So I’ve been following a few folks on Twitter – one of them is Tim Mitchell from the US, he tweeted a link to some resources he used in a recent SQL Saturday he presented at. One of them is Konesans.com. Who happen to be based in Holbeach, which is really close to my home town of Wisbech. You go all over the world in search of knowledge, only to find there’s a guru right on your own doorstep....
I had a rather odd error with OctopusDeploy where the RavenDB backups were failing. Turns out the problem was because I had assigned 1 IPv4 address to OctopusDeploy and another IPv4 address for TeamCity. Oddly the RavenDB backup routine referenced the localhost address – 127.0.0.1, it appeared to be hardcode with no option other then changing port. This was especially weird as the OctopusDeploy service, was able to access it fine....
Our new HR system uses SAP Business Objects for transactional reporting, as this was setup by our HR supplier we haven’t really got involved with it beyond writing a few custom reports, turns out we’ve written quite a few, so much so that the Business Objects CMS database has swollen to over 30 GBs. This, as you might have guessed, is causing a few performance problems. After a discussion with the supplier, we found out it was storing all the reports, even the ad-hoc one-off reports and we should have set a parameter to limit it....
Two new Azure features have caught my eye – the first is Logic App. In a nutshell this is workflow. You have connectors and you can add triggers and actions. So you could have a trigger on your HR system that when a new employee starts, it creates a user account then sends a welcome message to the existing staff informing them of the new starters. The other is Data Catalog, this basically allows you to generate meta data about your data sources....
I made the above video using Microsoft Excel using data from a FOI request to Ipswich Borough Council about the number of Parking fines issued since 2010.
Just an update to my previous post about the Toshiba Laptop, I’ve been thinking about reinstalling the Toshiba laptop with Ubuntu, but before I do that, I want a backup. Luckily, I still have the original 500GB hdd spare, I just need a USB caddy. Luckily my local Curry’s had a USB3.0 one (PNY SSD and 2.5″ Hard Drive Enclosure and Upgrade Kit), before anyone comments about how I could of got one cheaper off eBay, just remember, I was able to get it same day and it included Acronis....
I was talking to a colleague about one of our suppliers and the progress they were making on a new product they were developing. He was surprised to hear how little progress they appear to have made, they had previously been making huge steps in very little time with very few developers, especially surprising when they have been scaling up the development team over the past few months. I explained they are burning some of the technical debt they have collected whilst they still can....
UPDATE: I’ve detailed the Toshiba default build a bit here At the beginning of the month I order a new laptop, for the past few weeks I’ve been wanting something more mobile then my desktop, at first I was toying with the idea of selling my desktop and picking up a new Surface. The new Surface 3 which starts at £419 seemed like a good idea what with its sexy full hd touchscreen, however when you scratch the surface (ha ha) it doesn’t look so go...
I’ve been thinking lately about the adoption of version control. One of the common fears of using version control is that its permanent. All mistakes are visible and are in fact, highlight. Originals are updated with new commits which detail only the change and a nice comment. There is no hiding mistakes. The thing is Mistakes are what make us human. Everyone makes mistakes, we need to accept that fact. In doing so we can move forward faster....
It appears the Local Government is looking to follow in schools footsteps and do an “Academy” – cutting the red tape and be given more control and freedom.
Tomorrow, Sunday the 7th December 2014, I will be celebrating 4 years of contributing wasted CPU cycles to the excellent Rosetta@Home project. Rosetta@home project is determining the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins through research, that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases such as HIV, Malaria, Cancer, and Alzheimer’s. The project is lead by Dr David Baker at the Univerity of Washington. You can find out more about the Rosetta@Home project on their website – http://boinc....
For a long while now it has been known that IPv4 will run out of available publicly assignable IP addresses. IPv4 address are 32 bits wide and quite simply can’t cope with the demand of the modern world – despite NAT’ing. IPv6 looks to resolve this by have not only more digits, but also using hexadecimal. For example, an IPv4 address looks like this 192 . 168 . 0 . 1...
Found this little gem – appears they actually made those really cool interfaces they used in Tron Legacy: http://www.robscanlon.com/encom-boardroom/
I received NameCheap newsletter today full of annoying holes (at least for me), needless to say I hit the unsubscribe button shortly after. First mistake – mark your calendars. Did they not check their calendar before sending it? The June 10 was 2 weeks ago! $1, one dollar!! You’re trying to promote .UK, use the local currency, using £ (GBP)! Final mistake I notice (I didn’t look very hard to be honest) was the “SCHOOLSOUT” code....
One of the things you’ll find when your going to interviews for your first job after leaving education is that they ask the same types of questions. The main one that feels me with dread is “Give an example of good customer service you have provided”. I hate that question. Hopefully your interviewer would have been kinda enough to at least state that, as you are ill experienced, you might want to give examples of good customer service you have received....