These Things Matter to Me
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
These Things Matter To You: Links for December 5, 2005
XEN 3.0 is out. I have such high hopes for virtualization, and XEN's overall potential, but the difficulties I encountered with previous versions make my expectations for this low.
Enomalism. XEN management console vaporware that I hope becomes a reality.
Portland's open source rumblings get national coverage. Missing some stuff (hello, OSCON!) But still...
I don't know how to play them, but text adventure games and sys-admins probably go together like peanut-butter and jelly. So it goes without saying that a text adventure game about sys-admins will get mentioned here. That's for you, h-p.
10 Golden Rules at Google. Hey you know what?!! Google!
Enomalism. XEN management console vaporware that I hope becomes a reality.
Portland's open source rumblings get national coverage. Missing some stuff (hello, OSCON!) But still...
I don't know how to play them, but text adventure games and sys-admins probably go together like peanut-butter and jelly. So it goes without saying that a text adventure game about sys-admins will get mentioned here. That's for you, h-p.
10 Golden Rules at Google. Hey you know what?!! Google!
Sunday, November 27, 2005
These Things Matter To You: Links for November 27, 2005
An ever-expanding, increasingly neatly-labeled list of open source software packages page in Wikipedia. One really great thing about this list is that it covers open source applications for non open source operating systems, too! You can have your setup.exe, and eat it, too, you lazy dudes.
A list of 13 (and growing?) Linux podcasts. Given how well the list above is evolving, it'd be great to see this as a wiki page, too.
Punk rock zine Forbes (just kiddin') feature, Open Source Invades the Enterprise. An executive summary for your boss, not that specific, about how open source is influencing strategies by Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, and SAP, among others.
A list of 13 (and growing?) Linux podcasts. Given how well the list above is evolving, it'd be great to see this as a wiki page, too.
Punk rock zine Forbes (just kiddin') feature, Open Source Invades the Enterprise. An executive summary for your boss, not that specific, about how open source is influencing strategies by Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, and SAP, among others.
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Some Google Stuff (and) Should Internal Job Transfers Be More Common, And Easier?
Part profile on Google's endlessly dissected internal culture, and part profile of CEO Eric Schmidt, the Forbes feature,Google Thinks Small, uncovers an interesting organizational factoid:
The feature also talks about the Google hiring process, a topic I've been thinking a lot about lately. As technologies and waves of related activities come and go, the need for specific niches of talent can rise and fall dramatically. What should a company do with this talent? Constantly hire and lay off people? Let people stay even after major milestones have been met, and needs have subsided?
Google of Director of Consumer Products:
...This ideas-and-data approach lets Google use fewer managers--one for every 20 line employees, compared with one for as few as 7 industrywide. "It has been as high as one to 40," Mayer says...A romantic ideal. I wonder what the role of the manager is, exactly, in that context.
The feature also talks about the Google hiring process, a topic I've been thinking a lot about lately. As technologies and waves of related activities come and go, the need for specific niches of talent can rise and fall dramatically. What should a company do with this talent? Constantly hire and lay off people? Let people stay even after major milestones have been met, and needs have subsided?
Google of Director of Consumer Products:
"We need generalists," she says. "Lots of projects and companies grow without doing new things; they just get bigger teams. We want projects to end." ... Once deemed Google-worthy, new hires get bid on by managers across the company.The article doesn't really go into it with much more detail, but it sounds like they're committing more to a person and the accompanying talent, than to a role for that person. This seems like a much less disruptive and wasteful strategy than team "bloat" or painful layoffs. If employees and their employers can assume a flexibility and willingness to develop new operational roles, depending on the shifting needs of an organization, companies should be willing to make long-term commitments to their employees. With both parties feeling more comfortably invested in eachother, neither party's interests should be at odds with eachother, and everybody could save a bit of time and pain. This hiring/ employment approach isn't a cure-all, and if an industry change happened quickly enough, there'd always be the need to hire new talent, and displace existing staff, but the dominant current set of 1person:1title assumptions could use some shaking up.
