GioList

Balls

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 05:32:00 +0000

Folks, tonight I'm paying homage to Pink Floyd's "Astronomy Domine" (http://popup.lala.com/popup/576742231816075621). If you can't grok the beauty then I think you're not human. This was probably my favorite Pink Floyd song from 1981-82. I just loved the reckless abandon of the tune. The longer version on Umma Gumma was on a constant loop on my "record player" during my high school years. I sold the LP at my last garage sale and some lucky stiff walked away with a bit of my past for a few dollars. There is a lot of music being turned out these days. My kids listen to it on the radio every day. I'm trying to stay quiet when they prefer to listen to that stuff they churn out. I just wish that they would open their ears. I wish they could give up on what they are listening to and take a few minutes to let this music wash over them. Just for one minute.

I Love My iPhone

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 17:57:00 +0000

I love my iPhone. It's perfect. It knows all my music and important data. It gives me access to apps that make me happy. It connects me to the Internet. It keeps me connected to the world. It feels perfect in my hand. I never leave home without it. My iPhone is like Monica Bellucci. I feel great using it. I love it. I will always love my iPhone and Apple.

I hate the AT&T network. It sucks. I don't care what Luke Wilson says. I get dropped calls. When I call people sometimes they can't understand what I'm saying. Sometimes I can't call anyone at all. Sometimes I can't get to the Internet and my apps that make me happy. In the heart of Silicon Valley, in New York City, and sometimes just here in New Jersey the network fails me. I hate the AT&T network.

This week I signed up for a Verizon plan and bought a shiny new Android phone. I'm carrying it with me all the time. It tucked into my left pocket (my iPhone is in the right). I don't love my Android/Verizon phone yet. It's clunky. It feels like high school science project. It's like Janean Garofalo. It's not as sensual or sexy as my iPhone but it doesn't drop calls! (Not yet anyway.) People can understand me when I talk to them on my Android phone. It's been connecting me to the Internet even in places where my iPhone, or rather the AT&T network fails me. Some of the apps that make me happy are starting to show up on my Android phone. They aren't as good as the versions on my iPhone but they're getting there.

I don't like carrying two phones but I need to be able to make calls and not have them drop. I need people to be able to understand me when I'm talking to them on the phone. That is the point of the phone to begin with, right? So now I'm learning to love the Verizon network. It's not perfect either because I can't be on the phone and use the data network. Hopefully they'll fix that and I can surf the web when I'm on the phone. That would make me really love them.

As for this whole iPhone/Android thing right now there is no contest. The iPhone hardware and software are far superior to anything that Android has to offer, today. Yeah, there's an approval process to get into the Apple App Store, Yeah, Apple controls the platform. All true. That may be draconian, but it does keep quality very high. On the other hand Android is very open and they are making progress. I think they will catch up eventually and you know...I've always had a thing...for Janean Garofalo.

Kicking Caffeine

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 15:52:00 +0000

So for the second time in probably two years I'm caffeine free. More accurately, I'm stopped taking any extra caffeine in the form of coffee, soda, or other such stimulating drinks. The last time I did this I think it lasted close to six months. I'm not sure how long this current behavior modification will last but I want to make it a life-long change. I have health issues that could probably use reducing my stimulant intake and my life is not what I would call stress free. It was probably a good idea to permanently eliminate all this extra jitter.

The week before the Christmas break I kept track of my coffee intake and it looked something like:

7 double espressos, my morning pick me up
25 cups of regular "american" coffee (a 5 cup a day habit)
10 Diet Cokes

That totaled about 3050mg of caffeine a week or about 436mg per day. According to some sources you shouldn't have more that 300mg per day. I didn't measure other small amounts of caffeine I may be ingesting in chocolate and other sources. I figured they were noise in terms of the other more concentrated sources. So after Christmas week I went cold turkey. After a week or so of bad headaches, irritability, an just plain feeling lousy, I'm off coffee and other caffeinated drinks. I'm feeling pretty good now and I'm sleeping better. I'm still not sleeping much but what sleep I do get feels more sound and less interrupted.

I'm not sure if this will be a complete and total break with coffee. I mean real coffee. Dark rich creamy espresso. I may still enjoy one after a particularly good meal, but I don't think I'm going to be downing coffee at work to stay alert and active or worse just out of habit. I don't like the feeling of needing to have coffee in the morning just to be able to function. That can not be good. I think that automatic, default, consumption behavior is something I need to weed out of other areas of my life as well. For now I'll start with caffeine.

