Inchoate Curmudgeon

I just stumbled upon a curious headline “Sun Plans To Close Its Data Centers” describing a post by Brian Cinque. Brian’s post was about Sun’s aggressive work within SunIT to reduce data center costs, including power and cooling requirements as well as the continuing vision of utility computing as seen by SunIT. The program has […]

Zed Shaw is ranting about Rails. The effects are palpable. People are talking about the post. I’ve seen no less than a dozen tweets on Twitter in the last hour or so, and it has been by far the vast majority of the tweets about Rails. The post is clearly consistent with a theme of healthy […]

At the Oracle Open World keynote, Larry Ellison reminisced about 30 years of Oracle history. I have never seen him speak before, and Larry was nothing like I expected. He was disarmingly frank about Oracle’s, hapless early days, and frequently reinforced a picture of Oracle as a company of geeks, growing over the years to learn […]

Vladis’s Blog has just posted an entry on good and bad reasons to virtualize titled “Virtualisation, comfortable or tight trousers“. I’d like to elaborate on the subject a bit. Vladis mentions several important drivers supported by measurable, direct IT operational cost reductions, typically enabled by:

More efficient use of the existing server footprint through higher utilization, More […]

In my recent post Virtualization and Infrastructure Modeling I neglected to mention SysML. SysML is a set of specifications for extending the UML for systems engineering disciplines, described by the OMG as “… a general-purpose graphical modeling language for specifying, analyzing, designing, and verifying complex systems that may include hardware, software, information, personnel, procedures, and […]

I was able to attend Sun’s Customer Engineering Conference (CEC) in Las Vegas last week. These are the sessions I attended:

“Turning ‘Blue Shift’ Datacenter into ‘Red Shift’ Enabler”, Eric Bezille and Michel Kintz “Project Indiana”, Glynn Foster “Virtualization: Technology, Performance and Benchmarking”, Jim Mauro and Tariq Magdon-Ismail “Intel EMT64 Quad-Core Deepdive”, Eric Markwardt “Demonstrating Ruby and Ruby on Rails […]

Robert Scoble just posted an entry titled “Steve Ballmer Doesn’t Understand Social Networking“. The article provides a reasoned perspective on the inability of some business people, notably Microsoft in this case, to understand the full implications of the social networking evolution.

The larger truth to the story is really about trust and how we converse. We […]

You might not think these things are related but they are.

I was around, and actually participated in, the bloody revolution that left glass-house mainframe data center operations in virtual flames. I was working on large, and I mean to say scary, scary large, construction projects. These projects had a typical burn rate in the hundreds […]

Following up on the post today regarding anonymity and yesterday’s post regarding integration issues in Web 2.0, I stumbled across an entry titled “Social Networking 3.0” on Henry Story’s Blog, The Sun Bablefish Blog, regarding the silos the various Web 2.0 applications and services are forming. Henry’s area of interest is focused on identity issues, […]

I’ve encountered several items today prompting me to blog on what must be a worn topic.

James Governor’s links today include a reference to Microsoft’s Terms of Use, “Just because a work is easily available on the internet or elsewhere does not mean you may use the work freely. Look for terms of use, such as […]