Christopher Kusek, Technology Evangelist

What is the @girlkawasaki effect? How does this work, and how can it work for you?

Let me first off by telling you that @girlkawasaki is a very real person who has a very real blog.  They’re a very good friend of mine and are fortunate to have been an influence of the first draft of this (Originally it could have been the @cxi effect, but that’d be lame and the fruits of my labors resulted in the direct effect to apply to @girlkawasaki :))

So, WTF is this?!? – Alright, I’ll tell you!

While studying the way Twitter works, and more importantly how other people on Twitter work, I began to analyze some trends and patterns of likely events.  I personally love conversation on all topics, so I would follow people of all backgrounds on twitter.  When someone re-tweets someone else on something interesting, I follow them as well, continuously spreading the love of knowledge whether me sharing or simply learning from others experiences.

I noticed that when you add some people, you may get an immediate follow-back, and more often than not an Auto-DM (Direct Message).  A lot of people find these Auto-DM’s to be a bit annoying.  I simply find them to be rather insincere and only a little annoying. ;) I do like them because Auto-DM’s typically give rise to the fact that you’re using a 3rd party service like SocialToo or others which auto-sends that, and often Auto-follows on your behalf :)

So if you have a boatload of followers like I do (Hey I’m no @guykawasaki) But I do have a fair number of followers, many of which happen to reside in my own industrie(s) You’ll tend to find that by following a lot of people, a lot of people will often follow you back.

So in that first test, @girlkawasaki wanted followers for the same reasons I do (People to learn and share with) so she followed a bunch of the people I (@cxi) happen to have been following and a number of them ~half followed her back.  And this trend would carry on for some time, of people following her either directly (a response to being followed) or randomly based upon tweets, comments and interaction.

So the next phase of this, once @girlkawasaki was seen to have a comfortable following of stable tweets, I then tried to follow everyone (minus spammers and locked accounts) that happened to be *Following* her ~650 people were following @girlkawasaki which were then followed.

This is where it gets interesting.  You might think “I’ll get a mass of followers instantly!”  But that isn’t true and isn’t the case, because people use different services which have large databases with different scrubbing and updating routines.   The result turns out to be that after the first hour of following ~650 people,  ~130 twitter accounts followed back.

This is after the first hour ofcourse, and after several hours we’ll see how the numbers reflect.    I’m not saying you’re guaranteed to get hundreds of followers if you follow everyone who is following @girlkawasaki, however after one full day I’ll update this to include what the final number looks like.    The account I used in this test is indeed an actual real twitter account so these are real live and valid numbers to be working with. :)

This is not a test of a Denial of Service, more of an interest of parties out there (like me) who want to follow more people and want more followers so we can continue our conversation in life, in Tweetdom and most importantly with ourselves :)

This is no disrespect to anyone who follows @girlkawasaki and are interesting in what she tweets (both actual tweets and her wonderful blog posts :)) Just think how many followers you get by consequence when you don’t fall into that small criteria of auto-followers :)

Thanks, and don’t hesitate to ask any questions or leave any comments on your success! :)

Control Group: 373 followers in 17hrs, for 56% followback!

When that’s out of 650 that’s pretty amazing!

It’s been asked – Hey what kind of features do you get when you use Google Apps in the Standard Edition?

For those of who you use Google Apps will realize it is free, so you can host your email (as I do) and have the rest of the apps controlled and assigned out there for the huge cost of $0.00

Let’s take a look at a few of the distinctive features.

By the looks of it, I have Webpages (I don’t use) Start Pages (Don’t use!) Email (Do use!) Chat (Use while in Email) Calendar (Don’t use) and Sites also not being used.

One cool feature of User Accounts is Contact Sharing!

A cool specific features for the Domain Settings happen to be some granular control, one feature of which Sarah was interested in knowing!

Another cool bit is Service Setting does allow you granular control over each of your Services that you have available.   But those few things aside, this was just an extremely high level look at the Free offerings that Google has as part of Standard Edition

Hooray! It is now time to drill into the Health Summary and Detailed Health check!

For those who remember the last Dashboard snapshot, we had a number of warnings and notices on this filer!

So, we’re going to drill down into the 12 warnings and 6 notices!

The Health Check Details will provide you with a number of “sections” which will provide a number of bits of information (You may have one or more of the areas I’ll be quoting out)

It all starts with the Health Check Analysis:

Very basic, straight forward and provides you with a timeline of what the recommendations are based upon.  This can be especially useful if you say “I fixed that!” you know when its referencing so as to not freak out!

Next comes System Level Warnings:

You’ll need to zoom in to see what kind of cool stuff there is, but I’ll zoom in for you in some areas I want to make sure you recognize.

That little bad boy there, oh my god, so cool if you happen to want to actually find out Why there is an error instead of knowing there is one.

So, if we click on that lun.offline message to figure out “WTF” is going on, we get this!

For simplicity sake, it showed us the exact error in the logs, showed us an indication as to why this happens and provides corrective actions on what to do!