These Things Matter To You: Links for November 17, 2005
Trailer for Aardvark'd, a documentary about interns and a software project. (It takes place at joelonsoftware's Fog Creek Software.) Hope they can digitally distribute this somehow.
A great comparison of a Power Mac dual-core 2.3GHz and an Athlon X2 dual-core 2.2GHz. The short version? Apple hardware is overrated, the Power Mac hardware is inferior in every way, but the delightful Mac OS X experience makes the Power Mac the right choice.
Sun blogger on how IT has a role in employee retention, one way or another. Part of a larger Sun theme lately about environmental impact, which I am interested in, but am skeptical of, in terms of Sun's angle. More on this later, but basically in the current business climate, talking about eco-friendliness suggests like you have little else to talk about. At the same time, I consider it somewhat brave, if it's sincere.
Trailer for Aardvark'd, a documentary about interns and a software project. (It takes place at joelonsoftware's Fog Creek Software.) Hope they can digitally distribute this somehow.A great comparison of a Power Mac dual-core 2.3GHz and an Athlon X2 dual-core 2.2GHz. The short version? Apple hardware is overrated, the Power Mac hardware is inferior in every way, but the delightful Mac OS X experience makes the Power Mac the right choice.
Sun blogger on how IT has a role in employee retention, one way or another. Part of a larger Sun theme lately about environmental impact, which I am interested in, but am skeptical of, in terms of Sun's angle. More on this later, but basically in the current business climate, talking about eco-friendliness suggests like you have little else to talk about. At the same time, I consider it somewhat brave, if it's sincere.
Monday, November 14, 2005
The First Ubuntu Linux Package I Install After I Move In
Ubuntu Linux is a bit like Mac OS X in that some UNIX users will feel at home, but then wonder where the heck some stuff is. For example, in Ubuntu, most attempts to compile will fail due to lack of compiler. To get the gcc compiler and other basics, a great place to start is:
sudo apt-get install build-essentialYou can also use the graphical Synaptic tool, and search for "build-essential."
Friday, November 11, 2005
I've Been Complicating Find
I'm writing this to myself so that I never go back to how I used to use the find command.
Self:
Self:
%find . | grep (the file name, or any part of it)
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Another day, another Jonathan Schwartz podcast. But this one is a part of the Sun I/O podcast blog (lately, most Jonathan talks have been found on itconversations.com ). Around 20 minutes.
A small movie about the background of the OpenSolaris project. It's a marketing movie, no hiding that. More about open source development than OpenSolaris. BTW, why does Sun seem to favor Real media formats so much? Less than 7 minutes.
I promised info on Solaris 10's SMF system. Lots of presentations can be found here, and then some.
Great interview with Redhat co-founder Bob Young. He's left RH amicably. Devoted to new publishing venture lulu.com. Publishing. Like books, publishing.
A small movie about the background of the OpenSolaris project. It's a marketing movie, no hiding that. More about open source development than OpenSolaris. BTW, why does Sun seem to favor Real media formats so much? Less than 7 minutes.
I promised info on Solaris 10's SMF system. Lots of presentations can be found here, and then some.
Great interview with Redhat co-founder Bob Young. He's left RH amicably. Devoted to new publishing venture lulu.com. Publishing. Like books, publishing.
SUSE founder, kernel maintainer Hubert Mantel, leaves Novell. When you buy expertise, what can you do to hold on to it?
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Backseat CEO. Novell. Let Me Drive Your Car.
With a week's worth of pent-up advance-notice and anxiousness behind it (that's like a million years in speculative blog-land!), Novell announced its upcoming 600ish layoffs last week. That's less than the rumored 20%, and a little more than the rumored 10%. Once the news hit, there were some slightly misleading freak-outs going on ("Novell to cut desktop line!?!"). Not misinformation exactly, just people being theatrical, backed up by lots of people who link to stories without reading them, and then people populating comment-boards based on 3rd-level filters of the not-all-the-way read reports. The usual. Probably even Novell doesn't exactly know how it's going finally prioritize projects and staffing, but is has made some official announcements. It will make GNOME the default desktop. Not exactly a radical redirection.
