This morning we’re having an all-ITS staff meeting, and one of  the agenda agenda items is a breakout session to discuss “Improving ITS customer service.” Which (perhaps inevitably) is the wrong question. When we start thinking of people outside ITS as “customers” rather than friends and colleagues we’re already heading in the wrong direction.

The “customer” label assumes and supports an “us vs. them” point of view. Trying to improve ITS customer service is more about making ITS look good than about advancing the mission of the University. It’s also about avoiding responsibility for the overall success of our projects: “I provided the service you asked for, so if it didn’t work it’s your fault.”

What we need to ask is, “How can we work together with other staff members, faculty, and students to make the University of Texas at Austin the best place in the world to learn, teach, discover new things, and share what we’ve learned and discovered with the people of Texas and the whole human race?” If we could have a vision of how the University can improve the world, and how our own tasks contribute to realizing that vision, the “customer service” issues would disappear.

This past weekend was General Conference for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which means I spent it watching broadcasts from Salt Lake City. In one of his talks, President Monson (the president of the church) referred to a passage in Alice in Wonderland that I think has some application to ITS:

“Cheshire Puss,” she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. “Come, it’s pleased so far,” thought Alice, and she went on: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

Whether we run applications on a mainframe or a Solaris box or a Windows laptop doesn’t make a lot of difference if we don’t know what we want them to accomplish.

So this is cool: Andre Geim, one of the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics was also one of the winners of the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize for Physics. (The Nobel was for experiments with graphene, the Ig Nobel was for using magnets to levitate a frog.)

The 2010 winners of the Ig Nobel prizes were announced last night. I think this is my favorite:

MANAGEMENT PRIZE: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.
REFERENCE: “The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study,” Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo, Physica A, vol. 389, no. 3, February 2010, pp. 467-72.
WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo.

via The Register. Also from The Register: Artist crafts Kevin Bacon bacon bust.

Google has proposed a new image format for web applications. They say they’ve used compression technologies from VP8 to reduce file sizes below what JPEG provides. They don’t say anything about patents.

This story came up in a conversation today, and I thought I’d post the link: The Story of Mel. Many years ago I made a little poster with a quote from this story:

If a program can’t rewrite its own code, what good is it?

I’ve kept it on my bulletin board ever since.

A similar story my father told me: the IBM System/360 model 30 implemented the S/360 architecture through microcode, and by changing the microcode it could also emulate an IBM 1401. This way shops that had a 1401 could get a model 30 and still run their old programs while they were rewriting them for the System/360: shut it down, switch the microcode, and restart it in 1401 mode. (And it ran those programs twice as fast as a real 1401.) The microcode was on copper-clad punch cards; the instructions were sensed based on the capacitance.

My father, who was an IBM Systems Engineer at the time, was working with a customer (I think it was Lockheed) that had customized 1401’s with an extra instruction. (Yes, back then computer companies would customize the instruction set on your computer if requested.) To use their old programs on their new model 30, they needed IBM to customize the 1401 emulation, so IBM flew out a microcode guru. He asked them what the instruction code was, and they told him, so he sat down, did some calculating, and said, “That would make the tape drive rewind and unload the tape.”

“Yes,” they said, “that’s what happens.”

“What do you want it to do?” he asked.

They told him, and he sat back down, did some more calculations, pulled some copper-clad cards and a hole punch out of his briefcase, punched a bunch of holes in the cards, and stuck them in the machine.

“Now try it,” he said, and it worked.

The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center celebrates its 40th anniversary this week. The Register has a good write-up: PARC turns 40: mice, money and the new interwebs.

I don’t always agree with everything “Paul Murphy” (it’s a pseudonym) says, but he’s often thought provoking. This weekend he examines “The CIO role in the Unix enterprise”:

From a long term perspective CIO stability and willingness to do as little as possible are the critical managerial success factors because the system as a whole is very much like Unix itself: something that works until brought down by an idiot with root access -or in the organizational context, a senior executive with hiring control over the CIO role.

This author is really hostile to IBM, but his ideal “UNIX enterprise” is a lot closer to how Data Processing was run when I started here than to the “DP shop” he’s always railing against. I think this is another example of how the people who make the decisions have a more significant effect than the technology chosen to implement those decisions.

p.s. The server that hosts this blog is scheduled to be down for maintenance tomorrow morning, Tuesday, September 21 9:00 – 11:00 p.m.

Interesting article: SciDB: Relational daddy answers Google, Hadoop, NoSQL

I was going to post about Tim Bray’s anecdote about Oracle and developer mindshare, but I hadn’t figured out exactly what I wanted to say and then Adam beat me to it. And like he says, I’ve been a bit obsessed about the need for a strategy the whole time I’ve had this blog. I’d like to feel like I’m working to make the University a better place, but without the big picture and clear priorities only a strategic vision can provide, how can I know?