Dirty little IT secret #1

A CTO of a public company (who shall go unnamed for obvious reasons) wrote to me to note that a key system of his was running on a really old Sun box with a custom install of Oracle with no support, no documentation, and no root access. He took the "keep it backed up and pray" approach while planning the replacement of the system.

Dirty little secrets of IT

In this week's InfoWorld column (jumping into the column in medias res):

Because your servers are hidden away in a datacenter and software is just plain ephemeral, the dirty little secrets of your IT department generally remain hidden from view -- but, oh, they can be ugly. [full story]

I've shown you some of mine, now show me some of yours!  E-mail them to me (chad_dickerson@infoworld.com) or post them to your weblog, and I'll certainly link to and/or post the good ones.

25 Most Influential CTOs -- nominate someone today!

InfoWorld is accepting nominations for its annual 25 Most Influential CTOs awards.  More detailed information on the nomination process is here -- but time is running out because the deadline is September 30!  The honorees from last year can be found here.

I was able to meet most of last year's group at various times, and it really is an honor to be included with such an amazing bunch of top IT leaders.

Travel woes revisited

[T]he "business center" available in most hotels is an insult to honest working travelers everywhere.

I wrote that earlier this year in a piece headlined "IT for weary travelers." Just last night, I was staying at a major business hotel chain and the power supply in my laptop died unexpectedly, so my only option for checking e-mail was the business center.  This particular "business center" was literally a cart shoved in corner of the gift shop (should have it been called a "business corner"?).  Nevertheless, I walked to the keyboard with some hope.  I decided to reboot the machine for good luck before getting started, but my heart immediately sank a little when I saw "Windows 95" cross the screen.

Started Internet Explorer and it didn't work.  Ran "winipcfg" to do a release/renew to get a new IP address, but all the buttons I needed to do this were grayed out.  Defeat. (I tried my 802.11b-enabled PocketPC -- this place actually had wireless -- but squinting at the small screen at 11pm after a long day was too daunting).

Through the miracle of FedEx (and think about it, it really is a miracle), I had a working laptop this morning.  But still. . . .are business centers simply doomed?  If IT is really becoming a commodity (and it isn't), why can't major hotels have working computers in their business centers?  Maybe keeping those machines working and up-to-date is actually not that easy.

John Cleese on IT

Interesting post from Mark Jones over at InfoWorld's Tech Watch.  John Cleese is giving the keynote at SunNetworks and Mark is blogging it live.

Turning to the geeks in the crowd he thought the theme [mistakes being a part of life] was appropriate here, and that we were smiling at his antics because: "The crap architecture (you built) contains major management flaws that only you can fix. Clever, but sly."

Yep, pretty clever, huh?

You read it here first

Interesting display of the power of blogging today as our own Ephraim Schwartz (channeled via Mark Jones) reported on the bomb scare at the Moscone.  The first report hit our site at 2:42pm, over two hours ago.  Mark Jones and the news team continued following the story through with other posts (1, 2, 3). Most news reports I've seen (like this one) say that the evacuation began about 3pm, so Mark and team were ahead of the curve, as good journalists should be.  Had this been a serious safety issue (and it doesn't appear to that it was), this kind of early warning could have saved some lives.  Nice work, Ephraim and Mark.

What I did over summer vacation

While I didn't spend a whole lot of time in front of the computer over vacation (not a single RSS feed consumed!), I did have a few things to relate that might be of general interest.  On my first week of vacation, my wife and I drove from the Bay Area up to Vancouver, BC, and in the second week, I spent time relaxing and doing small projects at home.  Some notes:

1) The Grand Hyatt in Seattle is a truly excellent hotel for a vacationing technologist: free ethernet in the rooms and remote control drapes.  Flat screen TV's with a full cable package mounted on the treadmills in the fitness center.  A 151-seat theater with ethernet and power at every seat (didn't make it in there, but that's what they said).  I also have to give them kudos for their reservation system.  Just to see what would happen, I booked the room on the Hyatt.com web site from the wireless network in the Starbucks adjacent to the Hyatt, then closed my laptop and walked straight to the front desk to check in.  They had the reservation I had made just a minute earlier.  In the past, I've done this at other hotels and the record isn't in the front desk computer when I get there.  I have to hand it to Hyatt for having their data properly synchronized (hey, a CTO on vacation still thinks about such things).

2) If you're driving into the United States over the Canadian border, it makes things a lot easier if you have your passport or birth certificate.  Otherwise, you have to stand in line and wait your turn to be grilled by a U.S. Department of Homeland Security officer. I thought a drivers license was sufficient since I've breezed through the Mexican border that way fairly recently.  (From the State Department : "To re-enter the United States, returning U.S. citizens need to show the Department of Homeland Security officer proof of identity, such as a driver’s license, and proof of citizenship, such as a passport, birth certificate, or Certificate of Naturalization. A U.S. passport is proof of both citizenship and identity.")

3) One small project at home during vacation: finally setting up a universal remote.  It's a little lame for a CTO to have 5 remotes sitting on the coffee table in a world where universal remotes exist.  I bought the Kameleon One for All and it is  incredible.  I had tried cheap $30 universal remotes and was disappointed, and I wasn't ready to pay $200 for anything too fancy.  I also needed something that would control my ReplayTV.  The Kameleon fell in the middle price-wise, and it was easy to setup for my TV, ReplayTV, DVD, VCR, and satellite box. The coolest feature is the context-sensitive function of the buttons.  The remote is actually a flat touch pad with dynamic LED buttons, so the One for All only lights up the buttons  that are needed for the component you are controlling at any given time.

4) I went pretty much Mac-only over this vacation -- my latest column running this week gives you a glimpse into how I got hooked.  I've gotten so much reader e-mail on this column I can't even recount it here as I'm trying to get back up-to-speed from vacation, but thanks to everyone who has written.