Luncheon is for softies

Mm. I hate to nitpick, but there is maybe a slight problem with the way you are visezing for your objectif to speak English the way they do on Wall Street...

(And I dont just mean that your Union Jack is upside down. Thats the least of your problems with it.)

(How do I know its upside down? From the fimbriation of the ordinaries, thats how.)

(Oh, and please dont tell me its the Union Flag if its not flown from a ship. Thats one of those facts that every uncle knows, but  isnt actually true. You definitely dont call it the Union Flag at sea, but both terms are acceptable on land, and personally I like Union Jack.)

(In the brackets above, I initially wrote Thats one of those facts that every uncle knows, but if you said it on QI, the klaxon would go off. But then I checked, and annoyingly someone did say it on QI, and the klaxon didnt go off. But it should have done.)

(Thats a lot of clarifications. Maybe I dont hate to nitpick after all.)

Available link for download

Lose the Teaching Work is Learning

A year back, when I decided to go with the idea of ThoughtWorks University V2, I was seriously influenced by Jay Crosss idea of a workscape. We already had a very successful graduate induction program in the form of ThoughtWorks University, and to change it meant flouting rules like "If it aint broke, dont fix it." But then, I think a bit like my friend Aaron Silvers - "We should be fixing things all the time". I wanted to move from a purely academic approach towards learning to an approach that we drove through real work. I wanted to rethink the reason we ran the program and if instructional soundness really translated into workplace effectiveness. Our team took a gamble towards workscaping the program. I can say safely today that weve seen results that make me proud to be part of the program and I believe were making a dent in the universe like never before. Last Thursday, the team of graduates at ThoughtWorks University enabled a local charity Sukrupa by launching their website complete with a donations system. This apart, theyve made significant progress with a student records system and an ecommerce project for the same client. In todays blogpost, I want to reflect on our experience of the last six weeks and share with you how real work has made ThoughtWorks University a better program for the company and the world at large.

You Cant Train People on Values
"Profit, smarts, and growth is essential, but the meaning of work-life must extend beyond the bottom line." - Jonathan Wolter
At ThoughtWorks, our values and mission are at the heart of how we work. My colleague Jonathan Wolter, has written eloquently about our mission to advocate social justice. While our mission and values are at the core of our DNA, I dont believe we can train anyone on this. We can do great presentations and elearning courses and convince ourselves that we did a great job, but frankly you believe in a mission by pursuing it. You cherish values by living them. Teaching of any kind lacks the realism to drive home a passion for missions and values. At ThoughtWorks Univeristy, we set our graduates the task of enabling Sukrupa - a local school thats on a mission to educate children from Bangalores slums. Its amazing how a challenge with a real world impact can galvanise people. In solving this problem our grads not only pursued software excellence and helped change the world in their own little way, but they also lived ThoughtWorks values as a means to the end. If you read about our values youll soon realise how a small, real world problem can easily help them live each of our cultural traits.

Experience is the Biggest Teacher
"Experience is what you get when you dont get what you wanted" - Randy Pausch
Often it takes seeing what doesnt work, to realise what could actually work. We took a risk by starting the project with little upfront analysis. In the initial weeks of the project we were literally playing it by ear, taking our clients requirements as they came. While we took this chance knowing the potential benefit for Sukrupa and for the graduates experience, the uncertainty and the lack of coordination on the team was disconcerting. There was even an occasion when our otherwise affable client was put off by our amateurish approach. When you put a group of talented, passionate people together though, problems are only an opportunity for greater responsibility. A quick shuffle of team roles and our analysts had nominated a testing lead, a UX analyst, a project manager and backlog cop. From that point on we never looked back. The graduates have forged such a strong relationship with our client, that itll drive most experienced account managers to shame. Technically, and process wise - our graduates struggled; but their passion kept them resilient through ups and downs of the six weeks. The role of the trainers was just to be coaches - guides on the side, who would chip in with their experience and help the project along in the right direction. At the end of the day, the trainers have learned heaps about leadership and the students have learned heaps about client management and software delivery. We didnt teach them anything - they learned through experience.

