After my back injury in January, numerous physio appointments, training carefully and following a bit of a rehab program, I’m finally back to full strength.
Today I squatted 140kg for 10 reps - the most I’ve ever done - so I think I’ve burst through a plateau with the rehab work I did as well. It feels good to be healthy again. My current training goals are to squat 180kg for 3, and bench press 120kg for 3.
I’m staying away from deadlifts for a while yet.
The words strategy and tactics are tossed around some Dilbertised IT departments like a Management Consultant’s wet dream. Once, these words actually meant something. As much as I hate a lot of the unnecessary business buzzwords, I also hate to lose words that are actually useful, and can provide valuable insight into why we do what we do.
So what do they mean, and why the hell should you care?
By their dictionary definitions, strategy and tactics don’t sound very different. In colloquial use, they have a different spin to them. Strategy is about working towards a common, greater, usually longer-term goal. Tactics is a series of steps to solve a problem, or accomplish a direct goal. Players of chess are familiar with these terms. Strategic players tend to move all their pieces in unison according to some greater game-plan, where tactical players work on executing a series of moves.
If you start thinking about what you’re doing with your client’s or your computing infrastructure in terms of strategy versus tactics, you might be able to give a better solution.
For example:
Problem: You’re running low on disk space on the primary file server again.
The Tactical solution to the problem might be to add another disk to the file server. Problem solved.
The Strategic solution might be that you realise that it’s only been six months since you last had to add a disk to the file server. The company’s data usage is growing by 40% per year. With the help of your boss, you build a business case for a Storage Area Network that will handle the primary file server’s growth for the next five years, as well as allow you to expand your SQL Server environment. Backups during business hours with no performance impact are also a bonus. Problem solved.
Thinking strategically can be harder than thinking tactically, but you end up with a better environment at the end of the day, that services the business’s needs more appropriately. Having said that, sometimes the quickest solution is the most appropriate. You just have to judge each situation on its own merits.
When you think in this way, it becomes easier to judge if you’re doing the right thing.
By the way - I don’t play chess, I just know a few people who do.
No matter the size of the organisation, location, or the platform that you run your information systems on, eventually all companies reach the point where the current IT infrastructure doesn’t match what the rest of the business requires. At the most basic level this can be a lack of disk space on the main shared drive, or a poorly performing Exchange Server. If an organisation is growing quickly, 24/7 IT operations with fast, anywhere-access to email and applications might be required. Regardless of what the current problem is, the fact remains that IT needs to constantly change, upgrade and enhance the operating infrastructure as business needs becoming more demanding.
In my experience, most companies IT departments don’t spend enough time planning what they should do with their infrastructure and spend too much time babysitting what they’ve got when it clearly doesn’t suit. Regardless of whether IT is on the periphery of your business or is strategic to your company’s survival, IT infrastructure planning is critical. While the helpdesk driven IT department was par for the course in the 90’s, the reality in today’s knowledge-centric economy is that IT needs to stay ahead to make sure that the business isn’t hamstrung by a lack of availability or functionality.
So how should you plan your infrastructure? Start at Step 1…
1. Be A Visionary
The first step in infrastructure planning is to be a visionary by investigating new technology and determining how (and if!) it applies to your business. Being a visionary is about finding out about new technology, getting excited about it, and then getting everybody else excited about it. Being a visionary isn’t a full time position - it usually takes just a few hours each week.
Most importantly, for a visionary to be effective, you need to have direct communication and trust with the decision makers in your organisation. If you don’t - then get on board with someone who is.
2. Have A Goal
So now you’re aware of what technology is out there, and what suits your organisation. With this information in your mind and notebook, you need to build a goal that your company’s IT department can work towards. This needn’t be overly complex, flowery or utopian - simple goals are best. You’ve probably heard of the principle of low hanging fruit. The same idea applies to forming IT goals - determine what will provide the largest benefit to the business, that will most likely be the easiest to implement.
The following are some good examples of goals. They are simple to understand, and specify concrete measures:
Some bad examples of goals include:
What you need to remember about having goals in infrastructure planning is that they must apply to your business and that you must be willing to re-evaluate them if circumstances change. They’re goals, not the ten commandments.
Once again, the goals must have buy in from the decision makers for your ideas to be successful.
3. Build A Road Map
After you’ve defined your goals, you need to build a road map to achieve them.
A road map is a series of high level stepping stones to get you from where you are now, and end up where you want to be. You don’t need to get down to the nitty gritty - keep it simple, and keep it high level. The simpler the road map is, the easier it will be to communicate the road map to other people who may not be technically minded. Don’t confuse simple with easy - just because the tasks are easy to grasp, doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll be easy to do.
If your IT goal is “to be able to build or rebuild a Standard Operating Environment PC within 30 minutes”, you might include the following steps in your roadmap:
Depending on what your goal is, you may have completely different steps in your road map. You could have a different set of steps than I’ve got in my example for rolling out a Standard Operating Environment - that’s OK too. It’s important than your roadmap fits your situation, and your environment.
