Bob Plankers

Bob Plankers is a man who wears many hats. In his professional career he has spent three decades leading teams that design, build, operate, and talk about reliable, secure, and compliant IT infrastructures, both in the public sector and in the high tech industry. He currently focuses on applied security, compliance, and operational resilience for virtualization and cloud platforms.

Why You Shouldn't Lie on Your Resume or CV

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Some reasons I think lying on your resumé is a bad idea. People, in general, aren’t good enough at lying to get all the details right. One little lie ends up needing a whole network of lies to support it. Especially during an interview. You said that you’ve run large mail servers at your previous job. What software did you use? What did you do about spam? Viruses? If you lie about your experience you need to lie about all the details of that experience, too. That gets tricky, because it all has to mesh perfectly. Even if you can get all the details right you’ll act funny or seem like you’re lying when people ask you about these things. …

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Wisconsin vs. Washington State

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The view from the press box at Camp Randall Stadium, Madison, WI (via my phone): I’m doing telecommunications support, and will be on the sidelines for the actual game. Definitely one of the fun parts of my job.

links for 2007-09-01

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Rands In Repose: The Laptop Herring One of my coworkers insists on bringing and using his laptop to every meeting. He pays no attention and we often have to backtrack for him. I am starting to not even invite him to things anymore, because I don’t see the point. Paul Soglin: Waxing America: George W. Bush Drives 18 Wheeler: America Stays Home We’re letting Mexican trucks in without inspection? Does this seem like a good idea? If so, why do I have to still take my shoes off to get on an airplane? Last.fm – the Blog · Audio Fingerprinting for Clean Metadata Oh, hell yeah, a way to clean up all that metadata that was entered by people who …

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Good Old FORTRAN 77

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I walk up to a conversation a few of my coworkers are having. It’s a typical old guy to young guy “you don’t know how good you have it” speech. “…well, complain all you want, you should have been around to endure the misery of punch cards,” the older admin comments to two students we just hired. “Yeah, I don’t think those would have been much fun,” comments one of the young guys. “If you want a taste of the misery you could always program in FORTRAN 77,” I add. “Why’s that?” “FORTRAN 77 was built to read programs from punch cards. Punch cards used the first seven columns as control information, to indicate line continuation, etc. So when you …

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links for 2007-08-29

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Burning Man’s icon goes up in flames, 4 days prematurely Oh, that sucks. 18 to 88: Your source for Indianapolis Colts news and analysis The comparison of the Browns to Jawas and the Bears to Anakin Skywalker is unbeatable. “Brash and talented, but has no arm.”

Call The First Version "1.0"

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Dear Open Source Software Developers, Take a cue from the commercial software of the world and call your first released version 1.0. Subsequent feature releases can be 2.0, 3.0, etc. Bug fixes can be 2.1, 3.0.1, etc. I don’t care how you do that, just so long as the version number is greater than or equal to 1.0.0. “But Bob, I use versions like 0.3.1 to indicate that the software is not feature complete.” So don’t release it, then, or call it ALPHA. Most software adds features with new version releases. Why are you different? “Sure, but I want to indicate it isn’t ready for prime-time.” Hey, pal, unless you put ALPHA or BETA in the version name us poor …

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links for 2007-08-28

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Seth’s Blog: Lying to your customers I freaking hate Home Depot. Their customer service sucks. Rob Galbraith DPI: Nikon unveils full-frame D3 digital SLR Mmmm. Mmmmmmmmmm. Guerrilla usability (Monoscope) LOL. SABLE-3 Balloon Launch Awesome photos from a helium balloon. eyeRblog » Blog Archive » 9 Survival Tips for College Freshman Dead on, especially #1. Not that a lot of college freshmen read my blog, but it’s sorta nostalgic.

Lightning, Cold Water, and Me

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This morning my building was hit by lightning. The power sorta browned out for about 10 seconds, and then everything was fine again. Except some control system freaked out, and the chillers in the data center stopped receiving cold water. Oops. Thus began an hour of frantic shutting down of development, test, staging, and otherwise not production machines. All in an attempt to keep the room temperature down while the facilities guys fixed the problem. It worked. A couple of things occurred to me during all of this: 1. We discovered that the Jabber server we use to coordinate outage handling is open to the world. We had customers joining our chat room. Not that we were hiding anything, but …

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links for 2007-08-26

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WindowsRG Fullscreen Demo From FSJ, classic. Absolutely classic. Court orders movie pirate to switch to Windows Two words: VMware Workstation. Vinography: A Wine Blog: Stop Telling Us What to Taste This post is why I read Vinography. I absolutely hate people that tell me what to think, smell, taste, see, or hear. At least with me, I will always react badly to people telling me those things (usually that means I won’t buy the product).

links for 2007-08-25

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addi+ions: Internet Marketing Strategy & News » Archives » TierraNatal Making News Across the Web Congratulations to dt for another successful site launch! Ask The Readers: How Do You Handle “Bacn”? – Lifehacker BACN?!? WTF. Personally, I try to get as little “bacn” as possible. Turn it all into ham, people, or stop it at the source.

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