2013 was an eventful year in many respects. There were professional moves – first to Vyatta, and then to Cisco – and a number of changes affecting family and friends. I remained interested in the topics that I’ve written about over the years – technology, politics, philosophy, atheism, books, music, and so forth – but…
Read More This blog has been very, very quiet for the last yearI’ve been at the OpenStack Summit in Portland, OR this week. I’ve posted a couple of blog pieces on the topic of interoperability and governance over at my other blog.
Read More Cross-referenceI wound up getting an Apple MacBook Pro Retina 13-inch, 2.6GHz Core i5, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD. Half a dozen of my colleagues had chosen the 13″ rMBP with various sizes of SSD, and it feels like the perfect compromise between power and weight. Normally I’d have bought an extra power supply, but since I…
Read More Laptop chosen – thanks for all the adviceI few weeks ago I started work at Vyatta, which had been recently acquired by Brocade. On my first day, I was handed a Brocade corporate laptop. It’s a Dell: 13″ screen, 4GB, 128GB SSD, Windows 7. As corporate laptops go, it’s perfectly nice, but I’ve been a Mac user for many years now, and…
Read More My next laptop: a tough choiceI’m pretty much out of ports on my TV. I’ve got a Motorola set-top box/DVR from ComcastXfinity (a crappy early model with hardly any disk space), a PlayStation 3, an Apple TV, and a Roku 2XS. I need the ATV for AirPlay from my iPad or MacBook Air, plus YouTube; I need the Roku because…
Read More Too many little plastic boxes connected to my TVThe tl;dr version: Arguably all interesting advances in computer science and software engineering occur when a resource that was previously scarce or expensive becomes cheap and plentiful. The longer version: This particular thought was provoked by a series of exchanges on blogs and in Twitter yesterday. It started with a piece at Information Week in…
Read More Thought for the dayI’m composing this while surrounded by Ethernet cables, sitting on the (raised) floor of the Layer 42 colo in Mountain View. This is the new home of the box (grommit) that hosts email, blogs, and various stuff for me, friends and family. Steve Lau and I (but mostly Steve) are working to sort out the…
Read More A new home (for the box)I spent several hours today disinfecting my other website (Speaking of Clouds, also reachable as GeoffArnoldConsulting.com) after a WordPress hack attack. As is often the case, I was saved by the incompetence of the hackers, who had modified my .htaccess files in such a way that it created an infinite redirection loop. (Hint: you’re not…
Read More Cleaning up after a hackOn Monday, I had a conversation with Derrick Harriss of GigaOM, which he published here. I’ve followed up with a piece on my tech blog, adding a few thoughts and ripping the naivety of certain analysts…
Read More Live, learn, fix, repeat – my thoughts on the recent AWS outage.After years of work by many people, we’ve finally published my mother’s memoirs. “My Short Century” by Lorna Arnold is now available from Lulu. A Kindle version is on the way, and both of them should show up on Amazon quite soon.
Read More Just published: "My Short Century" by Lorna Arnold