No degree dooms you to a life waiting tables...
on
To Be Or Not To Be A CET?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
And also, no degree will provide a guarantee of success.
The pluses and minuses have a lot more to do with your ability to get along with other people, your ability to think through problems properly, and your willingness to do the things you are asked to do.
Ultimately, I think that studying and working within two obscurely related disciplines will make your skills more valuable and usable though. Whether that's CS and EE though - the relationship is perhaps too obvious. CS and CE might be a more worthwhile choice right now.
Well one thing it would potentially be good for is as a test suite for enhancing Wine. Whatever these guys have done is likely to have been done by other VB programmers, and making this app work with Wine would likely have a flow on to many other apps.
Having source code for something can really give the Wine coders something to sink their teeth into. I recently saw that they now have the (windows version of) AbiWord running under Wine, and that pointed up a number of fairly minor bugs.
Wine is actually getting surprisingly good nowadays. My wife still runs Photoshop, but with wine I have been able to migrate her over to a Linux desktop. Likewise I used it for a mapping application recently in a linux desktop rollout project. I have one last Windows development environment that I still need to use for a couple of clients (Progress 4GL), but Wine does that job for me too now.
Many software shops have dedicated build teams that do nothing more than make sure that the software is rebuilt from source every day. This entails tweaking build scripts, makefiles, and making sure that the proper libraries are available for the compiler and linker
Really? I don't know about other people, but where I work we do this stuff with computers!
Maintaining a team of people to autobuild would be really expensive, but maintaining a couple of computers to do it has mostly involved some setup costs.
And it has been utterly fantastic, in terms of making sure we don't deliver broken software:-)
Open source has some amazing examples in the medical field.
"Vista" is the system used to run a couple of hundred hopsitals - particularly the veteran's administration. It's open source (public domain), and nowadays can run on a completely open-source (GPL) stack, as well.
Or there's Care 2000 (probably Care 2k by now) which runs a few European hospitals.
Debian has a sub-distribution for Medical software (debian-med) which includes more "focused" stuff.
And, as someone else points out, linuxmednews will give you regular gossip for the sector.
... so it sure ain't a pre-requisite. And out of all of the characteristics of ADHD I have seen listed anywhere, he has 18 out of 18, or 14 out of 14 or whatever the particular list says.
He's six and a half now, and the total TV he's seen in his life is probably less than a month (we're not anal about it - we just don't want one in our home).
On those occasions when he has watched TV for any length of time, it totally locks him in, and he can become very uncivilised, which he normally isn't.
I don't think the lack of TV has been a bad thing, at all, either: although he couldn't read when he started school at five, six months later his reading age was eleven.
As the numbers of machines you manage increases, you will find the meaning of the word "control" changes. We only manage a couple of hundred, but the pressure to standardise, as far as is practicable, is a strong one.
Look at the people running clusters, and you can see where that gets to in the end.
The reason we (primarily) use Debian is that the potential architectures for distributing change, and for customisation-with-binary-releases seems to be much greater.
No, seriously, one of the advantages USB is supposed to deliver is that it has a 5v supply that can deliver power to devices so they don't need a power adaptor any more. Sometimes it even works, too - I have an unpowered USB doohickey that I plug my camera media into, for example. Do that with WUSB:-)
Taking over an obviously fucked project is the best opportunity you will ever see.
It's obviously up shit creek, right?
Your opportunity is to head in there with all guns blazing and fix the situation. This is fun. This is serious, major, fun. Nobody is going to disagree. Your boss is going to back you to the hilt, because he has no other choices.
You can pull your head in and be completely boring. That's fine: there's room in the world for people who want boring stuff. They're essential. They make sure I get water to my house, and that I pay my tax.
People who make stuff happen are important too. I'd like to think that they are more important, but maybe I'm biased:-)
Hmm.. The 140 users I just rolled Debian-based desktop systems out to all swear that their new "Windows" is the best thing since sliced bread. They love the cute penguin too, and the cool graphics.
Admittedly these users are mostly characterised as "middle-aged housewives", but we were careful to make everything work predictably and to manage their expectations.
Sometime next month we're going to start rolling out another 260 [Debian] desktops for a different organisation. These are going into retail stores - a horse of a different colour entirely, but I don't see that there will be Big Scary Insurmountable issues (we have the image ready now).
Usability? Well, they just point and click and things happen. Seems like these are things they were expecting to happen too.
