Posted by Michael
Thu, 20 Apr 2006 11:09:31 GMT
Whitepapers are problematic on their own:
- They contain too much copy (less is more)
- They read like the books you read in school. You know the ones you DREADED that ended up with drool on the pages when you fell asleep on them.
- They are white (duh)
That’s not to say they don’t have a place, but thinking that people are going to read your whitepaper just because you wrote it is wrong. A whitepaper’s place is to back up the other things you say.
For example, say I create a product
“The X Product”
and it:
“Allows you to see the errors of your ways in Real time in a simple 1 page printout”
Now being the student of marketing that I am (meaning I study marketing all the time, I’m not sitting in a class somewhere right now), I’d back this up with an example of the output of this great product and 2 or 3 testimonials (video if I can get them) of people explaining how their lives are sooo much better because they have a real time method to see the “errors of their ways”. No installation, no maintenance.
1 step to a better life.
That’d be enough for most people to buy it.
I showed the actual value.
Now, it would add credibility (to some people) to have a 10 page study (ie whitepaper) that backs up this claim. Nobody would read it, but to some, it might be a comfort that someone at least bother to write such a thing.
If you’re one of these people, you’re about to get run over by a horde of forward thinking marmosets. As you lay examining the conference room’s geometric carpet pattern, you may wonder why such a thing wasn’t mentioned in the planning meeting. You have TPS reports to do, shoo.
Posted in Rants | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Michael
Wed, 12 Apr 2006 09:36:27 GMT
22. No matter how tempted I am with the prospect of unlimited power, I will not consume any energy field bigger than my head.
There’s also this one:
60. My five-year-old child advisor will also be asked to decipher any code I am thinking of using. If he breaks the code in under 30 seconds, it will not be used. Note: This also applies to passwords.
Get the rest of the
list here.
Posted in Random Cool Stuff | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Michael
Sun, 09 Apr 2006 13:17:38 GMT
Rails 1.1.1 Gives Spurious Warnings: “Rails 1.1.1 got pushed yesterday, fixing a number of issues with the
massive 1.1 release.
One attempted fix, however, seems to have backfired. Many folks who
aren’t developers use the Typo blog, normally hosted on an ISP such
as Textdrive or Dreamhost. When those ISPs upgraded to 1.1, a change in the
way Rails handles loading its environment broke Typo, and all the blogs
stopped working. In a well intentioned (if somewhat hasty) reponse, Rails
was modified in 1.1.1 to record its version when you first create an
application. It then uses RubyGems to ensure that the application continues
to use that version of Rails. Of course this only applies to new
applications, so it doesn’t fix the Typo issue, but longer term it
will allow applications to continue to run when new releases introduce
incompatibilities.
However, this change has brought with it an unfortunate side effect. Now,
when you run script/generate for controllers, and models,
you’ll see a warning:
./script/../config/../config/environment.rb:8: warning: already
initialized constant RAILS_GEM_VERSION
This is apparently benign, so the advice from Rails core is to live with it
until 1.1.2.
“
(Via PragDave.)
Posted in How-To, Programming | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Michael
Thu, 06 Apr 2006 12:17:56 GMT
Finally! Parallels, Inc has released a BETA version of their virtualization software for OS X. If you have an Intel based Mac…
Posted in Mac | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Michael
Thu, 06 Apr 2006 12:10:33 GMT
Back when RedHat decided to stop developing the Red Hat Linux and switch to their “Enterprise” line of products, we penguins have not been able to gain any sort of confidence in the Fedora project because it’s always felt like RedHat didn’t really want to do it. ArsTechnica has an interesting take on it today:
Red Hat gives up on Fedora Foundation: “Red Hat has decided against establishing a nonprofit foundation to run the Fedora Project. What does this mean for the future of the distrubtion, and what are the implications for corporate involvement in open source development?
Posted in Linux | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Michael
Tue, 04 Apr 2006 12:05:00 GMT
A few weeks ago, we reviewed Insightix Enterprise 1.5. Quick as a penguin chasing a herring, they released 2.0 on us. A round up of new features are:
-
Automatic OS Signature Generator
- Offline Elements Support
- Inventory Right-Click Menu
- Detection of DHCP Servers
- Event History
- HTTPS Support
- SNMPv3 Support
What’s good?
The 2.0 product continues the “turn it on and it works” functionality that we enjoyed so much in the 1.5 review. In about 20 minutes, we had a real time picture (literally) of every device and virtual machine on our network.
