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.

Having Options is Nice

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Taken from the Slashdot article on Linux finding homes on the desktop: “The State of Illinois recently consolidated its IT systems onto Microsoft software — and has no interest in using Linux, says Paul Campbell, director of the state’s Central Management Services department. ‘We don’t have time for science projects in state government,’ he says.” I’m all for organizations deciding to go one way or another. I’ve worked with a number of clients who had some Windows, some Solaris, some AIX, some OS/400, some z/OS, etc. The IT staff could barely keep up with everything, much less be experts in any of it. On the other hand, though, an organization should take advantage of the strengths of certain OSes. UNIXes …

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Analyzing Conditions

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“The disadvantage of spending all of one’s time and resources on analyzing conditions is that you will never get to the original cause, the source of the problem. You may get a temporary answer for how an accident happened, but as long as the original cause is not discovered, you will never be able to totally prevent it happening again.” – Gehlek Rimpoche in “Good Life, Good Death”

links for 2007-03-13

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Sigma APO 200 – 500 mm F2.8 lens: Digital Photography Review Holy light buckets Batman. You’d need a scissor lift for a tripod.

Upgrade to the Latest Version

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If you are bothering to upgrade something, upgrade it to the latest version. If it isn’t the latest version it’s deprecated. Deprecated == needs to be upgraded again, soon. End of discussion.

Noob Spammers

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I’ve been getting a lot of backscatter from spammers lately. One of them was particularly interesting. The spam message was: Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 02:01:24 -0600 From: %FROM_NAME < %FROM_EMAIL> Subject: %SUBJECT %MESSAGE_BODY If you’re going to use my email address to spam at least do a good job of it.

Electronic Theatre Controls Has The Best Support Ever

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1. Arrive at theatre. Conduct dimmer check approximately 30 minutes before the house opens. 2. Discover that about 10 dimmers will not shut down. 3. Power cycle light board several times. Nothing changes (usually ghosts and whatnot will resolve themselves once the board is off). Attempt to control the dimmers with commands, to no avail. Inspect dimmer rack, nothing obviously wrong. Double check everything. 4. Call ETC support. Leave a message. 5. ETC support technician Heather calls me back within five minutes. Calmly walks me (who is not very calm) through some diagnostics, and then instructs us to reset the dimmer control module. Explains what we are doing and why it is necessary. Psychically predicts and answers my question of …

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My Designs Start As 80% Unjustified Raw Vision

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Michael Bierut over at Design Observer wrote a great article about his process for designing. Rather than discussing it point for point I encourage you to just go read it. Even if you don’t work that same way it is probably useful to know more about those that do. The paragraph that really hits home for me is his truthful description of his design process: “When I do a design project, I begin by listening carefully to you as you talk about your problem and read whatever background material I can find that relates to the issues you face. If you’re lucky, I have also accidentally acquired some firsthand experience with your situation. Somewhere along the way an idea for …

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How To Torture Your System Administrators

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How to torture your system administrators: a checklist for developers. 1. Insist on using /etc/hosts instead of DNS, because it is more secure that way. 2. Run everything as root, because your application is secure. You’ve heard of no problems with it. 3. Scatter the components of your application into no less than five filesystems. 4. Demand the latest versions of libraries and languages even though the ones that ship with the OS you are on have everything you need. Newer is definitely always better. 5. Treat your database as a flat file (“select * from TABLE”). 6. Use more than one programming/scripting language for a project. 7. Store data in /tmp. 8. Insist that your application needs its own …

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links for 2007-03-07

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Caterina.net: MyBlogLog Snafu, Identity and Resurrection [ECHENG.COM] Eric Cheng’s Journal » “You must have a nice camera.” II Windows Vista: I’m Breaking up with You ~ Chris Pirillo One thing PC users can do that Mac users can’t… O’Reilly Radar > Another War We’re Not Winning: Us vs Spam Passion Has No Place In The Workplace | Wise Bread “More importantly, passionate people make stupid mistakes. Passion is defined as “violent, intense, overwhelming feeling.” Just what you want in an employee, a nut.” Help Key: How-To Fix an iPod that Won’t Boot octopi_party: Cthulhu doll. Leather. defective yeti: On Call (tags: humor) The Old New Thing : If you have to ask, you’re probably doing something wrong AMEN SourceForge.net: Adaptive …

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One Month Of Mac

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Well, I scrounged up a PPC-based Mac Mini yesterday, and I’ve decided that I am going to use it almost exclusively at home for one month. I am not committing to switching to Macintosh, but seeing as it’s been almost six years since I used a Macintosh regularly I think it’s an interesting experiment. At the end of the month it might be interesting to try Linux on my desktop for another month, but we’ll see. So, for day 1, here’s my report: Cons: – There is not a single SSH client I can find that is worth anything. I want tabs, I want green-on-black. Basically I want Van Dyke’s SecureCRT on Mac OS X. I am willing to pay …

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