Sources

Ubuntu Server Guide
Object Oriented Programming using Java as the "glue language". I know it's probably not ideal but it will run on most stuff and perform if not well at least in a reliable and reasonable way. Eventually I am guessing HTML5 or something would be better but I can't judge that with out at least knowing some language. Java is what we use so I need to learn it anyways. Sorry.
An LDAP based BI database hooked into our monitoring system. All this stuff should fit on a ~3k box, I have a generic mid ranged business laptop + a decent SSD.

Benchmarking

Hi all. Please remember to benchmark your stuff before putting a working load on it. It's important to know how your performance bottlenecks move around. With SSD I think there will be a new layer basically precaching 90% of the reads. sqlio is the tool we're using to measure a couple metrics, I'm sure there's a better methodology but it's at least something.

Up to operands and have written something maybe a step above hello world, sucks but at least I understand the oo paradigm already. OO system management makes sense.

Progress Report

I won't say I've "mastered" Linux, I think I can say I'm at least as good as I am with Windows, 2008 UI changes aside. So now I need to learn how to query a data base & graph the result. We use Java for most of our stuff here so first I am learning that language. This will take some time, I anticipate most of the next month. Lets see if I am motivated enough.

I am planning on doing this with JDBC, Pentaho and MySQL (or compadible) db. Not sure if sqllite will run it or not, that would be preferable. I'd like to learn the solid multipurpose tools that will likely be around for ever.

Linux device drivers & manufacturer idiocy

USB network cards are a major example of this - these companies are dumb as hell, Linux is aimed squarely at their growth market.

you people are getting screwd

people are starting to realize that they dont need high end hardware any more than a massive tv and xbox. dell is becoming a husgh end toy store with a business casual line. 

most people dont dress up in suites, why is our lowest end laptop able to powear a tenth of a billion dollar a yr co?

they make the work models intentionally uncomfortable to rest on too, want you to buy two of them. they realize that its quickly the equivelant of the comapy car. pretty slippery slope, remember anyone at your work can read your mail, probably a lot more people than you think. if it sounds silly a couple of grand can make a supergoogle out of a good sized company and most companys done even know what information they even have,

Oracle should be ashamed

So the client for our big BI roll out today? You have to uninstall it by hand. This is new software and can't uninstall itself properly. And requires specific versions of Java to run properly. If you don't want to get eaten by open source products you better do something Mr. Ellison.

Buying them is not feasible in the long term.

"Lean" IT

My company is a big booster of Lean manufacturing. It's basically capitalism at it's bare bones where you wring the last bit of value out of every process. We follow the Toyota Business System which is based around the kanban principle. This is reasonably hard core business stuff where if you follow the protocol you will develop a better business. It strikes me that IT can learn a lot from it since they already had a lot of the concepts we've worked on for years like automation and load balancing.

One of Toyota's big competitive advantage was where they broke up all their resources to the atomic (greek, not geek) level and then put them in a pool that can constantly be shifted to what ever makes sense to the company. Kind of like a hypervisor. To do this effectively at that level you need to document and manage every resource at a very well defined level. I'm not there yet.