The Pocket Site

IMHO, there are four parts to managing services in most linux distributions.

First you need to decide what services you really need. The less software you have running on your desktop or server, the easier it is to maintain long term. This is important both for security and in terms of allocating valuable resources.

Use the netstat command to check which services are listening to external ports, and the ps command to see the global process list for your server

Secondly find out how to control the service

• under CentOS, use the  service command
• under Debian, use update-rc.d

Third, you may need to enable some services in the distribution configuration. For example under Ubuntu, to enable the Apache server edit /etc/default/apache2 to allow that to be run by default

Fourth tweak automated running services.

• under CentOS, use the chkconfig command
• under Debian, install the sysv-rc-conf console based gui

That should help you get started on working out what is important to have running on your Linux server or desktop.

I’ve mentioned the Cynefin model before, or at least the Cognitive Edge site. And here is a bit more to add to that fascinating network of ideas around knowledge, story and leadership.

The article I’m talking about? Why its right here at Masters of Order and Un-Order.

10 Things No One Tells You About Parenthood…

nough said ;P

I came across this puzzle recently, and I thought it would be fun to share.

The question is…

1 11 21 1211 111221 … What’s the next number?

I wont spoil the surprise in this post, see if you can work it out, then follow one of the links I’ve provided to learn all about it

• One answer to the Morris puzzle
• Solving the Morris Puzzle with F#
• The Morris Puzzle (A ‘Maths Solution’)
• Morris Puzzle Progression Done in Perl

I was reminded today of the theory of relativity, and in particular the idea that funny things start to happen when you try to travel as fast as light. The idea is that in order to go as fast as light you need nearly infinitely large amounts of energy to get there and will suffer an effect known as time dilation.

For example, suppose you travel around the earth as fast or faster than the speed of light. In theory, you could move fast enough to get to the point where you started before the light you saw then had reached you, hence the effect of time travel.

What I often have to remind myself is that its not about where you’re coming from, but where you are going to. The destination. Start a stopwatch on yourself and one at the destination at the same time (never mind the logistics of that) and when you get to the destination, they should show exactly the same time regardless of how quickly you got there. It’s not about the time that you think the destination has from where you are, but their time (assuming you use the same type of clock).

So when someone looks at the stars and says the light we can see left there umpteen years ago, thats just a feature of the story light tells. If we traveled faster than radio waves, which is a good deal slower than light, the same effect occurs. It’s just not true time travel.

Travis Eneix has a really interesting blog about making stories and individual meaning/interpretation,

The mechanism of meaning making is vitally important to our survival, as individuals and as a species. It is not to be shunned. Rather, it is to be recognized, and kept in perspective for what it is: a useful tool. When it become more than that, when it become a replacement, and substitute, for reality the tool becomes a poison.

I recently came across this quote,

Information is knowledge, learning is wisdom.

I’m not really comfortable with this, both axioms appear to be a fallacy. So I attempted to come up with something better.

Information creates learning,
Learning builds knowledge,
Knowledge contributes to wisdom.

To me information doesn’t exist without some type of filter for organizing it. Otherwise its not useful, so by definition might as well be noise. Therefore the filter could represent some type of parallel evolution between a capacity to learn and the value of the information.

As filter(s) become more complex, we might suggest that they describe a representation of the information, knowledge emerging through the learning process. So knowledge is the result of a kind of interactive process in an environment

And finally, knowledge can contribute to, but does not always guarantee the deep insight that is wisdom.

I will think on this some more… I’m sure others have argued similar points so I should do some research. Any of you with suggestions please leave comments here.

This article I Think You’re Fat – Esquire describes the interesting insight of living with fewer intellectual filters. IMHO it’s not just about being honest with ‘others’, but as Aristotle says, “We are what we repeatedly do”. Like the author, I’m not 100% comfortable with this solution, but can see that it must be an all or nothing approach. As soon as a little bit of filtering creeps in, we find the whole house of cards reverting to the way we used to communicate. Lets face it, if you find a situation is uncomfortable, its usually because you have to adapt and change in some way to cope.

I wonder if the intellectual filters we eliminate by this approach are then replaced by a deepening emotional intelligence. Our intentions in communicating can be more clearly conveyed because there are less internal conflicts getting in the way, while our conviction/passion is more evident. Hmm…

I’m concluding a special topic course for my computing degree, in which I submitted a paper contrasting ontologies with folksonomies and their relative merits in building knowledge representation. In particular I suggested that user interfaces such as those designed for digital libraries and other repository access might benefit more from collaborative folksonomies.

A interesting example of this approach is being trialled at the Bibsonomy web site where instead of the system spending expensive processing power attempting to generate the best semantic ontology for collaborators to employ, users define the site semantics as the site grows, and language restrictions are reduced through the opportunity to use made-up words or conjoint words etc. They have used a highly structured model for the tags that maps nicely to relational database tables.

This article “Collaboration: a case for ontological commitment” describes some basic approaches used in group settings that I believe are a bit inadequate. It seems the author is generally discussing projects or activities which require time extended participation. She also states that she is not discussing semantic ontology per se, but isn’t that what is suggested be developed, or have I missed the point?

By using tools like Bibisonomy, the use of folksonomies provide an opportunity for group semantics to emerge during online project/group exercise life cycles rather than needing to be explicitly established beforehand.

The following two references I found extremely relevant. I have included links which are current to the best of my knowledge.

Hotho, A., Jaschke, R., Schmitz, C., and Stumme, G. (2006), BibSonomy: A social bookmark and publication sharing system, In de Moor, A., Polovina, S., Delugach, H. ed, Proceedings of the first Conceptual Structures Tool Interoperability Workshop of the 14th International Conference on Conceptual Structures, pp 87-102, Aalborg University, Denmark from the publication home or the Bibsonomy website.

Longva, T. (2004), Sharing knowledge using rich representations, Retrieved on 19 June 2007 from here

This is a comment to a blog post on Cognitive Edge. It is a really concise, interesting summation of an approach to leadership that I have been considering more recently, and that demonstrates some of the most powerful elements represented in emergent and collaborative knowledge management.

Perhaps one of the problems here arises from thinking of leadership communication solely in terms of ‘getting the message across’ – whether or not story is used as the way of pursuing this. Organizations comprise people talking, acting, interacting and transacting with each other continuously through the medium of conversation. As people get together, both formally and informally, they make things up. That is, they perceive, interpret, evaluate and share their views of what’s going on and decide how, in the light of that, they should act. Through these everyday interactions, ‘stories’ are jointly crafted which, in turn, tend to channel ongoing conversations down familiar, ‘cultural’ pathways.

Outcomes, in the form of the sense that is made and the use that this is put to, are co-created by those in the conversation. These can’t be handed down by leaders – or by anyone else for that matter. From this perspective, a leader’s task is to actively engage in the joint sensemaking process – both directly and indirectly – to build active coalitions of support around themes that are organizationally beneficial. Others who participate in the process will do so from their own perspective and with their own agendas in mind – coalescing informally around particular themes, either to advance a particular cause or to frustrate it.

From this “informal coalitions” view of organizations, the future is being perpetually constructed in the present, through this dynamic network of self-organizing conversations. Sometimes these conversations serve to reinforce the existing patterns, ‘deepening the channels of meaning’ (in the form of openly articulated stories and taken-for-granted assumptions) that are currently influencing the nature and outcome of everyday conversations. At other times, the conversations shift the patterns in new ways, creating new ‘channels’ that begin to divert sensemaking in new directions. As the pattern of conversations change, so do the stories that are told. And so does the organization.

Update: I cam across this really cool post with another take on the difference between knowledge management and social/organisational interaction.