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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.

After a frustrating 15 months or so of very sporadic running,  I’m happy to report that I’ve been able to run fairly consistently for the last 3 months.  I am still getting some annoying BFS based symptoms, but it seems like I am trending towards getting better.  I also had a EMG in December to help make sure there was nothing else amiss (I had been given a misdiagnosis of muscular dystrophy from a neurologist in early 2009, which really scared me).

For the last 3 weeks I’ve been averaging 30 miles a week and would like to run in the Garden Spot Village Marathon on April 10th with Nate.   My certainty level about the race isn’t too high due to the impending California move and lack of clarity about my work/travel schedule.  If I can’t make that race for some reason, I’ll try to keep my mileage consistent and then look for a marathon more local to San Jose.

I’m definitely not in prime shape yet, but at this point, I am thrilled to be running again on a regular basis.

I borrowed “Release It!” from Bill Kratzer a few weeks ago and have really enjoyed reading it.  My favorite quote from the book is “Feature complete does not mean production ready”.  I think this sums up a lot of large software projects, especially when there is a disconnect between the development team and the group responsible for deployment and operations.

The book covers 4 main topics:

• Stability
• Capacity
• General Design Issues
• Operations

In most of the sections the author breaks his advice down into an introduction (with a real example showing a problem), a set of anti-patterns that encourage the problem and a set of patterns to help  software cope with the various stresses placed on it and make it manageable.

The book stays at a relatively high level of discussion and is easy to follow.  If you are looking for lots of low-level coding examples you will be disappointed, but I think the book offers good advice that can be consumed by a wide range of people ranging from developers, to system administrators, and to project managers.

Last year I was involved in a project that struggled with a lot of the issues mentioned in this book and I think that hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless hours of stress and frustration could have been saved if this book had been required reading at the start of the project.

I recommend this book to anyone involved in developing or operating software services, or managing the people that do.

Photo by John @ ThinkHole.com

On Tuesday night I gave a presentation on ZFS to the Central PA Linux User Group. Since the audience was a Linux user group, I wasn’t expecting too many in the crowd to be familiar with ZFS, but I was pleasantly surprised that about 40% of the ~ 20 people in attendance had used ZFS in some capacity. If you are already a seasoned ZFS user, I would highly recommend Richard Elling’s ZFS presentation which he uses in his day-long tutorials.

A friend of mine’s son, Alex, has recently accepted a software development job at a financial trading company.  He is starting his final semester of school, so he won’t begin working at the company for another 4-5 months.  When I was over visiting at their house last week, Alex showed me a small stack of  books that the company had sent him.  The books covered  a mix of technical and business topics that would help him build up an understanding of the software tools, development philosophies, and business concepts specific to the organization so that when he arrived at work he will be productive much quicker.

I think this is a fantastic investment by the company, and should be considered by organizations hiring for any but senior positions.  You obviously don’t want to overwhelm new hires with an onslaught of 10,000 pages of recommended reading, but having a small package from Amazon show up at their door containing a few books most appropriate to their position and your culture is a great way to help new hires get up to speed, even before they hit the door.

I’ve been taking advantage of my vacation time during the past week and a half by reading a motley collection of technology, science, career, and military history books.  One of the books (“Ship It!”) I had to read on the computer via the Safari on-line book service since it isn’t available in paper form yet.  It has been nice to spend a lot of time focused and really absorbing material versus the tons of short-form articles/blog entries that I tend to read while doing interrupt driven surfing on the computer.  I know my reading pace will slow down substantially when works starts up again, but I  want to keep tackling at least one new book a week.

Over the holiday vacation my brother mentioned he was a big fan of a library search service called WorldCat.  If you give WorldCat a book or media title/ISBN, it will search thousands of library catalogs and let you know if it finds any libraries nearby that have it.  Not all libraries are indexed by WorldCat, so depending on where you live (and your library system) mileage may vary, but it is worth checking out.