Archive for September, 2009

Can Google create community?

September 30th 2009

I have been meaning to blog for ages about a site I use called Goodreads. It is really excellent, I signed up ages ago and cant remember exactly how I found it but I think it might have been a Rails app. Anyway, it is a fairly simple idea, log what books you read (or want to), rate them and share reviews with others, I am on there as thattommyhall. What convinced me to use it was the really stellar monthly emails with interviews with authors and picks of books with a certain theme.

I have been playing with my new HTC Hero and there is a Google Android app that can scan books and add them to the (easilly overlooked) My Library section of Google Books. While the app is good, there is no feeling of community there really. Orkut does not seem to have taken off and they released Wave today but I dont know if they can really get a feeling of community in their apps. I love the stuff they put out, use gmail and docs in particular pretty much constantly but think facebook, flickr and lots of other sites somehow seem to get more of a communtity vibe, perhaps it’s even the google branding – it all looks the same.

Anyway, I have things to do today, if anyone gets an invite to Wave and wants to send me one, please do.

Posted by tom under Life | No Comments »

Getting VMware Certified Professional (VCP) on vSphere 4

September 28th 2009

On Saturday I took and passed the VCP410 exam to get VCP4.

It was not really that hard, though I have been reading about vSphere since before it shipped, follow loads of blogs on VMware, installed it as soon as it came into beta and migrated my companies clusters to it relatively early. I would say if you have VCP3 and have used vSphere you should be OK.

The frustrating thing about the exam was the questions on the config max document, in my view if you are approaching the maximums you could just look it up and memorisation is a pointless exercise. A lot of the maximums are just decisions someone in vmware made, how many NFS stores by default ? (8), max? (64). What it the tree-depth per resource pool? (12… unless you use DRS, then it’s 10). This kind of memorisation is stupid, pointless, hoop-jumping and will be the difference between passing and failing for lots of people.

The exam (like most IT certs) is multiple choice so the questions are fairly mundane and of course there is only 1 correct answer. When interviewing candidates, I always prefer questions that start “what is your” rather than “what is” as anything that is so unsubtle as to only have one answer is probably too uninteresting to spend time discussing.

I did do a nights worth of revision however, using:

Also worth considering are

You may like to see the things I have added to delicious on vmware over the last few years.

Good luck if you take it too!

Posted by tom under VMware | 2 Comments »

Hiatus, Departure, Return

September 22nd 2009

It’s been ages since I blogged as I have been mad busy in work though a lot has happened recently.

I have:

  • Left thebigword
  • Packed up my house
  • Sold/Gave away most of my possessions (keeping only books and my PC, as my friend Ben said “proves you are principally concerned with knowledge”)
  • Left Leeds
  • Gone to India
  • Returned (earlier than planned but refreshed and excited about the future)
  • Set up a limited company to go contracting
  • Started plotting a move to London
  • Begun making big lifestyle changes – drinking less, eating better and training for the Paris Marathon, a triathlon and a return to India for some Hardcore Mountaineering next year

All is well in TomLand, expect more posts now I’m not so sillybusy!

Posted by tom under Life | No Comments »