I’ve been a long time user and supporter of Firefox – through all of the pains and memory hogging years. Before that I swore by Netscape Navigator.
I dabbled for a short time with Rockmelt – good idea – but didn’t seem to have the execution and updates.
I’m now back to trying Chrome. It’s improved a lot.
For fairness – Internet Explorer 10 is actually pretty impressive too. The ONE THING that I miss is a plugin that does adblock. There is a paid option for IE9 – but nothing for IE10.
Word 2013 allows direct publishing to a blog – this is my first test to see if it’s a replacement for the venerable Windows Live Writer.
I just got reminded of this very cool demo tool.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897434.aspx
ZoomIt is free – and lets you zoom into an area of the screen to highlight a piece of functionality or an area of interest. Great for demos.
Just loving Windows Server 2012 and the updated version of Hyper-V – it’s fast and furious on modern hardware.
The updated Linux support is great too – multiple v-procs – and great aware drivers for SUSE Linux.
There’s a lot to be said about ease of use – especially when it comes to extensive customisation.
I’ve spent the weekend installing and building the “back office” for Grania’s business using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 – and it’s been pleasantly rewarding. No code, no SQL, no UI hacking – and I’ve got a really solid, supportable CRM for her Music Together business fully working.
The best part is that the customisation is fully portable – and can be moved up to Dynamics CRM Online. That’s powerful.
I’m the silent half of Grania’s business. The business process, policy and web monkey. I talk about marketing, lead generation, moving people through the funnel – she gets to teach pre-schoolers Music Together® classes.
The best part of all – telling friends that the business had gone live – and watching the Apache logs to see when people hit the site. It was a real warm and fuzzy moment to see .. one.. two.. three.. then more hits to the site. Early days; and friends aren’t customers – but one step has been taken.
It was hot this weekend – over 35°C (92°F) outside – and the home servers were suffering somewhat.
Western Washington is pretty friendly for servers – it’s usually cool – but we do get occasional spikes.
Normally I’ll add an extra fan to the rack – but this time I was away for the weekend. The firewall/IDS server hard drive collapsed and died. The alert monitors sent a final notification that the internal temperature reached 120°C. The final straw was a power outage for over an hour that triggered the UPS and graceful shutdown. On power restoration everything came back as expected – but the firewall sat with an unbootable file system.
It only took twenty minutes to replace the hardware – and it running happily at 42°C right now.
Interesting issue this week with Postfix and IPv6. The webserver was resolving MX records as usual for delivery of blog notification – and also looking up AAAA records for delivery via SMTP over IPv6. Without a functioning route from home to the far end these were obviously failing and not retrying with the (routable) IPv4.
The fix was to force Postfix to only use IPv4 – there’s a great readme on this.
/etc/postfix/main.cf: # You must stop/start Postfix after changing this parameter. inet_protocols = ipv4 (DEFAULT: enable IPv4 only)
One of the major frustrations with wireless networking is the proliferation of noise from neighbours.
When I got my first Wifi router – back in 1999 – there was practically zero interference. From our house in Nottingham I got a whopping 11Mb/s and mine was the only network in sight.
I’m writing this sitting on the deck working. My laptop can see over 30 different wifi networks. Some are secured; most are not. I’ve been offering to secure neighbours networks to prevent “driveby surfing” and the associated risks.
It seems as if the vast majority of networks are set to use channel 1 – the very few routers set to “auto” or “channel switch” are bouncing between 4 and 6.
I’ve been using Ekahau Heatmapper for a while to walk the house and deck and check the signals. Two benefits – I can spot “who’s new” and what they are broadcasting on. Secondly I can tweak the settings for the two networks at home and make sure they are performing optimally.
I still smile when I hear about “bug bounties” – and I always think back to this Dilbert cartoon from a long, long, long time ago.
Scott Adams – just spot on. This was on my wall at Novell for many years.
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