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I couldn’t help but laugh at the kitchen in Microsoft’s Home of the Future. Everybody knows that nothing dates like visions of the future, but this takes the biscuit (or the focaccia, see below). I’m still waiting for my jetpack and my nuclear powered million-miles-to-the-gallon car that I was promised when I was a child, but it looks like I’ll have to wait a while yet. Anyway Microsoft are going to computerise everything in the kitchen (they would wouldn’t they) and it’s the most bizarre mix of things you’ve ever heard of.

We are in the midst of server consolidation drive. Three servers will go into one! The hack attack last week has certainly speeded things up, though it was always in the technology plan for this quarter anyway. The new server is very locked down with a nice heavy iron firewall in front of it. We also went for a RAID 1 system too. If anything is going to go, you can bet that it will be a disk.

Over the weekend one of our web servers was hacked… fortunately it wasn’t our main e-commerce server. The server is in fact in the middle of being de-commissioned. The hack happened around a day after our software vendor reported a vulnerability and provided a patch. You sure don’t get much time to fix things. You either fix it immediately or bang too late. Thankfully, our system was locked down enough to prevent a root level penetration, only Apache got nailed.

Happy New Year to all our readers! The new year has started off well. We kept the on-line shop working over the holiday period and most days there was activity on it (not Christmas day mind you). Obviously some people take very short holidays and were in work between the Christmas and New Year breaks. Here’s hoping that things continue in the same vein. All the best for 2007!

We moved office recently as some of you may know. We thought we’d treat ourselves to a professional grade broadband router more in keeping with our new surroundings. We went with a Cisco 877 router thinking you can’t get more professional grade than Cisco. The only problem with it is that nobody around here can persuade it to work. We’ve tried everything…software upgrades, support forums the works. It is still refusing to do anything useful.

Programming is still way too hard. Even the smallest piece of software takes a huge amount of effort to build. Software tools are not great. The tools I use now are not really that far away from what I first started using professionally in 1992. Back then it was a command line compiler with make scripts and Brief as the text editor. Now it is a Integrated Development Environment wrapping the same command line compiler.

I’ve been trying to get my head round what the Alarm Numbers mean in Intellipool INM. Just when I think I’ve got it everything just slips away. The idea seems to be that you can escalate Alerts. If something gets ignored you can change the Action so that a different person gets notified or a new Action gets performed. For example you can take readings from a Temperature Monitor every minute.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 has been out for over a year now. I would say that it is quite possibly the worst piece of software to come out of Redmond for a very long time. I am amazed that they released it. I am mortified that they still haven’t fixed it. The bug that makes me fume is the Class View bug. Scroll down to a class you wish to view and just before you can click on the class you want to work on the view goes right back to the top again :(

I was daydreaming today and I wondered just how many files actually make up the openxtra website. For a small site you would assume that wouldn’t be many? Well, I’ve counted and I got quite a shock. The website is made up of 4974 files. And that doesn’t count the databases. There are three of those. It just goes to show that things grow organically and before you know it you’ve got yourself quite a headache.