Explaining race conditions
It can sometimes be difficult to explain abstract concepts to people who don’t have programming backgrounds. I was working on a really simple single system image cluster for someone, all that we had left to complete was the cluster announce mechanism and heartbeat configuration. The design called for a completely automated / self-recovering setup. Even [...]
Layered Technologies hikes prices
Holy cost of doing business Batman! Layered Tech, one of the largest providers of leased & racked commodity servers has raised prices across the board one more time. The latest increase means an additional $20 per server per month (on average) for most customers. I have received not one, not five, not ten, not twenty [...]
Why I don’t take PayPal
A few clients have asked me why I don’t accept payments via PayPal. This question is very easy to answer: Unless you sell (real) goods that you ship with a tracking number, PayPal allows crooks to rip you off by filing bogus disputes. My product is my time. I can not produce a “fedex tracking [...]
Abort, Retry, Stumble?
I’m now a firm believer in information overload. Quite frankly, I think that information overload is good for us, we laugh and discover more things than we normally would. The problem remains that our bosses get irritated when things don’t get done ‘on time’. Note: ‘on time’ usually means a reasonable amount of time that [...]
How will I.T. contractors retire?
I am happy to see that plenty of jobs are available in specialized I.T fields such as virtualization. I’ve been digging through the hundreds of head hunter web sites the past few days just to test the water and noticed that many of the posted opportunities offer contract positions. If you aren’t exclusive to one [...]
Avoiding ‘scope creep’
Anyone who has worked as a consultant knows the dreaded phrase ‘scope creep’, a euphemism employed to describe a situation where a customer is (usually) attempting to get services for free. Scope creep can be rather difficult to spot, usually a consultant does not realize the amount of services that they’ve provided for free until [...]
A freelancer’s guild?
I’ve been looking at lengths for an organization of freelance I.T. professionals who combine efforts and forces to help each other. I’ve found some rather informal groups, none that looked like they were likely to stay operational for long. There are writer’s guilds, programmers guilds, various scientific and research guilds, however I could not find [...]
My little coffee problem
I drink way too much coffee. From years of traveling I’ve gotten rather used to microwaving a cup of water and dumping in some coffee-like powder whenever the urge hit me. Since 2002, my schedule has been chaos. My days and nights are often reversed without warning (due to work or travel). In my industry, [...]
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