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.

Go Badgers

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If there is a sport I like more than baseball, it’s college hockey. I was at the Frozen Four on Thursday, and it was a blast. Such good hockey from four excellent teams. The lineage of my tickets meant that I sat in the Maine section. Let me just say this: Maine spectators are as big of fans of their team as Wisconsin fans. There were just 500% more Wisconsin fans, being that the tournament is in Milwaukee. And I, as a Wisconsin fan, dressed in my red jersey, was adrift in a sea of light blue. The upshot is that I made it to the jumbotron a couple of times. If I were sitting in the Wisconsin student section …

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links for 2006-04-08

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Bizarre Thai gift ideas, local novelty Thai gifts I collect canned meats. I had a web page for them all, but took it down as it got decrepit. I am rebuilding it, hopefully I can have it back online in a couple of weeks. (tags: meat humor food)

Themes, Again

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Okay, time to find a new theme. Bear with me. If you’re reading in an aggregator: A) thank you for reading! B) thank you for not caring about my theme! 🙂

Dear Apple: Two Mouse Buttons

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Dear Apple, Your Boot Camp product looks cool. I applaud you for providing supportable solutions to your customers, even if you are encouraging them to use Mac OS X. However, I still won’t buy a MacBook Pro. How can I run Windows without a second mouse button? I am not going to shift-click, or ctrl-click, for everything I need, and I use my right mouse button a lot. This is also a complaint I have in Mac OS X, too, and with your desktop models you offer a two-button mouse. I have one on my G5. Using a USB mouse on a laptop isn’t practical in many cases, though. Could you offer a built-in two-button mouse option on your MacBooks? …

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VMware vs. Xen vs. Microsoft

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A comment made: Yeah, sure, your costs might drop, but you really think their Linux support will be better than VMware’s support? VMWare’s support is horrible enough, and they don’t make a competing product. I’ve actually had really good experiences with VMware support. The only bad part about it has been that they are learning about their products just as we are. Take support for our EMC CLARiiON CX700s. We were having horrible I/O performance, and the solution for it, after lots of back & forth with VMware support, ended up being found by me in a pair of slides from VMworld. The compelling reason to continue using VMware VirtualCenter and ESX Server products is that in 3.0, which I …

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Self Conscious

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“The best thing I ever read on a toilet wall was at Gabe’s Oasis in Iowa City. It [read] ‘Your mom swims out to meet troop ships‘” – Neko Case, from her web site. I’ve heard from two of you now that your news readers caught my inadvertent del.icio.us bookmarking of that page with obscure sexual terms. You were wondering if I’d nuked that post. Yes. I was feeling self-conscious, but you know, I’ll make you a deal. I think stuff like that is funny, and I bookmarked it without thinking, which shows you that I’m getting used to del.icio.us as part of my life. Like, who the hell comes up with those terms? I’d love to use some of …

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links for 2006-04-05

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Download or Order Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise Edition for Free I’m thinking that in a year my virtualization costs are going to drop a lot. (tags: vmware virtualization windows linux) XenSource looks to invade Windows base | The Register (tags: vmware virtualization windows linux) DigiHack – Digital Photography projects: Tilt-Shift PC Lens (tags: cameras hardware photography photo technology)

Getting Your Mind Off Of Things

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A post yesterday stated that I was about to play SimCity while at work. “OMFG, you play games at work?!?” Yup. Sure do. I play “SimCity 4: Rush Hour” when I am thinking about stuff. I play “Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory” when I’m stressed out. “Does your boss know about this?” She sure does. In fact, the other day a fire started in my city and I paused our conversation while I dispatched fire trucks. “She’s okay with it?” Sure. She’s been a friend of mine for years so she’d say something if it was a problem. She knows I get a lot of stuff done, and also knows that people need to get their mind off of things sometimes in …

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links for 2006-04-04

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Secunia – Advisories – MediaWiki Encoded Links Script Insertion Vulnerability I love MediaWiki, but gosh, if there was ever a candidate for some auditing this is it. It’s the sendmail of the 2000’s. (tags: sysadmin technology wiki security) subversive cross stitch: mind your fingers (tags: humor crafts) podbor62_34.jpg (JPEG Image, 800×600 pixels) How in the heck do you maintain a cable plant like that? (tags: sysadmin tech)

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