Just a quick update on getting our office setup. In the last post on Building our Rigs, we were still in Chris Spagnuolo’s house. We have since moved into our "temporary" space while our final home is being built-out (more on that as the plans get finalized and construction starts!)

So let’s take a look around. As I noted before, we all have 3 monitor setups. It’s as good as you’d think. The workstation itself seems really fast, and the other guys have been really happy with the performance while developing. I’ve been traveling and setting up servers and the network so I’ll report back when I’ve had a chance to really beat on it.

As you can see I’m currently rocking the Home Depot desk. We’re still waiting for our Ikea desks to arrive, but a sheet of plywood and some sawhorses work quite well.  Since we went with the very economical Ikea desks we could afford Herman Miller Mirra chairs. Besides being a little less expensive than the Aeron, these are 96% recyclable. We gave these a test run at Rally when we visited them a while back.

Speaking of recycling, setting up an office generates an awful pile of waste from the packaging. We’re trying to recycle what we can, but these two bags are full of Styrofoam and other non-recyclable plastics. This pile is just from the packaging for the chairs, the printer and some other misc office supplies.

We have been able to put some of the cardboard boxes to some good use…

We’ll get a rack once we move to the new space, but for now our servers have to make do with what we’ve got. Speaking of servers, we got Dell PowerEdge’s with Xeon LV chips – they are supposed to use significantly less power than the standard Xeon chips. We are running 3 physical machines for now.

Our the File Server / Domain Controller and the SQL / Oracle servers have a single Quad Core Xeon CPU, and ~500GB RAID5.

Our App Server has two Quad Core Xeons, 8GB Ram, and two 15k disks. We’ll be running AGS and IMS on the base OS, and other stuff as needed in VMs.

We just barely got them up and running last week, but I can say this – they be FAST. And just disregard that tangled mess that is supposed to pass for a "built in networking panel". We”ll be keeping an eye on whoever is wiring up the new space for us, and ensure that we get a patch panel rather than another one of these!

Our server room also does double duty as a separated recycling storage area. Separating this stuff before you take it to the recycling center makes it so much easier.

So that’s about it for now. After the new year we’ll be getting a serious firewall so we can start hosting demo sites, and other fun stuff. Construction build out will start mid-January.

Got up a little early today and had some time to mess around. I had been reading about Virtual Earth 3D, and decided to see if it the control could be added to a Winforms app. I found a rough how-to from this blog, and it took a little more meddling to get things working, but it definitely does work.

Since the SDK is not actually released yet, it’s going to take some stumbling around the API to do useful stuff with it, but think about what this and SQL 2008 are going to allow us to build!

Many people jokingly refer to the “cult” of agile. But the reality is that to outsiders, many Agile teams, particularly those doing Scum, seem to have the messianic zeal of cult members. I think this is just fine, and really no different than the zeal you see from Ruby on Rails converts. These people are simply excited about having found something that really works for them, and they want to tell you about it. This becomes problematic when a dogma emerges – where you start to see semantic arguments which boil down to “I’m more agile than you because X.”

What I’ve seen this week at the Agile Development Methodologies conference is an underlying theme which more or less boils down to:

Agile = good, Dogmatic Agile = bad

Although this seems obvious, it’s the sort of thing that’s worth repeating because we are starting to see more people engage in “Are you Agile^[tm] Enough” debates on blogs and forums. This is dogma rearing it’s ugly head. If you happen across these threads, ignore them – they are irrelevant at best and detrimental at worst. Quite simply they are missing the point. The successful groups realize that silver bullets do not exist – agile or otherwise. There simply is no methodology which works for all teams in all situations. The key is to apply the agile concepts to your situation. Try some techniques – keep what works, drop what does not. Inspect and Adapt. But just be sure to leave the dogma out of it!

A month or so ago I was dumping another 2GB of photos and videos of my son Kai off our cameras and decided that I needed to get a more robust backup strategy – we’ve been using digital cameras since 2001 – I’d hate to lose it all!

I should preface this by stating that I had a kludgy “local replica” strategy. Basically a power shell script which dumped deltas from my home workstation to my home server, as well as an external drive. While that’s good enough to ward off critical failures in hardware, it really does not address theft, fire, or other serious natural disasters. For that you need off-site backups.

Enter Mozy.com. I have to give my co-worker Mike Juniper props for giving me the little shove I needed on this. The price was certainly right – $5 a month for unlimited storage, but I was concerned about how unlimited Mozy’s unlimited really was. Mike had uploaded 12GB without issue, so I took the plunge and see if I could jam all 36GB up there. And while it took about a week to get it all up there, it’s been working very smoothly.

For home users it’s ridiculously easy to setup. Your backups appear as a drive in File Explorer. Getting a file back is just drag and drop.

In fact this is working so smoothly that we are likely going to use Mozy Professional for offsite backups in our new office. This is set it and forget it software and Sit sure beats setting up cryptic backup software and slogging tapes back and forth!