In honor of Black History Month, I'm reposting one of my early writings... This editorial was published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Feb 14, 2001.

A new economy is upon us. The so-called "Post-Industrial Information Age" is maturing. That means that most companies know how to make a good product. High quality is a requirement for entry into a market, it is not sufficient to differentiate a company from its competitors. Quality control is no longer in charge of economic growth.

If you're a parent your child has at some time told a "whopper" that's so outlandish that you had to respect the kid for having the cojones to even try it! Yesterday, while trying to drill down into the numbers surrounding the recent budget fight, I bumped into two such whoppers within 15 minutes, but they weren't from my kids... they were from elected officials.

Dice.com just released the results of their salary survey of nearly 20,000 IT professionals taken last fall. You can see a summary of the results on eWeek. This survey is self-selecting, but I think you can still draw some conclusions from the results, one of the main conclusions being that you need to know Java.

New Laptop

I got a new laptop a few weeks ago. This machine, an HP Pavilion dv8 is radical! Intel i7 quad-core processor with multi-threading shows up as an eight-way box in System Monitor. With Blue Ray DVD, 8 GB of memory and 18.4" screen it still came in under $1400 on eBay. I decided to go with Ubuntu this time instead of OpenSUSE. Ubuntu 10.4 (lucid) is working quite well for me. Everything except the fingerprint reader is working. I even got the TV card (which actually came from my previous HP laptop) working, though only for digital TV broadcasts.

I've started a development project on the Liferay Portal server. Liferay is a nice opensource Java Portal server with auser-friendly  Web-2.0 interface. For example adding or repositioning portlets on a page is a simple drag-n-drop affair. Liferay also ships with a lot of portlets, so it's easy to build a portal site with Wikis, RSS feeds, and discussion forums right out of the box. However, I did run into a few irritating issues with Liferay:

A funny thing happened at lunch the other day. I was dining with several area CIOs when one fellow asked the table whether or not they were able to realize any electricity savings from their virtualization efforts. You may recall from Why start a Virtualization Blog? or Virtualization: The Importance of a Story to Tell that few companies account for electricity or floor space in their server charge-back models.

Yes, it's been a while since my last post . I've been completely buried under a number of projects, including kicking off this year's BDPA-Charlotte High School Computer Competition (HSCC) training program. The good news is I learned a few things, which I may write about in future blogs.

   When I was toiling as a junior Unix Administrator (capitalized for fear of threats.....LOL), I remember thinking I had great ideas, but no audience.  I wanted to know what role could I aspire to  that represented technical expertise and seniority.  I enjoyed the systems work, but I wanted my opinions to matter more.  I wanted people to pay attention to what I thought and why I thought it.  I quickly learned from more senior engineers that what I wanted was to be "An Architect".....Cue Cheesy Superhero Music... 

I once interviewed for what I suppose you could call the chief architect position at a small firm (about 1,500 employees) that wrote logistics software. Their flagship product was based on Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) version 2.1 and they were looking for someone to lead them through the migration to EJB 3.0. At the time I was the team lead for the Java half of a internal resource management application.

An engineer held a meeting with 25 application owners to determine the group's interest in virtualizing their applications.  The engineer's presentation lasted about 25 minutes where he showed utilization numbers, footprint reduction in the datacenter, savings in power consumption, and every other metric he could think of to convince them of the advantages of virtualization.  When he was finished, he asked for anyone who was interested to setup an appointment with him.  Nobody did.  So what happened?