July 2009 - skunkworks - Skunkworks Site

Top ten tips for preventing innovation
by Gakuru Alex 10 Jul '09

10 Jul '09

Top ten tips for preventing innovation *1. Hire employees looking for safety in their roles*. Innovation happens when people stretch outside their comfort zones – don’t let them stretch! Find people who primarily want security and a nine-to-five role, stay away from those troublemakers who want to “change the world.” *2. Hire incompetent employees*. What better way to prevent innovation than to have people who have to focus just to do the bare minimum? For extra safety, try and find someone who can take credit for other people’s work and hide their own incompetence – these people are easier to promote, which will become important later. If we are forced to hire someone who is competent, it’s critical that we make sure that they only have one area of expertise. People with more than one area of expertise, switch-hitters, just cause trouble by talking to people on other teams. *3.Keep salaries below the 75th percentile.* Innovators know their value – and when they aren’t applying for jobs with intrinsic utility to them, they are commanding higher salaries. If we keep our salaries low, there’s much less risk of one of these innovators sneaking into our organization. As a bonus, we’ll save a fortune! *4. Read The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley of IDEO.* He focuses on the types of people and organizational behavior that encourage innovation. The writing style is very clever – Mr. Kelley writes as if he were trying to encourage innovation – what a riot! He identifies ten personas that contribute to innovation. Put those ten faces on the wall in HR like an FBI most-wanted poster and coach HR to screen those people out. *5. Treat employees like garbage.* Yell at them. Whenever possible, call them at midnight to yell at them some more. They work for us. If they get uppity, make them work on the weekends. Make them dig holes and fill them back up again. Threaten them – especially when they need the job. If you can’t yell, at least be condescending in public forums. Remember we are smarter than they are. Punks. *6.Reward conservative and marginal successes.* The old rule of thumb for office politics was “It takes ten good projects to recover from one bad project.” Stick to it! If we punish people for mistakes when they ’swing for the fences’, and reward them for marginal and safe projects, they will quickly get the idea. This is the most subtle of all the tips – but don’t worry – people will figure out the reward system and shy away from those risky projects. This technique has the added benefit of propogating itself up and down the management hierarchy. Many organizations get lucky, and do this one accidentally. Wish we were all so lucky! *7. Micromanage.* We’ve been promoted because we understand their jobs so well that we could do them in our sleep. Whatever those pesky little people think, it’s wrong. We know what we want, we know how we want it (not like that, you fool!). Every day we should make sure they do things exactly like we want. Even things like using the right font in their emails can be important. If anything slips thru unmanaged, then we aren’t doing our jobs. Of course, if we have a good boss, he’ll tell us exactly how to manage them. *8. Only create customer-requested features.* Let our customers tell us what to do. Lucky for us – customers don’t have big ideas, they keep us focused on what we’re doing. Don’t let them whine about their other problems – that’s not why we’re talking to them. We just want to know if they like the idea of animated buttons on all the dialogs. Stay away from the unhappy customers – if we aren’t getting the job done now, well, we don’t really care what they say (they are existing customers, we need new customers). We’re here to solve our problems. Oh – and don’t second guess the customer. If they say they want the menu items in alphabetical order, well, that’s what they want. The customer is always right. If Henry Ford had listened, think of how fast horses would be today. Even better, appoint a user-representative, then we don’t have to talk to the customers at all. *9.Make performance reviews easy.* Create some easy-to-measure metrics (like # of sick-days taken, # of powerpoint slides created, # of meetings attended), and use those for performance reviews. People always gravitate toward the metric. We can run the reviews with a minimum of effort, giving us more time to tell them how to do their jobs. Just an hour a year. Some managers can give feedback in 15 minutes. *10. Build a kingdom.* When we have information, that means we have power. With that power, we can grow our organization. The more people we have, the more important we are. We need to make sure that those other teams don’t get our information. They might apply it in ways that we didn’t intend. While we’re at it – make sure our people don’t find out what we know. Not only will it protect us from them, but it will keep them from accidentally discovering a more important problem, or an alternate way to apply what they already know to a new problem domain.

3 3

Re: [Skunkworks] Mobile Internet-Getting the best of all worlds.
by wesley kiriinya 09 Jul '09

