If you're feeling at a bit of a loss over the next few days; ennui and all that, pop over to Call Centre Confidential blog. Think on this and behave next time you call.
Friday, December 24, 2004
Sunday, December 19, 2004
log parser command line tool
Posted on 10:46 AM by Unknown
is a very handy looking utility included in the IIS6 Resource Kit Tools from our friends in Redmond who also provide an archived webcast on its use. The tool is the work of Mike Gunderloy of Microsoft.
Thursday, December 16, 2004
diamond hard geezers
Posted on 5:10 AM by Unknown
Yesterday was the Unix Team Xmas Lunch at the very excellent Skippers Bistro in Leith with not a turkey or xmas pudding in sight. Amidst the jolly banter one fact seems to have remain lodged in my brain this morning; that Tony and I share an equal appreciation of Ronseal (Does exactly what it says on the tin) products and in particular the Diamond Hard Coloured Varnish range of interior wood products. Tony sadly still persists in sanding the floors himself whilst I opt to employ a contractor for this task. One thing on which we are both in total agreement though is to never follow the manufacturer's advice to sand down the penultimate coat of Diamond Hard Clear Floor Varnish with 240 grade abrasive paper. Just don't go there or associate with people who do!
Monday, December 13, 2004
aacPlus delivers 48Kbps stereo
Posted on 9:29 AM by Unknown
As a listener to the very excellent Groove Salad on the online station
SomaFM you have got to be impressed with the CD quality 48K aacPlus stereo stream now on offer. I think that Rusty and the gang are using one of Orban's Optimod PC 1100 cards along with the Opticodec PC software. Spectral Band Replication(SBR) and Parametric Stereo (PS) anyone! Expect 32Kbps stereo on your 3GPP mobile any day now.
SomaFM you have got to be impressed with the CD quality 48K aacPlus stereo stream now on offer. I think that Rusty and the gang are using one of Orban's Optimod PC 1100 cards along with the Opticodec PC software. Spectral Band Replication(SBR) and Parametric Stereo (PS) anyone! Expect 32Kbps stereo on your 3GPP mobile any day now.
Sunday, December 5, 2004
walkies no talkies
Posted on 12:37 PM by Unknown
Today was spent in glorious sunshine walking the Fife Coastal Path from Leven to Pittenweem, catching the 95 bus back to Leven to pick up the Type R which was then allowed to "stretch its legs" ;-) along the A92 back to Edinburgh. Looking forward to a week in Cornwall over the New Year to renew my love affair with the magnificent South West Coastal Path. Walking is really good therapy and us humanoids evolved to "just do it".
Java Service Wrapper
Posted on 11:07 AM by Unknown
Over the past few months I have been using the very excellent eXist XML database available under the GNU LGPL on a project to store and query TEI encoded documents. eXist is run stand-alone using the supplied Jetty servlet engine. One of the things I've been casting about for was a way to start eXist as a service on 2003 Server rather than the default method of running it from a console window. The present eXist beta now points the way to achieving this using Tanuki's Java Service Wrapper This is definitely high on my agenda for Monday - the support calls can wait a little longer
Saturday, November 27, 2004
won't get caught again - again
Posted on 9:57 AM by Unknown
We run a Windows Media Services 9 hosting service across a couple of machines using the Network Load Balancing facility inherent in Windows Server 2003 Enterprise edition: works like a dream. We recently had to rebuild one of the machines following a problem with the RAID controller and yet again I clean forgot to remove the default Authentication and Authorisation settings for the WM service to match those used in the other cluster host. I then spent several hours banging my head on Active Directory and NTFS permissions trying to figure why this host was serving OK from some publishing points and not others before a I realised the error of my ways. A "salutary experience" as they say!
enter the dragon
Posted on 9:28 AM by Unknown
Thursday evening was spent at an excellent SCFUG meeting that we hosted and which featured a great presentation from Alan Boyd of Blog City on their use of the Blue Dragon server as their core infrastructure. Alan really nailed the often repeated and very mistaken opinion - repeated to me just yesterday - that CFML based applications will not scale. Oh and guess what Linuxworld is written in and runs on! Alan also mentioned load balancing on Apache with mod_backhand which we must take a look at. But what was really cool was seeing pages containing both CFML and VBScript running on .Net care of Blue Dragon for the .Net Framework
Monday, November 22, 2004
Google Search Appliance (GSA)
Posted on 2:18 AM by Unknown
Oxford University have a report on their evaluation of a Google Search Appliance(GSA.
