blog.species5618.net

Over the past few days I have seen teenagers using social networking (facebook in this case) in a interesting way.

On Saturday (14th June) morning, a 19 year lad (Karl Hampton) was killed in a car accident. Within hours his friends had created facebook group (R.I.P Karl Hampton) which 4 days later had 270 members and 80 heart felt comments?? on his wall

I walk past a CEX shop on the way to the office from the buis stop every morning. If an attack of boredom strikes, of the need to get a TECH fix, I have a wonder in.

I have never understaood their pricing structure, in the past i have seen

• 2nd hand Wii’s 30 quid more then a NEW one next door
• Pink DS 40 quid more than a new on, in stock in Argos

yet today??I was surprised to see them selling SIM packs for 3.99 or 4.99 which are available in the high street for free, or 1.99 (in the case of THREE, and that was direct from a THREE shop)??

I am busy designing and building infrastructure for various “as a Service” service offerings

Web as a Service (IIS)
Data as a Service (SQL and Oracle)
Middleware as a Service

So I thought I would float a few questions

What is High Availability?
When do you need it?
How do you create it?
How do you measure it?

DISCUSS !!

[UPDATE]

Here is my two penneth,

Just in case anyone wondered what I actually do for a living, I build world class web hosting platforms. We are talking up to a Terabyte of content and 8-10 Million hits per day. So when a friend of a friend said he was having trouble with a site getting 190,000 hit per day, i did a detailed analysis and made some recomendations.

Then I hear they have been and done something completely different, and possibly daft.

Well I say good luck to him

About a month ago I was in an infrastructure meeting discussing backup strategy. The conversation was around disk based backups such as near store and Virtual tape libraries.
So I asked the question “do we know how these disk based backup system cope with earth quakes?”
As yesterdays data could be on the same disk that is being access today, a disk level corruption could be “interesting”
As the point in time I got laughed at, “Earthquakes, yeh right !”

Does not seem such a silly question now does it !

From BBC The biggest earthquake in the UK for nearly 25 years has shaken homes across large parts of the country.”

What make a good technical Curriculum Vitae?
The Internet is flooded with differing opinions,
The only consistent thing seem to be lots of white space to aid reading and the following points in order

• Personal details
• Career Objective/Summary
• Personal skills
• Summary of skills (the technical page)
• Work history (listing the most recent position first)

Outside of that, 2 pages, 4 pages, or 10 (if you have enough relevant content)
So lets say you have 4, will one of the 2 pages max HR / PIMP people chuck it straight in the shredder.?? Or you don???t have time to tweak a CV for a particular post, and they are looking for a skill you have left out to make it fit 2 pages.?? Catch22

Suggestions on a postcard !

HORRAY

Currys, Dixons and PC World are to stop stocking analogue televisions and will instead promote “integrated” sets with built-in digital Freeview tuners.

My son got a copy of the Nintendo DS transformers game for XMAS, and decided to try out the WiFi features over the weekend.
I had heard the some WiFi routers and access point do not work well as the DS wireless if not fully WiFi compliant. They aren???t kidding, more like not RFC compliant in many areas.
NO support for NON wep security
A TCP/IP stack that does not confirm it has taken the DHCP address it was offered and then does not respond to ping, instead it just uses it and says nothing, so the next new device connects to the network, gets the same address, and the DS gets kicked off,

Decided to upgrade my SKY in the dining room to SKY+, I had a old box which was not too reliable, but once it booted up it was OK, (some funny microcontroller fault, not any of the usual well documented faults)

First stumbling block, the wife, insists on nice face plates for all the cables, so I need to buy a double plate to replace the current single one, so off to maplins we go. Double Face plate and a few meters of decent coax, the dish is only just the other side of the wall, so nice and simple.

Managed to pick the windiest day on 2008 so far, but got the New bit of coax from the QUAD LNB to the dining installed without dropping the ladder into the conservatory window.

Now for the inside stuff, connect all the leads and switch on, WHOO HOOO, good signal on both inputs, call sky to get the card re-paired to the NEW receiver

To damn quick, 30 mins later the box locked up and refused to BOOT

BOLLOCKs, Hello Ebay ?????????..

Well after waiting 3 weeks by FON router (with optional 7dB antenna) finally arrived on Friday

Much to my surprise, it did the business straight out of the box

Plugged it in to my network and away it went (using the serial no for the private network WPA key)

Logged into the FON web site via the FON_AP public WiFi configure the location and that is it done, the FON locate WiFi maps now shows my house as a FON node.
Jobs a good???n