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I am not an entrepreneur. I've known this about myself for a long time. I am a builder. The requirements for one who creates and one who builds are very different, and I am the latter. This knowledge has driven me to study as hard as I can to learn how to be the best at building, to learn everything that there is. Management Systems. Organizational Structure. Policy Frameworks. ISO Standards. SOX and COSO. Corporate Govern...
In my last post I shared my journey leading me back to the epistemological foundation of the LEAN, and therefore DevOps, movements: conceptual pragmatism. While I'm tempted to give you a total recap of the subject, there are entire university courses on the subject, and I'm fairly certain no one will care to read a blog entry sized recap of something so large. Therefore, I shall instead focus on what it means to the world in which we live ...
In the purest sense of the word, I am a philosopher, a lover of wisdom. If I learn something about a concept, I've gained knowledge, but if I learn about a concepts origins I gain understanding, which leads to wisdom. With wisdom I can anticipate behavior. Deming was a genius, without a doubt, but anyone who knows Deming also knows that he was first and foremost the student of Shewhart. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the ...
We've seen a variety of interesting developments in computing, the astounding success of Docker being the most recent. When I look back across the successes and failures an interesting realization pops out at me: the difference between a good product and a great one is whether or not it service enabled. Lets use Docker as an example. What makes Docker great? Is it about virtualization (LXC)? That's certainly an enabling technology, ...
2012 has been a great year for metal fans, and in particular, for the more mature metal fan. Maybe you've noticed, the headbanging demographic has slowly been changing, as seen best by "That Metal Show": There are lots of great metal bands, but a lot of our old favorites fail to really evolve and after decades of rockin' to Slayer, Megadeth, Pantera, etc, you just need something new, something more evolved, and complex. A critical element ...
If you've never heard of iPXE, it is the official fork of gPXE, which was the ultimate result of the Etherboot Project of old. Apparently there was a power struggle that caused the primary contributors to leave Etherboot/gPXE and they renamed gPXE to iPXE to distinguish. Technically gPXE still exists, but for all intents and purposes its a dead project. If you are completely unfamiliar with both iPXE and gPXE let me summarize. The ...
In my day to day work I rely on two systems, a MacBook Pro and a custom built PC workstation. My Mac is used for all my travel needs and communications (email, Jabber, Skype, etc). All my "real work" is done on the workstation which I refresh to the latest and greatest every 3-4 years, run dual headed, etc. Up until about 30 days ago my primary workstation ran some variety of Solaris for nearly 10 years, starting with Solaris 9 when X86 ...
My blog has certainly suffered a slow down in the last 2 years... I thought I'd provide a little insight as to why, give you a little insight into where I'm at these days, and ask for your suggestions on the future. Once upon a time, my blog was a predominately Solaris blog. In fact it became over time the most read Solaris blog. Thanks to Google it actually still is, because I have verify few active readers, the vast majority come to the ...
XKCD always has something interesting and funny to say. This one made me think a bit: We all know longer is better than more funky, but we rarely do it in practice. I've seen plenty of passwords in my time and they are almost always 6-8 chars. Why? Least common denominator of course, the truth is that most people (even IT people) re-use the same password over and over, so they pick on that works with everything, meaning 8 chars long ...
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 ...