Slow Tech Week

Sorry for the lack of posts this week. It’s been a slow boring tech week for me here and I have been pondering what I should post about all week and I have a big empty bag of nothing to post about. At least not much in the POWER or i arena.

I am now living in Charlotte, NC and it’s kind of the home of NASCAR now and this week has been ALL-STAR week so not much going on here with that either. Sadly the city does not seem to give two winks about placing some local hype around the fact that the largest sporting event in the US right now is having it’s ALL-STAR weekend and you live here right next to all the fun,  maybe you should come on out. Instead we get nothing. I think Charlotte has mis-managed the presents of NASCAR int he area and forgets it brings over 1 Billion dollars to the state every year.  Once again local cities and state governments ignore the people. So that has nothing to do with tech but I thought about it all week and I read and searched for any information about NASCAR in Charlotte this week.

I did happen to find an old Navy buddy of mine this week after searching for him for over a decade (My Listing). He is just a few hours away. It was one of the highlights of my week. Stew and I spent our first three commands together and I really missed just cutting up with Stew. He is a blast most days and pretty easy going. If you have been in the service go check out Together We Served. They have one for each branch of service so it should be an easy way to connect up with others. ARMY NAVY AIR FORCE MARINE. For a small annual fee you get to be a full member and I think it’s well worth the cost.

The OLPC project I think is way over-rated. Way to much press on it and I think it all depresses me. I had the opportunity to use one recently and was not impressed with it and think while the idea is good and it’s nice it’s not vapor wear  but I don’t think it’s making it to the hands of the people who need it. I have nothing to support that only there are no big stories about thousands of kids in far off places getting big shipments of OLPCs? I could be wrong.

Ubuntu 8.04 is out and you all knew that but what I have not done is installed it on my PC at home. I have a pretty nice gaming rig, it has an ASUS mother board AMD 6000 64bit Dual Core CPU, 2 GB or RAM, 2 MSI nVidia 8600 GTS Over clocked Video Cards in SLi mode and some other stuff. I like to play America’s Army, COD4, and a few other games. It’s a nice rig and plays them all really well without glitches. I use XP as my OS on that machine. Ubuntu 7.10 and 7.04 would work once I installed the the second video card and placed the SLi strap on it. Ubuntu just was angry about that arrangement. So I had given up in it. I would run Ubuntu Server on a VM on my Mac and call it a day.  So I installed Ubunut 8.04 and you know what, it didn’t die or not work. Ubuntu 8.04 works, and i have the nVidia driver loaded and all seems well. I didn’t have some trouble with the boot loader but fixed it after a few minutes of working on it. The average user would have been stumped but there is a Super GRUB kit that helped me fix it. So me and Ubuntu are pals again.

I mostly tinker on Ubuntu as MacOSX is my main computer on my MacBook PRO but I have to use Linux for some things and I like to help out other Linux people from time to time so Ubuntu is working good for me most days. I considered moving to OpenSuSE but still don’t like what they have done with KDE. It’s ugly and to confusing. KDE 3 is a huge mess and I have not played with KDE 4 yet in hopes they get the ugly out before I see it.

Top Gear is my new TV addiction. I don’t watch that much TV but I have just fallen head over heals for the BBC program called TOP GEAR. I have watched in the past and have always enjoyed it but lately I have just really gotten into the show and even made a purchase from the web site to let people know “I AM NOT THE STIG”

I seem to spend a small amount of each day keeping up with my “peeps”, and one of the site where I like to keep track of people is LinkedIN. If you are not on LinkedIN please go sign up today. It’s a great site to help you find your way around and seek out new people who you can interact with on a business level.

Well that is all for me right now. I hope this makes up for not posting much. I am sure I will get a stern talking to by the HEAD BLOGGER about not posting. It was just a pretty boring week for me in IT, and I tried and tried to find something to share but could not bring myself to think anything was interesting. IBM did some releases this week with the i and I think they approved LTO4 for the i, but that is boring too in that it should have been out months ago when the LTO4 was released. Oh well….see nothing exciting.