As a side note, I haven't seen any organisations rolling out 100's of Apple iSomethings at all, unless they are already addicted to that stuff. The Linux rollouts I am seeing (and doing) are replacing Windows systems prior to license expiry. They also don't need all the features - they are being used for basic waged staff who need browser / e-mail / word processing and (usually) some major corporate application. They don't need much else at all and are already in a tightly controlled software environment.
When I grew up, I had meccano to burn. Well, being metal it wouldn't burn, of course. When I was in my teens, I was the friendly neighbourhood babysitter, and by then ('70s) Lego was all the rage. I used to build large constructions from the sets at some of my charges houses that they wouldn't pull apart until next time I came to babysit them.
When I saw the rise of sets like "Star Wars" and "Harry Potter" and so on I thought "Oh, yeah. Boring. No creativity need be applied here.".
Now, though, I have my own children. I have bought them basic boxes of blocks, and that's fine, and I've bought them specialised sets like Harry Potter (Hogwart's Castle) and SpiderMan (my wife is a spiderman nut, so my kids are too).
The interesting thing is, is that they sat right down and built it "like on the box" then immediately pulled it all apart and made amazingly creative stuff out of them. We now have pyramids, temples in the jungle (complete with mazes) secret laboratories (with traps, computers and mad scientists). We have Spiderman rescuing X, Y, or Z from some scenario that never happened in any comic. We have marble races, and endless things that fly and drive.
Most of the parts that allow all this wierd stuff to happen are actually the special ones. All of the neat secret panels and traps in Harry Potter are wonderfully repurposed in making a "Temple of Doom" (with a few Orient Expedition pieces, and a quick pyramid out of basic blocks...).
Creativity is pretty hard to hide, really. If you give a creative kid some toys to play with then he will be creative with it.
It is a shame to see MindStorms discontinued. I'm halfway tempted to go out and get one for my sons before they disappear. On the other hand the oldest (and most creative) one has just turned six, and I won't trust him not to destroy it for a couple of years yet. In those couple of years the landscape will change enough that I full expect something better will be available.
Basically this means that when you set up a domain, you specify what the IP addresses are for the authorised mail-servers. Something like SpamAssassin can then add a "+2" it came from SPF listed address, or "-2" if it didn't.
Put that in the box with all the other heuristic techniques going on and it will make a suprisingly large difference to catching spam.
I, for one, really look forward to it's implementation for some very good reasons:
It will completely stop "Joe Jobs".
A domain with SPF can't usefully specify "every trojaned box on the internet"
Software can look at the age of a domain
It all becomes grist for heuristic systems like SpamAssassin
I've been joe-jobbed plenty of times. It is &^$%*& annoying, especially for a domain that's been in use for a long time.
SPF is a great idea (aside from the problems for all the people who currently transmit legitimate email with forged from headers).... but it definately won't stop spammers. It's just another step in the arms race.
It is certainly that.
I, for one, really look forward to it's implementation for some very good reasons:
It will completely stop "Joe Jobs".
A domain with SPF can't usefully specify "every trojaned box on the internet"
Software can look at the age of a domain
It all becomes grist for heuristic systems like SpamAssassin
I've been joe-jobbed plenty of times. It is &^$%*& annoying, especially for a domain that's been in use for a long time.
It's a matter of opinion that "restricting people's control over the hardware" is necessary or appropriate. If there is some compelling state interest, then it should be considered a defective and/or dangerous product, which ought to be dispensable only to licensed purchasers.
Right.
In this case it is the opinion of the Federal Communications Commission. They have decided not to license these devices for consumer use unless these sorts of controls are in place. Meanwhile the "control in software" approach to hardware design continues apace, and there are technology drivers behind that which are not going to about-face all of a sudden.
Radio transmission devices do inherently offer the possibility of affecting people further afield, and the industry has historically been extremely regulated.
Interference can be life-threatening, if it disrupts the communication of police / ambulance / fire /... services too. Not that I expect any WiFi kit to have the power to do that, but that is the sort of thing that drives the regulations.
There are people here claiming that we'll never see Linux drivers because of this.
The main reason this is required, however, is because the latest chipsets for wireless give too much control to the software. That means the user can theoretically control transmit levels and frequencies, and make their transmission interfere with other people's communication.
Since the transmit power levels and frequencies are all set differently in different parts of the world, the closed-source software is needed to restrict people's control over the hardware.
