Directed Project/Thesis Defense

The thesis defense was succesful. I was looking forward to it. Tanya and Nikhil accompanied me for the presentation. Mark set up the projector, Dr.Newton, Dr.Latif, and Dr.Newton entered Knoy 569. I introduced all to Nikhil and Tanya. Dr.Elliott played with Niknil and said that they were gathered to meet with him and my presentation was just a side show.
After everyone settled, the proceedings began. The light was dimmed, and I began. After about three slides into the presentation Nikhil started acting up. Tanya took stolled him out and waited in the lobby.
For the next hour I was in the groove, slide after slide I talked and answered questions interactively. At one point, during the presentation Dr.Newton murmed, "This is important work". The professors were satisfied.
At the end of the presentation, the lights were switched back on. Everyone was beaming with satisfaction. Dr.Newton asked if she could use the statistical part of my paper to teach her six hundered level course. I responded before she could complete her request with a confident smile and a blunt "YES". She commented further to the department head that this is definitely worth a PhD. Dr.Elliott, my chair said he was very pleased with the work and saw no issues. He offered to co-author an artcile to be published in a scientific journal. Dr.Latif, the department head, said that I was young and I should consider teaching, if I ever decide to teach at Purdue, even part-time, this would be a great help. He asked me what I thought of the program and I answered honestly. Mark took down my feedback, not sure why. Over all it was a satisfactory defense. I am quite pleased with myself.

EJB 2.0 SLSB versus SFSB

Almost every engineer I talk with is riddled with apprehensions about EJBs. I can understand why they would consider Entity Beans as "useless", "c

One benefit of SFSB is that they can receive transaction notifications by implementing SessionSynchronization interface. The transactions can span multiple methods, across multiple calls (with BMT).

The interface provides 3 hooks "afterBegin","beforeCompletion", and "afterCompletion", these methods provide significant control over the transactions. Horizontal application functionality can be placed in these hooks for transactions.

Several applications of this interface come to mind, one could log certain transactions, notify support on all rollbacks, add a simple layer of authorization etc.

Ethical Power

According to Paula Caproni, author of "Management Skills For Everyday Life", there are six universal forms of influence.

• Reciprocation
• Committment & consistency
• Authority
• Social proof
• Scarcity
• Liking

Power emanating from these forms of influence can be considered ethical.

Founding principles:

• You should tell people explicitly what you want.
• Organization's interest and others' interest is at par or above your own.
• You treat everyone fairly, follow process and do not abuse.
• You leave yourself reasonably open to be influenced by others.
• You back your points with valid data.

These founding principles and ethical form of influence is in direct contrast to the Robert Greene's "The 48 Laws Of Power" in which he shockingly suffocates any breath of ethics. The book is laced with a dark sense of human power perversion. For instance, #31 Control the options: Get others to play with the cards you deal. #32 Play to people's fantasies and #36 Disdain things you cannot have do not play to long term interests nor do they breed contributors who care for the greater good.

Caproni's book brings a breath of fresh air to the taboo "Power", it certainly explains in detail, and backed by research, the ethics associated with power - and how it can be put to good ethical use.

Breaking Trust: A Tutorial

Trust Breakers

Here is a list of behaviors & traits you should demonstrate, practice and implement at work in order to break the trust of your employer, employees, co-workers and clients :

• Advance your own interest at the expense of others.
• Be blatantly and pompously self-promoting.
• Use inconsistent standards to evaluate employees.
• Allow some people to break the rules and expect others to follow them.
• Do not care about performance problems until the time to rate your employee.
• Enable poor-performers to stay in your organization unchallenged.
• Pigeon-hole your employees.
• Take credit of your employee's work.

• Withold important information.
• Be closed minded to diverse ideas.
• Act disrepectfully towards others.
• Lie or cover up, rather than admit to mistakes.
• Break promises, or use words cheaply.
• Betray confidence by saying one thing and doing another.
• Spin by communicating selective facts, and by lacing tone to imply a different context.
• Act inconsistently; be incongruent in body language and intent.
• Have frequent negative interactions with co-workers and subordinates.
• Hide incompetence by making excuses.
• Plagerize others' ideas and work.
• Don't listen to others' opinions then punch holes without understanding the issue completely.
• Don't teach others to fish, rather bring them the fist.
• Make people dependent on you for daily work.
  