Thyroid Post-Game Show Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:53:00 +0000

Last Friday, about a week-and-a-half or so after having my thyroid taken out, I started my Levothyroxine regimen. My primary care physician and I will work on determining the correct daily dosage. I was surprised at how little was actually required. Right now each pill contains 25 micrograms of the active ingredient. Makes you wonder what's in the rest of that 1/2 gram pill. I will be on this drug for the rest of my life.

Yesterday was my last visit with my surgeon. The final result of my biopsy was in and he needed to do his standard post-op check up. The main reason my thyroid was so enlarged was goiter however the biopsy turned up two small cancerous nodules (measuring 3mm and 1mm) one on each side. The guidelines for what to do next are pretty clear. Do nothing. My surgeon and the pathology report both indicated the tumors were completely contained and there is no indication that the cancer has advanced outside the thyroid. These tumors can almost be considered "pre-cancer" and basically they are nothing to worry about. So I'm not going to worry about them. The only alternate course of action is radioactive iodine treatment. Unless my primary care doc thinks it's worth doing, I'm going to skip it. These types of tumors are actually quite common and usually pose no threat. Later in life there was a chance that these tumors could have evolved (devolved?) into something really nasty but we won't know. Those little bastards are sitting in some pathology lab getting ready to be incinerated or whatever they do to incorrigible organs after they are separated from their owners, chopped up, and analyzed. The biopsy contained some other good news. There was no parathyroid tissue found in the sample so it looks like my surgeon did a good job keeping those calcium regulating babies intact.

So the $64,000.00 question is was it worth taking out my thyroid? Unfortunately I'll never know. I probably could have treated the enlarged thyroid with drugs but there were those tiny tumors in there which later in life could have blossomed into a real problem. If given this information I probably would have taken the same course of action.

This is probably all I'm writing about this unless some really big news comes up. I hope these posts are helpful for anyone facing the same choices. I found it extremely comforting to talk to other people who went through this experience and I'd be happy to converse, publicly or privately, with anyone who's been diagnosed. You know how to reach me.

Let's Connect with Friend Connect

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:19:00 +0000

Now that Google has added more social features to Friend Connect, I've decided to try a few experiments on my blog. I may try to extend these trials at work as well but for now lets see how this small test works out. The only change I've made is to attach the "Add Members" gadget to the right hand column of my blog. Stop by and sign up if you read my blog and would like to participate in the experiment. I promise not to spam anyone but it may be a way for us to have a two-way conversation as some of you have been doing by posting comments.

Adding the gadget was pretty simple. The first thing I needed to do was to just sign up for Friend Connect. After that the Friend Connect admin page was populated automatically with my Blogger blogs. At that point you just pick the gadgets you want for your site, step through some wizards, and out pops some Javascript code you paste into your template. Pretty drop dead simple.

The Thyroid Post-Game Show

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 14:27:00 +0000

For those of you not following my daily tweets, my thyroidectomy was completed successfully and I've been home for about five days now.

It was a long surgery. About four hours from the time I was wheeled into the operating theater, under the influence of a healthy shot of Versed, to the time I regained consciousness in the recovery room. Modern anesthesia is wonderful thing.

In the recovery room, the first thing I noticed was my throat was killing me and not from the outside but from the inside. I figured that was from being inubated during the operation but I'm not really sure. They gave me another shot of something for the pain in recovery but that's the last pain killer I've taken. My voice was unchanged. I was obsessing about this before my surgery and I was furtively testing it our in recovery. The nurse must have thought I was a looney.

I stayed overnight in the hospital for observation. That was fairly uncomfortable. I know that there are all sorts of nasty post-operative complications they have to watch out for (blood clots, internal bleeding, infection etc.) but you would figure there would be some passive way to monitor for these conditions. Nope. The way this is done is a nurse wakes you up every 2-4 hours, takes your temp, blood pressure, pulse, and blood-oxygen levels. It's impossible to rest or sleep. As a bonus, I had the pleasure of wearing what amounts to blood pressure cuffs on both legs which alternately inflated/deflated, right leg, then left leg, every 30-60 seconds. I was told this was for circulation but I think they were meant to keep me awake as much as possible between my vitals checks. But I kvetch. They took good care of me at St. Peters and I'm grateful.

