Have had confirmation from $HEAD_OFFICE that our horrible and slow external network connection (“a piece of wet string”, according to a colleague) will be upgraded, from $BANDWIDTH to 30*$BANDWIDTH before the end of March. Which is nice. This means that we’ll no longer be in the absurd situation where our bandwidth at home is ten… (read more)
Perhaps the Christmas database thing could be developed into something even more sophisticated – allow friends/relatives to drop the information straight into the database from, say, this web page, then behind the scenes the presents are ordered from Amazon or wherever and delivered to the person that requested them, all neatly gift-wrapped. A kind of… (read more)
What proportion of households in the UK do you suppose have a MySQL database running on a Linux box using an Apache web server, with a Perl/CGI frontend … to manage their Christmas present lists (i.e. who’s buying who what)? Yeah, you’re right, it’s probably just us.
At work we use SpecialSoftware on Windows desktop PCs. When running SpecialSoftware, it speaks to BackendDatabase, running on a network server, currently on an aging Netware platform. I want to get rid of the Netware server, so am investigating alternative platforms for BackendDatabase. Conversation with Supplier of SpecialSoftware: Supplier Support Droid: BackendDatabase only runs on… (read more)
So, regardless of whether Guy Fawkes was framed or really guilty, are we celebrating the fact that he was caught, or celebrating the fact that he was trying to blow up Parliament?
Many people’s first experience of Linux will have been with one of the earlier Red Hat releases. Mine was Red Hat version 5.2, or thereabouts. Although on most systems I now use Debian, Red Hat is still very well known. Except that, officially as of today, a press release states that they will be discontinuing… (read more)
Unless we ever move to Double British Summer Time (that’s two hours ahead of GMT) and stay at one hour ahead of GMT for the winter, I’m now stuck with it being dark for my cycle commute home, until the spring at least. Given that it was sunny and bright, last week, the darkness kind-of… (read more)
Finally got around to rolling out a copy of Mozilla Firebird at work. Picked about a dozen Willing Volunteers (TM) and set them up with it. So far so good, and most of them definitely prefer it to Internet Explorer, which is excellent news. Before I started the rollout, I took a look around on… (read more)
A story on BBC News describes new functionality to be included in the forthcoming Microsoft Office 2003 which would allow senders of email messages to set ‘expiry times’ (after which the message would be automatically deleted from the recipient’s inbox) and control whether the recipient can print or forward the message to a third party…. (read more)
One advantage of hosting one’s own web server is that one gets full access to the log files, indicating stuff about who visited and when etc. I’m using AWStats to produce nice analyses of my web site’s traffic. For example, Monday and Tuesday are the busiest days of the week, and early morning and early… (read more)