And that is a real bummer. It is hard to support closed-source Linux drivers - people don't particularly like them, there are thousands of different kernels out there (each distribution has about fifty or so current at any one time, not to mention all the patches you can download from kernel.org).
As a result, this doesn't surprise me at all. I think it's probably the only way modern WiFi will be supported under Linux. That doesn't translate to the end of the world, however, since the regulatory situation is quite different for almost everything else in the computer.
Firstly, my client is in a position to influence the authors of the software, being in a position to influence not only their own use of the product, but also being in a position to influence wider use.
Although the product works OK, there is no doubt that a native version would work better. If the current supplier is not forthcoming with one then it is not beyond the realms of possibility for another company to produce one. The underlying data is available through legislation, so it is potentially a competitive environment.
The main point though, is that Wine allowed us to do the changeover, whereas this application would otherwise have caused a logjam for the whole switch, even though it is a relatively minor part of the user's application environment.
I've just been doing a Linux Desktop rollout...
on
Can WINE Compromise Unix?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Wine was an essential tool.
There are some applications that you just can't get converted to Linux easily, and Wine is a good solution.
In our case we are primarily using OpenOffice.org, Evolution and Mozilla Firebird as Linux apps, but the essential application that shows the users a nice map of our country with legal boundaries accurately marked is not (yet) available under Linux.
Should we delay our Linux rollout for this? No. The app does everything it needs to under Wine, and we are rolling those desktops out on time.
Once we have 140 PCs out there running Linux, however, the pressure will come on the supplier to provide us a native Linux version next time.
That all seems to me to be a perfect example both of why it is needed, and also of why it is a damn good idead.
Thanks for the project, guys - it's getting to be useful:-)
There are so many solutions...
on
PDF Writers?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
In PHP I use pdf-php, which is simple and straightforward. I've used this to produce invoices for a non-profit that I voluntarily did a membership system for in PHP.
If I want to mailmerge a document I would just use OpenOffice 1.1 - it does both parts perfectly well.
There are heaps of "printer driver" approaches as well, and of course there is Ghostscript, which has been doing this for many years.
There's plenty of proof out there. Even "ancient" but worthy texts like "The Mythical Man Month" discuss this one.
The size of the project and the nature of the bug really combine to drastically affect the outcome.
For me personally we have just spent about a year tracking down a particular set of bugs (probably not all nailed yet) which showed up post-live. When we were pre-live these would undoubtedly have been easier to fix, but something else that we could have done at that point would have been to improve our design, which would have nuked most of the bugs completely. Once we are in production however we have this forward/backward compatibility heuristic tying one hand behind our backs, and redesigning the thing gets much much bigger.
Raised floors are damn useful. By all means do all your cabling overhead, but if you can connect the A/C to pump air under the floor it flows nicely up the inside of the racks and out the top. This means that people can actually work in the server room without freezing, yet it still keeps the servers cool.
Environmental monitoring is a good idea, for when something stops working at 6:00pm on Christmas Eve.
Fire extinguishing is important. The sky is the limit for what you can spend, but at least make sure you have handheld extinguishers even if you can't afford the more elaborate stuff.
Patching per-rack is nice. When you set up it can be easy to just patch from point to point, but if you can put a panel in each rack, through to a central patch-panel, then re-patching etc. etc. will be much easier.
Minimise monitors. We run our entire server room (about 120 servers) on a single monitor and keyboard with cascaded KVM switches. Of course we ssh in for about 99.999% of the admin work, but every now and again you need to sit on the real console. A KVM generates less heat, uses less power and (per server) costs considerably less.
Redundancy. Or did someone say that already?
Windows. It's good to be able to see from outside what is going on in there. Not from the big blue room, of course, but from inside the rest of the office. This is particularly the case if you have to swipe a card or something to get in there just to go looking for someone who isn't there in the first place. Usually the place should be secure, in any case, so having it like a fishbowl tends to promote that.
Speak to a real estate agent. It may be that you can rent a server room that meets all your needs already. Lots of business have gone to smaller server rooms, or outsourced their servers to a hosting facility, and it is possible to walk right into something that's already got 90% of what you want.
Finally: Expect the unexpected. What happens when you have a server room full of mainframes, 1000's of litres of diesel, and honking great generators, all on the 14th floor? Well, about 4 hours into a major power cut you discover that the water cooling for the generators comes from water pumped to a reservoir on the top of the building.
