Jul
11
Busy @ Home
July 11, 2008 | 1 Comment
Well, I have been home for a week now and things have been quite busy.
So far, I have built my two new Mini-ITX systems and they are both working well, although I still have to configure the VIA Board machine as a web server; the other machine will be used by my wife.
What this means is that now all my server boxes are Mini-ITX boxes running on VIA chipset motherboards. I find this somewhat impressive as that means that all my websites, databases etc are running on machines which are not a lot bigger than an external DVD and which take up a lot less space and use a lot less power than the mini-tower ATX boxes that they replaced.
Here is a picture of my server cupboard to illustrate the point.
In addition, I have modfied my existing Mini-ITX development box to have a DVD writer added which allows me to back things up to DVD more easily while I am on the road. I have also installed a small portable 10″ screen to use with it as a backup display and that works quite well. It also has a touch screen interface which works very well, the only glitch I have found is that you need a keyboard to do CTRL-ALT-DEL in order to access the box and you cannot do it through the touch screen interface.
One problem I found was that one has to be very careful with the interface cables inside the Morex 3677 case as the case is pretty small and cables pressing down on drives when the lid is screwed on can cause them not to work.
I am now working on my accounts and expenses for the year (sigh!) and also working on rewriting the TSQL code to handle primary keys in my database to make it more resilient. Once that is done, I am going to install MSMQ on the network and write an interface to use MSMQ to handle integration between different databases to replace SQL Server Replication, which is what I use now.
Oh, and I also have to start looking for another contract which is not that easy given that we are in the middle of the summer which is not the best time to be looking for work.
Jul
1
Moving Mountains @ Microsoft
July 1, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Redmond Developer News have an interesting article up on their site on an interview with Anders Hejlsberg which came out of their piece on Bill Gates as a developer which can be found here.
Anders Hejlsberg who was the man behind Delphi at Borland was poached by Microsoft in 1996 to work on Visual J++ and he has some interesting things to say in the interview.
What I found most interesting was the comment in the article that it was the Sun lawsuit over Java which led directly to the creation of the .NET Framework and C#, which Heljsberg worked on.
It was, in large part, Sun’s legal action in the late 1990s to limit Microsoft’s work on Java that set the wheels in motion for the creation of .NET.
Source: Redmond Developer News
