The template separates Project tasks into five different phases:

1. Planning
2. Team
3. Prototype
4. Implementation
5. Closure

The template may have been designed by a Software Project Manager hence the ‘Prototype’ and ‘Implementation’ phases. But then again these phases may be used in other industries as well. You may choose to replace these phases with ones that are more suitable to your project or job function. For example, you may choose:

1. Initiation and Planning
2. Design and Execution
3. Control Activities
4. QA and Support
5. Pre and & Go-Live Activities
6. Closure Activities

This template is also useful because it can be treated as a high-level Project Timeline report shared with senior executives. I do not think executives care about the 100s (or maybe even 1000s) of tasks that we have set up neatly as a Project Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). The latter primarily serves as an instrument for the Project Manager and his team to control and monitor scheduled tasks. Executives or senior managers on the other hand prefer a simple high-level view of the project timeline and this template does just that.

]]> http://www.petrosrigas.com/pubs/a-sample-project-timeline-template/feed 0 http://www.petrosrigas.com/pubs/facebook-loading-issues-in-google-chrome http://www.petrosrigas.com/pubs/facebook-loading-issues-in-google-chrome#comments Sun, 19 Feb 2012 05:39:44 +0000 petachilles http://www.petrosrigas.com/?p=295 Facebook Loading Issues!

Have you had issues with opening the Facebook page from your Google Chrome or even with Mozilla Firefox? Let me illustrate the problem further.

You browse to http://www.facebook.com and the page loads and loads and loads…yet nothing comes up. You notice a message on the bottom status bar that says: “waiting for static.ak.fbcdn.net”. And this goes on forever. You try various things:

1. Clear your browser’s cache.
2. Re-start your browser.
3. Attempt to use other browsers.
4. Re-start your computer.
5. Re-start your network router.
6. Flush your DNS settings.

Still, the problem presides. What should you do?

This is what worked for me.

1. Run Notepad as an Administrator: it is crucial that you run the Notepad application as an Administrator. Otherwise you will not be able to write certain changes to a file (indicated later).

2. Make sure all your browsers are closed. Make sure they are by checking the processes in your Task Manager. Sometimes Chrome runs various applications (or extensions) in the background. You need to make sure all these processes are closed.

3. Using Notepad, open the following file: %systempartition%\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

4. Add the following line and save: 159.148.86.199  static.ak.fbcdn.net. Note: you may first want to make sure ‘static.ak.fbcdn.net’ resolves to the above-mentioned ip address. To do so, browse to ‘iwebtool‘ and ‘ping’ static.ak.fbcdn.net and make sure it’s the same. If not, then replace it with the ip you get a response from).

5. Open Google  Chrome and browse to http://www.facebook.com.

Problem solved!

Being a professional stylist, my father worked at a salon in well-known 5 Star hotel in the region. His earnings were enough for our upbringing. He had embarked on a career that should have brought further prosperity and success.

Early 1974, and before the war broke out, my brother Pantelis (named after my grandfather) is born. He was a cute little blond baby and was a center of admiration for our friends and relatives specifically for my grandparents. Let me just say his birth brought about a more peaceful relationship between my mother and her in-laws.

My parents had planned to send Pantelis to a Greek school nearby to help make sure our Greek lineage survives and that he learns the Greek language, which is otherwise considered a sin by modern-day Greeks. Ask me today. I’d rather not tell you about my infamous visits to the Greek Embassy to seek a renewal of my Passport. When they realize I could not speak Greek, I become a “traitor” in their eyes or at least that’s what it feels.

Put it shortly, I describe this period as a mere recounting of a standard family person raising a modest family in an area that was about to become the center of all war crimes in the region.

All I can say at this juncture that despite what was to come, I wish I were alive to witness what was about to happen. At least that would have put me in touch with my biological father. I never smelled or touched him. I only know of him through pictures and stories. Sometimes I feel betrayed. I feel like it was his fault that I do not know him. Nevertheless, life went on as it does routinely for others. Sometimes routine is not that bad specifically when what breaks it ends up destroying one’s family or even a whole nation. Picture what happened recently in Japan.

I do know the Church where my parents wed was known as Mar Elias, which is still a center of attraction for many tourists and visitors up to this day.

My father was a sort of jack-of-all-trades. He was a hair stylist, an artist, a poet, and a survivor. His parents, Pantelis and Annette, did not really approve of his marriage to my mother, who was not Greek, and was not ‘up-to-standard’ per their strict requirements for a beloved daughter-in-law. Before knowing my mother, Pantelis accompanied Pavlos to Cyprus to seek a “better” future. Not sure exactly how many months they spent seeking “golden” opportunities, but I do know that their time spent there also involved negotiations for a pre-arranged marriage, which did not come to fruition.

