Derailment
A Train Of Thought That Jumped The Track

Computer technology is a fast-paced industry. Even though I'm directly involved in it, I'm still sometimes unaware of just how quickly it evolves. Today I was thinking back to my first semester of college, which began 15 years ago this month. Yikes. I already feel some perspective coming on, the kind where you find yourself saying things that begin with, "In my day..."

Read the rest of this story...

Recently I saw one of Shell's Real Energy TV ads. I have TiVo, so I'm used to zipping through ads, but this one caught my eye because it was a good bit longer than the usual ad. This spot featured a Shell engineer working in Southeast Asia, who was being interviewed by a local reporter about the work Shell is doing there. I won't go through the whole story, but to summarize, after the interview, the engineer is sitting in a restaurant with his teenage son, who is drinking a milkshake. The kid slurps the last bit from the glass and his dad says, "Do that again." He has a "eureka moment" which leads to a design for a flexible drill that can snake into otherwise unreachable places to extract oil.

Read the rest of this story...

As any admin knows, OS upgrades can be painful. Despite the best intentions and efforts by the vendor, bad things happen. This is especially true with kernel upgrades. It's one thing to run a blanket "yum update" or "apt-get upgrade" on your average Linux desktop, but even the tamest patch can ascend to truly ulcer-inducing levels when it applies to a critical system that can ill afford any extended downtime.

Read the rest of this story...

At the $DAYJOB we use a lot of open source code, as do the vast majority of our clients. While not always the best solution, it often permits us to build excellent solutions at a low cost. This week, we launched OmniTI Labs as a place to collect various bits of code developed in the course of our business and share them with the community. We have some phenomenally talented people on staff, so expect good things.

I'm proud to have had a small part to play in one Labs project to this point, Zetaback. Zetaback is a backup utility for ZFS. It's the brainchild of Theo Schlossnagle. It's still in alpha, but we're running it internally with good results.

OmniTI Labs will be a great place to find lots of other useful tools that may be just what you're looking for to solve your problem.