All posts by nadyne

Nadyne

news cat gifs

Yes, I know, the title sounds like it’s spam, but bear with me.  The coolest tumblr that I’ve found lately is News Cat Gifs: animated .gifs of reporters cats reacting to news events.  It’s hysterical, and I have to say that no small number of them apply to my job as a researcher …

Okay, that’s enough animated gifs for now, go find your own favorites.

VMware

VMware acquires DynamicOps

Last year, my co-workers and I were joking that we seemed to be acquiring half the Valley.  And then it felt like acquisitions slowed down, but now we’ve got a new one: VMware has signed an agreement to acquire DynamicOps, a company that has some awesome applications that help get you to the cloud faster.  More information about it is available from a blog post from DynamicOps, a blog post from VMware, and a press release too.

Welcome, DynamicOps!  (And if you work in UX at DynamicOps, ping me.  I’d love to get together with you and introduce you to UX at VMware!)

user experience, VMware

research participants needed

5 Comments

Edited on Friday 7/13 at 11am: Thanks for your interest!  We now have all of the participants that we need.  But we’re still looking for people who would like to participate in research about security policies … 

My team is conducting some research about troubleshooting in virtual environments.  If you’re a virtual infrastructure architect or senior admin who does a lot of troubleshooting, we’d love to hear from you.

For this study, we are looking for people who perform troubleshooting tasks in their VMware environment and are willing to share their experiences with us.  For those of you who are local to the Bay Area, we can either come to you and chat with you in your environment, or we can do a conference call.  For those of you outside of the Bay Area, we’ll do a conference call.

Our research will be conducted beginning on July 9.  If you’d like to participate, please email me with the following information:

  1. Your name, email address, and telephone number.
  2. How big is your virtual environment?  (number of hosts, number of VMs, etc)
  3. What kind of issues do you troubleshoot?
  4. What tools do you use for troubleshooting?
  5. Does your organization use vCenter Operations? (We’re looking for a mix of people who do and don’t use it.)
  6. Would you be willing to show our researcher the tools you use for troubleshooting your environment via during an online screen-sharing session (such as WebEx)?

Feel free to share this blog post with anyone you know who might be interested in chatting more with VMware about troubleshooting.

Nadyne

a small personal note

2 Comments

Tipsy, my 18-year-old Maine Coon cat, passed away yesterday at about 12:30.  I acquired him as a six-month-old abused kitten, and we haven’t been separated since.  I’ve had him for literally half my life.  And now, I don’t.

Eighteen years is longer than I ever could have asked for, and not nearly long enough. Rest in peace, Tipsy.  I’ll miss you more than I will ever be able to articulate.

Tipsy snoozing, March 2010
Tipsy, asleep on the sofa in March 2010
user experience

how to disguise bad research

There’s a lot of bad research out there.  And there’s lots of ways to disguise bad research.  Perhaps I’m just overly sensitive to it, but it seems like one awesome way to disguise your bad research is via the use of infographics.

Take, for example, this infographic about the relative impact of social media activity between Google Plus, Facebook, and Twitter.  In their research, they say that getting more Google Plus activity to be most closely correlated to increased visibility in Google results.

Now, I actually found this picture that explains the differences in social media via donuts1 to be more accurate.  I just went and looked at my G+ page.  I follow ~100 people there.  Now, I freely admit that my sample isn’t anything that could be remotely considered to be statistically significant, and my sample is clearly skewed towards my friends (who are, generally speaking, geeks), but here’s the posts that I found from the past seven days:

  • A Google employee2; he generally posts to G+ first and then (I probably shouldn’t give his secret away) posts to Facebook.
  • A friend who is cross-posting everything from Twitter to G+.
  • My employer, who also appears to be cross-posting everything from one of our official Twitter accounts to G+.
  • A friend whose blog automatically posts a link to G+ whenever there’s a new post.
  • A friend, who is not a Google employee, who appears to be actually using G+ to post content.  It appears that he’s posting weekly-ish.

Looking over my own experience, this research just doesn’t sit well with me.  I don’t know what I could do that would actually get 100 “+1” activities on G+, whereas my recent Facebook post acknowledging my wedding anniversary got ~70 likes and comments within the first 12 hours of the post.

Leaving aside my own experience, though, their methodology seems pretty dodgy.  They say that they got 100 G+ followers, and that increased their Google ranking by 14.53; on the other hand, getting 50 Facebook links and shares increased their ranking by 6.9.  And they even note that their methodology is dodgy, since they conducted their experiment in different markets with varying degrees of social media sophistication.  Also, it’s somehow a surprise that Google’s algorithm would give a higher ranking to activity on G+ rather than a competing site?

But they’ve got a pretty infographic, and they’re trying to sell you search engine optimization solutions, so it must all be good.  Their conclusion is just as slimy as you might expect from someone doing such bad research:

Regardless of the individual results, this study is another confirmation of the growing consensus that any well-rounded SEO strategy will have to embrace an element of social media signals.

Yeah.  This study is totally confirmation that you need their services!  I guess they get credit for being less shady than the fake malware scammers, but I prefer to set the bar higher than that.

