Here's me in August talking about some of the pains of Big Agile. When Cote put it on his blog, the only comment was some guy dogging my monitor. That situation has since been remedied.

My 5 year-old daughter and I were down by the old mill stream fishing for perch with bamboo poles this weekend, when she turned to me and said, "Daddy, what's the difference between agent-based and agentless architectures?" Of course, you can imagine how stunned I was. I went on to explain that agent-based distributed systems are based upon the existence of some sort of proprietary program that runs on many nodes. That program can do processing on gathered information and provide the results to other components on the same box or on other boxes. Conversely, agentless monitoring assumes that the information needed can be accessed remotely. This raw data is then processed in a more centralized fashion.

"So which one is better?" she asked, and I responded as I often do, "Well, that's kinda complicated." I explained that first of all, the agent vs. agentless is less of a binary choice and more of a continuum. Over the next few days, I'll go into details about why someone might prefer one or the other in their infrastructure monitoring tool, with the big reveal being that BMC Performance Manager allows an easy coexistence of the two.

Squinting in the sun as she looked at me, she said, "Considering you haven't posted since May, will that be before I graduate high school?"

Brandon linked to this rant over at Pragmatic Marketing. The guy goes off on how some of the stupid things in the product are the fault of lazy developers and not the product manager. However, he found them immediately upon installing the product. So who's the lazy idiot here? Either (a) the PM likes these "features", or (b) the PM has never installed the product. I'm not really defending the developers here, but rather I'm attacking the PM. Product quality, including common sense requirements, are everyone's responsibility. Just as developers shouldn't get off scot-free when bugs get past QA, neither should product managers get off when dumb stuff goes in the product.

Blogging about enterprise software? Isn't that equivalent to making a movie about accounting or producing a concept album about maritime law? Call me a freak but I kinda like talking about enterprise software. If you see me out, I will likely be hanging with a developer, product manager, development director, or analyst, and more often than not, we'll be talking about enterprise software. I can already hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth of those who envy my exciting lifestyle, and to those playa-haters I will only say the following: you too can easily be involved in such conversations by reading this blog. I promise it will be at least as interesting as sitting on my couch and listening to me expound. Just keep your feet off my coffee table.

Things I will prabably talk about:

• Developing software - from code-level topics to development methodologies (especially large agile teams)
• Developing enterprise software - the meat! enterprise software problems are the HARD problems. More on that later...
• Developing systems management enterprise software - Infrastructure monitoring is what I'm usually working on.
• Developing BMC systems managmeent enterprise software - Of course, I work at BMC and a lot of my experience comes from working on products like PATROL Express and Performance Manager.

So, if this sounds interesting, keep reading. Otherwise, what exactly did you expect from the title of the blog?