Like every other member of the British public, I usually find Jamie Oliver to be irritating. Extremely irritating. However, having watched his food lecture on "TED", I have a new-found respect for the man. He knows his stuff, and is working hard to improve food standards and dietary awareness, and not just in this country. This is a dynamic 21-minute lecture, stuffed full of gob-smacking facts and insights into the appalling modern Western diet, and its link with obesity. You owe it to yourself, and particularly your childen (if you have any), to watch this. It's made me want to go home and cook something basic and nutritious.
Tuesday, 13 July 2010
Friday, 9 July 2010
A bit of ColdFusion confusion
We recently got a shiny new cloud server from those nice chaps at Sagari, a rather juicy beat with 8GB of RAM and twin Xeon processors. I downloaded ColdFusion 8 from the Adobe website and installed it, but the darn thing refused to work in any way, shape or form. After some digging I finally twigged that ColdFusion needs to be installed under the root (admin) account in order to work properly. So, uninstall, changed login, re-install, and all was well, except now our serial number wasn't accepted. Perplexed, I phoned Adobe, who pinged me around a few different people, finally I ended up speaking to an American chap in the Philippines, who said they'd have a look into it and get back to us. I'm never comfortable with "we'll get back to you" in business speak, as 9 times out of 10 it means "go away and stop bothering us".
True to their word though, a very pleasant Adobe technician from Mumbai phoned us, and explained that we have a serial number that's only good for the 'standard' ColdFusion 8 server, and as we're running Windows 2008 Data Centre edition, it's expecting a 64-bit key. Two solutions are available - we could either liaise with Adobe and swap our 32-bit key for a 64-bit one, or we could re-download the full CF8 product from the Adobe download manager, which is slightly different to the generic download offered on their public-facing site. I opted for the second solution, a 380mb download, and our key was immediately approved, and the 32-bit version installed correctly. All I had to do then was to put IIS7 into 32-bit mode (advanced settings - enable 32-bit = true), and it worked perfectly. It's a slightly odd problem, but understandable, as CF8 is a few years old now and operating systems are changing on a regular basis.
We did have a slight issue getting the SQL Express JDBC drivers working, after downloading them and unsuccessfully trying to use the default "sqljdbc.jar" file, I tried changing to the "sqljdbc4.jar" file, with no joy. It turns out that ColdFusion had cached and locked an older version of this file, the only solution was to stop the CF8 service, remove the old file and re-copy the new one, then start it again. I guess this will be true of all the JAR files in use by CF, changing any of them will require a service re-start, and caching is always on the cards.
All fairly minor problems, but together they've added up to a few days of extra faffing around, and delays to the project, and reminded me that paying a bit more for a managed server from dedicated ColdFusion host might not be such a daft idea after all.
True to their word though, a very pleasant Adobe technician from Mumbai phoned us, and explained that we have a serial number that's only good for the 'standard' ColdFusion 8 server, and as we're running Windows 2008 Data Centre edition, it's expecting a 64-bit key. Two solutions are available - we could either liaise with Adobe and swap our 32-bit key for a 64-bit one, or we could re-download the full CF8 product from the Adobe download manager, which is slightly different to the generic download offered on their public-facing site. I opted for the second solution, a 380mb download, and our key was immediately approved, and the 32-bit version installed correctly. All I had to do then was to put IIS7 into 32-bit mode (advanced settings - enable 32-bit = true), and it worked perfectly. It's a slightly odd problem, but understandable, as CF8 is a few years old now and operating systems are changing on a regular basis.
We did have a slight issue getting the SQL Express JDBC drivers working, after downloading them and unsuccessfully trying to use the default "sqljdbc.jar" file, I tried changing to the "sqljdbc4.jar" file, with no joy. It turns out that ColdFusion had cached and locked an older version of this file, the only solution was to stop the CF8 service, remove the old file and re-copy the new one, then start it again. I guess this will be true of all the JAR files in use by CF, changing any of them will require a service re-start, and caching is always on the cards.
All fairly minor problems, but together they've added up to a few days of extra faffing around, and delays to the project, and reminded me that paying a bit more for a managed server from dedicated ColdFusion host might not be such a daft idea after all.
Wednesday, 7 July 2010
Well done Sky!
Without wanting this to read like an advert, or trying to sound sycophantic, there are a few companies who always seem to "get it right" without appearing to try, and Sky is one of them. They called me the other day, and asked if I'd like to abandon my BT landline, and switch to "Sky Talk", which basically means renting a phone line and getting my phone calls from Sky, and not BT. They're £5 a month cheaper than BT, and if you sign up, they knock £5 a month off your Sky Broadband bill (assuming you have one). I thought what the heck... why not?
