What we’re going to here is go back. Way back. A long time ago, I made a brief comment on Mr Angry’s blog article about project managment disasters where I suggested a reason for the difference between a high level management view of IT projects vs. a lower level IT “Engineer” view of those projects. Mr Angry spun my comment into an entire article and made quite a few good points about how people at different levels look at these kinds of projects.
So another day, another Java vulnerability. Before we go on, if you’re not actually using Java for anything then uninstall it right now from your computer - or at the very least disable the browser plugin. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Done? Good. Much like the problems that surrounded Microsoft’s Windows XP prior to Service Pack 2, the problens with Java have reached critical mass - even Oracle themselves are finally waking up to this fact.
Ok. So apparently Sergey Brin (seen here with an entire computer strapped to his face) thinks we should spend less time just “standing around rubbing this…"(smartphone/tablet)”…featureless piece of glass". He said this with an entire computer strapped to his face, covering his eyes. He seems to feel smartphones are “emasculating” somehow. Not sure about that myself, but I’d love to hear him explain why a smartphone or tablet is more emasculating than, say, having an entire computer strapped to your face.
When Windows 8 was first released to techies, I made the effort to install it on my main computer at home and use it in order to try and get used to it. I’ve always done this; if you work in technology you need to be up to date with technology. This install lasted for a bit longer than a month before I gave up on it and rolled back to Windows 7.
iPhone 4S disappointment... why? So the new iPhone 4S. Who's excited about that eh? Not the technorati apparently. More fool them, it seems. I guess a lot of tech commentators feel let down because they had decided among themselves that Apple were going to release something called the iPhone 5 and it was going to have 4G (despite no-one being entirely sure what that means exactly), be a nice new shape, possibly come with some kind of matter replicator and who knows what else exactly.
Whatever problems you've faced at work today just comfort yourself with this thought: You're probably not "head of security" for the PlayStation Network. Yeah, Sony have been the victims of an intrusion, and the question that everyone is wondering (and I certainly hope you are thinking about this if you're a Sony Playstation network customer) is what exactly has been "lost" and how quickly can you get all your banking security details changed.
So I finally took the plunge into the world of tablets and got myself an iPad 2, and very nice it is too. Now those people who know me (and know exactly how many Apple gadgets I have) could be forgiven for thinking I just went for the Apple on autopilot… and nothing could be further from the truth. Apple’s original iPad was clearly a very clever bit of kit but when I picked one up to try it never “spoke” to me.
In my last post, I talked about optimising virtual machine builds for the virtual environment. In this post, I shall talk about how to do just that. My employer implemented a VMWare ESX farm in 2008, using the “enterprise” level of their product, which includes tools like vCenter and vMotion. We imported a large number of physical machines into virtual machines and created a number of new virtual machines to deal with various projects.
As virtualisation becomes more popular, and as I’ve done a few projects with this myself and both helped and watched others do virtualisation projects, I think there are probably at least four stages to the life cycle of virtualisation within an organisation, and I thought it might be interesting to compare and contrast them. It’s important to remember that while some organisations will go through all the stages, others will skip certain stages, and its very important to remember that the stages are standalone goals in their own right; its perfectly reasonable only complete the first stage listed below and stick with it if that is all the business needs to do.
The phrase “I’m not very good with computers” is one you frequently hear, sometimes from people who are embarrassed to have a problem with their computer, sometimes as a response to any technical question (Our helpdesk once had this response back to telling someone that their password was temporarily set to their surname). That phrase, along with “I don’t know what this file does, so how do I delete it?” probably ranks in my top 5 list of frustrations with my job.
My feelings about various email servers I’ve had to do battle with over the years are well known to those people who have worked with me. Imagine my surprise to receive an email that began like this: OS2 wasn't enough for me, I feel the need to go the whole hog and get IBM'd*! As it happens I am now officially using Notes instead of outlook, it's weird in here!