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.

links for 2007-07-13

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FBI Patriot Act Abuse Documents – Threat Level – Wired Blogs A Nuclear Ruse Uncovers Holes in U.S. Security – New York Times Beijing steamed buns include cardboard – Yahoo! News Mmm, tasty. Thanks to Derick for pointing me to this. metaquotes: plz can it be prayer tiem nau? Translating the Bible into lolcat… The Seattle Times: Local News: Hanford downwinders get their day in court AIX 6.1 Open Beta Seattle Dept. of Transportation: Buy Old City Street Signs A Letter to Optimus Prime From His GEICO Auto Insurance Agent

Nice License Plate

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Today has been hectic. We’ve got two guys on vacation and we’re discovering all the little things they left undone. Plus, I have a wicked headache. Ugh. So it’s a little slow around the blog today. To make up for it here’s an, um, interesting license plate I saw on the way back from lunch: Happy Thursday, y’all!

Spend Time vs. Invest Time

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Spending time = using some of your finite amount of time to do something. Investing time = using some of your finite amount of time to reduce the need to spend time doing something in the future.

Pownce

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I have five Pownce invites. Anybody want one? The local Pownce client uses the Adobe Integrated Runtime and appears to be completely brain dead. Like, nothing in it works, can’t click on links, can’t reply, won’t sit in the system tray, and it also won’t automatically sign me in. In the immortal words of Maddox, “Terrible. F.” Looks like it’s the browser for me. But don’t let that scare you off! 🙂

Just Pull the Drive

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I don’t know about other hardware, but on Dell PowerEdge servers the best way to fix a dead drive is just to pull it out and put a new one in while everything is up and running. It’s blissfully simple. Walk up to the box, pull the drive, put a new one in, and wait until the status light turns green. I walk away after the whole array starts blinking as it rebuilds the missing disk. Every time, and I really mean every time I’ve seen someone try to use the Windows or Linux-based RAID controller software to help them replace a disk they’ve ended up either needing to power cycle the whole machine or doing something dumb. Dumb, like …

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links for 2007-07-11

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Fast Icon – Quality Stock Icons for Web and Software. Some great free icons here. Not All Pink Links Stink Give It Up at Search Marketing Expo (June 5th, 2007) SMX Notes – Give It Up! | Marketing Pilgrim Bruceclay.com – The Top SEOs ‘Give it Up’ In Seattle for SMX Bust a Name – the easy way to find domains Electronista | RIM’s CEO sees iPhone as “dangerous” Yeah, the iPhone is dangerous because old-guard phone manufacturers and telcos couldn’t care less about usability, design, features, performance, or customer service, and now Apple is beating them in all of those categories. Why can’t a cell phone be like a land line, with user-replaceable handsets and the like? Hangover Prevention …

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Write Your Documentation as a Script

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Which would you rather have: a document telling you how to start an application in 10 easy steps, or a script (shell, Perl, Makefile, etc.) that does it for you? I’d pick the script: The script is self-documenting. You can look at it and see what it will do. If you need to troubleshoot something you can just run the commands yourself. If you need to change the documentation you just change the script. The script can help ensure that the environment is correct for the application. Do you need to set environment variables, like JAVA_HOME, ORACLE_HOME, etc.? Just do it at the top of the script. You can call the script at boot, and have the application start automatically. …

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links for 2007-07-10

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Texas Memory Systems – Products – Tera-RamSan Solid State Disk I want one of these. Badly. Mark Shuttleworth » Blog Archive » Merging is the key to software developer collaboration Dead on. Sprint breaks up with high-maintenance customers | Tech news blog – CNET News.com Why is it not okay for a company to choose not to do business with certain people? And besides, Sprint sucks. Go somewhere else. Millwall brick – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia As seen on Bruce Schneier’s blog.

Show and Adjust ext3 Mount Counts With tune2fs

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The folks over at Ubuntu Geek have a post about installing showfsck, a utility that will show you the number of mounts left before you’ll get an fsck. You can do the same thing with /sbin/tune2fs: $ sudo /sbin/tune2fs -l /dev/datavg/www_lv tune2fs 1.35 (28-Feb-2004) Filesystem volume name: Last mounted on: Filesystem UUID: 18c4cf33-9dc5-4230-9eea-17eed1060f46 Filesystem magic number: 0xEF53 Filesystem revision #: 1 (dynamic) Filesystem features: has_journal ext_attr filetype sparse_super …<snip>… Mount count: 14 Maximum mount count: 39 Last checked: Sat Dec 2 13:46:24 2006 Check interval: 15552000 (6 months) Next check after: Thu May 31 14:46:24 2007 …<snip>… When your mount count reaches the maximum mount count you’ll get an fsck on the next reboot. You can adjust this with tune2fs, …

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iTunes Video Not Working on Vista

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I’ve been having a miserable time with iTunes on Microsoft Windows Vista. I’ve posted about my trouble with it before, with it crashing and locking up. I still don’t have a fix for that, but I do have a fix for video not playing, thanks to the folks over at the CNet forums. If you have Vista and iTunes, and you cannot play videos, TV shows, or movies try moving the video file to a drive that isn’t your system drive. For me, that fixes the problem.

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