 |
| 2008-05-13 16:56 |
| Woo! |
| Public |
 relieved |
| fedora, sdm |
|
And with that, a couple of huge weights are lifted off my shoulder. Let's recap or those playing along at home...
Just one class tomorrow and I have a few weeks of "just" work before summer classes start up. It looks like I'm taking Systems Engineering and System Dynamics over the summer. Hopefully with the two classes, the workload won't be too high so that I can manage to get in plenty of riding ;-) Of course, if I bike on the days I come into the office like I did today, that'll help substantially with my overall mileage.
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
| 2008-05-10 01:30 |
| PDD Final Presentations |
| Public |
| sdm |
|
Tonight, we had the final presentations for Product Design and Development. Over the course of the class, we were to start out by looking at a few markets to uncover the needs of users, narrow in on a market and a product concept and go all the way to building a prototype and a business plan. As I think I've previously noted, I very intentionally did not go after working on a software product to avoid falling into the trap of doing product development the way that I always do -- instead, I used it as an opportunity to work within a different subject area and you know, do some learning :-)
With the final presentations, we were to all do a 10 minute presentation of our product concept with everything from information on the user needs, a prototype and our business plan. We also had a mini-tradeshow with tables for demo'ing our products as well as anything else that we wanted to do within the space of half a six foot table. Along with this was a contest amongst the products -- each team was judged by the faculty and a set of additional judges to pick the "best" of the products presented.
With 18 teams, this made for a relatively long evening. But it was amazing to see what all of the teams managed to pull together in the short space of semester. Some of the products had seemed very unlikely from earlier presentations on their concepts, but they were able to pull them together.
My team worked on a product for the tea drinker and I did the first half of the presentation. And, at the end of the night, our product was chosen as the best one. Which is pretty awesome. After the presentations and tear-down, a bunch of us headed to Tommy Doyle's. And now, it's time for bed.
Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
Just really, really busy. Between the end of the semester and chugging towards the Fedora 9 release, haven't had a chance to write much. Highlights in bulleted form...
- Birthday was good. Had some people over for a game night and I think everyone had a pretty good time
- Prototype for our product in PDD is finished and it looks really nice. It's cool to have an idea and then see it realized in a physical form. Something you don't really get in the software world
- Tech Strategy continues to be good... I want to write up summaries of some of the classes, but just haven't gotten there. Maybe I'll do a whirlwind pass through them late next week
- Summer schedule is out... I think I'm going to take Systems Engineering and System Dynamics this summer, leaving the finance/accounting and supply chain classes for next summer
- Fall schedule is also out... pretty much have to take System Architecture and Systems Project Management then. But also have room for at least one other class, just need to decide what. On the plus side, lots of good options to choose from
- Fedora 9 is shaping up quite nicely -- only the last minute "oh no!" types of things cropping up now. Feeling a little bit more confident today about getting the release out "on time"
- Big presentation for PDD on Friday, big paper for Tech Strategy the first of next week... lots to do, not a lot of time
- Warm enough that I'm not letting rain stop me from biking... realized that I didn't take the T to class at all during April. I did let the rain stop me from racing, though
- Just another week and a half and things get a lot better...
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
|
As really seems to be the norm, this week is also falling into the nice and busy category.
Had the ERBA quiz on Wednesday and didn't think it was bad at all -- fair in terms of what was asked and if you paid attention to the review session, you had a very good idea of what was coming. Tech Strategy I felt less prepared for than I typically do just because I hadn't had much time to really read and digest the case. We were looking at Adobe and while I had familiarity with a lot of the events covered, that familiarity just didn't run as deeply as some of the other things we've covered. PDD was a pretty interesting class too, even with a guest lecturer -- the speaker was the professor's husband who has a lot of experience in coming up with product ideas and selling them either to companies or through a company he's working for at the time. His experience had largely been in children's toys, but it was still pretty fascinating to hear the stories he had as well as some of the processes and lessons learned.
