Many years ago I spent a lot of time learning about electronics. It was great fun, I can’t remember specific things I built, but learning what resistors and capacitors do was fascinating. I haven’t really thought about this much as my interests have been concentrated on computers and programming, but recently my...

TeamCity is a Continuous Integration software package which is very easy to install and set up. So easy I managed it over a weekend. First of all I fired up a VM in Azure. I found that a Basic A1 VM was sufficient so running a CI server doesn’t have to be expensive, alternatively you could always set a Virtual or...

We all know that it is important to monitor your servers and services, so you can spot issues before they become problems. I personally have spent a lot of time configuring nagios to email me about issues and I have recently been configuring various different alerts in Azure. My old boss has this idea that I should...

I recently went to an event called ITBoss organised by Core Com Consulting . It was really good, helped partly by a free bar and great food. The event was hosted in a pub in central Leeds, so I rushed to the train station from work to get there. And yes I was the first to arrive (Why do I always do that?). The event...

Every developer uses source control, it is a great tool for keeping track of changes to your code, seeing who has done what. However I keep messing up, my use of it. I am fairly disciplined when creating new features, all my changes will get committed to source control and when I am happy I will deploy these changes to...

I have spent most of the day tweaking my Azure websites. Lots of fun! Last week unfortunately Azure had some problems and many websites that were running in the North Europe data centre were unavailable for several hours. And you guessed it my websites were hosted here. All hosting providers are going to have downtime...

My desktop is always a mess. I constantly download files there and forget all about them. Every now and then I copy files into sub directories, so my desktop looks sane for a day or two before it gets out of control again. Why don’t I write a script that I can schedule to do this for me. Then my desktop will always be...

One of my jobs is adding extra features to our internal databases. There is a fair amount of risk in doing this. I could make a change to one of the queries in the database that stops the rest of the company using it as they need to. This could be a costly mistake, almost as bad as the database server being...

n the film Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan Spock sacrifices himself to save the Enterprise from destruction. What follows is a very moving funeral scene and his coffin is launched into space. McCoy tells Kirk that he is not dead as long as we remember him. Yesterday the actor Leonard Nimoy passed away and millions of...

Last week I blogged about the Game of Life. Well it took some searching through dead hard drives and old USB storage but I found the program I wrote, and better than that I have figured out how to turn it back into source code. The file date is November 2004 and the source code has no comments so I don’t know what was...