mike.mainguy

We try so hard to get our IT infrastructure organized, but I wonder how useful that is. In a typical business environment, we see these high costs of software "overhead" and try as hard as we can to reduce the cost to zero. The problem with this is that we got our original gain from technology, not necessarily from the advantage of the technology itself, but also from the chaos created by changing from one paradigm to another. It is almost like a nuclear reaction and is just about a difficult to control. Too many restrictions and the energy disappears... Not enough restrictions and ... well BOOM!!! Finding the balance between the highest energy and the highest entropy is a difficult task in IT indeed.

I'm reading "supercrunchers" and it has reconfirmed something I've thought for a long time. Experts suck. Time and time again I find myself at odds with authorities in varying disciplines. Usually the situation develops when we have a problem, consult the experts, and they postulate that the problem is something that can only be solved with a very big and very expensive project. I will spend some time, form some models, run some analysis and reach some alternate conclusions. I am met by a stubborn and braying pack of obstinate mules who have no argument against my data except that they are "the experts" and I should stop questioning their authority on this subject. I have, to date, simply thought these people where just jerks and not worth my time. It turns out, however, that the problem is very widespread and many people seem afraid that if we can build a statistical model that can effectively do what their "expertise" provides, then they'...

I wrote some new music and realized and audio engineer might be helpful. I terribly confused at how to compress the dynamic range into something that sounds OK on a radio.

I've recently spent a lot of time explaining scalability and architecture to people in our organization and am being largely unsuccessful. I blame hardware vendors for this, they shove new technologies at unsuspecting infrastructure professionals without any high level explanation about the real advantages. As my first example, I will talk about logical partitioning. Listen folks, this is not a scalability feature! Don't listen to the salesman, he doesn't know what the hell he is talking about. I will admit I can imagine some scenarios where this might be able to help you scale a collection of applications, but do NOT try and tell me that adding a new LPAR is somehow scaling my application. Also do not tell me I should buy a machine that is 20x more expensive because it's more "scalable". The problem with machines that share disk, buses, cache, or other resources is that you need to manage who is allowed to use the resource at any given time. It is v...