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.

Complexifying

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“Sometimes I wonder about the complexifying instinct,” says Brent Simmons over at inessential.com. Yeah, sometimes I wonder about that myself. Two of my coworkers just dreamt up this complex user management scheme, complete with scripts and whatnot. Things automatically add people to other things, another script removes people, and my prediction is that sometime down the road one of the scripts will go nuts and delete everybody. “What’s wrong with the current system?” I asked. “What current system? We don’t have one.” “Sure we do. We have a tool to run ad-hoc commands on all the boxes. When someone leaves you tell us and we do a userdel on that username. When someone new shows up you tell us and …

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links for 2007-04-12

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Pearls Before Breakfast – washingtonpost.com Holy crap, virtuoso Joshua Bell busks in the L’Enfant Metro Station with his $3.5 million Stradivarius. Sweet! The Invisible Grip – Esquire.com Common Carrier Law ‘Getting Things Done’ In 60 Seconds

Thank You, Mr. Vonnegut

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“Cat’s Cradle” sat in my car for months before I read it. I read it in one sitting, one gloomy wintry day. Wonderful. Thanks for all the words, Mr. Vonnegut. “When the last living thing has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon, ‘It is done.’ People did not like it here.”

ESX "SMB" Edition Would Rock

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The folks at EMEA TSX had a brainstorming session for ideas for VMware, called “The Next Big Thing.” There were several ideas thrown out there that are good, but I know what I would have voted on: the “ESX SMB Edition.” Hands-down, this would be sweet. A cross between MogileFS and ESX Server would rock. I talk to a lot of people that just cannot justify the price of a SAN-based VI3 implementation. Yeah, SANs are good for lots of things, but it’s a big chunk of change for a small business. Heck, it’s a big chunk of change for a big business, too, and a major source of IT complexity. SANs add major points of failure to anything they’re …

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links for 2007-04-11

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Jeff Boulter’s Blog » 10 Things I Hate About My MacBook Pro Bookmark Bliss: 10 Tools to help you select a Web 2.0 Color Palette by Fuzzy Future (tags: revisit) Hubert Jocham – Type & Design – www.hubertjocham.de – Type, Design, Brands (tags: revisit) 10 Powerism: The Art of Blog by Sun ZiLla gapingvoid: does everybody think you’re an idiot The Architect and Builder Dilemma » Aldenta: Web Nourishment

Feed Broke, Fixed

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Ah, crap — the 2.1.3 upgrade I did nuked my .htaccess file, which in turn broke the feeds. If you’re reading this, cool. If not, well, I guess I’m talking to myself. 🙂 I guess this means I should monitor my RSS feed URLs, too. Didn’t think of that until now.

links for 2007-04-06

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The UNIX Philosophy – Worse Than Failure DOING IT WRONG OMFG, that’s time well spent. Everyone is an Expert (at something) (tags: revisit)

Transparency vs. Manipulation

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transparent: a : free from pretense or deceit : FRANK b : easily detected or seen through : OBVIOUS c : readily understood d : characterized by visibility or accessibility of information especially concerning business practices. Transparency does not mean that you can tell two different parties two different things. It is not telling your coworkers and/or staff one thing and your customers another. It is not telling one customer one thing and another customer a different thing. It might look like you are being transparent, you might call yourself transparent, but the right adjective is “manipulative.” manipulate: to change by artful or unfair means so as to serve one’s purpose. Unfair != free from pretense or deceit. Manipulation is …

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links for 2007-04-05

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AtomFilms: Star Wars Gangsta Rap Special Edition (tags: essential) Burger King Christmas Carol – ebaumsworld.com (tags: essential)

links for 2007-04-04

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The Fishbowl: The Matrix Has You filehippo.com Update Client – filehippo.com Why in the flying hell can’t Microsoft or Apple come up with an API to do this? Your app tells a daemon how to check for updates via HTTP, and then a daemon checks once in a while to see if there are some. Cool Tool: Chain Mail Glove Nice, but still won’t help me when I hit my hand with a hammer. I need gloves that can predict the impending blow, scorch, or stab and react accordingly. 🙂

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