Ideas and Thoughts

Dell are slashing a shed-load off of their low-end servers, we picked up an Opteron with raid1 for £228 exVAT saving us £261 (the base unit starts at just £99!) The offer expires in two days though.

Ourselves and JJC Design recently collaborated on another web project, and launched www.audisouthwest.com last week. The clients (a collection of Audi dealerships across the south west region) love the self-managing site, we got to write a funky backend (which automagically pulls car data and car images from other systems) and also got to use a nice google maps implementation (see the contact page and click on a marker!)

We're investigating using openVPN to create a fully meshed VPN network across 4 sites. We'll post our findings up on the blog once we've setup the test environment!

Yesterday evening saw the 2nd ever Microsoft "CoffeeTalk", a new informal and intimate event designed at getting closer to us admins who don't have time to travel across the country to go to larger events! Exeter's QueenStreet Starbucks filled up quite nicely, and we got to meet a wide spectrum of industry attendees.

Martin Parry and Viral Tarpara presented on Sharepoint for Developers and Microsoft Sharepoint Search respectively. Despite the limited time we had, a lot of ground was covered and I now know a bit more about all of the tools and programs that are sitting unused in our Microsoft Action Pack folder! Many thanks to Viral and Martin for an information stuffed evening. And the free coffee

I hope Microsoft continue these smaller get-togethers, it's great oppertunity to demo new technologies and to see how other organisations are putting MS software to work. I'd love to see a whole host of topics such as windows server 2008, administering windows vista for business etc.

Viral used the ZoomIt presentation tool aid, something which I will be putting to use in my University presentations soon!

Grisoft has bought Exploit Prevention Labs and their software "LinkScanner", which checks the safety of websites before allowing access to them. This is going to be part of AVG's internet suite, and will also be bundled with AVG's Free Edition

I only just noticed,but the Hospital Records podcast is back to full strength, with two new releases (#46 and #47) from the Coleman himself.

I finally got Lego Star Wars for the Wii (I had to get Game to refund my pre-order, and then I purchased the game from GameStation in town) - the Wii controls don't add anything to the game, as all they do is replicate button presses! It looks pretty much the same as other games, there is a bit of slowdown in places, but it's a good timewaster.

Resident Evil Umbrella Chronicles for the Wii is excellent. You don't need the gun attachment (i think it would probably make playing the game harder!), two player is great fun, and the graphics are simply gorgeous. Lots of people are slating it, but they don't realise that it was never intended to be anything more than an on-rails shooter.

We just took delivery of a new toy in the office - a portable LCD digital TV tuner which has AV and VGA inputs... so what did we do with it?

We plugged it straight into our new PowerEdge 2900 which has a VGA port on the front! It's a nifty little unit, it'll interlace any resolutions it can't cope with and has full OSD menu control. It also comes with a car adapter and composite input cables.

According to this article on The Register, don't ask Excel 2007 to calcualte what 77.1 x 850 is! There is a bug in the new calculation code which presents itself when multiplying two numbers whose product equals 65,535 - or the limit of a 16bit unsigned integer. A fix is in the works, apparently... another reason we're not advising clients to upgrade to office2007 at this time!

This article on ComputerWorld has the headline "Report predicts 802.11n wireless technology will start eroding the wired Ethernet market within the next two to three years". Based on what i've seen of 802.11n, i really don't think this will be the case! Throughput and reliability alone are good enough reasons to stick to wired ethernet, especially as gigabit hardware is much more affordable now. Yes, WiFi is useful in certain situations, but in a working environment where people are going to be sitting at a desk, you might as well stay wired!

An article on Security Focus "Teaching hacking helps students, professors say" is something that I totally agree with. When lecturing web programming at the university, it would have been a major omission if I didn't go over topics such as the domain-security model, cross-site scripting, SQL injection, cookie stealing and so on.
It makes the content more exciting for the class as well - quite a few students woke up once I demonstrated how the schools website could be exploited with XSS and a logged in person's cookies stolen in real time.

We recently purchased an Eizo 630L thin client from ebay on the cheap to investigate using it as a network monitoring station here in our offices. It's a 15" TFT with a windows CE machine built into the unit (300mhz, 64mb) and built in speakers.
It's running windows CE 4.1, and has Internet Explorer (4) built in, allowing you to browse the net without having to connect to a server. It can deal with RDP v5, and has support for 16bit colour, sound and local devices (com/lpt port). A useful feature is that it can auto-connect/login on startup, which means we can wall mount the unit, remove the keyboard/mouse (or use wireless ones) and leave it watching our networks!

After going through my xplsv.tv downloaded reels collection, I came across a few Magnetosphere movies, and found that the flight404.com guys have released an iTunes visualisation. Check out the video below for the result of one of their initial experiments using processing.

Short Royksopp experiment from flight404 and Vimeo. Beautiful.

You can now Sign Up to the BBC iPlayer beta program!

Catch up on the last 7 days of programming for free. It'll be interesting to see whether it's P2P like the Channel 4 client. Both Chanenl 4 On Demand and BBC iPlayer use windows media DRM.

Happy System Administrators Day everyone!

I finally got Caller ID enabled on our phone line (and found a suitable modem which reports CLID correctly!). Why is this important? I'm writing software which will popup information on who's calling on my desktop whenever the phone rings!

We have YAC setup on our server, and i'm halfway through writing a windows application which will receive the YAC alert via TCP/IP and then do a MySQL database lookup on our Vtiger CRM system.

I've done a fair bit of work on this this afternoon, it now sits in the system tray and pops up an outlook2003/2007 style notification window when a call comes in, and clicking on this opens the CRM at the appropriate page. Opening up the main program window shows a list of calls received. I plan to extend this program, possibly doing things like :

• ini file configuration
• Logging and histories
• a 'has called X times' counter to the CRM database
• and also maybe a 'last called on XXXX/XX/XX' to the CRM database

Once finished, i'll release the software and source on the website.

I've just implemented an SMS gateway system so that our monitoring services can send staff SMS text messages whenever the system detects that a service has gone down! www.clickatell.com offer a variety of APIs, including HTTP(s), COM, XML over HTTP, SMTP and even FTP!