Torturing Your Users

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“Hey Bob, you do desktop support, right?” “Well, not much anymore, but what’s up? I can probably help, or ask someone.” “I’m getting accused of hacking my work computer because I changed the desktop background.” <stunned pause> “Hacking? You’re serious?” I have some personal experience with stuff like this, getting accused of hacking a network because I knew how to use the Novell “attach” command. Scandalous, I know. “Yeah. I set it to one of your photos, actually. Our IT morons are claiming I had to break in and change some security setting on the computer to do it. I just right-clicked and picked ‘Set as Desktop Background.’” “Um, okay. Well, if these are the same guys you told me …

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links for 2009-11-12

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RRDtool Announcements – RRDtool 1.4 – higher Performance and cool Features rrdcached seems like a cool thing. My organization has a long history with rrdtool, as we run what might be the largest single-machine MRTG instance around. KS2009: How Google uses Linux [LWN.net] Why is it that anybody doing anything serious with Linux is mangling the kernel on their own? Google, Red Hat… I guess that's the power of open source, but I think it's a downfall in some ways, too.

links for 2009-11-11

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Barbershop Songs are Fun! | David Choi Music David Choi's cover of Fireflies is great. I have a lot of respect for the amount of time it takes to put something like that together, and it's really well done. This guy is on my list of people to see next time I'm out west. Block sizes, think before you decide ยป Yellow Bricks Good recommendation for VMFS3 block sizes. I've been formatting all my datastores as 8 MB blocks, so I have fewer problems growing them in the future. Disgruntled Star Editor Takes Constructive Revenge – Torontoist Firing your editors is a moronic move. Editors are awesome. ALL NEW! Star Wars Gangsta Rap: Chronicles | Star Wars Gangsta Rap | …

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Ninite

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If you haven’t checked out Ninite, by all means go do it. All those Windows 7 machine rebuilds in your future just got a whole bunch easier. Installers like these require a certain level of trust, though, and history has shown that eventually they will bow to pressures to make it less simple, show ads, or even start silently installing toolbars and other spyware. Here’s hoping that the folks at Secure By Design can resist those things and keep it as easy to use and useful as it is right now.

Delicious Going Nuts

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My apologies, the Delicious blog poster seems to be going nuts and posting the same things multiple times. I’ve disabled it for now.

links for 2009-11-06

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Dislike 0.2 Adds a Disapproving Dislike Button to Facebook – Facebook – Lifehacker I wish there was a dislike button. Then I could take all those passive-aggressive statuses people have and give them the thumbs down. Ryan Gordon Halts FatELF Project "It looks like the Linux kernel maintainers are frowning on the FatELF patches," he writes, "Some got the idea and disagreed, some didn't seem to hear what I was saying, and some showed up just to be rude." The Linux community needs to grow up. FatELF would have made distributing commercial binaries a lot easier, and the user experience of running them a lot better. The problem is that the Linux community doesn't care about their users, or what …

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VMware vSphere 4 Thin Provisioning: Pros & Cons

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vSphere 4’s thin provisioning is a pretty cool feature, but it has downsides, too. I was putting together a concise list of pros & cons for a customer, and I thought I’d share (especially given all the thin provisioning talk lately). Please leave me a comment if I’ve missed something. Pros: Saves disk space where it isn’t really being used by permitting overcommitment, meaning: more VMs per datastore, which, for local datastores, means more VMs per host. better utilization of expensive storage. Smaller disk allocations translate into faster storage VMotions, clones, snapshot operations. You are only copying what needs to be copied. Incredibly easy to convert to and from thin-provisioned disks, on the fly, using Storage VMotion. More flexible disk …

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Eight Business Stars on Steve Jobs

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Fortune interviewed eight business stars about Steve Jobs. Bob Iger’s interview had a section that I liked more than the others: Another piece of valuable advice he gave to me was to build a prototype of the new store on your property — don’t put it in a mall or on the street — build it close enough so that you can visit it often, massage it, and learn from it. And when you’re really ready, roll it out. I think there’s a lesson in that for a lot of people, in a lot of situations beyond just retail.

vCheck 3

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I second what Duncan Epping said about Alan Renouf and his vCheck 3 script. In fact, I was in the middle of writing a very similar post when I saw his. I won’t duplicate what Duncan said, but I will say: 1. If you haven’t started using PowerCLI to help manage your infrastructure you might want to check it out. I started using it when I was doing mass Storage VMotions and got sick of doing it all through the vSphere client. Turns out, in PowerCLI, it’s: Get-Datastore “source-datastore” | Get-VM | Move-VM -datastore (Get-Datastore “target-datastore”) …and then you wait for it to finish. That’s really slick. 2. I don’t pick up a new tool on a whim. I always …

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links for 2009-11-04

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Disable User Account Control (UAC) for certain Windows Vista applications | Windows Vista for Beginners WTF, people. I want to disable UAC for my defragmenter, and my defragmenter alone. But to do so requires some tribal dancing, a sacrifice of a goat, etc. This "all or nothing" security model needs to die.

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