  1. In my very quick search, I couldn’t track down the originator of that picture. If you know, please share with me, and I’ll update my link so that the appropriate person gets the credit they so richly deserve.  If they’re local, I’ll even buy ’em a donut. ↩
  2. Who, to the best of my knowledge, isn’t a fan of donuts. ↩
software, Workstation

using VMware Workstation to thwart a fake antivirus scammer

3 Comments

I’ve gotten a bunch of fake antivirus/malware scammers calling my home lately.  Like others, sometimes I take delight in stringing them along, playing dumb while they try to get access to my machine.  Sometimes, I’ll ask them, “What’s Windows?”, waiting for them to figure out that I’m not actually a Windows users at all.  Or sometimes, when they tell me that they’re from Microsoft, I’ll use my old Microsoft credentials and say, “wow, I wasn’t aware that we were being more proactive about this, I’m so glad that our company has decided to do more to eradicate malware”.  Once they realize that they have someone technically adept on the call, they hang up instantly.

But I’ve never strung them along like this.  A couple of weeks ago, one of these scammers cold-called a security researcher from Sourcefire.  The security researcher immediately knew that it was a scam, but he decided to take it a step further: he quickly set up a virtual machine for them in VMware Workstation, and let the scammer go to town: “I realized I could give them an environment to bang around in”.    So the scammer installed LogMeIn, and then he watched (and, yes, captured video) while the scammer disabled Windows Services and VMware services (but not actually realizing that this means that he’s in a VM!), all the while insisting that he’s removing malware. Then they force a reboot under Safe Mode, which (given that they’ve disabled everything) won’t work properly.  This is how they try to get the victim of their scam to freak out and give them their credit card details, and likely will leave the victim with a computer that won’t work at all unless they can find someone else who can figure out that it’s simply that Windows Services have been disabled.

Dark Reading has a good breakdown of the security researcher’s call, and a shortened version of the call is available on YouTube.

VMware

VMware made the 2012 Top Workplaces list

On Sunday, my husband and I were sharing breakfast and the newspaper, when I discovered that the San José Mercury News has released its annual Top Workplaces list.  Who made the list for large (<500) employees, do you ask?  Why, VMware did.  We’re also the largest company on that list of large employers, with 3300 employees in the Bay Area.  Some of the reasons cited include supportive management, our green initiatives across campus, and our community commitment via the VMware Foundation (amongst others).

Mac

on buying Mac apps

2 Comments

Jonathan Rentzch, a Mac developer, wrote an interesting post about the pros and cons of buying Mac apps in the Mac App Store versus buying them directly from the developer.

I think that he sums up the developer experience really well.  From an end-user perspective, I think he’s overly dismissive of two major points (easier to buy and install apps, infinitely easier to know when software is updated).  I think that he also completely leaves aside the point that the MAS gives a lot of visibility to apps that would otherwise be overlooked.  This is good both for developers — even though the MAS takes a bigger cut of sales than developers would have by selling through other methods, the increase in sales probably more than makes up for it — and for end-users.  He also doesn’t include the point that developers cannot offer trials via the MAS today, which is negative for end-users.  For example, I’m using a trial of BusyCal right now because I wanted to see if it would fit into my workflow before plunking down $50 for it1.

It’s my hope that many of Rentzch’s points, especially those which are about the current sandboxing implementation, will disappear over time, and that the MAS will be a great solution for buying Mac apps.

  1. The answer, by the way, is yes.  It’s certainly miles and miles better than iCal! ↩
software

clustering programming languages

Back in my programming languages days, when I was on the committee for a programming languages conference, I spent lots of time arguing the pros and cons of certain languages1.  I still keep an eye on the programming languages community, even though I haven’t been actively involved since I was the Industry Chair for OOPSLA 2008.

So when I stumbled across this project by a couple of people at UC-Berkeley to cluster programming languages, of course I was interested.  They’re collecting opinions about programming languages via survey, and drawing plenty of interesting observations from the data that they’re collecting.  They’re showing correlations for various properties about the programming languages.  For example, there’s a high positive correlation between “I would use this language for writing server applications” and “the thought of using this language in 20 years fills me with dread”, which I have to admit made me laugh out loud.  There’s a high negative correlation between “code written in this language will usually run in all the major implementations if it runs on one” and “I would list this language on my resume”, another correlation which made me laugh.  Actually, all of the high correlations for “I would list this language on my resume” are pretty interesting.

For my fellow programming language geeks, you should definitely check out this site. And, of course, you should fill out the survey and help further their research!

  1. Smalltalk is the One True Language. ↩
VMware

new VMware Fellows

VMware did a totally awesome thing last week: we named our first VMware Fellows, Ole Agesen and Mike Nelson.  Aside from Ole and Mike getting a spiffy new title, their alma maters each received $800,000 endowments.

Having just been promoted to Staff, I’ve been talking with my manager lately about what my next career goal is.  Senior Staff is on my radar as my next move, but now I see I’ve got a new long-term goal to aim for.