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22/08/08 - That was the week that was
Current rambling brain thoughts:
I'm glad this week is over, it's not been a very good one in many ways. Just completed what was supposed to be an administrator's course for SharePoint 2007 - turned out to be more of a 'content administrator course' with very little emphasis on installing things and configuring multi-site connectivity. Oh well.
Still awaiting Elonex Laptops. Had a look at the netbook in Maplin which is essentially the same unit. Looks canny enough - hope the unit performs well. Just played with a few of the new Atom-based laptots and I really like them, apart from the touchpads.
Currently struggling with decisions relating to employment. Need time to think - digging the garden up this weekend will help.
Managed to max-out memory usage on my VM server at home putting another two VM's into operation. All good fun, and useful too!
I Need sleep.
Casio still sell their databank watches that I loved, even though a lot of shops don't stock them. Think I might invest in one in the near-ish future as my current watches are all dead.
Flash animation on Celeron 450 processors sucks.
I really shouldn't run a main development machine with three screens on a Celeron 450
I need a vacaation.
The spiders keep getting bigger... and closer to my computer oh my!

06/08/08 - There aint enough coffee in the whole of South-America
For the mamoth task ahead of us in the IT department. Just about to hit a stupidly busy period at work and I'm already pulling stupidly long days. Worked a ten and a half hour day yesterday to try and work through some bits and pieces.
Caffeine levels... low... need more coffee.
Elonex ONEt ... should have been here this week... yet another delay email yesterday stating the 'due to unprecedented demand yak yak price of cheese in Uzbekistan yak yak didn't actually buy enough units yak yak stealing your cash yak yak' I won't receive the units until the end of the month.
It had better be worth it after all this or I'll never hear the end of it from the missis!
I need a vacaation.

10/07/08 - Elonex ONEt
I finally recieved an email from Elonex today regarding the shipment of the sub 100 pound laptops I ordered for Rach and I back at the beginning of the year. I've actuallybeen offered the upgraded new model Elonex ONEt instead of the ONE for the same price as the initial unit!
I'm rather excited by the fact it seems to be a RISC 32-Bit Microprocessor in the unit running at 400Mhz - a little investigation returns that it might be a 360Mhz model overclocked to 400Mhz - but the manufacturer provides all of the necessary tools to port any Intel x86 architecture linux modules over to the unit. The new ONEt has a sleeker look, much like that of the EEEPC though it has much less 'on-paper' horsepower. The RISC architecture should offer a fair bit of beef though, and I'm sure I can slide more memory in there and recompile the kernel if necessary! On the whole, I'm really looking forward to receiving the units!

08/07/08 - Code, Manuals and building the impossible dream
After a fairly hefty amount of work on some of my projects I've managed to rebuild manuals to about 90% of the functionality the systems operate to. It's amazing how much you need to document when you sit down and look through your working applications. It would be so much easier having another couple of people onboard with me helping to write the manuals and fully test the software - at present it's a hefty load to carry when undertaking major modifications to systems. Currently working late into the evening trying to ship out manuals and training materials for some of the latest pieces of software. I had planned to create a full DVD training video for clients, I'm just struggling to find the time to film/edit/resource for it.

22/06/08 - All work and no play make Rick go woogawoogaboingboing
I'm not entirely sure where the time has gone - well I'm aware of the time passing undertaking all of the DIY projects on the house, but I'm not sure what happened to all the lovely development time I had planned!
I've managed to do a fair bit of work on some of the applications I'm concentrating on at the moment, documenting features and building training guides alongside the main development thread. I've got a large list of things to build and a growing list of things crossed off on it which is nice to see.
On the cool side of things, I've just managed to get Synergy working on my work computer at work - well, on two computers actually - both joined together to act as one with a single keyboard and mouse able to traverse four screens. Very cool, and extremely useful.
I've also managed to start rebuilding my home network to make it more useful and start building virtual machines. If we were on mars I'd maybe have enough hours in the day!