09 Jul '09

How? Are there drivers for Ubuntu? And do u use the App that comes with the modem? If so, I thot that app is windows only. --- On Wed, 7/8/09, Frankline Chitwa <frank.chitwa(a)gmail.com> wrote: From: Frankline Chitwa <frank.chitwa(a)gmail.com> Subject: Re: [Skunkworks] Mobile Internet-Getting the best of all worlds. To: "Skunkworks forum" <skunkworks(a)lists.my.co.ke> Date: Wednesday, July 8, 2009, 3:38 PM Yes On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 4:32 PM, wesley kiriinya <kiriinya2000(a)yahoo.com> wrote: BTW: Are u using the $afcom modem on Ubuntu? --- On Mon, 7/6/09, Frankline Chitwa <frank.chitwa(a)gmail.com> wrote: From: Frankline Chitwa <frank.chitwa(a)gmail.com> Subject: Re: [Skunkworks] Mobile Internet-Getting the best of all worlds. To: "Skunkworks forum" <skunkworks(a)lists.my.co.ke> Date: Monday, July 6, 2009, 1:40 PM Wesley I think safcom's (1GB bundle) price(2.50/MB) is second only to telkoms 1/MB. And I have surfed on safcom for 200kbps on ubuntu so.... at the moment, I have these funny feelings for safcon...... On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 12:28 PM, Patrick Kariuki <patrick.kariuki(a)gmail.com> wrote: > and create multi-link PPP. 2 bundled L2TP tunnels from each SIM with IPSec - a perfect VPN solution! Someone should bring in 3G routers with dual sim support, the failsafe mechanism makes the whole setup perfect!, especially once the ofc is up and running. On 7/6/09, aki <aki275(a)googlemail.com> wrote: > @Wash and Brian. will mail you offlist later on the changes I made. :-) > _______________________________________________ Skunkworks mailing list Skunkworks(a)lists.my.co.ke http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/skunkworks Other services @ http://my.co.ke Other lists ------------- Skunkworks announce: http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/skunkworks-announce Science - http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/science kazi - http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/admin/kazi/general -- www.dealcent.com - Your electronics shop www.golavish.com - The travel and leisure www.raccuddasys.com - code Development issues -----Inline Attachment Follows----- _______________________________________________ Skunkworks mailing list Skunkworks(a)lists.my.co.ke http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/skunkworks Other services @ http://my.co.ke Other lists ------------- Skunkworks announce: http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/skunkworks-announce Science - http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/science kazi - http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/admin/kazi/general _______________________________________________ Skunkworks mailing list Skunkworks(a)lists.my.co.ke http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/skunkworks Other services @ http://my.co.ke Other lists ------------- Skunkworks announce: http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/skunkworks-announce Science - http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/science kazi - http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/admin/kazi/general -- www.dealcent.com - Your electronics shop www.golavish.com - The travel and leisure www.raccuddasys.com - code Development issues -----Inline Attachment Follows----- _______________________________________________ Skunkworks mailing list Skunkworks(a)lists.my.co.ke http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/skunkworks Other services @ http://my.co.ke Other lists ------------- Skunkworks announce: http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/skunkworks-announce Science - http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/science kazi - http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/admin/kazi/general

4 3

Mobile Boot Camp 2009 at Strathmore University
by Jessica Colaço 09 Jul '09

09 Jul '09

Hi All, You are cordially invited to: Mobile Boot Camp 2009 on 9th - 11th of July 2008 at Strathmore University. The charges are: - Students (Strathmore and non-Strathmore): Ksh 700/- - Non-Students: Ksh 1,500/ More details: http://www.strathmore.edu/aboutus.php?id=171 We look forward to seeing you there. Please email me if you have any queries. Best, -- Jessica Colaço

17 35

New Optical CSS Menus
by David Mugo 09 Jul '09

09 Jul '09

Guys, For all of you who are website developers and those of you who love to just get things done quickly, you will find this very interesting....there is a new technology that is currently tested and working with Firefox 3.77 only, where you can get to a site and just think what you want to see and it translates that from your expressions and gets the relevant content. You need a webcam though or a mic, but you will need to turn your mic volume way up because the mic version reads your breath. Anyone wants code for the menu, talk to me. Currently working with PHP, ASP and RUBY ON RAILS. David. -- Got any life problems? visit www.dearkenya.com

4 3

Dear Old People who run the world...
by saidimu apale 09 Jul '09

09 Jul '09

.... my generation would like to break up with you. Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences. http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/2009/07/today_in_capitalism_20_1.html This brilliant article reminds of an earlier Business Daily piece: "Is Exodus of young executives driven by generation clash in boardroom?" at http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Company%20Industry/-/539550/617890/-/u9k… Saidi

3 2

fyi
by aki 09 Jul '09

09 Jul '09

Four million people living in the grinding poverty of Nairobi’s huge and overcrowded urban slums are on the brink of a massive food crisis. Because they are already so poor and their living conditions already so bad, this deadly threat is hard for the outside world to see. Concern has launched a report urging an immediate response – before it is too late. In just two "neighorhoods" of Kibera slum, the report commissioned by Concern, Care, and Oxfam revealed that more than 5,000 children under five years old are currently suffering from malnutrition, with one-fifth of these suffering from severe acute malnutrition. Food shortages have been exacerbated by drought and poor harvests. Cooking fuel prices have risen by 30-50 percent, and the cost of water has more than doubled. full story here : http://www.concernusa.org/Public/News.aspx?Id=739

2 1

safaricom roaming with vodacom a raw deal for data users
by David Mugo 09 Jul '09

09 Jul '09

Am currently in TZ and within 3g coverage. Using my safaricom line, I get worse connectivity than Kenya's Zain if anyone knows what that means. At the same location i switch sim cards and use a vodacom line, I get serious 3g, up to 250 KBPS, now this is a funny thing because in Nairobi, vodacom subscribers get as good speeds as i get on my safaricom, someone communicate this to safaricom.... David. -- Got any life problems? visit www.dearkenya.com

5 15

Palm Treo 700m
by Job Njogu 09 Jul '09

09 Jul '09

Hi guys. I have this phone from verizon me states. I understand its cdma. Anyone who knows how to get it working with any cdma network in kenya. -- Sent from my mobile device Regards, Job Njogu Muriuki, Phone: +254736333075, +254202360107 Address: 42665 00100 Nrb

2 2

www.tafutagari.com
by Zack Githinji 09 Jul '09

09 Jul '09

Hi all, Any links to the guys who did this site, or is there any skunk(ette) out there who can do a replica, Please contact me offlist, with estimated cost and Time frame. -- Regards, Zack K. Githinji Technical Officer, Cell:+254 722 649199 E-mail:zachgithinji@gmail.com "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

1 0

Local software repository
by Simon Mbuthia 09 Jul '09

09 Jul '09

Hi guys, I want to download MySQL and PHP 5 installers, but my internet speeds are painfully slow (thanks to SG). Anyway, I was just wondering if there is a mirror hosted locally from which I could download the files... something like http://mirror.ac.ke at reasonable speeds, at least. Or alternatively, could someone who is able upload the files to mirror.ac.ke or my.co.ke/pub? Thanks, Me. -- שִׁמְעוֹן

2 1