Then, we had the first SDM Connect event of the year. Unlike the ones I attended last year, this one was a bit more formal -- we brought in a few people from a private investment group who were actively recruiting to get someone new to join their firm. But instead of a more information conversation, it was tilted more towards being a presentation. Which isn't bad, but lots of slides with lots of words aren't my proverbial cup of tea ;-) We had a good turnout, though, which is good as hopefully it will help to ensure that we can bring in more people effectively through the rest of the year.
Today was a day at the office, but the morning started off with my alarm not having been set. Managed to get up just in time to get ready and make the bus, though, so it wasn't an entire bust. Then, I had been planning on looking at some blockers and also sitting down to do a review of pytrainer since the package got submitted. Of course, I had failed to remember that the materials for prep'ing for the office move were present now, and so instead, I spent the day doing that. My cube is now pretty empty looking as everything is instead in boxes. So, now I've shifted things and hopefully I'll get to what I wanted to from today tomorrow.
After coming home, I headed down to the bike shop for our monthly social event where I hung out and just chatted with people. It sounds like we're going to have a good showing for the race at Blue Hills in a little over a week, so hopefully that will work out well. Also, before I headed down there, Kara gave me my birthday present even though I had said she didn't really need to get me anything. She got me the Garmin Edge 305 which I've been wanting for a while but trying not to buy for myself. It should be pretty sweet for keeping better track of my riding and helping to improve my training. The next trick will be getting it to work nicely in Fedora and seeing if I can figure out what some of the web-based apps are looking for in terms of data so that we can have good support for them ;-)
2 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
| 2008-04-22 22:54 |
| Long Weekend, Cars, Bikes, and then Catching Up |
| Public |
 tired |
| cycling, fedora, life, sdm |
|
Since it was a long weekend from classes, I decided to take yesterday off of work and turn it into a long weekend in general which turned out to be a pretty good thing overall. After spending the day at the office on Friday where I successfully threw out a lot of crap from my desk in preparation for the office move, I came home and then we headed out to dinner with a friend of Kara's. Dinner was good, although for some reason, I couldn't fully get into enjoying it.
Saturday, woke up in the morning and started the day off right with a nice long bike ride. Lots of people were out and a fair number of stronger riders within the group made for a good and spirited ride. Got in about 50 miles and felt like my legs were feeling okay after a few days of not. Then some time at Starbucks and a quick stop at the shop and then headed home. Kara and I then headed out to look a little more at cars since hers has been showing some signs of its age. Then, dinner with friends and eventually home to pack up what I needed to have for the race on Sunday.
Sunday was pretty much consumed by the race and not much else between travel time, food, etc. A good time was (I think at least) had by all. See my last post for the details around it.
Yesterday ended up turning into car day. After doing some additional preparation, we headed out again. And a few hours later, we had signed a chunk of paperwork to purchase a new Prius. Okay, that makes it sound like it was a spur of the moment thing, but really, it was the result of a while worth of looking into our options. The hatchback will be good for when I need/want to carry a bike and it's just me or just me and a passenger and it's also practical from other perspectives. Going for the nav system may not quite have been "practical", but it's at least fun ;) It's definitely the car to appeal to geeks. After all of that, we came home, had dinner and did some cleaning up around the house. Later in the evening, we finally got around to watching Juno which was fun.
Today, it was back to the grind of school and work. Although to be fair, I did start out Earth Day with a few of my classmates doing a loop up the bike path and back. Was good to get to show some more people what's out and about and the weather really is getting to be perfect. After that was diving back into the piles and piles of mail and bugs awaiting me. Made pretty good progress plowing through them, though. Also studied a bit for the ERBA quiz tomorrow and did some work for Tech Strategy. I'm pretty glad that tomorrow is the last day of ERBA as having one class less should help a bit for my sanity which is good as the continued march towards the Fedora 9 release isn't helping it any ;-) So maybe it'll balance out. Hopefully information on the summer class schedule will get sent in the next few days as I'd really like to figure out what my plan is for the summer.
