John Stanford's Blog Random Sample

The astronomical clock is an amazing accomplishment for it's time (probably for any time).  As I was walking across the Charles Bridge, I realized that it was on my list of places to visit since I saw it in a movie a while ago.  I didn't make it to the castle (next time), but went to the Strahov Monastery.  The fact that the library has survived the ebb and flow of enlightenment and war is pretty astounding.  I was reading a book that you might like - 

"Prague : A Traveler's Literary Companion (Traveler's Literary Companion)" (Whereabouts Press)

It's a nice mix of short stories that provides some good insight into the local history and culture.... 

By the way, it was very cold, but not too many tourists were out on the town.

Music: Carnivores Unite from the album "Music By Cavelight" by Blockhead

What happens to datacenter administration over the next 10 years?

It shifts away from the near real-time interaction with systems, and becomes more like application development. Teams of people will architect, design, and implement datacenter elements from a service perspective. They will run the product through a development lifecycle just like developers should be doing today. Administrators will define models of datacenter services, and one of the key elements of the model will be how to deploy it into the environment. The models will gradually get more comprehensive. They will become more robust with respect to deployment assurance by incorporating more intelligent testing. They will include registrations with other services such as security frameworks, virtual communication and storage networks, and change management systems. The interface to the datacenter changes. Less real-time interaction is allowed, and more auditing is in place when real-time interaction must occur. Less low-level interaction occurs as virtualization technologies and advanced tools address more and more of the low-level usage patterns.

This will be roughly analogous to the shift that occurred in the database administration world when RAID storage began to emerge. DBAs before RAID were some of the most advanced storage administrators. They would request specific sets of devices, and would lay things out in specific locations on individual disks to maximize performance. There was a great deal of skepticism when system administrators started to tell them that their mode of interaction was out of date, and they shouldn't worry about those low-level details any more. Today, I doubt that those techniques could even be applied to modern storage systems. System administrators don't even need the real-time access anymore in some cases. They can define policy and let the system tune itself. The old way is history, and the new way frees up their time to do something else. A fundamental difference between developers and system administrators... Developers need to go through a rigorous release process because someone else will use their product, and to fix a problem requires another pass through the cycle. System administrators tend to create tools that solve a point problem that arises in a near real-time interaction with the systems. They are less likely to apply the rigor of developers, and are inevitably more likely to suffer from human error in production environments.

Music: Nothing Owed from the album "Dial 'M' For Monkey" by Bonobo

Here is an excerpt from the Roller documentation on setting up a blog client. Seemed to work pretty well. I will be testing a few different blog clients including Current (this posting), ecto, and maybe BlogEd. Current allows you to organize information into drawers and pages, and has some other nice features for use in a wide range of situations including meeting notes, web posting, and blogging. I have found some flaws in the UI, but generally it seems pretty good. I wish it had the ability to capture the music I'm listening to currently (Bonobo - Wayward Bob), mood, etc. like some of the other blog specific clients.

Using a blog client with Roller

A blog client allows you to post to Roller remotely, from your desktop or from some other web site. For example, desktop applications such as Ecto and MarsEdit can post to Roller and so can the photo-sharing web site Flickr.com. This is possible because Roller supports the standard Blogger and MetaWeblog APIs.

Configuring a blog client for use with Roller

First, make sure to enable Blogger API support in your weblog via the Preferences:Settings page. Next, start your blogging client, find the preferences or account setup dialog. You'll need to set the following parameters:

Username: your Roller username

Password: your Roller password

BlogID: the handle of your Roller weblog

URL: the URL of Roller's XML-RPC endpoint

Note that you may not need to enter your BlogID because some blog clients will login to Roller and then present you with a list of the weblogs that are available to your user.

A blogs.sun.com example

For example, if you have an account on blogs.sun.com, your username is fred and your blog's handle is fredsblog (i.e. your weblog's URL is http://blogs.sun.com/roller/fredsblog), then your paramters would be:

Username: fred

Password: (your password)

BlogID: fredsblog

URL: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/xmlrpc

You may not need to enter your BlogID because some blog clients will login to Roller and then present you with a list of the weblogs that are available to your user.

A jroller.com example

If you have an account on jroller.com, your username is fred and your blog's handle is fredsblog (i.e. your weblog's URL is http://jroller.com/fredsblog), then your paramters would be:

Username: fred

Password: (your password)

BlogID: fredsblog

URL: http://jroller.com/xmlrpc