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.

Virtualization Versions

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Ryan over at vmhero.com is pondering what the numbers behind Virtualization 1.0, 2.0, etc. mean. I wish him luck with that. Personally, I’ve never heard any actual, real-life sysadmins refer to anything by those terms. I don’t have a Virtualization 2.0 environment, I have an environment that lets me get things done. And sometimes I upgrade it. Then I go home for the day. I do have one question, though. What version of virtualization will get us SkyNet? Actually, SkyNet uses a lot of physical hardware, so maybe it isn’t virtualized very well. I hope those creepy red eyes are low-voltage. In a weird twist of fate, I went to lunch before posting this and came back to Don MacAskill …

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Sydney Pollack

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The New Yorker has a good post, “Remembering Sydney Pollack:” Finding the spine of a story like “Out of Africa” was important to Sydney for many reasons, the most important of which was that it led to what he called “the ache.” The ache is self-explanatory if you’ve seen Sydney’s films. It is the ache of having one chance at deep love in a lifetime of shallow loves, and losing it too early. It is the ache of perfect, private union destroyed by terrible, worldly circumstance. For Sydney, the ache was about the way that the things we hold most dear always elude us. The ache is exactly what I relate to, what I look for and enjoy in so …

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links for 2008-06-03

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rc3.org — A Web 2.0 perspective on open government “…rather than government agencies focusing on building Web sites that provide access to government data, they should focus on providing the data itself in an open format so that it can be utilized by anyone.” I like this idea, too. Ross Mayfield’s Weblog: Provocations and Design Flaws for Management “Kevin Kelly: Productivity is for machines. If you can measure it, robots should do it.” LOL.

Browser Errors? Ditch the Toolbars

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Over the last three months I have fixed four PCs that have had strange browser errors, appearing as dialog boxes to the unsuspecting users. The dialog boxes are usually some sort of failed assertion, whose message only holds meaning in that the user knows something bad just happened. “Why is my computer telling me I’m doing something illegal?” one person asked. The fix? Remove every toolbar installed on their PC. In two cases the Google Toolbar wouldn’t uninstall unless I updated it first. In one case there were four different toolbars (AOL, Ask, Yahoo!, and Google) all competing. And in all cases, when I asked the owner of the computer if they used the toolbars, the answer was “Toolbar? What …

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links for 2008-06-02

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Not Cool To Call Your Teacher “Douchebag” on Your Blog, Says the US Court of Appeals – Silicon Alley Insider Yeah, as it turns out the First Amendment lets you say whatever you want, but it doesn’t mean there won’t be consequences for what you say.

links for 2008-05-30

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Inside the Attack That Crippled Revision3 In short, a company working for the RIAA/MPAA (MediaDefender) decided to SYN flood Revision3 because they had an open BitTorrent tracker. Nevermind it was theirs, used to disseminate their own content. I hope they sue. Cyborgs: Obsolete Cyborg Dies in Power Outage 58 years in an iron lung? Holy crap.

Old Technology

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A complete stranger walks in, looks at me, and utters a mildly panicked “Hey man, can you give me a jump start?” He’s young, maybe 18 or 19. “Problems?” I ask. “Yeah, won’t start. And now the battery is dead.” I walk with him out to the parking lot. The car is beautiful, some sort of 1970s Mustang, a deep shade of blue. “Is this your car?” “Well, sort of…” “Sort of?” No way am I jumpstarting a stolen car. “It’s my dad’s, I thought it’d be fun to take it out but now something’s wrong and he’s going to be pissed.” “Ever seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off?” I joke. He has. Not nearly as funny to him. I hook …

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links for 2008-05-28

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Simulacra. | EUGENIZATION. A Personal Training Blog. “What if he’d applied the equivalent number of game-hours to playing a real guitar?” This is why I stopped playing “The Sims” many years ago. I realized I could go make real friends.

links for 2008-05-24

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Royal Pingdom » Smart and funny use of Google Adwords I like the ASCII art ones. ‘Miracle’ leaves that may help protect against liver damage | Science Blog Beer, beer, sea buckthorn, beer, beer, shot, beer… Office: What’s in Your Office Survival Kit? My office survival kit is a clean blank t-shirt, pair of socks, a pair of shorts, a stick of deodorant, a toothbruth and a travel-sized toothpaste, and a comb. And a supply of antacid and ibuprofen. All designed to give me options if I spill something. Licorice extract provides new treatment option for canker sores | Science Blog Hmm, I wonder if absinthe would work, then, too… I might have to try that. Former Prosecutor: ISP Content …

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