ProductionScale

I added the Sphere widget to my site today.  You'll see a little icon right at the bottom of each article.  Do take a look.  It is context sensitive so you might get different results if you client on an article then click the sphere button versus clicking on the sphere button from any article on the home page.

My initial tests show that the related content links provided are quite relevant which is impressive. 

-Kent

Occasionally I'll read something that I think is good enough to say something along the lines of, "just read it, it worth it." At the Harvard Business Review website is such an article titled, "Radically Simple IT."  The premise here is something called the "Path Based Approach" to IT.  I've been calling it Agile IT recently and I've been doing it a lot longer than than I had a name for the process.  It's an effective approach that often scares the hell out of the people who don't understand the processes around it so be forewarned.

A quote that got my attention, "When continuous improvement is an integral part of daily work, the need for catchy slogans to inspire the workforce and heroic problem solving greatly diminishes."

One example of that, in the context of launching web sites, that I often tell colleagues is that if we do this site launch right, then this launch will be the most boring web site launch you've ever experienced.  Oh how I love a boring site launch with no emergencies, late hours, heroic coding marathons, or 72 hour system rebuilds followed by dozens and dozens of trouble tickets over the next 4 weeks while living (so they say) on RockStar and Energy Bars.  Yes, I love a boring launch.

Anyway, if you are into Technology Operations, Development, or managing one or both this article is worth a few minutes of your time to read in my opinion.

And lastly, to quote liberally, because it touches a special place in my heart,

The notion that business strategy and IT strategy should be aligned and, therefore, that business users should be involved in the design of enterprise systems has been widely accepted. However, doing this has proven fiendishly difficult, for several reasons. For one thing, IT leaders struggle to truly understand the business context. What’s more, business leaders do not invest the time required to appreciate the power and the challenges of technology and tend to treat the IT staff as second-class service providers. Even when the two groups meet to discuss a project, those occasions tend to be isolated, onetime events, rather than part of an ongoing discussion. Like it or not, however, information systems are an integral part of business strategy in almost all industries today. If business leaders view the IT staff as an ancillary player rather than a partner, then knowledge transfer between the two groups will suffer, resulting in missed opportunities and suboptimal performance.

So, enjoy the article and let me know what you think.

Resources:

The Article Link 

I saw this quote on a website for GridGain.

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away..." -- Antonine de Saint-Exupery

I think this quote is great because I personally feel it also applies to good systems architecture and software development as easily as it does to design.  Just swap out designer with programmer or administrator and start cutting away the excess.  Don't stop with the code you wrote or the system you built.  Look at the OS, the bloated frameworks, and key pieces of software that run your applications.  You'll be surprised at the results of cleaning all that up can do for your application performance and scalabilty.  It can also have a positive effect on your wallet over time as well I'd say.

I saw a post on Slashdot today with this title, "27 Billion Gigabytes to be Archived by 2010."  Since that is otherwise known as 27 Exabytes I wanted to check it with Google Calculator.  I use Google's built in calculator functions a lot.  Oddly enough, it didn't seem to know how to convert a Gigabyte to an Exabyte.

Search string:

27 billion GB to PB

yields

27 billion gigabytes = 25 749.2065 petabytes

 Search String:

27 billion GB to EB

yields 

Did you mean: 27 billion GB to BE

Nope. 

A little tangential to my usual postings and not exactly mind blowing for a first post of 2008.  But, I've been really busy with work and thought I'd kick off 2008 on a lighter note this year.

I've been working on some interesting articles and hope to post good things here more regularly in 2008.
Happy New Year! 

I read this interesting story today on Yves Trudeau's blog about a data storm as a result of an interesting setup using VLAN's, bonding, and DRBD to mirror a MySQL DB.  I'm not sure if this is something you'd see often or is the result of some obscure bug but it's certainly an interesting thing to be aware of if you are looking at a DRBD implementation.

Oh and  yes, I'm still alive.  But, like many other bloggers I've seen report lately, November and likely December are crazy busy months.  Everyone seems to want to cram as much as inhumanly possible down the pipes before year end.  So, I've had to slow down my posting to a trickle and sleep every now and then.

This on gets lots of points for being very cool and not so many for the fact that I can't test it because it's a limited beta.  This is a purely online Rails development environment.  You do everything in the browser based IDE and it's "instantly" live.  The screen casts are cool but spared IMHO. They note on their site that the system is "resource intensive" so I'd be really interested to load up a good app and kick out a couple of load testing runs.  Is it elastic?  That would be cool.

http://www.rubyinside.com/heroku-an-online-rails-development-and-app-hosting-environment-647.html