I did say at some point that this was going to be a pretty mixed up blog didn’t I? Well here is a book review, not that its too far away from being technical and, actually, I think its something that anybody working in a technical environment would do well reading it even if they have no management aspirations.
CIOs at Work (Ed Yourdon), is an opportunity to get an insight into how many influential CIOs got to where they are, what they believe are the good steps to take to get into that role, what its like once your there and what’s key to delivering once you are in that role.
This is part of a series of three books (the others being Founders at work by Jessica Livingston and Coders at work by Peter Seibel) where a section of the technology workforce are interviewed. Ed Yourdon, internationally recognised expert in project management and the software field, is the person who takes us on this tour. An excellent choice as he is able to communicate equally with those that he is interviewing and get some amazing insights through just simple conversation. Each of the interviewees get asked the same questions, in generally the same order. This approach then allows us to see what the differences are in thoughts and processes between each person.
This is something that I have been interested in for many reasons. This first, running my own company, knowing what people have been through to get into these roles and what they are trying to achieve, their needs in that role, their expectations and where they think the industry is likely to move, can all help me develop my business to help us provide exactly what is expecting. At the end of the day the CIO is often the person who makes the final decision when it comes to hiring in external companies.
Another major reason is my own personal development. A lot of this comes from just reading about others and how they have defined themselves, got to where they are, achieved what they have. Through this book a lot of my personal believes for the work place appear to have been, or at this moment in time are possibly, the correct way of looking at things. The need to diversify as much as possible on your way up through the ranks so you get a very good understanding of how business work, form the front line support, sales, finance and HR, well before you even get near the technical departments. I feel that this idea is is particularly highlighted through comparing the interviews with Ashish Gupta (brought up straight through the company technical ranks) and Paul Strassmann (the first CIO in America) and all the others. Their views in many ways are so different to what all of the others are saying and they both appear to miss what many f the others have deemed as very important in the role. There also appears to be a common view on technology and how consumerism is changing the enterprise landscape, new cool things hit users before enterprise and then enterprise has to play catch up while being mindful of the business needs all when users just want to do things instantly in the way the do at home. Something I have been interested in, having been a security engineers for a few years. How is this idea of bring your own device managed with security of the business and the ever shifting point of location of security management. The final big piece of information that is constantly repeated is that you cannot standstill. To make no decision for the future is to immediately fail in your role.
If you have any interest in reaching the top of the technology tree or you just would like to see a potential view of the future this is certainly a book to read.
This time last year I posted this
2011
More running
less drinking
Save money
Blog a week? (a day is certainly not going to happen)
rugby…..
build my company so that its not just my contracting that brings in money
So how have I done?
More running and less drinking, as you would expect, go hand in hand. While not being amazing at it things were certainly different enough that I was happy. Made great headway in the running that I managed to achieve my personal best for a 10K at just over 60 minutes. While all the running was taking place it did meant that I didnt feel like drinking as much. Sadly this all fell apart in December but, it is party season. Back onto it for Jan though.
Save money and work on Sawdit also went together. Due to the workload and the generosity of Global Dawn. I was able to stack enough money away that gave me six months just focusing on the company. New customers, some support contracts and now a full partner in the company. Lets hope this continues for this year.
AS for the final two, doesn’t take a genius to see that blog a week was a failure and I have at least thought about buying rugby boots so that is a step closer..
All in all I am very impressed with what I did manage to do and as I always live by “only regret the things you haven’t done not the things you do” I have once again had an amazing year.
So whats for 2012?
The company work will hopefully continue and will hopefully grow to allow us to start to take on employees.
On a personal note I have two aims.
I will properly learn two programming language this year, not sure which ones but if you have any suggestions, let me know. The second one for now I will keep to myself but I will update as things change with it.
Have a good year all and I hope everything goes the way you want it.
Just so you know my year has started excellently. I am sat on a beach in beautiful sunshine here in Spain. life can be amazing sometimes 
This blog was never supposed to be about technology and being geeky alone as there are many other things I am just as geeky about. I suppose the time spent working in startup companies and also pushing hard to get my business up and running has just given me that focus.
