Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

As the server count here in the office has increased significantly recently, over the weekend we asked our ISP for a few extra IP addresses. A /248 came through on Saturday morning, and one of my weekend tasks (along with setting up a VM of Exchange 2010) has been to get them working. marypcb paints tanais's room and I do the network infrastructure. It's a fair division of labour.

To be honest, the documentation for our router isn't the best, but with a mix of downloaded PDFs, information from the router FAQs written by the UK distributor, and posts by users on the distributor's forum, I managed to get everything set up. The new IP addresses were added to the router's IP alias table, and set up so they weren't part of the default IP pool for out-going NAT addresses. I then set up a couple of test services using the router's multi-NAT functions, specifying specific IP addresses for each server's remote desktop and installing a RDP client on my iPhone.

But I couldn't connect to any of the new IP addresses. The old one was working just fine, but nothing was getting through.

I was stuck, even though it seemed I'd done everything correctly. I checked with a friend with the same set up, but he couldn't connect to my servers either. So, I documented everything, and sent it back up to my ISP.

Just before midnight last night I got an email from them (midnight, on a Sunday?!), saying they'd restarted my DSL service from their end, freeing up a routing configuration that hadn't propagated through their systems correctly. I fired up the iPhone, and connected to both of the new server RDP connections, and to the temporary web server I'd set up. Our new addresses were online and routing correctly.

It's a good feeling when something you've been puzzling over for a couple of days suddenly comes together, and you realise you'd got it right all along.

The next task is to move the router to the first socket in the house to get rid of the ATM CRC errors, and to hopefully eke out a megabit or so more bandwidth. That and to finish the Exchange migration, upgrade the main server to Windows Server 2008 R2, and move our BES from its server onto a VM on the new quad-core machine.

Once a sysadmin, always a sysadmin.

I bought a new microphone the other day. I needed something better for recording meetings, and as I work direct-to-disk in OneNote (timestamping interview audio with my notes), I decided to look out a high-quality USB microphone.

To be honest it didn't take me long to find the device I wanted. Blue Microphones have an excellent reputation and their chrome-retro styling has a certain 30's space opera feel that I found appealing. The fact that they were getting consistent good reviews for sound quality also helped a lot. Most of their devices aren't that portable, but I found the one I wanted very quickly: the Snowflake.



Sound quality's good so far, and it'll work with my Macs and my PCs. It is a little larger than I expected, but not too large, and the base doubles as a carry case for the USB cable and as a clip to hand the mic off the back of my PC. I do like the way the microphone folds into the base for travel, and the ability to twist the head to point where I want is definitely a plus.

All in all, I'm very happy.

Now to go out and interview some people.

My desk is somewhat different today.

The old pair of 17" LCD panels that has kept me company for the last few years is no more. I've sacrificed some resolution for clarity, and have jumped a whole generation of graphics technology in one fell swoop. There may be 10 inches less diagonal on my desktop, but the new LG 24" panel that arrived this morning more than makes up for it in clarity and quality. The colours leap out you, and I'm seeing things in my photographs I'd missed in the pink tinge of the slowly fading panels.

It's an HDMI panel, so digital all the way from the monitor to the graphics card - and there's no fuzzyness or flicker from analogue signals fighting with the RF and EM that fills the office aether. That's one of the reasons for the clarity, the other being, well, half a decades-worth of LCD technology. Five years is a long time in the technology world! I haven't started fiddling with the controls yet - as it seems to work just fine with the default settings (though I may run a calibration scanner over it in a day or so - I've got a couple of Pantone calibrators on the shelves I can try out with it).

One of the things that impressed me the most was the stand - it's easy to position the monitor just the the way I want, and the smooth rise and fall of the central column is a delight. Of course my old monitor stand took three different-sized screwdrivers just to tilt a monitor a few degrees, so I may be a little biased.

317440 less pixels. That's still more than a couple of million to play with...

New desktop PC, new monitor. That's me set until 2013 then...

Right, back to writing about HTML 5.

The Royal Mail's online stamp service has got a little easier (and cheaper).

Go online, buy some postage (which has to be used by the end of the next day), print out the resulting labels, stick them onto an envelope and post.

You can even use a credit card for less than £3.50's worth of postage...

Useful. And no need to subscribe to the old system.

