musc@> $daniele.rant | Out-Blog

Two days ago I read the following Tweet by Hugh MacLeod:

"[...] Early Adopter Problem: How to differentiate from the bandwagon, once the bandwagon starts moving faster than you are [...]"

That makes me think of early adoption of a few technologies I have been working with, and how the community around those evolved. For example:

Operations Manager… early adoption meant that I have been working with it since the beta, had posted one of the earliest posts about how to use a script in a Unit Monitor back in may 2007 (the product was released in April 2007 and there was NO documentation back then, so we had to really try to figure out everything…), but someone seems to think it is worth repeating the very same lesson in November 2008, with not a lot of changes, as I wrote here. I don't mean being rude to Anders… repeating things will surely help the late adopters finding the information they need, of course.

Also, I started playing early with Powershell. I posted my first (and only) cmdlet back in 2006. It was not a lot more than a test for myself to learn how to write one, but that's just to say that I started playing early with it. I have been using it to automate tasks for example.

Going back to the quote above, everyone gets on the bandwagon posting examples and articles. I had been asked a few times about writing articles on OpsMgr and Powershell usage (for example by www.powershell.it) but I declined, as I was too busy using this knowledge to do stuff for work (where “work” is defined as in “work that pays your mortgage”), rather than seeking personal prestige through articles and blogs. Anyway, that kind of articles are appearing now all over the Internet and the blogosphere now. The above examples made me think of early adoption, and the bandwagon that follows later on… but even as an early adopter, I was never very noisy or visible.

Now, going back to what I do for work, (which I mentioned here and here in the past), I work in the Premier Field Engineering organization of Microsoft Services, which provides Premier services to customers. Microsoft Premier customer have a wide range of Premier agreement features and components that they can use to support their people, improve their processes, and improve the productive use of the Microsoft technology they have purchased. Some of these services we provide are known to the world as “Health Checks”, some as “Risk Assessment Programs” (or, shortly, RAPs). These are basically services where one of our technology experts goes on the customer site and there he uses a custom, private Microsoft tool to gather a huge amount of data from the product we mean to look at (be it SQL, Exchange, AD or anything else….). The Health Check or RAP tool collects the data and outputs a draft of the report that will be delivered to the customer later on, with all the right sections and chapters. This is done so that every report of the same kind will look consistent, even if the engagement is performed by a different engineer in a different part of the world. The engineer will of course analyze the collected data and write recommendations about what is configured properly and/or about what could or should be changed and/or improved in the implementation to make it adhere to Best Practices. To make sure only the right people actually go onsite to do this job we have a strict internal accreditation process that must be followed; only accredited resources that know the product well enough and know exactly how to interpret the data that the tool collects are allowed to use it and to deliver the engagement, and present/write the findings to the customer.

So why am I telling you this here, and how have I been using my early knowledge of OpsMgr and Powershell for ?

I have used that to write the Operations Manager Health Check, of course!

We had a MOM 2005 Health Check already, but since the technology has changed so much, from MOM to OpsMgr, we had to write a completely new tool. Jeff  (the original MOM2005 author, who does not have a blog that I can link to) and me are the main coders of this tool… and the tool itself is A POWERSHELL script. A longish one, of course (7000 lines, more or less), but nothing more than a Powershell script, at the end of the day. There are a few more colleagues that helped shape the features and tested the tool, including Kevin Holman. Some of the database queries on Kevin’s blog are in fact what we use to extract some of the data (beware that some of those queries have recently been updated, in case you saved them and using your local copy!), while some other information are using internal and/or custom queries. Some other times we use OpsMgr cmdlets or go to the SDK service, but a lot of times we query the database directly (we really should use the SDK all the times, but for certain stuff direct database access is way faster). It took most of the past year to write it, test it, troubleshoot it, fix it, and deliver the first engagements as “beta” to some customers to help iron out the process… and now the delivery is available! If a year seems like a long time, you have to consider this is all work that gets done next to what we all have to normally do with customers, not replacing it (i.e. I am not free to sit on my butt all day and just write the tool… I still have to deliver services to customers day in day out, in the meantime).

Occasionally, during this past calendar year, that is approaching its end, I have been willing and have found some extra time to disclose some bits and pieces, techniques and prototypes of how to use Powershell and OpsMgr together, such as innovative ways to use Powershell in OpsMgr against beta features, but in general most of my early adopter’s investment went into the private tool for this engagement, and that is one of the reasons I couldn’t blog or write much about it, being it Microsoft Intellectual Property.

