s cool.
• Fact: If you do the same thing, you’re a chump (putting it nicely).

A large number of people tout social media tools as breaking down barriers to communication between people.

A real, and very chilling side effect: you’re never more than a few clicks away from being ostracized.

When your every move, every piece of communication is subject to world-wide, public social scrutiny… you’re back in high school. Or worse.

As in high school, if you can’t score points, keep your mouth shut (fingers away from the keyboard) and focus on what you do best.

This is as old as the internet. Go back and read through some of the usenet flame wars for historical examples.

Here’s another example, a bit of hurt feelings in blogistan back at the dawn of sponsored tweets. In my opinion, both parties are being silly here. Matt Cutts needs no reason to follow or unfollow people. Shoemaker shouldn’t care one way or another.

Here’s concrete action you can take when you’re too emotionally wrapped around social media:

• Close your feed.
• Unfollow everyone not in your audience.
• If anyone bitches, they can just unfollow you. Or block them.
• Go do something else for a while. Like walk the dog. Or tell your mother you love her. Or both. I guarantee it will make you feel better.

I post publicly on twitter as @websiteweekend, my current business brand. You can also find me on twitter as @doolin, which is a very private, blocked feed. If I don’t know you personally, I won’t accept your request to follow me.

Post from: There Is NO Box

Dealing With Self-Appointed Internet and Social Media “Police”

(Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes)

For a while, I was posting regularly on financial and economic matters. The need for that passed as the news became common knowledge. That is, the problems became real for ordinary people, not just for nutjobs screaming from the fringe.

But it’s not over yet. Even if the recession is officially over, the recovery will be anemic for years, until all the bad debt is either inflated away, or those liabilities are sold for market value to customers paying (essentially) cash money.

There are many things we can do individually. Most of these things are actions that the government and large corporations are panicking about. Unfortunately, large corporations and the government are working at cross-purposes to us, the taxpayers, who have to take care of ourselves no matter what the economic conditions or the tax rates.

Here’s a few things to consider:

1. Vote against every congress person that voted for the bailout bill. The bailout just “kicked the can” into years hence. When the bills come due, they will be bigger. That’s just math.
2. When possible, vote for congress people over the next few years that will reinstate all the financial controls we dismantled allowing this to happen.
3. Move your money to locally owned banks with no exposure to any of these “toxic instruments.” I do not know which these will be.
4. Stop spending and start saving. We have a deep recession coming in any case. There is nothing we can do about it. Everyone stopping spending and starting to save could result in a real depression, but the powers that be haven’t really left us any choice in the matter. The national economy isn’t as important to me as my personal economy.
5. Save for retirement, but don’t plan on retirement. That option is closing for people of middle age. I spoke with a woman at work last year, and she has lost over 50% of her life savings. She won’t ever retire. She can’t.
6. Get out and stay out of debt. Not only have so many people lost so much in their retirements, they are also in debt that they will never, ever be able to work their way out of.
7. Make sure you are prepared for disaster, which could be financial or from earthquake or whatever. Keep a couple of weeks water on hand, and month’s worth of cash. ATM only work when there is electricity and cash inside. Financially, I believe that danger has passed, but if you are in California (or Pacific Rim), you are still earthquake prone. Be prudent. Hedge for “worst case.” It won’t hurt, and it will make you feel better.
8. Bust your ass at whatever job you have, and get a second job if you can. My father was able to find work all through the Great Depression. He would work for whatever they paid him, he had to support his mother.
9. Be glad if you aren’t chained to a house you cannot afford. I was infuriated I was priced out of the market for so many years. Now I am delighted I am not sinking under that weight. If you are chained, I personally won’t fault you for walking away. It’s what the bank would do, so you should consider it too.

I suspect very strongly the world is going to look very different two years from now. This may not be a bad thing. It certainly provides those of us that were never able to stake a claim in the current system the opportunity to carve out a niche in whatever is coming.

