Saturday, September 19, 2009

Update

Well, not a great deal to report. As usual, all busy. Too busy to do stuff. We decided that we are probably wasting the money on the hosting as the applications are taking too long to come through. In parallel to that we've thought about hosting the development site at home instead and I've been doing some investigation into linux. I bought a 64-bit PC running Ubuntu Linux, to start to get a feel for how that is set up, creating a Linux server at home might appear very Geeky but the other reason for trying it was that it happened to be a bargain in PCWorld - no one wanted to buy it so the whole thing was available for a bargain £200 - 3 Gb RAM, AMD Athlon 64, monitor, mouse, keyboard, the lot. Of course the shop had no clue what to do with it either so the first task on getting it home was to figure out how to get the admin user to work. It turned out that there was a bug in the OS with which the PC was delivered: 32-bit Ubuntu Desktop 8.04, Hardy Heron that prevented me performing admin functions until the system hooked up to the internet and downloaded the latest fixes. So after a couple of days of downloading software updates it all worked perfectly and I've managed to get the Glassfish AS working. Next step is Liferay and MyEclipse, and then re-install the whole thing on 64bit Ubuntu Server 9.04 on a LAN here at home.

Or I could watch TV or play some music (which might be a little less sad for a man of my age).

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Twitter and Web 2.x and Email

I read something in the Times yesterday which I thought was quite profound. The Russian guy who just bought 2% of Facebook for $200m (just ponder those numbers for a moment... ) said something about email, he reckoned in future we'd be using web 2.0 sites for communication and not email. I don't quite get what he meant but I can imagine a world without an email account,we'd just have a zillion IDs on different websites and correspond with people inside the applications I suppose. I'm not sure if he's right but its an interesting and provocative thought.

Time

Is flowing away at an alarming speed..! We've managed to hold two meetings in 2009 and some progress has been made with the centile application but not online yet. The problem, I guess, is that we have day jobs and families and other things to do. What we really need is to be 15 or 20 years younger and have nothing better to do... :)