Themeword 2010: FOCUS
Focus
I have never been one for putting together a list of resolutions every year only to forget about them before the new year is a month old. However, there was a discussion and game of tag that emerged on Twitter among the SQL Server tribe recently about choosing a themeword instead of listing resolutions. After reading about the themewords that were chosen by Thomas Larock (@SQLRockstar), Colin Stasiuk (@BenchmarkIT), and doing a little reading about the concept over at HPC, I decided that I would jump into the ring and try it out this year.
My themeword for 2010: FOCUS
The one thing that I realized over the past year that has been missing in both my professional and personal life is focus. I need to focus more on my career development this year. The role of a Teradata DBA has been a great source of achievement and satisfaction for me over the past several years. I still enjoy the thrill I get when I hyperfocus on a performance tuning a query, writing a statistics maintenance routine, building an object catalog or developing a multivalue compression routine. But I also have the desire to learn more about data management, data quality, and data governance. While I blogged about data governance, data management and business intelligence this past year, many of the issues that I have dealt day in and day out with have centered on being a DBA and less on theses other areas. This year I want to spend more time focusing on these areas because they are going to continue become increasingly more important in both the public and private sectors.
I have also made several great connections on Twitter. I would like to focus on strengthening theses connections over the course of the upcoming year. In doing so, I need to also make sure that I focus on the value that LinkedIn can provide through its discussions and even local meet-ups that occur on a semi-regular basis. This also includes branching out into new realms such as attending the local SQL Server PASS meetings on a regular basis.
However, just as important as focusing on career development there needs to be equal amounts of time spend focusing on developing as a father and husband. I have been very fortunate that I have been able to be an active participant in the activities that both my sons have been involved in over the past several years, from coaching Little League to bowling tournaments to roller skating and school parties. But I need to work harder as they grow older to serve as a role model and provide guidance for them as they face the transition from childhood to adolescence and adulthood. As a husband I need to focus on setting time aside for my wife and I to do things together. All too often we are so caught up in our children's activities, day-to-day life, or my Playstation 3 gaming habits. It doesn't need to be anything elaborate like cruises or vacations abroad (although I wouldn't mind either!). Just something simple like catching dinner and a movie or having take-out dinner and watching a movie at home.
How to Pick Your #ThemeWord for 2010
- Think of a word that reflects your hopes and dreams for 2010.
- Share your ThemeWord with friends on Twitter, Facebook, or Your Blog.
- Be sure and use the hashtag #ThemeWord.
Tag Your IT!
I am going to tag a couple of the people that I have met on Twitter this year:
All Your URL are Belong to Us
Today's Lesson
Today, Google announced the launch of goo.gl, its own URL shortening service. It is currently in a "limited" release for users of its Google products such as Feedburner and the Google Toolbar. This was done in concert with Feedburner's new enhancement called Socialize, which will currently send your feed to the Twitter account you specify. In order for your feed to be socialized in near real-timte they suggest you leverage Feedburners "ping" feature whenever you publish a post. Overall, the Socialize feature of Feedburner is a nice enhancement and I hope that we will see additional services like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn included in the future.
However, the most important feature that was launched today was the URL shortening service. Why is this so important? Because several URL shortening services have come and gone over the past couple years. With the demise of these services comes the inability to redirect the user from the shortened URL to the target URL, also known as linkrot. Brent Ozar wrote about his suspicions of using free web services to shorten URLs for this very reason. With Google the chance that your shortened URL will rot is virtually nil given Google's appetite for data.
While Google has said it will protect users of its URL shortening from malware and phishing it would be nice to see a link preview feature enabled. The current version of TweetDeck (v0.32.1) simply opens your web browser with the resolved goo.gl link while for other services such as bit.ly a preview of the full URL is given in a pop-up window . This is either due to TweetDeck not understanding how to handle goo.gl's URL preview or because goo.gl has not exposed a URL previewing feature. Google would be doing its users a disservice if a URL previewing feature is not exposed sooner than later.
Finally, how long before the current crop of URL shortening services fade away or are bought by Google. With the adoption of bit.ly as the default URL shortening service by Twitter in 2009 combined with Twitter's explosive growth in 2009 the loss of bit.ly's URL resolution over time could be troubling for many.
Will goo.gl become the dominating URL shortening service or do you think services such as bit.ly and ow.ly can survive?
Engaging the Teradata Community
If you are looking for Teradata developer or DBA resources, you are not going to find an equivalent to SQLServerPedia yet. The Teradata developers and DBA's aren't found tweeting about join indexes, DBQL, or fallback, nor are they blogging about multi-value compression, UDFs, or Teradata Active System Management (TASM) on a regular basis. That doesn't mean the community doesn't exist you just have to know where to find it and how to engage it.
Finding the pieces...
The TeradataForum
The TeradataForum has been around for over a decade now. However it is not a traditional forum, it is an independently operated, semi-moderated listserv that is maintained by John Hall. A listserv is a lot like a party line in your Inbox. You can listen in and talk when you feel the need. However, there are some drawbacks in that conversations can't be easily taken offline as email addresses were stripped before the message goes out on the listserv. The website for the TeradataForum provides a collection of sample threads, archive of threads by year, and the ability to search the listserv via Google. All in all, it is a great resource that has been serving the community well for quite some time.