Post from: There Is NO Box

Actions you can take that help your personal economy and make you feel good

(Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes)

I’ve purchased every edition of MS Office from before Office 95 through Office 2003.

I’ve rarely used any of them. They have always been “required” purchases because everyone else uses them. This isn’t “peer pressure” because I don’t really care how other people format documents. Well, maybe it is peer pressure… of the most intense sort: use Word or go home.

What I usually use is LaTeX.

But LaTeX isn’t really that good for laying out – fast – publications such as ebooks and the like.

I take that back. LaTeX is superb at ALL typesetting tasks… but learning a new layout style in LaTeX is time consuming, and personally, I need to get with the WYSIWYG world because it’s what everyone else is using. Very difficult to outsource document preparation in LaTeX, not that many people do it. I’m sure I would find it much easier to learn WYSIWYG document preparation is I liked. But I don’t. I loathe it. It’s infuriating.

In any case, OpenOffice fills the breach.

The problem is that OpenOffice is painfully slow.

It’s so slow that the fanboys blame the users: “You must have a virus on your computer.”

No. It’s like this: OpenOffice is painfully slow.

What these evangelists don’t get: when OpenOffice is the most painfully slow application on my computer, that’s called a “clue.” The clue is… it’s not my computer that’s slow.

Why am I using it?

Several reasons:

1. Document format is open. While I don’t have any desire to muck around in OpenOffice’s XML, it’s nice to know I could if I needed to. In fact, if the file got “corrupted” somehow, I could fix the XML easily using a validator such as tidy. I’m sure I have Word files hanging around somewhere that won’t ever open again.
2. Image handling is much nicer than MS Word. Word sucks in your images, turns them into bitmaps, and you’re stuck. It really sucks. There may be a way in Word 2003 to get around this problem, but if there is, it’s complicated and obscure enough to NOT be useful. OpenOffice reads your images from disk. This means that if you want to use dummy images to lay out a document, you can easily swap images later, OpenOffice won’t mind. Won’t even know.
3. It’s free. Costs no money. This is probably the least important reason for me. If Word would handle images how I want instead of locking me into how Word wants images, I’d probably switch. If the Word file format was open (open for real), I’d switch immediately. The problem here is that Microsoft’s insistence of “openness” doesn’t equal usefully open. Just examine Word’s HTML output if you want an example. It’s horrible.

Why I loathe OpenOffice:

1. It’s slow. Really, it is. I’m working on a 70 page document right now, and it’s just not responsive at all. Sure, it would help if I weren’t teaching myself how to do visual layout. All these formatting experiments resulting in “Not Responding,” but is that really the way to inspire users?

   Let me put it another way… I’ve had time to write this entire blog post interstitially, while waiting on OpenOffice to do whatever it does. As I write these very words, I’m trying to scroll through the document… and it’s bogged down, “Not Responding.” That’s no good. And yes, I’m using the Navigator widget too. I really am:
   

   

   Unacceptable.

For final lay out, I’ll have to switch everything to Word and tweak it all again.

Other options in this space don’t matter. Word is what’s used, and that’s that. Go try and outsource document preparation. Professionals want your work in Word. Not in OpenOffice. Not in Google Docs. Word.

I can tell you partly why this is, too.

When you outsource to Eastern Europe, China, India and like places, you’re going to working with people who – with almost 100% certainty – don’t pay license fees for software. They use ripped copies of Office, InDesign, Photoshop, everything we pay Big $$$ in the West. I know this from experience.

This has been my experience to date. Tell me I’m wrong, I’ll link to you, maybe even send you some business if you’ll work with me in OpenOffice and Scribus.

Otherwise, I may just head off to Office Depot and get the latest copy of MS Office. I hate to have to do that, but I need to get some work done, not spend my time waiting. My time is worth money. A few hours wasted time covers the cost of MS Office, hands down.

OpenOffice just segfaulted on me. I can’t recall the last time I had ANY program segfault.

