I previously wrote about an offer for a free copy of Microsoft Visual Studio, well, mine came today. While it look it’s time about getting here, it finally arrived. The book, while not the full version, is larger than I expected, and looks like it should be worth reading. I’m a bit disappointed in how soon that the discount for the MCP exam expires, as with the schedule I have for the desktop MCTS I don’t think I’ll have time to make use of it.
All in all, this is one of the best free offers I’ve seen Microsoft release. The offer is still open (closes the 17th), so if you’ve not signed up for yours – you should hurry.
MONEY Magazine and Salary.com have announced their top 10 jobs in the country. While it's no surprise to me, Software Engineer took the #1 spot. Here's what they had to say:
Why it's great Software engineers are needed in virtually every part of the economy, making this one of the fastest-growing job titles in the U.S. Even so, it's not for everybody.
Designing, developing and testing computer programs requires some pretty advanced math skills and creative problem-solving ability. If you've got them, though, you can work and live where you want: Telecommuting is quickly becoming widespread.
The profession skews young — the up-all-night-coding thing gets tired — but consulting and management positions aren't hard to come by once you're experienced.
What's cool Cutting-edge projects, like designing a new video game or tweaking that military laser. Extra cash from freelance gigs. Plus, nothing says cool like great prospects.
What's not Jobs at the biggest companies tend to be less creative (think Neo, pre-Matrix). Outsourcing is a worry. Eyestrain and back, hand and wrist problems are common.
Software development is certainly a great career, and here is yet more proof – from outside the industry.
When it comes to the world of development, Joel Spolsky is, without a doubt, my favorite writer. His work is always interesting and on-topic, and his latest work is something special. Development Abstraction, what a concept, the only way to ensure the highest productivity, and perhaps, a large part of the Superstars & Monkeys issue.
When I wrote about my views on how developers are treated, it was from a developers perspective, this article provides the managers perspective, on much the same issue. This covers what a development team should see, noting more, nothing less. Focus is critical for productivity, the hassles of running a business, finding ways around over-restrictive internet filters, or wondering how long the Development database will be hosting Production databases, none of this should be involved in a developers day.
Development is a thought driven, focus dependent activity. Anything that gets in the way should be eliminated, anything.
While I’m not a huge fan of Internet Explorer, I am quite impressed with the progress the IE team has made. IE7 stands to be the most impressive release so far, with many rendering issues resolved, rather impressive security advances, and a great many improvements on the standards compliance front. I must applaud both the team, and Microsoft for making these moves.
By focusing on standards, instead of proprietary features that degrade the experience for everybody, developers can work towards a unified web, free of browser discrimination and hack filed code. It seems like the Redmond power house has finally started to see where IE needs to go to remain relevant for Web 2.0, and beyond.
Then again, that’s leaving TIME out of the picture.
Time up for TIME?
While HTML + TIME could prove to be a fun toy, due to its very nature – it’s a toy not everybody could enjoy. This is an older (introduced with IE5), proprietary technology that is fairly unknown, and not often used. While it does have some merits in its concept, any design technology that is intended to serve a single, closed platform is simply a bad idea.
Why Microsoft is taking another look at this, I’m really not sure. I’m holding out hope that they are cleaning up old, non-standard features in preparation for the next release. My fear is that they want to make another push with this out-dated, IE-centric technology.
Holding out hope…
Let’s hope they make the right call, and remove support for proprietary ‘features’ such as this. IE7 has the chance to not only catch up with the other major players, but to help push the wide-spread adoption of standards compliance.
Over the next three months or so I plan on more-or-less rebuilding all of my computers, and the network they sit on. This is going to be a fairly time consuming process, though I expect should be well worth it. This includes the addition on a couple new computers, as well as new hardware for the existing ones. Among the various changes is the move to a rack-mount environment, away from normal tower cases. I think this is going to be quite a project.
