The ramblings of a yorkshire tyke » spgennard

Building a better pogoplug.

spgennard — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:30:24 +0000

A while ago I purchased a pogoplug as a means of sharing photos with my family but its use never really happened because the interface they provided is clunky for hi-res pictures/video.. and some of the family failed to consistently …

rsync & permission denied/operation not permitted & arch linux

spgennard — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 00:31:36 +0000

I use rsync to sync directories between machines but one of my machines kept screwing up the permissions, I finally get time to track the “Operation not permitted” issue and it turned out to my vfat backup drive not being …

Metro up Java

spgennard — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 22:54:54 +0000

Microsoft’s Metro environment is a bit of a closed environment for the Open Source language vendor, so although you can code Metro applications in C/C++, C#, HTML/JavaScript/CSS on both Intel and ARM chipsets the choice of other languages are non-existent. …

Windows 8 Developer Preview on VirtualBox

spgennard — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 22:29:36 +0000

Although I got a developer preview samsung Windows 8 tablet at the Microsoft Build event I do like to use Virtual machine whenever possible because they are very useful. I have managed to get Windows 8 installed on VirtualBox on …

Heroku add Java support but dumps containers!

spgennard — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 22:35:18 +0000

Recently I have reviewing various cloud solutions and what impact this has on the way you create/architect applications and I have come to the conclusion they are often way too complicated for most existing applications to be effectively hosted in …

Motorola XOOM 3.1 update for Europe

spgennard — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 07:25:55 +0000

My beloved European XOOM finally is getting Android 3.1 support… Boy have I had to be patient… Android™ 3.1 for Motorola XOOM™ will soon be available over the air to all Motorola XOOM users in Europe. We expect the over-the-air …

Zero Day – Mark E. Russinovich

spgennard — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 22:08:30 +0000

Just finished reading “Zero Day” by Mark E. Russinovich. The author is a fellow at Microsoft and well know in the computer circles for also being the author of various tools from SysInternals a company he used to own. The …

You can make money without doing evil…

spgennard — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 23:55:22 +0000

Well this is what google says in their corporate philosophy but I seriously doubting this. If you are not aware of the most recent cuffle about google, let explain and perhaps rant a little. Google; in an attempt to prevent …

One Billion Reasons..

spgennard — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:25:55 +0000

What can a company do with a 1 Billion USD? Well if you are Microsoft you can use this or more to ensure one of your competitors becomes a OEM vendor! This is exactly what is said Microsoft did to …

New Gadget

spgennard — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 22:57:29 +0000

Over the last couple of years I have not been getting on too well with my second generation iPod Touch but it has been a bit of a love hate relationship… I love it when works well with my mac’s …

Getting started with Windows Azure

spgennard — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 23:12:14 +0000

As someone has been working with Windows Azure since its early days I understand how much effort it takes to get started with the platform. Luckily over the last couple of Windows Azure SDK releases the documentation is started to …

A good new years gift…

spgennard — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 23:44:08 +0000

My day job keeps me housed in Visual Studio 2010/Windows, so for my out of hours development I feel I need a change, so for many years I have been a home mac and/or linux user; anyway I have used …

Michael’s very own “Getting Started with Visual COBOL”

spgennard — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 11:04:07 +0000

Michael Burgun over at his own blog space has started blogging about using Visual COBOL… Its worth a look as having meet Michael last year I can honestly say he is a very knowledgeable and experienced chap, so I am …

DNS – Tweaks take 2

spgennard — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 23:10:04 +0000

Although I have good results tweaking my DNS it appears it can have its side affects if you have a very fast internet connection and are doing some serious streaming… have a read of the following quoted article. If I …

AzureKit and COBOL

spgennard — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 22:26:19 +0000

AzureKit is a nice piece of source code released on CodePlex by Mark Rendle. The AzureKit makes life much easier for creating, searching, deleting elements in your Azure’s Table Storage. My idea was that if the AzureKit was easy enough …

DNS – Tweaks

spgennard — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 14:01:34 +0000

DNS speed can really affect your home router either for the better or worse.. I use a open source bit of software called namebench to periodically verify that I am using the most performant/reliable DNS server. Take a peek, it …

MacBook upgrade

spgennard — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 11:30:55 +0000

My home laptop is my beloved black macbook which has a reasonable Core Duo 2.2 ghz but unfortunately the hard drive is getting a bit full due using as my digital photo album… After a bit of research I decided …

Attachmate acquires Novell for $2.2 billion

spgennard — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 23:31:26 +0000

Over the last decade I have gained quite a lot of respect for Novell mainly due to their SUSE Linux platform and Mono. Strangely one of the companies involved in the acquisition is “Golden Gate” from San Fran, looks like …

Programming languages on the rise: Cobol

spgennard — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 17:43:13 +0000

Although the article/quote below is so true…. Programming languages on the rise: Cobol It may not be fair to call Cobol a niche language as it was once the dominant language in the enterprise. Grace Murray Hopper, famous for finding …

Java… does it have a future? Well not for me..

spgennard — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 22:20:34 +0000

As someone who has used Java for my own development needs for years, I find it sad the Java platform appears to be falling apart or at the very least getting some bad press. Lets consider the recent events, we …