Use blog as top level notes. Also about email, electronic notes, ISO 9000 and RUP, and tablet PC

Use blog as top level notes. Also about email, electronic notes, ISO 9000 and RUP, and tablet PC


To make sure that I keep writing blog and to keep myself honest in writing, I will stop writing my top-level “notes”, and start to move the content to my blog. Of course, I will still keep my low-level notes, because they contain some of my passwords :-)

Immediately, we need a rule: I change my notes often; however, I should not change my blog once it is published. The trade-off: for small changes, I post comments; for bigger changes, I post another blog, provide link(s) to its previous version.

----------------- More elaborations:

I know that I will need sometime to get used to it: we sometimes put some obviously incorrect, yet creative ideas in our notes. Because the notes are private, so, it does not matter; but now, we need to be careful. However, we still want to keep the creativity.

However, it is doable; because we have done it before. I guess it started with emails. Looking back, using email, as innocuous as it seems, is revolutionary in our technical thinking: by email, we begin to think while we do “persistent” communication (i.e., talking does not count), instead of think first and then communicate. I know it is not that big deal in political thinking ;-), but for technical thinking, that is a novel thing.

Using email also helps us to ease the pain to switch paper notes into electronic notes; more accurately, using emails makes it a necessity to make electronic notes, because otherwise you have to maintain both emails and paper notes. However, because the concept of “(extensive) electronic notes” is so difficult, it takes a while. Often I can still see people, even programmers, using paper notes as their “primary” notes..

Sometimes I feel that the most difficult concept in ISO 9000, UP, RUP etc. is simply the fact that it effectively requires people to take electronic notes. I understand that there is a huge “organizational” element here (“tacit knowledge ownership”). However, it seems that an equally important factor is a simple cognitive one: people are not used to write electronic notes, yet.


Why? Simple: It is still too difficult. Writing electronic notes is still not at it prime time, yet. You may say I am crazy. No, I am not. It is amazing that it took so long to do such a simple thing.

There are a lot of challenges. I do not want to list them. The good news is that its prime time is coming. I bet it is a TabletPC, with voice recognition, handwriting recognition, build-in camera/scanner and voice recorder, wireless Internet and phone, and with processor, memory, and disk space equivalent with its contemporary desktop/laptop PCs. The last one -- although sounds ambiguous -- is important, because we need one (virtual) machine as our primary machine that can basically do everything; otherwise it is will be too confusing. Note that the word “virtual” is important here; perhaps we will use a TabletPC as the human-computer interface, and the TablePC will communicate with other things.

You may say, why TabletPC? Because human-computer interface: we need typing; typing requires certain size. The minimal size is TabletPC. Until we have affordable and reliable electronic paper or/and light projection keyboards/screens, which we may have after at least another 5 years, we have to use TablePC.