Since a lot of what everyone does on those pesky devices called “comp-you-tars” is becoming increasingly more business-critical, and we’ve come to a point where a web company that has “one server that we all use” is going nowhere, we have piles of lovely silicon and metal, with electric pulses flowing through them to create the world as we see it today.

I love these machines, as they have extended our abilities far beyond a single person, they have connected us in ways that our ancestors could only imagined and written about in fiction, and they provide a central part of our everyday lives.

Developing complex systems has provided us with a challenge of building and maintaining large amounts of machines, and done correctly, a single person can easily control thousands, if not tens-of-thousands, of machines with a high degree of stability, confidence and grace.

Back in the olden days, systems were small, resource constraints were very much a real problem, and this provided developers the incentive, nay, the requirement, of knowing about their system and how to write efficient and clean code within the constraints.

As time goes by, each resource constraint is alleviated, for a while, by hardware manufacturers (more…)

I guess Verizon think they know what’s best for me.

Recently got a nice little Verizon USB 760 Modem from work, not a new concept for me, just something to keep in touch while on the go.

Unfortunately, the Verizon Access Manager software most decidedly does NOT install correctly on my Mac. Instead, it tells me I’m not an administrator. Feels a lot like trying to install software on Windows Vista.

See the failure, how pretty it is...

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I seem to be letting larger amounts of time slip by between posts, and that kind of makes me sad.

Between having the ability to Tweet, Facebook status update and Google Buzz, i feel that sometimes I just don’t want to write, and that is a Bad Thing.

Writing is a great way to dump some of the thoughts, feelings and ideas from inside this mess of a brain to written word, and in the past has allowed me to review these at a later date to see what the heck I was thinking and talking about.

Now I am not committing to writing regularly, or even on any set schedule, but just doing it now and then seems to help out.

In recent past, I’ve been tinkering with all kinds of technologies – from TCL to python and powershell, from WordPress php and css to Google AppEngine, and even more in the hardware and software realms.

Some of the things I am teaching myself is how to understand enough of the lowest possible level to get the core ideas to then be able to make that jump into the high-level arena, where having the big picture is crucial.

Some of that lies within data visualization, some of it relies on knowing the inner workings of a system, another is how to get data in and out of a management interface, and trying to figure out what is the question you want answered.

I think figuring out these kind of things are the challenges I like most.