The next day I saw my surgeon. The recap was pretty simple. I had a complete thyroidectomy. They left a little bit of tissue around the parathyroids so as to not rough them up too much. I need them for regulating calcium levels. The thyroid was very big and deep which is why the surgery took so long. What he extracted didn't look like cancer to him but we need to wait for the full biopsy to say for sure. He asked if I wanted anything for pain and surprisingly I turned him down. I wasn't in any real pain. So he released me. After losing my I.V. and signing some papers, I was walking (yep, no wheelchair ride) downstairs to the hospital main entrance where my wife was waiting in the getaway car.

I've been home since then. No strenuous activities but I did drive yesterday, which in the Garden State, can be harrowing. I also walked a bit. No running yet. I've taken a bit of Tylenol here and there when I felt uncomfortable but no other pain medication unless you count the warm soup my wife made. Man! That felt great going down my sore throat and tasted great. I'm going a bit stir crazy and will probably start doing some work from home soon. Another advantage to a career in technology.

I still have not started hormone replacement therapy. Due to the fact that my thyroid has left the building, I'm going to be on Synthroid for the rest of my life. From what my docs tell me I have about a two week window before I really need to start taking it. I'll be going in this week to figure out dosages, etc.

So that's it folks. Not too bad all things considered. For anyone going through this I hope this gives you some idea what to expect and helps to relieve any anxiety you may be experiencing. I've been contacted by friends and strangers who have all been very helpful with words of advice, experience, and well wishes. Thanks, everyone. You have all helped me a great deal.

Of course a special thanks to my family who have been helping take care of me and making home the perfect place to recover. I love you all.

Let's take out his thyroid for 100 dollars!

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:37:00 +0000

Close to a year ago my doctor discovered that my thyroid was larger than normal. I was in for an ear infection and after the usual poking and prodding he felt the front of my neck and asked, "How long has this been like that?" That's how this odd journey began. Now, after a biopsy and some further monitoring my doctor and my surgeon both agree it's time for that troublesome gland to go. Funny, the surgeon was the one who initially was opposed to taking a scalpel to me.

The "tumors" are quite large. I can feel them when I swallow. I have two, one on each side of my thyroid. The largest is about six centimeters which is about how long the incision will be across my throat. Kinda makes sense since that six centimeter mass is going to have to squeeze through that small window. A friend recently brought to my attention that I should have scheduled the surgery this week so I'd be out by Halloween with a nasty, oozing, possibly bleeding wound on my neck. My timing was always shitty. I would have made a great zombie.

I call them "tumors" but it's not yet determined if they are in fact cancerous or if they are malignant or benign. My biopsy indicated that I probably don't have cancer, but given the relatively high false negative rate for this procedure, I'm not willing to play the odds. My docs both agree with my decision. My family members are happy too. Some thought we (i.e. my wife and I) were taking this all a bit non-chalantly. We'll know soon enough.

I know people who have gone through this procedure before me and they are all ok. Some have had all or part of their thyroid removed. No one seems to have a nasty scar or long term health issues. Most are just taking a pill a day to replace the hormone normally secreted by their lost gland. I'm expecting to have much the same experience.

I have been counseled on what could go wrong. All of these scenarios have very low single digit probabilities. The worst of which is probably that I could permanently lose my voice. It freaks you out but again very low probability. I've never had major surgery before so I'm a bit unsettled about being under. I'm also not one for staying in the hospital but my wife has delivered three kids, the first by c-section (Yes, that's right the first by c-section.) she's basically telling me to suck it up. She's right of course. There are others I know who are really fighting for their lives. This little hiccup is nothing in comparison.

So gentle reader we'll see how this thing goes. I'm going to try to remember to blog and tweet my whole experience if I remember and I'm determined to ask my surgeon if I can have what's left of my thyroid after my operation. I think it would be fun to keep on my desk and have my kids take it to school for show and tell. It will be fun to have a little bit of myself in a jar even if it is a little bit of myself that has gone slightly haywire.

Playing with Google Wave

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:22:00 +0000

Wow. I've spent some time playing with Google Wave over the past few hours. I must say it's a bit overwhelming. My initial reaction is that Wave can fulfill it's design goal. I can see Wave completely replacing email. Traditional email functionality is a subset of Wave functionality. It should be a simple switch with one caveat. Large public waves are like being in a chaotic editing jam session. It's often difficult to keep track of all the conversations going on in the same doc. So if you are sending a Wave to a bunch of contacts that are all online you can probably expect that someone is going to just start typing a response before you've finished composing your message. There is currently nothing stopping them from seeing the inbound wave and just jumping in. That happens frequently in IM/Chat but it's impossible with email. No one sees anything you write in email until you press send. This has all sorts of interesting implications. Drunk Waving is probably going to lose a few of you out there your jobs or your ex is going to want to slap you with an injunction. So waver beware! (Caveat Undo-er?)