Nothing Succeeds like Success

"You know that youve done well, if your customer breaks out in tears during a showcase." - Patric Fornasier
You can teach people all you know, but theyll never know what its really like until they achieve real success. In the past six weeks our graduates wrote real tests and real code, configured one-click deployment for the project, elicited and delivered real user stories, worked in a true Agile environment, and managed a real client relationship. As I sat through graduation on Friday, I looked at each of our 20 new consultants -- their confidence and energy was evident. As I later wrote to these consultants they arent rookies anymore - they know what it takes to release software. They can now stand alongside their more experienced team mates and still be confident given their success on our project with Sukrupa. I hope its heaps easier for them to pull their weight on a project, knowing that theyve seen real success.

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This ThoughtWorks University brought for me, my happiest moments as a ThoughtWorker. Its been an absolute privilege working alongside each of these 20 young people - and its an experience thatll take some beating. Its also provided evidence to my hypothesis that challenges and failure can be great catalysts to learning. Ive seen that smart, passionate people, given a worthy task, will learn and rise to challenge. I hope our story can inspire you to make real work an integral part of your learning programs. Do chime in with your thoughts in the comments section - Im very keen to hear what you think. And by the way, please donate unabashedly to Sukrupa - a small donation from your side could go a really long way for this really special school.

Available link for download

M is for Market!

A few months ago I was asked to contribute to an Alphabet Book project that Tools for Schools Africa is putting together for Ghanian school children. Each artist was assigned a letter and asked to create an illustration based on people, places, and things that the children of Ghana can recognize. I was given the letter M and asked to depict a market scene with a mango tree! It was so much fun to work on!

You can read more about this project (and see the other wonderful contributions) here. A big "Thank You!" to Mike Boldt for including me in this great project. Thanks for thinking of me, Mike!

And also thank you to everyone who visits this blog and leaves me comments. It really does mean so much to me. I have had a lot of requests for a paper tutorial, so I will try to work one of those up in the next few weeks. More to come soon!

Available link for download

Ma femme le retour MY WIFE IS BACK

Je vais essayer de faire court dans cette intro vu que ça fait plus dun moi et demi que le monde attend ce turbomedia .

Available link for download

Make sure write cache is enabled on your RAID controller

Using a write cache protected by battery (BBWC) is well known and one of the best practices in RDBMS world. But I have frequently seen situations that people do not set write cache properly. Sometimes they just forget to enable write cache. Sometimes write cache is disabled even though they say they set properly.

Make sure that BBWC is enabled. If not enabled, you will be able to easily get better performance by just enabling it. The following is a DBT-2 example.

Write cache is disabled:

# iostat -xm 10
avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle
 21.16 0.00 6.14 29.77 0.00 42.93

Device: rrqm/s wrqm/s r/s w/s rMB/s
sdb 2.60 389.01 283.12 47.35 4.86
wMB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await svctm %util
2.19 43.67 4.89 14.76 3.02 99.83


Write cache is enabled:

# iostat -xm 10
avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle
 40.03 0.00 16.51 16.52 0.00 26.94

Device: rrqm/s wrqm/s r/s w/s rMB/s
sdb 6.39 368.53 543.06 490.41 6.71
wMB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await svctm %util
3.90 21.02 3.29 3.20 0.90 92.66

Both run same applications(DBT-2), but the server activity was significantly different each other. I got 85% better result when write cache is enabled.


Checking write cache and battery status

BBWC is mostly equipped with H/W raid controller so operational command depends on products. Here is an example of "arcconf" command result.

# /usr/StorMan/arcconf GETCONFIG 1 AL
...
--------------------------------------------------------
Controller Battery Information
--------------------------------------------------------
Status : Optimal
Over temperature : No
Capacity remaining : 99 percent
Time remaining (at current draw): 3 days, 1 hours, 11 minutes

--------------------------------------------------------
Logical device information
--------------------------------------------------------
Logical device number 0
...
Read-cache mode : Disabled
Write-cache mode : Enabled (write-back)
Write-cache setting: Enabled (write-back) when
protected by battery
...

