Dear ABC

The user experience of watching shows on your website sucks. Even on supported platforms, having to click through the ads is a pain. Why not let Hulu do it for you? They're better at it.

Field Trip!

Liz and I went on an impromptu field trip north today for berry picking and ended up stopping in Aurora. Really cool little town. Pictures up at Flickr. Liz will certainly be posting her highlights over there shortly. The highlights for me were finding a good deal on a 16GB micro SDHC and a real nice butane soldering iron / heat gun at Fry's.

Subversion Version Control Fundamentals

I help organize (peripherally, Hal really does 90% of the work) a local IT group called the IT Pro Forum. A couple months ago I did a presentation on the fundamentals of Subversion; what it is, why you might use it, etc. Pretty basic stuff. Unfortunately, the audience was already pretty familiar with VCS systems, and in a lot of cases SVN in particular so I don't think the presentation went very well. In an attempt to keep it valuable I pretty much threw away the content I planned on presenting and dove into more advanced stuff that I hadn't really prepared for. It ended up being an interesting "conversation" though, and I learned a bit, so it turned out ok in the end.

And now, finally, I am getting my slides up. I'm a slacker, I know. Mea culpa!


IT Pro Subversion Fundamentals

Publish at Scribd or explore others: How-to-Guides & Manu subversion vcs

More Upgrades = More Downtime

Tom Limoncelli put up yet another nice thoughtful post on measuring the performance of a sys admin team this morning. He talks about meeting SLAs, and that greatly exceeeding an SLA is a bad thing. I appreciate his logic here. Towards the end he remarks,

"Similarly, if they want to save money you can respond with scenarios that include fewer upgrades (higher risk of security problems, less productivity due to the opportunity cost of lacking new features) or by accepting a lower SLA due to an increase in outages."

In slightly clearer terms what he's saying here is, "If you want to stay on the cutting edge, you are going to have more downtime.". This is something that I think a lot of people, particularly people in management, don't often realize. This can be mitigated by running parallel systems, but the expense of that (both hard costs and soft) is rarely justified. Of course, this makes perfect sense once it's pointed out. Truly seamless upgrades are hard to do. In many cases, they simply aren't possible. To the sysadmins out there, next time you need to upgrade a service, don't forget to remind people that there's likely going to be an avaialbility sacrifice to be made. And to the managers, remember to account for that downtime when deciding whether or not an upgraade is worth it.

More Dinosaurs Bemoaning the End Days

When I heard the latest from Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton this morning talking about how terrible the Internet is, I thought to myself, "Techdirt is going to have a field day with this...". While I gleefully awaited Mike Masnick's response, I thought about some of the possible angles that could be used to take Lynton's stance apart, and came up with more than a few. Mike did not disappoint, dismantling most of Lynton's argument more or less point-by-point. Good times. Sometimes I wonder how these people got into the positions of power thay they occupy.

Those were the days...

So I found a survey just now that has some hilarious questions on it. One is: "Write a haiku describing something that happened to you in a car while you were in high school. Remember, a haiku is three lines, the first is 5 syllables, then 7, then 5 again."

My answer:

volkswagon heater
great for getting girls in here
too bad it's not me

Just had to share

:D

Oh how far we've come..

I really, really, really hope this isn't real. If it is real, I hopes it's only used in extreme cases...