There are other better examples of corrective actions (such as replace disk, unmap/remap luns, collect a trace) and so on and so forth to help you not only manage your system better, but come to better terms with the ‘warnings’ of your systems so you can be in better command and control of your own operations.

Next up is System Level Notices:

This is cool because it tells you something outright, and then provides you a link to a Bug Report on it, so you can follow the status especially if it applies to you!

Now this is cool as well, Volume Related Notices:

Note the disclaimer: These are based on conservative guidelines and may or may not be applicable to this system, but you should definitely know about it if you weren’t aware!

What I like about this, is it calls out specific volumes and discusses their snapshot usage, snapshot reserve and snapshot schedules (3 areas I find often accidently configured wrong and a hotbed of areas to clean up!)

And last but not least, another favorite area, Summary of Disks requiring Firmware Upgrade:

I personally hate playing guessing games of “Hmm, are my disks on the right rev? Do I need to upgrade?” etc, etc, etc… that same old story.  No matter how many types or different disks you have in the system, this Health Check will tell you the skinny.  

The only thing which would make this cooler, is Shelf Firmware Upgrade:

(I had to go to another filer to get this screen capture, because all these filers are current ;))

One of my favorite parts of this Health Check tool is that after I’ve upgraded and updated a system and I want to feel all warm and fuzzy about the work, I’ll go look at these details and make sure I’m not seeing warnings, notices, backrevved disks or modules, etc.

This not only saves me and my customers time and money at that moment, it also pays off dividends in the long-term.  Less work to be done to manage and maintain, less chance for unknown downtime because you know the EXACT state of your system at any given point.

The Premium AutoSupport toolset (This being just one part of it) opens the door to allowing you to not only self manage, but self-control and I’ll tell you – any system I’ve felt comfortable and confident in after building it, has never gone down.

It’s not magic, a special arcane craft or art form.   It’s clear conscious best practices and using the tools available to you, an ounce of prevention is worth an hour of downtime! :)

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this segment, I’ll be hitting up Visualizations next so look forward to my delivery of that!

Disclaimer: The information above reflects only some of the type of notices you can receive.  If you do not see any of these notices on your system that is great! If you encounter additional ones (Aggregate Level Notices, Volume Related Warnings, etc) it is not a problem just an education of the current health of that particular system and should be reviewed.

First of all, this is not an issue with Tweetdeck, this is an issue with Twitter!

How I personally handle this issue (And I haven’t hit an API limitation using just Tweetdeck)

Is go in and modify the API values to look like this:

As you can see, the major difference is the “All Friends” has been increased from 1min to 1min 12s.

That minor difference alone is easily enough to make up for the API limits on an hourly basis.

If you continue to run out of API calls in an hour, increase that number to 2 minutes or beyond.

While you’re at it, upgrade to Tweetdeck 0.21 Beta released: Christmas Eve!

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Firstly, a hearty congratulations to the 8 Year old (and 1 day) Lavina Shree who recently completed her MCP Exam in C#.

[NDTV via NewLaunches]

She has made quite an accomplishment for defeating the previous title holder Arfa Karim from Pakistan who was 10 Years old at the time she completed her MCP exam in 2005.

Apparently, she is 8 years old, and not 9 years old as some of the stories report (Her own website reports this)

Okay, time for the Therapy Faq on this.

Q: Should I feel bad about myself and my own certifications?

A:  No, why should you feel bad?   If you had a photographic memory and were 8 years old, wouldn’t you be able to find the time to study just a bit? I mean, outside of your regular 80 hour workweek fixing networks or dealing with your significant other, I’m sure you’d be able to find a few minutes to study for an exam, right?

Q:  What? But seriously, she’s 8 years old! Not even 9 years old like the other reports are saying!

A:  Wait, you’re right.    I forgot these exams aren’t based upon sole memorization and require you to have to think about extremely bound concepts the likes of which cannot exist in books.   I mean when I go into the Oracle to take the exam, it analyzes what I have in my brain and then starts providing dynamic questions the likes of which noone could ever hold challenge to.

Q: Does this happening make the Certification process at all less valuable?

A: Absolutely not.   That same analysis could be said of the Bar Exam, SAT’s or GRE’s.    Some people are extremely good at certain things (say, memorization) but that is not to say that they know everything there is, only what they’ve read.   So, while you can know the ‘answer’ to a defined question, if provided with a question outside the context of original discussion that shows your true ability to innovate and provide a solution.   If I want someone to be able to recite back to me verbatim a fixed question/answer, I’d get Wikipedia or something.

Q: So you’re saying I should feel good for this girl, and not feel bad about myself?

A: Exactly.  I think it is great, prior to this a lot of people didn’t even realize there was such a thing as the MCP.  Now perhaps some may feel this is bad PR, but any PR is better than none, and this will pass.    Especially when a girl who is cited as having performed feats of memorization at age 3? No, this will definitely do wonders for the Certification community and help to improve the process as a whole for years to come.   We’ve been watching it come for the past several years as tests have improved to be more relevant, and this will be no different.

Good luck out there, get ready for a whole new Certification year! And I look forward to the new innovative Betas as you should!