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)