A word of caution - before you go ahead and complete your road map, you probably want to check that the vendor’s technology you’re implementing actually does what you’re investing in it for. You might want to include a proof of concept stage at the beginning of your road map, or receive a product demo from the vendor.
4. Execute The Road Map
Okay, this should be obvious. Once you’ve formed your goals and built your high level road map, what now? In the much-cliched words of Nike, just do it.
Depending on the size of your organisation and the size of the change, this could start off by buying product, forming a project or submitting a business case to the board. Whatever it is, it’s getting into action that counts. The hardest part of launching any technological change in an organisation is getting started. Once you’ve kicked off, everything else falls into place. Form your project team, build your project plan, and go for it!
5. Stop, Re-Evaluate, and Go Back to Step 2.
So now you’ve bullet-proofed your data centres, are able to deploy a new PC with the touch of a button and halved your support costs, what next? Go back and build a new set of goals! By the time you’ve finished upgrading one part of the business’ infrastructure, you’ll no doubt need to improve some other part. Information Technology in business is like The Never Ending Story - just when you think you’ve finished, requirements will change and you’ll need to augment your business’s IT infrastructure in yet another way.
That’s the fun of IT!
After wanting dogs for years, we finally got some. In the end we went for Border Collies (not Weimareners or German Shepherds, as mentioned previously), and damn are they cute! We picked them up on Saturday after they had their vaccinations. Both are six weeks old - brother and sister from the same litter. They behave very well considering they are so young, and are already learning to sit and lie down. Smart dogs!
Layla has a big white streak down her nose. She is independent, but still likes to play with her brother. Layla means dark beauty.
Diego is mischevious and likes to get in to everything. He can’t leave his sister alone. Diego is Spanish for James.
I updated to Wordpress 2.1 through my hosting provider - a couple of things are nicer, and it’s a whole lot faster at page loading. I was mucking around with Community Server a little, but I think I’ll stick with Wordpress. It’s less complicated.
For all those that can’t seem to live without their computers, Shutdown Day is on the 24th of March. Check it out, join in. It’ll be good for you.
On Friday night my wife and I went to a local “movies in the park” screening. Movies in the park is run by Brisbane City Council, and is a series of screenings of family movies in suburbs with the idea of increasing quality of life in Brisbane (which is pretty damn good already). I initially wasn’t so keen on the idea, but Bianca was dead-set on it, and I did enjoy myself. It was pretty nice sitting in the park under the stars, sufficiently sprayed with mozzie-repellent, eating take-out and watching a good movie.
The movie was “The World’s Fastest Indian“. It’s a true story about an older New Zealand man, Burt Munro, travelling to the Utah salt flats in the USA in the 1960’s to set a land speed record in his modified, streamlined 1920’s Indian motorcycle. I’d been keen to see the movie for a while - I thought it would be good, and it really was excellent. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend that you do. The movie shows the difficulties Burt Munro faced in achieving his dream. While many of the events in the movie are fictional, the message the movie portrays is good advice for anyone.
Have a dream, and work hard at it. Burt Munro had a dream of setting a land speed record on his motorcycle. He spent day and night for decades working on his motorcycle to turn it into the machine that it needed to be. His single minded determination and focus on the one goal he wanted to achieve - setting that speed record - allowed him to achieve it at a stage in his life when most people are content to take it easy. If you’ve got a dream, stick to it, and work towards it to achieve it. It won’t happen by itself - you need to work towards it, for as long as it takes. How many people can say they’ve worked for decades on a single project before their goal came to fruition? Whether your dream is to run a successful software company, live off the land in the country or sail around the world, keep working towards it for as long as it takes.
Be genuine and love people for what they are. Burt treated everybody like they were real people, with real feelings, in situations where many of us would have stereotyped the same people. Because of the way he treated people, Burt always brought out the best in them, and really made their personalities shine. I can count on one hand the number of people that I know that have a genuine interest in others. Do you judge people before they let you see who they are?
Don’t let others push you down. Regardless of how many setbacks Burt had in getting to the final goal of setting a land speed record in Utah, he always kept trying. No matter how many times he got told “no”, he always looked for a way to turn it into a “yes”. When he was ripped off, he held his head up high, and continued on towards his goal, however unlikely it seemed that he would achieve it. Too often the harsh words of others cut close to the heart. They hurt, and they turn us from our dreams. Don’t let this happen - if you get beaten down, however big or small the event - get back up again, dust yourself off, and keep moving towards your goal. Don’t let anyone stop you.
After running his bike in Utah, Burt did set a land speed record. And the speed record still stands to this day.
One weakness of the Citrix client drive mapping is that you can’t automatically connect a client’s network drives. For some reason, Citrix don’t supply an option to do this, even if you want to - you’re supposed to write a script.
I’ve written the below script in PowerShell that will go through and map all client drive letters that aren’t already mapped. To run it, you’ll need PowerShell installed on your Citrix Servers. Get it here.
