I have always been a die-hard paper book lover. Nothing to me smells better than a old used book store. But I have recently finally given in to the eReader boom. I have had a Viewsonic gTablet I hacked with Android Honeycomb for about 6 months. On it I have Kindle and started playing with it, downloading sample chapters and a few full books. It quickly grew on me. Then with the release of the Amazon Cloud Reader it has put me over the top.

I enjoy being able to highlight and notate things in the mostly non-fiction books I read. Along with being able to access the books from my phone, tablet, and desktop. Most books I read are technical or startup/business related so my notes come in very handy with the research I do.

Some things that won me over:

• Notations in-line of the books with notes
• The ability to make black on white text and vice versa (big plus when reading in bed)
• Ability to make multiple bookmarks to reference things previous
• Access to books from many devices at once
• Saving a tree or two
• Lightening my load when it comes time to move to another residence

My biggest complaint about Kindle books is the disproportionate pricing compared to hardback or paperback books. Many times the price is only a few dollars less.

The only real downside to the Gtablet is the bad viewing angles on the screen but this does not bother me too much since I am not using it to watch movies with others or something that would require more than just me looking at it.

I have finally got Honeycomb on it and am happy with it even though it is an Alpha release since it is a hacked ROM being that Google is not releasing the source for Honeycomb. So aside from a few bugs it is great. You can also over-clock the CPU to around 1.5Ghz with no real impact in terms of overheating using CPU Master. Once you over-clock the tablet screams compared to a Xoom.

I have been compiling some notes on ways to foster innovation and help turn around the lack of innovation in companies I have seen first-hand. This is a working copy basically that I will add to and tweak as needed:

• Have no more than 3 governing rules for a team
• Follow the Lean Startup ideas of Build -> Measure -> Learn and repeat
• Create an environment of experimentation
• 6 people tops per team
• Do not keep teams in a vacuum
• Promote cross-pollination between teams (openly share ideas free of fear)
• Customers decide on what the MVP is not the stake holders. Double down on what the customer wants and uses. Drop the rest.
• Ask the right questions (don’t put the answer before the question)
• NEVER allow process over innovation!
• Remove barriers to teams getting new products/features
• Individuals don’t build great companies, teams do
• 98% of meetings are a waste of time
• Just in time not just in case.

Why do I not even get 10Mbps download speeds???

It seems that US data connection providers are charging a lot for the same speed I got l got last year and the year before.

Source:www.websiteoptimization.com

Source: www.websiteoptimization.com

Some of my more recent experiences in the last few years have encouraged me to sit down and write this post regarding the things I have seen that “management” does to hinder innovation and adversely impact company moral unintentionally (of course).

Negative traditional management actions:

• Lack of communication
• Leaving the “troops” out of decision making
• Creating a wall between management and workers
• Walling off project by stake holder (producer/manager)
• Pigeon holing

One of the main things I have noticed is the lack of general communication with the teams that actually do the work. You have management communicating with other management. But at the same time leaving the developers or other workers in the dark as to even the most simple knowledge in regards to the business and how well (or poorly) it is doing. I have spoken with many people who have no clue how a product is doing because they are not told. So they may make the wrong assumption and be looking for another gig when where they are is actually doing well.

The other side effect from this is the retention of good ideas by those same workers who assume that management is uninterested in their ideas, thoughts, and opinions because they never bothered to ask. So a Jr. Dev might have the best idea ever but keeps it to themselves out of fear. Or figures they will just keep that idea to do on their own. This can be detrimental to a company who doesn’t exploit the intellectual capital they already have. Instead many companies bring in consultants and spend even more money when they just need to include their entire workforce.

When I say leave the “troops” out of the decision making process I am referring to not allowing or even thinking to include the team as a whole in helping to drive the company/product forward. There is a common issue in companies where I have worked that the management or stake holder(s) wants to have total control over the direction of the project and to their own detriment ignore or discourage team members from having input. I have been in meetings where the stake holder gets downright insulted by others asking about why there is not X or Y feature when it is a perfectly valid question. This is an example of management working against themselves.

