It’s been slow blogging this last week or so – it is the end of the fiscal year at Novell – and that’s been taking up a lot of my time.
There is fresh snow on the mountains – and it is freezing overnight in Utah – I’ll get some photos of the snow posted later today.
I lost a blog server.
postmark.net were a free web-based email provider.
Their homepage tells a sobering tale:
Early last week, Postmark’s repositories of user mail and account information were lost to a serious hardware failure. The resulting damage left us unable to recover any useful data, and as such, Postmark.net is shutting down. In its stead, we recommend Google’s own Google Mail service, which offers superior storage and search capacities.
This caught my eye – a local Salt Lake company 360 Electrical has a whole new take on the standard US power outlets:
Now that’s useful.
Typical isn’t it – you get on a plane and one of your serves dies.
My blog server decided to complain about the lack of attention last Sunday evening – just as I was getting on a flight to London. Cycling the power really didn’t help – it needed fsck on the filesystem.
Now I’m back it’s a lot happier.
Apologies for the lack of updates in the last week!
I seem to have won the task of writing a short paper on ‘how to update and patch Novell systems in the enterprise’.
I’m working on this in conjunction with my ZENworks 7 Linux Management white paper – which is still being written. (Sorry it’s late – I’m on the road again!)
My summary so far is:
NetWare – use ZENworks Server Management. Deploy CPKs of the Consolidated Support Pack
SLES 8 – use ZENworks Linux Management. Mirror content from a YaST Online Update mirror.
SLES 9 – use ZENworks Linux Management. Mirror content from update.novell.com. Note: Make sure you have migrated your SUSE portal account!
NLD 9 – as SLES 9
RHEL – use ZENworks Linux Management. I know it’s not a Novell product – but mirror content from Red Hat Network using your RHN credentials.
There are probably some other platforms I need to add here – small biz server and some applications spring to mind – but I’ll be working off this list.
Comments welcome.
A busy one:
Microsoft Patch Disclosure – October 2005
Nine Microsoft patches: three Critical, four Important, and two Moderate.
Internet Explorer is the target of another Critical update. All nine of these updates are available via ZENworks Patch Management today.
I posted a few months ago about how Sudoku had hit the UK – the wave has now reached the US.
United have a set of puzzles in their in-flight magazine; I see them in newspapers; they have been on CNN – everywhere.
Bored on a flight I tried them – and they are certainly interesting. The harder puzzles really appeal to my sense of problem solving and pattern matching.
So – somewhat addicted – I purchased some cool software – Soduko from SadMan Software.
Great – I’ve now got an endless supply of really hard problems – along with built in tutorial advice. It’s interesting – since reading up on some of the pattern matching concepts I’ve halved my time to complete some of the harder problems.
Novell is an identity company. We present our vision and solutions to customers, potential customers, partners, integrators, press and analysts all the time.
I’ve never seen an identity presentation made like this before. Here’s the original blog post.
Did you know you can use the imaging in ZLM7 to image Linux and Windows?
Nice solution for a standalone imaging solution if you just want a nearly-smart(*) imaging story. It’s fast, furious and does what I need.
(*) for true smartness use ZENworks 7 with the full policy enablement of imaging.
What a great post. I recommend you read this one.
O’Reilly also have notes.
Less as a competitive advantage: My 10 minutes at Web 2.0
I was invited to present a 10 minute “High Order Bit” at the Web 2.0 Conference. I decided to talk about the concept of less as a competitive advantage. Here’s the rough text (from memory) of my presentation.
Less.
I want to talk about the concept of less. And more specifically the idea of using less as a competitive advantage.
Conventional wisdom says to beat your competitors you need to one-up them. If they have 4 features, you need 5. Or 15. Or 25. If they’re spending X, you need to spend XX. If they have 20, you need 30.
While this strategy may still work for some, it’s expensive, resource intensive, difficult, defensive, and not very satisfying. And I don’t think it’s good for customers either. It’s a very Cold War mentality — always trying to one-up. When everyone tries to one-up, we all end up with too much. There’s already too much “more” — what we need are simple solutions to simple, common problems, not huger solutions to huger problems.
What I’d like to suggest is a different approach. Instead of one-upping, try one-downing. Instead of outdoing, try underdoing. Do less than your competitors to beat them.
Recent Comments