In true Sky style, all the paperwork came through within a few days, and even BT got their act together with a "sorry you're leaving us" letter. I did express a concern about keeping the 1571 "Call Minder" service, but Sky reckoned they had the same thing, only better.
When I got home from work yesterday, I could tell that they'd switched me from BT to Sky during the day. My phone (a standard "BT Decor 1300") was miraculously aware of the correct date and time, and had a little message saying "3 missed calls, 3 new numbers". I've never bothered to program my phone before, so I'm impressed that it now knows the date and time, and as for Sky's 1571 service, it makes BT's look pretty clumsy. Whereas the painfully slow automated voice on the BT 1571 is clearly designed for the severely dim, or hard of hearing: "Welcome... to... BT... you've... one... new... message....", the Sky voice is much faster and more natural, taking you straight to your messages without faffing around. Even the basic 1471 readout is an improvement over BT's effort. The call quality has somehow improved too, when I made a couple of calls in the evening they were both crystal clear, whereas with BT I'd had crackling and distortion on the line since day one.
So, a better service, less annoyance, and I'm £120 a year better off. Bravo Sky, well played. More of that, please!
In true Sky style, all the paperwork came through within a few days, and even BT got their act together with a "sorry you're leaving us" letter. I did express a concern about keeping the 1571 "Call Minder" service, but Sky reckoned they had the same thing, only better.
When I got home from work yesterday, I could tell that they'd switched me from BT to Sky during the day. My phone (a standard "BT Decor 1300") was miraculously aware of the correct date and time, and had a little message saying "3 missed calls, 3 new numbers". I've never bothered to program my phone before, so I'm impressed that it now knows the date and time, and as for Sky's 1571 service, it makes BT's look pretty clumsy. Whereas the painfully slow automated voice on the BT 1571 is clearly designed for the severely dim, or hard of hearing: "Welcome... to... BT... you've... one... new... message....", the Sky voice is much faster and more natural, taking you straight to your messages without faffing around. Even the basic 1471 readout is an improvement over BT's effort. The call quality has somehow improved too, when I made a couple of calls in the evening they were both crystal clear, whereas with BT I'd had crackling and distortion on the line since day one.
So, a better service, less annoyance, and I'm £120 a year better off. Bravo Sky, well played. More of that, please!
Monday, 5 July 2010
Back to blogging
Following on from Mat n Kat's example, I have decided to start blogging again. This is an interesting time for many reasons, on a work front all the staff at our company were made redundant on Monday 28th June, which is the predictable conclusion of our trigger-happy "ConDem" government's cost-cutting. All the projects we had lined up have been put on hold indefinitely, and we just can't move fast enough to re-position ourself into the private sector. Charity IT projects are rapidly moving onto crowd-sourced, open source solutions, thereby depriving us of a valuable revenue stream.
The government departments we work for are literally crapping themselves with fear at the prospect of 25-40% budget cuts, and not a penny is being spent at the moment. This will, naturally, mean that towards the end of the financial year, there will be massive amounts of unspent budget up for grabs, and the usual last-minute flurry of tenders, but that's all around 6 months away - no use to us at the moment.
So, I'm now indulging in my least favourite activity: job-hunting. Liaising with IT recuiters. Sending out CVs into the great unknkown, to be read by all and sundry. Hoping that a word-of-mouth recommendation will come through... and knowing that thousands of people are in the same boat. At the back of my mind I've got a nagging desire to set up my own company, producing websites for local businesses and organisations. The most satisfying projects I've ever worked on have been small, shiny, fast turn-around sites. You get a real sense of achievement if your work goes live within a couple of months, rather than dragging on for years and hiding behind a login screen, which happens on most of our projects. I need to get myself in gear and register a small company name... any suggestions?
The government departments we work for are literally crapping themselves with fear at the prospect of 25-40% budget cuts, and not a penny is being spent at the moment. This will, naturally, mean that towards the end of the financial year, there will be massive amounts of unspent budget up for grabs, and the usual last-minute flurry of tenders, but that's all around 6 months away - no use to us at the moment.
So, I'm now indulging in my least favourite activity: job-hunting. Liaising with IT recuiters. Sending out CVs into the great unknkown, to be read by all and sundry. Hoping that a word-of-mouth recommendation will come through... and knowing that thousands of people are in the same boat. At the back of my mind I've got a nagging desire to set up my own company, producing websites for local businesses and organisations. The most satisfying projects I've ever worked on have been small, shiny, fast turn-around sites. You get a real sense of achievement if your work goes live within a couple of months, rather than dragging on for years and hiding behind a login screen, which happens on most of our projects. I need to get myself in gear and register a small company name... any suggestions?
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