We have a saying in the various companies with which I associate and it is "Any fool can manage success, but it takes talent to manage a crisis". The leader, project manager, team leader, or whatever you call the person in charge has to not be wishful. This sounds easy, but in my experience it is one of the hardest things to do for any individual. We tend to be hopeful and that is the slippery slope / gateway drug to wishfulness.

The reason I say this is that my own biggest screw ups are almost all tracable to some point in the past where I assumed that something would happen more positively than it actually did. This sounds like the classic admonishment against assumption and to some extent it is, but wishful is more of the root cause and assumption the symptom.

As an infantry platoon leader in Iraq many years ago, I learned that you are never done planning for and defending against the things that can go wrong. When you envision contact with the enemy it is easy to expect that things will follow the simplest route and flow like water, but since there are humans involved this is highly unlikely to be the case. You might even get lucky and survive this way once or even twice, but that just means you are more likely to get killed when your luck runs out. I try to run projects the same way. What if the components that should work fine together don't? What if the client changes the deployment server to run a 64 bit OS instead of the 32 bit OS on the test server? What if there is an illness or death in the family of my key developer the week before delivery? You can drive yourself crazy with these things and I am here to say that you should. That is the job.

The first place to start is by making plans and schedules with milestones. If you are collaborating with others it flushes out wide variations in viewpoint quickly. Either I accept your timeline or propose another (assuming I am not totally whacked). If I propose another you might discover that it just won't work early enough to do something about it. I have seen good resources fail to deliver items well within their ability due to time wasted assuming everyone has the same, sane view of what needs to be done by when.

And to top it all off if you follow this advice and try to plan for all possible outcomes, there will still be surprises and things that you did not count on which is good because otherwise we could write a program to replace your part in the show...

Michele Bustamante and I have started recording the first episodes of our new security focused podcast LockDown. While the website is up, it has place holder content describing Carl Franklin of .Net Rocks fame as our first guest (that was the original plan). However as usual Carl was flying around the globe when we started and we all agreed to save him for later.

If you are interested watch the podcast url or my blog (here) for the first show when it releases.

The Microsoft Identity story has matured quite a bit in the last couple of years and now would be a good time to get up to speed if you have been waiting for the train to get some speed. Vittorio Bertocci has pulled together the training he has been delivering around the world into a training kit including videos of the Redmond versions of the presentations. Check out the June 2010 edition of the Identity Training Kit here.

I have noticed a very interesting reaction recently to the way Apple has been throwing their weight around controlling who and what can be put in the appstore. Until a month or so ago there was a legion of companies and developers in my own circle, figuring out how they would enter the market and what they would develop, but that has changed dramatically in light of Apples series of what I consider large mistakes if not outright blunders. Pulling the storm trooper card on the guys that got the prototype phone, pulling the rug out from under Mono Touch, going to war with Adobe and also seeming to persecute all those that raise a voice in protest has put an enormous chill on most of those that I know that were looking to build applications for the iPhone and iPad. I own an iPhone and have bought an iPad so I am not a hater, just not a blind supplicant. I do not have any products launched or targeted to the AppStore (and have shelved those plans myself for the reasons many others I talk to are), so I really don't see how I can be punished for speaking my mind (Sad that I now believe that if Apple had a way of punishing me, I now fully believe they would use it).

I think this is an example of Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely. If you grip power too tightly you lose it and unless the groupies really do outnumber the rest of us this is a dangerous way for Apple to do business. How can we trust developing on a platform where the rules seem to change on a whim and which is controlled by those whose friends are treated no better than enemies...

I was recently asked how to cost effectively do backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) for a 50 or so person organization.

Here is what I have found to be a pretty good way to go that won't break the bank.

For an organization this size I use Backup Assist (http://www.backupassist.com). It leverages Windows Backup and has agents for Exchange and SQL.

I then break things into three categories and treat each slightly differently.

