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.

Simplification

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I am tired of my email. Over the last ten years I have subscribed to many, many mailing lists. I have procmail filters for about 35 of the most active. You know how many of these 35 mailing lists I actively read? None. Zero. My subscriptions exist to annoy SpamAssassin, add load to mail servers, and consume my disk space. I could just search their indexes online if I ever needed anything from them. I get all my news via RSS now. So I’m done with them. Gone. 35 mailing lists, unsubscribed. Bye. Adios. Seeya. Over the last ten years my coworkers and customers have subscribed me to many, many mailing lists, because I’m their sysadmin. “Please don’t add me …

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links for 2007-01-10

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WordPress Themes : Brian Gardner Grand Illusions – Homepage Some cool stuff here. (tags: games physics science) Find your cell phone with Google Maps’ click-to-call – Lifehacker My cell phone spends about a third of its life discharged or lost. This would be helpful. AVCRASH Mapping Aviation Accidents JScreenFix – Free software to fix stuck pixels and burn-in (tags: hardware tips tricks) Creating Passionate Users: Don’t make the Demo look Done Goes in the category of things sysadmins can learn from developers. (tags: development software management design) Tickle Me Elmo On Fire – Google Video Stickiness Aptitude Test (SAT) – A Service of Electric Pulp

Apple, Inc.

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I think ~stevenf sums it up quite nicely: AAAAAHHH AAAAHHH AAAAAHHH AAAAHHH AAAHHBB GGG LL AAAAA All I have to say is that I wish it were cheaper and available now. And I hope they don’t have supply problems. And I’m still not sure I’ll get one, but I want one real bad. Apple TV looks boring. I wish it did non-iTunes things. 802.11n was inevitable. Nice that you can share a USB disk now. I wish you could share both a disk and a printer… Maybe if you connect a hub…

While We're At It, I Invented The Web

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January 8th is the birthday of tags, according to the Technorati web log. I have one major problem with this: It might be the second anniversary of tags on Technorati but sites like del.icio.us had them first. Mr. Sifry even says that in the post, which puzzles me because it contradicts the message in the rest of the post: that Technorati invented tagging. The “Technorati Buzz” email said the same thing, only minus any mention of prior art. It’s nice to see that stealing credit is alive and well in 2007. Cluelessness thrives, too: The beauty of tags is that they’re metadata: data about data. What does that mean? Tags actually describe their subject, as opposed to, say, keywords, which …

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Taken Out

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Ugh, sorry folks, I’ve been totally out of the game for the last couple of days with some Norwalk-like virus thing. It manifested itself several hours after I’d been out drinking, meaning that I was pre-dehydrated, and it got a little scary when I wasn’t able to put any more liquids in me. I’d discovered a long time ago that the way to get my stomach to not reject everything is to coax it with little amounts of sweet liquid, and fruit punch Powerade seemed to do the trick. Of course, it sucks drinking the same thing for 36 hours, but hey, I’ll take that over dehydration any time. I read that you get Norwalk viruses from the stool of …

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links for 2007-01-07

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Loader manual Sandbox · plaintxt.org A minimalist WordPress Theme Cool Running :: The Couch-to-5K Running Plan (tags: health running) No Silver Bullet: No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering A must read from Frederick Brooks (tags: productivity programming)

How to Write An Outage Notice

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“Service X will be unavailable between 00:00 CST January 4th and 12:00 CST January 5th. We apologize for the inconvenience.” I hate outage notifications that don’t actually say anything. Sure, I’d rather know ahead of time that something is going down, but there are several other qualities that I think any communication like this should have. The key is to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. What would you like to know if you were them? Why is this happening? Tell people about the problem you’re having or fixing, and what you’re doing to fix it. Chances are people have noticed the problem already so saying nothing about it seems pretty pointless. Acknowledge the problem and take ownership of it. …

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links for 2007-01-04

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24 ways 24 ways to impress your friends with web design. tecosystems / Winter Driving 101 Had to be said. When I’m driving in winter with my Jeep it isn’t the snow or ice I’m afraid of, it’s the other drivers. makezine.com: Controller Kit I think this might be the generic controller I’ve been looking for…

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