Save the below script as “mapClientDrives.ps1″ and execute it via PowerShell. Wordpress is being a pain and not letting me upload the script.
# mapClientDrives.ps1
#
# Maps all client drives in Citrix, including network drives,
# which are not mapped by default.
#
# Author: James Kahn, http://liet.net/blog
# Version: 1.0$target = $args
if ($target.length -eq 0) {
Write-Host “Maps all client drives that aren’t currently mapped.”
Write-Host “Usage: mapClientDrives.ps1 ”
Write-Host “On Citrix servers, you should use ‘mapClientDrives.ps1 CLIENT’”
}$defaultDrives = “C:”,”D:”,”E:”,”F:”,”G:”,”H:”,”I:”,”J:”,”K:”,”L:”,”M:”,”N:”,”O:”,”P:”,”Q:”,”R:”,”S:”,”T:”,”U:”,”V:”,”W:”,”X:”,”Y:”,”Z:”
# Get a list of the current logical drives
Get-WmiObject Win32_LogicalDisk | % {$drives = @{}}{$drives.add($_.DeviceID,$_.ProviderName)}# Build list of available drives
$availDrives = @()
$i = 0
do {
if ($drives.Contains($defaultDrives[$i])) {
# Do Nothing
}
else {
$availDrives += ,($defaultDrives[$i])
}
$i++
}
while ($defaultDrives[$i])# Map Client Drives
$i = 0
$j = 0
$erroractionpreference = “SilentlyContinue”
do {
$curTarget = “\\” + $target + “\” + $defaultDrives[$i][0] + “$”
$error.Clear()
$oldErrCount = $error.Count
if ($drives.ContainsValue($curTarget)) {
$i++
continue
}
$net = $(New-Object -Com WScript.Network)
$net.MapNetworkDrive($availDrives[$j], $curTarget)
$i++
if ($error.Count -eq $oldErrCount) {
Write-Host “Mapped” $availDrives[$j] “to” $curTarget
$j++
}
}
while ($defaultDrives[$i])
This is seriously amazing stuff. The amount of integration between Microsoft System Center 2007 and Longhorn Virtualisation is starting to get into the self-healing infrastructure region.
Via Dugie’s Pensieve.
I’ve had a back problem for almost two months now. I’m don’t usually get many injuries, so it really surprised me when it came about. I’d taken some time off from the gym over Christmas, and was feeling a little stiff. Coming back to work in the first week of January, I was a typical egotistical bloke and tried to work out just as hard as I had before I took my break.
Big mistake.
After doing a few squats and chin ups, I thought I’d pull a deadlift. The deadlift is one of my favourite exercises, and involves pulling an olympic barbell loaded with as much as weight as you can lift off the floor, and standing up straight. Like this. I’ve done hundreds of them and it gives me a great feeling of power, because you tend to be able to lift a pretty heavy weight. I loaded up the bar with my previous 3 rep max (140kg), going for two reps. Using an over/under grip to stop the bar slipping at that weight, I pulled it. It hurt my back a bit - I think I rounded it slightly. When I put the weight down, I felt like I’d damaged something, just a little.
So what did I do? I did it again, of course!
In an amazing show of wisdom, I decided that I needed to make sure I didn’t develop a muscle imbalance by doing a single rep. You see, with an over/under grip, you should alternate which palm is facing you and which palm is not so that each side of the body develops strength in the same places, at the same rate. The second rep hurt a bit more.
I guess because I’m not particularly injury prone, I didn’t think about going to the physio straight away. I’ve been a little sore before, and this seemed no different. When it was still hurting after two weeks, I decided it was a bit different. The first physiotherapist I went to, a bloke at Browns Plains, wasn’t any good. He couldn’t tell me what was wrong with it, and didn’t give me any specific rehab exercises. He pretty much told me that it would get better on its own.
Two more weeks on, and I could swear it was getting worse, not better. I’d been avoiding doing a lot of things in the gym, and whenever I slightly hyper-extended my back, it screamed with pain. I really wanted to know if I’d caused some major damage. Enough people have back injuries that stick with them throughout their lives, and I’d rather get this sorted out sooner or later. On a recommendation, I went to Axis Physio, and ended up being treated by Brooke there. She was very good. She told me what I’d done to my back, checked my flexibility and sore points, and gave specific rehab exercises and stretches to sort it out. I had compressed one of the discs in my lower spine. A disc sits between two vertebrae, and acts as a flexible cushion between them (or something like that). I probably stuffed it up at the gym, and prevented it from healing by having bad posture in my chair at work, and doing too many crunches at the gym - some exercises can be bad for you!
After a couple of weeks of treatment and a range of rehab exercises, I’m about 80% “back” together. (*badoom*). The scariest part about the whole ordeal is that if I hadn’t sought treatment, and continued the way I was, I would probably have ended up with a permanent back problem. There’s enough people with those out there already.
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