Hola!
Felt compelled to do a preliminary review on Amazon, while I work on the full one for the blog here. I’ve given it 4 out of 5 stars, but I admit I tend to be a real hard ass. I would expect a 5 only for those books I come away from inspired. It’s a very good book, and it builds a fantastic foundation, but… it’s just missing that something that makes it a superstar. It’s a book that I’d use as a reference for time to come, and has gotten me thinking, but don’t suspect I’ll be quoting it in meetings (like I did for another book I reviewed, Todd Biske‘s SOA Governance book).
I should say, 4 is excellent. 4 is a book I’d wish I’d written myself, and carry around with me until I finish it because it’s so useful.
More soon!
There’s a ZDnet blog by Mary-Jo Foley titled “‘Private cloud’ = just another buzzword for on-premise datacenter?” I caught the post on twitter (thanks Mr. Linthicum!), quickly favorited it because I knew I’d have a strong opinion on this one!
Turns out the article wasn’t what I thought. The article was about Microsoft’s odd dual-approach cloud strategy, a ‘public’ cloud via Azure or a private cloud via ‘other tools’ that are not Azure. Frankly, I think that’s ridiculous, unless those other tools are the same ones Microsoft uses to run the Azure cloud, but… I’d like to talk about Mary-Jo’s original topic. Read more…
I think it’s really cool how easy it is to do a screen capture on my little i-friend. Here are three funny screen captures. Enjoy! Read more…
Packt Publishing has kindly provided me Michael Peacock’s Drupal 6 Social Networking to review. They have asked that I publish an except from Chapter 6, “Communicating with Our Users” and I’m glad to do so.
From what I’ve read so far, it’s a well written book that is useful for learning Drupal as well as for understanding why things are done in a certain way. I find the why to be practical… but I’m getting ahead of myself. Still reading (and playing with Drupal – it’s awesome).
Enjoy the chapter excerpt, and look for my review within a week or so (I hope!). Read more…
On vacation I had this dream, where the two robot sidekicks from Mystery Science Theater 3000 were sitting on my shoulder, and we were observing my life with the same running commentary style that they did in the MST3K show.
When I woke, I realized that I simply had the wrong perspective. I was treating my life as if it were an A-movie and I was the star of the show.
Reality is, my life is really a B-movie and I’m just sitting in the audience watching it unfold. Read more…
Listening to Amazon present earlier this week, my mind wanders to his comment that 70% of IT effort is on non-differentiating work.
I’m an explored who’s turned to lost shipwrecks at the bottom of the ocean as the final frontier. All the “easy” stuff was discovered years ago by Columbus and his pals.
With 70% of all IT efforts “unexplored territory” for IT optimization and improved alignment with the business it’s an awesome opprtunity to make an impact.
(Written from my iPhone using the WordPress mobile app while waiting for my flight to pushback.)
I’ve been learning a lot at the Cloud Expo this week, even sifting through the various sales pitches to get at the heart of the changes happening. Cloud computing’s about a lot of things, for some it’s data center outsourcing, for others it’s about elastic capacity. For me, it’s more about easing integration and changing the way software is purchased and deployed.
For AppZero (formerly Trigence), it’s about deploying applications across any cloud vendor.
If I understand it correctly, they’ve got an abstraction layer that allows you to install the application without affecting the OS “space.” In doing so, it becomes possible to move instances of your applications between cloud vendors (or between your own data center and the cloud). They have a very slick demo, in which they deployed an application to Google and moved it to Amazon Web Services. You can even try it yourself.
Read more…