Back in Lebanon, my father embarked on a career as a hair stylist. His customers were famous actors, dancers, and celebrities from around Lebanon. He worked at a famous hotel in the city center and became familiar to guests of various backgrounds and classes. He was a hard-working person and put all his efforts into his career seeking what everyone would seek today – a family and a dream of a life of full sustenance. That was all before the war.

The world is cruel and it has been very cruel to him. Despite the fact we were living among self-proclaimed evangelists, most of them treated us with cruelty. Now that I’m older and wiser, I wonder how people can treat others like that.

After my father died, my grandparents only saw him through us. We were young – my brother and myself. I remember the small hut they lived in. It was literally a perhaps 20 sqm room – that had 1×1 sqm toilet and perhaps 3×3 living room. The toilet was in the kitchen. I remember we had to squeeze ourselves in. What tragic conditions! Yet it was one of my favorite places to hang around. There was a small window in the so-called living room where my grandfather would place a his tear-drop medicine that had a yellow cap on top. I loved those because I could squeeze those bottles to spray water of them – when they were empty of course. I used to have my grandfather promise he’d give them to me when they were empty – and he always did.

My grandfather was a hard-working person. He’d wake up early morning (possibly 4-5 am) and walk up a steep trip to work at Middle East College’s bakery. It was a tiresome trip for a person his age. I think he did so for about 15 years and I don’t think he ever complained about it. I don’t know if life had a sense of purpose for him especially after my father died. I can only speculate today that he just was killing time. He was old and he just wanted to survive what was left of his days. He was not particularly happy as I recall and I think what brought happiness into his otherwise miserable life was the sight of either me or my brother. We changed his world. He saw his son, Pavlos, in us. We were everything to him. Nothing much left for him in this world. And the sad fact is we were too young to realize his miseries. Now I do and I only wish I lived it with him.

He was sick multiple times. He suffered from many illnesses specifically asthma. I remember being in a car transporting me from Bouchrieh Adventist School up to Middle East College. And on the way up that steep hill, he’d be walking with his hands on his chest trying to breathe – the inhaler in his hand. And someone in the car would say: poor old man. I couldn’t do anything about it. I knew he was suffering but I didn’t think it was that bad being a 5 or 6-year-old kid. When I think of it now, I blame everyone who knew him and never stopped to lend a hand. That place was cruel and I truly believe so today. The people there are cruel and they’ll always be. Fake and pretentious people. In fact, if such people wind up in heaven, I don’t ever want to be a part of it. I’d rather burn in hell not only until I die rather until eternity. I don’t care. If you ever read this, I don’t even care if you think that I’m an unforgiving person. Who cares. Those people were cruel and they’ll always that way to me.

I was a young kid. And one day as I was walking up that steep road to Middle East College, I saw him. He was standing under a pine tree on a road curve next to a well-known grocery shop known at the time as “NAJI”. I wondered: “what is my grandfather doing here under a pine tree?” Shouldn’t he be at home now? With his wife? It was either a holiday or some day in the weekend. I don’t even recall. It may have even been after he stopped working. So I stopped and went to see him. He was scraping some of the dry skin off that pine tree. It was like he was thinking deeply and I’m sure those were very sad thoughts. He looked depressed. Surely he was happy to see me. We spoke for a while and I remember him saying: “Peter, when I retire, I want all my retirement funds to go to you and your brother Pantelis”. I don’t want that dirty man ‘Rene’ (or his son-in-law) to have anything from it. I want you and your brother to use this money for a better future. I smiled and told him not to worry about us. We just wanted him better and happy. Yet and again I was too young to do anything. I don’t think he liked his son-in-law at all. He may have even hated him. Because ‘Rene’ wasn’t always good to them. I think he was a tough person and was too hard on his daughter or my auntie ‘Nadime’. He was thinking of us and wanted to find ways to make our lives better. He just couldn’t. This is very much a sort of my situation right now. I want to go back in time and change some things, which I can’t. I want to face those cruel people and I want to tell them in their face that they are cruel. Death is nothing. It’s just the end of an otherwise miserable life. Death is comfort. Those people don’t even deserve death. They deserve much better than that. They deserve to live and witness their cruelty manifested on them.

That place, where my grandfather stood, was not far from the cemetery, where my father was ‘put to rest’. I wonder whether he wanted to be with him at that time. He may even wanted to die fast without the suffering involved in the process. I don’t know. It just was too sad and that memory won’t leave me. It’s kind of imprinted in my heart and it always comes back. I’m in the middle of it today as it is happening right now and my hands tied.