Company culture is a very popular topic and people make livings from analyzing what makes a good start-up and how the culture affects that success or failure. A simple thing I do is take part in lunches with team members as well as those in other teams. This creates a relaxed environment where they are more open to sharing ideas and how they feel about the company, project, or management. While I see other C-level people avoid going to lunch with anyone else but each other. Something this simple can cause resentment and strife amongst the ranks and rightly so.

In order to have a successful company you need to move away from old-school thinking in terms of separating yourself from the people that make your company a success.

Looking forward to reading Steven Johnson’s book.

Also checkout his TED talk:

I looked at various “distributions” like Crunch Bang, Dream Linux, Arch Linux, and countless others.  Yet it is somewhat of a stretch to call most of them distributions since just bundling and branding or Debian based packages. So I decided to just go to the source and roll my own. This is by far the best option for a clean minimal desktop with only what you need and will use on it.

Let me first describe my idea of “cleanness” in a desktop install. I will be using Debian 6.0.1 as the base for my system. I have chosen this over Ubuntu for the ease of doing a very minimal clean install free of Gnome, KDE, etc. My install will be using awesome window manager, which is a very lightweight tiling window manager that uses lua. If you prefer something more familiar to the average user please look at Openbox, Fluxbox, or similar to maintain the minimalist approach.

First let’s install the base system using the Debian small CD iso image (consult Debian site for other architectures):

debian-6.0.1a-amd64-businesscard.iso – AMD 64bit

debian-6.0.1a-i386-businesscard.iso – i386 (32bit)

For easiest results I use a spare USB drive I can format and use unetbootin to load the ISO image on the drive. Once it is loaded on the drive I boot from it. You may need to hit a key like ESC to choose what device to boot from depending on your hardware and BIOS configuration. You can also use a CD and burn the ISO image onto it.

When I run the install I select a separate /home dir and to encrypt using LVM (optional but good for security). Towards the end of the install you will be prompted to select broad groups of install sets. De-select all but “Standard system utilities” and complete the install. You may also want to select “Secure Shell Server” if you will be using SSH to connect to your desktop (always nice to have).

Now in my case I wanted to install awesome and get the basic desktop going. If your hardware includes a Nvidia graphics card use this howto to install the kernel.

Install sudo and add your user to the /etc/sudoers file:

(as root) apt-get install sudo vim

vim /etc/sudoers

# Change username to your user and add below line to file

username ALL=(ALL) ALL

Now let’s add contrib, non-free and Debian multimedia to our APT sources.list file.

Open /etc/apt/sources.list using vim or other txt editor and add contrib and non-free after main in the file so the lines read

deb http://yourmirror.org/path/to/files/ squeeze main contrib non-free

Also add the line for Debian Multimedia:

deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org squeeze main non-free

Once done update your apt repo cache by running:

sudo apt-get update

First install the multimedia repo key:

sudo apt-get install debian-multimedia-keyring

Select yes when prompted to add the key.

Install SLiM (optional) if you prefer a graphical login manager. Along with awesome and its extras.

sudo apt-get install slim awesome awesome-extra

Now you can reboot (if installed Nvidia driver be sure to) or just run slim to get the graphical login and enter using your username which should launch awesome. Once loaded you may want to read up on the awesome man page for keyboard shortcuts.

If you right-click on the desktop or left-click on “A” in top left corner you will get a basic menu. Choose open terminal and we can install other wanted/needed packages for your new desktop.

You can pick and choose what packages to install but I will give you a basic rundown of ones I installed to make me able to work efficiently while still being minimal.

• feh – image viewer
• wicd – network configuration tool
• moc – music on console command line music player
• uzbl – lightweight web browser framework
• conky – desktop system information display
• vlc – video player
• pidgin – IRC and IM client
• gedit – text editor (choose your favorite)

sudo apt-get install feh wicd moc uzbl conky vlc pidgin gedit

The Arch Linux wiki has nice page of lightweight applications for many needs. Once you have the above packages you can use uzbl to download and install Firefox or Chrome.

In command prompt:

uzbl --uri=http://www.google.com/chrome/

Download the file, it will be saved in your /home/username directory.

Run:

dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_YOURARCH.deb

It will give error that some packages are not installed. This is to be expected.

To remedy the missing dependencies run:

sudo apt-get install -f

Then run the above command to install Chrome browser.

Install any other packages you may want. In Part 2 I will discuss pimping out your awesome desktop.