Storagezilla

Turning it all off.

I declare today a general purpose day.

I've taken time off from everything which for me is a big step since I tend to be an always on type of guy. I don't carry a Crackberry but I'm always on work email or hovering around work related sites. Not today. It can all wait.

I haven't read any of the hundreds upon hundreds of feeds my numerous overworked copies of FeedDemon sort and prioritize for me at different locations throughout my day. Those can wait too.

The phone is off. Anyone who I want to hear from knows how to contact me when they go straight to voicemail.

So why am I updating my blog? I'm waiting for lunch to finish cooking and I wanted some music going. The problem with keeping an iMac in the kitchen is that it's too easy to fire off an entry as you happen to be standing there.

Enjoy your weekend.

-Update- I just opened a letter to find that UPS billed me a ton of money for importing dental products. I've imported a lot of stuff since I'm sitting in a bog in Ireland and we have to import everything but I've never had a craving for dental goods.

If the Mark Twomey from the Family Dental Practice in RiverView is reading this pay your blasted bills as I'm not going to do it.

IBM employees hold virtual strike

We've become so bloody lazy as a society that now we won't even trudge around outside in the cold waving placards when we want more money. Why bother doing that when you can have an Avatar do it for you in Second Life as you sit at home in nothing but your underwear watching TV shows you've pirated off Bittorrent in another window?

EMC ONE : ONE EMC

So Chuck has taken the wraps off of EMC ONE. Good stuff.

When we first set out to tackle the challenge of how we'd evolve EMC culture and reprogram some of our DNA it felt like were were considering climbing K2 without supplies while wearing nothing but shorts sandals and T-shirts.

Fortunately we made a good call early on. We decided to use Social Media (Blogs, Wikis, Forums) to discuss the issues and put together a plan of attack. The learning curve was sharp but it was quick. That's the best kind of learning curve. Ideas were throw out into the crowd and hammered on from a lot of different points of view so the bad ones died really fast.

The result is that we've turned the lights on and are doing what needs to be done but we now have a whole new set of things to learn as this eventually rolls out across the far flung EMC empire to tens of thousands of EMC employees. While some people will choose to build their own communities on their own infrastructure to serve their unique needs (I have no problem with that. This stuff has to be organic or it won't work) but eventually I see EMC ONE as evolving into the digital nervous system of the company.

And if anything it'll provide a set of training wheels for the next crop of Bloggers who work at EMC before they decide they want to join the conversation out on the Internet. 

Family Guy does Star Wars

The bumper sticker on the back of the Imperial Star Destroyer was enough to sell me on posting this. There are other parts after this one.

(Episode pulled from YouTube at the request of FOX)

Shouldn't this be easy?

We offer this power saving feature through a services offering to ensure that our customers are thoroughly trained on the best practices in the use of this feature.

The AMS. Now with even more required services.

Dinner anyone?

Since no one actually reads his blog what with him looking like a failed nightclub act and all (Checkout that sport coat. Classy.), I though it best to mention that Len Devanna is holding a Social Networking dinner (Sponsored by EMC) on the 18th of October in conjunction with ex-HDS, ex-Podtech and current Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang.

He's had two jobs since leaving Hitachi and yet a sit down like this my friends is as close as our industry will come to peace in our time.

If you're interested party feel free to sign up. Even if you work for a competitor feel free to sign up as you can be safe in the knowledge that I'm thousands of miles away. Even though I promise you I'll be doing my utmost to ensure you're going to have a very unhappy Q4 while you're getting slaughtered on EMC provided booze. :)

Mozy

Right about now some people are reacting like a Prior of the Ori has just wandered into their little Web 2.0 village.

The Dogs of War

What with us being within collateral damage distance of Halo 3 I had a look at Medal of Honor: Airborne last night to see what other war based FPSs were available. It's the same old Medal of Honor you've played before, they just throw you out of a plane at the start of every mission in this one.

There was enough happened in WWII to ensure that they can remake these types of games forever, though if you're looking for real tragedy to put on the computer monitor can you beat WWI?

Though who'd have the mental stamina to lose ten thousand troops in order to move some out of touch General's drinks cabinet four feet closer to Berlin I don't know.

VMware Continuous Availability. Is it NonStop on the cheap?

Coming out of VMWorld the thing that interested me the most was Mendel's Continuous Availability presentation.

Boring dried up old blowhards will lecture you about Mainframes with LPARs being "real" OS virtualization, but one wonders what Terry Shannon over at Shannon Knows DEC/Compaq/HPC would have said about VMware Continuous Availability were he still with us.

It looks to me that having brought server virtualization down market VMware plan on doing the same thing with hardware functionality previously only found in Tandem NonStop systems. Unlike NonStop they can't control the OS or application design so it certainly won't support fail-safe transaction processing, if a guest OS crashes on one ESX due to an error in the code it'll crash on the other, but what it does offer is parallel execution. You could say it's to NonStop what ESX is to the Mainframe LPARs.

Which means of course that it'll sell like crazy.

Design matters

When not writing comedy/writing books/filming movies/writing plays/making TV programs, or hanging out at award shows with House M.D. star and long time collaborator Hugh Laurie, polymath Stephen Fry writes blog posts.

But he does it so much better than the rest of us. (At of time of writing his blog is being hammered with hits so connectivity maybe sporadic.)

Design matters
By design here, I mean GUI and OS as much as outer case design. Let’s go back to houses. The sixties taught us, surely, that architectural design, commercial and domestic, is not an extra. The office you work in every day, the house you live in every day, they are more than the sum of their functions. We know that sick building syndrome is real, and we know what an insult to the human spirit were some of the monstrosities constructed in past decades. An office with strip lighting, drab carpets, vile partitions and dull furniture and fittings is unacceptable these days, as much perhaps because of the poor productivity it engenders as the assault on dignity it represents. Well, computers and SmartPhones are no less environments: to say “well my WinMob device does all that your iPhone can do” is like saying my Barratt home has got the same number of bedrooms as your Georgian watermill, it’s got a kitchen too, and a bathroom.” … I accept that price is an issue here; if budget is a consideration then you’ll have to forgive me, I’m writing from the privileged position of being able to indulge my taste for these objects. But who can deny that design really matters? Or that good design need not be more expensive? We spend our lives inside the virtual environment of digital platforms - why should a faceless, graceless, styleless nerd or a greedy hog of a corporate twat deny us simplicity, beauty, grace, fun, sexiness, delight, imagination and creative energy in our digital lives? And why should Apple be the only company that sees that? Why don’t the other bastards GET IT??

With some of the hideously awful GUIs those of us in our business spend a large part of our day looking at this applies beyond the world of SmartPhones. We're all guilty, there are places where we all need to do better.