Feb 25

Fight crime with the SnapLogic JumpBox

JumpBox, Tutorials No Comments »

We just released the SnapLogic JumpBox today. This is an Open Source app that allows you to easily integrate data from different sources (web pages, databases, spreadsheets, applications) and transform the data into something useful.

To demonstrate how SnapLogic works I made a screencast that walks you through the process of building an application start to finish. You can watch the video below and get a time-coded table of contents and all the resources I used here. The app we’ll build in that video is one that reaches into a SugarCRM instance, grabs the contacts and then compares them against a list of “enemies of the State” maintained by the Federal government. It’s a quick rudimentary app but gives you a free and quick way to start working towards OFAC compliance without paying exorbitant fees to vendors that sell that service.

While this particular app may not be all that relevant to you, it should get you thinking about how you could use this tool. Ponder for a minute all the mini-challenges you encounter in IT when you have these isolated systems with bits of data that need to be brought together in one place. What could you do with a tool that lets you wrangle records out of a MySQL database, scrape data off a web page, mash it up with data via a public web service and transform it into a web page or an RSS feed or a csv file or an email or… This is an extremely interesting JumpBox and definitely worth playing around with. If you want to tinker, skim the video to get the basics and then launch your own private instance using the orange button on the widget below. And visit SnapLogic.com to learn more about their offering. If you’re really into this stuff, take a look at Yahoo Pipes and compare how the two systems work. Happy tinkering!

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Feb 22

March Metric Madness

Sport & Health 1 Comment »

They say “you can’t improve what you can’t measure.” March is the month I dive into a two-pronged Blitzkrieg assault to put metrics in place for tracking and improving health and wealth. I’ve spent the past couple days working on two projects, namely:

Body For Life Program

This is a 12-week program I did about a decade ago and I can attest that it definitely works if you stick to it. I re-read the book last weekend and printed out copies of the planner today – my roommate and I start the routine tomorrow. My publicly-stated goal here is to return to single-digit body fat by my birthday (May 7th) and to double my strength between now and then.

The program consists of a nutrition and exercise component. You work out six days per week alternating between cardio and weight training. You change your eating habits by increasing the frequency of meals (6x per day) while decreasing the portion sizes and ensuring the meal composition fits a certain profile of nutrients, carbs, fats, protein, etc. You get one day off each week to go nuts, pig out / veg out and you track everything you do down to the individual meal and weight rep (sounds super OCD I know but once you get into it, it becomes habit).

Mint for finances

I had signed up for Mint.com over a year ago and had integrated my bank account and credit card at the time so it’s been quietly tracking my account activity this whole time. I spent the day yesterday learning their system and categorizing a year’s-worth of transactions. For better or worse I now have a crystal-clear view of my negative net worth (woohoo!) and the absurd amount I’ve been spending on eating out at restaurants and going out with friends on weekends. I’m not yet using their “ways to save” recommendations so there’s nothing immediately that saves me money but it’s providing accountability and a big, fat, undeniable motivator for me to make some necessary expense reductions.

This may be a “commander of the obvious” insight but the phrase “you can’t improve what you can’t measure” is simply not true. It is possible to improve in the absence of metrics. To illustrate this take the following example: I could stand in my backyard and curl progressively-larger cinder blocks of unknown weight. My strength would improve over time but I would have no idea by how much. Conversely, I could wire myself up to all kinds of fancy machines that measured muscle density, bicep size, force exerted, body fat, etc. and know everything about my physiology but if I never lifted a weight my strength would go unchanged. The same principle applies to any situation you’re trying to improve: making effective modifications to a web site, reducing wasteful spending, optimizing how you use your time. The metrics are useful insofar as they help you to alter your behavior but ultimately results are the product of one thing alone: action.

On another note, I’ve had writer’s block lately being completely uninspired to write here. For whatever reason I’ve felt I don’t have unique perspective to add to the noisy chatter that is social media. Hopefully the exercise of going through both of these focused efforts will yield some interesting results and tactics that will become fodder for writing. There’s nothing of significance to share today on these fronts but this post serves as a formal declaration of war on sloppy financial and health habits. I promise to post a screencast here of how to get going with Mint.com and the few unintuitive aspects (they’ve got an insanely good UI with only a couple quirks). I’ll also commit to distilling and sharing whatever results and lessons I gain from going through the BFL program again.