But now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to go relax and then try to get to bed a little early.
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
| 2008-04-15 22:34 |
| Strategic Engineering |
| Public |
| sdm |
|
Had an interesting presentation in today's thesis seminar. The speaker was Professor Olivier de Weck, who has a background in aerospace (fighter jets to be more specific). He talked a little about his background, but recently, his work has been on what he's termed 'strategic engineering' which is basically about designing your system so that you can adapt to future changes with a minimum of pain. In this, you can break it down even more into two pieces. The first is "Design for Changeability" -- this is something that is often done in the software world when you do things like design an API by taking into account how you might want to expand it in the future and also ensuring that you have a way of tracking those changes. The other piece is "Design for Commonality" -- and this is a large part of what the whole Fedora spins process is about as well as the variation within the RHEL product family. Basically, each provides the basic building blocks upon which you build more things on top of.
Then, in contrast to many of the other speakers for thesis seminar, he did a pretty in-depth look at one of the SDM theses which he worked with. The subject of the thesis was change propagation in complex systems -- basically, they were looking at change requests over the life of a product and doing some analysis of grouping and where some of the loci of change were. This was really interesting to see as the application was far different from that of software and yet a lot of the patterns which I have anecdotally noticed from years of dealing with bugzilla emerged through their analysis of the data. From the initial work here, there's definitely a lot more which could be done and in a lot of ways, there's mounds of data that could easily be mined from various open source projects.
Very very interesting stuff and even if I don't end up going in one of these directions for my thesis, I think I need to spend some time reading the research that's been done previously.
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
| 2008-04-14 23:21 |
| Monday, Monday, Monday! |
| Public |
| fedora, sdm |
|
Another busy Monday. Today was a little weird with Tech Strategy being directly after than ERBA rather than after lunch. Was a good class, although less interesting than last week's look at Apple. I just felt less engaged by looking at some of Polaroid's mistakes than some of the other cases that we've looked at. I'm not sure if that's because I spent less time preparing for the class (due to the previously mentioned "trying to do less work over the weekend") or if it was the specifics or what, but it just didn't grab me as much.
The afternoon was consumed between trying to pay attention to the rel-eng meeting (and largely failing), doing the ERBA problem set that's due on Wednesday and a quick check-in with the faculty for PDD. Then a quick stop to look at panniers at the bike shop on the way home and it was time to dig into the piles of mail, bugzilla and work for the day. Mostly spent the time looking at some really bizarre bugs but finally tracked them down and got some fixes. Hopefully can continue to knock things out over the next few days to help solidify Fedora 9 as much as possible. Unfortunately, getting tablet PCs to work out of the box just didn't happen in time, although I have a good solid start and should be able to finish getting it working for Fedora 10. And it's always good to have a nice list of things to do for the next release before the current one is out the door ;-)
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
| 2008-04-08 15:12 |
| Manic Mondays |
| Public |
| hectic |
| sdm |
|
This half of the semester, it seems like my Mondays are incredibly busy and jam-packed with things needing to be done. Aside from just classes (which take up a fair bit of time), it seems like there's also always something that needs to be finished up for either Tech Strategy or PDD during my lunch "break" which I had been spending doing more work-related things. Then, after class are the ever-present ERBA problem sets which are due on Wednesday. On the plus side, by spending the time on them on Monday late afternoon and evening, I don't have to work on them on Tuesday. But it does lead to me feeling a little frantic on Mondays. Especially as I then go home and spend whatever is left of the evening catching up with email and bugzilla and also trying to fix various things.
Oh well, I think there's only one more week like this one so it should be getting better. And Tuesday is good for catching my breath again.
