Data Retention Plan

You want a data retention plan? I'll give you a data retention plan. Open up your organization! Depend on free services! Put everything you own on the internet, and you will be just fine! Trust me ;-)

In related news, there's a new class of student companies joining us at Venture Creations, the business incubator sponsored by RIT, which houses Tuesday Studios and the server room! In reality I do have some servers of my own, and I have really put a lot of consideration into data retention over the last 8-10 years as I have watched my own precious data occasionally slip through the cracks when tossing an old computer to the curb. First step is to centralize your data and then give it to me... I'll take good care of it for you!

If that doesn't sound attractive to you, then my next recommendation is to give your data to Google. If you're worried about data mining, no, I'm sure it'll be MUCH safer with Google than in my own server rooms... the world's foremost experts in data mining? Nah, I really don't think they'd try anything too fishy.

Still, if that sounds too much like charity, or you like the idea of doing things in house, I am always happy to pay a visit and perform a consultation, or give a tour of my own server room. I could fill at least 1 hour's time talking about where I keep my data, and the measures that I employ to keep it safe.

In fact I will even go so far as to say, free consultation. Bear in mind this may be a limited time offer; I could get very busy tomorrow. You know, this is not a contract to work at no cost for the rest of my days.

I was going to start digging up information on those new companies at the incubator! Tune into my del.icio.us feed for the scoop, I'm going to see what Google already knows. Hopefully I'll meet some of these people soon and post again to tell you how cool their services are; I don't like to interrupt people when they're working, and everyone tends to look busy when I walk by their desks. I wonder if that's because my card says President?

Marketing Woes

This is bothering me, and so I figure I'd better blog about it. It seems like technical people (in particular the most brilliant ones) have a generally hard time relating with people, especially when it comes to anyone who works in marketing. I've seen this recur so many times that I think it's worth further analysis, in fact I would like to write a book on the topic! Any publishers interested? Sign me up! :)

Technical people spend a lot of time in front of a computer, doing in-depth research on complex systems. Conversely, I see marketing people, and I observe a strong affinity for personal contact and the 30 second message. Here at Tuesday Studios, I call myself the President of a Middleware company. What does that mean, practically speaking? I do my best to play both roles, without exploding or any similarly horrible fate!

What does this mean to you? Well, I'm the president of a company with really just one employee... so in truth I hope it means that we will be the best of friends, whoever you are, or may decide to be!

Namaste

File Server Upgrades

Just purchased two 500GB drives and set them up in a spare server as a Local Area Network fileserver for the tuesday.local domain that I have running in my office at Venture Creations. I'm copying 300GB of data over from other servers as backups, before I start changing things around again I am nervous about doing that sort of thing. The last time I changed anything at all in my Windows network, (this is a VMWare Server upgrade from 1.0.1 to 1.0.3 to which I am referring, gone slightly awry) I wound up hosing my entire cluster!

Fortunately my developers have been on holiday and they didn't seem to notice the disturbance until a couple of days ago. Anyway I'm about to completely refactor the main VMWare Server cluster by reformatting the main server and stripping down to bare minimum services, then probably add another one or two servers to the virtualization cluster. Maybe I'll even have a go at configuring Xen on one of the Debian servers! This progression should happen in fairly short order if time and funding permits.

I'm now about 52GB through the backup process and this is going to take hours. I'm going to take a break from computers and do the dishes!

English Vocabulary Lesson #2

Lawyers make claims. Well, that's not all there is to it; they also substantiate them, and sometimes defend against them. A plaintiff and a defendant is not exactly the same as an ally and an enemy. In law (and thus in times of war) there must always be two or more parties. In business, and Microsoft will let you know if you just ask nicely, it's really much better for everyone involved if we're all allies. Still, don't let this fact stop you from making claims!

• substance - the stuff of which an object is composed: in schools of thought, the message, central meaning; in rhetorical analysis of software systems I will always insist that the kernel and process scheduler represent the substance of an operating system.
  
• substantial - having a firm basis in reality, and being therefore important, meaningful, or considerable; not imaginary.
  
• substantive - meaty, real, essential. substantive is a grammatical term whose meaning is lost on me. I would have to see some examples, duh, of what do you suppose an non-substantive looks like exactly?
  
• substitution - In theater, the method of understanding elements in the life of one's character by comparing them to elements in one's own life. In a psychologist's office or a business meeting, a defense mechanism, operating unconsciously, by which an unattainable or unacceptable goal, emotion, or object is replaced by one that is more attainable or acceptable.
  
• subsumption - A subsumption is a relation which specifies the relative generality of two concepts; incorporating something under a more general category. For instance: most graduate students are college graduates before becoming graduate students.
  

Recall from Lesson 1: Most cultures proscribe stealing. Some people equate piracy with theft. Some laws and practices place a value on things with no unique identity as an object. Calculus is required to quantify value in such a situation and logically explain this phenomenon.

The question of the day: what differentiates a graduate student from an undergraduate student? The answer, I hope, is all of these administrative theatrics and hazing rituals! I actually didn't wear the cap and gown, nor did I attend my own High School Prom.

More news tomorrow; still, for today the virtual server outage continues! Hard drives are on the way from New Egg, and I will contain my ecstasy at the latest interactions with Microsoft until I can properly explain my position. The instigation continues!

Facebook Work

Been contemplating lately what kind of groups and other manners of dancing that I should focus on involving myself with, centering around questions like who exactly is going to pay to fund my continued existence. This is not a question of depression, it's a matter of practicality!

The best way that I can think of to kick-start this process is to update my resume. I've been meaning for a long time to build a resume that allows central maintenance of both a printed and an online format. Second note here is that all of my previous resumes have been focused on providing a long list of technology keywords, and I'm not sure of the benefit of that anymore.

I have used a large number of programming languages and it is not helpful to enumerate them, as I will generally need to refresh myself with a book and some form of homework before I can successfully jump into another coding project. Also from my own perspective, I would rather work with a technology that is new to me than one that I have already struggled with before now, so a list of my own known technologies is almost a "bad seed" for any manager that might seek to hire me.

Also while it's helpful to know a lot of languages, usually programming takes place in one language so it could be quite helpful to regain fluency in at least one programming language before re-entering the software development job market. The neatest target language with the most interesting developer buzz ongoing today is PHP and the Facebook Platform API.

I think I'd better set up another server this evening and see for myself some of what can be done in PHP today. Facebook is an incredibly massive well-ordered database of information on groups and individuals, and I suspect the platform is especially ripe for data-driven applications! Lets get one started, or take a closer look at one of the applications that has already been developed.

Statistics

One interesting statistic that tells about the self-perception of illegitimacy in BitTorrent for sharing movies:

Average Speed:
Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee) 10 kB/s
Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino) 30 kB/s

What else can be inferred from this statistic is left as an exercise to the reader.

Gone Out of Town

Let me ask you, what fun is being out of town if you're still charged with the task of taking care of business while you're away? Isn't that the point of going out of town, to get away from taking care of business for a little while and do something else?

Learned to cook orange breaded catfish this week, and it's really quite delicious, especially with a bowl of rice and some light oil. I've got a nice Pyrex pan also that makes cleanup a non-issue. Observe the phenomenon under intense pressure from Chinese of a newborn clean sink at Kingdon's house!

... nope, I still haven't had kittens.