The upshot:

• OpenOffice handles things “The Right Way,” but it’s too slow to be used for serious work on long documents.
• MS Word locks you into all kinds of bizarre structure and behavior, but it’s very fast in comparison to OpenOffice.

Parting shot: These results are for me, on my computer. Your results may be different, for you, on your computer. But I’m not you and I’m not using your computer.

Post from: There Is NO Box

OpenOffice vs MS Word: Which is better?

(Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes)

I was walking around the block just a few moments ago, in lieu of actually getting real work done, and my big toe started to twinge. The big toe on my right foot just felt all jammed up. Kind of making me limp a little bit. As it turns out, I jammed this same toe some 12 years ago, on a 5.11a sport climb in the Obed River (Tennessee) Gorge* called (I swear I’m not making this up) “Dick the Impaler,” a couple hundred yards downstream from Tieranny Wall.

I distinctly recall what I was thinking at the crux, about 2/3 of the way up this relatively short route: “Well, the worst that can happen is I’ll take a lead fall.” Curiously, I also recall that I didn’t think I was going to make the move. It’s not that hard a move for a person with longer legs or better reach, but it was just at the limit of my reach, and I decided to dyno.

I didn’t stick it.

Well, the lead fall was only 10-12 feet. No big deal. But when I came down, I drop-kicked the planet with my right big toe. The planet, of course, didn’t notice. My right toe was outraged, and jammed itself halfway back to my ankle, or so it felt. It hurt!

A dozen years later, the consequences of my failure remind me every step I take. Bummer.

Would I do it again? Probably.

But I would do it differently. I wouldn’t accept falling as an option and I would trust more in my ability to stick the move.

How does missing a dyno relate to life in general? Let’s take a look at the risk of starting your own business.

Fear exists for good reason

Much is made in the self-help, self-development and entrepreneurship enterprises about fear “holding you back” from your dreams… that if only you “conquered your fear,” magically, success would rush to your door in a fanfare of thunder and applause.

The upside is fame and fortune, security and independence for your family, and the freedom to Do What You Want Whenever You Want.

Why is it so hard?

Because it’s risky.

There is a reason why fear holds us all back: sometimes, there’s real consequences to consider.

Perhaps these consequences are (much) less than they seem at the time, but risk does induce fear. Risk is supposed to induce fear.

Being an entrepreneur is risky

There are many aspects of being an entrepreneur that are risky. Financial risk is probably the most obvious: failure means being broke, and maybe poor (there’s a difference), and that’s not much of an option for a lot of people. But there’s the social risk too, and I suspect the social risk of failure is as (probably more) powerful than the financial risk. Most people (90%) aren’t entrepreneurially minded, so as an entrepreneur, you have to develop the capability to operate without an “emotional safety net.”

Now, many people will do risky things while employed at one job, figuring that they can just go get another job if it all goes pear-shaped.

But what do you do as an entrepreneur when it all goes horribly wrong? Get a job? FAIL!

This is a serious business, as it requires an astounding amount of emotional energy to succeed in anything. Yet wrapping one’s identity around being “successful” is almost guaranteed to induce long term misery (ask me how I know).

Build big successes from small successes

In “The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem,” Nathaniel Branden asserts that a cornerstone of building self-esteem is measurable accomplishment. He further provides concrete advice on exactly how to accomplish measurably. As it turns out, his suggestions are excellent recommendations for new entrepreneurs: start small, and build what you can measure and touch.

For example, if you’re learning how to build a successful web-based business, you’ll need to master skills for building traffic, and for converting (selling) visitors. These skills can be mastered more or less independently, and it doesn’t really matter which skill you master first. Go with what’s most comfortable. It’s not necessary to actually master these skills either… simply becoming comfortable with the learning process, and having a method for measuring results is enough.

