Can I get back to you in 5 minutes, I'm really busy at the moment?

Actually, no you can't. Because you're not busy, you're living in some fantasy land where you don't give yourself a second. And the reason for this is because you believe you're always busy.

It's important to remember, that each day, you create your own work load. If you don't have 5 minutes, then you need to stop what you're doing and change the way you work. No one should be worked every minute of the day, it's unproductive and unnecessary.

On the flip side, when you begin to recognise you do have spare time, you must ask yourself 'what am I doing with my spare time?' and if the answer is nothing, then that is fine. As long as you don't moan about not having any, because the bottom line is, we all have plenty.

In school you get taught an awful lot of rubbish. And at the end, you're judged on the ability to remember useless facts.

The biggest life skill in my eyes? How well you can communicate with strangers, how fast you can build rapport with different personality types. Communication is so important, as only a certain percentage of what we're saying is usually received by the other person(s). The higher this percentage on a send/receive level, the more successful, I believe, you'll be in what you're doing. You could spend years becoming a leading expert in a specific role, but it may be worth spending some time talking to complete strangers and seeing how well you do. Over time your confidence will grow and you'll be able to express the skills you already have, a lot better.

Good morning. This is the first year I've used software versioning to managed application development projects. And I must admit, it's the best piece of technology I've ever came across. I mean, ever. In a nutshell it allows you to develop your application from any machine in the world and always be sure you've got the latest files to work with. Once you've finished making changes, you 'check in' your work and the SVN server records the changes and increments the version.

I could go on for hours about SVN features and benefits but I wont, I'll just say this. Even if you're a sole developer, investigate and implement SVN, it will make your job ten times easier.

Cheers
Ryan Partington

A project I'm involved in at the moment has died on its feet. I've been asked to develop a specific application but have been provided with no guidelines or specifics on how it should work. - This surely could never happen? No actually, it happens all the time. Unless you know what information you need, you can spend hours working with people achieving, absolutely nothing at all. Over time you'll become disheartened and opt against new projects. Do not let this happen.

Instead, stand firm and explain why things are not moving forward and make it clear what information you require, if they don't supply the information, don't waste time developing. You'll no doubt be asked to re-write the framework in the near future. Be specific, and remember, the information gathering process is as important, if not more so, than the actual development.

Cheers
Ryan Partington

You’re losing interest in this post. To be an effective writer you need to communicate your message using as few words as possible. Before typing anything, have a clear understanding of what you’re trying to say.

KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is a philosophy which can also help create good technical documentation.

Time is an illusion, four words stood next to one another with no clear message. How can time be an illusion when we have the past, present and future? I have no idea.

Lets explore the possibilities. We only experience the 'present'. We remember the past and predict the future, but we only have here and now to analysis our thoughts and theories. All we have is here and now but the past must exist because two people can experience the same event and accurately recall afterwards.

The future is a lot harder to prove as it's yet to happen. But we can imagine an event which may occur in the future, i.e. day turn to night and the probability of this happening is pretty high. What we've done with these analogies is prove a change in state, some may look at this as evidence of time.

We come back to the present, the only state in which we experience anything and everything. Imagine the past and the future as we know it, were simply methods to analyse and process information. A way in which we can exist within a considered logic.

When we say 'Time is an illusion' one may argue that because we only ever experience the present, how can we be sure of a past and future. Of course above we looked at how one may justify the past and future but one may argue that's not enough evidence to say it absolutely exists.

I recently read an article on dreams, originally from 'The Interpretation of Dreams - by Sigmund Freud'. The point was that when we hear a sound from the waking world, be it an alarm clock in the morning, we awake with memory of a long and detailed dream based that ends with the sound of your alarm clock. This experiment was also done with random sounds that the dreamer would not expect, and fascinating the same results were found. The dreamer would awake and could vividly recall a dream in great detail. This dream had it been in real life would have taken many minutes and maybe hours to play out, although the sound to which they awoke was only on for a few seconds. The whole dream seemed to have been focused upon this final event, the sound of a drum being beaten, which was interpreted as the final stage in the dream where someone was trying to break down the door.