But to day something different, after a long week of lots of coding and very little sleeping upon the advice of flatmate, decided to take the afternoon off to buy more fish for my tank and to cook a decent Sunday lunch. This involved a shop that, as always with either of my flat mates more time was spent looking at booze than food. So with new beers in hand, here is the first and hopefully not last of my pointless opinion of beers.
Caesar Augustus (4.1%)from the Williams Brothers Brewing Company.
This is described as a larger / IPA hybrid due to the brewing process. Initially fermented for at least two weeks, it is then largered for at least four more weeks, during that time they add IPA style hops.
This is a very pale colour, as you would expect for something described as a larger. The taste is true to what they say, this has an initial clean, light and crisp taste that is soon followed by very strong hop tastes. Although I do like an IPA, there are some that push the hops a little too far. I think possibly that the why they throw the hops in really pushed their flavour as it is extremely hoppy, no to my particular taste. So if you love the flavour of hops give this a go as the other flavours do makes this a clean refreshing beverage.
Past Masters, XX Strong Ale (7.5%). Fullers.
Part of the heritage series and hopefully the start of the nice strong seasonal ales. Not sure what to expect as the flavours can be so different, this one certainly didn’t disappoint . The colour is a very pleasant medium brown and it has a very sweet smell. The taste explodes on the tongue, with the smoothness of licorice and then a sweet malty taste. This is certainly something that I will be trying to get hold of again in the future. If you see it I would certainly advise giving it a try.
Now I’m at the end of this I have realised that I should have possibly thought a little more about the best way of judging these things. As both of them have long been polished off earlier today. Will think about that before any more reviews, also it would be nice to try the XX again
- I am really really crap at keeping this thing updated. So much for the once a week, once a month would have been a good start…
- Listening to Jaguar Skills sitting in for Kissy Sell Out has made over and hours worth of mind numbingly boring text file manipulation actually go very quickly.
- There is a problem with some routers and IPv6 enabled linux machines in resolving DNS lookups. Point your resolve.conf at an external server.
- This tune is still certainly one of my all time favourites, although this will never replace it, the bass is amazing still not sure about the lyrics though but the video certainly makes up for that confusion.
- You can you wget against a file to pull a list of urls down “wget -i filename.txt”
- You still have to arse around a lot to get VMserver to install on linux but due to the love of the community its a lot easier, just look at the Ubuntu form and also Radu Cotescu
- Finally, shift + home key at the start of a line in notepad++ will highlight all the tabbed white space between start of line and first text
- Oh, this really is the last one. Sawdit provide amazing IT support in so many areas you should really call them and get them to do all your IT support. Go on you know you want to!!
That is all folks and if I don’t end up drowned in a big session of booze tomorrow I’m sure we will all talk again soon.
So a while back I talked about how to get (k)ubuntu onto the vostro as it didnt have a cd/dvd drive. Luckily things have improved greatly around that and the ability to just get it onto a usb drive to install.
So here I am having to give the laptop to one of the other employees in the company, a man that will never need the linux partition but will certainly need all the space he can get on a drive.
The first step is very easy, just a case of deleting the linux drive space, format and extend all done through the windows tools. This is obviously nice a quick and easy until you reboot. Grub tries to get all of its configuration data from a location that no longer exists. Back to playing with USB drives and ISO images here we come.
As with most laptops (and many other systems these days) no original disks are supplied as you are expected to make disc images when you first get the devices. Me, being the consummate professional that I am, obviously ignored that I was expecting to so destroy the OS at some point, as is normally the case, that I would end up just getting a fresh copy, and putting that on there.
So how did I do it this time.
First step hunt down a USB drive and then hunt down a windows disk. USB was where I expected but for the life of me I could find a single copy of vista or windows 7, silly considering the number of copies I own. Luckily a quick search on the internet revealed the Neosmart website with a nice link to a disk that was perfect for my needs and was easily downloaded using a bit torrent client.
Onto the USB and making it bootable and back to the old school.
open up a command prompt, yep run with cmd in it. Check you know what the drive size is as this is need to identify it in the next step.
type..
diskpart
select disk x (where x is the disk number of the USB drive)
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32
assign
exit
Hopefully by now you will have the iso downloaded so you need to mount it in a virtual drive.
