I am very happy to announce that I’ve taken a new job with Splunk! I’m going to be a Solutions Architect working in their Business Development Partner Application Development team for my buddy Brandon Shell. As a part of my new role, I will be using Python (and PowerShell wherever I can fit it in) to help to create solutions around our areas of focus. There will be VMware stuff for sure, and some other cool technologies as well that I’m very interested in. More news as I figure out what they are.

The job is 100% working from home, which is awesome. I’m glad to get back to that after several years of braving Atlanta traffic. (I had worked for HP from home for a while.) You know what else is great about this new job? I won’t be on call 24×7! Very glad to ditch the pager! (Not to say that I won’t return your calls, Brandon. , just not while I am asleep.)

I’m all set to start Feb 13th!

Don over at Concentrated Technology is running a survey. Rather than summarize, here’s his pitch:

We’re interested in learning about the ways in which you PREFER to interact with your colleagues and peers across the world – not just the one who work with you, but the ones part of the larger “community” that you belong to. The folks interested in the same technologies and products as you, who you turn to for help when you need it – and who may turn to you for help, sometime. THIS SURVEY IS PRIMARILY INTENDED FOR “IT PROFESSIONALS” – systems administrators, network engineers, and so forth. If you are primarily a developer or DBA, we ask that you not participate. We will be launching a separate survey focused on developers and DBAs at a later time.

Click here to fill out the survey. I think they’re doing a prize drawing afterwards also, so now you have another reason to go for it.

I haven’t written any non-PowerShell posts lately, as some may have noticed.  The weather is great today, and I’m home working on my book, and before I got into it I thought I’d spend a few paragraphs sharing some things I’ve been playing with lately.

Live Mesh

Available at mesh.com, Live Mesh is Microsoft’s sync platform which they seem to have a lot of great plans for. We’ll see. In the meantime, the desktop client makes a solid folder sync / p2p app so I’ve been using it for a while to sync my PowerShell profile across multiple machines. Just this past week at PDC, Microsoft released a new version of the client (ooh and added some videos), and has added a Windows Mobile app as well.  I’m underwhelmed so far, but I’m actually still interested so will continue to play with it. In particular, I’m a bit inspired by what Dale Lane is doing with it on his eighty-million devices.

Wakoopa

I just found this social network site Wakoopa which tracks what software you use and—not sure what else yet. I saw it linked on Dale’s blog, so thanks twice over, buddy.  As most of you know, I’m a hardcore software junkie, so this is right down my alley-wick, to mix a metaphor.  I’ve just started setting up a profile, we’ll see if I remain interested in it.

StackOverflow

I setup a profile on StackOverflow when it was still in closed beta, and I’ve been visiting the site pretty regularly ever since. It’s a Q&A site, somewhat like Expert Exchange, but it’s very lightweight  in feel, yet heavy on the web 2.0 GUI stuff, which I like. The site is aimed (heavily) towards developers, but I’m finding that PowerShell is fitting pretty well so that works for me.

New Toys?

I’m thinking of getting two toys for Christmas (they’ll really be sort of for/from my wife and vice versa, not sure who will get more time on which):

• Chumby – a cute little net-enabled streaming music box with widgets and alarm clock features
• iPod Touch – well, everyone knows what these are

Music

As always, you can find the music I’ve been listening to lately on Last.FM. Some notables:

• New and old Metallica
• Irish & Celtic music (thanks Oisin!)
• and a ton of other stuff

From the SMUG blog:

The Southeast Management User Group invites you to attend the next SMUG meeting scheduled for November 14^th, 2008 for a day of great presentations, discussions, and networking, at the Alpharetta Microsoft Campus.

REGISTRATION LINK

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/InviteOnly.aspx?EventID=5B-11-D1-1D-08-92-D8-84-78-E1-CD-6A-5C-13-92-AA&Culture=en-US

DATE & TIME

November 14^th, 2008
9:00 AM – 4:00 PM

I’ll be there with bells on.  Or something.

