Ontic Oren

 I don’t know what the weather is like where you live, but yesterday was one of those days that makes my soul happy. Got home, took the dog for a walk to the grocery store, picked up some dinner, ate outside, and all is good. When the weather turns nice like this, thoughts seem to go to “spring cleaning”. I have no idea why, maybe opening the windows, airing the house drives some need to air our psyche as embodied by our closets. My closet is… interesting. I seem to have 1000 hangers. Some have clothing on it. Some are empty and sad. Some are on the floor. Some of the clothing is so old it deserves a more dignified retirement than a crumpled ball. Some has been missing for months. Nothing is folded and organized like I wanted anymore after a few months of use. I’d argue that IT labs/datacenters/whatever are like my closet. I started my career as a sysadmin, and nothing brought me more joy than the perfectly organized new racks with pretty color coded cabling. (yes, that is as sad as it sounds). But after just a few months (days?), everything looked, well, like the image on the left. . And if the cabling looked that bad, you can only imagine what the machines themselves must have been like. We had NO idea what was running, what wasn’t. We didn’t know what OS we had, what software was running. What machines had died and been removed, nothing. Like my sad closet. It would have been great if we had an easy automated way to discover what we had. Barcode scanners be-gone! Zap! to the stupid paper sheet taped to each rack for tracking. And beyond just finding what we have, discovery has hundreds more uses. Programs can use it to discover other copies, do smart things like maybe cluster or auto-configure, or any one of a million other things. Maybe even figure out how to clean up my closet?We here thought this would be a fun problem to try and solve. So starting Real Soon Now (TM), we’ll be embedding discoverability into all of our products. Want to know what you have? Easy! Want to do something really clever? Done. If you’re curious to find out more about the technology, you can read the faq on service tags. Steve has a more serious look at service tags, and the value of discovery as well, well worth a read ASAP. Look for more information on how we’re using this technology soon! And in the meantime, clean up your datacenter, AND your closet.

It turns out, business is hard. One of the hardest things is knowing who to be worried about. Due to so many external worries, most companies decide to limit the internal competition. “Don’t cannibalize our own sales”, or “don’t release a product that undercuts this other product.”

This doesn’t work. We’re in tech. Tech is an innovation driven industry. As Clayton Christensen points out in “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, if you wait till the innovative opportunity is large enough it’s too late. Will Herman over at 2-speed has a great blog post on this today: Cannibalize yourself.

We should all be looking for ways to put ourselves out of business, every single day. Play both sides of the innovators dilemma – cannibalize yourself on the low end with new innovative products, and use the freed up resources to focus on the high end as well. If you don’t, someone else will.

Looks like google updated their analytics program. Very web 2.0 now and pretty. Great usability, amazing features, free, I love it.

But why can’t I group or bucket my data? I have very peaky traffic, and would love to see data by week, instead of by day. grrr.

Technorati Tags: google analytics

I don’t know if I’m “special” in a shortbus kind of way, or if most tech people are like this, but I’m obsessed with keeping up to date on the latest versions of my software. Clearly with the success of sites like MacUpdate and VersionTracker I’m not entirely alone.

But keeping up always has it’s costs. Today, thanks to the truly awesome Sparkle module that all the cool mac kids are using these days, Adium prompted me to download and install an update. Easy peasy, and I’m running 1.0.3. Which crashes. And crashes. And crashes again. And crashes. Waste 20 min online, find there’s a bug, and downgrade. But ick.

I’m also running these days, and using a Nike Plus which I love (look for a post on it shortly). Yesterday, after a nice 5K run, I plug it in and iTunes offers to upgrade the device. Of course, I say yes. And somehow it loses my 5K run. It’s on some screens on Nike’s site, but not others. Grrr.

Finally Steve pointed to an interesting blog from Illuminata: on outdated virtual appliances. The beauty and attraction of a virtual appliance is the “just works” aspect. But what happens when “just works” means also up-to-date. As the above examples show, it’s a real challenge. But frankly it’s a challenge that is eminitly resolvable. One way: provide tools to easily roll the appliance, and have the project maintainer keep their own appliance (thanks rPath!) Another might be to provide auto-updating functionality as part of the core appliance platform, along the lines of what Sun Connection offers. Or maybe we just need sparkle for appliances. Regardless, this is going to be fun!

Technorati Tags: virtual appliance, rpath, Sun, virtual appliance, sparkle, Adium, update

One of the products in my team is Sun Connection. It’s a great patching tool, with a ton of happy customers. Now, if you’re like me you can read a thousand pages, see a ton of slides, but until you play or see the product, it’s all meaningless. So without further ado, a great 10 min demo on Sun Connection

Technorati Tags: Linux, patching, Solaris, Sun, Sun Connection