Placed my first Geocache up there: Tall Man of Crane Lake.

Pictures are posted to Flickr.  Here are a few samples:

Mike, Melissa and me at the Crane Lake Voyageur statue

Sand Point Lake, just through the narrows

Look for the face in the rock

My job at VMware is similar – I’m a Senior Systems Engineer, but now focused exclusively on working with Chicago area customers, which is nice.  No more airline or hotel status after this year!

It’s been an interesting transition so far – down to the little things like switching from GroupWise to Outlook and Exchange, which I’ve never used in a company before.  After 3-4 years of running exclusively a Linux desktop, I’m now having to learn how much Windows sucks all over again.  I’m working on that part – I think I’ll either switch back to SLED, or take the Mac plunge.

You’ll probably see my posts focusing more on VMware and virtualization now, and less on Linux, although I’m proud to say I’m still running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 at home.  Of course, it’s now virtuallized by VMware ESX Server 3.5.  More on that later.

I used the openSUSE Build Service to create RPMs for SLED 10 and openSUSE 10.2. They are in my home repository here.

What really bothered me this morning were all the posts and articles I read that treated this news like an unwelcome religious development. Many in the open source community really do treat their devotion like a religion, instead of thinking about what makes sense from a technology or (God-forbid) business point of view.

Groklaw‘s headline was “Novell Sells Out.” The most common reaction on sites like Slashdot and Technocrat was “Guess I better find a new Linux distribution.” Some of these zealots seem to hate the idea of any ties between Linux/open-source and the commercial world. They are living in a dream world, and if they want to dump Novell/SUSE in favor of a more purely communistic distribution, so be it. We won’t miss them.
I can only hope that this does not reflect the view that our customers will have – I have to believe that they will welcome this as a positive. As Novell has said for quite some time, mixed-source environments are the reality in the IT world today. Making that easier on customers is a good thing, right?

Personally, I’m just looking forward to seeing how this pans out. The advantages for projects like Samba, Mono, and OpenOffice are easy to imagine. Michael Meeks at Novell does a good job of describing what’s happening in the OpenOffice space, and answers some questions that community members are already asking. I really liked his perspective on this deal.

This cracks me up – especially the part about the Redmond Artistic Recycling Project.

Novell Linux Desktop Decal Kit

I’ve written an open-source workstation inventory scanner plug-in for ZENworks in C#, called zRegScan. It will scan for registry values, as well as printers, then store them in the ZENworks inventory database. I may add more functionality to this, such as scanning for listening TCP ports on the workstation (using only an administrator-defined list of ports, not scanning all ports) and USB devices.

I’m next thinking about writing a plugin using the NAL Authentication Hook to allow for software usage tracking in a database. Lots of customers are asking for this.

The idea is that when someone launches an application, an event would be raised that causes the plugin to write a row to a database table with the application name, date, time, and user. Reports could then be run for usage counts within specified time periods. Not entirely sure of the appropriate data model yet, but I think it’s a good idea.

As a Novell employee, I’ve become more or less accustomed to rumors about other companies purchasing us. Over the years, it’s been IBM, Sun, IBM, IBM, and now Sun again that are supposedly ready to acquire Novell.

Even though Sun has plenty of cash, buying Novell would be an expensive proposition when you look at what Sun thinks about our technology.

From http://news.com.com/Sun+mulls+buying+Novell/2100-7344_3-5292579.html:

“[Sun COO Jonathan] Schwartz said Novell’s non-SuSE products are ‘far less interesting.’”

Nice.

I don’t see this happening. But, as Dennis Miller says, “Of course that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.”