By Bob Plankers on Apr 30, 2007 in System Administration | 0 Comments
Every project to implement a specific application or technology should be at least two phases:
1. Get it working for the first time. Check it out and learn about it, with the intention of throwing this copy away.
2. Get it working in production. Do it for real.
You cannot plan out how you are going to support something in production until you know something about the application. You won’t know anything about the application until you’ve tried using it once. Therefore the first steps of a project should be to check it out first. Then do it again for real later.
This goes for small applications and projects, too. Sure, you might be tempted to just start using that copy of MediaWiki you installed last week so that you could check it out. Don’t. Install it again from scratch and do it right so that all your mess-ups, all your false starts, and all the cruft that comes along with a first installation gets cleaned up.
I usually enforce this for small projects by having separate development and production environments for things. If I want to check something out I do it on my development box. When I want to do it for real I redo it on my production box. Once in a while I just level and rebuild my development box so that all the old mistakes, orphaned files, etc. go away.
If you’re a project manager this approach has several benefits. First, your team can make better decisions about how to implement it once they’ve had it running as a test. Second, your team can develop implementation documentation and procedures with the test instance, and then follow that documentation precisely for production so you know it’s accurate. Third, your production instance won’t be saddled with all the cruft from the testing. Fourth, you have a fighting chance at maintaining a test instance of the software, away from the production copy, which you can use for upgrades, etc.
Popularity: 4% [?]
By Bob Plankers on Apr 28, 2007 in del.icio.us | 0 Comments
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It’s awesome to see an article confirming what I’ve been saying for many years — sterile environments are not healthy for us, and especially detrimental to kids.
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Great, so now when an overzealous algorithm by some CS dropout dubs me “angry” or “disturbed” my insurance rates will go up, my life insurance policies will get canceled, and I’ll lose my job. No thanks.
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Check the maintenance bulletins on your vehicle. My Jeep has 159 of them. It’s just like patching an OS, except it costs more.
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“The thinking, not just the building, has gotten small and lightweight…” – some good stuff here.
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Awesome, cut ‘n paste Perl scripts to get rid of errant stuff in sendmail’s mail queue. Replacing my awful shell scripts (find/xargs abominations) with these.
Popularity: 5% [?]
By Bob Plankers on Apr 23, 2007 in del.icio.us | 2 Comments
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It took Sun 25 years to compete with IBM. I completely agree with Jonathan Schwartz, though, there are some problems that are better solved with just a single big machine.
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Well, I guess if I get to decide, I won’t ever buy anything from BMC.
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Glad to see people in the U.K. being sheep. How long until they have a little revolution of their own?
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“That’s the primary function of the apostrophe–to expose apostrophe ignorance.” Apostrophe ignorance drives me nuts. NUTS I TELL YOU.
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Waiterrant has wonderful stuff, this is a random plug for him.
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Weird coincidence, I first listened to his music on Friday. And I love covers, especially good ones, like this. The links he has to those other covers are worth following, too. I love “Straight Outta Compton” sung by a guitar-wielding white lady. :-)
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Nobody understands sunk costs. Nobody. It is always viewed as a waste, and people always try to minimize waste. Problem is, you have to do that up-front, not after the fact.
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Wow. I, like this fellow, find iTunes library management underpowered. I just wish it would acknowledge that one person might have two or three separate libraries…
Popularity: 7% [?]
By Bob Plankers on Apr 20, 2007 in General Rambling | 0 Comments
It’s a beautiful day in Madison, WI. I hope it is everywhere else.
Have a great weekend everybody!
Popularity: 4% [?]
By Bob Plankers on Apr 19, 2007 in Outright Rant | 19 Comments
Why can’t I save my project as a web page?
“Microsoft Office Project 2007 does not support the ability to save a project file as a Web page. Instead, you can save a project as a more flexible XML file. This enables you to apply any style sheet to the XML file.”
And by “more flexible” they mean “not useful to someone who just wants to share a project plan with colleagues on Macs and Linux boxes.”
B as in B. S as in S. The reason I can’t save my Microsoft Project file as a web page is then there wouldn’t be a need for the Microsoft Project Server 2007! Frankly, I cannot think of a single reason they wouldn’t have an HTML export feature in a recent product release.
Microsoft: not interested in helping you just get your work done.
Popularity: 18% [?]