Back to the command prompt and change to the mounted virtual drive
type…
xcopy *.* /e /h (usbdriveletter):\
You should now see all the files copying across.
You can now put this into the laptop and reboot it, select the windows partition and then at the next step repair manually. I didn’t try the automatic repair as I have no idea how it works and couldn’t risk destroying the raw data of the laptop due to the time I had do get this done.
Once in the repair console just type..
bootrec.exe /FixMbr
bootrec.exe /FixBoot
There you go all done, reboot and everything will be back to just windows.
So here I am again after a little while building a Nagios server.
Its amazing how painful you forget the initial configuration of the hosts and groups are. Lots of typing and remembering.
Any way, base information in there so I start trying to get all the alreting working and then two problems hit me, which I always come across on updates and new installs, so for all of you out there and more importantly so I can find it quickly again next time here is a little summary of two problems that might happen.
Sorry, but Nagios is currently not checking for external commands, so your command will not be committed!
All you need to do to fix this one is open
/etc/nagios3/nagios.cfg
and change
check_external_commands=0
to
check_external_commands=0
next is the error
Error: Could not stat() command file ‘/var/lib/nagios3/rw/nagios.cmd’!
little more difficult but just these four commands
/etc/init.d/nagios3 stop
dpkg-statoverride – -update – -add nagios www-data 2710 /var/lib/nagios3/rw
dpkg-statoverride – -update – -add nagios nagios 751 /var/lib/nagios3
/etc/init.d/nagios3 start
and there you go all running correctly.
Now to finish the configuration….
Ok due to issues with my last server things broke badly. Due to working a huge amount of hours migration took ages but I’m back and looking to start writing again.
Running out in the could so with Amazons recent down time, who knows how long I will be here though
Ask me anything http://formspring.me/bleachin
Going well isn’t it.
I cant believe that not only did I fail two weeks into this but also missed putting something up the following week.
Sad fact is that I have a few draft posts that should have just been finished and pushed up here.
things like a review on Designing web interfaces master class, a video from O’Reilly as a follow up to the book review of starting html.
A review of the kindle and how good it really is.
Working with ruby, rails and RVM
Me training again and doing random domestic things like cooking.
Normally I would come up with some lame excuse because I have been out drinking all the time but here is the bad thing I havent this time, I have really been working and as stated above doing domesticated things like cooking. I am even scaring myself.
So sadly nothing exciting at the moment but I will finish off a few psots soon to make up for my failure. In the mean time I’m off to finish a customer web site I’m working on.
So having joined the O’Reilly blogger program I picked this as my first choice. Not wanting something to swamp me on my first attempt but also something that I would be able to understand to possibly make the reviewing process slightly easier.
How surprised was I??
The Head First series is aimed at people looking to make a start in a particular area, as every book in this series that area is described in the title.
If your looking to build a website, no matter how big or small, this book will setup up for moving onto amazing things and in a very short space of time.
It works through taking a light hearted view to the subject and adding lots of pictures, tasks and systems to help you remember what you are learning while also giving you an excellent understanding of not only what to do but why you are doing it.
The level of information was amazing, as I know a fair chunk of what it was saying I could of easily found it boring but the authors Elisabeth Robson and Eric T Freeman have done an excellent job. It goes into great detail about many things while still talking “human being” so that a complete novice will easily be able to follow it. The fact that it actually builds websites so people can see what the changes being made are doing first hand also will give every beginner a great deal of confidence for the future.
It starts by taking you through the first steps of HTML and then on teaching you a very structured approach so that it becomes easy to under stand the difference between content and it structured way and the look and feel of a site.
If you are looking to learn html, build your own website be it for fun and someone has suggested you build something for your local club as your the “tech guy” this book is excellent and will give you a solid foundation that you will never look back.
Only two issues with the book. Its possibly time for a refresh as it says that HTML 4, thats it no more, just when 5 has been released (certainly don’t be put off by this as it gives you a much better foundation than running out and buying a book thats just for version 5) and also there is a little too much tuition on Photoshop. Although Photoshop is an important tool, not everyone uses it and there are lots of other resources to teach this.
Marks for this book 4/5.
Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML by Elisabeth Robson and Eric T Freeman
