Smart. Progress.

We’ve recently added a resources page to our website. You’ll find links to standards and references for Systems Engineering, Modeling & Simulation, Programming, Conferences and an acronyms list. Feel free to bookmark that page and use it often. If there are links that you’d like to see included, please let us know and we’ll add them if relevant to our industry.

While we’re at it, check out the MIT course material for Distributed Computing Systems Engineering.

One more note: We’re looking for top shelf talent for Systems Engineering and Software Development. We’ll only consider the best. If you are looking for a challenge and consider yourself better than most, drop us a line.

With the iPhone 4 coming being announced today at WWDC and with the Android HTC EVO being available last week, I’m feeling as though the Palm OS boat is sinking. I’m wanting to switch over and not just for newness sake. I still enjoy the Palm OS, but the hardware issues, speed and lack of apps are killing me. Seeing friends being more productive than I on their phones is like fingernails on a chalkboard. I’m the effective one and I have the Palm OS. I have hardware problems with my device that Sprint doesn’t seem to want to take care of, that Palm could’ve avoided with a better hardware provider and that drive me nuts when trying to use the phone for an important task.

The EVO and iOS 4 (what they’ve named the iPhone OS now that it powers much more than iPhones) are light years beyond Palm’s Pre with no new release on the horizon from Palm or HP (who agreed to purchase Palm recently).

Another annoying thing the Pre is that it doesn’t have a user’s manual to tell you how to take advantage of its features so I went weeks without knowing some of the useful, but not obvious features of the phone.


iPhone
HTC EVO
Palm Pre


Android Development
iPhone Development
Palm OS Development

The emotional reward from Smart Progress is a stronger feeling than most people realize. The feeling of satisfaction and pride are already recognized as emotions that we crave. Those feelings are amplified when the effort to accomplish something was time-consuming and difficult. We don’t have to work hard though if we can work smart. I think the satisfaction grows based on the perceived difficulty of the task rather than how many hours we spent. Using your brain rather than your hands to accomplish a seemingly hard task in a shorter period of time can provide the same amount of satisfaction, if not more. Before dropping to your knees to scrub the floors, wait a minute and think how you could get the job done smarter. Take satisfaction from the end result, not the effort. We’ve been trained to think hard work is good work. I’d argue that the value of the results should be measured rather than the effort to obtain the results.


Vacations, the time we reserve for ourselves, should include work towards the one thing you want most. When was the last time you accomplished an amount of progress that left you feeling satisfied with yourself for the results you produced? The feeling of satisfaction is always better when the progress you made was towards something that you really wanted. When we take a week off from work, we tend to look for ways to enjoy ourselves in the short term: lying on a beach, skiing, sight-seeing, etc. All those things are great, but it seems that the ideal way to spend a week away from work is to improve your life for the long run. The best way I can think to do that is to spend that week making Smart Progress towards one of your biggest goals. Progress is more invigorating than sleeping or relaxing on the beach for a week.


On your next family vacation, leave a few days at the end to concentrate on working towards your biggest goal and let me know how you feel. I suspect that you’ll feel better after you slay the dragon towards your goal rather than after you get done with the relaxing portion of your vacation.

The Pre was released on 6/4/09 to a pretty average result. Many of the stores including Sprint stores themselves were sold out very quickly having only 50-100 phones on hand. I blame Palm for having such a limited amount in stores. According to preliminary polling results and numbers, the Pre didn’t come near the iPhone sales but that is to be expected as the intended audiences are completely different. Business people will hog the market share for the Pres while teenagers and Apple fanatics will be the majority of iPhone owners.


There are already some reported problems, although fairly minor. The major problems are screen discolorations, dead pixels and dying phones that required a hard reboot (remove battery). Some minor problems include the sharp edge to the bottom of the phone when opened, lack of hard synching with Outlook, lack of symbol support in the web browser for symbols not on the keyboard (having to use the Sym key) and the lack of available applications.