Here’s the process broken down, stepwise:

• Identify a new skill necessary for achieving long term goal, say acquiring readers is a skill you need to become a top ranked blogger.
• Chunk down the skill into a series of tasks that can be independently acquired, and that produce results. To acquire readers, one must provide content worth reading. Either learn to write, or find people to write for you. In any case, learning to produce content worth reading is a skill worth learning.
• Turn the learning process into result-oriented work. For example, learn to acquire traffic by learning to write articles worth reading.

At each step of this process, you’re successfully producing measurable results, viz. articles on your web site. Once you have the process mastered (which is NOT the same as having the skill mastered), start the process for mastering the next skill necessary for your long term success.

Which brings us back to the topic at hand…

Success breeds success

An old saw goes something like “Nothing succeeds like success.”

An obvious tautology… or is it?

Looks what happens when you build your success incrementally: at each stage, you have independent confirmation of competence and success. Suppose you DON’T master the art of closing sales from a web page, yet have insane web traffic because (it turns out) you’re a brilliant writer. In such cases, you have the proven chops to provide real value to a partnership or a joint venture. (Or even an employer…) And as you “breed” your success, your risk of failure starts to decrease, as do the consequences of failure.

Returning to our old saw, it’s probably more accurate to say that past success is a pretty good indicator of future success. Build your successes incrementally, pounding down the fear and loathing at each step.

Post from: There Is NO Box

The Fear — And Consequences — Of Failure

(Reading time: 6 – 10 minutes)

Here’s an excellent snapshot of my emotional state right after I upgraded to Jing Pro. I thought about just not publishing this, because I end up chumping myself worse than Jing Pro, but there are a couple of valid points to consider:

1. Jing has several really non-standard user interface “features” which I am not sure benefit users. To be more specific, Jing has some important user interface innovations… and some gratuitous changes of no clear benefit to anyone (that is, me). I’ll save a specific suggestion for a future post, this is getting long enough already.
2. Whether I’m right or wrong, other people have had similar trouble figuring out Software from Techsmith, so it’s in Techsmith’s interest that such diatribes as the following don’t erupt. That is, whether I’m “right” or “wrong,” Techsmith would bear the brunt of having a publicly unhappy customer.

As it turns out, I do have future plans for that more or less glowing report. And I’ll put my endorsement for Jing Pro right here up front: If you make a lot of static screenshots or simple screencasts for blogging,

I find absolutely indispensable for blogging, much better than MS Paint for example.

If you have any problems with Jing Pro, email me before you email Techsmith, I may be able to help you quickly.

I’m putting the following rant out there raw, stream of consciousness, with very little editing. Partly I don’t feel like taking the time to clean it up, partly, and the raw version gets you a better snapshot of my emotional state as I pounded through the process.

Ok, on to the rant…

Purchasing Jing Pro (rant)

I really, really wanted to write a glowing report on my experience with using the Pro version of Jing.

After really taking some time to figure out how to use the free version, I thought I had the skills I need.

But the Pro version is slightly different, in an important way, which I’ll get to later.

My technology chain for the current project has an .swf embedded in a sales page, which I really, really wanted to take live today.

But the Pro Version of Jing doesn’t save as .swf. When I tried to “Save As” .swf from the dialog box, there is no option for that. It saves as mp4. Which is run as Quicktime in my browsers. Which runs automatically and blasts my voice to the world at large… before the prospect even gets the chance at reading my headline.

That’s NDG at all.

So I’m now 30 minutes into a researching how to set a remote Quicktime client to NOT play automatically (it’s a user option so far as I know now), or converting the .mp4 file into a .swf file. The conversion is probably easy… provided I purchase the correct application… but which application is best? More research…

So, I’m absolutely astonished at this turn of events.

I’m going to take the sales page “live” without the screencast, I just don’t have anymore time. I resent that I spent a couple of hours yesterday rehearsing this with the promotional free version, to find that the Pro version requires me changing how I deliver the technology. Because I simply will NOT risk users getting an audio blast BEFORE they even read the headline.

I may consider using the free version instead. It has a link to Techsmith at the end of the screencast, which will adversely affect conversion, but not as much as getting blasted off the page.

