Recent Events for foo.be MainPageDiary (Blog) Previous Next

2011-01-01 Often I m wrong but not always

A shaky night

Often I'm Wrong But Not Always...

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future. Niels Bohr

Usually at the beginning of the year, you see all those predictions about the future technology or social comportment in front of those technologies. In the information security field, you see plenty of security companies telling you that there will be much more attacks or those attacks will be diversified targeting your next mobile phone or your next-generation toaster connected to Facebook. Of course! More malware or security issues will pop up especially if you increase the number of devices in the wild, their number of wild users and especially those wild users waiting to get money fast. So I'll leave up to the security companies waiting to make press release about their marketing predictions.

As we are at the beginning of a new numerical year, I was cleaning up a bit my notes in an old Emacs folder (from 1994 until 2001). I discovered some interesting notes and some drawings and I want to share a specific one with you.

In my various notes, I discovered an old recurring interest for Wiki-like technologies at that time. Some notes are making references to some Usenet articles (difficult to find back) and some references to c2.com articles how a wiki is well (un)organized. Some notes were unreadable due to the lack of the context for that period 1. There is even a mention to the use of a Wiki-like in the enterprise or building a collaborative Wiki website for technical FAQ. There are some more technical notes about the implementation of the software to have a wiki-like FAQ website including a kind of organization by vote. I let you find the today's website doing that…

Suddenly, in the notes, there is a kind of brainstorm discussion about the subject. The notes include some discussion from myself and from other colleagues. And there is an interesting statement about Wiki-like technology from a colleague : it's not because you like the technology that other people will use it or embrace it. That's an interesting point but the argument was used to avoid doing something or invest some times in Wiki-like approach. Yes, this is right but the question is more on how you are making stuff and how people would use it. My notes on that topic ended up with the brainstorm discussion. A kind of choke to me…

What's the catch? Not doing or building something to test it out. You can talk eternally about an idea if it is good or bad. But the only way to know if this is a good or bad idea is to build the idea. I was already thinking like that but I forgot that it happened to me… Taking notes is good especially when you learned that you should pursue and transform your ideas in a reality even with the surrounding criticisms.

My conclusion to those old random notes would be something like this:

If you see something interesting and you get a strong conviction that could succeed in one way or another, do or try something with it. (please note the emphasis on the do)

Looks like, I'll keep again this advise for the next years…


Footnotes:

1. note to myself: better explain context when describing something or an idea to implement