Novell's obviously a big company, with enough history, legacy customers, and money to not be in danger of disappearing overnight. However, I wonder if they understand who their audience and most immediate prospective customers are. While there's no single customer profile, there's no doubt that most Linux growth has been in displacing other UNIX flavors, not Windows. It's a much smaller leap. And while cheaper licenses, totally available source code, community-centric support, and faster-paced releases can be an adjustment for anybody, UNIX shops don't need to be sold or introduced with quite the same language. Novell's marketing often seems like it's directed towards itself. Yes, it is a whole new world, Novell! A new world for you. UNIX users are beyond the proof of concept stage of the marketing of Linux. Data centers looking to displace 500 Solaris Sparc boxes with Linux, have already been running Apache (open source), and Sendmail (open source) for years! They don't need an army of marketing people convincing them Linux is safe. They are familiar with many of the attributes of Linux through exposure to related technologies that exist on most flavors of UNIX. When transitioning to Linux, people want to move forward with people who know and care about the technology.
Novell's attempts to make its support and tools "friendly" don't always fit in well with pre-existing UNIX environments. Novell's emphasis on GUI tools and "ease of use" don't actually help you transition to Linux if you already have 34 home-cooked UNIX scripts that just need to be re-written for Linux. Redhat seems to understand this. Google found 147,000 mentions of the word "Solaris" in the redhat.com domain, (including a Solaris-to-Linux migration center) only 24,200 in the novell.com domain.
Novell's offerings, particularly NLD, sometimes seem like they're being marketed towards current Microsoft users. And maybe Novell'd have an edge there over other distros, given their Microsoft-literate background. If that's Novell's plan, great. Maybe that's the right approach. However, that's a much longer campaign, to convince an organization embedded with Microsoft, to transition to Linux, than one embedded with UNIX. They seem to bounce back and forth between who they compare themselves with, and what problems they're trying to solve. It's fine to solve multiple problems, and have multiple customer profiles. Just don't be careful not to alienate the ones who are likely to choose your closest competitor (Redhat these days), by speaking to them like they're using the products from your old one (Microsoft).
Novell's obviously a big company, with enough history, legacy customers, and money to not be in danger of disappearing overnight. However, I wonder if they understand who their audience and most immediate prospective customers are. While there's no single customer profile, there's no doubt that most Linux growth has been in displacing other UNIX flavors, not Windows. It's a much smaller leap. And while cheaper licenses, totally available source code, community-centric support, and faster-paced releases can be an adjustment for anybody, UNIX shops don't need to be sold or introduced with quite the same language. Novell's marketing often seems like it's directed towards itself. Yes, it is a whole new world, Novell! A new world for you. UNIX users are beyond the proof of concept stage of the marketing of Linux. Data centers looking to displace 500 Solaris Sparc boxes with Linux, have already been running Apache (open source), and Sendmail (open source) for years! They don't need an army of marketing people convincing them Linux is safe. They are familiar with many of the attributes of Linux through exposure to related technologies that exist on most flavors of UNIX. When transitioning to Linux, people want to move forward with people who know and care about the technology.
Novell's attempts to make its support and tools "friendly" don't always fit in well with pre-existing UNIX environments. Novell's emphasis on GUI tools and "ease of use" don't actually help you transition to Linux if you already have 34 home-cooked UNIX scripts that just need to be re-written for Linux. Redhat seems to understand this. Google found 147,000 mentions of the word "Solaris" in the redhat.com domain, (including a Solaris-to-Linux migration center) only 24,200 in the novell.com domain.
Novell's offerings, particularly NLD, sometimes seem like they're being marketed towards current Microsoft users. And maybe Novell'd have an edge there over other distros, given their Microsoft-literate background. If that's Novell's plan, great. Maybe that's the right approach. However, that's a much longer campaign, to convince an organization embedded with Microsoft, to transition to Linux, than one embedded with UNIX. They seem to bounce back and forth between who they compare themselves with, and what problems they're trying to solve. It's fine to solve multiple problems, and have multiple customer profiles. Just don't be careful not to alienate the ones who are likely to choose your closest competitor (Redhat these days), by speaking to them like they're using the products from your old one (Microsoft).