23/05/08 - Free as in beer
Well it looks like I'm going to be missing BarCamp North East (damnit!) I've just got way too much on this weekend already. It's been an extremely hectic couple of months sorting things out at work and on the house and redeveloping applications for TeesCode. I've built some very cool features recently which I'm fairly proud of and I've mapped out all of the bits that I need to code on the new version of Virtucoll. Again I'm going to release the thing as Free Open Source Software, I can't see any reason to slap a price tag on it other than support which is fair enough really.
I've managed to get on the beta tester list for the ElonexOne which I'm really pleased about - I like testing new hardware and software and this is a great opportunity to mash around with some really cool new hardware. It's going to be nice to be able to throw a laptop in and out of my rucksack without worrying about it!
Google Gears has caught my attention also - allowing web applications to run offline. Interesting.. I must look at this further and see if I can reproduce my web applications offline using the open framework provided by Google.
Kongreg8 has had a few updates to the core framework, DocM8 is getting there slowly and Virtucoll shouldn't be too far behind hopefully.
Busy, Busy, Busy times and not enough hours in the day to sit down and put my new Fedora 9 system into one piece!

16/04/08 - Virtual Insanity
Ok so I really need to get some more sleep, fixed my SQL bug (after noticing my SQL was fine but the php line below it was skipping the whole procedure!) and I've managed to port versions of it to my spangly new Xubuntu virtual machine. I've been playing around with VMWare and VirtualPC this week quite a bit trying to build test servers for SharePoint 2007 and development environments for testing ISA server and some linux applications.
My Vista machine now has about 13 VirtualPC images on it (most grabbed from Microsoft's ISA demo lab...uuurgh!), and my MacBook now has three virtual machines available and configured to give me all of the application goodness I could ever need, if only I had enough memory to allow launching of them all.
I think my head is about to dribble out of my ears trying to work out the custom styling of SharePoint Portal 2007... the usual Microsoft six million style sheets and then hard-coding in the actual files. Well done. No, really. Classic coding there guys. Oh, and cheers for the 250 group limit on sites too, yeah that really helps. Just hit that with work projects having not realised that there was a limit so low. Currently having to contact Microsoft to find a solution as well as having to read about four books simultaneously to decode the underlying application set. Thanks Microshaft, you've done it again!
In happier news, InfoSec '08 is in seven days time and I've just put in my travel request - hurrah for geek conventions. Hurrah for being a l00t Wh0r3 ! Hurrah for a day out of the office.

14/04/08 - It needn't be hell with SQL
But is usually is, if we're being honest about it. I mean, seriously - all I'm trying to do is join two tables in a query to pull the results back combined. A simple inner join but will it play ball? Will it heck as like!
Working on my document control application, DocM8, I hit a small snag with the Trash function (displaying of the pending removal items) whilst constructing some joined table SQL. Now I know I've done this before but for some reason I'm just not returning the results I expect. Back to the drawing board I think... work it out on paper again and then try it all again.
So here I am, in the middle of yet another coding project and I'm about a month off BarCamp NorthEast which is where I'm hoping to show the system off at. There's nothing like setting deadlines for yourself that are taxing. Oh well... if anyone needs me I'll be hammering away on my backlit keyboard trying to get SQL and PHP to communicate in a semi- literate manner.

03/04/08 - Another hard hat day
Building seems to have been the theme for the past few weeks. If it hasn't been reconstructing the house, it's been constructing applications for the Internet.
Ahead of BarCamp ( barcamp.org/BarCampNorthEast/ ) I'm desperately trying to get DocM8 finished and the development framework built. I've got a fair chunk of the interface built, I'm currently working on the meta data and document storage routines.
WSS 3 is starting to annoy me with it's foibles of install. SPP2007 disks will be pulled out of the MSDN pack at some point very soon!
Just had a look at some of the new Mac developer videos and I'm quite motivated to start building some applications for the Mac that will interface to my web services. All good happy hacking fun.
Thought for the day: there should be a Costa Coffee in the office.

18/03/08 - For love and caffeine
It's been a busy few weeks sorting bits and pieces out and trying to get my head around a few different chunks of technology (both new and old). I've grabbed some old hardware from my good friend Owen who's clearning out some of his IT equipment and hopefully the thin terminals will prove to be of great use at the office in reducucing desk noise and heat.
Trying to get my head around WSS3.0 at the moment and it's proving to be a bit of a weird one to install at times. Currently trying to build a Sharepoint services environment on a virtual server image and something's not playing ball. All the clatter and clank of plumbers fixing my heating system isn't helping the thought processes... and I'm running low on my resident caffeine levels due to water-on-and-off effects.
Managed to get my old internal card reader working on my Ubuntu box.. hurrah for latest kernel updates! I'll hopefully be able to build custom flash kernels and mash them across to the cards now.
Currently writing a load of new software at the same time when I get a few spare minutes here and there. Lots of languages, lots going on... ooh and I think it's about time I started doing some guitar effects hacking again... I've got a couple there that aren't working fully and I know I can put them in a better casing!

