A little over a year ago, I started wearing a blazer to work. Originally I did it to try a new look. The more I wore blazers, the more I found myself keeping more and more things handy. It was nice to always have things within hands’ reach like a pen or chap stick. Also, I discovered I liked not having my wallet in my back pocket.
As time passed, I found myself carrying mints with me on a regular basis. I also ended up buying an iPhone and it was really was no big deal to carry my iPhone and my work Blackberry with me. At work we have a fairly large campus and I find myself having to walk from building to building and it’s nice to always be able to whip out my sunglasses.
Depending on what I am doing, like traveling or attending a conference or even just an off campus meeting, I will carry some additional supplies like hand sanitizer, tissues, business cards (forgot to add those to the picture), a camera, usb stick (another thing I forgot to get in the picture) and/or a notebook.
One of the added benefits to a blazer is that when I am at my desk I can take my blazer off and I am comfortable. I’ve taken to wearing blazers even when I am not necessarily at work. There is also the “gentlemanly” aspect of it. It’s so nice to be able to offer my jacket to the wife or my kids when we are out and they find themselves with a little chill.
I live in southern California and I wear a blazer year round. It doesn’t really add any discomfort from a heat perspective. Keep in mind, I work in an office and am not exactly out jogging around town in it.
I think more guys should think about wearing blazers, it’s way better then carrying around a murse.
I just love this concept. I can imagine homes of the future being built with this technology built into it. The thought of just laying down your phone or MP3 player on the table and it getting charged while there is just cool.
There have been some pretty famous spokesmen in the past who’ve made huge impacts to the companies they were representing. OJ Simpson and Hertz, before the whole legal issues of course. Michael Jackson and Pepsi, hum again before the legal problems and hair catching of fire stuff. Micheal Jordon and Nike, he hasn’t done anything too bad yet right?
Well now lump Eric Van Johnson in this category, hopefully minus the legal issues for awhile. In what will most certainly send this companies revenues through the roof, I have done my first video “endorsement” of a product. Now this is not my first brush with Internet stardom, a few years back I got my picture taken with Irina Slutsky of GETV but that was different she was more stalking me than anything else, this time it was business.
Oddly enough it’s not an Open Source product and I don’t even particularly care for it’s licensing model but with that aside, the product itself is very solid. Splunk on the most basic level is a indexing and search service for system log files. But its extendability really expands the product much further than just that.
Check out my video endorsement and then go and buy stock in this company. Mind you they are not publicly traded at this time but you shouldn’t let that stop you as they are obviously going to go main stream now that they have me doing commercials for them
During this time of financial “belt tightening” we are all feeling the pinch and probably no one more than the IT organization budgets across the corporate map. IT is typically the first to get hit, and hit hard, by cut backs. It’s during this time that CIOs and VP’s who wouldn’t have given Open Source Solutions much of a look start to turn to Open Source as some sort of magic bullet to allow them to get what they need and stay within budget. I wish to throw out these words of warning to both the afore mentioned group and the Open Source enthusiast who have been working to get Open Source into their environments and might be thinking this is the opportunity they were waiting for.
Yes, there are financial benefits to having an Open Source architecture and those people who have one will be able to manage the rough waters moving forward a lot easier but if you have not already established this environment then chances are you’ve already missed the boat this time around. It should be made very clear that there is a cost to implement any environment, including an Open Source environment, and more so if you are attempting to replace an existing environment.
For my fellow Open Source brothers (and sisters) who long to hear the phrase “let’s move our environment to Open Source” please proceed with a great deal of caution. Make sure the spirit of the initiative to move to Open Source is one of genuine architectural decision making and not one of financial desperation. In the latter scenario, organizations have already conceded to needing to “cut corners” and see Open Source as a way of doing this. The message should be made clear that Open Source is not a corner cutting solution. Furthermore, there are no substitutes for best practice and common sense, so do not sacrifice your architecture for the opportunity to implement a piece of Open Source you’ve wanted to put in place, make sure it’s put in place correctly. It will do more harm to your environment, and the efforts to establish Open Source as a better solution, if your implementation is done poorly and without enough forward thinking and ultimately fails.
Final suggestions:
Where Open Source fits, IMPLEMENT! Accept there will be cost.
Where Open Source needs to replace another solution, plan out the implementation carefully and try not to sacrifices any current functionality you may have now.
Nothing replaces best practices and having clear, well defined standards. Good Luck!
I’ve stated before how I am fortunate to be in a position where I typically work on a Linux, OSX, and Windows desktops on regular basis. Depending on what I am doing and my location I might spend a good amount of time on any of these systems. For the most part, my life style makes this pretty easy. I live in “the cloud” a lot for things like email and even documents. I keep things standard complaint and use tools that are typically cross-platformed or have counterparts on other platforms. This has afforded me some great freedoms and have allowed me to unchain myself and not be too dependent on any one solution. Instead my life has become one of preference and knowledge.
However, with everything there has always been pain points, one for me has been IM. While yes, it no longer matters which platform I am on at any given time I am still able to access my Yahoo, AIM, MSN, Gtalk accounts, the issue comes into play when I move from one machine to another and forget to sign out of IM on the previous machine. Some of the IM services alert you when you are logged onto one accounts from multiple systems and allows you to decide what to do, like AIM which gives you an option to send it a command to log you out of your previous session. Some just don’t care, like Gtalk which doesn’t seem to be concerned with how many times and from how many locations you are logged in, I don’t particularly like this approach. Then there are services like Yahoo that just get upset and decides to log you out from one of your accounts, couple that with IM clients that battle to keep their connection like Trillian and you can end up in a situation where you can’t log into your account because another is already logged in and wont let go.
