I heard a quote the other day – “Good is the enemy of the best”. It does make sense. To me anyway. But I thought, if I was “the best”, then it would be hard for me to get anyone to do anything for me, since I know I could do it better. That makes a huge problem in business. I believe it’s called micromanaging. I think it’s a terrible way to run a business, since it breeds fear (since people are constantly worried if they have lived up to your expectations), and it wastes time when you double check their work.

Stephen Covey talks about empowerment in organizations. Training employees to think for themselves and entrusting the work to them…allowing them to take pride in their work.
They might not do “as good” of a job as me…but a lot more gets done. From a client’s perspective, 0% of nothing is still 0% (i.e. they see nothing complete). I think I would rather structure my business on Covey’s idea of principles, rather than the methods that I think are “right”. That way, I can leave my business in the hands of someone I trust, and know that while they may not do it the way I would, the business will still flourish. That’s successful to me.

So, to be the best, or to be successful? You choose.

Ok so you’re trying to use Linux in a networking environment as a desktop PC. So you’ve got that work share mounted off the file server. You’re working away with OpenOffice 2.1 and after 5 minutes of work it comes up and bails with some error about being unable to save.

Now, you’re no newbie to Linux, and you know it’s a remote share, so you check the permissions first. They look ok when you do an ls -la, your UID is the owner. You think the problem might lie with the file, so you copy it locally, and saving works fine. You check your /etc/fstab, and the remote share is an SSHFS over the FUSE driver. Looks like the mapping to the file system is broken for some applications. Now you know the file server is exporting over NFS also, so you think, maybe that will work since it’s legacy. So you mount that, and it doesn’t work because your IP is not permitted because the DHCP gave you the wrong IP. So you drop to the command line and do an ifconfig on the device to get the right IP and it’s sweet. NFS mounted. And it works with saving files.

Unfortnately, OpenOffice crashes on you. It restarts ok. You go to unmount the SSHFS file system since you’re not using it, only to find it won’t unmount because it’s “busy”. Oh yeah, OpenOffice. You close it but it’s still “busy” when you try to unmount it. Nothing else is open. You check the process listing and there isn’t anything that should be accessing that file system unless…yep, OpenOffice forgot to unhook a file handler. So you do an unmount -l so that it umounts properly in the background, and start using Abiword instead. Now you go to open your files, and Abiword is nice and remembers where the last file was opened from – the SSHFS mounted drive. It tries to open that, but that is unmounted, but not properly…so Abiword hangs. And since GNOME is using fancy pop-up windows, you can’t actually put anything in front of Abiword. So now half your desktop is taken up with a program that is waiting to timeout. The only way you know to fix it is to reboot.

So sure, Linux is ready for the desktop…if you want it to be like Windows (i.e. things still break). But Linux is easier to fix right? Sure. But when I’m using it as a desktop, I want to be using it for productivity…not
messing with the system to make sure my “stable” opensource app doesn’t crash because the filesystem breaks! Come on, just give me an error instead of a 300000 minute timeout!

Well Winter Conference was on the weekend just been, and listening Leigh & Cathy McCulloch was certainly a good. They’ve been on quite a few trips on their own and with their kids through the finances provided by their business, and they’ve taken many photos. It was amazing to listen to them describe the trip looking at the photo, made it much easier to picture how fun it must have been

Post-conference I’ve been snowed under with a backlog of things-to-do (work and otherwise). I’ve found that one of the reasons why I stop working completely sometimes, is because I just feel like I’m getting nowhere. That is, there is no perceivable momentum. I mean, when the backlog is just so big that no matter how much effort you put in, you see no dent! At least as an IBO, the team members can usually see activity from an external point of view, and take time to point out that you are moving forward. Outside of that, I hate the feeling of a backlog that I cannot shift!
I’m starting to see results now though, after working for so long on the infrastructure in a couple of other projects in my life. Kinda like when I drive a car, I like the car to accelerate FAST when I put my foot down!

On the weekend I received one of those typical joke emails, this one a parody of girls ‘rules’ for guys – the parody being that it was guys ‘rules’ for girls. There was a line in it that I believe is very truthful, for everyone:You can either ask us to do something Or tell us how you want it done.Not both. If you already know best how to do it, just do it yourself.