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.

Tech Bloggers: Punctuation Goes Inside Quotation Marks

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One of the biggest differences between writing code for machines and writing English-language text for humans in the United States is the use of quotation marks. When you’re programming a computer a set of double quotation marks indicates a string, which is an atomic entity. As such, punctuation goes outside the quotes to delimit lists and whatnot. #include <stdlib.h> string animals[4] = {“Goat”,”Sheep”,”Cow”,”Platypus”}; This is not how it works when you’re writing in the English language. Periods and commas always go inside the double quotation marks in English. Incorrectly punctuated sarcasm: We all know how that piece of software “works”. Correctly punctuated sarcasm: We all know how that piece of software “works.” Incorrect: Her number is “867-5309”. Correct: Her number …

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Minimum Vacation

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Sysadmin1138 has a post today on minimum vacation policies, an interesting twist on the unlimited vacation policies many startups now have: The idea seems to be a melding of the best parts of unlimited and max. Employees are required to take a certain number of days off a year, and those days have to be full-disconnect days in which no checking in on work is done. Instead of using scarcity to urge people to take real vacations, it explicitly states you will take these days and you will not do any work on them. Sysadmin1138 expounds on several ways this is a cool idea. I agree. There are real benefits to forcing employees to go (and stay) completely away for …

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A New Hope^H^H^H^HLook

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Once in a while you’ve got to pull the trigger and actually ship some code. It’s been seven years (!!!!) since I did anything serious with the way this blog looked and worked. There were plugins that weren’t supported anymore. The old theme had been so extensively customized by me that it wasn’t upgradable, and didn’t really work well with new functionality or WordPress releases. A lot of the new functionality duplicated what I’d hacked into the theme, too. Stuff like Google +1, sharing, etc. Plus I wanted SSL (and not just CloudFlare’s poser Google juice SSL crap, I wanted the security). I started redoing the site six months ago, where “redoing” meant the cloud-esque “completely starting over.” The synchronization of …

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Keeping My Blade Options Open

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One of the types of advice I really appreciate is that which helps me to keep my options open. I have a team from Dell in the office this week, configuring a giant pile of equipment we bought. The equipment includes a bunch of blade servers. We’ve relied on rack-mount equipment for decades, but with a push towards a private cloud we opted to jump into the early 21st century with blades. I’ve had relatively little experience with blades so it’s nice to have more experienced people around. When I’m designing a system I always try to figure out what it’ll need to look like four years from now. Seeing the future is the hardest part of designing a system. …

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The Right Way, The Wrong Way, and The Way It Is

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I hate purists. You know the type. They’re in all IT shops, in all projects. They’re the people who won’t do any work unless they know exactly how it’ll all look in the end. They research, endlessly. They’re pedantic. They sit and poke holes in your work, claiming that they’re just playing Devil’s advocate. They rarely start an answer with “it depends,” opting instead for condescending phrases like “if I were you” or “if it were up to me.” And they wouldn’t know a minimum viable product if it bit them in the duff. Nobody knows how a project or product is going to look in the end. And even if you do have a great vision, nobody really knows the …

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Google Chrome Missing The URL in the Address Bar

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The latest Google Chrome update changed the omnibox/address bar so you cannot see the URL by default. I, for one, hate it. I’m not being curmudgeonly[0], I copy URLs all the time and it’s just another step for me to click on the “origin chip” (as it’s being called) to see the URL. Here’s how to change it back: Go to chrome://flags/#origin-chip-in-omnibox (you’ll likely have to cut & paste this in) Pick “Disabled” Click the “Relaunch Now” button at the bottom. Rejoice in having Chrome the way you like it.   —- [0] Yeah, I know, I am. GET OFF MY LAWN.

Coho Data Giving Away a VMworld US 2014 Pass

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If you’re trying to get to VMworld US and want a free pass, a number of vendors are giving them away, including my friends over at Coho Data: We are giving away a FULL conference pass to VMworld 2014 to one lucky winner along with a few goodies to others as well. Register for a chance to win: One Full-Conference Pass to VMworld 2014 in San Francisco* “Don’t FSCK with the Fish” T-Shirt Coho Data Chrome Industries Backpack *The prize includes the conference pass only. The winner will be responsible for their own hotel, airfare, and other expenses. Pass valued at $1,995 USD. Winner will be announced on August 1st via email, so register for a chance to win! A great deal especially if …

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Apple Aperture Reminds Us That Apple Is a Media Company

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Late last week Apple disclosed to the folks over at The Loop that it would be ending development of another one of its professional products, Aperture. They committed to providing a round of compatibility updates so it would continue functioning on OS X Yosemite. Replacing it, and iPhoto, will be a new prosumer-geared “Photos” app which will be the gateway to the iCloud Photo Library. Overall, cloud apps make me jumpy about performance, pricing, and intellectual property rights, especially for those of us that make 30 MB RAW format files every time the shutter clicks, in places where we’re lucky to get a bar of EDGE cell data service. More importantly, as a Windows Lightroom user I valued Aperture as competition. Lightroom still lacks many …

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SDN Industry Analysis

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Tip of the hat to Ivan Pepelnjak over at ipSpace.net — a welcome three minute distraction this afternoon. Enjoy.

VMworld 2014 Session Voting Open

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One of the most interesting things about VMworld is the public session voting, which is now open. Not many conferences allow attendees to have a say in what gets presented at the conference. If you’re planning to attend VMworld 2014 it’s probably a good idea to vote for sessions that interest you. I am involved in two session proposals: 2770 – The Art of Migrating to the vCenter Server Appliance As the vCenter Server Appliance gains maturity, capacity, and functionality it is becoming a serious choice for those running vSphere environments, reducing expense and administration time. This session will be based in first-hand migration experienced and cover what the vCSA is, common use cases and designs, and where the vCSA isn’t …

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