If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Not sure how to subscribe to a RSS feed? Read Subscribing to blogs the easy way. Thanks for visiting!We’re busy upgrading our internal network here at the Chambers. We need to host a number of devices on our internal network so that [...]

I was bracing myself for a good morning wrestling upgrading The Tech Teapot. Turns out the upgrade took less than a minute.
I’m a happy blogger.

I’m currently in the process of putting together a unit test for an open source project. I wanted to use real met office temperature data, ideally from around York or Leeds.
I emailed the met office to enquire where I could find the data I require. The met office, being a publicly funded body, I naturally [...]

Many thanks to everybody who attended the ELEX show in Harrogate last week. OPENXTRA had a stand and we enjoyed meeting you all.

Denis and Annie did heroic stand duty ably assisted by Steve from JDSU.

One of the big hits at the show was the cable tester demonstrator box (as demonstrated by Denis above) with various [...]

I’m a sucker for engineering in the trenches stories … some good ones I found today: here, here and here.  There aren’t enough of them documented. If you’ve got any I’m all ears. Engineers and engineering should be celebrated not just be the whipping boys for the sales and marketing folks.

I read Bryce Harrington’s The paradox of FOSS projects supporting Windows with some interest. If you’re a Linux enthusiast it should scare you.
Bryce makes the very good point that the ratio between contributors and users on Linux is substantially higher than for Windows users.
The contributor ratio is crucial to the success of an open source [...]

The folks over at TweetVOLUME have produced a tool for counting the mentions of words or phrases on the Twitter micro-blogging platform.
I thought that it would be an interesting, though not especially significant, metric for comparing open source projects.

The graph above shows the number of twits in which Zenoss, Nagios, Hyperic, OpenNMS or MRTG were [...]

One week until the ELEX show in Harrogate. It isn’t too late to get hold of complementary tickets. Just contact me here if you want some.

Many moons ago, around about 1989 or so, my brother-in-law asked me to solve a problem for him. He was the secretary responsible for assigning referees to football matches in a local football league.
He was having considerable trouble with it. It was taking him ages to do the task manually because, whilst it sounds easy, [...]

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