• Be unconcerned about personal needs, be pompous and self-promoting.
• Don't be humble or meek.
  

There are surely more ways to break trust and it is fairly simple to do so. Remember, that establishing trust is a time consuming process that requires consistency, congruency and solid principles. Leaders who are meek rise to the top and stay there. Read about meekness in Jim Collin's "Good To Great". Humility and meekness are different attributes, but I think both are equally important. "People with humility don't think less of themselves, they just think of themselves less" - Ken Blanchard and Norman Vincent Peale in the Power of Ethical Management.


The above is synthesized from Fernando Bartalome's "Nobody Trusts the Boss Completely, Now What?" (Harvard Business Review)

Diffusion Rates Will Increase in 2006

We have seen more advances in science and technology in the last 60 years than in all of previous history. The rate of technology diffusion has progressively increased as well.
According to K.H.Hammond (2001), it took the telephone 35 years to get into 25% of all homes in the United States. It took TV 26 years. It took radio 22 years. It took PCs 16 years. It took Internet 7 years. It probably took cellphones less than 5, DVDs less than 3, and iPod, XBox, PlayStation, less than 2 years. In a hyper-competitive global market, technology will seamlessly cross boundaries quicker than ever before.
By the end of 2006, I think that successful technology products will proliferate markets in months, not years.

How to make people like you in 90 seconds or less.

Introduction
An intriguing title for a book! This small book (less than 200 pages) is written by Nicholas Boothman. It covers a pretty broad range of topics. From my perspective, the book did a decent job of bringing body language, communication skills, and behavior together. It covers a lot of ground with everyday examples. One of the acronyms that is fascinating is KFC. Know what you want, Find out what you are getting, Change what you do until you get what you want. The key is the "K" know what you want. Once you know what you want, you can direct your attitude, synchronize appropriately, communicate effectively by using the preferred senses.

Attitude
The book focuses on achieving rapport when it does not come naturally. Boothman calls his technique "Rapport by Design". In this technique, you the reader, will assume the characteristics of the person you are engaged with temporarily,"The key to establish rapport with strangers is to become like them". He describes various ways of doing that, especially through body language and the right attitude. The author describes to general types of attitudes. A "Really Useful Attitude" and a "Really Useless Attitude".

Really Useful Attitude	Really Useless Attitude
Warm Enthusiastic Confident Supportive Relaxed Obliging Curious Resourceful Comfortable Helpful Engaging Laid back Patient Welcoming Cheery Interested	Angry Sarcastic Impatient Bored Disrespectful Conceited Pessimistic Anxious Rude suspicious Vengeful Afraid Self-conscious Mocking Embarrassed Dutiful

The whole idea to list the useful and useless attitudes is to get a picture of what is needed and what must be avoided. Attitude is the core of interpersonal skill.

Synchronization

There is significant talk about body language and synchronization at the subliminal level. Boothman states "When you meet someone new, immediately point your heart warmly at that person's heart. ". Such gestures, he claims are universal and cross-cultural. He adds, "There is magic in this.". He explicitly calls out on closed body language and gives examples of what not to do.
He cites Albert Mehrabian, professor at UCLA, who has studied communication in detail. His studies suggest that 55% of what we respond to takes place visually; 38% of what we respond to is the sound; and 7% is the content. The author suggests that we synchronize our attitudes,body language (gestures, posture, gesticulations, movement, tilts, nods, expressions, breathing and rhythms), and voice (tone, volume, speed, pitch, rhythm, words).


Communication
Boothman declares two types of communication methods, one that opens up the conversation (through open-ended questions) and the other, that closes the conversation (questions that ask for a yes/no response). The author encourages questions that begin with "who, what, when, why, where, how" compared to "did you, are you , have you".
A "location/occasion" conversation methodology is recommended to break the ice. It is even better to use sensory specific words like "See, Tell, Feel" in a conversation. The author offers situational advice for regular day-to-day scenarios. The strongest point the author makes about communication is that most people do not know what they want out of a communication. It is of paramount importance that you know what you want before you open your mouth. If you do not want anything, make sure the other person knows and ensure that you are not wasting any time theirs or yours.
Boothman explains nicely the difference between "active" listening and "parrot phrasing" by providing excellent examples. All facets of communication are touched upon, at one point in the book Boothman explains how to receive compliments and advises not to flatter, "cheap flattery, tired cliches, and patronizing remarks reek of insincerity & can be insulting".

