I recently spoke with a company who were setting up a process for estimating project costs, broken down by the services provided by the IT teams. The usual thing, how much for documentation reviews here, time to build servers there, etc. I was struck by the level of detail they… Read More
There’s a shift going on in IT these days. A movement towards cloud, or utility, computing. It’s still early in the marketing hype cycle, but the underlying ideas aren’t new at all. Let me tell you why. My job as an infrastructure manager is to provide a computing service for… Read More
Another TwitPiss erupted this week between the usual suspects. Over this. I don’t care about the topic of debate, really, since I’ve never personally used MetroCluster. I have used NetApp SnapMirror, sync and async, EMC BCVs, SRDF, EVAs and their data replication. And a bunch of other solutions to the… Read More
Last week I had quite a shock: The Australian domestic air travel experience is dramatically better than the US experience. I’ve heard various people complain about it, and it seemed to be much the same stuff as we get here: the security theatre, queuing, delayed flights, hassles and pain. Well… Read More
You can hardly move these days without bumping into someone innovating these days. Every blogger, every gadget vendor, every tech pundit, every politician. Twitter is awash. It’s an All Innovation, All the Time mega-festival. Or not. No, It’s Not Most of what’s happening isn’t that innovative. It’s incremental improvements that… Read More
Lately I’ve been doing a bunch of work with people who use the Agile software development methods. They had a bunch of success with it in one part of their company, so they decided to extend its use across the rest of IT. Now everything is Agile. Those who’ve been… Read More
I am now the proud owner of a shiny new Apple iPhone 3GS. My impressions so far are overwhelmingly positive, but it does have some significant flaws. Long Journey I’ve looked longingly at other people’s iPhone’s for some time. When they first came out 2 years ago (remember the lines?),… Read More
Grr. Sorry folks. My ISP scheduled some maintenance that knocked out my link, and the router didn’t reconnect correctly for some reason. Of course, this had to happen on the two days I was interstate at a client site and couldn’t reset things remotely. Everything’s back online, and I’m looking… Read More
There are lots of reasons big companies suck. Here’s my top 3: The law of averages Inertia They make people anonymous 1. The law of averages As a company gets bigger, it hires more and more people. They say they want to hire the best people, but they don’t. They… Read More
My name is Justin Warren. As part of my day job, I regularly get email that starts with “Dear Warren”. Today, I got an email starting “Dear Jason”. People get my name wrong occasionally when speaking to me in person, usually calling me Jason. I’m used to it. Sometimes I… Read More
