by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . April 9, 2010 . 10:37PM
After my first post regarding iPad wallpapers, I got some feedback to the tune of “dude, it gotta be 1024 square so it elegantly resizes regardless of portrait or landscape orientation.
So, here’s the first one I got from an ancient D&D book (Dragonlance, 2nd edition, from Time of The Twins if I remember correctly) as well as one from the first trilogy.
Enjoy.
by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . April 6, 2010 . 1:39PM
If you can’t tell from the reaction below, I really enjoyed the talk and the multidisciplinary nature of high-level datacenter work. Also, datacenter is a word, screw you spellcheckers. Since the speaker didn’t speak on a specific project or challenge his company had, this is more general than usual. Something I realized later is that some of the biggest companies in IT happen to be German. SAP, a company who I also saw speak in this class this semester happened to be boring. SAP sent “campus representatives” instead of a working IT pro, which probably explains it.
Mr. Kleylein is a Vice President in charge of Siemens Medical’s datacenter operations. Mr. Kleylein gave a comprehensive look at the workings of a datacenter, instead of focusing on simply the systems in place. It seems that with many of our speakers, it would seem that the larger the responsibility of a position, the more “wide” a skillset needs to be. No students in our program would need to worry about physical security or engineering cooling systems, but in order to be in a VP position, a wider skillset becomes necessary.
Some of the numbers were interesting: 22 robotic tape arrays, 780TB of storage, which seems low, actually, thats about 1500 drives, assuming an average of 500GB/drive. 99.998% uptime means about 10 minutes of downtime a year.
Layers of redundancy and physical security are oft-overlooked aspects of Systems Analysis and have been for years (Kevin Mitnick wrote on this in the excellent The Art Of Deception). Streamlining code, designing interfaces, and having a marketing scheme all come AFTER YOU SECURE YOUR DATA. HIPPA notwithstanding, many knowledge workers become pretty bored pretty fast without having data to knowledge work. It’d be delightful if in-house datacenters were ran this well in many companies, but somehow I doubt that many organizations have the expertise in engineering or as critical data as life-or-death health information.
Seeing a trend towards higher set points for cooling by hardware manufacturers is great from an ecology view, as well. While individual datacenters can and do everything they can to reduce the environmental (carbon) impact of the large amounts of energy usage, efforts on the chip die can instantly make every datacenter in the country 5% more efficient by requiring 5% less energy to operate and cool. Even low-tech can help (blanking panels) when it comes to reducing the carbon footprint of a datacenter.
I felt like I had a good paradigm stretch when I saw how much engineering goes into the datacenter even when you don’t talk about the blades.
by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . April 4, 2010 . 1:02AM
I can’t take credit for the illustration, but I ran across this when I was looking through my old D&D books.
Raistlin battling Fistandantilus back in ye olden 2nd edition.
Anyways, I chopped it up into the right resolution (1024×768, portrait) for those Ipad havers. Or someone using a five year old 15″ LCD wrong.
Direct Link, just in case.
Until the pixel ratio is a little closer to 16:10 or 16:9, I won’t be getting an iPad, btw.
by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . April 3, 2010 . 11:26PM
This assignment was to find and answer some questions regarding a project management tool. Even though I’m currently using Basecamp for a final group project, thats because of the cat-herding nature of having as-smart-as-you people in the group. Since the web is the new standard operating system, it made things easier than to find a tool that works for OS X, Linux, and Windows while seamlessly synchronizing. So, while I don’t think its the best. program. evar. it still is worthwhile.
The second portion of the assignment was to answer (in essay form) some questions regarding the process that Mariott used to standardize the bedding in the chains they run. Exciting!
Source be found here. Cheers.
I.
Basecamp (http://basecamphq.com) is a project created by the web design firm-accidental web application developer 37signals. 37 (as I’ll be referring to them through this assignment) tells the story of Basecamp being an internally developed to-do list for the firm’s growing business turns out to be just so good, that the firm decides to develop web applications.
The main selling points of Basecamp are: Ease of use and setup, security (this is true, for the wrong reasons, I’m afraid), remote access (all access is remote, isn’t it?), and a people-centric design. Basecamp is a web-based tool. All interactions are done within a web browser. Instead of starting from a product like MS Project, it’s better to start from a simple to-do list and add. The reason behind this was explained by one of 37′s founders as being the result of features being “guilty before proven useful.” PC Magazine touted the extensibility while making the point of some common collaboration feature’s absence: specifically chat, whiteboards, and file sharing (37 has a separate application for whiteboarding).
37 claims a disparate amount of customers, including a t-shirt e-business, wedding planners, “brand designers” (in quotes because I think that may be a made-up job), as well as larger businesses (usually a department or two, from what I gather). Basecamp was originally an application for web-based and design businesses, and although you’ll find allusions to other firms (manufacturing) knowledge work is the lion’s share of 37′s client base. 37′s other products, specifically the internal chat system called Campfire, have large blogs as clients.
Four reasons that I’d consider Basecamp: flexible pricing (which starts at $19.95/month, dead simple web interface means less training time for temporary/contract work or interns, Having an application hosted elsewhere would probably equate to higher uptime (or a waste, depending on a company’s IT infrastructure), and finally the lack of complexity would (hopefully) equate less time playing with pencils and more time writing homework.
* Information taken, unless denoted, from 37signal’s website, basecamphq.com and its press kit.
II.
“the team implemented several project management techniques, the most important being communication”
Oh, really? That’s project management?
Three factors need to be considered for project management: scope, time and cost. In regards to all three of these factors, the PMO (Project Management Office) for Marriot had unique challenges. The scope of the project involved over half a million beds across ten different brands. The time was more ambiguous – there were problems of deployment, logistical challenges brought on by offshore manufacturers needing longer lead times. Adding to the ambiguity was also cost, as the brands varied from low scale to luxury. Price performance would be needed at all levels in order to allow Marriot to remain competitive.
As mentioned earlier, the challenges of lead time by offshore production put pressure to start orders as early as possible. The problem was that without firm production numbers (for each of the ~1800 different pieces needed) cost couldn’t be determined. Another challenge was the multilingual nature of domestic and foreign employees who would be “deploying” the product (via a making-bed process that I didn’t see an E-R diagram attached for). Visual, non-lingual training material was produced to smooth out any transitions that would be needed without the expense and trouble of translation.
Factors that lead to success in this deployment using the project management process stem from the frequent communication between the PMO and everyone involved, including the offshore manufacturers, internal financiers, and brand owners. Both property managers (corporate franchisers) and franchisers needed education on the necessity of the change. MArriott using a database to smartly make orders and decide on a “standard” enterprise-wide probably saved a ton of money as well.
I think that the two most important skills used in the development of the new fit-and-finish of the guest rooms for Marriott were twofold: communication and effective selling to internal customers. First, we have not only the useful communications “hack” of creating non-lingual training material, there is the constant communications that the PMO and the internal customers, the stakeholders for brands and even individual hotels (at least one brand Marriott runs is exclusive to one hotel). Secondly, the effective two-way communication meant that when it was finally decided, buy-in was easy to get from these stakeholders who had “our” project in lieu of “their” project to revamp linens.
