Peaches and pecans on vanilla ice cream is a wonderful thing, but get some perspective on how you came to enjoy it. I have heard (and have told others), “life is too short to do something you don’t enjoy,” but the truth is there is no way to revel in everything you do at every moment; not even the most ambitious and determined hedonist can achieve this. While I don’t think he was right about everything, I feel confident Sigmund Freud nailed this one: “We are so made, that we can only derive intense enjoyment from a contrast and only very little from a state of things.
And this is it … OmniOS.
I’ve been using these computer things for a while. I’ve written what is now over 100k lines of production C code and many thousands of lines of code in a variety of other languages. I’ve seen my software run and I’ve run other people software. One thing they all have in common is their propensity to break under unforeseen circumstances. Shit happens.
On my laptop, I don’t care much. I want nice, I want convenient, I want new and pretty and productive.
I haven’t blogged for a while because:
I have been travelling insanely. About 80k miles this year so far. Hacking on Circonus and (subsequently) Reconnoiter. Providing strategic and tactical guidance on some mind blowing projects for the truly awesome clientele we have at OmniTI. Speaking at quite a number of conferences. Attempting to participate more in some of the open source projects I can help. … and planning for Surge.
My opinion is that the only reason the big enterprise storage vendors have gotten away with network block storage for the last decade is that they can afford to over-engineer the hell out of them and have the luxury of running enterprise workloads, which is a code phrase for “consolidated idle workloads.” When the going gets tough in enterprise storage systems, you do capacity planning and make sure your hot apps are on dedicated spindles, controllers, and network ports.
The CFPs have been rolling in for Surge 2011; these are exciting times. It does, however, appear that our description of what we’re looking for has produced a different set of submissions that what I expected. I think it might help to better understand what sessions were like last year and, luckily, we’ll be releasing all of the Surge 2010 video footage this week. I apologize for the poor audio quality, we intend to pull in A/V recording professionals this year.
At OmniTI, I’ve been a part of writing a lot of open source software, my fair share of closed source software. Some of it has been shipped and some of it has been operated as a service. While it is possible (and quite useful) to take what one learns in one scenario and apply it to another, some things simply translate poorly.
I do a lot of consulting with traditional software companies that are looking to make a transition to the new world of SaaS.
