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.

links for 2008-01-09

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Frog Design brings WPF sexy to the enterprise masses – istartedsomething Lawson and sexy in the same sentence? Ugh. Lawson software is what was behind the huge failed payroll implementation for the University of Wisconsin. Just because the front end is sexy doesn’t say anything for the back end. Obama Quote | Jezebel “I know I’ve been campaigning too much because I was a rally and instead of saying ‘The time for change has come’ I said ‘The time for come has changed.’ And I have to admit, everybody clapped.” LOL, I like this guy. EA mobile prez: iPhone is hurting mobile game development – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) No kidding. I would love to play some games while …

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links for 2008-01-08

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Mac Rumors: Intel Launches Penryn Mobile Processors Figures, now that I ordered a new laptop. I don’t think these things are anything I would have opted for anyhow. Not friendly to batteries, given what I’ve read. MWSF 2008 keynote bingo Waiting for the iPhone SDK myself, I want some freakin’ games on this thing! Alienware Unveils Curved Monitor Sweet. Underwhelmed by the Remote CLI – blog.scottlowe.org – The weblog of an IT pro specializing in virtualization, storage, and servers Yeah, Scott hits the nail on the head. The VMware RCLI leaves a lot to be desired.

Keep Your VMware Tools Up To Date

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Over the weekend my storage guys conducted an outage on several of our EMC CLARiiON disk arrays, to patch them, change their IP addresses, and fix some issues with our SAN. Just like any other system these disk arrays need maintenance, too. In the past we’ve had serious issues with updates to these arrays, so we treat each one as completely disruptive and shut down the hosts attached to them. While a complete shutdown is annoying, most system administrators don’t mind because it gives them an opportunity to patch and do maintenance. Us VMware guys are no different. While I might be able to use VMotion to work on my environment at any time, this isn’t the same for the …

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links for 2008-01-07

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Noontime Web Video Revitalizes Lunch at Desk – New York Times In my office we have a central meeting area with a projector, and we convene there a lot to watch videos during lunch. Seo Book Keyword Suggestion Tool The Fishbowl: On Resume, Error. “I think what many people forget is that a résumé is an exercise in marketing.” Amen. What I admire about professions like Engineering and Medicine I don’t like how computer guys add the title “engineer” to their positions. Did you pass a certification test to get that? (no) Is there a code of ethics? (yes, look at the LOPSA or SAGE sites) Can you use the ethics code to refuse to do things? (no) In Defense …

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links for 2008-01-05

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December 2007 Windows Vista Application Compatibility Update An update that improves the performance, responsiveness, and reliability of Windows Vista is available [Mimedefang] OT: Configure sendmail queue runner. [Chapter 34] 34.3 Configuring with V8 m4 Options FOXNews.com – Boy, 11, Uses Toy Lightsaber to Defend Mom From Attacker – International News | News of the World | Middle East News | Europe News “An 11-year-old boy demonstrated The Force when he defended his mom by hitting an attacker with a toy lightsaber.” w00t. You want to go home and rethink your life. It’s behind you: Great White stalks ocean canoeist | the Daily Mail If I were in that kayak it would need to be rinsed out. About Us – Pantone …

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New Laptop On Its Way

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After waffling for a month about what I should get for a new laptop, I have just ordered a Dell Latitude D830 to replace my war-weary D610. It’ll be all decked out, with a 2.4 GHz T7700, 256 MB NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M[0], 4 GB RAM, DVD+/-RW, dual batteries, Draft-n wireless, and 120 GB hybrid hard disk. Sweet. I was thinking about waiting until Macworld happened, but the likelihood of Apple adding a second mouse button and pointing stick mouse to the Macbook Pro is pretty low. Plus I don’t like where the MagSafe power connector is. I sit cross-legged a lot and the power connector on my girlfriend’s Macbook Pro knocks loose on my knee. Dell has their power …

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A Week With Virtual Infrastructure 3.5

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I upgraded some of my virtual infrastructure to VirtualCenter 2.5 and ESX 3.5 on December 31st, 2007. It is five days later, and this is what I’ve noticed so far: The Virtual Infrastructure Client 2.5 is kinda slow. It reminds me of the early 2.0 clients, which got speedier with each update. I’ve used Storage VMotion a lot, with great success. Very cool feature, and really the reason I upgraded this soon. My storage guys need to get rid of an array I was sitting on, and instead of coordinating a big move it was just easier to do this. The upgrade process changed the resource limits for many of my VMs, to custom values which were just wrong. This …

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links for 2008-01-04

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Rogue Amoeba – Under The Microscope A live CD with demo software — cool. The Energy Blog: About Solar Towers Cool.

links for 2008-01-03

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100 Things We Didn’t Know Last Year | BBC NEWS “There are 30,000 wild parakeets in London.” Heh. Oh, and we’re going to run out of IP addresses in 2010. Uh huh. Slides – xkcd I just found my new intro slide for presentations. I love xkcd. WolfQuest First person wolf pack game. Heh. 2007 Darwin Award: The Enema Within Geez. Takeaway point: if you put alcohol in your body in some way other than orally you bypass your body’s ability to get rid of it (vomiting) when you’ve gone too far. Null Device – The London EP Great free EP from one of Madison, WI’s best musical groups. I really like “Unknowningly.”

Why I'm An NVIDIA Guy Now

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I’ve been having all manner of problems with Microsoft Vista on my desktop PC. Many of you who read my blog regularly know this, as I’ve been very critical of Microsoft Vista, often because of these problems. I couldn’t play any QuickTime videos from my system drive, video quality was poor, and a lot of things were slow. Of all things, it was QuickTime and iTunes causing me the most problems. I never realized how much I relied on multimedia until I couldn’t use it, especially now with my iPhone. I even have an external hard disk just so I can play videos. I was talking to some guys today about Vista and all the problems I’ve had. In conversation …

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