The quite side of wave is simply document editing although one could see that you could add some useful robots to your editing session. Robots are bits of code that will watch while you type and trigger some functionality based on an event or by matching some word or phrase. It's not hard to imagine basic utility robots for thesaurus, dictionary, spelling, grammar, etc. You can also imagine more advanced types of robots that would identify addresses, embedded images, and pull up more information via search. Imagine dropping in a bad picture of a painting in a document and having a robot automatically, or at your request, search the web for alternative images of the same painting.

Wave is really going to be all about communicating and collaborating online and in real time. I think that's where things will settle but it's going to require us to learn how to deal with collaboration that happens that fast. There aren't many systems out there that behave this way on this scale. It's going to take some time and it might be some time before your Waving with your mom and dad.

Correction: The Sun is Setting.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:25:00 +0000

Just for the record, I was wrong the Sun was definitely setting. Not that I'm not keeping score or anything but I think I'm doing better than I do at home where I'm always wrong.

At any rate, I'm in San Francisco eagerly awaiting the start of Oracle Open World, where I hope to understand how the great carcass of Sun's software assets will be carved up and consumed. Unfortunately for us, and our customers, the butchering is going on behind a great canvas sheet. Hopefully, I'll get a peek behind that sheet this coming week. Stay tuned gentle readers!

BTW, why I'm not living in San Francisco is just beyond me. I love this city.

Today's Tweets

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:04:00 +0000

06:37 My Facebook Newsfeed is nearly cleanly divided into those posting via Twitter and those playing Mafia Wars. Any way to turn off the latter? #
06:46 Thanks to Sandi all Mafia Warriors now sleep with the fishes. #

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Today's Tweets

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 20:02:00 +0000

10:18 This is a good thing. Our blogs need some love. - Talkin' Bout a (Blogging) Revolution bit.ly/10lGS1 #
12:24 Jolicloud www.giolist.com/2009/08/jolicloud.html #
13:06 Lunch by Katia twitpic.com/f0778 #

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Jolicloud

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 16:24:00 +0000

I just installed Jolicloud on my netbook. The installation process was simple once I created the bootable USB image. I had a lot of difficulty with the Jolicloud supplied tools for both Linux and Mac OS X so I just resorted to a straight forward dd command from the UNIX shell. I was able to boot the USB image from the grub command line. I'm not sure why I had so much trouble getting to this point but it all worked once things started booting up.

The OS installed flawlessly. No futzing with network drivers, no loading of backports. I just stepped through a half dozen of dialog screens and it just worked. This was an improvement over Ubuntu NBR. The makers of Jolicloud are really working hard to make this as simple as possible so they must have their hands full dealing with the explosion of netbook models from a growing list of vendors. I'm grateful for their efforts. The big difference is that during the installation process, or in my case when I asked for an invite, you need to create a Jolicloud profile. This profile is to support some of the other features of Jolicloud which I'll explain later.

After the install completes and you've rebooted your system you'll want to launch the MyJolicloud Dashboard. The dashboard and the way this distribution handles applications. It's central to the Jolicloud experience and it's the primary mechanism to install applications into your system. The reason you want to use the dashboard is because the definition of application within Jolicloud includes web based services like Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter. So instead of launching a browser and getting to gmail via bookmark or just typing in the URL, you install the Gmail application, click on an icon, and it pops up in a dedicated browser window. It even shows up in the upper left-hand app tray as it's own icon. All of this web app magic is done using Mozilla Prism. I'm still trying to see if I like this experience but it is growing on me. My normal work pattern would be to just fire up new tabs in Firefox/Safari and just type in a URL. In NBR these apps would just show up as instances of Mozilla indicated by a small Mozilla icon which does result in a lot of searching through windows and tabs to find the right app. In Jolicloud I have to click on the home button in the upper left, find the "app" icon I want to launch and it will be started in a new window and managed as a separate app.

