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The most interesting thing about technology change are the odd juxtapositions it throws up. If you’d asked me a few years ago who would be the leader in cloud computing, I wouldn’t have predicted that it would be Amazon. Sure Amazon know how to run very large websites. How did they go from e-commerce pioneer to cloud computing? It’s kinda like your local supermarket deciding that they’d like to build ships.

Interesting what Amazon is up to…first with cloud storage then cloud computing and now cloud databases. Is the art of data centre management going to be concentrated into a few massive data centres? We currently rent a single Sun box, running Linux oddly enough, in a data centre to run all of our websites and email. One of the down sides with renting a machine is the limited capacity of storage, CPU and bandwidth.

Spammers have automated tools to spam blog comments. Blog owners have a number of automated tools to stop them. Spammers set up dummy blogs with the anti-spam tools of the day so they can refine their spamming tools. Blog owners deploy new or updated anti-spam tools to stop the newly refined spamming tools… All so that a few people can get links to their (completely worthless) websites. Who would have predicted even ten years ago that something as nebulous as hyper links would inspire a technological arms race in the 21st century.

One of my pet hates is coming into the office only to be presented with a nice problem on the website. This morning I tried to log into this website and saw the screenshot above. All sorts of things went through my mind. Have we been hacked? Fortunately not. 😄 The explanation was much simpler. The Bad Behavior Wordpress plug-in we use to keep the internet wild west at bay decided to issue permanent false positives.

I’ve been hanging around with the 8-bit crowd lately! Yes, it does still exist, though is now largely restricted to the embedded market. What has surprised me is the level of functionality you can implement with very modest hardware. You can create fully functional web server, email servers and pretty well everything else all with off the shelf 8-bit microcontrollers. The new breed of 8-bit microcontrollers are particularly good at network enabling older non-networked devices.

The Tech Teapot, or as it was originally called, the OPENXTRA Blog is one year old today. Ten categories, 186 posts, 156 comments & trackbacks and more tags than I care to count and we’re still going strong. Thank you all for reading. A blog is nothing without readers and commenters. Extra special thanks to the following people: Chris Garrett – Sage advice on blogging. Thanks Chris! Robert Aronsson – creator of the Intellipool software and blog

If you aspire to the high priesthood of geekery, being a Star Trek fan, I recommend the U.S.S Enterprise NCC-1701 Putter. Perhaps the perfect fusion of Star Trek fandom and golf. 😄

One of the side effects of the recent RackSpace outage in their Dallas/Fort Worth data centre has been finding out just how quickly their data centre heats up when the air conditioning system fails. Our backup generators kicked in instantaneously, but the transfer to backup power triggered the chillers to stop cycling and then to begin cycling back up again a process that would take on average 30 minutes. Those additional 30 minutes without chillers meant temperatures would rise to levels that could result in data loss and irreparably damage customers’ servers and devices.

Denis, a co-founder of OPENXTRA, was reading a story to his son last night. He was rather surprised to find a character in the book called Google. The book is called Circus Days Again by Enid Blyton, the book is copyright 1942, though the version quoted is from a battered 1962 edition. The reference starts on page 50. “Yes - it’s just the sort of thing you’d like to do yourself, isn’t it,” grinned Stickly Stanley, who knew what a little monkey Lotta was.

As promised in the OpenNMS coming soon to Windows post, OpenNMS 1.3.8 has now been released with Windows support & an installer. Tarus Balog announced the release and the developer too. You can download the release from the OpenNMS site.