Level 1
The things you call critical such as active email, source code, CRM, financial data, etc.
This stuff gets backed up daily and depending on my level of paranoia (how screwed we are if we lose X days) I copy it offsite either to an alternate office or if none exists (your scenario) to either a hosted server at a datacenter somewhere (max on the disk and bandwidth and min on all else which is much less than you $750 per month) or to a server connected via VPN to the company principle's house (poor man's hosted server).

Level 2
The things that change often, but just aren't level 1 such as home directories, business shares and other data.
Data in this category gets weekly backups and usually gets posted monthly to a large USB drive which gets rotated with its twin monthly. The drive with the current data is brought offsite for storage (again maybe to the company principal's house or maybe a safe deposit box). When the new drive is delivered the old one comes back to be used for the following month's backup.

Level 3
These are the unchanging files like images, email archives and stuff.
You can either burn these to optical media (if you do muliple copies with one going to the company principal's house(s) and a copy to the safety deposit box if you got one) or you can lump this onto the USB drive shuffle.

Hope this helps those who might be looking for this kind of insight.

The latest security threat as outlined here has hit over 100,000 people already and if you read through the details of how organized the attack is you will understand why it has been so successful. The problem is that while we have to protect ourselves from every threat, the bad guys only have to find one vulnerability to lay your plans to waste.

Security is a war, and the hackers are not slowing down their attacks.

It seems that everytime the government gets involved in high tech, things go wrong. Today I found out that there is a looming intervention that I think could potentially screw up one of the biggest successes in US based high tech, namely processor technology.

If you get time soon check out the petition here.

I would really like to see this kind of meddling prevented.

Lately I have been helping customers find talented developers. As the topic of many books, courses, web sites and numerous other sources (many of which I have read or used) it is a problem that I find keenly interesting.

There are of couse many, many ways to look at it, but I think I have found the single most important strength not just for technical talent. So take this as advice for your own advancement or as the thing to look for and test for when you are hiring. The key strength is to be able to accept feedback and objectively recognize it for truth when it is true and then have the strength of character to actually try to work to improve as a response.

It sounds easy, but it is not. It is also very much at odds with being an ego maniac (in other words those people can't do it). If someone passes this test then the sky is truly the limit, they will be able to improve, move up the ladders of responsiblity and will likley only be limited by the strength of their intellect.

Try it yourself sometime by asking someone for honest feedback and see if you can act on it. Repeat.

Over the last year I have gotten an education on PHP and MySQL web sites to go along with my existing expertise with ASP.Net and SQL Server.

It turns out that I purchased a web site a little over a year ago that supports gamers who play World of Warcraft (a game I have played for years). The site gets about 100,000 unique users a month with just shy of a million page views a month. The site was written in PHP against a MySQL backend and is just not driving the revenue yet to justify porting it to ASP.Net and SQL Server (though as you will read here the balance of pain is shifting that equation). It turns out that we end up rebooting the system pretty damn often which was a problem with IIS back in the old days, but not one I have had in recent versions.

We have thrown more hardware at the system, brought in professional help and it just seems that at these levels of use the system runs down and needs a kick and sometimes intensive care.

My point here is that it has been an education for me to validate what I suspected, there is no magic with the non-MS stack. It can hang in some regards, but it seems that for really heavy loads, MS has got them beat on stability. I am working on an ASP.Net with SQL Server site now that handles similar traffic and it just doesn't suffer the same issues.

I plan to dig deeper into the tech here if for no other reason to figure out what it takes to port the site to ASP.Net with SQL Server.

I have been working on commercial products for a long time and repeatedly have seen companies compete with similar solutions. Often one is the technology leader and innovates while the other plays catch up and only survives by clever marketing. Sometimes the laggard can become the market leader, but typically only if the innovator makes a mistake (the classic example of a market leader losing ground due to a mistake is when New Coke came out).

When it comes to software products the rule is pretty simple, mistakes in usability are the ones that cost marketshare fastest. Customers are pretty tolerant of technical issues and bugs since all sofware has them, but if the user feels stupid when trying to use your product, they will switch very quickly to an alternative.

Bottom line is that mistakes of ususability are more costly in a competitive market than almost anything else, design wisely.