This isn’t funny, except…
Month: August 2014
The Monkey Parable
My friend Andrew told me what I now call āthe monkey parableā several years ago, and itās stuck with me ever since.
There are five monkeys, locked in a cage. Thereās a banana hanging from the ceiling and a ladder set up on the floor.
Predictably, one of the monkeys immediately starts to climb the ladder in an attempt to get the banana, at which point *FOOOSH* the monkey gets sprayed with icy-cold water from a hose. This repeats as the other monkeys try climbing the ladder, only to each get sprayed. The monkeys give up, resigning themselves to the fact that the banana is unobtainable.
Next, one of the monkeys in the cage gets replaced. The new monkey sees the banana and the ladder and starts to climb. Right away the other four monkeys, familiar with the consequences grab the new guy, pull him off the ladder and beat him. New guy gets the message ā the banana is off-limits.
This process then repeats as, over time, each of the monkeys gets replaced. Each new monkeyās first instinct is to reach for the banana, at which point heās immediately grabbed and pulled away by his peers.
Eventually, none of the original monkeys are left. There are still five monkeys in the cage, but none of them have ever been sprayed by the hose, and none of them are attempting to get the banana hanging from the ceiling.
When another new monkey is introduced to the cage and is prevented from attempting to reach the banana heās confused, and he asks the existing monkeys why they beat him when he tries. The other four monkeys shrug their shoulders.
āDonāt know, but thatās the way we do things around here.ā
You may be able to draw parallels between this and process improvement initiatives youāve attempted to run. I certainly can. This parable illustrates one of what I believe are the two most poisonous BPR dangers, and Iāll be writing more about them both in the not too distant future.
Watch this space!
The Monkey Parable
My friend Andrew told me what I now call āthe monkey parableā several years ago, and itās stuck with me ever since.
There are five monkeys, locked in a cage. Thereās a banana hanging from the ceiling and a ladder set up on the floor.
Predictably, one of the monkeys immediately starts to climb the ladder in an attempt to get the banana, at which point *FOOOSH* the monkey gets sprayed with icy-cold water from a hose. This repeats as the other monkeys try climbing the ladder, only to each get sprayed. The monkeys give up, resigning themselves to the fact that the banana is unobtainable.
Next, one of the monkeys in the cage gets replaced. The new monkey sees the banana and the ladder and starts to climb. Right away the other four monkeys, familiar with the consequences grab the new guy, pull him off the ladder and beat him. New guy gets the message ā the banana is off-limits.
This process then repeats as, over time, each of the monkeys gets replaced. Each new monkeyās first instinct is to reach for the banana, at which point heās immediately grabbed and pulled away by his peers.
Eventually, none of the original monkeys are left. There are still five monkeys in the cage, but none of them have ever been sprayed by the hose, and none of them are attempting to get the banana hanging from the ceiling.
When another new monkey is introduced to the cage and is prevented from attempting to reach the banana heās confused, and he asks the existing monkeys why they beat him when he tries. The other four monkeys shrug their shoulders.
āDonāt know, but thatās the way we do things around here.ā
You may be able to draw parallels between this and process improvement initiatives youāve attempted to run. I certainly can. This parable illustrates one of what I believe are the two most poisonous BPR dangers, and Iāll be writing more about them both in the not too distant future.
Watch this space!
New Home Server Setup
As I mentioned briefly in a previous post, my home server is in desperate need of an update. Last weekend I took the plunge and bought the hardware necessary to build a replacement.
I donāt need anything especially powerful ā the chief function of this device is as network-attached storage ā but I do want room to grow and do things with this new server that werenāt possible with the hacked pogoplug device I was using previously.
I bought a Celeron-powered Intel NUC, a 750gb harddrive, 8gb of RAM and an 8gb USB drive. My intent was to use the 8gb drive as the boot device, keeping the harddrive entirely free for storage purposes.
I chose the Intel NUC primarily because of its small size and low power consumption (it uses a particularly small amount of electricity with the Celeron processor in the model I opted for). Iām a big fan of this platform though, and when the time comes to replace the media-centre PC that lives underneath the TV in our living room I will probably buy another one of these. That said, the platform is not not without its problems. Read on, to learn how I set mine up.
Hardware Installation
First things first is hardware installation, and this was especially simple. You remove four screws from the base of the computer and the lid slides off. Inside youāll find a metal chassis for the 2.5ā HDD, and you lift that out to revel the motherboard.
In my model of NUC thereās a single SODIMM slot for the RAM, so I slotted that in. Next up is the HDD itself. The chassis includes brackets to hold the drive in place and the power and data connectors are already positioned. The drive just slots in, and you insert a couple of screws to hold it in place.
And thatās really all there is to it! You put the cover back on, and tighten the four screws on the base of the unit. Done.
