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.

Get A Bigger Screen

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In reading the multiple monitor posts over at Jeff Atwood’s “Coding Horror” I was reminded of a conversation I had a couple weeks ago: “Hey, I just wanted to let you know that your web site doesn’t look right on an 800×600 screen.” “You should get a bigger screen,” I reply. “I have a 30″ monitor, I just limit my browser windows to 800×600 to optimize the web stuff I do. You should really redesign your site to fit in 800 pixels, for compatibility.” “I see. Similarly, I have a 50″ TV at home but I only watch stuff in the picture-in-picture window.” “You do?” “Actually, no, I don’t, because that’s dumb.” Even my mother’s computer is capable of 1280×1024 …

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Rights of Survivorship

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A few years ago my father died of cancer. He had a will which left everything to my mother. Everybody thought that everything was okay until a few years later when my mother discovered that she owned only 50% of her house. Investigation into the matter revealed that the deed to my parents’ house did not include provisions for rights of survivorship, and that in Minnesota a will is not enough for that. The deed has to include the right language to make the transfer happen, which is often just appending “with rights of survivorship” after your names on the deed. Since 50% of her property was owned by the state of Minnesota she needed to go to probate court …

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St. Patrick's Day

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Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Being a Wisconsinite, holidays like this remind me of Lewis Black’s comments on Wisconsin drinking, from The White Album, recorded in Madison, WI: I love Wisconsin. I love coming here. I’ve performed here a lot because I’ve discovered that you people apparently have some sort of federal grant for drinking. You’re insane! You pay less for liquor than anybody I know anywhere else in the country. Nobody pays less for liquor than you…. I don’t know if you’re using that farm subsidy money or if you’re just hijacking liquor trucks, but this is f*&#in’ insane. Is it volume? It’s unbe-f@#*’-lievable! It’s staggering! I come here because basically, if I spend four days drinking here, even with …

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links for 2008-03-14

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Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site Good stuff here. A Guide to Creating a Minimalist Home | Zen Habits This is pretty interesting. I’ve been kicking around the idea of moving just about everything I own into one of my bedrooms, and only pulling out what I need when I need it. Then, in six months, throwing the rest away. Dolphin saves two beached whales | Science Blog I’m beginning to think there’s something more to dolphins…

Things I Didn't Need Today

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Today has been a day of meetings. Lots of them. I got to my desk for the first time around noon. Since I was meeting someone for lunch I hustled to unlock my workstation, print something, and take off. I routinely unlock my workstation before my monitors wake up, one big swoosh as I sit down. The problem was that my workstation apparently didn’t lock itself[0]. So when I typed my password I typed it into a window… …an instant message chat window… …which was open to a fellow in my Security group. *sigh* This is right up there with the time I typed my password in the wrong field while doing a presentation. [0] Don’t know why. Most people …

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links for 2008-03-11

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Gone, Without a Trace | Newsweek.com “As humiliating as it sounds, let me repeat: the MacBook Air is so thin that it got tossed out with the newspapers.” If he were a customer of mine his replacement notebook would be spiral-bound. Spitzer Is Linked to Prostitution Ring – New York Times Why does it always sound like the high-priced prostitutes are the ones being watched? 🙂 NASA photos These are great photos of one of the NASA missions to the ISS. (via Jeremy Zawodny) Scifi Art: Robots Have Needs Too “…the only thing missing from the photo is the reactions of the students who wandered into the men’s room and saw the rusty contraption using up one of the urinals.” …

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Get Even

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“Don’t get mad. Get even.” – David Plankers (1946 – 2001)* * also, I realize that he’s probably not the first to say it, it’s just where I heard it.

Use Absolute Paths

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As a guy who spent a few hours last week figuring out what was changing the permissions on / and /tmp on two of my servers, I offer this advice: always use absolute paths in scripts. You can’t count on the path or current working directory to be what you want, especially if your script runs from cron. And if you can’t count on that you run the risk of changing the wrong permissions, filling the wrong filesystem, or just generally doing the wrong thing. In my case a script changed the permissions of /tmp, using code very similar to: cd /opt/application; chmod 700 tmp What if the ‘cd’ fails? What will the chmod change? A better way to do …

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links for 2008-03-10

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WWNPHD on Flickr – Photo Sharing! I am looking forward to the new Harold & Kumar movie, and this poster is great. Dude, NPH wouldn’t do that. SXSW Showcasing Music Torrents Excellent use of BitTorrent for legal purposes. A big thanks to Greg Hewgill for setting this up. New icons for iTunes and Calculator on the iPhone 2.0 – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) My theory about the calculator icon changing: it looks too much like a classic Braun calculator and they had to change it. 451 CAOS Theory » Red Hat branding police outlaws RHEL More proof that as time passes these open-source companies get more and more like their closed-source brethren, one moronic decision at a time. Everybody …

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Babysitting

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“What do you mean he doesn’t know how to do that?” I ask. “He just doesn’t. Matt had to show him. Twice.” “Twice? Well, we’ll have to show him a third, fourth, and fifth time then, too.” “Don’t we have written procedures for these things?” “We all know how to do this stuff. We’ve all known for years. We hire folks that know this stuff. I guess there’s just been little need for these basic procedures.” “How do you know everybody does it the same way? What if I had to do it in an emergency?” It’s fun to hear my own questions being asked by others. “In this case there’s only one way to do it successfully. Plus you …

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