2020 Hindsight

How companies thrive by sharing what they know

Dr. Nancy Dixon's article appears on the leadership.gc.ca site; she wrote a book called Common Knowledge. [via Rebecca's Pocket]

Her 4 main points:

• start with the seekers of knowledge, not with the providers
• knowledge can only reside in the mind
• to acquire new knowledge, the seeker has to connect it to existing knowledge
• people are delighted to share what they know

Dixon's fourth proposition is that people are delighted to share what they know. She has a caveat though. People are delighted "if what they know is appreciated.

..."I've done a really interesting experiment," she adds. She has asked people to spend a couple of hours writing down an aspect of what they've learned on the job. The answer is very often, "I just don't have time."

"If I go to them and say, 'I want to interview you about what you've done; it will take a couple of hours,' they say, 'Sure,' because now they're going to be telling it to a human being and they're going to be able to see my understanding.

"Why would they take two hours to talk to me when they won't take two hours to write it up? It has to do with the human connection and with their knowledge being valued."

GE Company Manual, 1926

Ancient Geek Tech: The GE Schenectady Personnel Manual. Don't touch live wires. when and how payday. A look at life three-quarters of a century ago.

The regular pay day is Friday, at which time the piece rate employees are paid up to and including Thursday of the previous week, and day workers up to and including the previous Sunday. All women employees are paid off at 4:25 p.m., at the regular pay stations of the different departments, and form in line according to the numerical order of their check numbers. Men employees are paid in the same manner, with the exception that they form in line at 4:30 p.m.

MacOsX: Print to PDF to make "commentable" pdf docs?

So I'm talking w/ Doc M about pdf files and commenting. "Oh, you can enable comments in PDF documents," I say. So we're doing tests now, using whatever JPL installed on his powerbook. (Adobe Acrobat Reader 6)

Here's what Acrobat's Help says,

In Adobe Reader, you can add coments only if the creator of the Adobe PDF document enabled commenting. If commenting is enabled, you can place comments anywhere in the cument, and you can determine the style and format of the document

How do I create PDF documents which enable commenting?

MacOS X has this lovely feature whereby you can print any document to a PDF file. We did a test out of MS Word print to pdf. Opened it up in Adobe Reader, looked at the Document Properties. This is what it said:

Document Security:

• Security Method: No security
• Can be opened by: All version of Acrobat

Document Restrictions

• Printing: Allowed
• Document Assembly: Not Allowed
• Content Copying or Extraction: Allowed
• Content Extraction for Accessibility: Allowed
• Commenting: Not Allowed
• Filling of form fields: Allowed
• Signing: Not Allowed
• Creation of Template Pages: Not Allowed
• Submitting Forms: Not Allowed

So here's what I want to know: Is there any way inside MacOS X to change the default prefs for created pdfs to make Comments allowable? Can one hack the contents of the pdf itself to change that?

Macworld reviews of Acrobat 6.0 Standard and Acrobat 6.0 Pro state that

Reviewers must have Acrobat 6.0 Standard or Professional to read and annotate these files. (Adobe Reader can't even open them; its modest annotation tools can be used only by plain-vanilla PDFs.) When the reviewers have finished commenting, they export their annotations, which Acrobat sends back to you. [emphasis mine]

also, from Planet PDF on Adobe Reader 6.0:

Good news, bad news for Mac users. Long-time Mac users may well be disappointed with the lack of browser-integration for Acrobat 6.0 and Mac OS X which means that online commenting is off-limits for Mac users. But they'll be happy to see their old friend, Acrobat Search, back in action. But it gets worse for Mac classic users, they don't get any support at all.

Dang. I guess not. (Plus, the Adobe Acrobat Reader 5 for Linux doesn't allow commenting either). I'll check out what happens with an older copy of Acrobat that's on a computer elsewhere, to see if something works, but I'm guessing that Doc M can't create pdf documents using existing tools that'd allow his workgroup to comment on 'em--other than printout and paper scribbles.

Screenshot tricks in MacOS X

Capturing full or partial screenshots in OS X. I saw (and can't remember) a little shareware utility (OS 9 only) that will create a screen capture of an entire browser window (long page? long image, w/o multiple scrolls, and merging images together).

Anyone know of such a beast for OS X?

Mac OS 10.3 Security Hole

There's a Mac OS 10 security hole. It's only in jaguar. or wait, is that panther? I don't know. (I can't tell those names apart.) It affects the later version, the 10.3 version , the one with the metallic-style finder windows and the clever doohickey that'll simultaneously display all the windows in a particular app (which item may yet get me to update and reconcile myself with awful ugly metal finder windows. Sigh.). It does not affect 10.2.8. Which is Jaguar. Or Pather. um, well, like I said, I can't tell the different OSes apart by animal names.

So what is it? A web page that has a link to the help: protocol, which will launch Help Viewer. Help Viewer can call a script, which, when executed, can do Very Very Bad things to your computer.

Transterrestrial Musings pointed to the Making Light post, which also points to an explanation by Jay Allen, and another explanation by Liz of Mamamusings.

There's a fix (well, a workaround) described on Mamamusings. Check it out and install the fix right now.

All you Mac users... be safe out there, no matter whichever large feline wild animal-named Operating System you are using.

of naming your WiFi network

Dave Winer points to something about making a political statement using your WiFi network (tell 'em all that you're against N --and are therefore for M). Whatever. Political bumperstickers broadcast for those within wireless distance is not my cup of tea. The same goes for regular-ol' political bumperstickers.

