Working from home: a collection of thoughts

A few weeks ago, my group participated in a mandatory work from home day. This is an ongoing thing that all groups in the central IT organization are doing in turn. (The reason why is not entirely clear to me. Cynically, I suspect it’s because they want to make people work on snow days or they want to oversubscribe our office space. That’s entirely speculation on my part.) I’m not convinced that test is very useful, since it does little to simulate real-world conditions. Knowing ahead of time that I’d be working from home, I took steps to ensure I was prepared.

Since I normally leave my workstation on anyway, I mainly had to take home my headphones. The rest of my work could be sanely accomplished over SSH, through replicated files (via SpiderOak), or with a web page. My group already uses a Jabber server for IM communication, and we coordinated a Google+ hangout in order to conduct face-to-face meetings. (As an aside, I’ve developed a new management maxim: you should never have more direct reports than can fit in a Google+ hangout.) We worked fairly well that day, at least from my perspective. Since it was a day when no meetings were on my calendar, it was a fairly reclusive day anyway. I did end up having one meeting with someone outside the group, which we conducted via Google+. It worked well enough. A better test would have been conducted on a more meetingful day, with the entire IT organization home at once. Really, a multiple-day test would be better, since I suspect the temptation would be to put off complicated interactions until the following day.

This morning, faced with the possibility of a very unpleasant commute home (near-blizzard conditions existed most of the day), I opted to work from home. This time, I didn’t have my headphones, which wasn’t much of a problem because there was nobody to call. So many people take the days between Christmas and New Year’s Day off that even if I were in the office, it would basically be a ghost town. It was nice to see that an unplanned WFH day worked about the same as the planned one, though it remains an un-representative case.

I’d like to see this test conducted in a more meaningful manner. As I alluded to above, a full week with all of the IT staff working from home would provide a more meaningful result. My productivity was slightly dependent on my workstation at the office remaining online, though I could recover from that if I needed to. It would just involve finding by accident all of the packages I’ve installed at work that I don’t have installed at home. I’m interested to see if there are any follow-up efforts.

Advancing science with your smartphone

The network of Doppler radars used by the National Weather Service is a powerful tool for forecasters. It can detect the intensity of precipitation, the motion of (and in) storms. With the ongoing deployment of dual-polarization upgrades, radars can even detect the type of precipitation. But radar can’t detect precipitation at ground level. In the past, the NWS has depended on a small number of trained volunteer spotters to provide “ground truth.” A recent project at the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) aims to expand the number of precipitation reports.

Called “PING”, the Precipitation Identification Near the Ground project uses mobile phone apps and a website to make it easy for members of the general public to provide immediate feedback on precipitation conditions. Feedback is available to the NWS and the public. The apps are available for free and present an easy interface. Expanding the available pool of spotters will be of great benefit to scientific understanding and to the warning process in general.

Coming up: LISA ’12

It may seem like I’ve not been writing much lately, but nothing can be further from the truth. It’s just that my writing has been for grad school instead of Blog Fiasco. But don’t worry, soon I’ll be blogging like a madman. That’s right: it’s time for LISA ’12. Once again, I have the privilege of being on the conference blog team and learning from some of the TopPeople[tm] in the field. Here’s a quick look at my schedule (subject to change based on level of alertness, addition of BoFs, etc):

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Now I just need to pack my bags and get started on the take-home final that’s due mid-week. Look for posts from me and my team members Matt Simmons and Greg Riedesel on the USENIX Blog.