I used to work for a government department that inflicted this sort of thing on me as well. It never worked for me because I would sleep in despite my best efforts.
As a result, if I slept in I would just phone in sick. Being sick was a lot more acceptable than being five minutes late, no matter how much more expensive it was to the organisation. We had rules about being sick that required a doctor's certificate only for sick leave in excess of two days, so no matter that nobody actually believed I was sick, they couldn't pull me up on it.
When I left I'm afraid I had no respect for that kind of clockwatching (well, given my behaviour I guess I didn't have a lot of respect for it to start with:-), and I still don't.
Every job I have ever worked in since then I have made damn sure that nobody gives a flying F*** what hour I leave or arrive, in general. Of course there are occasions when you need to be on time - it just isn't an every day sort of rule around any workplace I have worked at since, and it never will be in the future.
Some jobs require it, of course. If you are in a customer service position in an organisation that opens at 7:00am, then I would expect repeated lateness to be a perfectly reasonable cause for dismissal. I wouldn't expect the owners of such a place to say that your hours were 7:00am - whatever though: I'd expect them to be (e.g.) 6:30am - whatever, so that turning up 1 minute late would not be an issue.
What's important is when most distro companies (other than bleedinge edge Gentoo and "we don't need no steenking 2.x kernels" Debian)
Debian Unstable currently has 2.6.0-test kernels available.
Your complaint, which is perhaps mildly legitimate, is that Debian Woody (current "stable") was released with the standard default vanilla kernel as a 2.2 kernel.
In fact it had plenty of choices there for people who wanted to run 2.4 kernels - they just weren't the default standard vanilla choice.
Really: just what you want for a stable server-oriented environment.
What is needed is for more people to opt in, in protecting their domains in this way, and for people to unilaterally start using that information. If any one of yahoo, aol or netscape opted into this approach I could well imagine it would cascade to comprehensive success overnight, forcing spammers to more obscure domains (such as my own - currently victim to a 12 month "Joe Job").
Because this is distributed information, it is not easily modifiable by spammers. Ultimately this sort of approach is the only one that can work.
Ultimately, I would be able to set spamassassin to add +5 for any e-mail coming from a domain that didn't publish this information, or -5 for any one that did.
And I would not be receiving 1000's of bounce messages for messages from spammers using my domain name.
Well I know that the one I always get pulled up on at work is that you can't insert a reference to somewhere else in the document, and have it display (e.g.) the section number of that reference like (see section 4.3 - The Interweb).
That said, I must confess I used OpenOffice to write my last major (150 page) design doco, and it was great. I've converted about 2/3 of our office over to it (and about 80% to Linux).
Slashdot Mirror
And also, no degree will provide a guarantee of success.
The pluses and minuses have a lot more to do with your ability to get along with other people, your ability to think through problems properly, and your willingness to do the things you are asked to do.
Ultimately, I think that studying and working within two obscurely related disciplines will make your skills more valuable and usable though. Whether that's CS and EE though - the relationship is perhaps too obvious. CS and CE might be a more worthwhile choice right now.
Having source code for something can really give the Wine coders something to sink their teeth into. I recently saw that they now have the (windows version of) AbiWord running under Wine, and that pointed up a number of fairly minor bugs.
Wine is actually getting surprisingly good nowadays. My wife still runs Photoshop, but with wine I have been able to migrate her over to a Linux desktop. Likewise I used it for a mapping application recently in a linux desktop rollout project. I have one last Windows development environment that I still need to use for a couple of clients (Progress 4GL), but Wine does that job for me too now.
Really? I don't know about other people, but where I work we do this stuff with computers!
Maintaining a team of people to autobuild would be really expensive, but maintaining a couple of computers to do it has mostly involved some setup costs.
And it has been utterly fantastic, in terms of making sure we don't deliver broken software :-)
Open source has some amazing examples in the medical field.
"Vista" is the system used to run a couple of hundred hopsitals - particularly the veteran's administration. It's open source (public domain), and nowadays can run on a completely open-source (GPL) stack, as well.
Or there's Care 2000 (probably Care 2k by now) which runs a few European hospitals.
Debian has a sub-distribution for Medical software (debian-med) which includes more "focused" stuff.
And, as someone else points out, linuxmednews will give you regular gossip for the sector.
Be happy! Be healthy!
