Mobilis in Mobili

All Quiet on the Western Front

2008-01-26T21:05:00.000-08:00

There will be even more quiet on this blog: I started a fulltime position as a Project/Product Manager at a local firm in early January. I'm still learning what I can and can't discuss about what we do behind the scenes, but will pop in now and then with PM related stuff to share.

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2007: "Most Influential" Writing

2007-12-21T08:42:00.000-08:00

Looking for some good reading over the holiday break? Try starting with John Bracken's blog posting on The Most Influential Media Writing of 2007, and continue on to the source material he's so helpfully linked into the post. I'd not heard of John's blog before this post was mentioned on Farber's...

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APODizing the Cosmos

2007-12-16T22:41:00.000-08:00

Saturn's Rings and the moon Tethys (via APOD) I've been getting tired of the Cosmos lately. No, not the actual Universe, but the lovely yet small set of astronomy pictures in the Mac OS X (Tiger) screen saver "Cosmos". I knew that there would be gorgeous images like I'd like to branch out,...

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Chalup PM Book in Progress

2007-12-01T10:12:00.000-08:00

Over the past 6 years I've taught literally hundreds of sysadmins, network admins, and other IT professionals the fundamentals of a streamlined project management process that I call "Practical Project Management". For the past 3 years, I've also taught "Project Troubleshooting". All this time,...

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Liveblogging LISA'07

2007-11-13T14:36:00.000-08:00

So here I am in Dallas TX, at the annual LISA conference for systems administrators. It's been a great conference so far, even though I haven't gotten out of the hotel since I arrived on Sunday evening. Heck, I haven't gotten off the lobby/2nd/3rd floor zone! I love it when I can do all my...

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Both books are now shipping!

2007-11-08T11:28:00.000-08:00

It's been a long year, but the fruits of various labors are now available for harvest! I co-authored one book and contributed a chapter to another: The Practice of System and Network Administration, 2nd Edition (Limoncelli, Hogan, Chalup) Handbook of Network and System Administration

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That TransCon Rails Ta(il|le)

2007-11-02T01:33:00.000-07:00

Nathaniel Talbott is really rocking my world with his recent essay comparing the transcontinental railroad with the ruby-on-rails phenomenon. As he points out, there are some surprising similarities in enabling markets and disintermediation-- the physical railroad opened up new territories and new...

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"But will it scale?"

2007-09-03T21:28:00.001-07:00

Doing some remedial reading on this summer's Great Twitter Scaling Kerfuffle, found a great quote from Phil at Progressive Data Solutions, in his writeup on Railsconf: "To me, this question is a "shark-attack" question. Sure, you could get attacked by a shark if you go swimming in the ocean, but...

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Strata Travel Schedule

2007-08-13T17:14:00.000-07:00

Craigslist Foundation Nonprofit Bootcamp Burning Man Permaculture Intensive, OAEC (tenative) LISA Conference

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New Network, New Value

2007-06-05T15:44:00.000-07:00

Energized buzzword particles are flying ahead of the ripples in Riemann space of Supernova 2007, Wharton's little slice of FooCamp Heaven. Fortunately for those of us whose thinking (deep) doesn't match our pockets (shallow, ah shallow), there's the Supernova Unconference being held...

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Isolated in Nature?

2007-05-14T21:44:00.000-07:00

Lecture 1 of the Notre Dame open courseware materials for Architecture 50611: Architecture and the Built Environment. Part One. Do you see yourself as a part of nature, or as separate from it? I see myself as being artificially separated from it. Compare, for instance, our globalized sense of...

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Mind the Gap

2007-05-14T14:24:00.000-07:00

Go watch Hans Kessler presenting his mind-blowing data visualization of world health, economy, and myth debunking at TED 2006. Using the nonprofit GapMinder Foundation site's tools and database access, it should be possible to create similar correlations between results of conservation efforts...

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RubyonRailsCamp Redux

2006-11-10T09:19:00.000-08:00

Absolutely excellent, with the usual agonizing decisions of which sessions to attend because there were so many that were relevant. I'm looking forward to next year! And what the heck were the odds I'd end up at a table at dinner with two other people who have enjoyed the goodness that is a...

