Supply and Demand

Currently I am enrolled in the MBA program at Temple and this semester taking the graduate level economics course. This is all good, and professor seems to love the topic, which makes for a fun course.
However, for those thinking about doing your MBA, do it now don't put it off. I have had previous opportunities to go for my MBA before I had kids, and when I had employers that would cover a much bigger portion of the bill. Big mistake it only gets harder and I think you have less time to get the other benefits of networking and socializing that you might get if you can spend more time getting involved.
Also my guess is that if you mapped the value of an MBA relative to age, so your Y is value of MBA vs X being your age, value is much higher the younger you are maybe mid 20's? While this might be true and the value I receive might be diminished, it keeps me learning and that is worth it.

Symantec, Altiris, and the field.

Does anyone know the amount of systems management vendors in business, how many are up and coming, how many have vanished and how many have gone open source ?
Symantec acquires Altiris

And who makes up the top 5 these days? IBM, HP, CA, BMC and now Symantec?

Every time I check out a VC site I find at least one 'management vendor' and let's check out this list from Accel Partners
* Broad Jump (Acquired by Motive, listed below)
* Hyperic (Recently went open source)
* Mendocino Software
* Motive
* Remedy ( Acquired by BMC )
* Wily ( Acquired by CA? )

And to pick another random VC, Mayfield Fund
* IT Groundwork - Open source systems management (nagios ;)
* Cemaphore
* Centrify
* ... getting tired of this ;)

Get it. There are a lot of them, and managing systems is important. There are a lot of ways to do it, and many projects and products are willing to help you ;)

Ice Skating and Coding

Absolutely not related.
I took my 5 year old, ice skating this weekend, first time and he did a great job. But earlier I had spent the morning working on Blue. Some how everyday I get a combination of the real world and my virtual world, life is good.
Synchronized Blue with Nagios 2.7, pretty simple. Also, had someone offer to Maven'ize project blue (http://sourceforge.net/projects/blue), looking forward to seeing that.

Blue, a java port of nagios.

Took on this project in my spare time quite a while ago and very excited by the progress it is making. While I am a big fan of nagios there were three things preventing me from getting invovled

a. develop on windows. I tried hard to get things working with cygwin, but had problems especially with plug-in development.

b. build to deploy. I just like to download and run, with as little constraints as possible. I talked to other nagios users in production environments and they had similar desire.

c. java developer. While I can still code in C/C++ I have been developing in java for so long now that I just find my way around a lot quicker. Also, like to leverage what is built into things like jboss, jetty and tomcat and other great projects.

So, what did I do? I rewrote nagios in java, and calling it blue. I rewrote the server, the console and some of the plugins. You can run blue in any combination with existing nagios components and configuration files. However, blue server, console, and plugins out of the box can just run in a self-contained location on any OS.

Stay tuned for a distribution as it is coming shortly.