Sunday, November 21, 2004
googletastic!
Posted on 5:35 AM by Unknown
No day goes by without my resorting to "googling" for information
either trivial or work related. For anyone who has a similar pattern
of use an hour or so reading the excellent O'Reilly
Google Pocket Guide will help you improve your searching enormously. For a quick fix just head over to Google's Advanced Operators Page. And for those hackers amongst you there is Googledorks - after which you will probably want to head over to this Google hack on how to remove your content from Google!
either trivial or work related. For anyone who has a similar pattern
of use an hour or so reading the excellent O'Reilly
Google Pocket Guide will help you improve your searching enormously. For a quick fix just head over to Google's Advanced Operators Page. And for those hackers amongst you there is Googledorks - after which you will probably want to head over to this Google hack on how to remove your content from Google!
Saturday, November 20, 2004
enriching media
Posted on 1:18 PM by Unknown
Thursday this week was spent delivering the SMIL course at the BUFVC which provides excellent resources - courses, online databases and off-air recordings - for the use of film and media in further and higher education. Education Media Online (EMOL) is another great resource supported on campus via our streaming media service.
Tuesday, November 16, 2004
never mind the bollocks II
Posted on 1:53 PM by Unknown
Have you noticed all the talk in the "qualities" recently about what a super TV host jolly Johny Rotten really does(would) make for all these MOR reality TV shows? Let's remind ourselves that this is the person who fronted the Sex Pistolsand PiL, who still represents a threat to civilisation as we know it and should not be allowed anywhere near a mass medium. At your peril people "'cos I want to be anarchy".
Monday, November 15, 2004
beyond marks on paper
Posted on 3:44 AM by Unknown
Ted Nelson's concept of hypertext predates the web, so it was interesting to get a request this morning from an academic colleague to provide web hosting for small groups of undergraduate students to enable them to collaborate in creating hypertexts as part of course assignments; a refreshing alternative to our extensive IT infrastructure simply being used by students to produce "marks on paper".
Sunday, November 14, 2004
artist of the week
Posted on 7:07 AM by Unknown
Came to Ian Broudie's beautiful album "Tales Told" through a mention in today's Observer Music Monthly magazine in the Record Doctor feature with Ricky Gervais as the patient. There's an interview with Ian by Dave Monks on the BBC website as part of their coverage of the Radio 2 "Live in Liverpool" show.
Saturday, November 13, 2004
IIS6 Known Extensions feature
Posted on 8:09 AM by Unknown
Yesterday I ran across this issue when a user of our IIS6 hosting service reported that their Authorware applications were giving timeouts when using the latest 2004 player. The server logs were showing 404 response headers whenever the .X32 files called by the player were requested. Evidently if IIS6 gets a request for a resource whose file name extension is not mapped in the MimeMap property, IIS denies the request and logs a 404 error. This issue and further info on how to work around it is documented on MSDN
CFMX requestTimeOut attribute
Posted on 3:37 AM by Unknown
Recently had a user of our CFMX hosting service complain that they couldn't override the default application server timeout when running a page that used CFSTOREDPROC to load huge data files into an Oracle table. Beside the matter that this is job for the RDBMS itself it did cause me to find that there are a number of CF tags that will not observe the timeout: CFSTOREDPROC, CFCONTENT, CFFTP, CFEXECUTE , CFOBJECT and CFX tags as they must complete execution before they can check for a timeout. This and further tips are contained in Andy Allan's presentation to the October Scottish CFUG.
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