Blog

Apologies for the downtime over the last day or so. What started as a small hard disk failure turned into a much larger problem when the remaining disk started having intermittent errors and the server itself collapsed too. Fortunately, we are paranoid enough to take our own backups in addition to the ISP backups. Good job we did!

The images on the blog, from 30 November onwards, are missing because we didn’t have the bandwidth to back them up. I’ve got them on my machine so I will be restoring those throughout the rest of the day.

Sometimes you’re glad you spent that little bit more money on resiliency. Today is that day. I’ve just been informed by our ISP that one of the disks in the server that brought you this page has died and gone to hard disk heaven.

The last time that happened we had some bad downtime. Lesson learnt. If what’s running on your server is in any way valuable to you then pay the extra money and get a RAID based server with disk mirroring. In these days of cheap SATA based RAID systems, disk mirroring is not expensive and one day you may be very thankful that you did.

I don’t suppose many of you know my dirty little secret: I’m a failure. There I’ve said it. I founded an open source project and failed miserably. Sorry! Please wait there whilst I go outside to self-flagellate…that’s better the open source gods have been salved.

Back in 2005 I knew there was a tool missing from Apache for ad-hoc searches on access logs. Now, I mean a tool for performing ad-hoc searches not the programmable type. You can use AWK, a very flexible text manipulation tool, for that.

We expect two main trends to continue to drive business throughout 2008:

• Convergence – a lot of people not normally associated with computers and communications are being drawn in, most notably electricians working in the building industry. With things getting sticky in the housing market, it is likely that a lot of electricians will be looking for alternative sources of revenue;
• Heat in the data centre – its not just the planet’s environment that’s warming up…servers keep getting hotter too with only modest signs that things are going to change any time soon. The data centre environment is going to be a concern for a while yet.

Mid March we will be going to the ELEX show in Harrogate. Given the first item above, you won’t be surprised to know that we’ll be showcasing cable testers aimed at the converged electrician.

Sigh. Just received this email from the folks at Pandora. What a shame, Pandora is by far the best internet radio station out there.

hi, it’s Tim,

This is an email I hoped I would never have to send.

As you probably know, in July of 2007 we had to block usage of Pandora outside the U.S. because of the lack of a viable license structure for Internet radio streaming in other countries. It was a terrible day. We did however hold out some hope that a solution might exist for the UK, so we left it unblocked as we worked diligently with the rights organizations to negotiate an economically workable license fee. After over a year of trying, this has proved impossible. Both the PPL (which represents the record labels) and the MCPS/PRS Alliance (which represents music publishers) have demanded per track performance minima rates which are far too high to allow ad supported radio to operate and so, hugely disappointing and depressing to us as it is, we have to block the last territory outside of the US.

Any super observant readers may have noticed some problems with the blog comment system. Long comments wouldn’t display properly. The comment author name would appear correctly but the comment itself wouldn’t be displayed.

We’ve tracked it down to being a plug-in problem. I decided to selectively deactivate plug-ins until the comments worked properly again. The SEM Do follow plug-in looks to be the candidate…when I deactivated it long comments went back to being displayed properly.

Mark Hinkle from Zenoss sent me a link to an interesting document he prepared yesterday.

I think Mark may be over egging Zenoss clear market leadership but without any doubt their growth over the last year has been impressive.

Perhaps the most impressive thing to take away is that all of the projects featured have grown over the last year.

I actually refused some chocolate last night…not often that happens! Geese, I need to get down the gym today. 😄

I must confess that I’ve been looking forward to going back to work for the last few days. The highlight of my holiday was the annual family trip to the pantomime at the Theatre Royal in York. The award winning performance was up to its usual high standard and I recommend a visit if you can make it…the performance runs until the 2nd February.

Merry Christmas to all our readers, from everybody at OPENXTRA. Many thanks to Tarus Balog over at OpenNMS for the lovely t-shirt.

OPENXTRA is going to be closed over the Christmas holidays, though we will fulfill online and fax orders. We’ll all be back at the Chambers officially on the 2nd January.

The Tech Teapot will be kinda sparse too…unless I get really bored of watching The Great Escape for the 40th time.

There are very few people who really influence the world. I think one of those people is Alan Kay. If you’re a programmer I would suggest that you familiarise yourself with his work. He’s got some very interesting things to say about IT and programming in particular.

“To find the most interesting things about our field you have to go back 30 or 40 years.”

Kinda hard to argue with that sentiment. I can’t think of anything that’s been invented in computing in at least 20 years.