There was an entry on the Flickr blog addressing some of the performance issues some may be experiencing on the site recently. Apparently Flickr is going through some growing pains.
Also in the news, VMWare Workstation 5.0 was released earlier this month. Those who bought VMWare 4.5 between December 16, 2004 and April 7, 2005 are eligible for a free upgrade.
I’ve completed the download, but haven’t installed it yet.
About two years ago I bought a Compaq Presario 3000 laptop computer as my primary machine. It started overheating whenever I would try to check things out of a source repository or build software on it. I had it dual booting Windows XP and SuSE Linux 9.1. The overheating would cause it to just plain shutdown on Linux, or completely freeze under Windows XP. It was impossible to get anything of any substance done on the machine past email and web browsing, but I stuck it out because I didn’t want to spend more money on a new machine — and I didn’t want to be without a machine for 4-6 weeks while they sent it in for repairs.
At the time I bought it, it was brand new on the market and the poor customer reviews weren’t available. By the time I called support, the machine was on Compaq’s “classic” list.
Last month I got completely frustrated and decided to go out and find a laptop. I settled on the GATEWAY 7422GX Notebook Computer. It’s a 64-bit AMD chip with built in wireless, universal card reader, and DVD-RW drive. To be honest, I was actually too cheap to settle on this one and bought a cheaper model. However, that model I soon found had a known defect with the system restore, and they let me trade up for this model for the same price. You have to love Best Buy.
My first inclination was to again dual boot the machine running Linux and Windows XP. I need XP because my Digitech GNX4 software does not run on the Linux environment. However, once I got Linux on the machine, I found that the wireless card wasn’t supported on the distribution of Linux that I was installing (or if it was, I couldn’t figure out how to get it running after hours and hours).
Rather than spending my time wrestling with the machine and operating system for hours on end, and realizing that I actually wanted both Windows and Linux without having to reboot every time I wanted to change operating systems, I grabbed VMWARE WORKSTATION 4.X for Windows NT/2000/XP and installed it.
I decided that this time around, I was going to try out Fedora Core 3 as my Linux operating system. Having VMWare at my disposal was great, as I could muck about with the configuration as much as I needed to without hosing the machine. Once I found the documentation on getting the VMWare tools installed under Fedora, the machine has worked great.
In addition to being able to run multiple Linux distributions at my whim, the virtual machine is also able to piggy back on the hardware drivers for the Windows operating system, giving me access to my wireless network from my Linux installation. For each virtual machine installation, I now have the ability to snapshot the environment before making any major changes, guaranteeing that I can get back to a working installation.
This is truly the best of both worlds. If you want a truly safe way to run Linux on newer hardware and have any questions as to whether it will run or not, I highly recommend VMWare as a platform to integrate Linux into your daily work. I haven’t been happier.
From the “Holy-Crap-this-is-the-coolest-plugin-I’ve-ever-seen” department:
I ran across the WP-Touched plugin this morning that purported to do inline post editing on your WordPress postings right from the main page – no admin screen. Thinking this is too good to be true, I tried it.
It works. This is about the coolest plugin I’ve seen so far. The plugin inserts a link on your posts that when you click it, you get full editing capabilities right on the current page – from the content, to the categories, to the allowing of pings and comments and excerpts. Everything is right there at your fingertips with no post up to the server to the admin pages! The only thing missing right now is the trackback edit box (which would be useful).
This plugin is really cool and is a good illustration of the power of AJAX based applications in a really effective and practical way.
As I was browsing around today looking for email subscription plugins for WordPress I came across a post on skippy.net about a term called GoogleWhacking. I had never heard the term before so I did some research.
Apparently GoogleWhacking is a word or set of words without quotes that returns exactly one result.
Now that I know this I’m going to try and forget it. I can’t imagine the amount of time one could spend trying to find one of these terms.
On Silicon.com I found an article from August of last year talking about how kids in school are not really interested in IT related school subjects, despite the "opportunities for well-paid employment and the availability of jobs for the right people with the right qualifications".
This isn’t really surprising to me. At the 2004 Gartner Symposium last year, one of the tracks had an overwhelming theme about how the IT function is viewed by the business as a huge bottleneck, because the IT department can rarely respond to the needs of the business in a time frame that the business finds acceptable. Much of the talk around Gartner was around a concept called "IT Lite", where the IT department works as "glue" between outsourcing companies and the business departments who need to get work done.
For years we in the IT industry have been hearing about how 4GL languages, ERP systems, and off shore development will remove the need to have internal IT departments in order to have our needs fulfilled. There is little surprising about the fact that children these days do not feel a need to gravitate towards IT related roles. Why would you when you read articles like this one proclaiming that "IT departments face the axe by 2008":
IT departments are set for major staff cutbacks over the next four years and can expect to see more than half of their jobs to be axed, according to research from Gartner.
Gartner said that increasing pressure to deliver on business processes, and the momentum behind the outsourcing movement, will cause around two-thirds of companies to lose at least half of their IT workers by 2008.
