Just found out about this, haven’t had a chance to look at it. Trying to recover from vacation still. 🙂
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2012/08/23/ad-replication-status-tool-is-live.aspx
joe
joeware - never stop exploring... :)
Information about joeware mixed with wild and crazy opinions...
9/5/2012
8/8/2012
Active Directory 5th Edition
Not that I need anything else on my plate at the moment with all of the busy-ness of summer but the chapter drafts for Active Directory 5E has hit my inbox and I am told need to be reviewed by August 20th. So good news on the progress on AD5E, boo on its timing. 😉
joe
p.s. The Wiki work is still in progress. 🙂
7/23/2012
Go Amazon!
When I pulled up Amazon today to go check on the price of something I saw the following announcement… Go Amazon, Go Bezos! I loved this, especially the bolded part… Logic based assistance… Who knew?
So, for people who’ve been with us as little as three years, we’re offering to pre-pay 95% of the cost of courses such as aircraft mechanics, computer-aided design, machine tool technologies, medical lab technologies, nursing, and many other fields.
The program is unusual. Unlike traditional tuition reimbursement programs, we exclusively fund education only in areas that are well-paying and in high demand according to sources like the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and we fund those areas regardless of whether those skills are relevant to a career at Amazon.
I pulled this from http://www.amazon.com
Dear Customers,
At Amazon, we like to pioneer, we like to invent, and we’re not willing to do things the normal way if we can figure out a better way.
One area where we’ve seen particular success is our fulfillment center network. Sustained innovation inside our fulfillment centers has driven improved reliability, accuracy, and speed of delivery, as well as productivity and safety. Our high productivity allows us to pay our fulfillment center employees 30% more than traditional physical retail store employees while still offering customers the lowest prices. Our work on safety practices has been so effective that it’s statistically safer to work in an Amazon fulfillment center than in a traditional department store.
Our bias for reinvention extends into our recruiting teams. For most of the year, our full-time fulfillment center employees can keep up with customer demand. But during the holiday gift-giving season, our peak needs temporarily double, and we employ many more people. Our seasonal recruiting program called CamperForce — where RVers combine work with camping — has been very successful and much written about in the media. And our military veteran recruiting program effectively helps vets transition into the civilian workforce. Amazon was recently named the #1 Top Military Friendly Employer by G.I. Jobs Magazine.
Those are just a few examples, and innovation doesn’t stop. Today, we’re announcing our newest innovation — one we’re especially excited about — the Amazon Career Choice Program.
›Learn more about the Amazon Career Choice Program
Many of our fulfillment center employees will choose to build their careers at Amazon. For others, a job at Amazon might be a step towards a career in another field. We want to make it easier for employees to make that choice and pursue their aspirations. It can be difficult in this economy to have the flexibility and financial resources to teach yourself new skills. So, for people who’ve been with us as little as three years, we’re offering to pre-pay 95% of the cost of courses such as aircraft mechanics, computer-aided design, machine tool technologies, medical lab technologies, nursing, and many other fields.
The program is unusual. Unlike traditional tuition reimbursement programs, we exclusively fund education only in areas that are well-paying and in high demand according to sources like the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and we fund those areas regardless of whether those skills are relevant to a career at Amazon.
Like many of our innovations at Amazon, the Career Choice Program is an experiment. We’re excited about it and hope it will pay big dividends for some of our employees. This is one innovation that we hope other companies in this economy will copy.
Thanks for being a customer,
Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
7/19/2012
7/13/2012
Active Directory Wiki Part Deux
So previously (http://blog.joeware.net/2012/07/05/2540/) I mentioned the idea of an AD Wiki. I had quite a bit of feedback in the comments and offline through email on the idea with some strong points to use the Technet Wiki and some strong points on YES DO IT! No other options came up so it came down, for me, to whether I felt the Technet Wiki was what I visualized I thought I/we needed or not.
After looking over the Technet Wiki pretty closely and thinking through the whole thing and then just plain listening to my gut, I have decided that putting up an AD Wiki is something that I am going to do. I just didn’t feel good about whether any kind of censorship of opinions and/or third party vendors might come up in Technet and based on some of the guidelines I saw there I don’t think they would take kindly to, for example, articles on the comparison of OpenLDAP to Active Directory or ADAM or detailed instructions on tying MIT Kerberos to AD or vice versa or documentation on how to set up VMWARE to host DCs if someone wants to write it up and others think it would be good to have and see. I.E. This isn’t going to just be a wiki about AD in a homogeneous Microsoft environment, but AD in the real world where we live.
I really really really want to see contributions from a wide range of people and sources. If your writing skills aren’t the best, don’t worry about it, this is about consolidating and sharing information, not showing who can word smith better than others. If someone else reads what you wrote and thinks there is a better way to say it, they can update it. If you have ideas on what you want to see but can’t speak to it, put in stubs and people who see the stubs who have more info and want to write will be able to take those stubs and suggestions and perhaps write something. These are things that make up the beauty of Wiki.
