Some women deal with loss by hitting the hairdressers, what does a girl geek mourning the exit of her country from a football tournament do? Migrate a domain. As the great philosopher Doris Day once said “Que sera sera”. OK I left scottishlass.co.uk as the last domain to move over to the VPS. I held off doing it sooner because I could see a few hits from people looking for the Runrig Loch Lomond link and had landed on this blog. If you can read this then you should be getting served by the American VPS host. Next step close the old hosting account…and make sure they cancel the recurring billing. The whole move’s gone amazingly smoothly so far, suspiciously so. Just a few cron jobs to set up for RSS gubbins.
Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Comfort geeking…
Saturday, November 17th, 2007
Busy *doing*, gonny be movin
Tuesday, November 13th, 2007Just a note to self and subscribers that I’m in the middle of faffing around with my portfolio of domain names, nameserver changes and moving all sorts of ancient shite between servers across the globe. UK visitors may find things a wee bit slower when it all settles down as I’m abandoning my UK hosts. Plan to do most of the donkey work this week/weekend so disruption may occur. If it all ends up looking as it does now then everything’s working well – the lousy design is, cough, ‘normal’ 
UK under attack?
Saturday, March 24th, 2007Strange net day today. Three British websites I visit regularly are down including one high profile newspaper site and a couple of smaller sector-specific players. Doesn’t seem to be DNS problems but technical faults on the sites themselves. (look like MS SQL related judging by the error pages). Probably just sheer coincidence but it does makes you wonder if there’s some coordinated attack exploiting some vulnerabilty going on. Don the tin foil hats. Incoming.
Cheap but good quality podcast new recorders from Olympus
Saturday, January 6th, 2007A while ago I was bemoaning the lack of medium quality digital recorder devices (everyone concentrating on players instead). The Podcasting News site has a mouth watering description of three new recorder models from Olympus: DS-30, DS-40 and DS-50. What I think is important here is the conjunction of quality recording bitrates with affordability. I’ve read a few other pioneering podcasting projects that used ‘ordinary’ Olympus dictation devices as a prototypes in organisation-wide podcasting systems but they all agreed that although they were affordable and simple to use the low audio quality was the weak point. These new models could make Olympus a serious player, or is that recorder in the entry-level podcaster market. Something newbies find is that they buy expensive microphones/mixers and connect them to their computer but forget that they have a noisy machine so are forever trying to post-process the sound to remove fan/central heating/air conditioning noises in the fixed location. Having a cheap but good quality recording device that could be used in a more acoustically friendly environment or outdoors for vox pops/sound seeing tours could make a big difference. It’s maybe a small market right now, but over the last couple of years there’s not been much competition from hardware companies competing with new products.
Olympus Intros Three Digital Recorders for Podcasting
Reading the description is sounds like Olympus has been listening (ha!) hard to the wish lists from podcasters and at long enabling visually impaired users to have a non-visual way of operating the device (almost all rely on cryptic, inaccessible menuing systems). Folk like Shelly have been lobbying long and hard to get the likes of Apple to improve the accessibility of iTunes and iPods but with little result. Olympus seem like they’re moving in the right direction.
Legacy
Saturday, January 6th, 2007Interesting but not at all surprising:
70 per cent of firms rely on legacy systems put in before 1996, says survey
With all the hoopla about Web 2.0 and start-ups it might give the impression that most of IT is taken up by writing new code and products. In reality most jobbing programmers are maintaining and extending existing systems rather than new projects. Many times something stable and well-understood is much easier to learn and use simply because of the pain that your peers have gone through to get that stability before you, things that have been around longer tend to have larger pools of developers with experience, more support/documentation available etc. so although they may be ‘old’ they’re not necessarily worse than something new. For every successful startup there are many failures, business entrepreneurs just fold that experience into their portfolio, learn from it and make the next project better but how about the IT folk? Technologies change all the time, you can make the same general mistakes but in a fast-changing environment yes you may be battle-scarred from a previous project but how much practically you can take forward can be tricky if the next project doesn’t have something in common with what you’ve worked on before even basics like platform/language.
The downside of maintenance is the real drain on productivity, a particular headache I find working with legacy systems is a malady that takes many forms, I call it “versionitis” – the versions of the product in use in a system are older than the vendors recommended release version and faults are indicating that an upgrade should fix the problem/improve performance/security. Snag is products these days tend to be an amalgam of multiple other third-party elements. Say you have 3 components one gets upgraded but second component isn’t compatible with the upgrade, wait around for 2nd component to upgrade then 3rd breaks…and so on you can go round in circles and never move forward. With Open Source you could have a go and try fixing it yourself but when you are relying on a paid closed-source vendor you’re pretty powerless. You have to watch upgrade notices like a hawk to try and find that Nirvana where subsystems sing in perfect harmony like the Coke advert. But you can gobble up oodles of valuable time experimenting trying out patches and upgrades, backing up, rolling back. Not all upgrades are good news, it’s fairly common for a new patch to also inadvertently introduce a new bug that is in fact more serious than the original fault you were trying to fix.
Who can blame vendors for wanting to improve the baseline code customers use by encouraging upgrading to bug fixed, feature enhanced versions? Fewer support problems…for them. In practice it’s it’s not always feasible or even possible from a resource point of view to make the change. I’ve run into a small version of this recently where we’re using a product that the application vendors strongly recommend using a particular version of DB as that’s all they support and can guarantee the product is tested under(?!), the snag is that third-party DB vendors have stopped offering support and have withdrawn the binaries/sources for that version which is now over three years old. So there’s no easy way for me to create a testbed for the product with that DB version, what can I try? How about trying the nearest point version and hope for the best that the application and the database get along without trouble? It’s frustrating when you don’t have control over the ingredients for the recipe for success.
