Making IT Happen

We just finished our second year of volunteering at Old Ford School in Bow. We did this through City Action. I was one of the volunteers this term, and it left me with a few thought on volunteering:
1 - nothing, and I mean nothing we have done has generated the same level of buzz in the team than the shared experience of doing this.
2 - you can make a difference without committing huge amounts of time. It was half a day a month for me.
3 - it's very practical, and all absorbing - we tutor children who are 8 or 9 years old for an hour each, and after three tutoring sessions I'm ready for a break.

I'll ask my colleagues what they think about the experince and do a post that summarises their response.

We achieve excellent availability of our systems, and whenever we do have an outage the first question is 'what's changed?' Most of the time, we then find the outage was caused by one of two things. First, our ITIL based change management process wasn't followed, or second, and more subtly, it was, but the final tests that were defined and applied didn't pick up the issue that caused the outage. So how do we ensure we define better final tests of changes to production systems? By no means exhaustive, but here's a rough checklist for defining tests to ensure changes have worked:
1 - chances are the change will work - it's what else it breaks in the process you need to worry about.
2 - don't second guess the people that use the system - work with them to define and agree the tests.
3 - the test should be very clear on timing of the tests relative to when the change is done. Don't change in the evening and then test at 7.45 the next morning if your call centre opens up at 8.00am...
4 - try to use separate people to define the test, apply the change and test it. There's a slight conflict of interest. End users are a useful source of testers.
5 - assume the change will fail the test, and have a plan for extricating yourself from the fine mess you have now created.
6 - make sure you've got people lined up to fix the problem or apply the escape plan. There's nothing worse than knowing it's gone wrong but not being able to get hold of the best person to fix it.

You may well have seen this, as when it first came out it was one of the most talked about videos in the blogosphere - but if you haven't, it's a treat. Every web developer, and anyone with an interest in Web2.0, should watch Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us.

In the past week I have seen a number of tech stories about something to do with still and moving images and how they are obtained, managed, changed and stored. One example was a strange Japanese shadow lamp , which uses cameras to record the activities of a friend in their home, and then projects this as shadows inside a lamp in your home. Another is a clever bit of software that reviews your photos, and suggests replacements for things you don't want in them, be it a jutting roof or an ex-boyfriend. I also saw a project called Spellbinder which matches images and locations (although I have read the text three times and still can't figure out exactly what it does).

Point is that more and more technologies appear to resolve around images. In some ways it seems like we are grappling towards a set of rules and techniques for managing and using this data that will eventually parallel concepts such as the relational database. This seems likely to have a huge impact on any business that uses images in some way. It's certainly got me thinking about ours.

VMWare is now valued at $19Bn following its IPO last week. An amazing investment by EMC, who bought it for $635M in 2004.

We use the product extensively for our test and business continuity environments and are increasingly looking to use it to support production environments. As a solution it almost creates a perfect storm of benefits - quicker and easier to manage environments, much better value from server and hosting spend, reduced environmental impact. If you don't use it yet then certainly worth a look.