And yes, I will want to see opinions because I think people like seeing opinions along with hard facts. Sometimes opinions and "feelings" precede and possibly drive research that provides hard facts later. I do think there should be a special tag that indicates that something is opinion where opinion is when you state something you feel without verified sources you can cite.
I am even open to vendors writing up articles about their utilities etc. I don’t want to see ads, but real life examples and how-tos would be nice. When someone goes looking for how-to do X, seeing a page talking about it with related pages on native methods based on a multiple scripts, tools, and products you can purchase would be a good thing.
Anyway, it will take me a little bit to set it up but I will announce its availability here and likely places like the ActiveDir.Org list, etc.
joe
7/11/2012
It’s not a question that someone is going to mess up…
It’s not a question that someone is going to mess up in the GUI or not, it is a matter of how often, when, and how bad. The larger the organization, the more likely the answers to those questions will be answers you won’t like very much.
– Me in VMware vSphere 5 class
7/10/2012
7/5/2012
Active Directory Wiki?
I went looking for something I knew existed previously and I’ll be darned if I could find it, took me a good 3 hours of looking to dig it up and it should have been 3 minutes… That got me to thinking, is there an Active Directory WIKI out there? I looked around and couldn’t find one. Anyone know of one? I saw that the domain name adwiki.com is taken and has been registered since 2004 and is expired so not much happening there. 😉
If not I think I will set up a publicly editable WIKI site for Active Directory driven by MediaWiki software.
Let me know your thoughts people!
joe
6/25/2012
Interesting article on Software Engineers.
I think much of it applies to Systems Engineers who are tasked with "building" IT infrastructure and Application Infrastructure as well as Admins who write scripts[1] for others as well.
Some of the quotable pieces I liked:
"Cards on the table, software engineers generally have a reputation for being arrogant, disagreeable, and moody. We also have a reputation for saying “no”, for debating pedantic details, and thinking we know how to do everyone’s job better than they can. In general, this reputation is deserved. That’s exactly what we do, day in, day out, as we intermix writing code with checking in on Twitter and Hacker News."
"Reputations aren’t randomly given out, they are earned based on experience."
"And here’s the real crux of the problem: software engineers aren’t builders. Software engineers are creators. Building is what you do when you buy a piece of furniture from Ikea and get it home. The instructions are laid out and if you go step by step, you’ll get that comically small table you wanted. Creating is a different process, it’s birthing something without direction or instruction. It’s starting with a blank canvas and painting a masterpiece. Software engineers don’t get into coding because they want someone to tell them what to do, they get into it because they discovered they could create something useful. Every single software engineer fell in love with coding because she made a small, useful program early on and was hooked."
"Both engineers and product managers tend to think, incorrectly, that product specifications or requirements are equivalent to the furniture manual from Ikea. In reality, these documents rarely contain enough information to build an actual thing. They’re usually just the starting point. And that presents a unique problem to the engineer.
To understand the problem, consider the job of building a house. Someone has decided they want to build a house on a specific plot of land. The house is to be two stories and have a garage. There’s even a rough sketch of the front of the house scribbled down on a napkin. That person comes to you with this information and the napkin and says, “this is enough for you to start building, right?” Are you able to start building?"
"“Well,” your customer tells you, “why don’t you just start building, and I’ll get you the details as they become available. That way, we’re not wasting any time.”"
"The old adage, “when you assume, you make an ass of u and me,” is about as true as can be. Assumptions are dangerous and often wrong. Yet without making some assumptions, the project can’t move forward. So that’s what you do."
"In almost every other industry where things are built, it is expected that all requirements and details are agreed upon and finalized before building commences. Except in software. In software there’s “not enough time” to gather all the requirements ahead of time. The importance of moving quickly is hammered into us from day one. And so engineers learn to fill in the gaps left by product managers just to keep the project going."
"This is one of the top things that make engineers grumpy: constantly shifting priorities. If something is a number one priority on one day and something else is a number one priority on the next day, that means inevitable context switches must occur. Creative types don’t like being interrupted until they’re finished, which is why engineers are happy to continue coding until the wee hours of the morning just to complete what they’ve been working on. Interrupting the flow makes us less productive."
"What can we do to make this go faster? Do you need more engineers? (Throwing more engineers at a problem frequently makes it worse. The only way to get something built faster is to build a smaller thing.)"
"Engineers don’t hate hard work or long hours; we hate when it doesn’t pay off."
"It’s typically not a designer or product manager that’s woken up in the middle of the night because something is broken in production."
"It’s difficult to get into a good flow while coding if you know you have a meeting coming up in an hour or two hours, that’s always in the back of your mind while coding. It is amazingly unproductive to code for an hour, stop for an hour, code for an hour, stop for an hour, etc. You can’t get into a flow and just as you start, you have to stop. The software engineer brain has to switch into a good mode for coding in that switch takes time."
joe
[1] Perhaps a title could be Software Engineer Lite?
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