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What does “Enterprise ready” mean?

“Enterprise Ready” means, in the end, that you have a vendor to blame if something goes wrong.

Let’s assume I spend a million bucks of company money on software from major vendors and pay a few million more per year on maintenance and support. Now let’s assume something goes horribly, horribly wrong — we’re dead in the water for a day, for example, or our online stock trading application crashes at market open. I have spent millions of dollars on high end software from top tier vendors, who all work very hard to get us back up and running. Eventually it’s all sorted out, and everyone is satisfied. I keep my job, and when it’s time to renew the support contracts the vendors remind the senior execs about how they pulled our ass out of the fire. Total cost: Let’s snatch a number out of mid air and say $12MM annually on software and support, and a $6MM outage. $18MM total.

Now let’s assume we go another route. We use all free, open-source software and save millions of dollars.  The same “something” happens, but now there ARE no vendors to call. We, our loyal, courageous and highly skilled technical staff, work tirelessly to solve the problem. We’re up in HALF the time it would have taken the vendors to rescue us. Total cost: a $3MM outage, plus say the two mil I spent on consultants and contractors to implement everything. We just saved $13MM, woo-hoo!

All the blame for the outage now falls upon me, the hapless putz whose idea it was to use all this “home-brewed” hacker stuff the vendors warned our CEO, CIO, CFO and everyone else about. It matters not what happened, why it happened, nor how well we handled it. A few stockholders (who coincidentally also own stock in the software vendors) file a class action suit. Blame is assessed, disembodied heads demanded. I’m out on my ass, along with anyone associated with me, probably my boss and maybe his boss as well.  I can’t find another tech job because it’s all my fault my company took a three million dollar outage.

You think I’m making this up? Think again. There’s a reason big companies pay loads of money for next-to-useless support contracts from Red Hat and Novell to run SLES and RHEL, instead of using free Linux distros. And there’s a reason they spend tens of millions (in the case of a large company) for software and services from Microsoft, IBM, BMC, HP, BEA, EMC, Oracle and all the rest. And for the most part it’s got nothing to do with technical considerations.

It’s one of the lessons we learn when working in an “enterprise” environment.  Of course no one ever wants to talk about the real reasons; we talk about “value propositions” and “core competencies” instead.

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Dayton Hamvention 2009

Going to Dayton this year — first time ever. Lisa and I will be loading up the truck with as many kits & new keyers as we can carry.

Oops — did I say new keyers? Guess I must have slipped.

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Addicted & obsessed

I’ve been completely absorbed in trying to get a new product finished. I’ve already pretty much committed to making it to Dayton this year with inventory to sell. I have all fo the basic stuff working, and quite a few of the “whiz-bang” new features that no one else has. I keep hammering at getting the code finished, or at least to the point where I feel comfortable to taking it to Dayton.

I have been hacking away at this code (which is now somewhere upwards of 7,000 lines of C) for months.  The last couple of weeks I’ve been doing that and virtually nothing else.  I can now copy a limited set of Morse characters at over 20 WPM, sometimes 30…  and I still have not been on the air in a couple of years.

So, if you know me, I apologize for being completely out of the loop.

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Web site overhaul

I have been helping a friend of a friend who is trying to get her web site going.  In the process, I took a look at what others have done with osCommerce.  There are some pretty slick sites out there.  I had been trying to figure out how to integrate somethings I wanted to do into OSC; now I see I was thinking bass-ackwards.  Build a whole site, and wrap the osCommerce shopping cart into it.  Duh.  I’ll be looking at different ways to do that.

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I call shenanigans!

OK, so now we have an uproar over a political cartoon in the NY Post.  If you haven’t seen it, it shows a chimp laying dead on the ground, having been shot by a cop.  Two cops are standing there; one says something to the effect of “Now they’ll have to find someone else to write the next economic stimulus package”.

I have seen the cartoon.  It’s about as funny or un-funny as most; it very clearly uses a current story (pet chimp goes nuts, has to be killed) to illustrate the fact that the economic stimulus package recently pawned off on the US taxpayer could easily have been written by a demented chimp.

Of course now we have Al Sharpton and the rest of the usual band of jackasses claiming that this is somehow a racial attack on Saint Barack.  OK, ‘scuse me?  Are we going to have to change the color of the ink in the newspaper, lest we be accused of trying to make a racial slur against the Anointed One?  Close down zoos for fear of us white devils telling our kids that black people look like monkeys?  Get serious.  This is 2009, not 1949.  Like it or not, we are a whole lot further than we were 10 years ago, or 20, or 30 — but I think we’d be a lot farther were it not for people trying to make things seem worse than they are,  just to increase their own power and line their own pockets.

