Archive for the 'General' Category

My server uptime


June 26th, 2009

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!I was messing around inside top trying to diagnose a server slowdown and I noticed that my server has been up for 463 days. [...]

Windows based structured systems management


June 11th, 2009

Found a post whilst reading a post by the Standalone Sysadmin… and it is a beauty. Michael Janke has a post comparing ad-hoc versus structured systems management.
One of the items that Michael says is essential for structuring your systems management is automation. As Matt Simmons says:
“Remember, if you can script it, script it. If [...]

Five hundred comments and counting…


June 8th, 2009

Thanks to everybody who has commented on the blog over the last two and a half years (yes, it really is that long!). Interacting with the people who read this blog is what keeps me going. Here’s to the next 500!

Interesting comparison of WMI performance…


June 3rd, 2009

… between various flavours of Windows. Not sure what Microsoft have done on Vista and Server 2008 but it hasn’t half slowed down WMI performance. Thankfully the latest release candidate of Windows 7 has much improved performance.
Oops!

The joy of content plagiarism


April 22nd, 2009

One of the nice side effects of our new content management system is that you can leave comments on our articles. We received one rather intriguing comment this week effectively accusing us of plagiarising an article. That came as a bit of a surprise given that I know Denis wrote the article in question several [...]

The cloud application shortcut key conundrum


April 1st, 2009

One of the more annoying things about using the new, all singing, all dancing web interface on Apple’s MobileMe email service is the hijacking of my much used Firefox shortcut ^N (create a new browser window.)
When using a browser, I expect ^N to create me a new browser window, which it duly does most of [...]

Choosing a content management system redux


March 13th, 2009

I blogged about choosing a content management system and we’ve finally managed to deploy the resulting system. It would be fair to say that choosing a content management system is a nightmare. And, anybody elses experience probably won’t help you very much unless you share the same set of requirements.
Our requirement was largely shaped by [...]

PowerTime is now TimeTag


March 3rd, 2009

The blog hiatus continues…
I’ve started a new blog to cover the TimeTag project that is keeping me away from here. Had a project rename because none of the powertime domains were available. The timetag.net domain was available. I think I like the powertime name better, but I don’t want the hassle or cost of obtaining [...]

Blog hiatus


February 2nd, 2009

My posting activity has been a little light of late… and there is a very good reason for that, I’ve been busy writing some software. Writing software is kinda like the powerful spell in Rincewind’s mind in Terry Pratchett’s book The Colour of Magic, it will prevent everything else from occupying your brain.
Anyway, the software [...]

OpenNMS conference in Europe


January 13th, 2009

… now all of you OpenNMS fans and people who’d like to know more about how OpenNMS can help you manage your network for less, have the opportunity to meet lots of influential OpenNMS people, without the need to hop onto a plane to the good ol’ U.S. of A.
The first ever OpenNMS user conference [...]