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
|
Unfortunately, the not feeling well persisted beyond Sunday. Woke up on Monday and forced myself to head in for class anyway. It was the first day of Tech Strategy and I didn't really want to miss it -- definitely the right call to make. The class is very intense, but interesting. The class is run case style, so plenty of opportunities to chime in and get some different viewpoints. Monday's class was specifically around E-Ink and some of what they faced in their early days. Was interesting to learn some of that history. Also, the class is one of those that is going to be incredibly helpful in building up a way of thinking about things that's consistent and not just arbitrary.
Monday also had a pretty good guest lecture in PDD -- we had a guy in from one of the local (video) game companies come in and talk about the design of games. It was an interesting talk from the "well, video games are cool" angle as well as some of the parallels that the game studios have to what we see sometimes. They've gone from pretty small teams to much larger ones and are struggling with some of the questions of how to keep effective communication
It was pretty cool and interesting on some level to see how they struggle with a lot of the same issues of scheduling and releases and also, some of the approaches that are starting to be taken to address that in their world.
Yesterday, I decided not to go in for the thesis seminar and instead spent the day working from my couch. Overall, pretty productive just going through and working on some of the bugs that need fixing for Fedora 9. Nothing ground breaking or that interesting, though. It's to the point where most of what needs doing is just kind of the dredge cleanups. But still, more testing needed! And then file bugs. And thus give us more to do ;-)
Later in the day, I headed down to the bike shop to pick up my bike as I had left it there for a tune-up on Sunday. While I was there, I went ahead and made the plunge to pick up some nice wheels. Looking forward to the weekend when I can really give them a good spin. Although it's temping to bike into the office tomorrow on the Merlin rather than taking the bus.
Today, woke up and was feeling pretty much entirely better. So biked in to Cambridge and was in class a good chunk of the day again. Tech Strategy was again interesting, today looking at Lexar. One thing that's becoming very obvious to me is that it's tough to look back at these case studies and try to analyze the decisions which were made and talk about what should or shouldn't have been done while at the same time trying to avoid having your ideas colored by what has come since. In this case, the question of Lexar branching out from their "digital film" products (CF cards and the like) and into USB sticks really doesn't necessarily seem like it would have been a good idea only knowing what they knew -- the USB stick wasn't a given and realistically, the main reason they've become as practical as they have is the drastic drop in the prices of flash due to increased demand. Which has been driven quite heavily by Apple and the iPod. It definitely gives me a bit to chew on and think about.
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
|
A busy, busy week is now behind me and I get some small measure of relaxation. Spring break is here at last. Of course, I have to work next week instead of having the week entirely off, but it should still be quite a bit less hectic. And today just happens to be a holiday for work and I have no classes. So if you don't see me online much today (or over the weekend in general), don't be surprised.
But this was a pretty good week really. Was a little bummed by the weather last weekend leading to me not really getting any riding in, but so it goes. The first part of the week, I took one of the Sloan SIP workshops titled "Leadership Under Fire: Managing Hostility". This was an interactive session where we got to look into some techniques for dealing with a hostile audience as well as getting to practice them. Which also meant we got to practice being a hostile audience, although I don't think that was the real intent :-) It was actually very, very helpful and hopefully I'll be able to actually have some of what was learned sink in rather so that I can use it in the future when in such situations.
Also related to classes, my Product Design and Development group has now narrowed things down to an explicit product concept as opposed to just having a few floating around. We think that it's pretty cool and the people that we've talked with about it also think so. Stay tuned for more information on this as things move onward.
For von Hippel's innovation class, I finished up the second paper last night and now am completely done with that class. Overall, quite enjoyable. I would have liked to have been able to dive a bit deeper into some of the things we talked about rather than remaining at the high level, but part of that is due to the fact that I have a fair bit of familiarity with the subject matter already. For the second half of the semester, I'll instead be taking Tech Strategy which is looking like it is going to be an amazing class, although with a fair bit of work. But I'm still looking forward to that starting up.