Unfortunately, sentiments like the above are most of what people hear about IT these days and outsourcing is always viewed in a positive light when compared to the standard practice of in-house IT. You never really hear the other side of the story, in which outsourcing can actually hurt your organization.
As the article linked to above talks about, many companies outsource the truly strategic work while leaving their internal employees to deal with most of the support work. The end result of this is either a dependency on the outsourcing staff to keep the business running (at a higher long term cost than the original short term cost was estimated), or a decreased ability of the internal IT staff to respond to issues related to the developed software due to lack of exposure to the technology developed externally. This lack of ability to respond could be one of the contributing factors to the view that internal IT is unable to meet business needs.
Another contributor is the inability of IT and business staff to understand the others view of the world. Many times IT departments, because of their lack of visibility into the business itself, may view certain changes as not as important as others. Conversely, business users may not see the value in upgrading a system that is the primary cause of extreme amounts of maintenance work (which eats time that could be serving business needs) because there is some business functionality that is needed rather than decreasing the work load on IT staff.
All of these issues are real and all of them contribute to the mentality we have these days around IT.
The bottom line is with all the press about the uncertainty of the future of IT, is it any wonder kids aren’t interested in persuing it? I know that as an IT professional myself, I would think twice about recommending the profession to my children while companies continue to tout the advantages of outsourcing the work rather than looking at the deficiencies in the process that can be introduced by such an action.
Outsourcing is not an easy thing to do successfully and the savings that companies think they are going to get are not guaranteed . Until this is realized, businesses will continue on their quest to remove IT costs from the organization by outsourcing work rather than figuring out where in the process the cost can be removed. Little things such as improving the requirements analysis process, introducing source control and continuous integration, and agile development practices can go a long way in removing many of these costs.
During the time in which business are on the quest to cut costs by removing staff, and viewing internal IT as a cost rather than as an investment, there will continue to be a lack of interest in the next generation to look at IT as a profession worth persuing. Why would we even be surprised?
As an aside, the only way to be viewed as an investment is for the IT function to understand it is there to serve business needs, not the technology. This is the hard part for us IT folks.
As usual, I upgrade the software running the site because the newest isn’t released yet, and a day later it’s released. The WordPress Team has released version 1.5 of the WordPress System.
You can download it from the download area of the WordPress site.
I guess now is as good a time as any to start managing my new vendor branch …
While browsing around this morning I found a cool article that outlines the history of the ZIP archive format and, more specifically, the guy who created it, Phil Katz.
I’ve posted about this before on previous incarnations of the web site. The “compression wars” are one of the things I remember most about the early days of the PC. It was, for computer geeks, the equivelent of the O.J. trial. Everyone tried to keep up on what was going on, and everyone had an opinion.
Patrick Grote also wrote a great article describing the environment in those days. Patrick, during this time, was actually writing shareware software reviews and had reviewed a program I had written and released as shareware at the time. I still remember how great it felt to get a 9.2 rating out of 10 “for the promise of being better than Norton and following through”. What a great thing for a young kid to read as he’s learning C!
As I was writing this I looked around and found the original (1989) documentation for this program, which might be fun to read. When I can get to it, I’ll post the source code as well. It’s not pretty, but I was just learning.
I had a great time reading Patricks article, as I can remember the excitement in the air when all this stuff was going on. What an exciting time in computer history!
The computer industry is no where near as exciting from a cultural level as it was back then, when you could change the world from your garage.
By the way, I did receive one check for $10.00 for this program, in case anyone was wondering.
Update: The source for QF800 is on ibiblio.org. Working binaries for DOS can also be found there. I realized when I started looking around that I had donated this stuff to the FreeDOS project a while back, though I don’t think they’re using them.
Probably one of the coolest companies around from a “pushing technology” perspective, Google has two new web sites that I am really impressed with. The first, Google Maps is a really cool competitor to Mapquest.
The second is Google Suggest. This one is way cool and makes searching a hell of a lot easier than normal.
This is one company that has their “innovation” strategy together, even having an official policy that their employees work 20% of their time on any project they choose in order to foster innovation.
Now, the trick is to figure out how to initiate a policy like this that isn’t effected by the day to day work of a “non innovation” driven company, which I would guess is the environment that most IT people work in.
While reading slashdot this morning I came across an article about Sun opening OpenSolaris.org.
Yes folks, Solaris is finally going open source. Currently the only source code available is for dtrace, but according to the site, Sun is looking to have “buildable Solaris code” available sometime in Q2 of 2005.
I’m not sure whether this means the whole operating system or not. The statement is a little vague. I am curious to see what effect this will have on the Solaris install base (related to Linux installations) once the full software is available. I guess we’ll have to wait and see …
There’s an article in this months Red Hat Magazine (new this month) called “The Red Hat Patent Promise: Encouraging Innovation” that is a good follow up reading on companies using patent law to protect open source software.
Kind of a “Rah Rah” article for Red Hat, but it does show one thing they’re doing right.
Bieber Labs 