I am going to take a break this week from talking about technology to talk about Star Trek. I have just listened to a podcast where they consider this list of great Star Trek Characters. I am now going to try and come up with my own top 25 characters. Here we go. Spock. My number one star trek character is Spock....

Rubber Duck is a process in development where you talk through an issue with an inanimate object such as a Rubber Duck. It gets its name from the book The Pragmatic Programmer where it was first used. I am the only programmer where I work and often I find myself with a question that I can’t find the answer to. I do...

How did this happen I think I may actually like SQL Server now? I remember a few years back when I used to grumble about writing a SQL query that included a JOIN. For some reason back then I could never get my head around JOINs. Today is a totally different story. I wrote a deployment script that did the following:...

I have been recently working on a database that hasn’t been designed but has been hacked together by lots of people over the years. It started life as an Microsoft Access database created by my director to keep track of all the projects that our company does. It was not much more than one table listing everything. At...

So my first Raspberry Pi project is a security camera. If you have read my previous Raspberry Pi posts you will know that I have been playing about with the camera but I had one or two problems with Pidora so I am using Raspbian for this example. To take a photo with the camera module you can use the command...

I am currently buzzing with excitement about my Raspberry Pi. I will try to document here what I have done so far. I decided to buy the camera module along with my Pi. It was straightforward to connect them up, lift the connector behind the network port, insert the ribbon cable, push connector back down. Next I...

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...