Recently in Meta-Joe Category
In the end, the screencasts didn't seem to fit with the overall message of the Greening: Monitor Sleep in Brainstorm, but I did put in some work into creating them so I figured I'd include them below for your please.
Animated Bubbleplot of Lab Usage by hour over a 1-month period.
Animated Bubbleplot of Lab Usage over a 1-month period.
It includes narration, too!
Ah, the wonder of JMP. Oh yeah, and I used Jing to capture the screen-contents (and my mellifluous voice).
I happened to be browsing www.stardock.com, looking at their latest 4X gaming offerings, and ran across a product that they claim will help me "clean up my desktop clutter".
If you're anything like me, you keep a ton of links, documents, folders, and other stuff all over your windows desktop (not unlike your physical desktop). I have been manually organizing my clutter for a long time. PDFs here, Zip Files there, To-Dos up there in the right-hand corner. My "nightmare" scenario? Having to do a presentation with my laptop on a projector with less than the native 1920x1080 resolution of my screen. All of my desktop icons get re-arranged all over the place!
I installed Stardock's Fences about three days ago, and it really has changed the way I interact with my desktop. For the better! Here's a look at my desktop with Fences, followed by my favorite feature: double-click on any empty space on your desktop and all your icons are automatically hidden.
I wish I had a picture of my desktop *before* installing Fences, but I never want to go back! It's free for personal use (at least for now). Here's a short video giving you a demo of the product.
Any other nifty desktop productivity apps you want to recommend? Shout out in the comments!
A year ago, roughly, we had a major SAN outage; half of all the LUNs on our primary Fiber Channel SAN went belly-up, and services were down for approximately 36 hours. That event started us down a long path to a different storage vendor and technology.
Today, me and some die-hard SAN geeks, met and said goodbye to the disk subsystem we've affectionately known as TUPPERWARE (in all-caps, 'cause that's how we identify systems, ya dig?). And yes, at one point we had a ZIPLOC, a HEFTY, and a RUBBERMAID. And PYREX is still humming along in the new DataCenter.
Yes, we had a TUPPERWARE Party. Check below for the festivities! First up, the storage scene before and after. Our power and cooling requirements just got a heckuva lot lighter in that DataCenter! Woohoo!
UPDATE: I accidentally deleted my blog directory on GUTENBERG and had to re-create this post. Sorry for the redundancy! I'm furiously adding the Backup Client to the server now!
More photos after the break.
Had this strange conversation over IM this morning. It's like Kurt and I were sharing a brain or something!
Oh yeah, and we're *still* running Live Communications Server 2005. Upgrades coming soon!
I was tooling around with my Brother's home computer over the holidays, and noticed that there may have been a good bit of malware installed (thank you BearShare!).
I was about to run a scan using Symantec, then my other brother piped up and said:
Why don't you use Windows OneCare? It's online and free!
I was confused, befuddled, and intrigued! There's a free scanning tool from Microsoft? And my little bro' knew about it and I didn't? Something isn't right with the world.
Turns out it's quite useful and pretty effective; check it out:
I know how they say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what about a thousand words (well, actually 250) as a picture?
Here's a couple of pictures of previous articles about Link Aggregation and Dell Blade unboxing, as rendered by wordle.net. Pretty cool, huh?
wordle.net via LifeHacker.
Today marks the 10-year Anniversary of my employment at Wharton Computing.
I started out supporting users in The Lauder Institute and Reprographics, moved on to become a Programmer under Bob Z, where we started out with Cold Fusion and Oracle (shudder), then ultimately tagged along when he took over Core Systems (what seems like) eons ago.
Thanks to everyone out there in WCIT-land for making this place a such a rewarding, dynamic, and energizing place to stick around for this long.
Where does the time go?
So, I ran into Sanjay M. in the subway stop after work yesterday. We chit-chatted about stuff, he confessed his undying love for his Blackberry (which he recently had to divorce for an AT&T Tilt, a Windows Mobile 6 phone that I also have), talked a little bit about the SysAdmin Hangout that I proposed on Brainstorm (you all did remember to sign yourselves up to the Aspect group, right?).
Anyway, the conversation starting wandering into talks about what we were excited about and what was coming down the line in terms of what he's doing at Knowledge @ Wharton and what's going on with me in Core Systems and he brought up a great, though-provoking question!
In essence, why do we do what we do? It's a very interesting question, and not as easy to answer as I thought.
So, I'm in Core-Systems, and our group is responsible for the core infrastructure IT services for the school, specifically, Exchange, the Active Directory, VMWare, our Blade and SAN Storage infrastructure, Firewalls, VPNs, pretty much you name it, we are responsible for it.
But given that service scope, why do I bother? What makes me want to get up in the morning and come to work?
First, we are surrounded by really smart, really driven people.
Second, diversity is welcome and encouraged, be it the classic idea of diversity (race, gender, ethnicity), or just diversity of ideas and experiences. I mean, check out the interests in Aspect! I feel like I can be myself and still fit right in.
Finally, and to be more techno-specific, I like the way we work to integrate so many disparate and separately managed systems (be they databases, Linux and Windows, SANs and networking, or anything), and aren't married to doing things "just one way", but determined to do things "the right way".
Those are the biggies! I can go on and on about other things (like access to resources, flexible work schedules, the classic list of benefits of working at a University).
So, why do *you* do what you do? Hit me up in the comments or draft your own post!