BIOS Update
The first thing to do is update the systemās BIOS, and this really is an essential step. This thing comes with Intelās visual BIOS, and the version it ships with has some issues.
Updating isnāt difficult: Head on over to Intelās website, download the latest firmware and put it on a USB drive, boot into the BIOS and hit F7.
Even with the latest version installed, the BIOS is where this thing falls down, in my opinion. If youāre planning on installing Windows 7 or 8 on this thing then you probably wonāt run into any problems. My plan was to install an alternate OS though, and I ran into a whole bunch of issues. I believe this was because of bugs in the BIOS and its implementation of EFI, but I donāt know enough to say this for sure.
Software Installation
My plan was to install vSphere Hypervisor and use this thing to host a couple of virtual servers. vSphere has a hardware compatibility list and none of my hardware is on it, but Iād done some reading and learned that I could slipstream drivers for the HDD and network card into the install. Nevertheless, I never did manage to install vSphere ā the install just froze every time and I couldnāt get through it no matter what I tried.
The next hypervisor I tried was Proxmox VE. The install completed just fine, but I couldnāt get the server to boot. While the problems I had with vSphere may well have been in relation to my use of unsupported hardware, I firmly believe my problems installing Proxmox were related to the BIOS, or at least an incompatibility between the EFI implementation in Proxmoxās version of the Linux kernel and the BIOSā EFI implementation. I never did manage to get this working either, except for briefly with a cludgy workaround involving booting from a live-CD and entering the relevant commands to make GRUB boot the OS installed on the HDD instead.
After a day of frustration and failed attempts to install an OS, I moved on to my third VM hypervisor, oVirt. With vSphereās proprietary solution the OS and the hypervisor are closely intertwined. Itās possible to install Proxmox on top of an existing Debian install, but itās not the recommended way of doing things and the process seems complex. oVirt, by contrast, seems to have been designed to be installed on top of an installation of CentOS. An all-in-one install image is offered, but after the previous dayās failures I didnāt even bother with this ā I did a (successful!) minimal install of CentOS and then used the yum package manager to add oVirt on top.
With the hypervisor up and running, I used the web-interface to install Ubuntu Server into one VM and Windows Server 2008 into another. I plan on adding two more virtual machines, one Linux and one Windows, for testing and playing around.
Late Night Links – Sunday August 10th, 2014
I remembered to write this on time this week! Flo has gone out for brunch this morning so I’m on something of a post-writing binge. Let’s get on with the late night links stuff then, shall we?
- A Framed Printout of a 4chan Screenshot Just Went for $90,000 on Ebay
- Page Preloading Effect
I like this. And I like these On Scroll Header Effects even more. - A Much More Fun Way to Label Merchandise
- This Is The New Foursquare
I don’t like it. Uninstalled. - No Joke: AOL’s Dialup Subscriptions Still Generate More Cash Than Display Ads
How is this possible? - Runner Users Nike+ App to Draw Penises
More here. - Microsoft’s Idea of Severance Pay is a Free Lumia 630
- DeWinton Break and Enter Suspect Arrested After Attempting to Hitchhike from Scene
This guy is not a criminal mastermind. - Man Buys 23 Burger King Apple Pies to Spite Screaming Child
And that’s it for another week! Until next time, interneters.
when the boss is not around on friday night
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti2OjZJctMA?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]
When Charlie Brown was a puppy Uncle Reza was his roommate. Today he visited from Montreal, and craziness ensued.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
Kaizen Widsom
See, I do have my occasional moments of profanity profoundness!
“The people in the room aren’t the problem, they’re the solution.” – @JayWll #kaizen #wisdom
ā Matt Edwards (@wastedgenius)
We were talking yesterday morning about an upcoming Kaizen event that one of my colleagues will be running as part of a process improvement initiative that she’s spearheading. Apparently there’s a whole blame game thing going on between the groups that participate in the process over why it’s broken, and she’s concerned this might influence the way her event unfolds.
This was my advice: Acknowledge in the introduction that there are issues, but affirm that everyone in the room owns the whole process (even though they may only be a subject matter expert for a part of it). Recognize that all the participants are there because they see there’s a problem, but certainly not because they are the problem. Quite the opposite, in fact.
This year, I’ve made a commitment (to myself more so than anybody else) to make more charitable donations.
Find out why and read about what I’m supporting on my all new Causes page.
As an aside, I made the image at the top of this post myself. This is my first time putting a large bold quote on a serene background as is apparently the trend these days. I think I have something of a knack for it, no?
This year, I’ve made a commitment (to myself more so than anybody else) to make more charitable donations.
Find out why and read about what I’m supporting on my all new Causes page.
As an aside, I made the image at the top of this post myself. This is my first time putting a large bold quote on a serene background as is apparently the trend these days. I think I have something of a knack for it, no?