There are two other important aspects of the Jolicloud Dashboard that are unique. Frist off, the dashboard allows you to synchronize the configuration of machines. That means that if I had a second netbook I could clone my settings between the two systems. I'm not sure how far this goes but even if it just saves my installed apps that could save time when upgrading to a new machine. It doesn't support this yet but it may also be a way in the future to maintain a central or standard config for a group of netbook users. Which may appeal to system administrators. If your concerned with privacy this is an obvious red flag because this means they are storing information about you and your installed applications and possibly app usage on their servers. This may turn off a few folks. Second, the OS includes a social network. You can follow other Jolicloud users and you can see their updates. So when the person you are following installs an app you'll see a notification. If it's something your interested in you can install the app too. Not sure this is something I would use on a regular basis. I'm not really sure I get it. I really don't need another social network and this one is built into the OS. Again, those concerned with privacy are not going to be thrilled with this feature.

I'm going to give Jolicloud a spin for a while. The nice thing about the netbook is that I'm not storing any information on it. Everything I'm using is in the cloud, so changing OSs is a low impact activity. I'm up and running as soon as the install is done. It's quite liberating.

Today's Tweets

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 20:01:00 +0000

11:32 The Netbook Experience bit.ly/1JA72d #

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The Netbook Experience

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 15:32:00 +0000

About two weeks ago I bought an Asus Eee PC 1005HA. I wanted to set up a computing platform that was small, lightweight, that I could use when on the road. In some ways my iPhone has spoiled me. It's such a useful device in such a small package. It allows me to travel light but not sacrifice connectivity with my colleges and some of the applications I use to run my business. Where the iPhone falls short is note taking, composing long text documents, or making quick diagrams. Lugging around my 15" MacBook Pro all day at a conference or visiting customers just seems like overkill. So the netbook machine form-factor was appealing. I'm not a windows user, so within minutes of coming home with the diminutive computer I was installing Ubuntu NBR. The installation of NBR was fairly straight forward but getting the network up and running required some extra tweaks for my system. The process was relatively painless.

I've never used a netbook before and I wasn't sure if Ubuntu NBR was going to work for me. I was pleasantly surprised. Everything I use on the road worked great. I should mention that most of my applications are already web based, so the netbook was simply a convenient platform for running Gmail, Google Docs, Salesforce.com, OpenAir, Dropbox, etc. However things like using an LCD projector, OpenOffice.org, and my AT&T USB 3G Network card all worked fine. Everything worked out of the box. I was also able to install Emacs for note taking all quite painlessly via 'apt-get' from the command line. I was shocked to see how polished the Linux desktop/laptop/netbook experience could be. Kudos to Ubuntu.

After traveling with the system for about a week and a half I've been pretty happy. I had some logistical difficulty in managing when I would bring my netbook vs. may MacBook Pro and making sure essentials from my backpack made it to the smaller satchel I've been using to carry the netbook. Network connectivity has not been a problem. NBR works great with Wi-Fi and my AT&T card works fine where there is a good 3G signal which is the case in most of the locations I tend to travel.

So why not a MacBook Air? The main reason is cost. I couldn't justify spending that much on a light-weight computer. Maybe if Apple releases some kind of tablet or lower cost Air I might consider switching. For now my little netbook is serving me well. Does this mean I'm abandoning Apple? Absolutely not. As I said earlier my iPhone is my computer of choice when I'm really traveling light and I still need the MacBook Pro for programming, running virtual machines, and other heavy duty tasks. When two and a half-year 15" MacBook Pro needs replacing it will most definitely be another Apple.

My next netbook experiment is to install Jolicloud. It looks like an interesting repackaging of NBR but with more direct cloud/web app integration. So you install Gmail instead of just using the browser. It seems to treat cloud apps as first class citizens on the desktop. I'll let you know how that goes.

Today's Tweets

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 21:11:00 +0000

20:36 Gin and tonic, hot tub, and the Dead. Priceless. #
21:07 I'm warming up but it will feel good when I get out. twitpic.com/enpvq #
10:30 Is it rude to tweet while you are giving a presentation? #
11:27 OKpresentation over. Time to do something useful. #

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Today's Tweets

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 20:04:00 +0000

06:13 It may be too early for this but what a great way to start the day: Visualizing up to ten dimensions bit.ly/mOxQD #

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Today's Tweets

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 20:05:00 +0000

21:04 Lair of the White Worm (tinyurl.com/r7vrfo) is one of my favorite monster movies. Reminiscent of those Hammer films w/Peter Cushing. #

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Catalyst09 Sessions

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:42:00 +0000

The first surprising thing I heard at Catalyst yesterday morning was that attendance was only off 10% over last year and that last year's conference was their biggest year ever. Impressive. I've been to other tech conferences this year and I have noticed a drop in attendance at these events. Digging down into this a bit more, this data point isn't so surprising since a lot of the attendees are here with passes they get as part of their Burton research subscriptions. Still it does indicate that there is value in attending or at the very least with Burton Group's research.