Outside of classes, there's been the big push over the past couple of weeks to finish up the beta for Fedora 9. We've now finally done so and it's on its way to the mirrors now. That means that we can sit back and really start adding the polish and final bugfixing to help make Fedora 9 as good as possible. I encourage everyone to at least download the beta live image and try it out on your hardware and file bugs if things don't work. And even more importantly, if you can help fix things, contribute patches :-)
But today is not going to be about any of those things. Today is about relaxing. I think I'm going to take the time to really clean my bikes good, play some video games, maybe waste some time down at the bike shop and just generally unwind.
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
| 2008-03-14 11:26 |
| Lou Gerstner |
| Public |
| sdm |
|
Yesterday morning, Lou Gerstner came to speak to SDM for a bit. Prior to the session we received a copy of his book that we were asked to read so that we could ask good questions. Unlike a lot of the cohort, I grabbed some time for reading it (hooray for bus time even if i'd rather be riding). The book was quite good and gave a good account of how he managed to go in and transform IBM. Some of the most interesting thoughts were about the culture of IBM and how that is really the entire game but also that changing culture is not easy. Rather than having him stand up and give us a canned speech, he instead took questions and gave us very honest answers - he seemed like an extremely straight shooter in that respect.
The question (or answer really) that struck me the most was one about IBM's handling of the pc in the 80s. While he wasn't there at the time, he definitely seemed to think it was a bit of a missed oppurtunity. More interesting still was his opinion on how open standards continue to win out over proprietary ones and that he sees this happening in software as well, although it may take another 40 years to be fully realized. He also made some thinly veiled comments against a certain monopolistic software company ;).
All in all a very interesting session... I probably should have taken some notes to have more to write about, but so it goes.
4 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
|
Had a pretty good weekend and even managed to get in a little bit of relaxing (which I'll pay for later, but I needed it). Friday night after meeting with my PDD group, I headed towards home and we got dinner with some friends. Mmmm, thai food. Also sat around for a while just chatting. Then headed our separate ways and Kara and I headed home and played a bit of Rock Band.
Saturday was monsoon day and also the day that Kara and I were going to observe as our anniversary, given our busy school schedules. So we ran some errands, worked on some homework together and then ordered dinner in and watched a rented movie. It was just the low key sort of evening that we both needed.
Yesterday, woke up early and headed out with the Quad folks for a ride in the wind. While windy, it was good to get out again as it'd been way too many weeks since I'd ridden with the group. And similarly, too long since I'd ridden the Merlin. Thus, a very enjoyable ride -- only about 35 miles, but that's okay for March. Eventually headed home (after length stops at Starbucks and the shop), tried to work a little and then headed into school to meet with my PDD group again. Which ends up meaning that my total milage for the day was like 50. I think the last time I did a 50 mile day was November, so this morning, my legs were wondering why I was pushing them again as I rode in to school.
But a very good weekend. And now a busy week ahead. It's the SDM business trip, so lots of people on campus and lots of activities, etc. Also, have to finish up my two papers for von Hippel's class, do an ERBA problem set and get ready for the ERBA quiz next week. Oh, and finalize our selection of a product concept for PDD for next week. And on top of that, there's also the Fedora freeze. So, yeah... busy, sporadic availability and seeing just how much can be gotten done over the next 100 hours or so ;-)
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
| 2008-03-09 18:55 |
| Threadless |
| Public |
| sdm |
|
In Professor von Hippel's class on Friday, we had Kareem Lakhani as a guest lecturer. He received his PhD from MIT working with Professor von Hippel and now teaches up the river at HBS. HBS has a very different teaching style from Sloan -- much more focused on case studies which you must have read in advance and then the class is driven by discussion of the case. The professor sort of "leads" the discussion to some extent, but things are mostly driven by the students.
