Tony Lepage

• I just sent in my application to win one of 6 5-minute talks at Mesh 2006 in Toronto. The idea is, 6 lucky people will be able to pitch their ideas to a room full of tech saavy business people. I’d be pitching for venture capital and for some talent—all in one bang. If I win, I will pay for anyone that wants a free ride to a cool Web 2.0 conference.
• LiftPort: A company that plans to build an elevator to space! It’s a very fascinating concept that sounds like it can work. In fact, there are a couple of physics professors that have written about how to implement it. It might just be the “next” X PRIZE.
• The TTC is debating whether they should include a new form of ads that is deliver using technology that is decades old. They plan to put ads up along the inside walls of the subway tunnels that are sequential. When the train passes by, it will animate the ads (like those flipbooks you had as a kid) creating a moving advertisement.
• Along the Transit theme, Google has asked the TTC to provide them with all the routes and schedules of its system. Google Transit is being developed on top of their maps engine and it looks to be the sort of thing I’ve been waiting for. If anyone can figure out an easy way to navigate the TTC system, I’m sure Google can. One problem, the TTC isn’t sure if they’ll take advantage of this option because they had tabled plans for a $2 million website of their own (Oh please! Just hearing the sound of subway doors closing when you visit TTC.ca makes me want to jump in front of a train).
• I’ve added a few new blogs to my bloglist, primarily, Antonio Cangiano. He’s a fellow IBMer that I ran into by accident—and he’s developing with Ruby! In fact, he introduced himself just after I finished making a very bold statement “I don’t think anyone uses Ruby at IBM.”
• I’m also going to use the sections feature of this blog to collect information that is similar. A question that I’ve heard a few times now is “where do I find my financial information?” (Yes, fellow Guelphites, some people DO want to know more than I have to say). I am also going to be collecting Ruby on Rails resources is an effort to become part of that community (I’m going to join TRUG too!).

I’m currently working on developing a new infrastructure plan for our team. Like I’ve stated in previous posts, our group provides training for WCC and we use a variety of courseware delivered in a variety of ways.
Approaching this plan, I’ve decided to tackle a few main business components that need improvement.

1.  Courseware development is bulky and inflexible 
• Large pdf documents are passed around and dealing with formatting takes a lot of time. Also, I currently have at least 4 different version of each course document on my hard drive and multitudes in my inbox. 
• Synchronization meetings to have discuss action plans and combine the teams work into one distribution. We each evaluate each others’ work and then implement the suggested changes. 
2. We have more clients requiring our training than we can physically train. 
• This is good because I know I’ll be training courses in a few months and hopefully traveling the world early next year. 
• This is also bad because we should be able to provide the clients with other means of training. 
3. When new releases of WCC v6.0 come out (version 6.5 in mid June and version 7.0 early September) significant time will be spent changing these documents and it will be hard to line the release of the training with the release of the software. 
4. Course setup is taking up to a full day to complete. This is a full day of training that the customer has paid for. Of course, that is not entirely our fault because they are told how their environments should be set up before we get there—truth is, these IT guys don’t seem to take the work load seriously (hmm…). 

This is what I theorize we’ll end up doing
Setup a server with a WikiBooks style for our training material. This will allow further QAing and the ability to build a community around our knowledge. This is something IBM is big on right now—knowledge sharing within IBM and to our partners and clients.

The server will also host DB2, WCC and a tool for connecting to WCC. The tool will allow users to run the XML transactions that make WCC so powerful (remember, it’s middleware and it has no front end).

Not too complicated… I think… after a couple days of phone calls and emails, this is my current situation. Getting a basic internet facing server will cost $80k a year. I have not yet found a simpler solution. This does not include the cost of meeting the requirements I have set forth (eg, running a web app). It also doesn’t include any of the compliance costs that are would be required to make IBM happy enough to let us put anything online; I’ve been told this is 5-6 weeks of man hours.

Obviously, internet facing servers aren’t taken lightly here. And of course, throw in some protocols to deal with and we’re looking at weeks before we’ll have anything accessible to the general public. Sure would be nice to show you guys something and even allow our customers to interact with us.

Speaking of compliance, midway through today I saw a quick flash on my taskbar. It looked like a command window opened up really fast and then closed. Uh oh, did I just get spyware? Up pops a little ballon “IBM Standard Asset Management has detected a non-compliance issue and requires your attention.” I have no clue what this means but after some investigating, the IBM spyware has detected that I have a windows user account that doesn’t have a screensaver password. My manager has been informed. Ha ha ha. The user this program is talking about is my DB2 user account. Very strange indeed. 

All in all, working for Big Blue has been very exciting to date. I enjoy the people and the atmosphere is relaxed enough that you work at your own pace—but don’t take on tasks you can’t finish. Every deadline is discussed and agreed upon, never told. I’m very lucky to have a manager who takes this style with his employees. I don’t think things could have worked out much better.

When (not if) you get an hour, watch the first hour of this:

http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/saturday_school/video_archive.shtml

You’ll get an interesting perspective on the Michael Jackson Trial. It’s really worth a watch, I promise.