Botanicula
Played Botanicula tonight with the kids. It’s the follow up to Machinarium – also known as The Robot Game – which we’ve loved forever.
Charming with lovely music – and some nice puzzles.
WordPress updates
Updated to WordPress 3.4. Seven years since I started using WordPress. Time flies.
Raspberry Pi
Finally it arrived. Unboxed; find all of the bits needed (Micro USB power supply, USB keyboard, 2GB SD card); download the beta bits; boot and it worked.
I’ve not done anything beyond this – just checking the darn thing worked.
Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate
The process and change control for the build/rebuild is pretty straight-forward now.
Updated the main archive server from Windows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate. Looks great – some nice features – and it seems to be faster than the previous version.
Also this blog is hosted as a SUSE Linux web server running on top of Hyper-V on top of Windows Server 2012 RC. Performance is solid. No issues to date.
Another blogging restart
I’ve said it before – but hopefully there’s more to blog about again.
Less confidential stuff; lots more around Private Cloud and datacenter transformation.
.. the more things stay the same
Back to self hosting.
The blog has moved from home, to hosting at GoDaddy and up to Azure.
All had advantages – all had downsides. It’s the private cloud/public cloud conversation in a nutshell.
Ultimately GoDaddy performance let it down – especially for the database – was unacceptable. Their support was also pretty poor. As always “you get what you pay for” – but the bottlenecks for even simple, near static, WordPress sites were unacceptable.
Azure has a lot going for it – I am still keeping my eye on future features that are currently in beta. Performance was incredible; the process of getting apps updated was a little too cumbersome for me.
Self hosting really requires me to get dirty with the infrastructure and tuning – but the fact that I can lets me drive the performance. I’m also responsible for everything below the app – hardware, storage, network, connectivity, OS, security etc etc.
The more things change..
I just noted that Fedora 17 has just been released. That took me right back to when Red Hat Linux spewed out RHEL and Fedora Core about nine years ago.
I clearly remember the debates within the Ximian team about which distros to support in Red Carpet Enterprise 2.x and moving forward into the ZENworks Linux Management platforms.
WordPress on Azure
I have started looking at WordPress running on Azure – Microsoft’s public cloud app fabric. One area I am really interested in investigating is the performance and scalability of a PHP app – with particular reference to Gallery integration.
Notes and comments in the coming months.
Goodbye Netflix
Another step in cutting the cord – but this is a strange one.
We’ve been Netflix customers for over nine years – I signed up before we moved to Utah.
Last month I removed the streaming option and reverted back to just physical DVDs; today I cancelled the whole service.
At the end of the day – there’s just not a lot of stuff at Netflix that we want to watch any more.
Picking up the blogging again
Firstly – it’s been too long without posting here. Lots of reasons, lots of excuses – mainly workload and not having anything public to blog about.
Secondly – I’ve changes roles inside Microsoft – moving from Business Development (where nothing is public or bloggable) and into customer facing enterprise strategy.
The role is a great fit – and it takes me back to what I love – working and interacting directly with customers.
I’ll write more about the role and the experience in the next few days.
Recent Comments