... so it sure ain't a pre-requisite. And out of all of the characteristics of ADHD I have seen listed anywhere, he has 18 out of 18, or 14 out of 14 or whatever the particular list says.
He's six and a half now, and the total TV he's seen in his life is probably less than a month (we're not anal about it - we just don't want one in our home).
On those occasions when he has watched TV for any length of time, it totally locks him in, and he can become very uncivilised, which he normally isn't.
I don't think the lack of TV has been a bad thing, at all, either: although he couldn't read when he started school at five, six months later his reading age was eleven.
As the numbers of machines you manage increases, you will find the meaning of the word "control" changes. We only manage a couple of hundred, but the pressure to standardise, as far as is practicable, is a strong one.
Look at the people running clusters, and you can see where that gets to in the end.
The reason we (primarily) use Debian is that the potential architectures for distributing change, and for customisation-with-binary-releases seems to be much greater.
A supply of power to the device.
No, seriously, one of the advantages USB is supposed to deliver is that it has a 5v supply that can deliver power to devices so they don't need a power adaptor any more. Sometimes it even works, too - I have an unpowered USB doohickey that I plug my camera media into, for example. Do that with WUSB :-)
Taking over an obviously fucked project is the best opportunity you will ever see.
It's obviously up shit creek, right?
Your opportunity is to head in there with all guns blazing and fix the situation. This is fun. This is serious, major, fun. Nobody is going to disagree. Your boss is going to back you to the hilt, because he has no other choices.
You can pull your head in and be completely boring. That's fine: there's room in the world for people who want boring stuff. They're essential. They make sure I get water to my house, and that I pay my tax.
People who make stuff happen are important too. I'd like to think that they are more important, but maybe I'm biased :-)
You have a choice: do you want to learn?
Go for it.
Hmm.. The 140 users I just rolled Debian-based desktop systems out to all swear that their new "Windows" is the best thing since sliced bread. They love the cute penguin too, and the cool graphics.
Admittedly these users are mostly characterised as "middle-aged housewives", but we were careful to make everything work predictably and to manage their expectations.
Sometime next month we're going to start rolling out another 260 [Debian] desktops for a different organisation. These are going into retail stores - a horse of a different colour entirely, but I don't see that there will be Big Scary Insurmountable issues (we have the image ready now).
Usability? Well, they just point and click and things happen. Seems like these are things they were expecting to happen too.
As a side note, I haven't seen any organisations rolling out 100's of Apple iSomethings at all, unless they are already addicted to that stuff. The Linux rollouts I am seeing (and doing) are replacing Windows systems prior to license expiry. They also don't need all the features - they are being used for basic waged staff who need browser / e-mail / word processing and (usually) some major corporate application. They don't need much else at all and are already in a tightly controlled software environment.
WFM. YMMV. :-)
When I grew up, I had meccano to burn. Well, being metal it wouldn't burn, of course. When I was in my teens, I was the friendly neighbourhood babysitter, and by then ('70s) Lego was all the rage. I used to build large constructions from the sets at some of my charges houses that they wouldn't pull apart until next time I came to babysit them.
When I saw the rise of sets like "Star Wars" and "Harry Potter" and so on I thought "Oh, yeah. Boring. No creativity need be applied here.".
Now, though, I have my own children. I have bought them basic boxes of blocks, and that's fine, and I've bought them specialised sets like Harry Potter (Hogwart's Castle) and SpiderMan (my wife is a spiderman nut, so my kids are too).
The interesting thing is, is that they sat right down and built it "like on the box" then immediately pulled it all apart and made amazingly creative stuff out of them. We now have pyramids, temples in the jungle (complete with mazes) secret laboratories (with traps, computers and mad scientists). We have Spiderman rescuing X, Y, or Z from some scenario that never happened in any comic. We have marble races, and endless things that fly and drive.
Most of the parts that allow all this wierd stuff to happen are actually the special ones. All of the neat secret panels and traps in Harry Potter are wonderfully repurposed in making a "Temple of Doom" (with a few Orient Expedition pieces, and a quick pyramid out of basic blocks...).
Creativity is pretty hard to hide, really. If you give a creative kid some toys to play with then he will be creative with it.
It is a shame to see MindStorms discontinued. I'm halfway tempted to go out and get one for my sons before they disappear. On the other hand the oldest (and most creative) one has just turned six, and I won't trust him not to destroy it for a couple of years yet. In those couple of years the landscape will change enough that I full expect something better will be available.