The three problems that really drive me crazy are the lack of hard synchronization which forced me to use MS Exchange, the lack of tethering, and the lackof available applications.


Most business people use MS Outlook and only a portion of those use MS Exchange. Not catering to the large subset that use Outlook as a stand-alone application with a seamless and out of the box solution is unforgiveable.


I understand why Sprint doesn’t want the Pre to allow tethering computers online, but it still irritates me. They need to get their $70/mo data card money.


The lack of available applications is the biggest irritant, especially since it is difficult to get applications published through their Application Catalog. There are many restrictions that they apply to you so the black market for Palm Pre apps is bigger than the real thing.


With all that said, I still love my Pre due to my recent adoption of a MS Exchange server and the over-the-air synchronization between all my computers of my email, tasks, contacts and calendar. The Pre still has a lot going for it including a pretty slick UI and multi-tasking OS that means I can put my attention deficit disorder to work. The easy to update OS seems to make progress every couple months. I do wish that the hard drive was bigger and in fact the Pre Plus being release for Verizon doubles the memory that I have.

I like to tinker, especially with the latest technology. To develop something for a phone falls within that scope so I’ve been learning what I can about the Software Development Kits (SDK) for each of the four major phones/OS:


Android

Read about and download the SDK on the Android SDK site.


Development guide


iPhone

The iPhone SDK cost $100 for the random small company person like myself and goes up to $300 for those in companies of 500 or more. This is the largest market for applications and has a good reference center.


BlackBerry

The development site boasts plenty of information for developing gadgets but I spend more time on the Java Application Section.


Pre

Finally, the phone I’m most excited about, the SDK called Mojo has not been released to the general public yet. Only a handful of pre-development vendors have been let behind the curtains so far. I’ve applied, but haven’t heard anything back yet.


I’ll post more as I traverse this journey including posting some sample applications with a focus on productivity.

Here are some of the truths we use when managing our task lists:

1. You should either know what higher level goal the task will help support or it should be a necessary task.
2. Each task should have a date associated with it.
3. If the task takes more than 15 minutes, then schedule it on your calendar

I happen to use Microsoft Outlook and synchronize those tasks with my phone (a Palm Pre thank you very much). As those tasks pop-up with their reminder, I either tackle the task right away, push snooze so I can get to after I finish whatever I’m currently doing or I immediately reschedule the task for a later date. Take those reminders seriously or you’ll snooze yourself right past a deadline. I also review my task list every morning when I get to work and every evening after the kids are in bed. This allows me to execute tasks due that day at their respective location (home or work). If I ever have spare time (haha), I’ll also review the list to see what I can check off, or at least make progress on.


Tasks should ultimately be well ordered within a larger goal for several reasons: 1) You’re more motivated to execute the task if you know that as a direct result of you completing the task, you’ll be closer to a highly desirable goal; 2) With limited time, you need to focus on important tasks rather than urgent “hey you” tasks that ultimately get you no further toward your goal; 3) The only way to get to your goals is to know that path and plan and then have the desire to reach that goal.

I was unable to attend the Google I/O in San Francisco this year, but I did watch almost all of the 80 minute Google Wave presentation. The technology looks very promising as it is based on very simple concepts, based on a strong infrastructure and will have plenty of momentum behind it from now on.


I’ve requested an account in the sandbox they’ve created in order to play around with it. I’d like to apply the technology to a couple problems I’ve been percolating: agent-based learning engine for poorly structured concepts, interest-based data synchronization across many nodes and basic workplace group collaboration with multi-level security.


I need to learn more about the APIs in order to create a functional design for those ideas, but after a quick glance through the JavaDoc, I think there will need to be some significant changes required. The fact that Google Wave is going to be rolled out as an open source project makes it exciting enough to give this a shot.