And that’s my time budget for this project. I won’t have time to unscrew it until September 9 when I get back from Burning Man.

Folks, if you sell stuff, or even give stuff away that you want people to use, please adhere very tightly to The Principle of Least Astonishment.

More: Quicktime isn’t compatible with 64 bit Windows. Do a Google search on “Quicktime blacked out controls.” Quicktime Pro is 29.95, and gets a big 2.5 stars for rating.

More and more: I did find something that would convert from mp4 to swf. It’s ignoring the autoplay “false” directive. This particular piece of software reinvented standard user interface practice, too. More astonishment. It has a pro version. No thanks.

These are the same piece of software, advertised here: http://www.webdesignforums.net/photoshop_flash_and_other_graphics_8/convert_mp4_to_swf_24020.html to convert from .mp4 to .swf, but they don’t:

you can try these software applications to see if its something that you think may help you.

Xilisoft MP4 Converter 3.1

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multime…onverter.shtml

ImTOO MP4 Video Converter 3.1.5.0430b

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multime…onverter.shtml

Yet another link took me to a malware site.

I have a newsletter announcement waiting to go out.

AVSStudio ran a System Modal on me… locked me out of writing this post. That almost produced a flash of rage… fortunately, I don’t suffer from that. But I could feel it. They also put a watermark banner in the output file… $49.95. Another 15 minutes wasted.

An enraged customer.

Nice.

I should probably just outsource all this. I know for a fact someone in Eastern Europe who does this kind of work pretty cheap. He doesn’t pay for any software. He just uses cracked versions. Keeps his overhead low.

I don’t have any problem paying for software.

I’ve paid for a colossal amount of software in fact, most of which I don’t use. Most of the software I actually use is free software.

Now, I’ve uninstalled, then reinstalled Jing, trying to get the free version back… but it gets me the Pro version again…

However, on the reinstall, I find the documentation stating file preferences are set such that the output format cannot be changed when you’re saving the screencast. This is very confusing because the user interface for the screencast implies choice. It’s a combo box. This is a serious WTF?

I understand “making things simple,” but displaying a combo box with a single choice – when the software is capable of other choices – is really dumb. That’s not simplifying the software. It’s astonishing the user.

Techsmith’s problem in my mind is now this: using their software is going to astonish me in ways I cannot anticipate. This means I’m going to have to budget open-ended time when I use Techsmith tools. Just like programming… without the feeling of accomplishment. And there isn’t anything they can really do about it now, because the emotional trigger is hard-wired into me. Because of my experiences, any time I run into difficulty, I’m going to feel imposed upon, confused and angry.

We have a saying back in the country: “Don’t fix what ain’t broke.”

This was a couple hours of my time. Let’s call it hours. That’s about $250 worth of consulting from my company. Figure my base rate at $50/hr, 100% overhead, ~20% profit (reasonable), comes out to about $125/hr.

If this seems high, go talk to someone that actually runs a technology company and pays people what their worth. If anything, it’s low.

If I didn’t really like their products… I wouldn’t be having such a reaction.

Now I have to re-record the screencast.

So much for the rant

Ok, rant over.

I felt embarrassed and frustrated when I realized that the file type chosen for saving is set in the global options interface, and not through the Save As dialog box.

I find this really annoying because it’s not how I would have coded the application myself. In fact, the last major desktop application I worked on had this same kind of system: One set of users got the ability to save to certain file types, other users to more extensive selection of file types. But we didn’t change the interface, the Save As dialog dealt with all of it transparently.

Thus my pique at what I felt should something extremely simple…

Someday, I need to make a list of all the software I have purchased. And emphasize that I am not using the vast majority of that software anymore. It’s a long list. And I want to be really clear that none of these little software engineering rants of mine mean I want everything for free. Far from it. Just want it to work.