Is your workspace important?

I think there is something to be said for a company that can create  a workspace for it’s employees that is fun and functional. I liked this article: LINK

“What makes for an appealing workspace? The envelopes they leave in your mailbox every two weeks. But after that, it comes down to design and amenities. Also, we like windows and brick. Lots and lots of brick. After spending some time on Office Snapshots, we present the ten best-looking offices in tech, below.”

OpenSolaris released in time to die?

Sun has never been buddies with IBM and since I still bleed blue and like the company named IBM, most days, I have a bit of disdain for SUN and it’s not just because they are who they are I have tons of reasons not to like them. Sun has spent the past 8 years fumbling the ball and failing all over the place and even while they have poor financial performance and what I would consider average. It’s sad that the stock holders do call it quits and let them be purchased by someone who might pay half of what they think that are worth. Not sure who would touch them now that they are all over the place.

With that said I am an open source advocate, and I think Linux is doing pretty good, I do however have questions about OpenSolaris and the lack of WOW wrapped around it. I read daily the blog put out there by Jim Grisanzio and while it is the most popular blog at Sun’s site he reveals some of the problems with OpenSolaris and is always willing to air their dirty laundry to make a point.

I also have trouble with the Sun Open Source model, where some things are open and others are not. While I can’t keep track of any of it, the whole idea just seems very stupid to me. Plus the fact that the hardware they are selling on the “cheap” side of things is just that, cheap. It’s utter rubbish and should be avoided at all costs. Any IT person woth their salt would avoid Sun equipment until they get their act together. I have seen some if it and it’s not worth what they are charging.

While I would love to see some hearty competition between Linux and OpenSolaris I think the fact that OpenSolaris is out there supporting a company that makes a profit on the backs of the free help is a bit of an odd model to me.

Here are some interesting points:

“OpenSolaris has been released under an Open Source license,” it doesn’t have “an Open Source development community.”

“OpenSolaris’ biggest trouble is that while it’s taken three years for OpenSolaris to reach a point where general techie sorts will get it a try, the Linux distributors, especially Red Hat, Novell/SUSE and Ubuntu, has been moving in strength both to the public and to enterprise customers.”

While I wish the project luck I don’t see much future for it, the teams inside OpenSolaris fight constantly and there are some unsavory IT has beens on the board as well who have not done well in IT much less helping OpenSolaris.

I also think Sun and Jonathan Schwartz are really hanging on, and in the next four or five years unless they make something truly remarkable will be sunk. He is a pony tailed silicon valley chatter mouth and if we were to shake his head you could hear his brain rattle around in it. Sadly everyone at Sun likes his goofy know nothing smile and puts up with his poor performances and his blathering blog where he rambles on and on about nothing of significance.

This post is not an attack on Jim at all. I point out that Jim is one of the most well spoken and articulate people in the OpenSolaris community. I respect the work he does and know at the end of the day if OpenSolaris fails it would have more to do with Sun doing to much and developers arguing and belittling each other inside the project vs. anything Jim did. I just recently saw a video with Johathan on it talking about how Sun is going to make a comeback here in the next few years with their new server strategy. I still think Solaris is flawed in that it is not easy to deploy or use for the average business. It does not make computing easy at any point like the i does. I also read this which is just like to males getting out the yard stick. More does not always mean better, and in this case with all that hardware they still have run out of capacity?

Learning from Microsoft’s Mistakes

Now I am no developer, and when I say NO I mean NO so I am going to need some help making the connection. Seems as if the move for developers from Windows XP to Vista was a big one and may have been mishandled by Microsoft. Are we as an i community doing the same thing? Should we abandon RPG, COBOL, FORTRAN for the likes of JAVA, PHP and C?

Now being someone who likes new and shiny things I would say yes. I think the i attaching itself to PHP and MySQL is a step in the right direction and of course IBM have no idea how to foster that growth, and when I say that I mean no disrespect to IBM but, IBM sucks at build new communities. They don’t make things open source, and they don’t see FREE as a way to help. The recent Lotus movement where after OpenNTF being open for god knows how long now gets some attention from IBM is truly sad.

