Another recurring issue from the last ten years or so… Short answer: You need to work with the SAN admins to get more storage IOPS, and you won’t be able to give them reliable numbers from where you’re sitting because SANs and VM’s will both lie to the guest OS. You will be able to […]

read more

There are many things you’re after in an interview, after the all-important chemistry question. However, I’ve found, forgotten, and remembered a question that works well to uncover a lot. If you’re hiring for a sales engineer, services engineer, senior customer support, or architect level position, there’s a cluster of fundamentally critical abilities that we’ll call […]

read more

Switching environments is always a good time to reflect on their relative merits… I’ve just left Android for iOS and have some thoughts on the matter. First, the timeline… a loyal Blackberry user through the 2000s, I was used to a few basic concepts like “email in my pocket” and “talk on the phone”. Apps […]

read more

UI and XP design and development are undeniably a big deal, but they’re only part of the problem. What size part? That depends on your sales model. For a consumer product designed to sell itself via the web, it’s well over half of the problem. UI and XP are pretty much the only differentiators for smartphone social media […]

read more

Every internal technical email list I’ve ever been on has had one of these conversations: A) module XYZ didn’t work by itself, what’s up? B) superstition and voodoo, XYZ will EAT YOUR SOUL. C) did you remember to click the button? A) seems to work okay when you click the button, but maybe I’d better […]

read more

http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit has me thinking about a conversation I had with a friend last week… The gist is that easier entry levels mean lamer entrants. Oh, we can spin it so many ways… cheaper entrants! Entrants who aren’t wasting their time on unimportant details! Or we can question what they know if they go from throwing […]

read more

Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants was a pretty good read, but I found myself disagreeing on a fundamental point… I don’t like that it treats technology as something separate from humanity. Perhaps I’d feel differently if I hadn’t read The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution first, but I did. That book’s argument that humanity […]

read more

I’m not impressed by much in the virtualization space… they’re all done with their two valid use cases and are trying to expand into unnatural places. The valid use cases are the obvious data center centralization and what I’ll call general geekery. Data center centralization is a backlash against the common sysadmin practice of one […]

read more

Companies, like individuals, have an inverse relationship between money, time, and age. When your company is young, you have lots of time and little money. Although it feels like there’s very little time at all because you’re continually struggling to prevail in the market, there’s actually a great deal of time available for problem-solving, and […]

read more

Law the First: People Suck. This is nothing about particular types or roles of people, it’s just a statement of fact. I am people and I suck too. We’ve got brains hard-wired to look for free gravy and four-leaf clovers, and we spend way too much time doing it wrong, doing it over, and bickering over […]

read more