Post from: There Is NO Box

Techsmith did it again with Jing Pro… sort of

(Reading time: 6 – 10 minutes)

Preface

Several years ago I did some design and programming work in the peer-to-peer (P2P) space. What follows is a few notes I wrote during that time, but never got together for a conference paper. This is a good place to put it, and if you manage to get all the way through it, you will understand a lot more about what a P2P network is, and one way it does it’s business.

Note: this is a very high level overview! The details are difficult. If you’re not well-versed in P2P, consider just skipping this. It’s “For Record Only” as we used to say in the Indiana Cave Survey, back in the day.

Abstract

A concise description of the United States Postal Service as a time-proven architecture providing physical transport for constructing overlay networks is presented.

A virtual network architecture

Consider the task of communication in a corporate organization, let’s call it “BigCorp,” a hundred years ago, before telephony, fax, etc. We may assume that much of the internal and external communication was in written form, letters. BigCorp may be defined by a set of people occupying certain parcels of real estate conducting business of some arbitrary nature. For example, a steel company of 100 years ago could have had offices in Pittsburgh, Youngstown, New York City and Duluth. The “company” itself is an abstraction, a virtual object, a set of ideas defined by an arrangement of physical entities such as people, places and things.

However, the company communicates by way of letters using the United States Postal Service (USPS) for delivery. By design, the architecture of the USPS system is independent of the identity of the recipients, and the nature of the payload. USPS cares not at all who the letter recipients are; the only thing that matters is how to find the mailbox. Conversely, the company is unconcerned about how letters come to be delivered. For example, personnel actions come from company communication: “Veeblefester, headquarters says you’re fired as of yesterday.” It is entirely irrelevant to Veeblefester whether the letter comes by locomotive, Pony Express or 20 Mule Team, because the letter is from HQ, not from the Post Office in Death Valley.

The brilliance of the modern mail system is to separate the transportation of messages (i.e., letters), from the routing of letters (addressed envelope), from the payload which is the letter itself inside the envelope. The payload/letter is what specifies the company, the virtual organization, the group of peers engaged in a common activity. In fact, the USPS could operate very efficiently delivering stamped, addressed envelopes that do not actually carry anything at all! Envelopes with letters, empty envelopes, it’s irrelevant to the USPS. As long as an envelope is stamped and addressed, it can be delivered.

Corporations need only be concerned with the payloads. The method of transport, whether passenger pigeon or Concorde supersonic jet, is completely irrelevant to the content of the payload. Routing is also irrelevant. Everything could be sent through Memphis, Tennessee (Federal Express) or Louisville, Kentucky (United Parcel Service). Customers don’t care, nor should they.

This model can be followed by peer-to-peer network application development. The network can be partitioned into a physical transport component that carries packets, an envelope component that allows routing in the physical network, and a payload component, which can be completely arbitrary. For example, the payload component could be used to construct “peer groups”.

PET stack

The following figure show the relationship of the payload-envelope-transport (PET) messaging stack to network activities, with supporting protocols on far right:

The physical network

Generally speaking, carriers do not own the medium, or exert more than second order control. The USPS does not own the roadways, and airline routes are controlled by federal regulations. Airliners can’t just take off and fly anywhere they want. In the same way, the wires and the airwaves are not completely controlled by those using wires and airwaves to construct virtual organizations.

The virtual network

Virtual networks are constructed from the contents of payloads. The information content of payloads is completely arbitrary.

While in extreme cases, payload may dictate transport, this is not completely coupled. While it is inconceivable to ship, say, a Nordik Track in an envelope, UPS would happy to deliver a Nordik Track box with a postcard inside. Or indeed, deliver an empty box.

The physical-virtual interface

Large corporate offices have more facilities to handle the chores of the physical network. They may be located in major urban areas well served by roads, planes, trains, etc. To some extent, the size of the virtual entity may depend on its physical capacity. One very interesting aspect of gnutella networks is that “super peers” or “hubs” emerge by self-organization. Gnutella nodes with high physical capacity (bandwidth) ended up having a dominant presence on the gnutella virtual network.