On several occasions prior to this event, my brother and I and maybe some of the kids that played with us passed through that area. It was supposedly a happy place. It was a good shortcut for us skipping possibly 1 km otherwise the regular road. Yet now I think of it as the place where my grandfather was saying his ‘goodbyes’. He was standing right there under one of the pine trees and he was thinking of the end. He’d stay there for hours, days, weeks, and perhaps months. I remember that because I did see him on various occasions. It was not only one time. I just did not spend enough time with him to understand basically what was running through his mind. I know I was wondering but I was not that curious. I was too occupied with going to play football or some other games with my friends. It wasn’t my priority. And now this same thought just would not leave me. Because not only I want to know what he was thinking, but also I want to make things better. Yet all this are just glimpses of memories that are living only in my brain. No one even knows about this. He’s buried now and he’s gone and while his memories are with me, the pain he went through still lives in that memory of it all.

Say you’re hosting a website on a server in the US or in Europe whereas your customers are in Asia. You may have done so because of cheaper hosting fees and most likely better support. You start off with a few users to the site without any complaints on speed. However, slowly you develop a good user base (or customer base in case you’re running a shopping cart or a B2C e-commerce site) and your site response time worsens. Sometimes it even takes more than 10 seconds to view your site’s front-page. What do you do? A couple of options: you either move the site to a host that is nearer to your customer base, minimize the use of graphics and images or anything that could take longer to load, or use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs).

A Content Delivery Network is a service that is usually provided by companies that cache copies of your website data in various locations around the world. And when a customer visits your site, the server that responds to that visit request is one that is nearest to that customer’s geographic location. Distance is no longer an issue then. You can host your site in the United States and target customers in China without having to worry about speed issues due to distance.

If you are looking for a reliable access to your site and if response time is an issue that may jeopardize your online business, then it is worth looking into hiring a CDN to maximize your returns. The only downside to all this is the cost of it, which may not be too cheap for start-ups.

A number of CDNs have emerged in the last few years. Notable ones include:

Amazon CloudFront (AWS)
EdgeCast Networks
CacheFly
Internap
Limelight Networks
Akamai 

And if you looking to host a wordpress site, check out: WordPress Content Delivery Network (WPCDN).

OMG-Facts explain Steven Jobs was afraid of death. The concept of total cessation frightened him. He felt the experiences we encounter in this life raise us to another level of attained knowledge. And he reflected this belief in his products’ designs. Apple products don’t have a shutdown button.

I remember when I first purchased an 80-GB IPOD classic. My only frustration was it didn’t have a shutdown button. As soon as something clicked or touched its wheel center button, it came ‘back to life’. And that surely meant I had to continuously recharge it to keep it ‘alive’.

iPod Classic

Lessons Learned

Despite my frustration, I derive one lesson from this. Each one of us needs some form of ‘recharge’ every once in a while. We engage ourselves in daily routines and forget to include some ‘hibernation’ time in our event calendar. And no I’m not only referring to physical rest or sleep.

I’m more interested in time when we isolate ourselves from the mental stresses of daily living – a time when we ‘recharge’ ourselves to handle corporate politics, worldly news, personal and family matters. I’m also referring to a time when we disconnect ourselves from our social networking ‘obligations’ in Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or others and when we keep the Blackberry, iPhone, iPad, or any mobile gadget away for a while. We personally need to conserve our mental energy resources and unless we do, our ‘batteries’ run out and when they do, there’s no ‘reboot’. There’s no escape to it – unlike our tech gadgets, we do have a ‘shutdown’ button.

Finally, it is remarkable how a person’s work mirrors his/her attitude. You do not need to know Steve Jobs personally. You understand the type of person he was simply by using the products he designed. And given he was a hard-working, highly detailed, innovative, and creative genius, his products reflected similar traits.

This should also be true for each one of us. If it isn’t, then look at the surrounding environment and ask yourself if you are doing what you value most.

Steve Jobs: one of the most respected visionaries today, even after his recent death . His fundamental trait and perhaps one that contributed to his success as a leader was his close attention to detail. Check this out. A slight inconsistency to the ‘o’ in the Google icon on the iPhone bothered him. And he calls an ‘engineer’ to solve the problem. He (a leader) does not call the CEO or Vice President or Project Manager or another leader, he calls the engineer.

Lessons Learned

I derive a few lessons from this:

1. Detail does matter and

2. Get to the bottom of the problem

First, as a leader, if you do not understand the roots of a problem at your company, how can you envision strategies that are to transform the way you’re doing business?

