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Category: Life: Work and Techy

Techy: New Free Monitoring System

March 28, 2008
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Beebware (the company I operate in my spare time) is slowly ramping up with a number of new services – and the first one is the Beebware Internet Monitoring system at http://monitor.beebware-internet.co.uk/ and to help promote the “soft launch” of the service (before the main Beebware Internet site is up and running) we’re giving away free trials of the service.

So, what does it do and how does it do it? Basically, we’ve got 9 monitoring stations (in Seattle, San Jose, Dallas, Virginia and Illinois in the US, Berkshire in the UK, Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Singapore and Queensland in Australia) running 24×7 which checks your site/server for any interruptions to pings, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SSH, SMTP, DNS, POP3, IMAP, MySQL, PostgreSQL or any other TCP/IP service. And unlike other services, we’ll also check for certain keywords on your site (some will mark your site as “available” even if it’s just returning a holding page!), send reboot notifications to your datacenter if necessary, send you alerts via email or SMS and it’s all web based!

Feel free to give it a try free of charge – whilst we accept payment via Paypal, you don’t even need to provide your Paypal email address to try the free trial!

Oh – did I forget to mention, you can even have a public status report on your site in HTML or RSS and that, if you decide to upgrade from the free monitoring account, it’s only £12 for ONE MINUTE interval checks – no matter which service? (For example, My Unitard .co.uk is being monitored at a five minute interval over HTTPS – Beebware Internet will just charge £3 per month for this – Alertra charges $144 (approximately £72) for the same service!

Avoid US Domain Registrars – A Response

March 5, 2008
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My darling other half has just made another interesting blog post – this time about avoiding US domain registrars due to eNom (the second largest domain name registrar according to Webhosting.info) disabling domain names belonging to a British National (based in Spain) selling holidays/vacations in Cuba to European citizens (Nytimes article).

Sounds good in theory – but in practice, it’s a bit more difficult.

Why? Well, I mainly use a registrar called DirectI/ResellerClub (as I have a lot of domain names – over 60) who are based in India – but (ignoring the fact they now have a US office) I could, in theory, still have my domain names disabled by the US courts: because DirectI get their domain names (like all other .com/.net/.cc or .tv domain name providers) from a company called Verisign GRS who are the “root provider” (also known as the “authoritative directory provider”) of all those domains. And they are based in the USA and hence the US courts could just ask Verisign to suspend the domain names at their level.

“Ah ha!”, I hear you cry – what about my nice safe .co.uk or .eu domain name that I brought for a UK company such as Heart Internet? Well, again, there’s a catch. All .uk domain names are via Nominet (a UK based company) and all .eu domain names are from Eurid (a Belgium based company) – so on the “registrar” level they are safe (apart from the inter-country co-operation agreements). But ALL domain names (.com/.net/.uk and .eu) are ultimately allocated by an organisation called the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) which is part of Internet Corporation For Assigned Names And Numbers (ICANN) which, whilst being a “private-public partnership” is a US organisation currently under the control of the US Department of Commerce (at least it’s a change – ICANN and IANA used to be run by the US Department of Defense).

So there you go – all your domain names are belong to the US Government!

Techy: Microsoft Fasttrack2 C#.Net

February 17, 2008
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My Microsoft CertificateI’ve just completed a 5 day Microsoft course (and I bet many people that read this blog never ever expected me to say or speak those words!) entitled “MS2124ADOE: Fasttrack 2 C#.Net Part 1: Object Essentials and Re-orientation to C#”. Quite a mouthful!

Basically, the course is about Microsoft C Hash (or C Sharp as the USians like to call it) and a little bit of Microsoft’s .Net (which was basically Microsoft’s response to Java). I found it extremely simple to get my head around – maybe because I’ve done standard ANSI C programming nearly 10 years ago and I understand the concepts of Object Orientated Programming (OOP) as I spend the majority of my time in PHP code (ok, mainly PHP4 code which isn’t that OOP, but has a little bit).

The only bits I had slightly trouble understanding was Events and Delegates (as I’ve not needed to use anything like that before in PHP), but once I “mentally mapped” them to RISC OS’s callbacks, it was simple. It was quite strange that out of the six of us there (2 with PHP backgrounds, 1 with Java background, myself [mixed backgrounds] and 2 Microsoft Visual Basic programmers), it was the Visual Basic programmers which had the most trouble with the course.

Why did I go on the course? I got sent on it by my manager, and I’ve still got no idea why – we have a single application running on C#.Net which, admittedly, I currently “look after” – but it’s closed source (we don’t have any access to the source code and any changes I could make have been at the database layer) and we’re going to be replacing it with a PHP version before the end of the year… We were informed on the course that C# programmers do tend to earn the “big bucks” so whether my boss is trying to drop me a hint ;)…

It wasn’t a too bad course and it made a change to leave the house at a reasonable time (8am) instead of silly early (7am) – and, despite the fact the training centre was over double the distance away from my house than work is, I still got there faster! Now I’m just pondering whether to turn more to “the dark side” and get more Microsoft training and maybe even certified (either Microsoft certified or mentally certified – but those two do not have to be exclusive! 🙂 . The only downfall I can see is that it is likely that any future certificates are more likely to be signed by Steve “Monkey-boy I-f****king-hate-Google, where’s-the-chairs?” Ballmer than William “Damn good marketer” Gates III.

Out with the old PC, in with the New Vista Ultimate Machine

February 6, 2008
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Sorry I’ve been absent from blogging for a while – my old Dell Dimension 4550 PC (which has lasted me just 2months shy of 5 years) practically failed. The power fan had been making funny noises for nearly 2 years on and off (rectified by just blindly plunging a screwdriver into the back of the power unit when it made a noise – not at all recommended) and the primary hard drive started failing. Yes, I know I could have just replaced the hard drive (at a cost of around 70 GBP for over 200Gb), but I couldn’t run certain large photo-editing applications on it as it had a measly 3/4Gb of RAM 🙁

So I splurged out with a combination of a new widescreen TFT Samsung SyncMaster 2032BW monitor from PC World – £180 (my old CRT was still in perfect working order after the nearly 5 years usage, but took up so much desk space), an extra 2GB kit (1GBx2), Ballistix 240-pin DIMM RAM from Crucial (£49.99) and the biggest purchase of all – a Dell Dimension XPS 420 with an Intel Viiv Q6600 Quad Core 2.40Ghz Processor, 2Gb RAM (giving a total of 4Gb), 16x DVD+/- RW drive (at long last – the old Dimension could never write DVDs for some reason), 512MB Nvidia Geforce 8800GT card, 2x 500Gb Hard drives and Microsoft Vista Ultimate. Total price (including VAT and delivery) – £760.75.

Was I disappointed and what did I think of Vista?

Continue ReadingOut with the old PC, in with the New Vista Ultimate Machine

Free Domain Names

January 27, 2008
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Are you looking at starting a new project but can’t afford the domain name? Well, my other half may well be able to help you free of charge. She’s got around 20 domain names (some registered and paid for until August 2009) available free of charge – with names ranging from aubrey-maturin.co.uk (for fans of the Patrick O’Brian Aubrey/Maturin novels), through the “Microserf”eque Chixor.co.uk, through to me strange ones such as Retronerd.org , WhipTang.co.uk and TheWebMonkey.info .

Check out her list of domain names and drop her an email (or comment) if you are interested!