I think that Sender Permitted From (SPF) and friends look to give us significant mileage on this.
Basically this means that when you set up a domain, you specify what the IP addresses are for the authorised mail-servers. Something like SpamAssassin can then add a "+2" it came from SPF listed address, or "-2" if it didn't.
Put that in the box with all the other heuristic techniques going on and it will make a suprisingly large difference to catching spam.
I, for one, really look forward to it's implementation for some very good reasons:
I've been joe-jobbed plenty of times. It is &^$%*& annoying, especially for a domain that's been in use for a long time.
It is certainly that.
I, for one, really look forward to it's implementation for some very good reasons:
I've been joe-jobbed plenty of times. It is &^$%*& annoying, especially for a domain that's been in use for a long time.
Right.
In this case it is the opinion of the Federal Communications Commission. They have decided not to license these devices for consumer use unless these sorts of controls are in place. Meanwhile the "control in software" approach to hardware design continues apace, and there are technology drivers behind that which are not going to about-face all of a sudden.
Radio transmission devices do inherently offer the possibility of affecting people further afield, and the industry has historically been extremely regulated.
Interference can be life-threatening, if it disrupts the communication of police / ambulance / fire / ... services too. Not that I expect any WiFi kit to have the power to do that, but that is the sort of thing that drives the regulations.
There are people here claiming that we'll never see Linux drivers because of this.
The main reason this is required, however, is because the latest chipsets for wireless give too much control to the software. That means the user can theoretically control transmit levels and frequencies, and make their transmission interfere with other people's communication.
Since the transmit power levels and frequencies are all set differently in different parts of the world, the closed-source software is needed to restrict people's control over the hardware.
And that is a real bummer. It is hard to support closed-source Linux drivers - people don't particularly like them, there are thousands of different kernels out there (each distribution has about fifty or so current at any one time, not to mention all the patches you can download from kernel.org).
As a result, this doesn't surprise me at all. I think it's probably the only way modern WiFi will be supported under Linux. That doesn't translate to the end of the world, however, since the regulatory situation is quite different for almost everything else in the computer.
Yes, it will, really.
Firstly, my client is in a position to influence the authors of the software, being in a position to influence not only their own use of the product, but also being in a position to influence wider use.
Although the product works OK, there is no doubt that a native version would work better. If the current supplier is not forthcoming with one then it is not beyond the realms of possibility for another company to produce one. The underlying data is available through legislation, so it is potentially a competitive environment.
The main point though, is that Wine allowed us to do the changeover, whereas this application would otherwise have caused a logjam for the whole switch, even though it is a relatively minor part of the user's application environment.
Wine was an essential tool.
There are some applications that you just can't get converted to Linux easily, and Wine is a good solution.
In our case we are primarily using OpenOffice.org, Evolution and Mozilla Firebird as Linux apps, but the essential application that shows the users a nice map of our country with legal boundaries accurately marked is not (yet) available under Linux.
Should we delay our Linux rollout for this? No. The app does everything it needs to under Wine, and we are rolling those desktops out on time.
Once we have 140 PCs out there running Linux, however, the pressure will come on the supplier to provide us a native Linux version next time.
That all seems to me to be a perfect example both of why it is needed, and also of why it is a damn good idead.
Thanks for the project, guys - it's getting to be useful :-)
In PHP I use pdf-php, which is simple and straightforward. I've used this to produce invoices for a non-profit that I voluntarily did a membership system for in PHP.
If I want to mailmerge a document I would just use OpenOffice 1.1 - it does both parts perfectly well.
There are heaps of "printer driver" approaches as well, and of course there is Ghostscript, which has been doing this for many years.
There's plenty of proof out there. Even "ancient" but worthy texts like "The Mythical Man Month" discuss this one.
The size of the project and the nature of the bug really combine to drastically affect the outcome.
For me personally we have just spent about a year tracking down a particular set of bugs (probably not all nailed yet) which showed up post-live. When we were pre-live these would undoubtedly have been easier to fix, but something else that we could have done at that point would have been to improve our design, which would have nuked most of the bugs completely. Once we are in production however we have this forward/backward compatibility heuristic tying one hand behind our backs, and redesigning the thing gets much much bigger.
But that's just anecdotal, of course.
Raised floors are damn useful. By all means do all your cabling overhead, but if you can connect the A/C to pump air under the floor it flows nicely up the inside of the racks and out the top. This means that people can actually work in the server room without freezing, yet it still keeps the servers cool.
