Techie :: Techno ::: August 2006 Archives

Just thought I'd let my blog readers know. After testing it for the last few weeks we've now made Ruby on Rails hosting available on all our linux hosting plans. Yet another first for Blacknight :)

If you're looking for a comprehensive review then Anil Dash from Six Apart has a very nice one - nice in a comprehensive sense :)

Jmcc forwarded a press release from Google earlier this morning where the search engine giant espoused its plans for hosted services. I can see quite a few google fans getting excited about this, but I seriously doubt that they'll stick around after they've encountered Google's customer (dis)service.

Earlier this year I mentioned the Microsoft /MSN initiative to help ISPs track their users' spam. Since I last logged in they've added several new features including the possibility of adding your entire AS number. Excellent! No more worrying about network segments. I'd simply throw in any AS we manage and be covered! WRONG! MS, in their wisdom, haven't set up their system properly. Instead of running: whois ASxxxx -h whois.ripe.net - or whatever the windows equivalent is, they are querying ARIN so the only contact returned is abuse@ripe.net! Gah!

Which browsers are being used and which OS is popular? I'm always interested in this kind of information, but finding a good source for it is far from easy. For my own amusement I thought I'd compare two sites I manage for the year to date. The sites I choose were this one and search.ie and the results are hardly surprising: Mneylon.com Browsers: Mneylon.com Operating Systems Mneylon.com Connection Speed Compare that to: Search.ie Browsers Search.ie Operating Systems Search.ie Connection Speed As could be expected this site attracts "geekier" types, so they're predominantly on broadband and using alternatives to Internet Explorer. A large number of them don't use windows as their OS. Search.ie, on the other hand, is dominated by Windows users who use Internet Explorer and are on dialup. What use is this info? Not a that much use really, but I could use it to tweak search.ie so that it was more 56k friendly, while I could work on the assumption that anybody who made it here won't notice if I've posted a couple of photos, or whatever :)

Like so many other bloggers it looks like I'm going to be going down the interview route a bit as well.... In my case I'd like to talk to people whose work fits in with my own particular set of interests, so the first person I've asked to give an interview is Julian Field, who is the developer of MailScanner I won't be podcasting this particular interview, as it will be conducted via email and I still haven't quite got my mic working on Ubuntu :) So, if anyone has any questions that they'd like to ask Julian please let me know via the comments

I really like the way Debian and Ubuntu handle Apache 2 modules and virtual host configurations. By using symlinks between the installed modules and the directory for the active ones, you can easily turn them on and off. It couldn't be easier, or could it? Well it can actually! There are a number of binaries available that can handle all of this even more gracefully (at least they appear to): a2enmod a2ensite a2dismod a2dissite a2enmod enables modules, while a2dismod disables them. The other two have a similar function with regard to virtual sites (vhosts). Nifty! Of course they may have a downside as well.. I'm yet to experiment that much with them

Back in January I added a webmaster discussion forum to search.ie. Over the last few months the number of visitors and general level of activity has grown, but it was still a bit on the quiet side.. After talking to a few people about ways to boost the site I've spun it off onto its own domain - with proper branding to follow as soon as I can get a logo done. The kind of topics you can discuss are pretty broad and cover all facets of online design, development, marketing, seo and monetisation.. Drop by and make yourself heard :)

You may have to excuse the meandering nature of this post, as it's more of a stream of thought late at night than anything vaguely coherent

I have a love hate relationship with technology. From speaking to other entrepeneurs who work in the IT field I get the feeling that I am not alone...

One of the things that I love about technology is that it constantly changes and evolves. Of course this facet of the business is also one that I hate in some regards :)
No sooner have you become accustomed to a technology than you find that it has been surpassed by something else.

So what is the next big thing going to be?

Over the last year or so php5 has become accepted as "stable", although it's not stable enough for a lot of "shared" hosting clients.

Microsoft have been pushing MS SQL Server 2005 really hard, but I still see a huge demand for MS SQL 2000.

Apple now offer Intel based hardware, so you can get the best of both worlds (supposedly) - sleek design and a choice of OS.

An offshoot of Debian has captured the hearts and minds of techies the world over and Ruby on Rails seems to be the big buzz.

So what is next?

I don't have a magic looking glass but I can see some technologies and, more importantly, their uses / implementations, becoming more and more central.

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The IIA blog mentions that there is a draft Accessible Procurement Toolkit currently available for comment