The primary coupling in a postal system is the actual recipient of the payload through the network address (i.e., street number). Many people can reside at one street address and one person can have multiple mailing addresses. The USPS doesn’t care. It is the responsibility of the virtual organization to route from the street address (or P.O. Box, etc) to actual recipients. Any further coupling creates more expense in the transport and physical routing, which quickly offsets any so-called optimizations induced by specializing the physical network or transport functions.

An example of poor coupling would be to require the USPS to open each envelope to find any part of the recipients physical address, and/or requiring routing along a certain path. In the first case, having addresses inside the envelope requires opening and resealing the envelope at each hop in the routing path. In the second case, requiring some certain path relies on the existence of that path in the physical layer, which the virtual layer should have no knowledge of. That is, no one specifies that Mother’s Day cards be routed through, say, Peoria, Illinios on its way to Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Some coupling is required between the virtual network and the physical network, and part of this has to be out-of-band. For example, phone books are used to look up phone numbers for people, who can then be called to obtain addresses, etc. There are many such analogues in the physical world, and these should be exploited for building virtual networks.

Engineering

Hoare’s First Law: There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.
-C.A.R.Hoare

The obvious and overriding implication of the preceding observations is that the engineering effort would benefit from a split into three relatively independent teams. The first team would handle the transport infrastructure, that is, build the roads, string the wires from point to point, launch satellites, etc. corresponding to the bottom row in the Stack figure above. The second team would handle the network infrastructure: message transport and routing in the physical domain of wires and airwaves corresponding to the middle row in the figure. The third team would handle virtual network infrastructure to create toolkits for virtual networks, “peer groups” etc. to be easily formed, corresponding to the top row in Stack illustration above.

Communication between “rows” is by interface. For example, the transport team may use TCP and specify an API, call it “sockets”, for use by the routing team.

At present, the Internet provides a largely complete transportation substrate. Building a virtual network (p2p) overlaying the Internet requires only teams 2 and 3. Just as the original unix socket’s authors (e.g., Bill Joy) are not necessary participants for programming based on the sockets API, the construction of a routing substrate for crossing firewalls and NATs need not include members of a team building virtual networks over the routing layer, and vice-versa.

Bootstrapping the network

One easy-to-understand way to encourage adoption is to implement an underlaying routing layer that provides an electronic envelope allowing programmers to send messages without regard to topology, and dedicate enough server/bandwidth to allow that piece of it to be transparent to programmers. The physical analogue is UPS or Federal Express, both of which use hubs. Given that the developer provided the source code for such a system, and actively encouraged its use, it seems reasonable that the community would jump to provide “safe” alternatives to prevent one company from dominating the network.

Post from: There Is NO Box

Payload-Envelope-Transport (PET) model for peer-to-peer overlay networks

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

I have too much to do.

My usual recourse (another cup of coffee) isn’t working.

One thing I could do is write out a list of everything on your mind, the sort it out using Covey’s or Blanchard’s methods. Eben Pagan recommends this technique as part of his Wake Up Productive info course on productivity. He uses a different sorting arrangement than Covey or Blanchard though.

But I’ve already done that. My Todo list is tyrannizing me!

By the way, it’s not that productivity tools DON’T work, it’s that people don’t use them. Productivity tools work great when you actually use them. Here’s a hint: if you postpone using a productivity tool until you’re too tired to think, it’s not going to work.

You have to use productivity tools when you’re fresh and well-rested…

…then you will have the vision and energy to follow through when you’re nearly spent… and can barely see the keyboard on your computer because you didn’t notice it was getting dark outside and you haven’t yet turned on the lights.

When you’re at the end of your rope, that’s a hint to go do something else.

One technique I use is to maintain emotional context while dissipating emotional tension and stress by doing something completely unrelated, which doesn’t require using the same part of my mind.

