Call me on: +61 413 489 388|craig@craigbailey.net

Technology

Virtualisation Smackdown next Wed 26 August

I’m pretty excited, I gotta say, about this month’s Sydney Business & Technology User Group meeting – we’re having a Virtualisation Smackdown! It’s this coming Wednesday, starting at 6pm.

Here’s the details:

Date: Wed 26 August 2009
Time: 6pm – 9pm
Location: Microsoft, North Ryde (map)
Web: www.sbtug.com
Phone: 0413 489 388 (call me if you get there after 6pm and need to get it)
RSVP on Facebook (or email me)

Smackdown, Schhhmackdown!
What this means – for the smackdown uninitiated – is that we have a panel of speakers (6 in our case) each present on a different virtualisation product. We’ve got Citrix coming along, VMware, and Microsoft each presenting on a few of their products. The smackdown term came to […]

Microsoft iPhone Apps

As Mashable and TechCrunch report, Microsoft is testing the waters with the iPhone App market, releasing a a little app: Seadragon Mobile (here’s the official announcement on the Live Labs blog). The app (available for free on iTunes App Store, allows you to browse Deep Zoom images effortlessly. Check out the simple 42 second demo on the blog. And for more on Seadragon itself, check this out. Technorati Tags: iPhone,Seadragon,Deep Zoom

Parallel Computing

Boring history prologue I started playing with ‘computers’ back in the days when they came with 3K of memory (Vic 20 anyone?). And thank goodness I was too young to have experienced the punch card era… They quickly scaled up so that by the time I was at uni, 16MB of RAM was becoming standard. Fast forward to today and we can buy consumer notebooks with 16GB of RAM. Never in our wildest uni dreams did we think we’d have Gigabytes of memory to play with. Today’s equivalent Perhaps the equivalent of my uni experience for today’s student is the number of cores in a machine. In the future they’ll look […]

TECHED: Lock note – Predicting the next 10 years in IT

Easily the best TechEd lock note I’ve seen (but then again I’ve only been to TechEd 4 times). Miha Kralj talked us through the technology changes we’ll be seeing over the next few years. If you get a chance to see his presentation (I’m sure it will be repeated at other events, or put up on a video site somewhere) make sure you do – it is well worth it. It’s difficult to do the session justice, so I’ll just post a few info-bytes and comments he made.   What went wrong at IBM? Having previously worked at IBM (and through the problems they went through) […]

ISP: iiNet spreads the love

I’m not really one for writing critical posts – frankly I just don’t have the energy…

But I’m also not really one for saying thank you either – and this is something I really should be doing more of.

Sure, there’s heaps of minor irritations every day, but in the scheme of things I think I’ve got it pretty good.

And on top of all the big good things I’m lucky enough to enjoy, I seem to get more than my fair share of little good things too.

Here’s a simple example. iiNet, my ISP ever since I switched to broadband all those years ago (5+ probably), sent me a little email tonight letting me know they’ve […]

OPINION: The Death of Gen Y

The whole Gen Y thing really intrigues me.

On one hand I think the concept behind Gen Y is a complete myth, and on the other I think there is something compelling we can learn from.

In this post I cover the following:

why Gen Y is a useless categorisation
why I think the IT crash is coming soon
why Gen Y will be especially disadvantaged, and
some suggestions for how we can all best survive.

 

What the hell is Gen Y?

First some clarifications. 

What is Gen Y? Ask this question and you'll get a variety of answers. Many will stick to definitions (eg they are born after 1980), most will point to (or […]

Grand Theft Auto 4 sells $500M in first week

Yep, half a billion. Not that anyone really needed convincing, but computer games are big business. This one eclipsed the record set by Halo 3 last year. And games are only going to get better. Interestingly – but I can’t find the reference (send me the link if you know it) – I was told last week that the average age of a gamer these days is 37 (this link from 2 years ago pegs it at 33). Technorati Tags: Grand Theft Auto,Computer Games

Important Microsoft announcement… about Mouses

I’m assuming you subscribe to Microsoft’s Press Release feed right? Well, for the one, or possibly two people world wide who don’t, I just wanted to make sure you are alerted to this highly important development. You will be overjoyed to learn that the Wireless Optical Notebook Mouse 3000 will be available in five colours as of May. And not any old colours. But ‘fashionable’ colours no less. Technorati Tags: Devastatingly important mouse news

SitePoint HTML and CSS References

You’ve no doubt used SitePoint before. So I probably don’t need to tell you about their excellent CSS Reference. And it’d be silly to think you don’t also know about their freshly released HTML Reference. Great resources. Technorati Tags: SitePoint, CSS, HTML, Reference

On reducing spam

Alan Lee gives an overview of how we reduced our spam email count here at Elcom. Interestingly, Alan found that 95% of all our email was spam – a figure that matched with reports I mentioned earlier in the year. The numbers: In the first week of implementing the changes we blocked 206,563 emails out of a total of 217,768 emails. Alan sent me an internal email with calculations of the cost saving just on bandwidth usage alone. Amazing. We're talking $,000s over the course of a year. Technorati Tags: Spam

