All Geekness Great and Small

Archive for the ‘Work’ Category

My brother is an IT contractor in the UK and has just completed a series of four articles on his transition from the world of permanent work to that of contractual work. One of the interesting points he makes is that, with the downturn in the global economy, on of the main barriers to becoming a contractor (the lack of job security) has been significantly diminished as large companies start to fail and roll out massive layoffs.

The four articles can all be found at http://www.contractoruk.com or you can click to them from here:

1. Diary of a first time IT contractor – Making the jump
2. Diary of a first time IT contractor – Deciding how to trade
3. Diary of a first time IT contractor – The first day
4. Diary of a first time IT contractor – Lessons learnt

Last week, I completed a paper on Visualizing SAN Volume Controller FlashCopy Mapping.

SAN Volume Controller (SVC), for those who don’t know, is a block level, in-band, storage virtualization appliance. FlashCopy is a function of SVC which allows you to take instant copies of a whole volume, capturing a single point in time.

As an SVC environment grows, disks become copies of disks and one disk can have multiple disks copied from it. This paper discusses a method to visualize these relationships graphically so that a Storage Administrator can understand the state of his system at a glance.

The paper also acts as a demonstration of automation of the SVC Command Line Interface, with the hope that readers will go on to write their own scripts for their own automation purposes.

I’ve been playing with technology for nearly 25 years, ever since my parents bought a ZX Spectrum 48K for my siblings and me. My brother and I would faithfully copy program listings from books, play the games that those listings created and then merrily modify them to our own ends. We also had a huge disorganised box of Lego and whiled away many a Saturday building models from plans and imagination (for British readers: many of these models were inspired by ‘Chock-A-Block’).

As time passed, my interest in technology evolved. At school, I was developing an interest in Physics, at home I was writing my own programs on a 286s, 386s and 486s. By the time I got to university, I was majoring in Physics and working for Milford Instruments in my vacations. During that time I learnt all about writing microcode and getting chips to talk to one another.

I now work for IBM. I started in their development laboratory and, although my primary role is more customer facing at the moment, I’m still writing plenty of code.

So, why the name and what’s the aim of this blog? Well, my interest in technology is both parallel and orthogonal to my job in technology. However, I’ll be writing about both and so some of the discussions will be about ‘great’ things like Storage subsystems and Automation frameworks and other broad topics; others will be about ‘small’ things, like rotary encoders and relays and my latest home project. By keeping the lines between my home technology and work technology blurred, I can transfer my experiences from one to the other and both will benefit. I encourage you to do the same.