Aside: I still hold that the most perfect bumpersticker would be:

Stop Continental Drift Now!

But I digress.

I wouldn't want to change my own WiFi name, for one. Ya see, I don't have any airport or wi-fi capable computers or components. My powerbook is (gasp) nearly 5 years old. Desktop machines are what they are. Got plenty of ethernet cables. Even a few 50' cables from when I had to get a big spool of Cat-5 to build an 'impromtpu' computer lab at an event I produced at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico. A 50' cable is not as elegant as wireless, but it's here, it's paid for, and it does the trick.

But, my boyfriend, Doc M, well, he's got wireless at his place. iBook and Powerbook surf the net anywhere at his house. It's sweet, I'll admit. He's been after me to install wireless at my house. Yeah, well, whatever. A wireless router has to get in line behind a bunch of other, more important equipment purchases. And my inner-CFO has been rather stingy of late with all capital equipment expenditures. Here, I'll connect a cable and string it downstairs for you. Or go ahead and surf using my neighbor's wide-open linksys connection.

So one of those little router thingies goes on sale. He buys it for me, and we install it. I assigned it a name in keeping with its provenance, and never, never! will I change it in order to make a political statement. Because, see, when you're in my 'hood wardriving, or live among the condo neighborhood. you'll see a (password-protected) wireless network entitled "Trophy WiFi".

How Life Imitates StarTrek

"I'm a doctor, Jim, not an inventor!" 40 years of invention inspired by StarTrek. Enterprise's gadgets come back/down to earth.

In the 23rd century universe of "Star Trek,'' people talked to each other using wireless personal communicators, had easy access to a vast database of information and spent hours gazing at a big wall-mounted video screen.

DVD format Blues

From Dave Winer comes a link to this article about the new DVD format made using blue lasers. It's bigger! It's better! It'll store more! more! more! ...but it may not be backwards compatible.

Just as consumers are beginning to get comfortable with their DVD players, electronics manufacturers are set to introduce next-generation discs that store more and would be harder to copy.

[...] The new discs, which look much like DVDs, would be read by players with newly developed blue lasers, which can pick out finer detail than the red lasers used to play DVDs and CDs. This lets the new discs store three to five times as much data as a DVD, enough for high-definition movies with surround sound.

Manufacturers from both groups plan to also build red lasers into their new players, allowing them to read current DVDs.

The Blu-ray disc has the most storage capacity, up to 50 gigabytes. However, it achieves that capacity by using a structure quite different from DVDs. This means that the companies that make prerecorded DVDs would have to invest in new equipment, which is sure to give Hollywood pause as it ponders which format to back.

It's not that I don't mind more! more! more! I like the benefits of Moore's Law and higher storage capacity. (Just today I was googling for info on DVD writer market penetration. I haven't found answers to my questions. But this article tells me that "the answer" is a fleeting thing; it'll change again. The new format'll muddy up the DVD pond, which will take a while to settle.)

I'm not whining in rebellion against the inexorable "adapt or die" (well, okay, maybe I am.) I'm just pointing out how this innovation fits into a larger trend of The Great Digital Graveyard.

How long will the DVD last? What's the longevity of both the physical item, and the supporting hardware, firmware and software that can play and interpret all those luscious digital bits that fit on that physical item? I'm thinking past the product development curve (from early-adopter to widespread use to obscurity as something better takes its place) to what's going to be around a generation from now. This isn't just about DVD, but about storage media as a whole. Stewart Brand's book, The Clock of the Long Now first brought this matter to my attention.

Thanks to the pace of innovation and invention, we will lose more data faster thanks to so many innovate storage formats coming onto the market and then dying a quick death. The Long Now foundation discusses longevity:

"It is only slightly facetious," wrote RAND researcher Jeff Rothenberg in Scientific American, "to say that digital information lasts forever--or five years, whichever comes first."

At an audio restoration workshop a few months ago, I got a tour through the past century's obsolete audio storage formats:

Pity the poor archivist who needs to take care of a collection of materials that were made using The Way Cool Media Format that is now so four decades ago. If it took the better part of a century to generate an audio-storage format graveyard of moderate size (albeit formidable for the archivist), what kind of digital graveyard have we been creating in the last couple of decades? DVD blue may be cool, but this reality-check from the future is the other side to innovation.

Related note: FAQ about the new, higher-density MiniDisc format (HD MD) introduced by Sony in Jan 2004. New HD MD recorders should be arriving in May. (I've started using MiniDisc for audio recording).

Beating a (dead?) Trojan Horse

Al has a follow-up post about last Thursday's panicky announcement that there's a new MacOS X Trojan Horse on the loose. ArsTechnica says it's exaggerated.

The proof-of-concept is exactly that: a demonstration that OS X can be vulnerable to some Trojan horses, and not much more. The file posted on the Usenet takes advantage of a beahvior that is a carry-over from the Macintosh's pre-Unix days: the file's creator code is evaluated before the extension when the file is opened from the Finder, while the Finder displays the icon associated with the extension. The file in question cannot be easily spread to other computers via P2P or e-mail unless compressed, as failure to compress it makes it inoperable.

Wired says the horse is a nag. Intego, the outfit that originally sounded the alarm, has a Q and A page that goes into more detail about the proof-of-concept.

What to do with your old 8mm home movies?

Home Movie Depot is a service that transfers 8mm and 16 mm movies to digital format. Preview the movies online before final delivery. This company is recommended from a friend who does a similar thing transferring and preserving audio tape recordings.

They've got a page on how to store film and what happens when it ages