The rest of the day was packed with a barrage of sessions, some given by customers, which were generally of good quality and filled with useful and thought provoking information. I was mainly in sessions that were part of the identity track and I particularly enjoyed the first half of the day where the current state, general trends, what's hot were discussed. The highlights:

Customers are demanding quicker time to value in identity deployments. (Typically, 3-6 months.)
Decomposition of identity products is starting to happen because customers want to mix and match solutions.
Standards are going to be more important and yes, SPML may get new life.
In some cases vendor products are ahead of where customers are in this space.
Identity services and identity as a service vendors are on the rise.

As an integrator I feel I'm pretty clued into what customers want, so a lot of what was said about quicker ROI on projects rang true. I'm also encouraged to here discussions that standards are important and are being demanded by the wider community. Standards are the best way to offset the instability caused by tectonic vendor M&A activity. It will be good to see standards seep deeper into identity solutions and not just deal with external interconnect. Sure, it would be great for the industry if SPML were more widely adopted. I'll bet that customers would appreciate if workflows and user form configurations would be portable between vendors as well. That's where the real lock-in occurs.

I also jumped tracks a bit to attend virtualization, cloud computing, and social networking talks but this is a fairly frustrating exercise. Most of the talks here are are short and packed tightly together. This format rewards those who just want to attend one track. However it makes it difficult to attend complete talks in other tracks. If you decide you want to hear VMware and Citrix debate performance you are guaranteed to miss either the Q&A from the previous session or the beginning of the debate. Frankly that sucks. I've been to other conferences. I know you can't attend every session but it would be nice to have the sessions scheduled in a way where you can see the whole session. A short break between sessions also helps increase the "hallway" conversations, the conference within the conference if you will. This is really why we go to these things, no? I bumped into a few customers, partners, and friends here and it was difficult to even schedule time as we were running between rooms.

So far lots of good things going on here. I'm glad I came. Next year I've got to bring my partner out so we can tag team this thing. To much to do for one person.

Catalyst09 Workshops

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:56:00 +0000

Much like other conferences I've attended in the past, the first couple of days at Burton Catalyst are dedicated to "deep-dive" workshops. These presentations are meant to impart more knowledge then a shorter presentation and they normally have more time for more Q & A. I attended three.

The first was on Active Directory Bridge products. This is the name being applied to software packages which allow UNIX systems to use Microsoft Active Directory for authentication and authorization. These products are important because they simplify the management of UNIX accounts for organizations that have any number of UNIX systems. I've produced a white paper on this topic which will be released soon which hopefully will give a more in depth justification for why I think AD is an appropriate solution. The workshop was a great. Mark Diodoti did a great job of explaining and quantifying the space as well as identifying big players in this market: Centrify, Likewise, Quest, and Symark. [Full disclosure: My company is currently a Centrify partner.] The workshop included a demonstration of an installation of Centrify on a few hosts. As far as implementation and feature set go, I really like Centrify and always have. They are going beyond plain authn/authz and are trying to solve the bigger issues of audit and compliance. These are big issues for a lot of my clients. Yes, the other vendors are moving into these functional areas but Centrify has it all in one tightly integrated suite that is very simple to install. That last bit is important. It's very simple to install and deploy in large environments. After attending the workshop I'm even more convinced we made the right choice in partnering with them.

One other issue that came up from the Active Directory Bridge workshop that came up was that some of the products support linking of different UNIX identities to a single AD account. This is mainly due to the fact that people may have different login names and UIDs on different systems. It's a fact of life in most organizations. While this feature is a deployment advantage it can be a bit of a problem when it comes to managing the identities long term and it may be difficult to audit this kind of environment once the Active Directory Bridge product is deployed. You can eliminate all of this by simply collapsing your UNIX namespace but that's a lot of work and could slow down your implementation. It was also pointed out that most provisioning systems can't support this type of account linking under the users AD account since these entries are stored in other parts of the AD information tree. I'm glad this was discussed because we, i.e. HCM, have been working on a solution.

