From Wikipedia:

Visualization is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message.

Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics present complex information quickly and clearly^[1], such as in signs, maps, journalism, technical writing, and education.

These are techniques to deliver a large amount of data in a simple and quick way which will be easy to grasp the amounts of data involved.

The Concept seen above is the Microsoft’s Education Competencies representation,
It is showing the full set of skills a successful manger should hold,
The PDF can be found in Microsoft’s Education Competencies Website.
The Wheel lists all the different area a new manager should be trained for.

Periodic Table of Data Visualization

The Periodic Table of Data Visualization,
segments the different areas where data visualization has been efficient so far:

• Data
• Information
• Concept
• Strategy
• Metaphor
• Compound

Data Visualization collections

Some more good resources online about data visualization:

Smashing Magazine Data Visualization collection
A beautiful collection of modern approach to the subject, with many samples.

Gapminder Statistics Visualisation
The Gapminder stats tool can show you how your data changes inside a time frame

Creating your on Visualization Tools

Wheel-Like Data Visualization With MooWheel
MooWheel is a mootools based script which visualizes data and connections between items like a wheel.

TouchGraph google browser
free Java application to explore the connections between related websites

Technorati Tags: dashboards, Management, statistics

In the last half-year I have gone through a personal change,
Taking a new job has changed me and the way I work.
In my last Position I was doing 70% hands on and only the rest Team Leader work,
But now I am spending 95% of my time not doing Technical things any more,
And this has been a dramatic change for me.

I am a technical person, very technical, and actually even a Geek too,
and suddenly I work mostly with people, and my main function is to help them do their Technical stuff the best they can.

after 3 months I got my first Panic attack. I have stopped doing what i was best at and started doing soft skills things, In which I do not know yet how Good I am.
This was a scary moment, and I have started to question myself:
Was this the right change?
Is this really what i want? maybe going back is easier?
How can I become good at it?
what is really my new Job? what does it takes to succeed at it?

I have gone through the crisis after doing a lot of thinking and soul-searching,
and decided to push back harder, to do the extra mile and learn to be the best I can,
I have started reading managing books and listening to lectures and Pod-casts,
And all this have helped a lot.

but, I have read an Article this week that would have saved me a lot of anguish If I’ve read it sooner,
and I think every new manager should read it too as part of his early training – so you know what you are getting into.

“Becoming the Boss” by Linda A. Hill

This Article at hbr.org has resolved so many of my fears and helped me relax,
I’m not alone at this! I’m not the only one going through this process and having a hard time!
Most new managers find their first major Role filled with unknowns life changing decisions.
The new job is more demanding than what they imagined, and the skills and methods they have excelled at over the years are not relevant to what is needed to succeed in the new managing role.

The article talk about a “Gap between the current capabilities and the requirements of the new position”,
This is something I really resonate with,
it’s not learning new technologies or applications that I’m missing,
it’s a whole new set of qualities I need to develop within me, and this is 10 times harder.

Security Blanket is another term used in the Article – after switching to management,
The technical worker is no longer increasing his technical skills,
And this is a scary decision to take.

Another Hard change for the technical person when becoming a manager is the need for good people skills:
“Unless they identify and build effective relationships with the key people the team depends upon, the team will lack the resources necessary to do its job”,   so now it’s not only creating good relationships with the team, but important relationships with people across the organization is needed to succeed at the job.

I recommend reading this to everyone who has started a new managing role, or even thinking about it,
the managing role is not what it seems from the outside, this article helps to build a better understanding of what it is and what it isn’t, and what is expected of a new manager.

This Article can be found at http://hbr.org/2007/01/becoming-the-boss/ar/1

Technorati Tags: books, boss, Harvard Business Review, Management

Every one makes his one way in the world,
and every manager creates his own path,
but it is always helpful to get help from people who already walked the path,
and have research numbers to back them up.

So I’m searching for resources on the Managerial profession,
and Today I have listened to an interesting Podcast, or at least the first half of it,
Which talked about Staff Meeting, the importance of them,
The fact that they should be weekly – and that’s very important apparently.