Here’s to improving whatever is important to you over the coming months.

Feb 10

“New York, New York” moments and getting one shoe on

Psychology 3 Comments »

If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.
It’s up to you – New York, New York.
-Frank Sinatra

This is a rumination on those tiny binary crossroad moments where it could go either way and the mechanics of what happens in those split-second daily junctures where (as yoda would say), you either “do or do not.” Let’s take these situations: either you’re going to…

  • get up and go jogging in the morning or you’re going to hit the snooze button and you’re not.
  • muster the courage to talk to that person of the opposite sex with whom you’ve been exchanging glances at the cocktail party, or you’re not.
  • put your pack of cigarettes down tomorrow and never pick it up again, or you’re not.
  • confront someone on an injustice you witnessed, or you’re not.
  • jump out of the back of that airplane and skydive 13,000 feet, or you’re not.
  • stay up an hour later tonight and start that project you’ve been talking about for months, or you’re not.

    • There’s a whole study in Psychology called “Cognitive Dissonance Theory” that basically says we humans don’t like to have incompatible beliefs and behaviors. We’ll twist one or the other in the strangest ways until they can live together in harmony. So that decision to hit the snooze button in the morning is rationalized by a single lightning thought like “it looks overcast this morning, I bet it’s a good chance it will rain on my run and I don’t want to risk getting sick so I’ll skip today.” Pick any excuse for any situation- there are an infinite number of ways to justify a cop-out. But think about this:

    Think of those moments in which you successfully resisted the temptation to hit the snooze button. Decompile that scene right down to the very nanosecond before that choice was made when you were still 50/50. Now what happened? What neuron fired that allowed you to overcome the inertia of comfort, put your feet on the cold floor, suit up and start running? Is it possible to bottle that mental sequence and reliably repeat it. Is there a formulaic approach to consistently perform better in this situation? Maybe not perfectly (because nobody is) but let’s say to be 70% effective vs. 30% at overcoming the inertia of comfort. I think there is and I’ll try and verbalize what I believe the crux of the technique is.

    It’s not so much about “Just Do It” as is about suppressing the mind while you allow muscle memory to carry you through the “New York New York” moment. I just made up that term, but I use it to refer to the tipping point at which “if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.” I’ve definitely bailed on my share of morning runs, chickened out in talking to girls, procrastinated on starting a project, etc. But there’s a point at which if I can get at least one running shoe on, that I’m inevitably going to make it out the door and complete the run.

    For David Allen fans, this is the concept of breaking up a daunting task on your todo list into bite-sized chunks and clearing the nebulous-ness that gridlocks action. For me the key to making that morning run comes down to being able to distract my mind long enough until I can get one running shoe on. That’s the magic crest of the hill for me- the point at which gravity starts working with me instead of against. I’ve literally had socks on before and ended up falling back into the covers because the thought of cold air won out. But the single shoe for me is the magic point-of-no-return.

    I realize this insight is probably about as useful as the “bend one of the flaps” advice. But I figured I’d share because maybe this helps one person overcome a mental obstacle. So the question becomes – how do you suppress your mind long enough to get the shoe on? My advice: find some mental activity you can use to sap just enough cycles to distract your mind and then lay out your outfit within arm’s reach the night before to minimize the distraction time necessary to get to the tipping point. In highschool we had to memorize this 15-stanza poem called The Cremation of Sam McGee. As much as that sucked, it’s been a useful tool because I still remember the entire thing by heart and yet it draws enough mental cycles to get the verses ordered right where I can use it as a mental distraction for “New York, New York” moments.

    So my challenge to you:

  • What is the “New York, New York” moment that currently confronts you?
  • What is your equivalent to laying out your running outfit within arm’s reach tonight?
  • What mental distraction technique can you use to power though the 50/50 moment and arrive at the point at which natural momentum will carry you through to successful completion of the task?
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