williamhathaway.com

I  admit to a bias since I work for a Splunk reseller, but I’m primarily an end-user of their product when I am consulting.   I think Splunk is doing a lot of things right as a software vendor. Namely:

• The software generally works as advertised
• It is very easy to get up and running, and the architecture is easy to change if your requirements shift
• Updates occur on a pretty quick cadence
• There is a free license version of the product that has a reasonable amount of functionality and works fine for people that don’t have a huge data need
• All of their documentation is freely available (I dislike vendors that make you spend $ or jump through hoops to access docs)
• They use the excellent StackOverflow engine for their community driven support site answers.splunk.com, making it easy to contribute and floating good answers to the top

Another company that I hold in a similar light is Atlassian (although they don’t have free versions, they have licenses for the first 10 users available for $10, which is close enough).

Here are my thoughts on living in the south SF Bay area now that my wife and I have been here for a while:

Pros

• It is awesome being in such a cultural melting pot
• The supply of interesting things to do is fantastic
• The density of technology oriented companies and people is amazing
• The weather is definitely better than central PA (although not as nice as an area like Santa Barbara)

Cons

• Housing costs are ridiculous (other costs are higher too, but housing is 3-5x central PA)
• Depending on time and direction, traffic can be horrible (mitigated for me by working from home)
• The state government seems really behind the times – my wife and I both had abysmal DMV experiences (the process and technology are busted, the people were friendly)

Notes

• A thumbs up to meetup.com for making it very easy to find groups of like-minded people to get together for activities
• The Mercury News’ events section is also handy when looking for things to do

Overall

I am really glad we made the move.  My wife now has a job that she absolutely loves, and besides missing our friends from the east coast, we are both really happy.

I bought a wifi based iPad pretty soon after it was released.  Here is my quick take:   The iPad definitely won’t replace my laptop or cell phone, but it is pretty handy as an entertainment and media consuming device.  The screen based keyboard isn’t as bad as I thought, but still isn’t very efficient if I need to bang out a lot of text.    I can see the form factor working really well for a variety of cases where someone wants to run specialized apps, such as the medical field using it for patient records.

Pros

• I’m using  DropBox + GoodReader to transfer and view PDFs which is working well for reading on planes.
• Netflix streaming of videos is great.
• Kindle app means lots of ebook availability (Apple’s iBook store is fairly sparse now in comparison, but you get access to both).
• I’m really happy with the long battery life.
• Web browser is very quick and crisp (although I wish it had Flash support or more sites switch to HTML 5)
• Mail client/Gmail is very usable, although I still prefer a laptop keyboard for long messages.

Cons

• Wifi support is persnickety.  I’ve had trouble connecting to some access points when both my iPhone and MacBook Pro were getting full signal.  I hope this is firmware fixable.  I thought about getting a 3G iPad but couldn’t stomach a single device broadband fee.
• Most apps originally targeted at the iPhone look either wimpy at original iPhone screen size or don’t scale up nicely when you switch to 2x magnifcationn mode

I was reading a NY Times article about these cool workspaces that had lots of high-end industrial machines available for members to use and noticed that the workspace chain called Tech Shop mentioned in the article seemed to be located around the San Francisco bay area.   Perusing the Tech Shop’s class list, I saw they had location that wasn’t too far from me and signed up for a “Safety and Basic Use” class about their Epilog Laser Engraving/Cutting machines.

Epilog Helix 24 Laser Engraver/Cutter

I took the two hour class on Wednesday night with three other participants.  The class was taught by Laura Mapping, who has been a laser-working enthusiast for about three years.  The class covered:

• Shop etiquette
• How the machine works & basic operations
• Safety
• Appropriate materials

Everyone in the class got to take turns trouble-shooting and optimizing a design that we “lased” onto some cardboard, showing how the dots-per-inch, speed, and power settings affect the final outcome.  At the end of the class we were given souvenir dog-tags and allowed to etch whatever we wanted onto them.

I really enjoyed the class, the machine was neat and the instructor was great.  Once Clio and I finally find our permanent location in the bay area, I’ll probably get a membership at the Tech Shop so I can go back and play with the laser and maybe learn about some of the other machines.

