Links for February 4th through February 8th

A little something extra…

Today’s extra is a video from OpsCamp Austin 2010. It’s from a series Damon Edwards did which was both fun, a nice format, and interesting – see the first round and then the second collection.

In addition to talking about delivering smaller “apps” vs. “applications,” I go over some ways that open source projects can work better with analysts:

3 Questions with Michael Coté at OpsCamp Austin 2010 from dev2ops.org on Vimeo.

I realize there seems to be a lot of “how to work better with analysts” stuff going on this links – just a coincidence!

The Links

• Caterina.net: Working hard is overrated
  "Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can be seen. But you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right thing. Working hard, even, if that's what you like to do."
• Finding the right thing to work on « Anne Z.
• OpsCamp Through an Internet-scale Lens
  "I would recommend we primarily consider the Cloud as a phenomenon that only becomes meaningful at scale. In particular, Private Clouds are not likely to yield Internet-scale efficiencies. Folks who regard their company’s conventional data center as a private cloud might be missing up on the ’secret sauce’ of cloud computing."
• SAP Board to CEO: Auf Wiedersehen, Sweetheart [Digital Daily]
• Pros and cons of Adobe’s LiveCycle services in the cloud
• QOTD [Digital Daily]
• SAP CEO Apotheker Resigns With Immediate Effect, Co-CEOs Named – Bloomberg.com
• New memoirs lift lid on La Dolce Vita era
  "Soon working as a gossip columnist at Corriere d'Informazione, Ciuffa was first to write up a scandalous striptease by a Turkish dancer in a Trastevere nightclub in November 1958, which finally alerted the world to the licentious and wealthy lifestyle that became known as the Dolce Vita. On that particular night, the Swedish actress Anita Ekberg danced barefoot, a scene she would recreate in Fellini's film, before Aiche Nana stripped to her knickers, egged on by the usual crowd of 'aristos', who fled when the police arrived."
• Mexican cartels: Brutal beyond reason
• G-7 Ministers Vow to Keep Stimulus at Arctic Talks Even as Deficits Mount
  I always read these pieces waiting for the author to finally explain what they hell they're talking about, and they never so. What does all this mean. At least there's little "say what?" moments like this one: "The G-7 officials are meeting 195 miles south of the Arctic Circle in a former whaling and fur-trading outpost that is now the capital of Canada’s northernmost territory, Nunavut."
• Wedge issues threaten Tea Party unity
  “We agree on 70 per cent of the agenda – which is to oppose Obama’s expansion of government and to return to the values of the Declaration of Independence,” says Ms Bachmann, a social conservative. “That’s what unites us.”
• Notes From the Tea Party Convention
  I need a good article on what exactly these tea baggers stand for. Are they just relabeled right-wigers, or something different?
• MonitoringForge Redux
  Tarus on the war-path.
• OpsCamp Debrief | Web Admin Blog
• Apple To iPhone Developers: Don't Use Location-Based Info 'Primarily' For Ads
  Real effects of mono-vendor lock-in. On the other hand, who wants ads? Coupons would e nice 😉
• Dell plans new line of 'private cloud' servers this year
  Dell is feeling the push to make "punk IT," sloppy less than perfect boxes. The question becomes, what do you want me to to pull out of the box so it's cheaper and still works. I suspect advanced management options and redundancy are one. If you're treating a data center as a computer, you don't need to get into the guts of each individual machine, you just need to know when to swap it out.
• Microsoft may launch new Office cloud license
  One of Goldman's recent IT spending surveys said that Microsoft licensing was one (if not the) thing holding back and/or confusing VDI deployments. While this article couches Office licenses in cloud terms, it could probably apply to VDI as well. I'm not sure that clears things up, we'll see what the actual details are.
• Rethinking Open Data
  "Data catalogues around the world have launched and then realised that they now have to build a community of data users. There's value locked up in government data, but you only realise that value when the datasets are used."
• Cisco to unleash data center extensions
  Routers that make it easier to do VMotion and such between data centers.
• Ubuntu for Business: Canonical Makes Major Hire
• Symbian is now officially Open Source

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.