I haven’t been running weekly staff meeting until now but scheduled random staff meetings,
but I will schedule them weekly for the next few months to see how that affects work.

the podcast can be found on the Managers Tools website

And another nice page I have found there New manager start from Basics page,
which organizes their important podcasts by the best order for new managers.
the main topics from their basics page are:

• one on one meetings
• feedback
• coaching
• delegation
• running effective meetings

I will be going through these podcasts in the coming days, be sure to follow the posts !

Technorati Tags: Management, meetings, podcast

Changes are good.
Changes are bad.
Changes are scary.
It is time for a change.

My posts to the site have changed, I have started the site as a Linux how to,
but started writing about WordPress when this wonderful platform became very interesting,
and switched to talk about Solaris, when I started meddling with that OS too.

I have changed jobs, started doing different things, and now its time to slightly shift the focus of my blog too,
apparently soft skills are not easy for this Linux girl.
and I have a lot to learn, a lot to understand and some thoughts shifts to carry out,
and I will follow this learning experience here,
with my thoughts of the process.

And ill start with the first Management book I’ve read which was very good:

The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You

This  book goes over the main laws of leadership,
it talks about qualities a leader should have and lists out the points each of us should check if we need to strengthen them in us to get better results.

After reading the book I started to get an Idea of how much more i need to learn, and how much more I still don’t know that I don’t know

wish me luck – this is going to be a life long journey …..

Technorati Tags: books, Management

Under the Solaris 10 system – or the open Solaris as well,
the service management have been upgraded, and there are great new tools to handle the sysadmin
work on the services.

The long detailed explanation can be found here:
Solaris Service Management Facility – Quickstart Guide

But for the fast paced sysadmin – here is the short version

To see the detailed boot sequence with all the services notices use:

boot -m verbose

Stopping and starting services

stop a running service as well as make sure it wont come back after booting the server:

svcadm disable service_name

Bring the service back up and make sure it starts after boot as well:

svcadm enable service_name

The new and improved services system will also watch over the service, and restart it if it suddenly stop.
but don’t worry – if the service loops and can’t start, after a couple of time the SMF will stop trying to bring it up, and will send you an error for the service.

To stop or start the service temporarily without impacting the startup status of the service use:

svcadm -t enable/disable service_name

Getting information about the services

List all active services:

svcs

List all available services:

svcs -a

List all failing services:

svcs -x

to get more details on a specific failing service, use:

svcs -x service_name

to add verbosity to the svcs commands just add “-v”

the services logs are located at:
/var/svc/log
or:
/etc/svc/volatile

List all the processes this service is running, even if they have a different name:

svcs -p service_name

Viewing Dependencies

List all the services this service is depended upon, if any of these services fails, our service will fail too:

svcs -d service_name

List all the services that depend on our service, if our service fails, they will fail too:

svcs -D service_name

Service Names

the explanation for the service names im taking straight from the SUN bigadmin site:

Solaris uses a URI string called an FMRI (Fault Managed Resource Identifier) to identify system objects for which advanced fault and resource management capabilities are provided. Services managed by SMF are assigned FMRI strings prefixed with the scheme name “svc“, as shown in the following examples for the Solaris service syslogd(1M):

• svc://localhost/system/system-log:default
• svc:/system/system-log:default
• system/system-log:default

Notice that these service FMRIs used by SMF can be expressed in three ways: first as an absolute path including a location path such as “localhost“; second as a path relative to the local machine; and third as simply the service identifier with the string prefixes implied. The SMF administrator tools described in the rest of this document typically describe services using the third form, as they are assumed to be operating on local services. Other management tools that operate on multiple types of resources or across machine boundaries may use one of the other forms to describe services. The SMF tools in the current release of Solaris can only manage services on the local host.

Solaris RunLevel

There are no longer run levels setting on the Solaris server, now this is called milestones.
Milestones are a group of services, which defines a state the server is in – just like single user, or multi user.
you can bring the server into a specific milestone with:

svcadm milestone milestone/single-user:default

to permanently set the server in a specific mile stone , use:

svcadm milestone -d milestone/single-user:default

and again – to list what services should be running to reach a specific milestone, use:

svcs -d milestone_name

and that’s the short explanation

next time ill explain how to add a service of your own to the system.

xkcd cartoons got me at least twice that i can think of,
I’m hearing a lot these days about uptime, and this cartoon just hits the spot:

devotion to duty

and another one that i went around with for months, couldn’t get it out of my head:

exploits of a mom

Technorati Tags: books, funny

Starting from the begining:

what is mediawiki?

