IT Tips, Tricks and Good Advice

Working in IT we are probably responsible for introducing more change in the workplace than any other profession.  If a change is to be made succesfully it needs to be carefully communicated and the various stakeholders need to buy into the change, otherwise you’ll have an uphill struggle on your hands.  In my experience people can often be defensive about how they do things and can be resistant to change.   I was at a planning session a few days ago and the chairman put up this quote on the screen at the start of the meeting, “change is not a criticism of the past but recognition of an opportunity for future success”.  No one had any idea who said this but we all agreed it was a good point to communicate to everyone at the start of the project.   If you know where this quote comes from please let me know.

I just came across this excellent Word Press Tags Cheat Sheet and want to post a link for future reference and to see what you think.

Google have launched their a new, News Reader called Fast Flip.  This presents the news stories from the news.google.com section as a series of images which you can quickly flip through using the left and right next / previous page buttons.  This means that you can flick through all the news stories to see what you are interested in, whereas normally you just see the headline and might click on the link.  The service only shows the first page of a story and there is a button to take you to the full story.   The service is also available on the Android mobile platform where the touch interface allows you to quickly flip from one story to another.

Following the brief outage of gMail on September 1st I was reminded that Google publish a status page or dashboard showing the status of all their services.  You can find this service at www.google.com/appsstatus.  I mention this because it’s an excellent example of providing visibility and therefore accountability about the services you are providing which is essential if you’re being paid to provide a service.  If you’re responsible for providing various IT services to your business or customers then you really need to consider how you can create this type of service dashboard or status page.

If you’re involved in providing online services then you need to have formally agreed service up-time levels and planned maintenance times.  When agreeing up-time SLA’s you need to get people to understand the cost of moving from 98% to 99%, to 99.99% to 99.999% (five nines) up-time.  Have a think about it, the level of engineering needed to deliver 99% is quite different to 99.999%.

If you commit to 99.999% up-time, you’re allowed 5 minutes a year, that’s not enough time to do anything so you need to your application to be running on a distributed system over two or more sites with instant fail over and probably load balanced workload.   In contrast 99% up time allows you 87 minutes of downtime which means that you can stick with simpler technologies like RAID and mirrored servers.

Let me know what you think and how you approach up-time SLA’s.

On Friday the Apple OS X Snow Leopard DVD turned up and I didn’t waste anytime installing the upgrade.  This was the first OS X upgrade I’ve done since switching to a Mac from Windows and I was pleased with how quick and simple the process was.  In total the process took less than 45 minutes.  The end result is a faster system and as a bonus the upgrade returns disk space.  There isn’t much to see in terms of a change to the GUI in this release with just one very big exception which I haven’t really seen discussed in detail elsewhere on the web.  I may be alone in thinking this but the new dock which now incorporates the Exposé function.

I always found that on Widnows I’d end up with a very cluttered taskbar as I opened lots of documents.  On Leopard it could be difficult to find the exact doument you were looking for when you’d opened several.  This all changes in Snow Leopard; now you just press and hold down the application icon in the dock and Exposé then shows all the open windows for the application.  This is fantastically easy to use and nothing short of brilliant.  I could imagine this working really well on a Mac Tablet (iPad) touch screen device!

The overall performance has improved in the applications I use most, those being Safari, Photoshop CS4 and Dreamweaver CS4.

For people using their Mac in compaines who use Microsoft Exchange the built in support in the new OSX for Exchange will be well received.  Personally this doesn’t affect me as we use Google to host our e-mail and we’ve always been very pleased with that.