CQ2

In Malcolm Gladwell’s worth-reading Outliers, he makes the case that developing expertise in anything requires 10,000 hours.  It’s a rule; the ten-thousand hour rule.  If you work 2,000 hours in a year, that means it takes five years to become an expert.

There are lots of examples of this in practice; to me, it seems roughly right.

For example, in late medieval Europe, this rule seems to apply to the guild craftsman system, vestiges of which still remain.  You apprenticed to a master for a period of time, typically three to five years, living with him like a son and learning the trade.  You might start out sweeping the floors and taking care of the tools, but you progressed to working alongside the master or, if he had a large workshop, journeyman craftsmen, but always under the supervision of the master.  After your apprenticeship you were sent out into the world as a journeyman yourself, with your reputation at least initially dependent on the reflected prestige of your master.

This guru-disciple relationship was formally regulated by the craft guild that the master belonged to; only masters could have apprentices and only masters belonged to the guild.  In order to get master status you have to submit a ‘masterpiece’ to the guild.

Kathie Brobeck was kind enough to send this photo of a pillar inscribed with Ājīvika ascetics from the south Kōśala site of Mallar/Malhār in what used to be western Orissa and eastern Madhya Pradesh but which is now a part of the new state of Chhattisgarh.  (More on the enigmatic Ājīvikas previously and, much better, in Basham’s History and Doctrine of the Ājīvikas.)

I’d never heard of Malhār before, which goes to show you how much I know.   The site was excavated between 1975 and 1978, I think by the University of Sagar, but I haven’t found the excavation reports yet.  It’s clearly a large, important site; from the satellite imagery you can distinctly see several enormous circular moats surrounding large ruined structures.  The site may be synonymous with either or both of the ancient cities of Śarabhapura and Mallalapatana.  For more on this debate, see the Introduction to Ajay Mitra Shastri’s Inscriptions of the Śarabhapurīyas, Pāṇḍuvaṁśins, and Somavaṁśins, esp. p. 122 of the introduction, not the main volume.  (I’m still trying to get up to speed on my South Kōśala history, so please pardon the inevitable errors.)

Jitāmitra Prasāda Siṃhadeba’s Cultural Profile of South Kōśala mentions (p. 298)  ‘colossal’ images of the Jain Tirthankaras found there, and Byomakesh Tripathy’s survey article “Buddhist Remains in Western Orissa [.pdf] refers to images of the Buddha, Avalokitesvara, Manjusri, and Hevajra.  And Doris Meth Srinivasan, in her Many Heads, Arms and Eyes, describes a supposedly well-known large (5′) four-armed Vaisnava image found at Malhār.  So it shouldn’t be too surprising to find the Ājīvikas represented here, too.

Now available from Novell IT Consulting: Mission-critical Services for SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension [pdf.].  If you need it, you know you need it, and I know the guys who work on this in the field; they’re really top-notch, and they’re closely connected to the development team.

Maybe it’s been there forever but I just realized that Wikipedia has a .pdf generator that creates a nicely templated printable document out of Wikipedia articles.  So, for example, here’s the article on Savonarola., and here’s the link to the .pdf generator (and the output, at least today’s, of that generator, for the truly lazy.)

This goes a long way, I think, to addressing the doubts that rotary dial people still have about Wikipedia.  The presentation layer is very very important and the clean, professional-looking printable version, bristling with scholarly apparatus and legal boilerplate, is effective for a certain kind of reader.  Not everyone, but the beauty is that you can create as many presentation layers as needed; this printable version, like the version on my iPhone, for instance, strips out the discussion and history pages.  Others, looking for semantic links in Wikipedia, will parse and present it in other ways.

SUSE Studio, now in beta, allows you to build custom versions of our Linux distribution via a slick and easy web interface.

This is good for nerds who want to impress their girlfriends* with portable versions of SLES on a USB stick.

It’s better for ISVs (independent software vendors) who want to create appliance versions of their applications

But, I think, it’s best for corporate IT shops that are looking to create a standard build environment for their technology infrastructure.  In Novell’s consulting organization, we have a popular core build [.pdf] offering, which does much the same thing, except with requirements gathering, security reviews, documentation, and all that complicated enterprise-y stuff.  Remember that a distribution is a kind of application marketplace, with more applications than you’ll ever need or want.  Enterprise IT usually wants less, if only for manageability and security concerns, which is why customers routinely hire Novell consulting to come and create custom versions of the distribution for them.

If they want to skip all that, this tool (screencast) allows them to create their own core builds and what we call ‘personalities’ on top of the core build — a personality for a database server will be different than a personality for a web server, for example, but the core build underneath will be the same.

Corporate IT teams can use it at the end of a regular build process to create blessed workloads consisting of “JeOS” (just enough operating system) + personality + custom or packaged applications.  These can be XML config files, .iso images, VMs, or AMIs for deployment to Amazon’s cloud services.  The deployment is just a checkbox option; pretty cool.

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