Don MacVittie is founder of Ingrained Technology, A technical advocacy and software development consultancy. He has experience in application development, architecture, infrastructure, technical writing,DevOps, and IT management. MacVittie holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Northern Michigan University, and an M.S. in Computer Science from Nova Southeastern University.
Lori MacVittie
I know I’ve touched on this topic in some of my “IT Management” overview blogs, but it’s an important one, so I thought I’d give it a blog all its own.
Even though we have a living myth that cats and dogs never get along, we all know it just isn’t true. There are any number of cats an...Aug. 26, 2011 09:30 AM EDT Reads: 5,226
We spend an obsessive amount of time looking at the market and trying to lean toward accepted technologies. Seriously, when I was in IT management, there were an inordinate number of discussions about the state of market X or Y. While these conversations almost always revolved around w...
Farm tractors and military tanks share an intertwined history that started when some smart person proposed the tracks on some farming equipment as imagethe cross-country tool that tanks needed to get across a rubble and shell-hole strewn World War One battlefield. For the ensuing sixty...
When you go to buy a house, everyone would love to look into the ten million dollar mansion on the hill, but when making such a significant investment as a house, we control our desire to see outrageous, and look at what ever it is that we, given our income and outgo, can afford to pay...
There was a time when application developers worried only about the hardware they were developing the application for. Those days passed a good long while ago, and then AppDev’s big concern was the OS the application was being developed for. But the burgeoning growth of the World Wide ...
One of the things that F5 has been trying to do since before I came to the company is reach out to developers. Some of the devices in your network could be effective AppDev tools if utilized to their full extent, and indeed, I’ve helped companies develop tools utilizing iControl that g...
In case you missed it, F5 released version 11 of TMOS this week, and working up some collateral for the release, I had an interesting epiphany. High availability, highly adaptable networks are about to change. Again. There has been a steady evolution of networking technology over the l...
We’ve all had that chilling moment when the gate attendant at the airport comes over the loudspeaker, and doing her best Charlie Brown’s Teacher imitation, announces “Jursim Puzzling vlordid Netting, gollink dummole Neptune.” (This flight is in an oversold situation, we’re looking for ...
Think about this for just a moment. When the automobile was invented, the idea was known. The idea was to free horses from transport duty, have less… Mess in the streets that horses generate, and move stuff. Over time, “stuff” became differentiated into “people”, “goods”, and “major sh...
In the years I’ve known Jonathan Feldman, he’s repeatedly come up with ideas that are profound in the “Huh. That’s obvious now, wonder why I didn’t think of it in those terms” sense of really profound. His most recent blog fits into that category, a blog where he urges IT managers not ...
This is the second part of this series talking about things you need to consider, and where cloud usage makes sense given the current state of cloud evolution. The first one, Cloud Storage, can be found here. The point of the series is to help you figure out what you can do now, and wh...
There’s a whole lot of talk about cloud revolutionizing IT, and a whole lot of argument about public versus private cloud, even a considerable amount of talk about what belongs in the cloud. But not much talk about helping you determine what applications and storage are a good candidat...
Information Technology – geeks like you and I – have been responsible for an amazing transformation of business over the last thirty or forty years. The systems that have been put into place since computers became standard fare for businesses have allowed the business to scale out in a...
I recently read a piece in Network Computing Magazine that was pretty disparaging of NAS devices, and with a hand-wave the author pronounced NAS dead, long live cloud storage.
Until now, storage has been pretty much immune to the type of hype that “The Cloud” gets. Sure, there have be...
Lori's and my youngest daughter graduated from High School this year, and her class chose one of the many good Vince Lombardi quotes for the theme of their graduation – “The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.” Those who know me well know that I’m not a huge football...
A few of us were talking on Facebook about high speed rail (HSR) and where/when it makes sense the other day, and I finally said that it almost never does. Trains lost out to automobiles precisely because they are rigid and inflexible, while population densities and travel requirements...
A few years ago, a gentleman created a video showing how quickly an unpatched, unprotected Windows XP machine was infected once connected to the public Internet (the linked video is worth a watch, and is short). That video took the business community pretty much by storm, but was old n...
Lori and I received the new Blackberry Smart Phones that F5 ordered for us last week, and have spent about a week familiarizing ourselves with all that has changed since our several-year-old ones came out. There is certainly a lot of change. The Social Media add-ons bundled into these ...
One of my hobbies is modeling – mostly for wargaming but also for the sake of modeling. In an average year I do a lot of WWII models, some modern military, some civilian vehicles, figures from an array of historicalimage timeperiods and the occasional sci-fi figure for one of my sons… ...
It’s kind of funny the way the tech press will kick an incumbent around the block for perceived or imaginary shortcomings in their products. The Blackberry Playbook is a good example. You’d think that RIM went out and created a useless piece of garbage that was never going to see uptak...
While plenty of people have had a mouthful (or page full, or pipe full) of things to say about the Amazon outage, the one thing that it brings to the fore is not a problem with cloud, but a problem with storage. Long ago, the default mechanism for “High Availability” was to have two ...
After a short break to get some major dental rework done, I return to you with my new, sore mouth for a round of “Maybe we should have…” discussions.
In the nineties and early 21st century, positions were created in may organizations with titles like “chief architect” and often there ...
It has been a while since I wrote a Load Balancing for Developers installment, and since they’re pretty popular and there’s still a lot about Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) that are taken for granted in the Networking industry but relatively unknown in the development world, I...
Note: While talking about this post with Lori during a break, it occurred to me that you might be thinking I meant “MS Windows”. Not this time, but that gives me another blog idea… And I’ll sneak in the windows –> Windows simile somewhere, no doubt.
Did you ever ponder the history of ...
Having just returned from our annual D&D tournament, this year in Las Vegas, I have role-playing on the mind, so when I read the title of Elizabeth White’s blog IBM and Cable & Wireless to Develop UK Smart Energy Cloud, I immediately thought of the AD&D Druid spell Call Lightning which...
InformationWeek has been out and about talking up their most recent CIO survey and keeps calling attention to the fact that one in three CIOs see creating a new business or business model as a driver in 2011. This is not a new phenomenon, but one in three is more CIOs than I would have...
Since I’ve mentioned it a couple of times, I thought I’d offer you all a link to my article in Computer Technology Review about The Cloud Tier. The point was to delve into how/when/where/why of cloud storage usage. While there is a lot to say on that topic and the article was of limite...
Mike Fratto over at InformationWeek has a blog that declares the need for standards in Cloud Management APIs is non-existent or at least premature. Now Mike is a smart guy and has enough experience to have a clue what he’s writing about, unlike many cloud pundits out there, but like al...
I was on the road last week, doing my bit for a roadshow with VMWare and NetApp sponsored by CDW. My team has spread these trips out amongst us, and I drew Nashville as my city to visit. I’ve been through and around Nashville, but never stayed there. This trip was no exception to that ...
One of the majors Lori and my oldest son is pursuing is in philosophy. I’ve never been a huge fan of philosophy, but as he and Lori talked, I decided to find out more, and picked up one of The Great Courses on The Philosophy of Science to try and understand where philosophy split off f...
