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.

A New Fish Tank

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About three years ago my group grew by five or six people. We didn’t have office space near us for the newbies, so they were in empty offices all around the building. Not having your newbies near the rest of the team is a bad idea, so we went looking for a fix. What we found was an old, big room in the basement, and our managers willing to let us renovate it. Part of the renovation meant a conference table in the middle of the room, and there was a natural spot for a fish tank. Fish tanks have been shown to reduce stress and decrease hypertension. Plus, they’re fun to watch, and I love playing with water. So …

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Where Have All The GOTOs Gone?

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My friend Mark bought an Apple II Plus the other day for $30. I cannot think of a better reason to watch the Apple “1984” commercial. Long live GOTO, 80 column cards, and Oregon Trail. YOU HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY!

Windows Vista SP1, Not Bad

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I have to say that my initial experiences with Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 are pretty good. I’ve installed it on both my desktops, and now my laptop. That pokey feeling that Vista generally had seems to be gone, making things seem a lot smoother in general. This high praise from me, given my criticism of Vista in the past, as well as the trouble I’ve had with QuickTime, ATI drivers, scanner drivers, and strange network problems. I’m also impressed that the Vista SP1 kernel is the same as the Windows Server 2008 kernel. Fewer code bases usually means time saved in fixing bugs and adding features. I know Microsoft did a lot of work to improve the copy routines in …

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links for 2008-02-19

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The Old New Thing : What’s with all those spam ping-bots? “The way to get the attention of the spammers is to hit them in the pocketbook.” I plan to start doing this with the spam blogs I’m getting trackbacks from. Steve: Developing on the Edge – SPOF: Single Point of Failure “How do you know you have a SPOF? Oh, you always have one. How do you find it? You don’t: it finds you. And on Friday, it found Amazon Web Services” Good take on this. People need to realize that with big services no big problem is easy to find or fix.

Compact Fluorescent Lighting & Tax Rebates

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I just read a post from the folks over at Starry Night Lights, talking about compact fluorescent lamps: According to the U.S. Department of Energy, if every American home replaced just one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR qualified bulb, we would save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes for a year, more than $600 million in annual energy costs, and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of more than 800,000 cars. WOW!! Assuming that is true wouldn’t the tax rebate I’m getting be better spent as part of a bulk purchase of these things, with a few mailed to every home? Or am I missing something here?

Power Outages

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Many of you have figured out I’m in Madison, WI. We’ve been in the news a lot lately because we keep getting snow, somewhere in the mid 80 inches now, with idiots on both sides using it to prove or disprove global warming. Snow is old news now, so the weather gods decided on a bonus round for today: rain. While the support cables for the power lines might hold the line itself they don’t stand a chance against a tree limb, heavy with ice, sagging and ripping the cable out. Today I had two power outages, the first in quite some time, and my first winter outages as a homeowner. Power outages in February in Wisconsin present certain challenges. …

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MS RDP Client: /console is now /admin

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Trying to use the Microsoft Remote Desktop Client (mstsc.exe) to connect to the console of a remote Windows machine? Coming from Microsoft Windows Vista SP1, or Windows Server 2008, or XP SP3? The old style of: host.name.com /console not working? It tells you “An unknown parameter was specified in computer name field?” Yeah, with RDP 6.1 they changed it to: host.name.com /admin Props to my colleague Steve Tanner for the tip. More information can be found at the Terminal Services Team Blog.

links for 2008-02-17

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(Really) Stunning Desktop Wallpapers | Graphics | Smashing Magazine (tags: wallpaper) » wallpapers (tags: wallpaper) Pruned: Fluorescent Field “…the project involved over a thousand fluorescent bulbs planted underneath high voltage AC transmission lines. Unwired, the bulbs drew energy from the surrounding electromagnetic radiation and lit up, making for what must have been a marvelous sight.” How Rackspace Now Uses MapReduce and Hadoop to Query Terabytes of Data | High Scalability “Facing exponential growth they spent about 3 months building a new log processing system using Hadoop (an open-source implementation of Google File System and MapReduce), Lucene and Solr.” Seth’s Blog: Stressed “Does it promise to reduce stress, but end up causing more?” Service Untitled » Communities as Parties – customer …

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Creative Commons

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I’ve had a couple of questions lately about whether people can redistribute things I post to coworkers, or quote me in articles. Um, yes! These questions have pointed out to me that I didn’t really have any sort of license assigned to my work… until now. I’ve always liked the concept of the Creative Commons license, so I’ve chosen the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, and I put up a Terms of Use page with all the information, including attribution information. I am always thrilled to see people doing stuff with my work, because it means I’m writing things that are useful to people, and writing in a way people seem to like. So thank you! And thanks again to …

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Stress

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Seth Godin has an interesting post today about stress. His perspective is as a marketer, but his point is universal: people are stressed out almost all the time. For us system administrators, do we ever just ask ourselves if something we’re doing, a system we’re building, even a tool we’re implementing for ourselves will create or reduce stress? Why not? I know some of the tools I use cause more stress than if I didn’t have them, to save very small amounts of time, gather almost useless information, or achieve some political goal. What if we could plot user stress versus time saved? Would we choose our tools, our applications, our systems differently?

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