All of the blog posts contained within The Tech Teapot with the most recent at the top.
I was clearing out my old bedroom after many years nagging by my parents when I came across two of my old floppy disk boxes. Contained within is a small snapshot of my personal computing starting from 1990 through until late 1992. Everything
before and after those dates doesn’t survive I’m afraid.
The early 1990s were an interesting time for software developers. Many of the tools that are taken for granted today made their debut for a mass market audience.
A series of box opening photos of the newly released Aviosys IP Power 9820 8 port rack-mountable power switch which arrived in the office this morning. This new model replaces the older IP Power Switch 9258-PRO model.
I was researching a follow up to how will cloud computing change network management post and I came across something rather odd I’d like to share with you.
Below are a series of graphs culled from Google Trends showing the relative search levels of various network management related keywords.
What is the most significant feature of them? What struck me is the downward decline with various degrees of steepness. The searches don’t just represent commercial network management tools, there are open source projects and open core products there too.
The rise of Stack Overflow has certainly changed how many programmers go about their trade.
I have recently been learning some new client side web skills because I need them for a new project. I have noticed that the way I go about learning is quite different from the way I used to learn pre-web.
I used to have a standard technique. I’d go through back issues of magazines I’d bought (I used to have hundreds of back issues) and read any articles related to the new technology.
Wireshark is a wonderful tool, no doubt about it. But, on Microsoft Windows, there is one thing it isn’t so good at.
Microsoft decided to remove the local loopback interface in Windows 7. So capturing loopback traffic is rather difficult without modifying your system. Something I try to avoid if at all possible.
There are ways to install the loopback interface if you want, as documented here. There are also other means to achieve the same effect, also documented in the previous link.
A network monitoring tool periodically makes a request to a system end point and records the result in a database of some kind.
Whether the polling interval is every few seconds, one minute or ten minutes or longer there is an awful lot of time when the network monitor has nothing meaningful to say about the state of the end point.
The network monitor is unlikely to be the first system to spot a problem.
Ray Kurzweil has a history of making accurate future forecasts. One of them is that the 3D printer is coming and the current ones are but a small hint of what is to come.
That got me thinking. We are quite possibly the last generation to have a direct connection between taking raw materials and making an end product.
Imagine your far distant relatives ordering a steak from their Acme Wondermatic 5000 3D printer.
Over the last few months we’ve been having some email troubles. For a few months the emails would start to back up with our backup email provider and then almost immediately begin to flow normally again. More recently the periods when email was backing up come around faster and lasted longer.
Intermittent problems are a nightmare to diagnose. Was the problem our broadband, the router, our network, the email server or, the old favourite, DNS?
I am currently messing around in the pits of .NET e-commerce. I thought it would be the last place I’d find open source inspired disharmony. But no, even here it is to be found. 😉
OK, a bit of background.
NOP Commerce is an ecommerce platform based on Microsoft’s open source ASP.NET platform. The project has been around for five or six years or so. Gets very good reviews too. Last year SmartStore.