Grotesque, but you can’t stop looking. This is a museum exhibit here in Atlanta. Friend of mine took the photos t’other day.

bodies exhibit – a photoset on Flickr

I work in the IT biz. At work, we follow a set of processes called ITSM. I won’t go into the boring details, but the short version is that ITSM/ITIL define a common vocabulary that we can use to talk to our customers about IT and more specifically for me, IT Oursourcing (which is what I do). Sounds stupid, but I eventually became a convert after endless training classes. I use ITSM and understand it and in most cases, appreciate it.

However, there is one area where I think ITSM is killing us. In my job, and in many others, documentation is very important. Unfortunately, we make it the hardest thing in the world to create and maintain it. Why? Because we take the concept of Change Management (which is an ITSM concept) to the nth degree. Change Management (CM) is something any programmer will be familiar with. It just means tracking changes in a consistent manner–just like a bug tracking system or a CVS/RCS/SVN/Darcs/blah blah blah.

Ok, let me lay out a documentation submission scenario:

1. Hal wants to document how to clear a printer queue so that Hal doesn’t get called at 3am to do something stupid like clearing a printer queue. And the lower level peeps need the docs because they may not necessarily be as technically competent as we would like.
2. Hal finds the proper document template, which in this case is a Word document template.
3. Hal has to look up in a spreadsheet what the name and location of this document should be–because we got it all structured. I’m gonna make one up and say its “Windows Level 1 Operations \ Print Queue Management”.
4. I write the doc, maybe throw in some screenshots. It’s not long, doesn’t have to be.
5. Then I create a Change Request (CR) in our tracking system. I think I attach the doc, not sure about that part.
6. Then the CR goes to another group.
7. The have to approve it.
8. Then it goes to another group, and they are the ones with actual write permission to our document storage website application thing. I guess it would be published then.

I’m now going to admit that I’m actually ignorant of the exact documentation process because it changed recently, and my job changed recently, and until now I didn’t really have to do the documentation, I’d just tell somebody else to do it. Anyway that’s a part of the issue here.

If the process is so involved that it is not intuitive given the tools we have (and its not), and it takes days to get something published–then the system is broken. I don’t know how many times I have had a question from a level 1 or 2 engineer and thought, “man, if I wrote this down and put it up on AKM, I wouldn’t get this question again”. But inevitably I never get around to doing it because my attention is always needed in more important places.

The solution is obvious to me. Maybe I’ll even bring it up to somebody who will listen politely, agree, then forget what I said. We need to scrap the documentation system and replace it with a wiki. Wikis have built-in revision tracking. And the barrier-to-entry is extremely low. From the time you have the idea to the time you have published it determined only by how long it takes to write. If the data is wrong, its easily fixed, and you know who changed it so you can flog them.

Ok that was boring. Sorry.

Tell me what you think. I decided that having my name at the top of the site was a little over the top. My first idea was “TechProse”, but there’s already a company and domain by that name. The meaning of TechProsaic is totally different than TechProse, but I still think it sounds cool, and at the same time, means something to me.

/me smacks forehead

Why didn’t I think of this???

ThinkGeek :: PowerSquid Outlet Multiplier

I’ve created a new page called “ideas” as you see on the top-right of the navbar on my site. What I’ve decided to to is to take any ideas that I have had and instead of just blogging about them, I will put up a static page so that they don’t disappear after some time goes by. That might prompt me to do further work on the ideas in the future, or at least remind me to write down my ideas so that somebody can benefit from them.

I came up with a new (non-jabber) idea today called Projective. You can read the page for the details, but the gist of it is to use the Flyspray bug tracking system as the database for a larger goal of managing a complex software development project.

I’ll move my other ideas (the jabber ones) over to static pages here shortly.

### Introducing…
[WordPress][] is my new blog engine of choice. Setup was not too hard. They even make writing [mod_rewrite][] rules easy. No more [pMachine][], that didn’t work out. As you can see on the right, I have imported my [Bloglines][] blogroll into the system.

[WordPress]: http://wordpress.org
[mod_rewrite]: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html
[pMachine]: http://www.pmachine.com/
[Bloglines]: http://bloglines.com