Baseline Magazine - May/June 2010

The Importance of Being Urgent

The nickname “Crackberry” has been around for years, and the addictive nature of the
Blackberry and other smartphones is certainly not a surprise to users. Now, however, there’s
research to support these beliefs. According to an article in Australia’s The Age, a recent
study by Melissa Gregg, of Sydney University, suggests that “participants believed checking
and sending e-mails from home did not constitute work. Yet e-mails were constantly invading
evenings and weekends, potentially affecting family relationships.”
Gregg found that “workers were checking e-mail at night in bed and as early as 6 a.m.
before children woke so they could focus on ‘real
work’ in office hours.” Sound familiar? Barbara
Pocock, of the University of South Australia,
summed it up best: “It fractures people’s
attention because there’s this dipping
in and out. I’m curious about what
this is doing to productivity. We’re
interrupting completion of task, where
the urgent overrides the important.”
The urgent—or, more likely, the
appearance of urgency—overrides the
important. The next time you take out
your smartphone at some off hour, you
might want to think about that line—I
know I will. Perhaps the best approach
would be to shove the thing back in
its case until some more appropriate
time. There really are things in life more
important than e-mail. woul t T p

Oh, Say Can You ‘C’?

Who doesn’t like indices, lists, Top 10s? Well,
here’s a neat one: The “TIOBE Programming
Community Index for April 2010.” For those
of you keeping score, the “C programming
language [is] back at number 1 position!”
Interestingly, C has hovered around
or been on top for quite some time—not
because it’s on the rise, but because of the
decline of its competitor Java. “Java has a
long-term downward trend. It is losing ground
to other languages.” Some of those other
languages in the Top 10 are: C++, PHP, (Visual)
Basic, C#, Python, Perl, Delphi and JavaScript.

Want to see what’s at the very bottom? How about these clunkers: Groovy, Smalltalk, J and C Shell. So, C is a cool software letter, but J isn’t? And plays on C don’t cut it either—C Shell, indeed. And who can imagine a coder working with anything called Groovy.

So, if you’re starting a new project based on Smalltalk, or are going back to school to learn Groovy, think twice. It’s all C, all the time.

BY THE NUMBERS

34%

BY
TIM
MORAN

The percent of IT security
experts who believe that the
business understands security.
Turnkey Consulting’s Governance, Risk and
Compliance Benchmark report

Want to Supersize
That Software?

In a tunnel 17 miles in circumference, some
500 feet beneath the Franco-Swiss border,
lies the LHC (the Large Hadron Collider),
“the world’s most powerful particle
accelerator. High-energy protons in two
counter-rotating beams [are] smashed
together in a search for signatures of
supersymmetry, dark matter and the origins
of mass. ... The detectors could see up to 600
million collision events per second.”
And do you know what has to sift through all
those events? Software. A recent article on arstechnica.
com explains the role of software in this dizzying search for
the origins of the universe. The scope of the data that must be processed coming from the LHC
is staggering. Ofer Rind, a physicist at Brookhaven National Labs, describes all this in computer
science terms as an “embarrassingly parallel problem.”
So, when you’re having some trouble building an enterprise architecture blueprint or CRM’s
got you down, buck up. You could be dealing with an environment in which data produced will
hit a total output of 15 petabytes per year, and the result of your work would be “the answer [to]
many of the most fundamental questions in physics [and] the deep structure of space and time.”
Maybe ERP isn’t so bad after all.

“Organizations today are working hard to get more value from the free-flowing business and social networks that exist outside traditional hierarchical boundaries. We call it the power of netcentricity. While netcentricity is enabled by technology, it also relies on having the right people, policies and processes in place.”