There are many web applications to help you collaborate among your peers. Here is a list of tools we feel are the shiznit:

1. Phone

Talking to somebody is dynamic, relationship building and clear. It is easy to get across your sarcasm, important points and gauge their reaction versus using text which is hard to interpret tone and intent. On the phone, the conversation lasts minutes. Email, forums, and other text-based collaboration tools take hours or days to get through the task. The constant context switching to the conversation or thought process will hinder people from just getting er done.



2. Email

An underrated coordination mechanism as companies are constantly trying to create applications from scratch that assist in collaboration just because people don’t know how to use email collectively. Think about what email is. It is a mechanism to deliver multiple people messages that they can read at their convenience. They already use it so there is no worry that they’ll forget to check their email. They is no need for a separate application or separate login. The technology is simple and robust – proven to work for decades. Just use it properly.



3. Text Messages

The problem with phone is that we’re not always available or willing to talk at that instant. The problem with email is that we don’t check it as often. Text messages provide a nice gap solution. They’re instantaneous because the message is immediately sent to the receiver’s cell phone which they always have on their hip. It is easily ignored if we’re busy going to the bathroom, talking in a meeting or getting a speeding ticket. We’re immediately notified that somebody has sent us a message and we can check it as soon as we’re mentally free.



4. Google Docs

The ever-popular online document management and collaboration suite from the behemoth Google. I’m sure you already know about it and we couldn’t have a list of collaboration tools without mentioning it so we’ll leave it at that. Here is a link if necessary.



5. Vyew

A semi-free web conferencing tool. You can use it for free if you don’t mind advertisements and you can work with the basic functionality. There is obviously a pay service that removes the ads and opens more functionality up to you.



6. Zoho Too

A growing collection of business collaboration tools and applications.

Everyone has heard of the 80/20 rule, or the Pareto principle – that 80% of your efficacy comes from 20% of your work. This doesn’t mean that you can reduce your days to only working that 20%, but it does let you consider what really matters. Some tasks just have to get done because they’re crucial for day-to-day work. Other tasks are long-term important or strategic tasks and that is where you’ll gain your 80%. Anything else should be considered extra credit.


Do the status report that is mandatory. Do the work that has proven important and the work you know will bring fruits. Anything else that comes up should go into the bucket you tackle when you have spare time or you’re bored. I know – we don’t have spare time nor do we get bored. That bucket will never get touched. That is OK because I personally hate doing work for no reason.


For each task, think if you’re doing wasted work. If what you’re doing won’t be around in 4-6 months and is isn’t contractually required, then chances are you’re wasting your time. Concentrate on those things that having lasting potential or are stepping stones to those things that will be important to you or the organization.

We love WordPress. It is the most powerful blog engine out there. We did quite a bit of research before settling on WordPress. It has the largest following, the most plug-ins and themes all while being focused on blogging. We use Drupal and Joomla! for other parts of our business, but they have expanded beyond blogging. They have much more flexibility and customization possibilities, but WordPress is focused, simple and “effective”.





My personal second favorite feature is the built in capability to post via email. I can simply email an address of my choosing and it’ll show up as a pending post. I wish it could inherently do the periodic email check (configurable of course) and I wish I could make use of attachments (images for the post), tags and categories, etc. Perhaps I’ll write my own email handler to act as an intermediary if I really do post from email much in the future.


My favorite feature is the ability to password protect posts. I can’t think of a reason to password protect a post, but it is technologically cool. If I really wanted to send private data to a group, why would I post it on a blog rather than in email?





I’ve worked with many (more than I can remember) application frameworks and there is always a trade-off between simplicity and functionality. The more functionality provided, the less simple the end solution. The more customizable the framework, the more complex it gets. This is the problem with Drupal right now. It has become so customizable, it is difficult for users to implement the simple customizations. I worked for years on a complex distributed simulation package that was ultimately customizable and scalable. Our biggest problem was not keeping the user-friendly capabilities up with the back-end functionality. It became too hard to use by the layperson and thus not used very often. WordPress has hit their target market being customizable but still simple to use and expandable.