The worst thing about being on holiday is when it comes to an end. An excellent few weeks off, bumbling around the house, burying cherry-pickers and drinking far too much with excellent friends. The rest of the week involves the Edinburgh Book Festival - we're seeing Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyer and Terry Pratchett, as well as going to laugh at Ed Byrne. Excellent.
When I restart officially next week, I think I'll finally publish some technical articles I've had kicking around for a while (Ajax, BlackBerry, iPhone) and start on my next set of 'The View' articles. Well, you know you have to sometimes just pucker up and kiss ass to get back on someones blogroll, right ?
Today is Yellow Day!
Imagine, if you will, a software product:
Which runs on a bunch of different computers. Macs, Linux, AIX, Solaris, AS/400, zSeries - and even on Windows (both 32-bit and 64-bit)
It stores data in a highly efficient, robust database - and I mean robust. Like 250gb+, millions of records, transaction logging, etc..
It has awesome public/private key security and a secure directory built right in. And we're talking industry standard RSA stuff
Its an application development platform with a Visual Basic style language, Java, Javascript built right in. And if you want to get down and dirty, C and C++ interfaces.
It bolts right into Eclipse for a really cool, extensible client experience.
It can run Google Widgets right out of the box. So you can wire your applications together.
The Data Store can be replicated. So you can have multiple replicas on separate servers. Servers on Linxux, clients on Mac, All running the same replica of the same data. Disaster recovery ? No worries. Offline copies ? Easy.
Applications are created within the data store. So they replicate too. No distribution issues. No DLL's to send out, no 'latest version of application xyz..'
Web Client enabled too, so you can run with any shonky old browser you want.
Its supported, and licensed by a HUGE company that isnt going to disappear overnight. A company, in fact, that created most of the IT business.
Its standards driven. LDAP, SMTP mail, the whole 9 yards.
Its standard applications are open-source, so you can take what ships, and start adding to it. Immediately.
The data store can sit on top of DB2 - the market leading SQL database.
Ajax ? Check. Web Services ? Check.
130m customers already? Banks? Governments? Film Companies?
Sounds pretty awesome, doesnt it ? And its available TODAY ? Yeah. Where ? here
Last Friday, my lovely niece got married to Michael, and currently they're touring Australia on honeymoon. Interestingly my neice and nephew in law are quite interested in migrating there - he's an IT service desk manager and she's a business degree type person. Anyone got any pointers on who and what they should do ?
After the family wedding at the weekend, I needed to do some height work around Casa Buchan. Specifically remove some trees from my phone cable, paint my house and trim a hedge. Of course, I didnt want a health and safety disaster such as the photo.. So I hired a cherry picker - a mobile, self powered platform on a stick - to get my hairy arse up in the air. Far far far up in the air. About 3 hours work. I guess. So how did that go ?
Firstly, the thing weighs about six tonnes. Its got HUGE batteries and runs off them for DAYS. So you can imagine you really dont want this running over your foot. The trees I had to clear were a good 40 feet up, so I thought a picker with a 60 feet span would do the trick. I dont know if you've been up at 60 feet, on a platform that - well - sways - before. There's NO WAY that this thing is going to topple over, but of course, try telling the lizard part of your brain that this is the case. I think this video sums it up:
Finally, the trees were cut, and we managed to get the cherry picker out of the muddy track area. It took a push from the guys relaying the road beside the pub (Thanks!), two broken nylon 5-tonne webbings (When they break, by god they break!), and I still have to repair the neighbours fence. Still.
I then inched the thing back to the front of the house - somewhere where I had take it before, and somewhere that USED to be a major road, capable of taking 40-tonne lorries. No worries..
Ah. No. Bogged down. Right to the axle. So basically, it was resting on its chassis, wheels merrily spinning. Sigh. I managed to paint 70% of the front of the house, and cut 40% of the hedge. And then started digging, jacking, digging.
After all the excitement, and the physical effort of digging the dammed thing out, I just went back to working from home:
Oh. Two of my long-suffering mates - Ralf and Derek - both said 'Oh, we have ladders to do this. You should have said..'. Sigh. Next time, I'll avoid DIY..
The Buchan family have congregated in Scotland - they're all moving to the east coast today for a family wedding on Friday. My Niece - god I feel old.
Anywhoo, work-wise, its all very exciting. I may have mentioned Flex a few times. Nearing the end of a large piece of work, making a nice easy-to-use Flex Web UI for our product - FirM. And you know - Flex (and its programming language - actionscript 3) - is very very nice. More event-driven than procedural. Tight binding and object hierarchy, but with Javascript-like monkey-coding features. Soon, I'm writing another pair of articles for The View on Flex programming - so I'll start dropping snippets. I'm coming to the end of four separate articles there on BlackBerry programming, and another two articles will mean I have six consecutive magazines. I'm not sure if this is any kind of record, but does give me that warm glow.
A big family gathering - Big Sis is in from San Antonio, Brother is in from Hua Hin - all for my neices' wedding next friday in Aberdeen. Frightening thought - all the men from the family in Kilts. Three generations of hairy knees on show.
The usual five hour drive from the east coast, punctuated by a quick shopping frenzy in Perth. Yes. I got an iPhone.
DAOS: Domino Attachment and Object Service. (15/07/2008)
When I first saw this feature over a year ago, I understood completely that this would be one of the most important features in the v8.5 release. DAOS basically allows you to move all file attachments from all databases on a server onto a separate filestore. All of a sudden, only one copy of a particular file is kept per server, instead of hundreds of copies in each mail file. All of a sudden, Lotus Notes databases are databases again, and dont have to bloat with file attachments.