But it is also true that I did not care to write other stuff when I considered it too easy or it could be found in the documentation. I like writing of ideas, thoughts, rants OR things that I discover and that are not well documented at the time I study them… so when I figure out things I might like leaving a trail for some to follow. But I am not here to spoon feed people like some in the bandwagon are doing. Now the bandwagon is busy blogging and writing continuously about some aspect of OpsMgr (known or unknown, documented or not), and the answer to the original question of Hugh is, in my opinion, that it does not really matter what the bandwagon is doing right now. I was never here to do the same thing. I think that is my differentiator. I am not saying that what a bunch of colleagues and enthusiasts is doing is not useful: blogging and writing about various things they experiment with is interesting and it will be useful to people. But blogs are useful until a certain limit. I think that blogs are best suited for conversations and thoughts (rather than for "howto's"), and what I would love to see instead is: less marketing hype when new versions are announced and more real, official documentation.

But I think I should stop caring about what the bandwagon is doing, because that's just another ego trip at the end of the day. What I should more sensibly do, would be listening to my horoscope instead:

[…] "How do you slay the dragon?" journalist Bill Moyers asked mythologist Joseph Campbell in an interview. By "dragon," he was referring to the dangerous beast that symbolizes the most unripe and uncontrollable part of each of our lives. In reply to Moyers, Campbell didn't suggest that you become a master warrior, nor did he recommend that you cultivate high levels of sleek, savage anger. "Follow your bliss," he said simply. Personally, I don't know if that's enough to slay the dragon — I'm inclined to believe that you also have to take some defensive measures — but it's definitely worth an extended experiment. Would you consider trying that in 2009? […]

Flickr Cake, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

Here the photo of another creation by Jyothi, that we have eaten two days ago with a bunch of Flickr-crazy friends: a Flickr cake! That wasn't only nice to see, it was also tasty!

Yesterday one of the "Social Centres" in Rome has been attacked by the police, and people have been sent out of it. I have struggled to find any mention of it in english, therefore I'll link a couple of italian articles and blog posts (try an automatic translation system - but at the same time I invite people who only write in italian to try and open out to the world, to let everybody know, by writing in english):
http://www.openpolis.it/dichiarazione/355693
http://www.ilmessaggero.it/articolo.php?id=33301
http://current.com/items/89435235_centri_sociali_alemanno_va_alla_guerra_sgomberato_l_horus_tensione_a_roma
http://davanti.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/la-zanzara-pensante/

Basically hat is happening is that Rome's major announced today that this is the first episode of a battle against the "Social Centres" and the he means to close/clear many of them. With the excuse that they are illegal places, filled with dangerous people. They even invented the presence of rudimentary "molotov" bombs that really turned out to be bottles of wine in it, to justify the action.
Once again, the old ghost of "security" is being used to repress spontaneous aggregation of people and use of spaces that were otherwise left to rot.
Should "Social Centres" be considered scary or dangerous? Just consider that last sunday I posted the photo below on Flickr and commented:

[...] The alternative people in Rome are growing. A lot of us have kids now, therefore you start seeing refurbished playgrounds and spaces for them inside of the various "Social Centres" [...]

Can you read? Playgrounds. Not bombs.

But what is a "Social Centre" anyway, for those reading this who don't know it? Here I found an interesting discussion about the translation of the term "Centro Sociale" from italian to english. An excerpt of that discussion follows:

[...] "centro sociale" is a place, usually occupied without police or government permission (the people staying there don't pay rent or anything basically) where militants, or politically aware groups, gather to discuss about issues and in some case prepare demonstration and revolt acts…For those of you knowing Milan like "Leoncavallo" once. Would you say "squat" or something similar?
[...]
I don't believe there is a one-on-one equivalent in English for this culturally-embedded term. [...] I'd like to underline that also in italian we use the term "squat" but it is slightly different from "centro sociale"; maybe we are poaching in the political nuances…but with "squat" in italian we refer mainly to an illegally occupied place where people live (they sleep,they cook…etc etc), while "centro sociale", especially way back in the Seventies, was mainly the center of great political awareness, of political activists, at least in the Far-left activists' intentions and point of view.
[...]
Despite there being a tradition of social spaces in occupied buildings (also known as squatting), the recent upsurge in (legal) social centres has come about in the last five years. List of current UK social centres, either squatted or legal [...]