On Friday, we were looking at a business case around Threadless, an online site for t-shirt sales that also incorporates an aspect of user-driven design creation and selection. The quick overview is that users submit their own designs for the shirts, these are then voted on by the community and a small subset is then selected for printing on a regular basis. The model has some similarities to the open source world, which is kind of cool.
A lot of the discussion in class focused around diving into the business model to fully understand what the benefits are to all the members of the community as well as why a company is important. One of the big reasons for the company is, as with open source, that the bits to develop infrastructure are not exciting and thus don't attract a lot of community. Fedora Infrastructure is, to some extent, an exception to this rule but even so, there are a lot of pieces there driven by people being paid to work on it. One interesting thing that came out is just how few designs actually "win" and are turned into shirts... of the 1400 designs submitted per week, only 7 are selected for printing. And of the 43000 designers that have submitted designs over the life of the site, only 500 have had winning designs. So the chances of a successful design are extremely low and yet it continues to be a vibrant community.
As far as the case method vs the more normal method in Sloan of a professor lecturing, I actually somewhat enjoyed the case method. It ensured that everyone was sort of "on the same page" from the beginning and also led to increased amounts of participation from everyone, and thus, increased amounts of learning (IMHO). It was definitely worthwhile to experience and it increases my thinking about taking an HBS course at some point during my time at SDM.
1 Comment | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
| 2008-03-04 22:24 |
| Everything hits at once |
| Public |
| busy |
| fedora, sdm |
|
As is probably typical, it seems that everything wants to happen at the same time. And so it's gotten to be a pretty busy time.
On the school front, classes are definitely up to full-speed now. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is occupying quite a bit of time. ERBA is continuing onward and I am continuing to enjoy doing the problem sets, even if they take some time. Being able to get back into some math, though, is nice and I had actually kind of forgotten how much I enjoy taking problems, getting some equations and just cranking through them. I do sort of wish that the problems had more applicability for me as opposed to being nuclear engineering based. But I can kind of squint and make it work. I'll have to look at some of the other courses available to me, though, and make sure to get some good math-y ones :-)
In PDD, we've moved on and are starting to really get into defining our target userbase as well as some concepts. There's still a lot more to go towards developing a product, but I think that we're going to end up with something that's at least interesting and fun. We've decided to target the market of tea drinkers and (probably more specifically) tea drinkers on the go. After spending a lot of time with users, we're also now to where we have some ideas for products, but I'll keep those under my cap for now. The class is pretty good, though. The material is well-thought on and is definitely applicable across a variety of fields where products are built from our tea drinking type user to software products.
Eric von Hippel's class continues to just be fun. I need to get on the ball, though, and work on the papers as they're due (and the class ends) in a week and a half. I'll be sorry for it to end as I think there's a lot of useful information there. I need to do some more thinking, but I could easily see my thesis coming out of an area that would interest him. Which is a good thing to start on too.
In addition to all of that (it's not enough?), next week is the SDM Spring Business Trip. It'll be good to see the distance folks again even though it really hasn't been that long. The week is pretty jam-packed with things to do, though, so that'll just add to the already high load. One thing that I'm really looking forward to is the session with Lou Gerstner on Thursday because his success with IBM is more than impressive.
And then, there's also the Fedora beta freeze. The added week is a good and a bad thing. It's making it so that I can shore up a few things that would have either only very roughly made it or not made it at all. But at the same time, it puts freeze resolution at the same time as the business trip. Somehow, I suspect I'm not going to be sleeping much over the next week and a half.
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
|
The month started out with the beginning of spring classes. A month in and I think i've got a good feel for the amount of work required for them. With 36 credits, its a pretty sizable amount but doable. It helps that for PDD I have a pretty awesome group. Building a product is going to take some time, though. ERBA is matching my expectations pretty well although the class drags at times with some of the questions. The idea of broadening it to also include some game theory types of things is interesting and probably compelling to be considered. Professor von Hippel's class is, as he said on the first day of class, fun. I probably should get started on the papers for it this weekend, though. The discussions and ideas are quite good and incredibly relevant in open source where its easy for lead users to contribute and help innovate.