Teradata Forums
A few years back Teradata established the Teradata Forums, a traditional discussion forum, for Teradata users to congregate and discuss all things Teradata. It currently boasts over 8,000 users discussing over 4,500 topics. The Teradata Forums are a great place for those who would rather not participate in a listserv to engage the Teradata community when they have a problem or to give back to the community when they have a spare minute to answer some questions.
Teradata Developer Exchange
Announced just this summer, the Teradata Developer Exchange is the latest step toward building a stronger community for Teradata developers and DBA's. Here you will find articles submitting by some of Teradata's own brightest employees on topics ranging from Priority Scheduler, Statistics, Viewpoint, and UDF development. There is also a forum here as well that allows community members to discuss many of the same topics that are discussed on the Teradata Forums without having to leave the Developer Exchange to ask or answer a question. There is also a section here to download some of the things that may be useful to developers like an Eclipse plug-in or the recently released alpha version of SQL Assistant Java Edition.
TeradataQuestions
TeradataQuestions is the most recent member of the Teradata Community. TeradataQuestions is an independently run forum based on the Stack Overflow Knowledge Exchange. (The best example of this can be seen at StackOverflow.) StackOverflow has become wildly successful in part because the community not only provides answers to the questions but they have the ability to flag the best answer and also vote on the question or the answers within the question. Participation in the community earns you reputation points and badges. Is there better way to encourage community involvement and self policing than by allowing your input to be voted up or down by your peers?
Get involved
The Teradata developer and DBA community is flourishing. You just have to know where the pieces are and figure out which pieces fit the missing pieces that make up your involvement in the community. How are you engaging the Teradata developer and DBA community? Let me know in the comments...
Five Ways to Embrace your Geekness
Geek Edition
Today is officially the day were us geeks have a chance to celebrate being a geek. It is an opportunity to enjoy all of our gadgets and time spent in front of the computer. Here are few ways that you can spend your day. I have done several of these already and others are on my list of things to do.
- Turn your $60 router into a $500+ router with Tomato Firmware. Tomato is a easy to use replacement firmware for Linksys, Buffalo, and other Broadcom-based routers. It has a simple and easy to use GUI, ability to monitor bandwidth, advance QOS, multiple DynDNS services, and other advanced features.
- Turbocharge your DNS services and add advanced content control using OpenDNS. By simply replacing your DNS Servers from your ISP with OpenDNS's DNS servers you gain anti-phishing protection via PhishTank and improved speed by automatically resolving your DNS requests with the DNS server that is located closest to you. Advanced content control is available to you if you choose to open a free account with them. Automatically determine how wide or restricted you want your internet to be for the entire house. No software installation is required on any computer in your house. I could dedicate an entire blog post to using this service. For more information, check out their website. I can't speak highly enough about this service.
- Run multiple virtual environments. Want to run Windows 7 RC on your system but don't want to dedicate a physical partition on your machine? You may want to consider trying Sun's VirtualBox. VirtualBox is available under the GPL. It supports a large number of Guest OSes including Ubuntu, Windows 7 RC, SUSE, Fedora, and many others. The host OS can be Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and OpenSolaris. The latest release, 3.0.0, includes support of Direct 3D 8/9, OpenGL 2.0, and Guest SMP with up to 32 virtual CPUs. What else were you planning to do with that 1 terabyte hard drive?
- Run a SSH Proxy using PuTTY that you can access anywhere to tunnel your web browsing for increased security. Chad Perrin has provided a nice write up on how to configure a SSH proxy using PuTTY. Sadly even as Microsoft prepares to release Windows 7 they have yet to figure out a way to provide a built in SSH client or daemon. However, once you have installed Tomato firmware you can configure your own SSH server and with Port Forwarding access it from anywhere you have internet access. By signing up for a dynamic DNS hostname you can access your SSH proxy without having to remember your dynamically assigned IP address. (You can sign up for free a dynamic DNS hostname using DynDNS. Don't forget to modify the Firefox setting to use your network proxy to resolve your DNS entries as well. (about:confg -> network.proxy.socks_remote_dns = true)
- Brush up your 100 essential skills as a geek. Anton Olsen over at GeekDad has comprised a list of 100 essential skills any self-respecting geek should be able to accomplish. These skills inlcude being able to open a Master combination padlock in under 10 minutes, being a Google search ninja, and knowing the answer to life, the universe and everything.
Bonus Material: Do you find that your spouse, girlfriend or parents just doesn't understand your inner geek? Well here is something you can share with them: The Nerd Handbook. While your reading the Nerd Handbook be sure you add Rands to your RSS feeds, he is a fantastic blogger worth following.
Bonus Material: Here are some well known geeks worth following on Twitter: Chris Hardwick (@nerdist), Adam Savage (@donttrythis), Grant Imahara (@grantmahara), and Levar Burton (@levarburton)
I may just take a few of these items listed above and blow them out into full blog posts to show how I am using some of these. I glossed over many of them for the sake of your attention span because I know you have Twitter open, four other tabs in your browser, and your iPhone next to you playing Pandora or Last.fm.
Do you have a secret project or geek skill that you are keeping close to the chest? Why not share it below in the comments with the other readers.