Shift your focus to dissipate stress

For example, if I’m working through a sticky programming problem, I might take a break and do some of the following. While these can be considered “wasting time” in some contexts, it’s important to understand that I don’t like doing these things either! I do them because they are chores that need doing as well, but won’t burden my mind.

• Upload recent pictures to flickr.com, this gets them backed up and off my laptop. I always have tons of pictures laying around. I’m weeks behind in my uploads. It’s a total chore!
• Take the next step in setting up a private Trac system so I can learn to use it easier in the future. This may result in a blog post along the “tutorial” line. The Trac documentation is fairly involved, but it’s hard to find simple information describing how to do simple things.
• Set up a git-based project. Git is becoming the tool of choice for collaborative development, I need to get with the program!

Sometimes, you just have to get away from computers completely.

Spend more time in meatspace

In my case, I’m to take advantage of of the warm, sunny weather and finish a surfboard repair for my friend Walter. I’ll have my trusty paper notebook by my side to jot down ideas as they come to me.

Here’s more things that mostly don’t involve computers:

• Fold laundry. Seriously, it’s a chore, it needs to be done, and about anything else is more fun. Almost guaranteed to get your idea machine running again.
• Clean the fridge (no, really, I do). Currently being a bachelor means I enjoy the luxury of living how I like, but I have to pay the consequences as well.
• Stay in motion. Brad Pitt: Be the shark, always be moving. Do something physical to free up your energy.
• Hot tar roofers starting at 7 am are a hint to either take the day off, leave for parts quieter, or just don’t attempt to accomplish anything overly involved.

But how well do all these distractions work for focusing your mind? Sounds like an oxymoron… use distraction to increase focus… I smell a future blog post!

Results from experience

All of these techniques above have worked for me repeatedly, and they may work for you. I’m sure I’ll be able to add to this list in the future.

What are your special tricks? Let us know below.

Post from: There Is NO Box

What To Do When You Have Too Much To Do

(Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes)

At each end of the economic spectrum there is a leisure class. The truly wealthy can pretty much do whatever they want having both time and money.

But at the other end, there is no money, only time.

Here’s a few things you could do with a lot of time and very little money.

Establish a new dog breed: The Huautla Cur

Go to Huautla de Jiminez and purchase a half dozen of the local cur. They breed true. They look a little like a terrier: small, energetic, territorial. The’re usually an attractive brindle color, or a white and black mix. Bring them back to the US. Establish the cur as a breed. Call it the Huautla Rat Terrier.

Exotic Tropical Milkweeds: Hoyas

Go to the high Himalaya or high altitude in Papua New Guinea, or Indonesia, and discover new species of genus hoya. There are bound to be many. Interview Kloppenberg and Greene beforehand for tips. Notify relevant conservation authorities. Attempt to export cuttings for herbarium preservation. Name it after your local guide’s eldest child.

Unscrew Microsoft name mangling

Microsoft has a spotty track record for publicly publishing accurate specifications, such that relevant information can be easily found on the internet. To be fair, they are much better than they used to be.

In any case, here is a nice project: Build out some test code for examining Microsoft’s name mangling schemes in C++. This whole procedure could be scripted to operate on an initial manually written code base composed of simple classes, methods, etc.

Backyard biology

Stake out 10 feet by 10 feet square in your backyard or neighborhood woodlot or closest state park or national park. Classify every living thing in that square. You will probably find a new species of something. Maybe a fungus, or an ant, maybe even a frog. Seriously, this is really how it happens. Name it after your great grandmother.

Is this for real?

Yes.

While all of these activities may seem rather tongue-in-cheek, the truth is that people everywhere are involved in some of the most outre activity you could possibly imagine. In fact, each one of these is something that I would find an attractive use of my time, given I had the time to spend on such projects!

And these kinds of in-depth activities – obsessions – are how we advance as a civilization. Balanced people don’t make history! It takes the truly obsessed to plow into unknown territory and keep plowing.

There is so much to do! What’s holding you back?

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New Obsessions — Opportunities and whimsy abound in stagnant economies