In the meantime, the Wikipedia page for "Social Centre" has also become pretty complete in its description. It says:

[...] Social Centers are community spaces. They are buildings which are used for a range of disparate activities, which can be linked only by virtue of being not-for-profit. They might be organizing centers for local activities or they might provide support networks for minority groups such as prisoners and refugees. Often they provide a base for initiatives such as cafes, free shops, public computer labs, graffiti murals, legal collectives and free housing for travellers. The services are determined by both the needs of the community in which the social center is based and the skills which the participants have to offer. Social centres tend to be in large buildings and thus can host activist meetings, concerts, bookshops, dance performances and art exhibitions. Social centres are common in many European cities, sometimes in squats, sometimes in rented buildings.
[...]
"Social centres are abandoned buildings - warehouses, factories, military forts, schools - that have been occupied by squatters and transformed into cultural and political hubs, explicitly free from both the market, and from state control… Though it may be hard to tell at first, the social centres aren't ghettos, they are windows — not only into another way to live, disengaged from the state, but also into a new politics of engagement. And yes, it's something maybe beautiful." (Klein, 2001).
[...]
The social centre concept has taken root most successfully in Italy, beginning in the 1970s. Large factories and even abandoned military barracks have been "appropriated" for use as social centers. There are today dozens of social centers in Italy, often denoted by the initials CSOA (Centro Sociale Occupato Autogestito). Examples include, Pedro in Padova, Spartaco in Ravenna, Officina 99 in Naples and Forte Prenestino, Corto Circuito and Villaggio Globale in Rome and Leoncavallo in Milan. The historic relationship between the Italian social centers and the Autonomia movement (specifically Lotta Continua) has been described briefly in Storming Heaven, Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomous Marxism, by Steve Wright. Social centres in Italy continue to be centres of political / social dissent. Notably the Tute Bianche and Ya Basta Association developed directly out of the social center movement, and many social forums take place in social centers. They are also used for hacklabs, activist copyleft centers (for example, LOA Hacklab in Milan). [...]

So well, what Wright has written is certainly true, and historically the Social Centres might have been tied to the extreme political dissent of the seventies. I don't say that that old model was right; but over time they grew to be very different and beautiful aggregation places where a lot of different activities take place. People have grown up, they calmed down, and are now building spaces for everybody who wants to join in and enjoy and share. There are places for concerts, and theatre, and kids play.

In certain occasions beautiful stories are told, and the audience listens, open-mouthed and enchanted:

There are happenings where a lot of creativity takes place, such as the yearly juggler meet-up, that is filled with so much joy and fun:

There is sharing of ideas, knowledge, and interests, such as the Hacklabs / Hackmeetings:

Someone commented ironically on the above, stating they found it strange to see a Microsoft employee joining that crew of the Hackmeeting.
I say that there is nothing wrong in passing by a computer geeks convention. Because that's what it is, after all.
Only difference from commercial conferences is that, well - it isn't commercial or sponsored by any company. Nobody will try to sell you anything, but nonetheless you might be able to learn something.

Talking about non-commercial, non-profit sharing, another example is the terraTERRA market that started in Rome at "Forte Prenestino" a couple of years ago:

[...] terraTERRA is the experimentation of an economic model where producers and consumers are committed to each other in order to subvert distribution chains, shorten food distance, value social relations, pleasure and taste. [...]

With all this amount of activities, even tourist resource recognize their importance and you start find reference of them on the net when searching for "what to do in Rome". From the previous link:

[...] If a visit to a squat doesn't rank high on your list of holiday priorities, think again. As any local musician will tell you, the best place to feel the pulse of Rome's music scene is in the Centri Sociali - semi-legal social centres organising concerts, film screenings, theatre and dance events, evening classes, language courses and a host of other activities. Some bands such as Rage Against the Machine play only in the Centri [...]

So why would you go and fight and declare war against these places and people?

Because they offer socialization and fun and aggregation, but they do it FOR FREE, and outside of lobbies and commercial interests. Because they undermine the logic of having to buy and own something in order to feel well.