Royal Podcast, Queen Elizabeth podcast, MP3s by Royal Appointment
Friday, December 22nd, 2006Thanks to American Dave Winer for pointing out that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth has her own podcast feed. If there’s been any publicity in the UK about this I’ve missed it. Gaun yersel Bessie! The Queen’s English from the horses mouth. She’s in her eighties now so she’s probably one of the oldest podcasters around too. Great to see part of the British heritage keeping up-to-date with changing technology, we already know that Andrew bought her an iPod a while ago. The Commonwealth is still nearly two billion people right around the globe so using the web for Royal Family messages makes bloody good sense. Maybe like Adam Curry’s sign-off sound of a lighter click she could just rattle her jewelry. One supposes that my podcatcher and I would receive the traditional Christmas message when it’s officially released, so sign up now in good time. Come on folks, let’s help push Bessie to the top of the iTunes charts where she belongs, it is your civic duty to subscribe. God save (to hard disk) our gracious queen.
The Queen’s Speeches podcast [via www.royal.gov.uk]
The best things come in small packages
Thursday, November 2nd, 2006Well it feels like Christmas, gizmos are like buses, nothing for ages then two come along at once. I’d put in an order with Apple weeks ago but delivery was delayed to today. Shh don’t tell anyone Christmas pressies for folks o mine but I’ve baggsied a shuffle for myself. I know people keep saying it but it’s so small! I’m female with small hands and even I was having difficulty picking it up. It’s teeny weenie. I originally wanted a shuffle for an older woman who likes listening to things while she’s out in the garden. Shuffle seems perfect, less chance of being damaged in the muck outdoors, lightweight, she doesn’t have great eyesight so a display on a device would be of limited use plus there’s few controls less chance to get confused. Mine will get used for the walk to work. I don’t now feel the need to lug my entire music library around with me on the iPod when it’s usually only a handful of tech podcasts I manage to listen to during the day – “Buzz Out Loud” is my favourite just now for tech news in the morning, light-hearted, entertaining technology talk, two women one man, refreshing change – stuff equality When the shuffle first came out I laughed at it, who on earth would want a thing like that with so little capacity and no screen, bah. Well for me it’s now the right gadget for the right time. I still need to get used to the clip though, out of about five times four of them I’ve pressed the wrong end of the clip to get it to open.
Gizmo 2, the Sony RH1 has also arrived. It’s a nice weight in your hand and black with LED on the side and sound level meters – handy to see if you’re still recording in low light situations. V. nice, the buttons are a bit smaller than in previous versions but solid metal rather than iPod plastic. It’ll be interesting to do a long term test and see which lasts better the RH1 or the Shuffle 2G.
Apple store for Glasgow?
Tuesday, October 31st, 2006Be still my beating heart. Macworld has an article Apple plans Glasgow retail store. Will be be able to buy Macs in the land of the Mac? Hope it’s true.
OCSPD
Saturday, October 28th, 2006Time to come clean, I suffer from OCSPD. Obsessive Compulsive Sony Purchasing Disorder. I can’t believe it, I’ve just ordered another minidisc recorder. That will make five at the last count. I can’t help myself. I know it’s a rapidly aging technology but I have a fondness for the minidiscs. The quality is still fantastic and sliding a physical button to start recording rather than all the faffing you normally have to do to set modes, choose menus and start recording on MP3 recorders, I still like the minidiscs but post-production has been less than thrilling. Another impulse buy. This one (RH1) is supposed to at long, long, long, long, long, looooonnnnngggg, last have the capability that minidisc owners have been crying out for “Let me transfer my own recordings to my computer digitally!” but for legacy SP/LP microphone recordings. At last! I feel kind of sad for Sony they’re having a rough time of it recently, slipping on PS shipping dates and battery recalls. The software with the minidiscs is usually abysmal but they still make cracking hardware and although the initial purchase is usually more expensive than other options, the products are robust. I have a MZ-N710 that’s still shiny brushed silver and iPods be dammed packs a lot of functionality into a beautiful square device – I have Sony gizmos over a decade old and they’re still going strong, for whatever reason their designs don’t seem to have cheap cases that get scraped, thin connectors that snap or get worn out. I think they’re well worth the money.
To me it seems like there’s a bit of a gap in the market for the medium quality recording devices, players aplenty but recorders? There’s the high-end Marantz and any number of cheap ‘voice recorders’ but not a great deal of choice in between. I can’t figure out why iRiver dropped the ball after the great wee iFP800 series of flash recorders. They went all Windows and DRM on us dropped Macs and offered fewer models with decent recording rates. If they’d enhanced iFP800 they could have cleaned up in the low-end portable podcasting market. Folk still recommend them on the podcasting mailing lists but you have to go to ebay to find them these days.
How many developers does it take…
Saturday, October 28th, 2006…to spot a really simple web problem. 3 and about 2 hours. Had a case where I was given some new styles to add to a stylesheet, added them and an image that should have been appearing on a hyperlink wasn’t showing up on my machine. Try the usual suspects, relative paths, does the image exist, check, proxy caching, check, delete cache, check, restart browser, check, restart machine check. Apple guy can see the images, another Windows user can see the images, just not me. Install new browser (Opera) check – hooray images appear…but why weren’t they showing up on IE/Firefox? Well after what seems like an eternity I clicked on the link in Opera…and watched the image disappear from view right before my eyes. Help mammy the image monster is eating my icons. Aha! The link was missing a visited state. Me being the only person to have clicked on the link was the only person seeing the effect. It was so bizarre having the same thing happen in Firefox and MSIE and not be able to understand what was wrong. Doh, doh and thrice doh! Another one to add to the collection.