Posted by Michael Thu, 31 May 2007 20:56:00 GMT
I’m giving a talk at Gartner next week. Details are here.
I’m not exactly the average Gartner attendee or presenter, let alone customer, so we’ll see if my radical ideas get me booed out of there :-)
Posted by Michael Thu, 31 May 2007 11:46:03 GMT
I just tried to log into a service I haven’t used in a while. My password doesn’t work and it’s not obvious how to request a reset. It was easier to search on Google for their competitor and sign up than to reset my password on the other service.
In your business, are the easy things easy? You’re loosing customers if they aren’t.
Posted by Michael Mon, 21 May 2007 16:46:21 GMT
Typical headline— “::Insert big name vendor here:: just released an ISA-based, hardened Windows appliance…”
I get chills when I think of what a disaster this could be.
I’m a fan of lightweight and flexible appliances that do something really well.
ISA on “hardened Windows” is an obese system trying to look good in a sun dress. Most good sysadmins have been trying to harden their Windows systems for years.
If you’re one of these people, raise your hand if you’re sure this “hardening” worked.
Anyone? Bueller?
Okay, you in the back with the Microsoft employee badge on, put your hand down.
I think they should tell the truth:
“Hi. We developed a cool solution but used a really inflexible technology to build it. Instead of doing the right thing and moving it to a good platform, we’re going to shoehorn it into this half thought out plan and call it ‘a rapidly deployable system’”
Posted by Michael Wed, 16 May 2007 11:28:01 GMT
Most days, penguins here work from home offices. Very cold offices.
We had Verizon FIOS installed today. Our cable modem is down more than it’s up and the performance is spotty at best.
2 hour install (FREE) and we have 30Mbits for the same price as our (supposedly) 5Mbit cable modem.
I used the speakeasy (competitor to Verizon) speed test.
29773
That’s pretty darn close to 30 Mbits.
It might be hard to get me for the rest of the day. I’m off to download the entire internet.
Posted by Michael Wed, 16 May 2007 07:54:00 GMT
I’ve really been into mind mapping for the last 6 months or so and dropped some cash on the product I found to be the best for me: NovaMind.
I’ve been using it every day for 6 months on my old trusty PowerBook and yesterday it crashed on open. This has never happened before. The crash reporter popped up, I hit send and it restarted. It’s been working fine since.
This morning I get an email from their tech support. Yes, someone actually reads their crash reports, suggested a fix in a quicktime that was trying to load, and told me I should let them know if it happens again.
I love these guys.
Posted by Michael Thu, 10 May 2007 16:29:00 GMT
Erlang is a really great language for problem areas where a distributed system is involved, but it lacks the huge number of libraries that Ruby has. Wanna have your cake and eat it too? Yep, so do we. Enter Erlectricity, a Ruby to Erlang bridge.
It’s already on rubyforge, install it with:sudo gem install erlectricity
We’re actively prototyping a software solution that would be better in Erlang as it needs to be massively concurrent (think deep packet inspection at 750Mbits). Two libraries we need for aggregation exist in Ruby but not Erlang. Now we can bridge the two and let Erlang do it’s thing and Ruby do what it does best, just not so fast.
Posted by Michael Tue, 01 May 2007 14:43:29 GMT
Okay okay. About 100 emails on this. It couldn’t be much easier:
sudo sed -e 's/\edgy/ feisty/g' -i /etc/apt/sources.list sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
No really, that’s it.