Mary and I will be in and around San Francisco, San Jose, Silicon Valley and the Bay Area at the beginning of October.

If you're a PR or a company representative, get in touch, as we're looking for technology companies to visit whilst we're there.

We're interested in everything from enterprise architecture to desktop applications, with a particular interest in mobile and social technologies, as well as tools for managing service oriented architectures.

Want to give a US client exposure in the UK? Drop us a line!

This is something in the way of an experiment to see if I can use this blog as a tool for handling pitches and RFIs

Here's a quick review of The Game Maker's Apprentice for The Register:

Subtitled "Game Development for Beginners", The Game Maker's Apprentice is just that, a guide to developing your own games using the free Game Maker games development software (available for download here, if you don’t buy the book).

Everything you need to build the games described in the book is on its companion CD, including the Game Maker software and all the images and sounds needed, as well as the final versions of the example games, ready for you to extend with your own levels and actions. There's plenty of installation help in the book, with the first section a quick introduction to Game Maker.

Game Maker is a visual development tool, with drag and drop visual programming for most game elements, and a GML language to extend object actions. Perhaps best thought of as an OO tool for creating games, it uses events and actions to tie objects together.

Read the rest here.

In other news, the cooker is dead, killed by the man who came to fix it. Take out 'til Tuesday then...

Here's the first chunk of some work I've been doing for The Register, looking at rules engines and declarative programming.

Businesses run on rules. They define business processes, and describe just what happens if something goes right - or if it goes wrong. Do all the gold-rated customers get a 10% discount, and what happens if one calls customer support? Business rules are part of the decision support systems that underpin every business process.

You can write the rules into your application business logic, but they quickly become spaghetti code, as you try to wrap each and every rule into a self-referential chain of "if then else", "case endcase" and "do while" statements (depending on your language of choice). Business rules change more often than the applications behind them. Debugging every case can add days and complexity to application tests, and meanwhile the business process owner is waiting for you to make the last set of rule changes...

Read more here.

...as a project I'm involved with now has a holding page...

Grr.

One thing I've started noticing recently is the number of different PR companies that don't seem to have their own central contacts database. It used to be that they'd have details of every relevant journalist, their address, their areas of interest, and (most importantly) the publications they wrote for. It all used to be up to date, and everyone in the agency had access to the information. It was their silver bullet, the intellectual property that differentiated the agencies and helped them win accounts and get their releases to the desktops of people who mattered.

I expect it was probably something like a FileMaker or an Access application, or even a shared Excel spreadsheet, perhaps an intranet application knocked up in LAMP. Whatever it was, it was nothing flash, but it worked. Now, however, they seem to have started outsourcing things to external companies, none of whom seem to be up to date, or have the full story. I'm now finding that agencies I've talked to for years have no idea of my address, while others, simply because I've written for the FT's technology section, insist on sending me financial press releases. I'm sure their are travel journalists out there who are getting press releases about new mortgage products...

I'm sure it'll all sort itself out in the wash, but I suspect that expensive contact databases have replaced the old in house systems - after all, that's someone else keeping track of things - but there's little or no feedback, no correction cycle - and above all, no attempt by the database companies to actually contact the journalists their tracking and check that they have the right information about them. If someone is paying many thousands of pounds far access to this information, shouldn't it be correct?

After all, if the aim of the game is to get stories out in the press, inaccurate and badly targeted releases are a waste of everyone's time and money.

Grr.

This isn't Putney any more, Toto. Not when two chaps in orange wigs shoot past on go-carts, and there's a giant bicycle with footballs for wheels propped up against a lamp post. That and there are lions in football strips all over the place. I suspect they ate the Cow Parade.

Today I am in Munich, for a set of VoIP briefings. As the company I'm talking to has provided the IT infrastructure for the World Cup, this morning I was scanned, security checked, covered in passes, and let into the bowels of the Munich's old airport. Now a conference centre, it's the nerve centre for the broadcast and IT infrastructure that's linking all the stadiums and training grounds. A fascinating place, full of little wooden buildings and cabling, it's going to make cracking copy for my monthly messaging column.

The rest of the day, well, it's been PowerPoint.

I'll upload the picture of the naked anime football fairy later.

Tomorrow I seem to be going to see some football match here in Munich. It'll actually be the first game I'll have ever seen.