This is important. Go off and read this article on DAOS here, print it out, and use it a a very strong case to get your server estates upgraded to Domino 8.5 as soon as your organisation is comfortable. Its going to save you a *lot* of money.
Think about that. A MILLION devices, and 10 MILLION apps. In just over three days. On a completely new platform. That you had to pay money for. To queue for.
Anyone who thinks the iPhone is uninportant, or is some consumer fad, is talking bollocks. Complete and utter bollocks.
Welcome to the new moble smartphone future. In the blue corner - BlackBerry - supporting the corporate user. And in the white corner - iPhone - aimed initially at the consumer.
The new Pixar movie - Wall·e - is officailly out this weekend. But *cough* thanks to my blagging skills, I got four free tickets. So at 5am, SWMBO and I got up, took the train to Edinburgh, and roused Warren and Kitty out of bed, before heading to the Ocean Terminal to see it.
Excellent movie. It has real *moods* - which did provoke at least one 'howling kid' near the end. (No, it wasnt me). Animation - as we all expect - is fantastic - and their future vision of humanity is spot on. I believe the right-wing in McMerica is up in arms about it, which means its probably right. Even Buy-n-large - the ficticious supermarket chain in the movie - has its own website. So. Go see it. As soon as. I suspect we'll see it at least once more in the cinema, and eagerly await the blu-ray release.
One last thing. Another new Pixar short preceeds this movie - "Presto". About a magician and his rabbit. Five minutes of howling with laughter. Unfortuately this short isnt on the new Blu-ray Pixar Shorts disk we bought last week, which is another recommendation. 'Lifted' in high resolution is even funnier, once you can see all the gags.
Here's a preview of Presto from youtube, setting up the characters:
Scotland appears to be sold out of 16gb iPhones.. (11/07/2008)
After some calling around today. Aside from the chaps at the AppleStore in Glasgow, that is, who got back to me and mentioned that they have a few 16gb units left. Unfortunately, they cannot do business sign-up for the O2 network - just personal.
And can I just take this opportunity to say how good the customer service from the Applestore in Glasgow is ? Based on one lease of two macs, almost a year ago, Johnny - the business chap - still remembers my darling daughter, the blog, the BlackBerry obsession, etc. And was kind enough to return a call during the week, and send two follow up eMails yesterday and today - during what must have been a fairly hectic iPhone 2 day.. Dell, take note This is customer service.
Now, all I have to do is lose SWMBO tomorrow in Edinburgh, and I might just be able to sneak an iPhone home..
Update: A rather "helpful" Carphone Warehouse person told me yesterday that Carphone Warehouse had received 25,000 iPhones - down from their original allocation of 40,000 iphones - and they were all sold by 11am on Friday morning. The 16gig units disappeared quickly. This doesnt include the iPhones that O2 received, or the fairly small number that the Applestores got at the very last minute. At the stores, they did mention that a lot of folks were upgrading, so this might not all be new customers. Expect a slew of iPhone 1 phones on eBay (524 at 11am on Sunday) very soon.
This does rather indicate that Apple have not been able to keep up with launch demand this time - especially looking at the mobileMe crashes, and the activation server crashes over the last 72 hours.
As a card carrying CrackBerry lover, I have a large number of the devices kicking around the house. Open drawers, and 7110's, 8120's, 8300's all fall out. I've even got the wife and sprog onto BlackBerries.
Oh. But the iPhone 2 is out in 17 minutes time. And its extremely lust worthy..
20 years ago, on July 6th 1988 Piper Alpha blew up:
10:20 p.m. Tartan's gas line (pressured to 120 Atmospheres) melts and bursts. From this moment on, the platform's destruction is assured. 15 - 30 tonnes of gas are released instantaneously and immediately ignite. Gas bursts out at ½ a tonne per second, equivalent to the entire domestic consumption of gas in the UK. A massive fireball of 150 metres in diameter engulfs Piper Alpha.
Three strikes and your out - European Ruling on MONDAY (06/07/2008)
Yikes. Slimy politicians are trying to slide in an amendment to a European ruling which means that ISP's can switch you off after three strikes. So much for net neutrality, eh? More here
How does the internet work? Well, aside from the tubes, there's the DNS - Domain Name Service. Someone holds all the TLD's - Top Level Domains - such as .com, .uk, and so forth. And we 'buy' names off of DNS registers (I use BulkRegister.com). However, we need to find someone to host DNS entries for us. NOT webspace, just someone to actually hold our DNS entry. In my case, Prominic.net do my Domino hosting and my DNS hosting - so I just get them to do it all for me. (And they're very good)
So this DNS stuff. What is it ? Its a 'name' - such as billbuchan.com - that resolves to an IP address. My server(s) have static IP addresses on the internet, making like a bit easier, so all I need to do is point billbuchan.com to the public IP address of my server. However, there are more than one type of record. There's the 'Host' record - for web traffic - which tells your browser where to go. And there's the MX (Mail Exchange) record, which tells your eMail where to go.
In my case, I have Postini spam-scanning my stuff, so the mail goes there first, and then ends up at my server. A good example of web going direct to my server, and mail taking a more indirect route.
Now, theres a new-ish thing on the anti-spam thing called 'SPF' (short for Sender Policy Framework). This means that my DNS entries has some extra text entries, which state that mail has to come from a particular place. This *should* cut down the amount of spam that appears to come from my eMail servers (I hope).
One really useful site (And the point to this entire post!) was to point you at mxTookbox.com which gives you the tools to query MX records, and to create valid SPF records for your domains.
Phew. And you thought that hosting a service just meant slapping a server onto the internet, and switching it on, eh ?
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