General Rambling

Arbitrary Milestones

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Scott Lowe’s post this morning echos something I learned a few weeks ago myself: Windows 2008 Server was released as SP1. And I had the same thought as him: WTF. For this we have to thank all of those organizations that have chosen arbitrary releases as the first time they’ll touch new software. From operating systems to disk array firmware, it seems that a lot of system administrators will only start looking at a new version once it’s had a service pack or patch set released for it. And as a result we now have software vendors gaming the system by releasing first versions as SP1. I’d like to share with you all a little secret: all software has bugs. …

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Expectations

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“When do you think our servers will ship?” That’s always the warning shot, fired over my bow. My customer didn’t tell me something, and weeks later they finally got around to listening to me. Now they don’t like something I had to say, after they agreed to all of it. “If you refer to the timeline I gave you several weeks ago your physical servers will be ready in two more months,” I reply. I always tell customers that it takes at least three months to acquire physical hardware. Two weeks to figure out what to order, by gathering facts, performance data, and sizing information. Two weeks to actually get it through their purchasing people. Four weeks to receive it …

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Wordle

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My blog, as seen through Wordle. Click on it to see a larger version. Visualization tools are neat ways to spur new and different thoughts about things. Or point out that I, like, totally sound like a valley girl sometimes. Like like like.

Super Bowl XLIII

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1. I fell asleep with about four minutes left in the first quarter, which just reinforced my suspicions that in good football games the first three quarters only set the stage for an amazing fourth quarter. 2. I didn’t see most of the commercials, but of the ones I did see the Doritos crystal ball one was my favorite. If you didn’t see it, it’s a guy telling a skeptical coworker that his crystal ball (a snow globe) says there will be free Doritos at the office today. He then turns and throws it through the front window of a vending machine. Heh.

Mask? Check. Costume? Check.

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T-12 days until I’m in New Orleans. T-15 days until I roll as part of the Krewe of King Arthur. Any of you going to be in New Orleans for Mardi Gras? I’ll be down there through Fat Tuesday. We should have a beer or two.

Don't Panic

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Matt Simmons over at Standalone Sysadmin is on vacation, and apparently has made the mistake of letting me write an article for his blog. 🙂 Thanks Matt!

Green Data Centers

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When asked about making our data center a green data center, my friend and coworker Terry Bradshaw always responds with: “Sea foam or forest, you can have it in any color green you want.” There really isn’t a way to make a data center green beyond painting it. Your corporation, your organization can go green. Your data center can’t. You can certainly make it more green (or, rather, less not-green) by making it more efficient. But no matter how efficient it is it’ll still be a power-hungry room stacked full of metal boxes made via environmentally-unfriendly techniques, each filled with toxic chemicals and requiring hazardous waste disposal techniques when their lives are over every few years. Virtualization can certainly improve …

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Tilt-Shift Lens

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After seeing this I’ve decided I need a tilt-shift lens: In case an aggregator is stripping the object out it’s Helpless from Keith Loutit — he’s got several other videos up there. “Metal Heart” is pretty sweet, too.

Quality Machine Names

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I don’t know about you, but shortly after I hear a cool term I think, “that would be a good machine name.” The most recent instance of this is “cloaca,” Latin for “sewer.” Quality subversive machine names are so hard to find.

Three Days With Windows 7

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I’ve always been a bit of a risk taker, at least in certain areas of my life. One of those areas has always been technology. With my laptop’s Vista installation showing signs of wear I decided to go for broke and install the Windows 7 beta on the machine that is my office away from the office, my Dell Latitude D830. I’m on day three now, and it’s the Vista that should have been. I love it. All of my software works, except my antivirus package. Microsoft Office works. Adobe CS4 works. iTunes works, though not with my iPhone Remote app. Last.fm works. SecureCRT works. Azureus works. Adobe Lightroom works. Firefox works, with Gears and Delicious plugins. Java, too. The …

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