On the work front, its been a balancing act. I've had to let a few things slide a little, but I still think I've gotten some cool work done for Fedora 9. There's also been a large chunk of time taken by a non-Fedora project.
Outside of those, its been a crappy month for riding. The weather has alternated between pouring rain, snow/ice and super cold. Even my commuting has been a lot less. I'm optimistic that things will get back to a more normal level in March. The fact that I didn't sign up for the March T pass will impact that too :). And hopefully the weekends will be nice for getting in some longer rides on the Merlin too. But given the weather (okay, and a few other reasons ;), I did pick up a PS3 and Rock Band. The PS3 actually is pretty nice from a hardware point of view and some of the games look impressive. And Rock Band is as much fun as its made out to be ;)
But now, back to work...
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
| 2008-02-06 23:57 |
| Balance, balance, balance |
| Public |
| fedora, sdm |
|
Two days of classes down while getting work done at the same time. On the class side, I've now had the first classes of Thesis Seminar, ERBA and PDD. Thesis seminar is pretty much what I expected -- an effort for you to get to know some professors and start coming up with ideas for the thesis. ERBA was this morning and seems like it's going to be a fun class. I was sitting there today and thinking "ooh, discrete math, whee!" and I also think some of the examples should be interesting. PDD was this afternoon and seems like it should be pretty good, too. Having some more rigorous background in how to do "traditional" engineering should help a lot when working with people for whom that's their background. Also, there are times when a more rigorous approach than we tend to use in the open source world could be truly beneficial. All that said, I'm also planning to have my project for the course not be software based -- I think that'll help me to avoid some bad assumptions from the beginning.
The balance side of things is balancing going to classes (and the work to be done for the classes) with actually getting things done for work. Thus far, that's going pretty well. Yesterday was very productive and today isn't ending up being too bad. Made some good progress yesterday on some anaconda stuff and today is more getting some things fixed up in livecd-tools so that I can push the new version into rawhide. Stay tuned for a neat screencast soon with one of the anaconda changes...
3 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
| 2008-01-29 22:52 |
| One day left of IAP... |
| Public |
| fedora, sdm |
|
Tomorrow's the last day of the IAP session, after which a lot (roughly half?) of our cohort will go off to wherever they're from and be distance students for much of the rest of the program. While one of the strengths of the program, it's also one of the downsides... it's nice to have everyone where you can just easily grab them in the hallway for a conversation, but so it goes.
Today was the last day of formal classes -- tomorrow is just a seminar type day on leadership. Not sure what to expect of it going in. Also, only two papers left, my big parts of both being pretty much set (one is due Thursday, the other the first of next week).
So since I'm somewhat caught up in that respect, I've been spending some time catching up with Fedora. I'm pretty current with mail at this point and also have made some headway on bug triaging. Now just to get back into the swing of fixing things come Thursday.
1 Comment | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
| 2008-01-28 22:25 |
| DC2 Finished and the Approach of Spring Classes |
| Public |
| sdm |
|
And Design Challenge 2 is now fully done. I sent off the paper before leaving this evening. I've also made good progress on the other remaining papers and am planning to be fully done with my parts at least tonight or tomorrow. Then I get to have a few days of "real work" and re-immersing myself in Fedora to catch up with the past month before spring classes start next week. I am actually quite looking forward to those classes starting up, too, as I think that most of what I'm taking should be really fun/interesting. Also, it should be nice to be working and doing classwork -- which I expect to be a lighter load than the past month ;-)
For the semester, I have two full-fledged classes that run the entire semester, two half semester classes and the thesis seminar.