If I may be permitted to candidly discuss a racial issue, it’s people like Sharpton and the rest of the nattering nabobs of the left that cause most of the racial issues I have encountered.  I cannot tell you how many times it has been presumed that all white people are somehow biased against blacks, usually secretly, often unconsciously.   If something doesn’t go the way the black person feels it should, well then obviously it’s the white guys secretly banding together to keep the brother down.

Hogwash.  I can count on my fingers the number of white people I have encountered in the past year or two who have shown any detectable bias against or dislike for blacks in general.  On the other hand, the more time I spend in Charlotte the more I hear my black fellow citizens bitching about how all the cards are stacked against them.  I think a lot of it is the constant harping of Jackson, Sharpton and the rest of the so-called “leaders” of the black community.

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Oh, how wonderful our new regime is!

So now we have our freshly appointed Attorney General telling the entire world that the United States is a “nation of cowards”.  How wonderful! It’s always nice to hear top government officials disparaging the entire country.

According to Holder, since the average American — in his estimation — doesn’t hang out with a racially mixed crown on weekends, we’re all just a bunch of cowards for candidly discussing racial issues.  Excuse me?  The last time I was tempted candidly discuss a racial issue, I was reminded that it would probably result in my being labeled (by people like Holder and his soulmates, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Ernie Chambers) a racist, right-wing thug just trying to keep my brother down.

Could Saint Barack have possibly chosen a more unrealistic jackass for this job?  It’s bad enough that this guy apparently wants to completely disarm the entire civilian population.  Now he apparently thinks forced integration of our weekends would be a good idea as well.  What would he like to see?  Government mandated EEOC oversight of family picnics and golf outings?

How ironic that Holder seems to have borrowed his comment from the title of a book written by someone who seems to be from as far as possible from him in the political spectrum.  It’s interesting to see the Ministry of Truth in full swing.  Orwell seems to have been a couple of decades off the mark, but we’re getting there.

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We’re paying for what??

As I suspected, it turns out that the cute little octuplets born in the People’s Republic of Kalifornia will be largely supported by tax money.

A lot has already been said, and will continue to be said.  I won’t beat it to death.  I will say this: The federal government and the state should both sue the doctors who agreed to do the in vitro fertilization to recover the entire cost of the delivery, neonatal care and tax dollar support until those kids turn 21.

I call this the “Michael Jackson Syndrome”.  Some people desperately need to have someone around them to say, “Look, this is a really bad idea.  You’re obviously not thinking straight — you just can’t do this.  It’s wrong, and it will also make you look like a nut case”.  Jackson has never had this, which is why he’s in the state he is.  Apparently neither has this woman.  You’d think a bunch of doctors would have the common sense, not to mention the social and medical responsibility, to do it for her — but, hey, this is Kali we’re talking about.

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I win!

I moderate every comment posted to this blog. All one of them, so far. I don’t do that to censor viewpoints with which I don’t agree (though I could). I do it to keep the spammers and other jackasses from polluting the pond here. Every once in a while I get a dozen or so bogus comments posted by lame-ass criminals trying to spread viruses, Trojan programs or porno ads. I just delete their sorry crap and go on with my life.

The Internet as we know it is under constant siege. Unfortunately most of the attacks come from outside the US, places where the local governments are unable or unwilling to do anything about it. Even more disturbing, I suspect the majority of these attacks are perpetrated by US residents, using crappy computers in crappy, backwards or unfriendly countries to avoid prosecution in the US.

The answer to this problem as it stands today is not more laws. The laws we have are easily (and universally) circumvented or ignored. The only answer I can offer up is frontier justice. In the mean time, I just play Whack-A-Mole with the spammers, thieves and other low-life scum. So far I win.

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Bonefish Grill

We had dinner at Bonefish Grill in Regency last night for the first time. The food was quite good. I believe the calamari may have been the best I’ve ever had. We also had the Bang bang Shrimp appetizer (spicy and not bad).

The menu is varies, with plenty of seafood entrees (of course) in addition to steaks, salads, etc.  I had a Caesar salad with dinner, but next time I’ll try the house salad, which looked excellent. My fish was perfectly cooked, stuffed with crab and shrimp with vegetable and jasmine rice sides.  The sauce was a creamy lemon caper sauce that worked well with the fish.

Service was a little off, but not bad — they forgot the occasional drink, but overall it was a good experience. A word of warning: the desserts are more than enough for four people. They’re enormous.

We’ll probably be back.

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The way to perfect rice

I’m surprised by the number of people who don’t eat rice because they have no idea how to cook it properly.  And let me tell you, folks, if Uncle Ben’s or Minute Rice is your idea of what rice tastes like, you have no idea what you’re missing.

The way to perfect rice is simple and doesn’t require much effort.  You can have it cooking while you work on the rest of the meal.  The method I use is Continue reading “The way to perfect rice”