Select Page

BrainShare 2009

by | Dec 17, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

Looks like BrainShare 2009 has been cancelled.

 

Dear Novell Customers and Partners,

This note is to inform you that Novell will not be holding its annual BrainShare conference in Salt Lake City, Utah that was scheduled for March 2009.

…

Over the coming months, we will continue to focus on building the high-quality training and enablement offerings you have come to expect from us. We will do this through online classes, virtual conferences and local tours. These new approaches will allow everyone to participate in our education and training—without incurring the high cost of travel that, at least for now, is an issue for many of you.

…

Thank you for your continued support and confidence.

John Dragoon

John Dragoon
Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer

 

After speaking at nine BrainShares in SLC and working on half a dozen keynotes I’ve got a particular attachment to the event. Personally I hope this isn’t the end of BrainShare for good.

CAB: WordPress upgrades

by | Dec 16, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

Change:

– upgrade WordPress to WordPress 2.7 release
– upgrade getthericketts to WordPress 2.7 and latest Gallery2

 

Rollback:

– previous version of WordPress and database restore

Risks:

– plugin issues

 

Known issues:

– pluggable.php issue with runphp plugin

– note from 2.5.1 – http://wordpress.org/support/topic/179091

 

To do:

– raise trac bug for 2.7 – get it fixed for 2.7.1

Arg! Technet vs. MSDN

by | Dec 12, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I keep forgetting that my subscription switched from Microsoft TechNet to MSDN when I changed companies.

I habitually go to TechNet and then see that I’ve no permissions to download ISOs and get licenses; then I slap my forehead and log in to MSDN.

LEGO club – 4 Dec 2008

by | Dec 4, 2008 | evilzenscientist, LEGO, Uncategorized

I spent a lot of time over the Thanksgiving week sorting and rebuilding the LEGO Mindstorms kits. Here and here.

Today all of the groups at LEGO club had a working robot; complete with two motors and the light sensor.

The challenge today was to make the robot roll forward in the ‘Shark Tank’ (the light coloured floor), detect the dark edge of the carpet, stop and then reverse up.

Initially all of the teams had a go at programming this; the usual combination of loops and guesswork. I then moved on to ‘human prototyping’. Two of the LEGO group – Ben and Jonathon – became my motors and sensors. I had the entire group verbally express what should be happening:

Ben walks forward

until

Jonathan is on the carpet

then

Ben walks backward

I introduced the concept of both the LEGO ‘move’ and ‘wait’ blocks.

The next iteration was much better; most of the teams got the move – wait – move concept; the difficulty was working on the sensor values. Showing the on-brick sensor values (reflected light on floor = 54; reflected light on dark carpet = 32) really helped – back to the human prototype – Jonathon held his arms in the air (the high value) and dropped his arms (low value).

Finally some debugging (greater than, less than confusion; tweaking sensor values) and everyone had a working ‘edge sensor robot’.

Here’s the visual:

shark-pool-edged

Here is a link to the tiny program shark-pool-edge.rbt from this morning.

New switch

by | Dec 3, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

Gigabit switch arrived today. Installation was nice and simple – a 15 minute job. Looks good in the rack too.

I like the Netgear kit – still has steel casing, so it feels like it has substance.

Hardware!

by | Dec 2, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I went mad and ordered a new rack-mountable 24 port Gigabit switch. Should arrive early next week; should be simple change control.

As an aside – I used Microsoft Live Search with Cashback! $13 in my pocket 😉

Infrastructure updates

by | Nov 10, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I’m moving my primary Active Directory and Kerberos box (which also hosts the internal DNS and DHCP) from Windows 2003 to Windows Server 2008 this evening.

That should free up a box to put System Center Operations Manager 2007 on to.

My goal is to get Operations Manager to map and display my home and lab infrastructure – and to alert on health and performance issues. I hope to use Operations Manager 2007 R2 beta; that will give me cross-platform monitoring. I’ll try and tie in some other partner tools to get some sexy mapping and alerting.