--------------------------------------------------------
Physical Device information
--------------------------------------------------------
Device #0
Device is a Hard drive
...
Size : 140009 MB
Write Cache : Disabled (write-through)
...

Write cache should be enabled only when battery backup is working. In other words:
- Write cache on logical device (H/W raid controller) is enabled when protected by battery
- Write cache on physical device is disabled
- The battery has enough capacity and long enough remaining time

I recommend DBAs to monitor write cache status regularly (adding this to your monitoring scripts), including battery status checking. Long time ago I was asked for urgent help to fix a problem that application performance suddenly went down. I looked into problems then found that write cache unexpectedly turned off because a battery was expired. If you successfully detected that battery capacity was decreased before write cache was disabled, you would be able to take an action before server performance suddenly goes down (i.e. allocating scheduled down time in order to replace the battery).


Quick health check with mysql commands

If you are not familiar with H/W raid controller specific command but want to check write cache status quickly, using mysqlslap or stored procedure is easy.

mysqlslap:
$ mysql -e "set global innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1"
$ mysqlslap --concurrency=1 --iterations=1 --engine=innodb 
--auto-generate-sql --auto-generate-sql-load-type=write 
--number-of-queries=100000


stored procedure:
create table t (c1 int) engine=innodb;
delimiter //
create procedure sp1(IN i INTEGER)
BEGIN
DECLARE done INTEGER DEFAULT 0;
WHILE i > 0 DO
insert into t values (1);
SET i = i - 1;
END WHILE;
END;
//
delimiter ;

set global innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1;
call sp1(100000);

You will be able to insert thousands of records per second if write cache is enabled. If disabled, only hundreds of inserts per second is possible, so you can easily check.

Available link for download

LSG Webinar When Learning is Working The 70 20 10 model in Action

Can I say how excited I am to be at this webinar with Charles Jennings? As a big fan of Jay Cross idea about workscaping and as someone whos put this idea into action, this is definitely a topic very close to my heart. I dont know what Charles agenda is, but if its about the way work and learning are synonymous, Im sure hell strike a chord with me. These are my liveblogged notes from the webinar, totally unplugged -- so I promise to keep it as honest and real as I possibly can.

So what does Charles want to talk about? What are the key challenges that organisations face today? Change is increasing everyday and we need to keep emowering our workforce to keep up with change and keep building their capabilities. We dont do training right - we, in fact do it very inefficiently. Charles is going to present a model on experiential learning that really works and hopefully hell share some empirical evidence for this as well. Nom, nom, very exciting.

Charles asks us to think about some of our most significant learning experiences and to think of where they occured. For me most of my learning happened at work. Charles has picked up my favourite example to explain experiential learning. I use the example of how we learn to ride a bike - we got bare minimum instruction, but we learnt from experience, failure and reflection. We didnt real a manual or go through detailed training -- we just did it and learned!

The Trouble with current Formal Learning Approaches

Much of formal learning is content rich and interaction-poor. We learn to know but we hardly learn to do. I called this the phenomenon of growing the knowing flab vs building the doing muscle. This is the big problem with formal learning programs in organisations these days -- if theres a best practice, content rich training works. OTOH for most knowledge workers, its an interaction rich approach thats crucial, because it prepares us to face complicated and complex problem domains and thereby deal with novel and emergent practice.

Most away from work training and learning leads to the phenomenon of the forgetting curve, because instruction out of context leaves nothing for workplace performers to remember and apply what theyve been "told".

Most of the participants like to get involved and try things out. They like to have dialogue and discussion. They like presentations which are organised according the logic of how they work and learn. They like to experience how things work. This is amble evidence that proves that people like to learn through interaction, working with others and real experience.

Real Adult Learning

Humans like other animals learn through experience, practice, conversation and reflection. Real adult learning is about acquiring new ideas from experience and retaining them as memories. Instead of structuring learning around content, we need to structure them around creating learning experiences.

Charles is now introducing the 70:20:10 model from the Princeton University which says that we learn 10% from training, 20% through observation and 70% through real experience. This is a model, not a recipe, but has significant evidence about this.

