Month: December 2007

ITIM 5.0 in the news

As mentioned previously, ITIM was released to manufacturing (RTMed) last week and yesterday was made electronically generally available (eGA). Yay!

Several news reports have been released. None of them mention the better performance with V5.0 (probably because we don’t give out specifics without a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) so they’d have no data they could share to back that up).

We’re not in Texas anymore

Well, specifically for this comparison: We’re not in Austin anymore.

It’s cold. Butt-freezing, teeth-chattering, toe-curling cold. The current temperature is 19 degrees with today’s high being 23. The low tonight is 8. Yes eight. Temperature-wise that’s been about par for the past week or more. It’s currently snowing and has been off and on for several days. The snow actually isn’t that bad (particularly since I can commute in house-shoes) but the cold is cold. It probably wouldn’t be so bad if we weren’t living in a 100-year-old building with original windows and 14′ ceilings. The building is heated by steam and apparently there isn’t enough steam to go around to warm up our loft to above 60 degrees on average (sometimes it gets up to 65 and we rejoice). Or, maybe, it does get above 60 degrees but you’d have to be 10′ tall to feel it given the high ceilings. And did I mention we don’t have ceiling fans to help circulate the warm air?

On the flip side I bought a pair of all-purpose boots on Sunday evening that have come in particularly handy for my treks outside (to the gym, library, bank, post office, etc).

But yes – it’s cold.

ITIM 5.0 RTMs!

I realize that subject line makes very little sense to non-IBMers, let me translate:

IBM Tivoli Identity Manager version 5.0 released to manufacturing last night just before midnight EST!

That may still not make much sense to some folks, so let me break it down further:

The project that I’ve been working on for almost 2-years was finally released last night on schedule!

This is a huge thing due to the size of the project, the size of the team, the aggressive schedule, and that few of us are still sane after the two years :)

This release has a lot of “firsts” that I was directly involved in that will positively impact our customers:

  • First time to have team members in all four US time zones. The joke is that I moved to Denver specifically for this reason. [Ok, this one doesn’t impact our customers but it’s a fun fact.]
  • First time to have a hardware sizing tool available at release instead of 90 days after release. This is vital as without a sizing tool our customers just have to guess what kind of hardware they need for their deployments.
  • First time to have a Performance Tuning Guide available at GA (general availability – about 5 days after RTM) instead of 90 days after release. This is important for customers with medium to large environments as well as the IBM Service team who is helping them deploy the version. [Well, technically we aren’t going to hit GA but rather 1.5 weeks after GA. Still that’s better than 12 weeks!]
  • First time to release an internal-only document for Support and Services highlighting some known rough spots in the product so they can guide customers around them.
  • And best of all: it’s the first time that product performance and scalability have been an integral focus of a release from the design phase. In all past releases performance and scalability have been, literally, the very last thing looked at just before we release. I’m unable to say in a public forum just how much faster the product is without all of you signing an NDA. Just trust me that It’s Faster and It Scales Better and that’s a Very Good Thing for our customers and for me!

Please excuse me while I do the engineer’s happy dance for about a week.

The importance of punctuation

Every time I hear the song Don’t Speak by No Doubt I think of the importance of punctuation. Specifically, take this line:

Don’t tell me cause it hurts

The meaning is actually ambiguous in my mind without some punctuation.

Consider it a rebuttal to some previous comment:

Don’t tell me “cause it hurts”

Or what about if it was actually an order:

Don’t; tell me: “cause it hurts”

Or maybe it is being spoken by someone who is a bit masochistic:

Don’t. Tell me cause it hurts

And yes, these are the things I think about when I’m at the gym and this song comes on :)