Items of relevance to my work for a company in Edinburgh providing solutions to the Finance Industry.
Well, that migration went more smoothly than I thought it would. In the end I would put more of the time down to file transfer and familiarisation with the directory layout than actual configuration related issues.
We shall see over the next few days whether everything is working ok – looks fine at the moment.
Its a fair cop. I, and the other europe.webmatrixhosting users have received notification that they are going to enforce the 30 day lifetime rule on sites hosted by them, so I am going to have to decide whether I want to pay some money and host this elsewhere, or go quiet for a while.
Decisions decisions. I’ve been posting stuff up here for a while, on and off, we shall see what I decide.
Managing, Organizing, and Delivering IT Projects by Using the Microsoft Solutions Framework 3.0 is on its way. And at last all that stuff you read about MSF for 70-300 and didn’t use in the exam you can now use!
An elective that appears on both premier tracks (not MCDBA though).
Ewan Magregor has just completed a round the world trip on a BMW GS motorcycle, with some other chap who I’d never heard of. Well done to them (though they had a support crew). Looking forward to seeing the TV series about it, but I’ll need Satellite television in the UK to see it. Mmmm, decisions decisions.
Minor rant about newspaper coverage again – banner on the front of the print edition of The Scotsman describes it as “his easy rider round-the-world road trip”. Off road bikes, no roads in Mongolia, easy rider ? Groan.
And don’t start me on their so-called computer expert talking about Linux and saying that noone hacks it because it is wonderful and hackers hack Windows because they don’t like Microsoft. I see no need to redress the balance because that would waste all of our time, but needless to say that proper regimes for all parts of your operation are necessary for security, not just Windows.
Just goes to show how far you have to simplify things to reach the mainstream audience. And yes, I probably applied a bit of spin to support my rant – its more fun 🙂
Via a people link on Sunpig (See – I’m on there too!). I ended up at the Geekquiz on Thudfactor. I’m not sure about going both ways though…
| You are 31% geek | |
You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator.
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I guess these will be coming out of Beta soon, as the MCP email newsletter featured them recently, and Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine now has a review of the electives. Summary of Mike Gunderloy’s review? Tough due to the wide spread of the material, do the analysis and web services/server components exams before you do them.
For the record, the two exams are 70-330 Implementing Security for Applications with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and 70-340 Implementing Security for Applications with Microsoft Visual C# .NET.
Doing a bit of background research to keep up to date on copywriting and search engine optimisation and came across a reference to Wordtracker.
A very useful site, at a good price, so have a look. To cut a long story short, take a look at the ticker across the top of their home page. It lists the top 50 internet search terms at that point in time. Sums up what the Internet is really about. Go look.
Joel Spolsky is a bloke who used to work in Microsoft, at least I think he did. And he wrote the foreword to a book called In Search of Stupidity, which is actually how I came to know about, buy and read that book – more on that another time.
As well as his day job, Joel has a website that he uses to spout forth from time to time on issues. After a quiet time since April 2004, Joel bounces back with a big post on Microsoft and APIs. An interesting article, and I admit I’m still thinking what I think (if you know what I mean) but quite a comment on .NET, a good bit of controversy on whether anybody is using .NET or SharePoint or any of those server products at all. And a fascinating insight on how to really develop a product that is used by non-techies.
Of course, there is still a lot of work to be done to make IT meet the needs of people who just don’t care about it like we techies do, and that will take a number of years to do.
I must admit that I have been struggling a bit with material for the old blog here. I go through periods of gushing to periods when I wonder what to talk about.
I did figure that my latest gadget acquisition might merit a mention – I upgraded my old Orange SPV to the latest version a couple of weeks ago when my annual contract ran its course. I now have the SPV E200 which is quite nice, having got used to the various functions. It seems less prone to freezing like my old one, and I quite like the little changes to the screen design albeit that the basic forms interface has not changed for outlook and the other applications. I am still at the daily changing ring tone stage so not settled down yet.
I have been having a wee internal debate with myself on work postings. The Managing Director at my previous employer trained me up to be very circumspect when it comes to discussing work related matters with anyone not employed ( or perhaps even employed) by the same company as me and I still carry a lot of that around with me. I wonder to myself how the Microsoft guys get on maintaining necessary company confidentiality while still keeping their blogs up to date. I guess they will be running with a set of guidelines, or the blogs will be very much part of the partner management process.
So when I feel comfortable that I am not “giving too much away” I will be rambling away about nonsensical rubbish that does not cause any problems, or re-using material that is in the public domain albeit with my own opinion stuck around it.
As the previous entries in the blog have described, I have been out of the office on customer sites for more days than not. I was going to point out that I have spent supporting a couple of customers using SQL Server 6.5, but it has just occurred to me that I have in fact used SQL Server 6.5, 7.0 and 2000 in the last 5 days and used all versions at one customer (albeit not the same project).
Fancy that.
I should really dive on to the Yukon box that one of my colleagues built using the disk I brought back from the PDC and get the full set. I wonder if there is an equivalent to “Munro Bagging” for getting four versions of SQL in the same week? Maybe I should hunt down 6.0 and 4.2 and then perhaps one of those Alpha systems.
Alistair Laing 