MediaWiki is free server-based software which is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It’s designed to be run on a large server farm for a website that gets millions of hits per day. MediaWiki is an extremely powerful, scalable software and a feature-rich wiki implementation, that uses PHP to process and display data stored in its MySQL database.
Media wiki site

Media wiki also saves the versions of the updated files – allowing for easy reverts and versioning of edited files.

The largest sites using medaiwiki:

Design matters

Wiki website doesn’t have to have the MediaWiki standard look,
you can design the look and feel either manually to suite the corporate guidelines or with existing skins.

Novelle’s wiki site:

marvel.wikia.com:

Extensions

Extensions are compilations of PHP code that add new features or enhance functionality of the main MediaWiki core. Extensions are one of the main advantages of MediaWiki. They give wiki administrators and wiki end-users the ability to adapt MediaWiki to their requirements.

The extensions can add capabilities like:

• Embed videos (YouTube)
• WhosOnline – shows you who is currently logged in to your wiki
• Allow embedded flash
• Iframe – to load pages from other site in your wiki page
• Convert to pdf
• Images preview popup window

Integrate into the Organization

• Email address
• Real name
• Nickname
• Language

First steps with editing wiki pages

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide:_Editing_overview

This simple editing tutorial will show you the basic step in editing a new wiki page:

• headings
• lists
• links

Technorati Tags: Linux, mediawiki, php, wiki

There are main 2 major software companies that supply free vnc server and vnc cllient,
the first is realvnc and the second is tightvnc , from the tighvnc site:

TightVNC is a free remote control software package. With TightVNC, you can see the desktop of a remote machine and control it with your local mouse and keyboard, just like you would do it sitting in the front of that computer. TightVNC is:

• free for both personal and commercial usage, with full source code available (GPL-licensed);
• useful in remote administration, remote customer support, education, and for many other purposes;
• cross-platform, available for Windows and Unix, compatible with other VNC software.

So these are 2 options for you to download a good free vnc viewer.

Solaris VNCserver configuration

and I say only viewer because now the Solaris 10 build 5 comes with the vncserver alredy inside.
all you need to do is to configure it.

This page on the SUN site will give you the detailed explanation on how to do things and what security patch you need to install fisrt ,but the instructions can be summed up in 4 lines:

mkdir -p /etc/dt/config

cp /usr/dt/config/Xservers    /etc/dt/config/Xservers

edit this file “/etc/dt/config/Xservers” and add these lines at the end:

:1  Local local_uid@none root /usr/X11/bin/Xvnc :1 -nobanner -AlwaysShared -SecurityTypes None -geometry 1024x768x24 -depth 24
:2  Local local_uid@none root /usr/X11/bin/Xvnc :2 -nobanner -AlwaysShared -SecurityTypes None -geometry 1024x768x24 -depth 24
:3  Local local_uid@none root /usr/X11/bin/Xvnc :3 -nobanner -AlwaysShared -SecurityTypes None -geometry 1024x768x24 -depth 24
And reboot the server.

The lines with the :1 :2 etc at the beginning, are the virtual displays you wish to server to have available for connections, you can add more by changing the numbers to :4 :5 etc.

when connecting to the server with the vnc viewer you need to express to which virtual display you want to connect by adding it to end of the server’s name or ip:

10.10.10.1:3

If you want to connect to virtual display number 3.

A security note – this configuration will allow passwordless access to the vnc screen – if someone logs in and leaves it open – the next user can just enter without a login.

A safer configuration is to require a password by using the -SecurityTypes VncAuth parameter. The Xvnc(1) man page describes password requirements.

VNC and Security

The vnc as a general is clear text, for a more secure connection there is a method of tunneling the vnc through a ssh session.
2 nice tutorials for vnc through ssh can be found here and here.
the second tutorial is using putty for the ssh connection – putty is another great freeware,
its a free ssh client for windows to connect to ssh servers.

If the server you wish to connect to through vnc is located withing your lan,
and you are relaxed about security for the users on it – if its a training server etc ,
you can just setup the vncserver without any safeguards,
but if you are connecting through an unsecured medium (AKA the internet)
you better add the ssh layer to it.

Technorati Tags: desktop, Linux, network, Solaris, windows