For the past ~6 weeks, I’ve been talking to people, getting buy-in, educating users and administrators, and generating copious amounts of project proposal and six sigma documentation presentig VMware Infrastructure as an infrastructure building and management tool. There’s a whole manifesto behind this, but I’ll try to boil it down. Basically, this client has three…
Category: Big Ideas
Why you should write: common myths debunked
I give a talk that advocates writing. I do this because I owe my career to people who wrote down what they knew and made it available in one form or another; either free on a web site, or in a book that I bought. When I started editing, one of my jobs was to…
On the demise of SysAdmin Magazine
CMP recently announced that they will cut 200 jobs, and shut down more than one magazine in the process, folding their content into other existing magazines. There has been a lot of buzz in the sysadmin community (which I know largely as a loose collection of people who belong to LOPSA, SAGE, USENIX, or local…
Python Magazine Lives
I have a confession to make: For the past 6 weeks, I’ve been leading a secret double life. By day, I’m a mild mannered system/network/database admin in academia. I also write some PHP, Perl, and Python code. By night, however, I’m an author and editor. My latest project is bigger than most. In fact, it’s…
Can Technology Kill the NAR?
The NAR is the National Association of Realtors. They’re the main lobbying interest for pavement-pounding brick-and-mortar real estate agents. Of course, this is problematic for web-based real estate outfits like Redfin, because the NAR has the required influence to get legislation passed that can make life as a web-based real estate sales organization difficult, if…
Freebase: Your database is ready!
This is going to be really frickin’ cool. There’s just no other way to put it. Maybe I’m a little too much of a data geek, because I can’t seem to sit still since receiving my email letting me know that Freebase is now in alpha, and the account I requested months ago can now…
The Future of IT and IT Policy
For those who didn’t already know, I work in academia. I work in the Computer Science Dept. at Princeton University. Every week I attend the “IT Policy Lunch”, which is a gathering of anyone on campus who is concerned with IT Policy. It’s hosted by Ed Felten, who heads up research into IT Policy. You…
Three tips to keep you focused
If you’ve read my previous posts relating to time management, you might realize by now that I tend to approach it from the opposite direction of a lot of other information sources. My philosophy is that it is easier (for me) to identify things that represent a mismanagement of time and find creative solutions to…
More news for Spanning Sync Refugees
First, there are lots of people who are pretty outraged by the new Spanning Sync pricing of $25/year for a subscription service or $65 for a one-time license. The people who are the most outraged are those who are intimately familiar with how buggy it is because they were beta testers. I’m in that camp…
Can Ubuntu Cut the Gordian Knot?
When Windows was released, it united a vast but rather fragmented society around a single philosophy. On the one side, you had end users. They had to get work done, and they needed applications to do that. On the other side, you had application developers, who needed a platform conducive to making useful applications to…