John's posterous

It's been a busy day here. I started with a meeting to kick off the
collaborative tools project and then had a meeting about formalizing the
puppet setup.

 The collaborative tools project is going to be good. Not only is it
going to be bringing a lot of really useful tools to the University but
it should also be quite a fast moving project. We are going to be
working in a semi-agile manor with small projects and quick feedback.
Today we just started to talk about some of the ideas of where people
are already collaborating and the process that they are going though
where we may be able to offer them better tools. I think that we are
going to now try an focus in on a couple of particular examples and work
out what could make them easier and the tools we could offer centrally
to help them. The University can't hope to compete with the facebooks
or delicious of the world but we should be able to offer services that
are hosted locally and offer more local features.

 The puppet meeting was good as it is starting to move from a pet project
of a few to be an official project. As more of the infrastructure starts
to depend on it then we need to start making it more serious. We made a
good start today with looking at the issues and have some next steps. I
for one have to find out a neat way of tracking what depends on what so
that we can make educated decisions about changing the lower modules in
the chain and what that may effect. I like puppet and I think that
longer term, if we approach it right it can offer real advantages in
system management especially in the virtual server world.

 Finished off by closing a couple of user issues. I did not even start
the things I was thinking about on the train in but none the less a good
day.