The second workshop I attended was on Identity Provisioning led by Lori Rowland and Alice Wang. The provisioning market is maturing as evidenced by the good questions from and discussions by the participants. A few interesting nuggets surfaced here. The first was a statement by the Burton folks that given the purchase of Sun by Oracle and the exit of HP from the identity provisioning space that even well established players are not a safe bet. That seems to contradict the statement that the market is maturing. I think it rather signals that there is probably some upheaval coming in this space in the short term. Especially since no one really knows for sure what Oracle will do with all of the Sun identity products. The second important take away for me was Lori Rowland's information on justifying ROI and measuring the success of IDM projects. She espoused doing this at the head of the project and for implementors to get metrics up front to form a baseline. It's difficult and next to impossible to attempt to gather this data after the fact. Great advice.

The last workshop I attended was on advanced role management led by Ian Glazer and Alice Wang. The workshop was kind of like attending a theoretical physics class because most organizations haven't implemented roles, and role based provisioning. Most efforts to do so end in failure. This is a hard problem and while the workshop offered some good techniques for thinking about roles it really got me thinking more about how confused people are about roles. What we think is role management is really the aggregation of entitlements management, entitlement certification, and the collection of entitlements into higher levels of abstraction. This has really sparked some heretical thoughts in my mind. Are roles really necessary? Is there a better simpler way? Don't we need just a better way to deal with entitlements? I think there may be a way using simple identity templates or entitlement stamps. Sure you could call the templates roles but somehow removing the R-word from the picture helps to de-politicize things doesn't it? It seems more grounded in reality. There are some details to work out. How does one not just aggregate entitlements when you change responsibilities within the organization? Who approves the content of the templates? There are more questions and I think I have some answers here. Lot of food for thought.

It's been a thought provoking couple of days. As a Catalyst noob, I'll have to see how the shorter format presentations compare but I've learned a bit over the past few days.

Off to Catalyst 09

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 17:23:00 +0000

I'm headed for San Diego this afternoon. Yes, I know ComiCon was last week. Maybe next year. No, this year I'm attending the Burton Catalyst conference. It's the first year I'm attending. I'll be representing HCM and I'll let you all know how it goes. As a company that specializes in identity management and one that has started a budding practice around virtualization and cloud computing I'll be keen to see if I've been missing out all these years. In any case, if your in San Diego for the conference I'd be glad to meet and share ideas over a few cold ones. I'm looking forward to the hallway conversations. See you there.

TimeMachine backup failure fixed

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:31:00 +0000

My TimeMachine backups had been failing recently on all my client systems. All the computers in my house use TimeMachine to back up to a central volume served up by a Mac Mini. I found that my son accidentally renamed the backup volume on the server and my systems wouldn't mount the renamed volume. I changed the name back and things still wouldn't work. No matter what I tried I couldn't mount the backup volume from the client machines. It was odd because screen sharing worked just fine but the volume wouldn't mount. Checking the system console, I found the following error:

7/25/09 4:41:30 PM /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[2400] FSMountServerVolumeSync failed with error: -128 for url: afp://steve@mrcrab.local/Drobo

Google searches turned up nada. I found a lot of errors related to FSMountServerVolumeSync failed but nothing referring to error -128. So I performed the only action I hadn't tried: rebooting the server. Lo and behold! I could mount the backup volume and all was right with my TimeMachine universe. Most folks may have just rebooted the server but I always attempt to correct things without rebooting. Sure I may have spent more time on the problem than someone willing to take that coward's way out, but in the process I fixed a few more issues I happened to notice lurking in the system log. I think my laptop is happier for the effort and hopefully this post will help those Googling for the dread -128.

Separated at Birth?

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:29:00 +0000

Today's Tweets

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 20:04:00 +0000

12:44 Bad couple of weeks to be a celeb. www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/top/all/6501472.html #

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Today's Tweets

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 20:03:00 +0000

17:23 It's the monsoon season here in Sedona, AZ. Not much rain but cool breezes an cloud cover spare us from the killer heat. It's beautiful here #
09:07 I'm saddened about MJ's death but can we talk about something else? I think the onion has the last sad but true words: ow.ly/fXtl #
09:42 RT @lcacciatore: twitpic.com/8kc0m - Nice [nice indeed, pretty awesome model bi-plane] #

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noreply@blogger.com (Steve Giovannetti) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:05:00 +0000

08:34 Just added myself to the wefollow.com twitter directory under: #entrepreneur #tech #developer #

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