The USS Quad Damage

Tim Berners-Lee’s idea of linked data is kind of infecting my mind. I have smaller, more immediate goals in mind, though: I want to link data in my system to other data on my system. That is, stuff that’s directly on my computer, not just on the internet.

Wikis have gone a long way towards solving some of my problems, as have a number of the Gnome tools. The Tomboy TODO lists, gnome-terminal, etc. all have superb handling of URLs / URIs. I can click, click-and-drag, and generally type in links not only to web addresses, enabling me to uniquely point to where related information is kept, but also allows me to point to SMB shares, as well as my own machine to look at files I’ve got which embiggen the related information. Alongside a couple of other nifty searchy thingies in firefox, I can get to information in my company, and my computer, pretty quickly.

There are a couple of problems in my road to linking my data, though. The first is the biggest, not because it’s particularly heinous in it’s non-linkability, but mainly because it’s so widely used: email. I can’t link to an email I’ve got. I want to be able to click a button in an arbitrary application and get to the email I’m referring to. I know I can do this, because after searching using beagle, I can get to my email by double-clicking it in the beagle window. It even gives me a URI for it. However, unless I get to the email through beagle, there’s no way of getting to my email. Interestingly, I cannot get to beagle queries using a URI, but beagle does have a web front-end, which you can use links to refer to.

Anything that’s not just a file in your system should be easily reference-able by a URI. Otherwise it makes my life suck a little.

I was reading a review of a video game and it got me thinking: It’s a video game about war and in order to make the most of your units, you have to consider their emotional state. Let me re-iterate: This is a video game, and as you’re explaining how you play to your friends, you’re telling them to put this female unit next to a guy because she fancies men, and it will help her do her job.

How many real managers think about the emotional state and attitudes of their workers when thinking about how to solve their problems? In most video games (RTS mostly) you can sometimes see units as expendable, and until the more recent games, where managing individual units to get the most out of them — by placing them in appropriate positions, or thinking about their individual strengths and weaknesses. Valkyrie Chronicles is the only one, to my knowledge, that makes you tactically address two units with the same roles (such as engineers or snipers) differently, based on their personality traits.

I’m going to mash up a term: Uber Micro Management. Unlike micro-management, this doesn’t really involve messing with your team’s daily activities, or telling them how to do their job. Rather it’s about understanding your team’s motivations, attitudes, and personalities. A single guy came up with twitter in his own time. He’s not a magician, just a nucleation point. All engineers can come up with the same ideas, but they need to be nourished for the seed to grow.