By |February 13th, 2008|Technology|0 Comments

XML turns 10 – Happy Birthday

XML turned 10 years old on10 Feb. I remember working on a project back in the very late 90s (can't be sure when but it was using SQL 7.0) and we decided to use XML as a mechanism for storing certification results (so yes, we were using XML in SQL 7.0 – quite an achievement in itself). Towards the end of the project our boss at the time (he left the company a year or so later) pronounced to the project team that this 'XML thing' was a fad and was never gonna take off. After he left the room, Scott and I just looked at each other with puzzled expressions, wondering what […]

By |February 12th, 2008|Technology|0 Comments

Mesh networks coming to Sydney

Last year the wonderful Laurel Papworth blew us away at SBTUG with a presentation on Social networking. In the course of her presentation she mentioned the whole mesh network concept (eg Meraki). I truly had tingles down my spine when I heard about the concept. Thanks to Laurel for this post in which she highlights the news of mesh networks coming to Sydney real soon. See http://blog.freesydneywireless.com/ Technorati Tags: Mesh networks, Meraki, Laurel Papworth

CLARITY: VSTS, VSTO, VSTA, VSX

Seems like Microsoft is having a V Day, every day. Here's a run down of the main V technologies/tools:

VSTS (Visual Studio Team System)

Firstly, Visual Studio. Visual Studio 2008 (the current version) is Microsoft's IDE for building .NET based applications, be they Web, Desktop, Device or Microsoft Office based.

Visual Studio comes in a number of different versions, grouped into three main areas:

Express editions (freely downloadable, limited feature set)
Visual Studio (Standard and Professional versions)
Visual Studio Team System (developer-role based versions that integrate with Team Foundation Server)

The premier version is called Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite and includes everything from all the different-role based versions.

VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office)

VSTO is Microsoft's tool set […]

Silly money continues to flow

When will the correction finally come? We've seen no end of silly money being thrown around by Venture capital companies of late, and now it seems that Google and Facebook are chasing grad students with fistfuls of cash. $95K for a grad student with no experience is crazy talk, but the comments on the post seem to support the claim. Sadly this just perpetuates an unrealistic industry that will eventually come crashing down. Of course, in the interim the rest of us software companies have had to increase salaries just to get any talent, and the end result is our clients pay. Software gets more expensive, and the industry gets a bad name […]

By |January 31st, 2008|Technology|0 Comments

Chris Sainty on LINQ to SQL

Chris Sainty has a series of excellent posts on LINQ to SQL. Start here, and the just subscribe to his blog for the updates (11 of them so far if you include his post on Extension Methods). Technorati Tags: Chris Sainty, LINQ, SQL

By |January 21st, 2008|Microsoft, Technology|0 Comments

TECHNOLOGY: Security, email and SPAM

Reading through Australia’s IT news roundup over the last few weeks has been illuminating. Security Take security exploits and spam for example. This reminder on SQL exploits welcomed us back to the new year, alongside this note about how 70K web pages were hacked in a single week. And a new take on the hijacking side things was scary (but inventive): the printer hijacking method. Or perhaps just using Windows Server 2008 is enough. In any case, you’ve been warned. That won’t matter for some though, given that many still fall for lottery scams. Especially ones from the FBI. Oh, and brace yourself for Valentines Day. Email And speaking of email, more interesting […]

Domain name shenanigans

The news earlier this month about Network Solutions automatically registering any domain you search for on their site has been universally condemned. And rightly so. Supposedly providing a service, but actually reducing service for your (potential and existing) customers is only ever going end up with reduced market share. I first read about it on TechCrunch, and then saw Joe's analysis. (It was first reported here as far as we know). Since then there's been a stack of discussion about it and we can only hope the company in question makes a hasty back-pedal. The other possibility – that other domain companies will follow – is just too sad to even contemplate. Comments […]

By |January 21st, 2008|Technology|0 Comments

Google, Wikipedia and China

Three interesting things happened last week.
First up, Wikipedia turned 7 years old. Happy Birthday Wikipedia. Wikipedia was and is the world's first open source encyclopedia, and remains one of the top 10 most visited sites in the world. Big things happen slowly.
Second though, Google hit 600USD. This, after hitting a high of 747USD last November. Big things happen quickly.
Finally, China prepared to become the world's biggest internet market with over 210 million internet users. Big things happen.
Technorati Tags: Google, Wikipedia, China

By |January 20th, 2008|Technology|0 Comments

Geocoding a physical address with Yahoo and VB

Code Project has a nice little article on how to use Yahoo Web Services to return the geocoded results of an address lookup. For those who don't know, Yahoo has a full developer network with stacks of articles for a variety of development tools including .NET. Also check out their Developer Centre blog. Technorati Tags: Yahoo Developer Network, Geocoding address

By |January 20th, 2008|Technology|0 Comments

Is the ECM market ripe for consolidation?

An interesting article from Computerworld on the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) space (of which my employer – Elcom – is a major player). Elcom is an ECM company, and we are always grappling with where to best extend our product. Lately we have seen the value of our systems being the platform for a business to run on. Our customisation tends to be in the building of Line of Business (LOB) applications for those companies. ECM and CMS companies must provide business value and an ongoing foundation. Whilst the expression 'content is king' certainly rings true, it is only part of the picture. Technorati Tags: ECM, Elcom, CMS

By |January 20th, 2008|Elcom, Technology|0 Comments