Recently in Technical Category

Each technical company has their own mechanisms of knowledge sharing. For a technical contributor though, publishing a whitepaper is the ultimate goal. At HP we realize how hard that can be for consultants working 40+ hour weeks delivering for our customers. Our attempt to solve that problem is with an internal publication process called Knowledge Briefs. They are short papers, written and reviewed by the technical staff, and can be published fairly quickly by anyone in the company.

This year HP took four of the top Knowledge Briefs and publsihed them externally on hp.com. One of our very own received this honor. Way to go Chris!

A colleague of mine (David Morse) points to a Nerd Test in which he scored a 83. When you take a test like this what do you really want the outcome to be. The competitive part of me wanted to beat that 83 and be more nerdy, but the cool happening-dude part of me wanted me to score a 12. The outcome. I'm a geek too.

I bet you Dave and Charlie score in the 90's!

UPDATE: The wife scored an 88. I guess I should go back to college.

My customer brought in Jimmy Wales to speak to a group of their top technologists. For those of you that don't know who Jimmy Wales is, he is the founder of Wikipedia and he is considered the Father of the Wiki. Dave Lemen summed up his presentation well in his Wiki Rock Star post.

As a technologists and an HP'er I was particularly interested when he discussed the software and infrastructure behind Wikipedia. With the amount of data they host and requests they handle, 200 servers spread across the world seemed rather small. He spoke gleefully of Yahoo and the support they have provided with a data center for Wikipedia in Asia. He spoke the exact opposite of the other data centers, one in particular, stating the "slow HP servers" were the current bottleneck in the system.

HP doesn't want Jimmy Wales making a statement like this ever. He is traveling the globe speaking to hundreds of people every working day. Wikipedia is an Internet Top 20 website. I don't know how they got the hardware. I don't know how old it is. I don't think it even matters. We want Jimmy Wales to be an HP evangelist. Come on HP, let's step up and make a donation to Wikipedia! If not for the sake of our own name, but for the sake of the culture that Wikipedia represents.

Update: HP France donated the orignial hardware to Wikipedia. Yeah HP! The hard part now is getting them to do it again.