The Carpenters Hammer
This is a story for everyone who has a need of tools no matter what their craft or trade. The Carpenters Hammer, a painters brushes, the janitors broom.
A few years ago, about eighteen in fact, we lived in a 2 bedroom flat in Christchurch city. It was in a block of four on a section which probably should have only held one house, but that's a whole other issue.
In the back flat lived a retired gentleman, who's name quite escapes me now. He had worked most of his adult live as a cleaner for PDL, an electrical manufacturer here in New Zealand.
One day I remember walking down the driveway to the garages which were squished in a row behind the flats, he was out sweeping the driveway in front of his unit with what is probably the largest broom I'd ever seen.
One of those large janitorial scale ones that requires metal braces from the handle to the head to stop it breaking off on it's own and sweeping whole counties.
I said good morning, or afternoon, whichever pleasantry was appropriate, and found myself in conversation about his broom. Not the most engrossing topic....
Tags: Saturday's Sunset
I don't know about where you live, but here the sun sets pretty much every day. Granted it sometimes does so behind a veil of grey or in the total absence of cloud it just disappears without the slightest hint of pomp and ceremony.
We are blessed, however, here in Canterbury with a reasonable number of stunning sunsets, along with the one at the beginning of the day. What's the name of that one? Sunlift? Sunclimb? Not sure. I'm not really a morning person, but I'm sure you know what I'm on about.
I'm a sucker for a good sunset as much as the next bloke, although in truth it's the cloudscape I'm after when I venture off into...
Security in the cloud, KISS
The second article in a series on using cloud computing services.
The idea of keeping things simple when it comes to server security is not at all radical and cloud servers provide the ability to reach the not so lofty goal of keeping your servers simple and secure without breaking the bank.
The theory is simple: The smaller the number of processes you have running on your box the less there is to go wrong, or attack. This is one area where...
Working on a cloud
This blog is now coming to you from a cloud. A rackspace cloud server that is. Two of them in fact, the front end server running the CMS, and the back-end MySQL server.
The concept of cloud computing really isn't all that new, but if you're all at sea when it comes to clouds you might want to toodle over to Wikipedia and read about it there.
The service I'm using is probably better described as cloud provisioning, in that I've got two virtual servers living somewhere in the bowels of the Rackspace data centre. I don't have to care about memory sizing, disk space, network infrastructure, or anything else for that matter, I'm just renting some resources out of the cloud.
I picked how much memory and disk space I wanted in a few clicks then before the kettle had time to boil the server was on line and ready for configuration. If this service was available back when I was running a hosting business I'd probably still be....
Yahoo plus Bing, strange bedfellows
The news that Bing is set to become the search engine behind Yahoo is quite old now. The ten year deal between number two and three in the battle for search dominance was cut back in July this year.
There's nothing too strange about Microsoft and Yahoo doing business together on the face of it, this came a bit of a year after a failed attempt by the Seattle software hawkers to buy out Yahoo lock stock and flickr pages for a cool $44.6 Billion in change.
What is strange is the positioning of Bing search results in the Yahoo pages.
Existing Yahoo search users have made a concious effort to not....
Right Time, Right Place
I commute to work, as many of you surely do. Twice a day I tootle across the countryside in our long suffering MX5, which aside from being 20 years old now is suffering distinctly from the gravel road portion of the trip it endures five times a week.
On the way home, for a few months of the year I'm travelling during golden hour. For those not of a photography bent, golden hour is the magical bit before sunset and after sunrise when the low sun angle creates the wonderful golden light you see on sampler biscuit boxes and the cheap post cards your auntie Mavis sends.
For that reason I regularly lug a camera along with me. Many suspect it's because I'm always on the hunt for road accidents but in all truth I'm more likely to cause one when I see something interesting and veer suddenly off the road to satisfy my itchy shutter finger.
On the way home tonight I had just such a moment, although....
Are You Part of the Four Percent?
I just bought a pair of shorts. Puma 'essential workout shorts' to be precise. I don't think I've ever purchased a Puma banded product before, although I was aware of their brand. Puma are well known but the only reason I chose them was that I was looking for shorts, and their local outlet store had a sale on when I walked past I the mall.
Now that I've made my first Puma purchase, the likelihood of be being loyal to the Puma brand in the future is very high. Not because the product was cheaper or better than their competitors, although the price was good due to the sale.
Not because an attractive and successful athlete endorsed them, or because they give 5% of all their profits to the crippled outer Galapagos tree frog foundation.
I'm am now converted to the Puma brand and products because I am part of the 4%.