It really boils down to what seems to be the only accepted way of socializing today, in some circles: free sharing and respect are labeled as dangerous, and the only accepted form of a social place is what turns around money: shopping centres, cinemas, restaurants, and any other place where you can be part of society by spending. If you can't spend you have no place. Anything that does not involve money but sincere expression and sharing is not allowed, when not even actively banned.  Talking about the squatted building that has ben emptied yesterday, it had been left to degrade for decades. Now that is was used for something useful, the owners decided they want to build a supermarket in it. So the occupants had to move out. No bombs, no dangerous people. Just money talks.

I have been playing music again, something I had not done in a while. I can certainly improve my equalizing skill, as the piano got distorted (among other things) in the MP3 conversion… and I would like to add a singing voice to it… but if you're curious, in the meantime, you can listen to the first test of a song I did with the new setup:

After several years not touching my midi keyboard not my guitar, this is the natural evolution of having bought a new PC, I suppose: I got inspired and wanted to play music again. Sure, I also study and test stuff on it, but I also want to do something that really is for myself. And something that makes me help relax, instead than working around the clock.

It is then that I figured out how much has changed in these few years: cheap soundcards don't come with MIDI interfaces anymore, these days. That's probably because they were shared with the so called "GAME Port"…. but since most joysticks these days are USB…. also the MIDI disappeared.

Therefore I did a bit of research, and I found an interesting external sound card that does everything I want (and more) and (most importantly) has drivers for Windows Vista x64. I am actually using this on Windows 2008 Server, but since Vista and 2008 really have the same kernel - it just works.

Esha Tizafy gets born in Madagascar. She leaves her island when she's only seven years old with her parents, who arrive in Sicily, in Palermo, where she still lives.

Author, composer and singer, she follows a musical path that helps drawing a bridge across cultures.
Her research grows from tradition and modernity at the same time.

I had heard her in 2007 in a previous concert in Rome and she had found on Flickr the pictures I took in that occasion. Therefore she asked if I could take some new pictures next time she would hold a concert in my area. This occasion has been on the 9th of August, in Rome.

I hope that her record will be ready soon, because she really deserves to be heard! I also suggested she registers on last.fm and share something there. For now you can contact her on MySpace.

I am not sure about why I went to sicily on holiday: it might be because my ancestors came from that land; it might be because in Holland I felt like Dorothy at the beginning of "the wizard of Oz" every time there was a thunderstorm ( = I was afraid the house would fly away); it might be because I have a physical need for a "Granita di Mandorla" every so much time.

Whatever the reason, Holiday is over and tomorrow I'll be back at work for a new busy year.

So this is a screenshot from my new Quad-Core Intel Q6600, 8GB RAM with Windows 2008 Enterprise x64, running Hyper-V.
I have bought it and installed it a few days ago, and migrated my home Active Directory off the old windows 2003 machine to Windows 2008. Yes, because I have an Active Directory at home. I know, I am probably nuts, but you already knew that much.

Today, I just updated Hyper-V to RTM version. Oh yeah, because Hyper-V has been Released To Manufacturing today! You can get it HERE.

I am having lot of fun with this. I had not bought a new PC in about 7 years and could not really test anything on that old one anymore…
I paid 8GB roughly 100euros, which is not a lot if you think about it. These days even standard "budget" PCs for just doing email and web surfing ship with 2 or 4GB…
With that amount of RAM, I expect it to last several years like the previous one. The one I bought 7 years ago had 512MB when everybody was buying 128 or 256MB. Kinda the same story here.

Wonder what happens to the old PC? That glorious machine that has been my server for years has now been converted to the new kids' PC and will go on for a few more years like that, I hope.

One of the pictures I took in Pisa at the Hackmeeting has been published in June's issue of "Internet Magazine", a famous italian IT magazine.

The article talks about Internet Privacy and the "Piano R*" project by Autistici/Inventati.

This is the cover of the magazine:

How many times you have gone somewhere (public demonstration, event, concert, etc) where yo saw other people shooting photos and you though "some of them MUST be flickr'ers"…. but you never had the guts to go and introduce yourself?

Now it's time to show off that you are a Flickr'er, and let other people figure it out.

Polo:

www.cafepress.com/cp/customize/product.aspx?clear=true&am…

Cap:

www.cafepress.com/cp/customize/product.aspx?clear=true&am…
NOTE:

This is just an idea and it is NOT endorsed by Flickr itself.

Also, I do not get any money for it - those are just the prices imposed by the online shop used to create them. I just thought it was a funny idea and I wanted to share it.