IBM should of course support the older languages, but should really place more emphasis on the new technology that is going to drive the system into a new era. Are we as i people destined for the same ill reputation as Microsoft and Vista because we are not “done right” and are not “hip” and a bit “free”. It’s time for IBM to really take a long hard look at the POWER platform and the OSes it runs and figure out how to tackle the next 20 years of growth. I can say PHP, C, MySQL, Python, AJAX, JAVA and other fancy words but how to get get them inside the i before it to late?

Lotus State of the Union - Why not to dump Lotus - Ed Brill

Ed Brill is the mouth piece for Lotus and at the latest Admin2008 had a session that explains what to do if some lose cannon in your company wants to move away from Lotus instead of using it to it’s full potential.

Link to EdBrill.com

Let me give you my two cents about why Lotu is a better choice, they seem to understand collaborative technology way better than Microsoft ever will. Lotus out of the box will allow you to do mail, that is easy but they also allow you to build applications and collaborate.

Most companies fail Lotus and don’t do anything with it but mail. There is also one other problem IBM and Lotus have, they don’t have anyone printing books about how to use Lotus Notes, How to be a Lotus Admin and how to develop real Domino applications for Lotus Notes and the Web.

i Disagree with your post Mark Fontecchio

So I don’t really disagree with Mark, I just disagree with his post and wanted to post his name on my blog to steal hits away from his. See tons of people daily good for “Mark Fontecchio” and I want to bathe in the light he warms himself in just a little bit.

I don’t know who this is: “an IT employee from an Arizona-based general contracting company”, but all I do know is he is pretty funny and not right on. LINK TO POST HERE.

I think the name, i , is fine. The more important part of the name change the POWER part. While the name will always get attention both positive and negative but the fact that there is one platform is huge. The best think IBM has done in a long time.

IBM really not ready for the letter i

While in Nashville at COMMON I mentioned to IBM that someone and maybe more than one person needs to work on taking out all the old System i, iSeries, and eeeek AS/400 terms out of the OS and the IBM.com web site.

I hate to report it but it’s not happening like I would like it to. If this were Apple they would have had this all done while we were in the session but IBM’s web site has always been a tangled mess in much need of a comb.

Take this set of pages for instance. LINK 

And how the heck do I find the i from the main page? What gives IBM? Why is it so dang hard to find what you do? Wht do you hid it all from the customer and not just the now customer what about the next customer? If I can’t find it and I have been a customer for over 18 years how is “Johnny College Student” or “New IT Guy” going to find out what the hell Power is and what I can run on it. MAKE IT SIMPLE. I am starting to fall on the side of the old AS/400 guys who think you could not market water to people stuck in an oven…….COME ON!

Bytware’s i5virus Nominated for Webby - Please sign up and VOTE

So it’s not everyday that an IBM vendor gets nominated for advertising, and I know IBM might never fall into that category. It’s a cold hard fact of life. IBM has never attempted to really be bold in advertising. I digress. Bytware on the other hand has made is a bad habit to be bold, and to make advertising campaigns that “suck you in” and hold you captive until you reach the bloody end. They have gone the normal route and given away things over the years but the recent ads and videos on YouTube have been fun. NEWS

Link to System i News Blog Post

Please sign up on the Webbey Awards site and vote for them. I really want to see them win and it would only make other i based companies think about doing more to reach the world and not just the 7 customers they have now.

Also take a look at the i5Virus Game.

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS is a day away

I can feel the downloads starting, the bit torrents are a buzzing and the next release is only a day away. I know this has nothing to do with the i or IBM but it’s important and needs to be talked about. The next version of Ubuntu is a day away!

Ubuntu 8.04RC

Ubuntu Linux ready for Enterprise? Shuttleworth says yes!

And despite his excitement about the possibilities now that the operating system is done, Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth said he knows there’s a lot of competition in the enterprise marketplace.

“We’re modest about where we stand,” Shuttleworth said. “We know we’re a new entrant in that game and that we have a long way to go still.”

Link to Article