The new features in the 2.0 release make the overall product feel more mature. We found a rouge DHCP service running on an old testing machine almost immediately. The inventory right click menu saves a bunch of time when editing an element and gives the browser interface a desktop like feel. The automatic OS signature generator reduced our unidentified OS count to a manageable handful.
There were a number of other features we really liked that aren’t so obvious unless you used the 1.5 version. Software release updates can now be applied and managed through the web interface. The configuration screens (that you don’t need to use very often) have a much more logical layout than the previous versions and the whole thing feels faster.
What’s not so good?
On the release date(today), they only support Internet Explorer for management. While IE may have 85% of the browser market share, we’d be willing to bet that Firefox is the vast majority in the data center. Official word is that some bugs related to Firefox couldn’t get fixed in time for the release date, but this is a real sore point. With Microsoft’s complete failure to fix a serious bug for a few more weeks, no good admin is using IE these days. It’s hard to even find a copy here in Penguin Land, we did manage to dig one up inside on old Xen virtual machine to do our testing. This release without broad browser support can be a deal killer for many shops.
The historical/offline feature needs some tweaking as well. If you have a device that drops off the network and then reenters with a different IP address, we found that sometimes it shows up as a separate (and unauthorized) device. This could get a little out of hand in a large DHCP range of machines but we think this might just be a little release day bug.
What’s next?
The new features make Insightix feel more like a mature product. They’ve added a number of features that make managing more than a few hundred devices much easier than their previous releases and the whole interface has a more snappy feel to it.
That being said, we can’t help but long for something more to do with all of this cool data that it gathers. We can view things like performance data in real time, but there’s no way to look at it historically. This means that we still need something else to collect and manage this exact same data and that something else is going to be much more intrusive to our network than Insightix is. Maybe an OBDC connection to the data, or a more flexible reporting interface would do the trick.
All together, Insightix does do exactly what they say it does, it gives you a real time view into your network without any fuss. There’s a simple elegance to the product that is very appealing and it fits very nicely into our “it just works” mantra.
On the east coast, you can buy Insightix from Assurance Data, Inc.
Posted in Reviews | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Michael
Fri, 31 Mar 2006 12:07:00 GMT
Boeing built the X-37 in the 1990’s to be an unpiloted, autonomously operated vehicle to go into low earth orbit. It was abandoned by NASA and transferred to DARPA in 2004.
The X-37 is scheduled to be test flown by being dropped from the White Knight launch platform which is the same plane design that carried SpaceShipOne to it’s historic feat of reaching “space” and thus winning the Ansari X Prize.
Posted in Space | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Michael
Wed, 29 Mar 2006 13:55:18 GMT
Okay, so the real fix is to freeze 1.0 into your vendor directory. The quickest way I know how to do this is to get into your Typo root directory and do:
rails .
This will try to reinstall rails, say no to overwriting everything but the Rakefile (you zipped up the whole thing just in case right?). After letting it recreate your Rakefile (that you backed up since you have stuff in there):
rake freeze_edge REVISION=3303
Restart whatever you are using to serve rails and that’s it!
Email me at mike@imapenguin.com if you have a better way or need help.
Posted in How-To, Programming | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Michael
Wed, 29 Mar 2006 13:25:56 GMT
Photo from nasa.com
“The shadow of the moon falls on Earth as seen from the International Space Station, 230 miles above the planet, during a total solar eclipse at about 4:50 a.m. EST March 29. This digital photo was taken by the Expedition 12 crew, who are wrapping up a six-month mission on the ISS. Visible near the shadow are portions of Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea and the coast of Turkey.”
See more here and here
Posted in Space, Random Cool Stuff | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Michael
Tue, 28 Mar 2006 20:16:51 GMT
I upgraded our production systems this morning to Rails 1.1. We had tested all of our apps extensively with the last few pre-releases so we felt good about doing this the first day. We run extensive usage tests with the Rails testing framework and all the apps both the public apps and the ones we run privately for companies pass with flying colors.
About 10 mins. after the migration, someone emailed me to say the blog was down. I thought “crap, I forgot to check Typo on 1.1”. Sure enough it’s broken. So we searched through the logs and found that if we commented these lines out of our environment.rb file, typo works enough to limp along:
Controllers = Dependencies::LoadingModule.root(
File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'app', 'controllers'),
File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'components')
)
I got caught up in the day and never got back to it. We’ll send a fancy Imapenguin Mug to the first person who posts a good explanation and/or fix.
Posted in How-To, Programming | no comments | no trackbacks
