Phasor Burn

Mambo is now powering my corporate website, http://www.cyberdex.ca/

Another fall-off-log easy install. Download to installed and running was a little under 10 minutes.

Add several hours to poke around for a template (skin) that I liked and to grok the basics of how the thing works enough to put up a simple front page for now. A pleasant Sunday afternoon’s distraction.

Do you take the risk and upgrade your machines in-place, or do you take the longer route of rebuilding from scratch?

I have always taken extra backups of a machine, verified them, then installed the new operating system version from sratch. This is then followed by a few hours to a day of hand placing the localizations from my backups and into the freshly installed os. This allows me flexibility in deciding what to carry forward, what to throw out, modifications that are necessary to accomodate changes in the way the new os version works vs the previous version, etc.

I think this gives me a more fine grained control over the process, but am painfully aware of the amount of time it can take. It is also not very scalable. I suppose if I had more than a handful of machines to tend to, I would resort to system imaging from a golden master and a central repository of system configuration and functional package divisions using Jumpstart and CFEngine for example.

I’m almost tempted to buy a few more sun boxes on Ebay to actually implement this for my home network. But then I think of all the other things I still have to do.

One day, One day …. I keep telling myself.

I have never seen a project take so long to get underway.

I have a few external vendors to organize installation of their equipment, but they were a breeze to get lined up compared to getting timely cooperation from my own organization’s IS&T department. Why is it that a customer facing project which is heavily backed and supported by a top level executive still has to run the IS&T gauntlet of useless processes and hurry-up-and-wait syndrome?

I’m new to the project myself, which is just getting out of pilot phase. The pilot phase has been going on for over a year now and has mostly been dragged out by IS&T getting their eyes crossed and t’s dotted. They have quite literally cost a 12+ month delay in a new revenue stream, never mind all the time and effort spent dealing with workarounds on crappy pilot stage hardware that was supposed to be proof-of-concept only, not production use and certainly not for the past year and a bit.

If the company ever had to turn on a dime to meet a new challenge in the marketplace, well it couldn’t.

Not with that IS&T group with their fiefdom of control over this that and the other getting in the way. This is most amusing as my previous gig had plenty of hands on control for me to exhert, but no budget at all. I’m now in the opposite situation — apparently oodles of money around to be used but you can’t actually do anything useful with it until dealing with IS&T has wasted a pile of time and money, week after week, quarter after quarter.

Why can’t large companies internal IS&T groups see that they are there to serve, to facilitate. Not to be a roadblock.

Hell, it took over a month after I started before I was able to access the corporate network via vpn. Took them that long to figure out that a contractor working from a remote non-company location would need a corporate notebook and vpn software…

I’m glad that I’m a contract-to-hire, as it gives me plenty of time to observe these shenanigans and decide if I really want to enter into a long term relationship of continual pain dealing with the IS&T group.

Well, how about those tornado warnings etc?

One of the TV stations broke in with the emergency alert system, and was talking about an unconfirmed touchdown near or in Red Deer tonight, and several confirmed funnel clounds seen over that city too.

I’m sure for those who get the business end of a tornado have a bad time, but is it worse than the second coming of Noah’s flood that we had three weeks back.? I suppose so, we still have the house intact.

In that storm a few weeks ago, we had sideways hail so thick we couldn’t see the near edge of the back lawn, a whole 5 feet from the window. Hid in the basement for a while too. Chunks of the yard washed away in the process, including shale, gravel, bricks.

Things like that.

The landscapers aren’t scheduled yet, but they sure took our money just fine . . .

Oy. I’ve fallen for the blog-mania sweeping the inter-du-huh-web.

Now I have an equivalent of a firing-pin-filed-down automatic weapon way to spew my guts out over the idiocies of the work place and other similar fun topics.

Getting WordPress installed was easier than falling off a log. Really… almost a click click click, done. Just like a M$FT app install, except without the blue screen of death.