C|Net News has an article talking about Legacy (mostly mainframe) skills and how they contrast to the skills developed in the modern world of Linux, Web, Java and .Net.
It is a typical high level article where each word is important, but the whole passage is hard to read.
On the other hand, we have a Slashdot [...]
Continue reading about Two takes on culture clash of Mainframe vs. Modern skill sets
Alan Williamson is planning to present about Open Source application that most of people don’t know about.
He is also asking the community to contribute their lists. Well, I have three tools that I like enough to mention (again).
Ethereal
Whenever you have to troubleshoot an application with a lot of network traffic, Ethereal is [...]
Continue reading about Re: Open Source Applications for IT You’ve Never Heard Of
Ok, so they don’t. But there are some bits they do hate and Rich Bowen goes through big issues present in apache’s configuration file. Warning, it is a PDF file.
What I find interesting is that we see the full circle feedback in action here. Because the people supporting apache are mostly the same people [...]
Kohsuke Kawaguchi (Sun engineer working with XML) writes about what happens when you try to read XML directly from a socket stream with expectations of actually writing back to that socket. Specifically, a big nothing. The connection either hangs or dies without sending the response.
Kohsuke gives a clear step by step explanation of why that [...]
Continue reading about Link: Socket + XML -> hard to troubleshoot issue
I while ago I was asking whether there are any technical support patterns out there. After all we have architectural patterns and design patterns already.
Turned out that BEA - the company I used to work for - has put together a number of the technical support patterns related to its products. But since [...]
The Chronicle of Higher Education has published an article which argues that a blog is often a bad thing to put on your resume or even to have within a google reach of your name. As a proof, they show a lot of negative things they found out about interview-ready people whose lives turn out [...]
Continue reading about Link: To blog or not to blog, is there a danger?
In the latest eWEEK paper edition, there is an advertisement that starts with the following: Why disk fragmentation is poised to outpace the virus as the biggest threat to productivity.
And it tries to prove this point by saying that viruses make our computers slower and making users frustrated and that so does the disk fragmentation.
Furthermore [...]
It looks like Sun is really serious about making Solaris 10 well supported. I am talking about DTrace facility that allows scripting what previously had to be done with truss/strace and a lot of strategic greps.
Better yet, DTrace can hook into Java and trace the function calls across Java and native code alike.
Adam Leventhal talks [...]
Couple of articles discussing the customer support and what both sides could do to make it better.
An article from the Mobile Magazine where they called a number of support lines and compared their processes and results from the user’s point of view. What is good about this article is that the problems were known and [...]
Continue reading about Links: How to get good customer support
An oldie but goodie discussion on slashdot about what needs to be done to make sure that application logs are useful to actually troubleshoot problems.
At reading level 4 (as linked), the suggestions actually make sense.
Try a quick test. If you are developing a software which produces a log file, or better yet many log files, [...]
Continue reading about Discussion: How should an application’s log work