The Joy of Non-Functional Requirements
ITILv3's "Service Design" book, in section 5.1 regarding Requirements Engineering defines 3 types of requirements: "Functional requirements are those specifically required to support a particular business function." "Management and operational requirements (sometimes referred to as non-functional requirements) address the need for a responsive, available, and secure service, and deal with such issues as ease of deployment, operability, ...
ZFS Backup & Recovery using Hadoop HDFS
Hadoop HDFS has essentially become the de facto standard in cluster file systems. I'm theory I'm a big fan of Lustre; I say "theory" because it never got ported to Solaris, despite the fact that Sun bought Lustre. But thats a different story. HDFS is extremely portable and well supported by a thriving community who are doing anything you can image with it. Consider a large cluster of production nodes. They almost certainly have unused ...
HAM’s Unite: Save 70cm!
If your a HAM, you need to be aware of HR-607 which threatens to sell off HALF of the 70cm (430-440Mhz) Amateur Radio band. I personally have been a 70cm fanatic for years, enjoying the fantastic benefits that band has to offer for clarity, range, and the wonderful repeater linking and experimentation (such as IRLP) infrastructure built on 70cm. Don't be caught unprepared, read up and fight against HR-607 to protect our limited ...
Adventures of an OpsDad: “Work/Life” Balance
At LISA, back in November, an attendee asked that I blog about work/life balance... "how you do it". I've obviously taken my time about it. Everyone's situation is different, ideology is different, culture is different. Parenting is very important to me, so I will indulge, but going in please understand that no two families are the same, therefore I can share my situation, but this is not prescriptive or intended say any other way is right ...
Systems Thinking & The Wisdom of Ackoff
Dr. Russell Ackoff was not the father of System Thinking, but he was in my opinion its best disciple. A voice of reason in the wilderness. In the following is one of many you will find on YouTube (I recommend you watch as many as you can), but there are a great number of important points he makes that I'd ask you to carefully ponder: "There are 5 types of content in the human mind: data, information, knowledge, understanding, and ...
The System of Profound Knowledge & The Wisdom Hierarchy
Wisdom, it is said by Lt. Cmdr. Data, "is the difference between knowledge and experience." Two of my hero's of the 20th Century are W. Edwards Deming and Russell L. Ackoff. Deming is commonly thought of as the "father of quality". He taught the Japanese about quality and management in the 50's and from it Japanese redefined manufacturing and the Toyota Production System (TPS) has become LEAN, which is changing the way all companies do ...
The Most Powerful 10 Minutes of the Last 50 Years
I'm preparing to leave on a long overdue vacation. When I return I hope to be back on-form, and to finally get this blog rolling again. I'll spare you the explanations as to why I've been so silent (for now)... but, every day I find more and more reflecting back to this video: If you can see the embedded video: Click Here This monologue of James Burke, from the last episode of his original Connections series has had the single ...
Special Offer from Joyent for Solaris Users
I work at Joyent... never the less, I'm really excited that we're offering a $45/mo 1GB Smart Machine offer. If I weren't an employee I'd absolutely jump at it.
CloudFlare: Firewall in the Cloud
A very interesting new startup, CloudFlare, provides a cloud based firewall solution, of sorts. The way it works is pretty straight forward, you move your DNS to them, they in turn direct your traffic at their servers which cache your site and make decisions about the connections. By leveraging Project Honey Pot information they can deflect bad guys. The nice thing is that its almost entirely automatic. Via their dashboard you can get more ...