Here are a couple of systems tools I’ve been using lately and have been very happy with:

Puppet (configuration management) – I’ve used CFengine a lot on the past for configuration management, but I now prefer Puppet due to its wide scope of manageable resources, ranging the gamut from standard file distribution to  packages, services, users, network configurations, etc.   We are currently using Puppet to bootstrap systems from a base CentOS image to having all the components needed for their role and it is working out really well. I read the book Pulling String with Puppet to get ramped up, and while it is helpful, it lacks an index, so I’d recommend getting an electronic copy.

Splunk (log/event parsing) – I haven’t seen any other locally deployed tool that can come anywhere close to Splunk for taking various log files and making the information immediately usable on a wide scale.  The search interface is super shiny and has a lot of very interesting capabilities for creating dashboard, performing data mining, and alerting.  Splunk came out with a new release (4.1) last week.  If you last looked at Splunk more than a year ago, check out whats new.  If you are looking for a cloud-based solution, Paglo (recently bought by Citrix)seems to be an interesting option.

Func (command & control) – while almost all of the management in the environment is done via Puppet, there are times when we want to run commands across a set of hosts. Func fills the niche nicely by providing the ability to use wildcards and grouping for host selection and running against multiple targets in parallel.  For folks wanting to get a quick overview of Func, I recommend Dan Hank’s Managing Your Minions With Func presentation

A colleague and I were  working with a new Seagate Black Armor 420 NAS appliance today and struggling with NFS.  It was often taking 20 or more seconds for local NFS mounts to occur, and this was below the timeout of our main clients (VMWare ESXi 4.0).  While the NAS has a feature that will automatically tell you if there are newer versions of the firmware available, this wasn’t working properly.  The device indicated that no new firmware was available, but after some forum searching, we saw a newer version (4000.0631) was downloadable.  The manual upgrade went fine and then NFS started working like a champ.   If you have a tight ( < $1000) budget for a Network Attached Storage device, the Black Armor line seem to be pretty feature rich for the price.

Clio and I made it to San Jose yesterday afternoon.  We are staying in a furnished short term lease apartment while we figure out where we will want to live in the long run. The location is excellent. After living in the suburbs for the last 10 years, it kind of odd that within two blocks of our place there is a big library, a grocery store, movies, and many restaurants and shops.

Our trip out west is got a slow start due to the crazy snowstorm that hit the mid-east, but as of Sunday night we managed to make it to Lincoln, Nebraska.  Hopefully we will reach San Jose on Wednesday.

Moving container being delivered

Lots of things are coming together in the final countdown before the move to San Jose.

Last week I had three nice send off dinners from various groups of people and met with Realtors. On Sunday, a bunch of Clio’s friends came over and as the night was winding down, we gave away the vast majority of our furniture.    It was a great feeling knowing that our furniture would be helpful to other people as well as the fact that we now didn’t need to deal with the expense of moving it across the country.

Today the moving containers we will be packing our remaining possessions into arrived.  The containers were on a flat-bed truck and the driver used a really neat looking 3-wheeled forklift to carry the containers about 100 yards from the truck to our driveway.

Walking around our now mostly empty house has brought home the reality of the move.  I’m really going to miss hanging out with the friends I made in central PA, but I am also anxious to see what the next chapter of my life brings.

While flipping through the Oracle presentations about the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, I came across some examples of meaningless clip-art. I know not everyone can have Steve Jobs’ level of presentation slickness, but it seems really odd to me that someone actually thought: “You know what will help get our message across?  An image of two golden stick figures with a huge measuring tape.” or “A stick figure with a huge paint roller really brings home our point!”.

If this was some local presentation I wouldn’t have been too surprised, but this was  during a presentation on how Oracle will manage their $7 billion acquisition.  This scenario is definitely one where you want to be bringing your communication “A game”.  The weird thing was that I only see this type of clutter on one of the seven presentations.

I’d recommend that whoever is in charge of creating the slides get a copy of Presentation Zen or similar books.