First up on the full-semester side is ERBA, Engineering Risk Benefit Analysis. This is a math-y class looking at how you can quantify and make decisions. I think it should be pretty fun but I am decidedly messed up in the head :) The other full semester class is Product Design and Development. It'll be interesting to do some more formal comparisons of traditional pdd cycles and open source.
My half semester classes are both Sloan courses and I'm really looking forward to them. First half I have User Centric Innovation in the Internet Age with Eric von Hippel. The syllabus of readings for the course are pretty compelling and I think I'll be able to add a lot to the discussions based on my background. The other is Tech Strategy. I've yet to hear a bad thing about this course and the presentation from the professor at the alumni conference was pretty compelling. Details and impressions on it from me will have to wait until 2H though.
The thesis seminar is intended to help jumpstart thinking both on thesis topics and to get to know some of the "typical" thesis advisors for SDM students. I don't really have to be thinking about that this soon since I'm a 24 month student, but I guess you can't start too early really.
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
| 2008-01-24 23:53 |
| Design Challenge 2 |
| Public |
| sdm |
|
And just like that, DC2 is done. Or at least, mostly so. Our presentation was this afternoon and we stayed a while last night to do some trials and ensure everyone was on the same proverbial page. I'm pretty happy with how itsturned out, too. I think that as far as a solution goes, we came to something which is reasonable and makes for a nice "system" (which was a big part of the exercise). And then there was a part which is waaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy out there, but it did fit into the system :-)
One thing about DC2 that I'm very happy about is that our presentation wasn't the typical powerpoint death by bullets. The more I sit through them (... and there are some professors that do them), the more I dislike them. It really is a terrible way to convey information and it ensures that people in your audience just sit and read rather than listening. Convincing my group of this took a little bit of work, but I managed in the end and I think I might have even sold some of them on the philosophy in general.
Then tonight, we had a get-together at Character's to celebrate the end of DC2. Pretty much everyone went which was good for chances to talk to people. I really do like everyone in my cohort and it was nice to be able to talk to them without an assignment being due. Well, that's not entirely true. There is still a bit to be done (have to finish up the DC2 paper, one more big paper, one small memo and a homework assignement), but it's a lot more managable.
And once that's all out of the way, January will be over. The time has flown, but it's been really good to get back into the mindset for classes. And it's been good to be able to get to know a number of my classmates. The January session is definitely a very valuable and important part of the program -- I'm sure that it's going to help me out over the coming months in a variety of ways. One downside of January being over is that about half the class will head back to wherever they are from and be distance students as opposed to being around on-campus. But, I'm used to working with people over the 'net, so it shouldn't be too bad. IM/jabber and maybe even we'll see some IRC usage pop up :-)
But now, it's time for bed so that I can get up in the morning for the Creativity Workshop in System Architecture.
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
| 2008-01-19 01:04 |
| Another week of January gone |
| Public |
| sdm |
|
Another week of the January session is over and with it is the end of the first of our classes, Probability and Statistics. I thought that the class was well done for a 15 hour (five 3-hour classes) refresher over all of the big pictures of probability and statistics and it got a few neurons firing which hadn't done so in a while. It's hard to believe that at this point, I'm a little over halfway done with this part of the program. It'll be nice to start a more "normal" class schedule, though.
Once all of the required bits of the day were done, I headed over to the Muddy for some of the celebration for the 13-month SDM '07'ers (and 24 month SDM '06'ers, although I know fewer of them) who finished up their theses today and are thus ready for graduation. After some talking and sitting around, a group of us headed off towards Bertucci's to grab some dinner which was good.
Then, I headed off and hit up J5 and clarkbw's housewarming party. Got to see some folks from work as well as meet some new people which was good.
Then, headed home and now I think that I'm about to head off to get a good night's sleep. On the agenda for this weekend is maybe some biking as well as definitely getting a fair bit more work done on various bits of classwork and DC2. Might also try to squeeze in a little bit of bug fixing just to keep from getting too rusty with bugzilla ;-)
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
|
|
|
|
hungry