I’ve come up with a few approaches that have made this situation somewhat manageable. On my Linux and OSX box this is pretty simple, there is a command line command called ‘killall‘ that comes to the rescue. With the line ‘killall pidgin’ or ‘killall Adium’ my IM clients on Linux and OSX respectively, end. Add the ability to ssh into these systems and if I forget to log out I simple do a quick ssh connection to these boxes, run my command and I am done. Furthermore, I typically have a good idea when I wont be at those computers, so with that information and the killall command, I am able to add crontab entries to automatically run my command. So for example, I know at 3AM I don’t want to be up IM’ing with anyone so I run that command at that time in case I left my IM client running before going to bed. I also know Monday through Friday I am typically at work and in my office around 8AM so I run that command on my home systems at that time too in case I left the house without logging out. The command ends up looking like this in crontab, 00 03,08 * * * /usr/bin/killall Adium > /dev/null 2>&1 Worse case scenario, I ssh back to the system and manually run the command. Its a great system and works like a charm.
At work the story is a little different. First off, the system I run IM on is a Windows machine which doesn’t have the cool ability to just SSH to and even if I did install an SSH server on the machine it is located behind a corporate firewall so I wouldn’t be able to get it anyways from the outside. I do have the ability to log in via VPN but that is a lot of work to log into the corporate VPN and RDP to my desktop just to turn off an IM client. Windows also doesn’t really have crontab, it does have a “scheduler” which acts kind of acts like crontab but that coupled with the fact that Windows doesn’t really have the same powerful command line tools that Linux and OSX have makes this simple task a little tougher to accomplish. Read the rest
Just something I came across and thought I would post about. This is a video about a “green project” called Air Trees. Pretty cool, would love to see one of these in person and feel how effective it is.
They produce climates and energy in a couple of different ways from cooling down the air to traditional solar power. Very cool stuff.
Recently I got my invite to try out the new Dropbox service. I am a long time Folder Share user and had heard some good things about Dropbox. I have to say, I am very happy with the performance of Dropbox and was even more pleased when I found out there was a Open Source Linux client. Figured I wouldn’t be a good geek if I didn’t do a quick install and see how it performed. Here is a video of that effort.
I had made mention last week to a couple of friends how I got a few Adobe Air applications up and running on my Ubuntu install. I walked one person through how I did it and decided to also make a quick video tutorial on the process.
A couple disclaimers, first one is that I use my Ubuntu laptop on a daily basis and I have had it up and running for awhile so I am not sure if I installed some supporting packages that make this work. I haven’t tried this on a fresh default install of Ubuntu. Second, I was trying to keep the video somewhat short so I didn’t get into some of the corkyness that I see in the applications, like on Pownce you don’t get the embedded video feeds. Remember, this is Alpha software and it seems like how well the applications are written also factors into how well they are going to run under Linux.
Hope you enjoy the video. Here are the links from the video encase you miss them.
UPDATE: I mentioned in my video how you don’t need to save the .air file but can instead just launch it with the “Open With” in the dialog box. This works fine on my Gutsy box but doesn’t seem to work on my newer 8.04 Hardy box. Even though Hardy recognizes that the file should be launched using the “Adobe Air Application Installer”, I still get the error that “the associated helper application does not exist” when I trying using it. You can however save the file to disk, right click, and select “Open With Adobe Air Application Installer” and it works fine. Not sure why I have this behavior.
UPDATE (2008-Sept-16): Adobe moved the Linux version of AIR to beta (link) and this has fixed a couple of things. First, the issue from my last update doesn’t appear to be a problem anymore on Hardy. Second, now AIR Applications have their pretty icons. And finally, and most exciting, Pandora AIR client now works!!
It’s funny how some people react when they learn I had (ok technically have) cancer. You have people who in general don’t mutter the word beyond a quiet whisper. Some people feel they are being insensitive if they discuss it; you’re not by the way. Then there are the ones that want to tell you about every person they’ve known who has, had, or have died from cancer. Those conversations can get a little depressing.
But I digress because that is not the reason of this post. No, the reason for this quick little posting is to let my family and friends know that I am approaching 3 years of being “cancer free” and that in my appointment with my Oncologist today he informed me that my numbers where looking so good, I would not need to come back and see him for an entire year. On top of that, no more CAT scans.
All great news and I wanted to make sure to share it with everyone. I now return you back to your normal life already in progress.
I was asked to speak at a small event here is San Diego about a week ago. I quickly came to the realization that I am not much of a public speak, sober anyways. It’s not that I was nervous or anything, I just suck at speaking to large crowds.
Now, it’s typical for me to rant and rave and yap about myself here on my blog, but I was extremely surprised and honored when Michael Baum, the CEO of the company I did the speaking for (Splunk), gave me a generous write up on his blog. Check it out http://blogs.splunk.com/thebaum/2008/08/15/splunk-live-southwest-2008/
A little over a year ago, I started wearing a blazer to work. Originally I did it to try a new look. The more I wore blazers, the more I found myself keeping more and more things handy. It was nice to always have things within hands’ reach like a pen or chap stick. Also, I discovered I liked not having my wallet in my back pocket.