Environmental monitoring is a good idea, for when something stops working at 6:00pm on Christmas Eve.
Fire extinguishing is important. The sky is the limit for what you can spend, but at least make sure you have handheld extinguishers even if you can't afford the more elaborate stuff.
Patching per-rack is nice. When you set up it can be easy to just patch from point to point, but if you can put a panel in each rack, through to a central patch-panel, then re-patching etc. etc. will be much easier.
Minimise monitors. We run our entire server room (about 120 servers) on a single monitor and keyboard with cascaded KVM switches. Of course we ssh in for about 99.999% of the admin work, but every now and again you need to sit on the real console. A KVM generates less heat, uses less power and (per server) costs considerably less.
Redundancy. Or did someone say that already?
Windows. It's good to be able to see from outside what is going on in there. Not from the big blue room, of course, but from inside the rest of the office. This is particularly the case if you have to swipe a card or something to get in there just to go looking for someone who isn't there in the first place. Usually the place should be secure, in any case, so having it like a fishbowl tends to promote that.
Speak to a real estate agent. It may be that you can rent a server room that meets all your needs already. Lots of business have gone to smaller server rooms, or outsourced their servers to a hosting facility, and it is possible to walk right into something that's already got 90% of what you want.
Finally: Expect the unexpected. What happens when you have a server room full of mainframes, 1000's of litres of diesel, and honking great generators, all on the 14th floor? Well, about 4 hours into a major power cut you discover that the water cooling for the generators comes from water pumped to a reservoir on the top of the building.
And the pumps don't run off backup power.
And it's empty...
Nagios - I'll say it again.
I used to work for a government department that inflicted this sort of thing on me as well. It never worked for me because I would sleep in despite my best efforts.
As a result, if I slept in I would just phone in sick. Being sick was a lot more acceptable than being five minutes late, no matter how much more expensive it was to the organisation. We had rules about being sick that required a doctor's certificate only for sick leave in excess of two days, so no matter that nobody actually believed I was sick, they couldn't pull me up on it.
When I left I'm afraid I had no respect for that kind of clockwatching (well, given my behaviour I guess I didn't have a lot of respect for it to start with :-), and I still don't.
Every job I have ever worked in since then I have made damn sure that nobody gives a flying F*** what hour I leave or arrive, in general. Of course there are occasions when you need to be on time - it just isn't an every day sort of rule around any workplace I have worked at since, and it never will be in the future.
Some jobs require it, of course. If you are in a customer service position in an organisation that opens at 7:00am, then I would expect repeated lateness to be a perfectly reasonable cause for dismissal. I wouldn't expect the owners of such a place to say that your hours were 7:00am - whatever though: I'd expect them to be (e.g.) 6:30am - whatever, so that turning up 1 minute late would not be an issue.
That'll be 2c, please.
Debian Unstable currently has 2.6.0-test kernels available.
Your complaint, which is perhaps mildly legitimate, is that Debian Woody (current "stable") was released with the standard default vanilla kernel as a 2.2 kernel.
In fact it had plenty of choices there for people who wanted to run 2.4 kernels - they just weren't the default standard vanilla choice.
Really: just what you want for a stable server-oriented environment.
In another recent thread, a suggested enhancement is for DNS to publish "allowed sender IP" addresses. The structure for this information is already there.
What is needed is for more people to opt in, in protecting their domains in this way, and for people to unilaterally start using that information. If any one of yahoo, aol or netscape opted into this approach I could well imagine it would cascade to comprehensive success overnight, forcing spammers to more obscure domains (such as my own - currently victim to a 12 month "Joe Job").
Because this is distributed information, it is not easily modifiable by spammers. Ultimately this sort of approach is the only one that can work.
Ultimately, I would be able to set spamassassin to add +5 for any e-mail coming from a domain that didn't publish this information, or -5 for any one that did.
And I would not be receiving 1000's of bounce messages for messages from spammers using my domain name.
Yes please. I want it.
Well I know that the one I always get pulled up on at work is that you can't insert a reference to somewhere else in the document, and have it display (e.g.) the section number of that reference like (see section 4.3 - The Interweb).
That said, I must confess I used OpenOffice to write my last major (150 page) design doco, and it was great. I've converted about 2/3 of our office over to it (and about 80% to Linux).
You mean like Everything 2?