Andy @ Hillhome.org » Technology

Site Makeover

Andy — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:36:03 +0000

As you can tell, I’ve undertaken some drastic measures in changing the appearance of this site. Unfortunately, I suffered a couple hacks recently, which have caused me to take a hard look at hardening the whole web site, and various aspects of WordPress specifically. The theme I had been using was heavily customized by me, and just became too cumbersome to keep up to date.

For now, I’ve moved to the K2 theme, which I like a lot so far. It’s certainly much more powerful than a regular WordPress theme, and I’ve had to re-tool some things that were working fine under my old theme.

Your patience is appreciated as things will probably continue to change for a while. Please let me know if you encounter anything broken!

Goodbye Novell, Hello VMware

Andy — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:50:41 +0000

I’ve been severely neglecting this site the past several months with everything going on. Moving is about my least favorite thing on earth, and as if that wasn’t enough, I resigned from Novell at the end of December to take a job at fast-growing virtualization giant VMware. Leaving Novell was something I agonized over for many months, but when the VMware opportunity came along, I just couldn’t turn it down. Novell was a great place to work, and the company was very good to me over 8-plus years. I will miss many of my former colleagues.

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.

Yellow Plastic

Andy — Sat, 19 May 2007 22:05:57 +0000

In getting our house ready to put on the market, my wife and I were recently wondering why it is that smoke detectors always turn yellow after a few years.

As always, Google came to the rescue with an answer, albeit not having anything to do with smoke detectors. So, if you are wondering why smoke detectors, Super Nintendo Entertainment Systems, or other plastic items turn yellow, here is your answer.

Flight Patterns

Andy — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 13:32:06 +0000

I’m a bit of an aviation buff, so I thought this was pretty cool, even though it’s been around for a while. A guy named Aaron Koblin created a bunch of animations based on FAA flight tracking data. It’s part of the Celestial Mechanics project, where there is some more interesting stuff about what is over our heads at any given time.

Novell and Microsoft

Andy — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 15:03:58 +0000

I have to say I was as shocked as anyone when word started leaking out yesterday that Novell (NOVL) and Microsoft (MSFT) were set to announce some sort of alliance. After watching the webcast it seems to fit very well with what Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian has been all about since he came to Novell. Ted Haeger makes that exact point in his post this morning.

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.

Sun buying Novell? No way

Andy — Mon, 02 Aug 2004 22:47:03 +0000

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.”