Senses
What makes this book different from other books is how Boothman classifies people by their preferred senses. He claims that there are three type of people: Visuals (55%), Auditories(15%) & Kinesthetics (30%). The author claims that it is more effective to select words in a conversation depending on which type of person you are talking with. The book offers techniques to determine the type of person. There is a good description of the type of eye-movement to expect when a person is visualizing, re-hearing, or re-feeling to retrieve information. A self-test is also offered in the form a questionnaire that determines your favorite sense. From a communication perspective, Boothman says to use metaphors, he claims that it appeals to all types because metaphors exercise all senses.


Conclusion
This book concludes easily by bringing all the four major components together. It ends with food for thought. The author urges his readers to get their imagination under control and install some Really Useful Assumptions. Assume rapport and trust, assume likability, assume synchronicity, assume forgiveness, assume impact, assume positivity and above all assume disposition to connectivity. He reminds us that when greeting someone new use this metaphor: Open-Eye-Bean-"Hi!"-Lean.

Management Skills for Everyday Life : The Practical Coach (2nd Edition)

An excellent book by Paula J. Caproni. This book covers important topics that will impact your personal and work life.
Topics covered by the author include success predictors, self-awareness, trust building, effective communication, ethical power & influence, relationship management, cultural diversity, creating high-performance teams, and crafting a life. Sounds a lot for 459 pages ? It is. The material is covered in sufficient detail.
One thing that strikes you while you read the book are the quotes. Famous quotes are printed on the margins, contextualized and related to the content. One of my favorite quotes can be found in the first chapter. "Learn as if you were to live forever. Live as if you were going to die tomorrow" - Mahatma Gandhi.
Every chapter is well researched. The end-notes are documented at the end of each chapter. This book should appeal to all.

IT Timeline

Information Technology Timeline

1642 - Blaise Pascal invented the mechanical calculator
1834 - Charles Babbage designed the analytical engine
1890 - Herman Hollerith created the statistical tabulator
1936 - Alan Turing described the universal machine
1947 - Bardeen, Shockley, and Brattain invented the transistor


(To Be Continued...)

IBM WebSphere 5 Classloaders

Abundant articles are available on WebSphere classloaders.


Just to reiterate one important point:

Several issues in WebSphere version 4.x have been resolved in WebSphere 5.x.
For example: If in a WAS5 ear there are multiple WARs and each WAR needs to reuse a utility jar and the reference is given in the manifest, the jar class loader will load up the utility only ONCE.

In a project I was working there was debate and almost certainly a hack was planned by delinking wars from their manifests and adding those manifests in a shell EJB projects (!)

Here is a sample classloader hierachy:
Application is set to Parent First
War is set to Parent last.

EJB ClassLoaders
com.ibm.ws.classloader.ExtJarClassLoader
sun.misc.Launcher$ExtClassLoader
sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader
com.ibm.ws.bootstrap.ExtClassLoader
com.ibm.ws.classloader.ProtectionClassLoader
com.ibm.ws.classloader.CompoundClassLoader

WAR Classloaders

com.ibm.ws.classloader.CompoundClassLoader
com.ibm.ws.classloader.ExtJarClassLoader
sun.misc.Launcher$ExtClassLoader
sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader
com.ibm.ws.bootstrap.ExtClassLoader
com.ibm.ws.classloader.ProtectionClassLoader
com.ibm.ws.classloader.JarClassLoader

You can view your hierarchy with the classloader viewer, read and download from here.

What is Architecture ?

"Architecture is a set of structuring principles that enables a system to be comprised of a set of simpler systems each with its own local context that is independent of but not inconsistent with the context of the larger system as a whole."

This definition can be easly contextualized to information systems.