Month: March 2011
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Networks of ships
For a long time I worked in the shipping industry. It is a facinating business that has changed our world. For many people and places the changes of the last 40 years have been delivered by networks of ships not networks of computers. The rise of Asia and the decline of the West’s industrial heartlands…
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Belkin UPS might have caused data loss
Regular readers will know that I had to totally rebuild my Windows Home Server. I now suspect that the origin of the server crash was a UPS self test. My Belkin UPS battery is totally flat and does not keep the server running. I have the self tests running but the software that comes with…
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“Advice needed – how to persue one’s venture” on the London Android mailing list
Richard Green made an interesting post to the London Android User Group mailing list. Advice needed – how to persue one’s venture: – The London Android Group – Londroid (London, England) – Meetup. This got some great replies that I recommend reading to anyone who is interested in Smartphone development or similar start-ups. Here I…
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Project Management Joke
Q. What’s the difference between a project management methodologist and a terrorist? A. You can negotiate with a terrorist.
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Windows Home Server reinstall disaster – use RAID next time
I am paranoid about backups. Until this week I was very fond of Windows Home Server which is Microsoft’s backup solution for the home. You simply put it on your network and every night it backs up your household computers to a server which contains redundant disks. It is a real server and you can…
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The future of the high street: near-field communication (Wired UK)
With near-field comms coming to Android in Gingerbread there will some interesting opportunities for app developers. Near-field communication payments are on the verge of rolling out into supermarkets, restaurants and shops across Britain, through your mobile phone. via The future of the high street: near-field communication (Wired UK).
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The semantic web on a platter – Google recipe search
The semantic web has made it to the mainstream in a rather surprising way. Recipe site owners have been marking up plain HTML pages with microformats that allow Google’s spider to understand the meaning of the content. This is much easier than creating two versions of every page – one for humans and one for…
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Doctor-IT creates ElephantPM brand
Doctor-IT has created the ElephantPM brand to market its project management services. ElephantPM nows offers FogBugz and Kiln (Mercurial) installation and training in addition to hands on project management. Request to readers: To get ElephantPM into the Google index I would be very grateful if you could mention http://www.elephantpm.com in your blog or on your…
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Joy reigns with AWS CloudFormation
Amazon’s relentless drive to make infrastructure management easier continues with their announcement of AWS CloudFormation. The big problem that ordinary people (well developers and techies anyway) have with cloudy stuff is that although it is easy to start-up one server, choreographing the creation of an entire system, for example a load-balanced, three-tier system remains difficult.…
Dr James Bayley 