Here’s how things look now:
- Primary Desktop (WinXP, tower case)
- Subversion Server (Win2000, tower case)
- (Misc hardware strewn about)
On to the changes…
Dell PowerEdge 2500
The first (and largest) change is the addition of a used Dell PowerEdge 2500 server, that will server as a development SQL & Web server. This will eliminate the need to be running SQL Server on my primary PC.
This was a beefy server in its day, though it’s somewhat underpowered for many of the more demanding projects servers have to deal with. This makes it a perfect development server. This allows a better view of the impact software can have on it, as well as being light on the budget, leaving money for more important things.
This box is currently setup with 1 PIII 933Mhz CPU (I plan on upgrading this), 512MB of RAM (it’ll be seeing at least a couple of these in the rebuilding process), and 6 18.2GB SCSI HDs. So it’s far from top of the line, but it’ll be a great development box.
Primary PC
My primary desktop is also my primary development box, this is the most important box on the network. Right now it’s a Windows XP box, and will see the fewest changes of all the systems I have. The only major change will be moving it from it’s existing tower case to a CODEGEN 4U-500-CA rack mount case. This is part of the move to consolidate all of my hardware and get rid of the ‘towers on top of towers’ issue I have now.
This is the first time I’ve tried to migrate from a tower to a rack-mount, so there may a couple “gotcha’s” that I’ve not anticipated, I’m hoping this is a smooth move.
Subversion Server
For an existing system, the subversion server will see the most changes. This server started out as my desktop, and has by now been relegated to the role of hosting subversion, and thats about it. To make this box more useful, I plan on adding a SABRENT RAID controller, as well as a couple Western Digital 160GB SATA drives (I’ll add a couple more latter). This will allow it to server as not only the subversion server, but also as a file archive server.
The other change for this server is the move to the CODEGEN 4U-500-CA rack mount case, the same one I’m using for my PC. getting these boxes all in a rack will be quite nice I think.
KVM
As a use a single keyboard/monitor for my separate computers, a KVM is a must. I’ll be replacing my existing KVM, with a new one from JustCom. Based on the reviews I’ve seen, the JC-104PE looks like a nice choice for my needs, while trying to keep to a tight budget.
Firewall / Router
After doing some research, and speaking to Andrew about his ideas (see comments), I’ve opted to pick up an older rack mount server from eBay, and using that as a firewall / router / VPN. It will most likely be running CentOS, and using IPTables as the basis for the firewall functionality. This will eliminate the need for my current Linksys router.
Using a single box as the firewall & router should provide excellent performance, and be very secure.
Switch
The Linksys router is being replaced, adding the need for a new switch. I’ve opted for the D-Link DGS-1008D, this is a Gigabit switch, and should bring a real speed boost over the current 100Mbit network.
Linux PC
![linux-penguin[1].jpg](http://adamcaudill.com/files/2006/04/linux-penguin%5B1%5D.thumbnail.jpg)
This will probably be one of the last steps in the rebuild process. I’m going to be using the same CODEGEN 4U-500-CA case, along with an ASUS motherboard to form the basis of this system. This will most likely be running SUSE 10, this will give me two fairly modern PCs, one for Windows development, one for Linux development. I image once that’s setup, most of my PHP work will be done from there, should prove much easier than working on Windows.
The Rack
I’ve yet to figure out what I’m going to do for a rack to hold all of this. This is stall an open item in my plan.
Thoughts?
If anybody has any ideas or comments about the direction I’m heading, or the products I’m using, feel free to let me know.
Microsoft recently moved to release their Virtual Server 2005 software for free. This is a somewhat unexpected, yet not surprising move by the software giant. With the fairly recent move to release a free edition of VMware Server, as well as recent strides in the Linux Virtualization space; the pressure on Redmond to deliver is clear.
This is a major step, and could have an interesting impact on the market. I’m wondering if we won’t see another Media Player vs. RealPlayer, or Internet Explorer vs. Netscape type battle (though at a smaller scale). By releasing this as a free product, they are walking into the same situation that has landed them in court several times before.
This could turn into a good show, might be worth watching to see what happens next.
