Remember When Hand Carts Were State Of The Art? Me either.

Funny thing about the advancement of technology, in most of the modern world we enshrine it, spend massive amounts of money to find “the next big thing”, and act as if change is not only inevitable, but rapid. The truth is that change is inevitable, but not necessarily rapid, and sometimes, it’s about necessity. Sometimes it is about productivity. Sometimes, it just plain isn’t about either. Handcarts are still used for serious purposes in parts of the world, by people who are happy to have them, and think a motorized vehicle would be a waste of resources. Think...

SSDs, Velocity and the Rate of Change.

The rate of change in a mathematical equation can vary immensely based upon the equation and the inputs to the equation. Certainly the rate of change for f(x) = x^2 is a far different picture than the rate of change for f(x)=2x, for example. The old adage “the only constant is change” is absolutely true in high tech. The definition of “high” in tech changes every time something becomes mainstream. You’re working with tools and systems that even ten years ago were hardly imaginable. You’re carrying a phone that Alexander Graham Bell would not recognize – or know...

In The End, You Have to Clean.

Lori and I have a large technical reference library, both in print and electronic. Part of the reason it is large is because we are electronics geeks. We seriously want to know what there is to know about computers, networks, systems, and development tools. Part of the reason is that we don’t often enough sit down and decide to pare the collection down by those books that no longer have a valid reason for sitting on our (many) bookshelves of technical reference. The collection runs the gamut from the outdated to the state of the art, from the old...

When The Walls Come Tumbling Down.

When horrid disasters strike and both people and corporations are put on notice that they suddenly have a lot more important things to do, will you be ready? It is a testament to man’s optimism that with very few exceptions we really don’t, not at the personal level, not at the corporate level. I’ve worked a lot of places, and none of them had a complete, ready to rock DR plan. The insurance company I worked at was the closest – they had an entire duplicate datacenter sitting dark in a location very remote from HQ, awaiting need. Every few...

Forget Performance IN the Cloud, What About Performance TO the Cloud?

In an N-Tiered architecture, the network connection between tiers becomes a truly important part of the overall application performance equation. This is a fact we have known for a couple of decades now. If your network performance is down for some reason (from mis-wiring to hardware mis-configuration to over utilization), your application performance will, by definition, suffer. I ran a test once while writing for Network Computing where the last person to use the lab had programmed the ports I was using to shunt bandwidth over threshold X onto a different VLAN. It took weeks and the help of one...

Toll Booths and Dams. And Strategic Points of Control

An interesting thing about toll booths, they provide a point at which all sorts of things can happen. When you are stopped to pay a toll, it smooths the flow of traffic by letting a finite number of vehicles through per minute, reducing congestion by naturally spacing things out. Dams are much the same, holding water back on a river and letting it flow through at a rate determined by the operators of the dam. The really interesting bit is the other things that these two points introduce. When necessary, toll booths have been used to find and...

You Say Tomato, I Say Network Service Bus

It’s interesting to watch the evolution of IT over time. I have repeatedly been told “you people, we were doing that with X, back before you had a name for it!” And likely, the speaker is telling the truth, as far as it goes. Seriously, while the mechanisms may be different, putting a ton of commodity servers behind a load balancer and tweaking for performance looks an awful lot like having LPARs that can shrink and grow. You put “dynamic cloud” into the conversation and the similarities become more pronounced. The biggest difference is how much you’re paying for...

Sometimes, If IT Isn’t Broken, It Still Needs Fixing.

In our first house, we had a set of stairs that were horrible. They were unfinished, narrow, and steep. Lori went down them once with a vacuum cleaner, they were just not what we wanted in the house. They came out into the kitchen, so you were looking at these half-finished steps while sitting at the kitchen table. We covered them so they at least weren’t showing bare treads, and then we… Got used to  them. Yes, that is what I said. We adapted. They were covered, making them minimally acceptable, they served their purpose, so we enjoyed...

It Is Not What The Market Is Doing, But What You Are.

We spend an obsessive amount of time looking at the market and trying to lean toward accepted technologies. Seriously, when I was in IT management, there were an inordinate number of discussions about the state of market X or Y. While these conversations almost always revolved around what we were doing, and thus were put into context, sometimes an enterprise sits around waiting for everyone else to jump on board before joining in the flood. While sometimes this is commendable behavior, it is just as often self-defeating. If you have a project that could use technology X, then find...

Whither Cloud Gateways?

  Farm tractors and military tanks share an intertwined history that started when some smart person proposed the tracks on some farming equipment as the cross-country tool that tanks needed to get across a rubble and shell-hole strewn World War One battlefield. For the ensuing sixty years, improvements in one set of tracks spurred improvements in the other. Early on it was the farm vehicles developing improvements, but through World War Two and even some today, tanks did most of the developing. That is simply a case of experience. Farmers and farm tractor manufacturers had more experience when...