22/02/08 - Hackintosh
After a few hours of mashing around with code and developing, Kongreg8 is running pretty sweetly now with plenty of content thrashing around in the database. Lots of nice reports and printer-friendly output. Plenty of functions built into the software now, more on the cards once I've completed the next phase of development.
Finally got my OpenMoko running the latest version of the OS - much better than the version I had on the unit. I'm working on some application development on it at the moment and trying to learn Python while I'm at it. Oh and Objective C using Cocoa just to really mess with my head. Oh yeah, and I'm trying to get my head around the new Sharepoint 2007 stuff which is really messing with my cranium!
Komodo Edit (free version) is really cool.. just installed it on the Mac and my XP coding VMWare partition. Very cool.
On the whole it's a busy busy time and there's plenty for me to do with very little time to do it all in. It's all good though. Trying to get my security knowledge back up to speed as well as I've been out of it for a little too long. So many pies.. so little fingers.

11/02/08 - Virtual Servers Virtually Networked
It's been a busy month of playing around with new technology and trying things out. I flew down to Poole last week to see the new VMWare ESX server in action, I have to say I am extremely impressed. It handles memory very well - using shared space when you use the same information, such as core OS files. This means you can boot several Win2003 servers on one box on around 512Mb RAM instead of 512Mb per instance. Nice.
On the coding front I've been putting together systems I should have written last year but never got the chance to. I've almost completed the first phase of building Kongreg8 and have it running with live data for RiverCityChurch's database managament. Separate style sheets for mobile and computer devices so it's nice and lightweight for phones. I'm quite pleased with the speed in which I've managed to put the system together, turns out my brain does still work after all.
I've managed to rewire my brain to do coding on a mac and a normal keyboard now thankfully, but I have found odd problems when going for extended characters - I think my higher ASCII character set is still confused in my brain somewhere. Odd moments of 'er....now..er... where's that key...'

16/01/08 - Something in the air indeed
Finally managed to carve some time out to watch the keynote speech by Steve Jobs at the latest Apple update conference. I am quite impressed with the new MacBook Air, I think that it is a very tidy unit and has some fantastic features. However, I'm not overly impressed with the price in the UK versus the US - some nearly six hundred pounds difference for the top of the range model it appears based on their pricing structure. Now there's tax, and then there's tax! It seems we in the UK are destined to pay over the odds for stuff due to no real reason other than they've been getting away with it for years.
Having said that, if I had the money, I'd buy one of the new MacBook Air models, and a new Airport base station with TimeMachine built in, and a copy of the new OS for my work MacBook, oh and if I REALLY had money to burn I'd spend fifteen grand getting the top of the range PowerPC with it's terrabytes of storage and gigs of memory and enough processing to chew up a small country oooh and two 30 inch monitors, but now I'm just heading back into my dream world. Maybe I'll just settle for saving up for a new coffee mug.

15/01/08 - Hacking for fun and profit
Finally I've managed to get my office sorted and managed to begin the process of developing more applications and getting much more sorted code-wise. Top of the agenda is a new Virtual Learning Environment to replace my ageing and somewhat outdated Virtucoll.
I've been slightly concerned by the new home router hack that allows unauthenticated modification of your systems (coverage on theregister.co.uk "Most home routers 'vulnerable to remote take-over'" and in-depth discovery over at gnucitizen.org). Having used many devices over the years I've noticed that a lot of them do indeed support UPnP out of the box with no way of turning the blasted thing off. Now, it comes to mind that if you can fire off SOAP events to open the ports on your router, what other havok can be caused by firing off applications on your local machine. Considering this is not a 'vulnerability' in the way Adobe Flash operates, and given the industrious nature of many of today's hackers (and script-kiddies) it worries me that people will start a knee-jerk reaction of blocking all sites with Flash content.
In other news, I'm still rather taken with the EEEPC that Matthew is a proud owner of. My G3 iBook works well as a Debian machine. I've finally got my Sitepoint CSS and PHP quick reference guides pinned to my wall in front of my very clean and efficiently placed and organised desk.