Currently I carry an external hard drive with me on which I store all my personal non-work things that you typically don’t want to expose to the administrators on the network at work. Although this is a very workable solution it becomes a bit of a schlep when you have to haul it out of your bag every time you need to reference a document when you’re on the phone to somebody disputing payment or figures.

I eventually started mailing all my docs to my gmail account, which provided me with all the document management features I could need. I can label my docs (mails), search for them (or the subject of the mail rather), and if you trust Google then you believe that your docs are both securely hidden away behind their security infrastructure and that it’s backed up so that you’ll never lose it.

The gmail document management solution sufficed, but I ended up with a ton of labels and the mail-oriented interface just doesn’t work that well as a file browser and explorer. Although there are many document management solutions available, some even free and OSS as I like it, you are still left with a management nightmare. Performing backups and creating restores is hardly my idea of keeping fun, and that completely eliminates any personal solution, whether free or not.

I’ve been a long-time fan of Sharepoint. The collaboration features are fantastic and it is overall a very usable system. Of course I will never run Sharepoint at home (not sure it runs on OpenSUSE…) which explains my utter excitement when a friend told me about Google Sites – Google’s free online collaboration tool.

Sites integrates with Google Apps, and luckily I’ve set up my Apps previously in an earlier experiment (the joys of having your own domain). I immediately set about creating my site and starting uploading all my pdf scanned documents I’ve been carrying around on my external drive. Sites allows you to create a logical folder structure and as it’s intended to be a collaboration tool you can always invite other people to, err, collaborate with you on your documents. Google Docs have provided collaboration for a long time, but you could never (that I knew of) upload a pdf to Docs.

So looking at the entire Google Apps suite; email, documents, calendar, chat, web pages, and sites you have to wonder when companies are going to wake up to the fact that they don’t need their own collaboration infrastructure and that they don’t have to keep paying Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint administrators and manage SAN storage to ensure that their staff can receive mails and collaborate on documents – securly of course.

Once again, well done Google!

We arrived at Berakah in Mamelodi at about 7:30 Saturday morning, high spiritis, truckloads of goodies, and enough energy to feel like we could really make a difference. The idea behind the facility is that all the official schools in Mamelodi are overcrowded, so the kids only get 2 hours per day in the official schools, after which they go to a facility like Berakah to spend the rest of the day, learning more.

The facilities are nestled at the foot of a hill and consists of a single, tattered marquis tent, and a few wooden class rooms, one of them being the creche. General wear and tear are at the order of the day, and negligence apparent due not to laziness, but overall lack of funds and resources really. The organization is about to start building proper brick facilities, and as a result are channeling all their funds into the new permanent structures.

The plan for the day was to have one group of volunteers undertake the DIY mission at Berakah, and at the same time we ship all the kids off in buses to another facility where yet another group of volunteers will entertain the kids for the day with all sorts of fun activities.

Sadly the buses arrived more than 3 hours late, but what was quite amazing to see was how the kids kept themselves entertained the entire time by playing games. It really struck me here how, and please pardon the racial spin, most more-fortunate white kids will whine about the lack of entertainment because they don’t have the latest XBox game, or quad bike etc…

On to the task at hand. The first activity was to plant the donated trees. Immediately the group of volunteers became one in the cause as picks started flying and the earth made way for the new trees that will hopefully provide ample shade in the not so distant futures. Bone meal and compost accompanied the trees into the freshly dug holes to give them a better chance at future growth.

By this time the kids started joining in too happily, and a small crowd started gathering outside in the street to see just exactly what was happening here.

While the men undertook the heavy lifting, most of the ladies explored the donated paint supplies and started with all the outbuildings. Spirits were still high, hands weren’t tender yet, and backs still fresh – something which would change pretty quickly as the day progressed. The coats of paint came quickly and feverishly, and the place was starting to take shape and showing improvement already. By this time there was a record amount of phone calls made to try and organize the buses for this kids which still have not yet arrived.

With the trees planted, the marquis tent got straightened and all anchor ropes fastened. We noticed that the cement floor was really badly worn and promptly made off to the local hardware store for supplies to start patching. This is by far one of the toughest jobs known to mankind. If you’ve ever seen builders mix concrete and thought its an easy task, think again – this is a real back breaker! Filling all the holes in the floor took quite some time, and the myriad of activities continued outside.

By now the buses had finally arrived, and it was overwhelming to see just how excited the kids were. Apparently they were told that they would be left behind if they were late for the buses, so some of them were gathering there from 06:00 AM clothed in utter excitement for the still unknown activities of the day.

The buses arriving late almost killed the overall effect of the day, but the kids still enjoyed it tremendously, which is ultimately all that matters. They all got T-shirts and other goodies to accompany them on the trip, and they were clearly very excited, and appreciative of it all.

By now the place was taking shape, backs were complaining from being bent over and carrying heavy things all day, and my hands, already sporting 2 plasters for donating skin to the tent’s anchor poles were in no mood to dig another hole.

The organisation already have a healthy vegetable garden and active wormery, and more herbs and pot plants were added to the mix.

The creche got completely overhauled with all the donated educational posters, and even a Christmas tree. Tons of toys were added to the existing bunch and I am sure the kids will just absolutely love these!

By now we were all pretty tired and sun burnt, but we all had a pretty good feeling from the day’s efforts. The obligatory braai was lit and boerewors rolls were made to kill the hunger from the day’s intense manual labor.

The place looked a whole lot better. Sure it’s still not a first class facility with the latest and greatest tool, toys or technologies, but what has been done was still being appreciated at a level that most fortunate people will sadly never really understand.

By 15:00 that afternoon we made our ways home, burnt, bruised, sore, tired, but happy. A bunch of people came together for one day and offered their time and their efforts to help people out, and it was a truly rewarding experience, something that I will definitely never forget.

Head over to my flickr set to see the entire collection of pictures taken during the day…

More concretely, a test case that took 190 seconds to execute, now completes in +-450 milliseconds! This calls for celebration, but this also calls for reflection and inspection, and even more so, continuous inspection.

Inevitably you get the question: “So why didn’t you just do it like that in the first place?” The reality is that this system went live with the original design that suited the original requirements, and it worked, and it worked well. In any enterprise things change over time, though, and ultimately you start experiencing scalability issues that far outweighs the amount of hardware you are willing to throw at a system. I’m a stern believer in simplicity, especially in large-scale computer systems, and if a system needs massive hardware to complete its required functionality satisfactorily, then there’s something wrong (unless if you’re doing weather simulations, of course).

Past experiences have taught me that heavily used systems that fulfill very dynamic business requirements are typically bound to a three-year major refactoring/redesign cycle. These “very dynamic business requirements” are the main factors behind most system-related problems and headaches, and have given birth to myriad processes, methodologies, and acronyms to try to deal with them, but the reality is that without these business requirements, we as IT people don’t really have a justification for our salaries, as we ultimately support business and business processes.

So embrace these changes and the headaches that they bring, because ultimately they will present a situation where you can considerably improve an existing process or system, and then you can also feel like a hero for a day — a hero who earned his salary the honest way …

Watch the video, and follow the discussion around it on her blog and notice the amount of fun these people, who are very non-technical it would seem, are having with the Ubuntu OS.

It’s really refreshing to take a step back from the sometimes inane technical issues about which product/distro and what versions of which systems we should use, and watch how normal end users actually experience the things we as IT professionals tend to get completely caught up in.