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Event: "From Counterculture to Cyberculture", Nov 9, Stanford

2006-10-28T20:58:00.000-07:00

This ought to be very interesting; I'm hoping my workweek schedule allows me to attend! Sorry, kids, blogger can't handle the PRE tag with pasted text for some reason. Sheesh. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog A symposium featuring Stewart Brand,...

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Strata at RailsCamp San Jose

2006-10-17T19:03:00.000-07:00

Strata will be joining the interesting folks at IBM Almaden's Ruby on Rails Camp in early November in San Jose. Also onsite will be Matt Petty, Virtual.Net's primary Rails developer, who has been implementing Virtual.Net's skunkworks Rails project from his Riverside CA location. We hope to be...

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Distillations from Day One

2006-10-12T08:51:00.000-07:00

First day at Office 2.0 definitely did not disappoint. I was unable to attend the morning sessions, due to a client meeting in the South Bay, but the afternoon panels were excellent. In addition to my usual 3x5 card notes on individual sessions, I was keeping a set of cards for particularly...

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Office 2.0 Update

2006-10-10T09:16:00.000-07:00

I'm looking forward to meeting folks at the conference. Unfortunately a prior committment prevents my attending tonight's cocktail reception, but I will be onsite for the afternoon sessions tomorrow (Weds) and most of the day Thursday. Trevor of Transmutable.com has created a handy iCal calendar...

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Office 2.0: A Paradigm or a Product?

2006-09-16T00:20:00.000-07:00

With plenty of time to get the thinking caps rolling, I'd like to share some of my thoughts on Office 2.0. I'm approaching it from the standpoint of designing a next-generation redefinition of the office paradigm, essentially breaking enterprise collaboration out of the fixed document format into...

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Will you be at ISPCon?

2006-09-15T12:42:00.000-07:00

Coming up practically in my parking lot, ISPCon will be at the Santa Clara Convention Center from November 7 - 9. Exhibits-only passes are free with pre-registration-- the site says "until Sept 29th" but the registration process says "until Sept 15th". Hmm. Which is it? If you think you might...

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Office as Community

2006-09-11T12:01:00.000-07:00

I'm somewhat buried in a deadline through this week, but want to get folks' creative juices flowing. My model for Office 2.0 is "the office as a community". What would it mean for productivity if the same kinds of social-networking software that allow individuals to find each other and trade...

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Strata Update

2006-09-08T09:46:00.000-07:00

I will be speaking and/or teaching at the following additional conferences in 2006; thanks again to the great folks who attended my tutorials at the Usenix Annual Technical Conference, and were so complimentary on the evaluation forms. Office 2.0, Oct 11 - 12, San Francisco LISA 2006, Dec 2 - 8,...

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Secret Sauce Explanation to Web 2.x

2006-05-19T14:08:00.000-07:00

I was looking for a particular reference to help a Unix-centric friend deal with some new Windows requirements at his employer, and found Joel Spolsky's excellent article on Biculturalism in Software. In the article, Joel talks about the cultural differences between Windows programmers and Unix...

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we who aren't posting salute you

2006-05-10T23:47:00.000-07:00

I've decided not to post until I have something to say about something I'm actually USING or WRITING MYSELF, so things are going to be pretty quiet around here for a while, given that all my paying work is non-programming right now. Just so ya know.

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Beta, beta, who's got the beta? Everybody!

2006-04-05T13:37:00.000-07:00

The Web 2.x bubble machine is turning out betas faster than you can say "Lawrence Welk". Somebody decided it was time to keep track of them all, and lo, the Museum of Modern Betas was born. Naturally the mere existence of a beta would be meaningless without a way to rank them (oh, let's!), so...

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Useful Miscellany

2006-03-28T10:17:00.000-08:00

SDForum and RubyCentral are putting on a joint conference on Ruby in the Bay Area during the weekend of April 22-23. Unfortunately I've already committed to being out of town that weekend, though it's possible that I could reshuffle some plans. I've received several invitations to check out the...

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