Category: Personal

Rack installation

We are currently in the process of migrating old unbranded 42U cabling-only (not deep) rack to new HP (10K series) one which have to contain old patch panels (9 of them) and other cabling stuff as well as 5 1U HP ProLiant DL360 servers. Very routine task but I really like it.

All patched panels were already transferred (with a bit of reorganization). Additional wire managers were installed. New power pallet units were added (very nice ones from HP for better power system). New servers are also mounted and so on, just have to finish minor stuff and I will post some pics :)

Two things pissed me off: 1 – HP now supplies screws (the ones to mount stuff in the rack) which need alien key (thanks God I had old normal screws I used), 2 – HP had changed the normal side panels (one per side) to some tricky 3-part-per-side panels. I took us some time to figure out how to set those parts up and it turned out to be not-that-comfortable to work with em.

Trip with yacht to Kastelorizo island

Last week I a friend of mine Dmitry and I went to the sailing trip to Kastelorizo island (Greece). Though it was not that easy since we were only two and we had hard time night times, the trip was amazing. We had a lot of experience every day and each day was like three days long. Photos from the trip are here (though the order is a bit messed up due to incorrect time on one of the cameras and thus incorrect EXIF data of pictures which I use for sorting).

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Broad Knowledge vs Narrow Specification

As far as I see there are two ways of learning things: one is to touch upon a lot of subjects from different areas to some extend and be get more or less deep in one particular, another is to ignore a lot of stuff out there and just focus on one subject deepest possible. For instance one may be quite familiar with different programming languages like C, Java, Perl, PHP, Visual Basic and programming for different platforms, in addition know a bunch of things about system administration on different OSes and so on and so forth and be more advanced let\’s say on Linux administration or whatever. Another person may not know all of those things, but be very very good in Java programming or any other field.

Until now I was more of the first type of the person where I was getting my hands on everything I could and meanwhile I was doing Linux administration (especially in MS Windows network environment) better than anything else. But recently I thought that maybe I should change the approach and just focus all my attention on one thing to get to do it perfectly well? What is the way you do things?

Memory

Memory is a very strange thing. No, I am not talking about computer memory, but human one instead. Sometimes you do a lot of things without even thinking much of them and everything goes fine, but sometime one may ask you regarding one of those things or how you do this and that and it is just impossible to recall em. While trying to get the memories in order to answer the question you start calculating them from whatever you can remember and that drives you even in more confusion, but later, when couple of minutes passes and the topic of the talk becames absolute you start feeling so stupid because you just got the thing and it is so bloody simple that you just can\’t understand how come you messed it up :(

On W3C

Today I was asked why one should follow W3C (WWW Consortium) standards and I why I try to do so as well. Well, it seems like I found a nice analogue to this: following w3c standards is like following grammar and spelling in general language. There is an HTML (or CSS or whatever) language and there are rules that describe it pretty much the same way it happens with natural language.

Not following w3c standards causes browsers to interpret things in the way they like more, some just can even ignore things they don\’t know. The only problem here is that not all browsers know/follow w3c standards themselves, but this, according to my thought is the same as they didn\’t study well at school and don\’t know how to interpret the language :)