Let me give you an example in Project Management.

You as a leader realize your company is spending more than it’s generating. You call up the VP of Finance and Accounting who then asks for detailed reports from his staff to explain the situation. A close examination of these reports by the VP of Finance reveals many projects are over-budget. A good and well-organized high-level presentation is then shared with the company leader who then gives directions to make sure those projects are closely monitored and to prevent such situations from re-occurring.

Has the problem been solved? Unlikely. Six months go by and the same problem resurfaces.

In this particular case, the leader gives directions to deal with problems as they become apparent whereas he should have been looking into prevention strategies. The questions he should ask are:

1. What types of Project Management processes (if any) does our organization follow?

2. Is there any centralized office that handles and monitors these types of situations? If yes, what are its directions? If there isn’t, then how can we deal with these situations?

3. What types of communication methods and channels is the company using to make sure all its leaders are well-informed of key matters?

Every company leader should understand the importance of instituting a standard Project Management methodology and standardized processes and that such processes must be followed by every person at that company (including all executives). Giving directions to subordinates to solve problems without actively following up on the methods used will not necessarily lead to sustainable solutions. Also by focusing on problem roots and causes, an effective leader introduces and implements standard Project Management Methodology at the company or forms a Project Management Office (PMO) to centralize and control all project-related issues. The PMO can then implement project tools to make sure project information is readily available to management and leadership through available communication channels.

Second, as a company leader, it is sometimes faster to deal with a problem directly by calling the person involved. It is only then that you get a good picture of the matter at hand and not a tainted and ‘gray’ description of the matter through the different positions that sit in between. After all, it is important that the problem is identified and dealt with speedily and without any unnecessary delays. Many times the solution is sitting right at the bottom of the corporate ladder and it is the executive involved that has a direct reach to it. Work through designated channels and prepare for a long wait before an answer is given.

Let me explain to you why I don’t trust any mechanic or car electrician anymore. I purchased my car back in 2001 when I first arrived in Thailand. Since then, I never had any serious mechanical or electrical problems. It’s only the usual routine service that it undergoes every 5000 km or so. Nevertheless, I did spend a bit on the car air conditioner. Every 6 months or so, I’d either run out of air conditioner gas or it would just stop working. I must say this has been a nuisance for us – having to visit many mechanics and electricians every once in a while to get it checked up for leakage and then trusting them to fix it. And every time I’ve had this problem (which is probably 20 times or so on an average of twice per year), they’d tell me there’s this one part that requires replacement.

I Replace the Whole Thing

Once I got tired of all this and decided to invest 800$ or so to buy a new air conditioner thinking this will be the end of all my problems. And surely I was wrong. The same old story – few months pass and then a visit to the electrician who promises to end my problems with ‘just this part’ that requires replacement for 60 or 70$.

 There It Goes Again

Given the floods in Thailand during the last couple of months, I park the car at my workplace (Loxley Public Company Limited) because all parking spots on the second floor of my residence are taken. Although I did start the engine once or twice per week to keep the battery alive,  that did not help the air conditioner as you may have already suspected. There I am again at my ‘newly trusted’ electrician asking him to troubleshoot.

I arrive at his garage about 1:00 pm. I wait 20 minutes before he shows up. He opens the hood, inspects without touching any part, and the verdict is out: there’s this one part that is causing leakage and that requires replacement. 4000 THB (134$ or so) for the part and another 500 (18$) for refilling air conditioning gas. I try to reason with him. I explain I’ve spent more than the original cost of the car in air conditioning parts and related. He explains again (in Thai) the need to have this part replaced and that there’s no escaping the situation.

Given I was planning a long weekend out to Pattaya and given I did not want my family to have a long hot ride, I give in again. I reason with him about the price and he insists that this is already discounted. I ask if he’d be wiling to drive the car to my office after it’s done. He asks whether he could use my car to drive his family around for the rest of the day or until he’d completed the fix. I get suspicious. And then I don’t know how this thought came to me. I ask him to just refill the air conditioner gas and explain to him that I’ll wait an extra few days to confirm the leakage before he goes ahead with replacing the defective part. He kind of recedes for a moment and then proceeds to prepare for the refill. He then explains that my decision could be right given the car had not been used for almost 2 months. I pay him the 500 THB and go ahead with my business.

It’s been almost a week since the refill and the air conditioner is still running smoothly (knock on wood). Is there any defective part that requires replacement? I don’t really know but one thing for sure: I’ll never trust any mechanic or car electrician even when it fails again.