Peggy Zagelow - a view from the lab

From archive: March 2008

Interesting technology to replay a system crash

PeggyZ Tags: recreate bug software 2,580 Views

I was pointed to this interesting article from the New York Times, about a new technology invented by two software engineers, Jonathan Lindo and Jeffrey Daudel, to be able to "replay" the events that led up to a system crash. Not that I really want to see my "blue screen of death" from yesterday again, but if it would help identify the problem and get a fix, I could probably live through it a couple more times.

Reading the article, I was struck by a couple of points. They quote Lindo as saying that the inspiration came to them as "Wouldn't it be great if we could just TiVo this and replay it?" And then it says this:

Innovation by analogy is a powerful concept, says Giovanni Gavetti, an associate professor at the Harvard Business School who, with his colleague Jan W. Rivkin, has published research on how businesses can use analogic reasoning as a strategic tool. Human beings are analogy machines, he notes, dealing with new information by comparing it to things they already know something about.

That's true, I often try out analogies when I'm trying to understand or explain something. And I can really see how that could lead to innovations, as well as to some odd product evolutions. For a consumer example, I love how the iPhone lets me listen to my voicemail messages in any order, instead of sequentially, which must have been a leftover paradigm from when messages were stored on an analog tape. I can picture someone saying - "why can't I access my messages like I read my email?" - and voila - innovation.

Then I started wondering just how much you could tinker with the crash replay. Could you start eliminating concurrently-running applications, for example, to see if any of them contributed to the crash? And could you test a fix with the replay to see if it fixes the crash?

I also wonder whether IBM's customers would voluntarily seek out software like this to help them narrow down problems. It's not from IBM, and I really don't know any more about it than is in the article above. It's from a company called Replay Solutions, and it runs on several versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. So, no mainframe support yet (grin). But you could ask them about it!

[Read More]

What grade would your organization get?

PeggyZ Tags: information_on_demand 4 Comments 2,682 Views

I heard an interesting story on the news last week, about how the individual states of the U.S. were graded on how they use information. The state I live in, California, got a C+. How can this be, with our advanced technologycenters in Silicon Vallley?

I found the article online here and found some interesting things, although nothing specific about California.

The article says:
When all is said and done, a state’s skillwith information is found at the intersectionof three distinct operations: the willingnessto share data, the capacity to generategood information, and the ability toget those who should use the data to do so.

Well, that sounds a lot like stuff that I have talked about when describing IBM's Information on Demand strategy. Is your organization good at doing this? I particularly noted the last point in the article, because some of the states complain that their legislators just aren't interested in using the data! Maybe we information professionals have to make that easy (and fun?) to do.

What about the highest-graded states? The article had this to say about one of them:
In Washington State, Governor ChristineGregoire held a series of town hallmeetings on the budget to communicate resultsto citizens and follow up on the budgetarypriorities she had previously establishedwith much citizen input. “We wantto give concrete information about whethera difference has been made or hasn’t"

Yep... this is what everyone wants to know. What did we say we'd do? Did it make a difference? In fact, I've been trying to get this type of information from my financial analyst for some time!

What about states that were graded worse than California?

Some state employees in Rhode Island arestill operating with typewriters—electric, ofcourse, but still a far cry from the ability toshare information in a database. NewHampshire has such weak data-sharing systemsthat it doesn’t know how much itspends each month—kind of like an averageJoe who’s lost his checkbook.

And finally:
At the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s Wyoming. Itstransportation department has linked geographicinformation systems to financialsystems and now knows with exact specificityhow money is being spent, down to thecost of the salt used between each milemarker on the state’s snowy roads.

OK, well, perhaps that is an example of too much information! :-)[Read More]

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