Blog

All of the blog posts contained within The Tech Teapot with the most recent at the top.

It's usually the firewall/anti-virus software

A good case in point today. Software ran just fine on Windows XP but the move to Vista stops the software working. First conclusion: the software mustn’t be compatible with Vista. Wrong! It was nothing to do with Vista. It was the anti-virus software running on top of Vista that was causing the problem. For reasons best known to BitDefender, it thinks the protocol used by Sensatronics for retrieving the temperature readings looks like the Yahoo messenger protocol.

A WEEE farce

Over the last couple of years we’ve donated around £2,000 in order to be Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) registered. In the same period how much toxic electrical waste have we saved from landfill? None. Not a single solitary chip or board. Why don’t we all just admit it: WEEE is just another tax and a dumb tax at that.

The popularity contest widget has moved...

…to be hosted with all of its brothers and sisters over at wordpress.org. The new hosting facility over at Wordpress provides a much better environment for the widget where it can be version controlled properly.

A perspective on open source network monitoring tools...

…by Grig Gheorghiu over on the Agile Testing blog: The sad state of open source monitoring tools. I wish there was a standard nomenclature for this stuff, as well as a standard way for these tools to inter-operate. As it is, you have to learn each tool and train your brain to ignore all the weirdness that it encounters. One of the problems with I.T. is the absence of a standard terminology.

The Tech Teapot two today!

The Tech Teapot is two years old today. Now we’ve got 13 categories, 334 posts & 412 comments. A selection of some of my favourite posts from the last year: What to do if you’re newly qualified and can’t get your first job How will cloud computing change network management Distributed network monitoring introduction Open source network management comparison Hub projects in open source network management Windows users kill free open source Tweets as open source network management metric Strange case of the missing application Open source software from a VAR perspective My first job Where is Java’s CPAN?

Subscribing to blogs the easy way

One of the things that has surprised me about running this blog has been the number of people who subscribe via email.

Off Topic: The recession according to Google Trends...

John Naughton has created a great post outlining the development of the recession in Google Trends. My suspicion is that Google Trends will also show the upturn before anything else too. I wonder which searches will be diagnostic of the upturn?

What to do if you're newly qualified and can't get your first job

In the early nineties I managed to time my emergence from college to exactly coincide with the beginning of the last recession. It wasn’t a nice time. Jobs were in short supply and the jobs that were advertised were usually deluged with applicants. Newly qualified people are bound to feel a downturn the hardest. You don’t have a track record, your skill set may not exactly match what is required by industry.

RiverMuse: open source enterprise fault management system

John Willis on his excellent CloudDroplets #7 podcast mentioned a very interesting development in the enterprise open source network management space. RiverMuse is an open source enterprise fault management system designed to replicate the functionality of IBM Tivoli & HP OpenView. RiverMuse has been developed by the original founding team of both Micromuse and RiverSoft. The software isn’t available yet, it was due first week of November. I’ll let you know when it’s released.