Dreams and real life are not the same thing, but the experience is intriguing all the same. If time was an illusion what relevance would this have to you and me in our day to day life? I have no idea.

Cheers
Ryan Partington

There's nothing quite like writing an article and then losing all the text and having to start again. Take two...

It's best to measure performance to ensure you're heading in the right direction. Yesterday I came across NetMeter which is a tool that monitors your network throughput and displays a pretty graph. I installed it on our TSM server and scaled the graph so it max's out when client backups are running. Now in the future without much effort I can logon and check performance. Takes seconds to setup and may help identify bottlenecks in the future. It can auto load with Windows and takes about 1/36th of your screen up (no idea how I came up with that number).

Enjoy your weekend
Ryan Partington

Friday I updated a clients TSM server from 5.3.2.1 to 5.3.6.0. All did not go well and a database restore was required. I'm losing confidence in TSM's stability on the Windows platform but that discussion is for another day. Once the update was complete and reported back as successful (I know) I started up the service and the problems began. What I should have done was fire up dsmserv.exe so I could see exactly what was happening and confirm the update had been successful. Whenever you make any changes to the TSM server, apply and fix pack or interim update, it's worth firing up dsmserve.exe rather than the service so you can see exactly what is and is not working.

This does not just apply to TSM server updates, the same can be said for all software walks of life. If making changes to a PHP page on a production server and you have suppressed the errorlog to report issues on the page, it may be worth tuning this on before you make the change and then review any potential issues afterwards. It's easy to do these things without taking the necessary precautions as it's easier to act now and think later. If you're anything like me you'll need a few slip ups and site downs before it really sinks into your mind 'what can I do to reduce the risk of my next action?' We're all human

Cheers
Ryan Partington

You've put time into implementing a DR solution, performing daily backups and you should. Your organisation will call on you for data recovery when it goes tits up. So, when was the last time you performed a full DR test, restoring all your data back to another server/disk and tried restoring a few files? DR implementation is nothing if it doesn't work when required. It's as important, if not more important to perform quarterly DR tests. You may think you don't have the time, but once you've ran through this exercise a number of times you'll end up with a procedure which can be followed quickly and efficiently. Questions you want to be able to answer once you're happy with the restore procedure.

What is the recovery point? How old will the data been once restored, 24 hours maybe? Assuming you have a full backup off site each day.

What is the recovery time? How long until you can start restoring data on specific servers? If using TSM you may need to restore everything to disk first?

Once you have these answers and experience ask the business what their business continuity plan is, how do they prepare for a disaster. What site do we have on standby, where will we purchase computers and servers from? What services and data are most important to the business. This is the kind of information that until required appears unimportant. If your organisation does not prepare for a disaster it's possible you'll be out of business sooner rather than never.

It's not about backup, it'd about recovery

Cheers
Ryan Partington

No matter how much housekeeping you put into your OS, you'll eventually need to rebuild. I’ve used every tool under the sun to optimise the registry, keep things in check. The majority of these tools are just additional bloatware and do the opposite of what’s advertised. I think it’s fair to get a good year of of your OS then it’s time to rebuild. To find out when your OS was installed type ‘systeminfo’ at the cmd prompt. This will show you the build date, how long it’s been up and a few other useless things.

Cheers
Ryan Partington

BIOS, Software, and OS updates. If it ain't broke, don't fix it? I'd have to disagree. Recently I had a case were a piece of software would fail and fall over at what initially looked like random periods. After doing some research I found a fix pack release which matched the behavior of this particular problem. After applying the update all was well with the world.

If you're anything like me, you may have the intention of keeping your system updated, but never quite find the time. There will be times when once you apply the update, something will stop working and initially this may support the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" theory. The difference being you're geared for potential issues, rather than been called up on your day off, or when you have something else planned.

If it takes you 30 minutes to research, download and apply a patch, schedule in 2 hours. After you've applied the patch list some common tasks you can run through. To begin with this may seem like additional unnecessary work, but it the long term I'm sure it will improve system stability and your overall system maintenance process.

Cheers
Ryan Partington