Mon, 11 Sep 2006
Visible Ops - Short Review
When it comes to system administration, the system part can refer to the
paperwork, processes and procedures as much as actual machines. Among
the modern admins worries are such evil beasties as section 404 of
Sarbanes Oxley, the data protection act, log retention for the lovely
police state powers of our government and, in some industries, ISO17799,
BS15000 and other similar standards. One of the topics I've been interested
in recently is the ITIL approach.
The initial hurdle was actually finding out where to start, and so for my first step I picked up (well, my employer bought) Visible Ops. This slim volume (98 pages) packs a lot of common sense. Most of the points it raises, including - the need for change control, inventory management, measuring and that your staff should look at what happened recently before they start tweaking things in an attempt to stumble across a fix - are all insights that most admins pick up over time. But to have them written down in one place, and in such an accessible style, is a great asset.
Although I'm not sure how useful this book will be on my ITIL road trip (I've got the BS15000 standards to read next) I can happily recommend it to everyone running an IT department who feels that things are slipping or that too much time is spent fighting fires. And let's be honest, 98 pages is about all we've got time to read these days :)
Score: 4/5
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Posted: 2006/09/11 20:23 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Dynamic Languages and the Big Players
Over the last week both Ruby and Python have had moments in the sunshine,
between Jim Hugunins (now of Microsoft)
IronPython 1.0 release and
Sun hiring JRuby developers it's nice to see the bigger players notice
how far dynamic languages have come.
So what do the little languages that can get from this? It's a decent sized list - a huge range of well written libraries (both .NET and Java have a ton of supporting code available and a lot of it is damn good), a large potential user base (especially for IronPython) and enterprise recognition; while more forward thinking developers know all about the benefits of dynamic languages there are a lot of late adopters that are about to see the shiny things for the first time. And hopefully some of them will stick with it.
So what does this mean for perl, my scripting language of choice? Well, IMHO the advantage CPAN gave is reduced somewhat (and destroyed in certain areas, like XML support and webservices) thanks to the volume of libraries both virtual machines can access. As for Parrot, I've never been a huge fan. I'm not an expert on VMs (and I've never contributed anything to any of them so I've got no right to bitch :) but it always seemed a bad idea to try and build your own when the market had two powerful ones available. On a non-technical level we've just lost a huge potential market, Python has always had nicer feeling Windows integration and I've got a feeling it won't be long until we start seeing it popping up in the MSDN code samples.
Update: I forgot to mention how cool IronPython and XAML are together. Have a look at the August 2006: IronPython screen cast.
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Posted: 2006/09/11 20:03 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
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