70:20:10 is a framework for thinking outside classes, courses and curricula. Most organisations spend their money on the formal training curriculum, where the bulk of the budget should ideally go to helping people learn from experience. A lot of the evidence comes from the initial assertions by Jay Cross and then from studies by Capital Works , Education Development Center at Massachusetts, US Bureau of Labour Statistics and Institute of Research for Learning. Charles will give us more evidence and studies later.

Incorporating 70-20-10 in Value Based Learning Strategy

First things first, this is only a model and not a silver bullet. The percentages are only indicative. So Charles recommends that we dont get hung up on the numbers and focus on the context because implementations will vary with the problem on hand.

This is quite understandable, given that youre very very unlikely to see behaviour change through classroom sessions. OTOH, this is extremely likely to happen with the constant "interventions" that informal learning creates for us.

Most managers say that they learn through informal chats with colleagues, search engines like google and through trial and error. This is some real research from Good Practice.

Charles mentions that thinking 70-20-10 requires a mindshift and cultural change whereby we can, as learning consultants help our organisations understand and be aware of the opportunities we need to create in the workplace people to pick up and hone the skills they need to grow. This means working with businesses to create sizeable investments in informal learning, getting managers involved and development driven performance management.

Charles also suggests that we include 70-20-10 thinking in the competency framework of various job families. This is something weve tried to implement via the concept of learning paths. Charles suggests through that we go a step forward where we list out recommendations in each area of the 70-20-10 model for each role to seek out their development through experience, observation & feedback and formal learning.

The Role of Managers

Managers are strongly involved in the development of their people. Not just Charles and I, Esther Derby says so too. Managers have the most impact in terms professional development and the mindset of "lets throw them to the trainers", takes away a lot of responsibility from leaders. The corporate leadership council has research that says that people who work with managers that are committed to developing them, outperform those with less involved managers. (I think thats what I saw, though I could be a bit wrong)

Working with team member through learning logs, coaching regular feedback, and goal setting are crucial skills for managers.

L&Ds Readiness for 70-20-10
The focus of L&D has to change:

• Moving from maintaining catalogues of courses, etc to managing workscapes.
• Moving from designing and developing materials to supporting learning experiences in the workplace.
• Moving from a course centric approach to a performance centric role.
• Moving from predominantly classroom and elearning driven approaches to a multi-channel, multi-modality approach.
• Finally we need to move from a learning focussed approach to a performance and productivity focus.
  

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Great stuff from Charles, I really liked the stuff hes mentioned and this resonates with my own approach in L&D. Thank you!

Available link for download

Lonesome Wyatt and the Holy Spooks Halloween is Here review and interview!

Ive been a big fan of Lonesome Wyatts work for years now.  Whether its through his goth-country outings with Those Poor Bastards or his stripped down solo work, I can honestly say the man has never made a bad record.  When I heard he was working on a Halloween themed album I was pretty excited.  If theres any artist who can faithfully recreate the aesthetics of some of the Halloween story and sound effects albums of the past its Lonesome Wyatt.



CR: Can you tell us a bit about the upcoming Those Poor Bastards album?
LW: Its like gazing into a big black hole of hopelessness. 

CR: With six full length albums and a number of EPs under your belt, has the creative process changed at all with this new album?
LW: Not really. Jesus tells me what to sing and I sing it.
CR: Behold the Abyss was a bit of a concept album that also tied into a book, was this a one time thing or can fans look forward to more multi-layered projects in the future?
LW: Probably a one time thing but nobody knows for sure.

CR: With Halloween is Here and past Those Poor Bastards albums youve proven you can create the perfect dreadful and gloomy soundscape, have any filmmakers contacted you regarding a film score? If not, is this something youd be open to?
LW: No they havent. I guess it would depend upon if the film had werewolves in it or not. 

CR: Last question, as this is a horror website and Halloween is quickly approaching I feel obligated to ask, what are some of your favorite horror films to watch during this time of year?
LW: Im awful partial to Gremlins and Vincent Price movies.

Available link for download