I don’t want to go to work Just want to hang with Captain Kirk I am a big Warp 11 fan. Warp 11 are a Star Trek rock band from Sacramento, California. Their songs often feature bad language, sex and drinking but always feature references to Star Trek characters and episodes and a good dose of humour. I first listened to...
This weekend I took James on an adventure. As he is only 8 weeks old it was a fairly low key adventure but hopefully he enjoyed himself. St Michael le Belfrey have been organizing an event for Dads once a month and this month I wanted to give it a go. I have been looking forward to going for a while. Looking after a...
I recently read a blog post by Pinal Dave about how you can backup straight to Azure Storage. The procedure he described is only available for SQL Server 2014 or later. I won’t go into detail of this method as Pinal describes it better than I can, but the basic of it requires setting up credentials and then running a...
My latest podcast can be found http://www.trekmate.org.uk/the-hunted-tng-s3-e11-the-battle-bridge/ and feedback can be left on the trekmate forums http://forum.trekmatefamily.com/2015/10/the-hunted-tng-s3-e11-review-the-battle-bridge/ While the Enterprise-D is reviewing a seemingly idyllic planet’s application for...
The Software as a Service (SaaS) website that I work on has been sold to lots of clients now. Which is great news. However the more Azure websites we have, the more websites we have to administer, especially if like us you take advantage of Traffic Manager which requires multiple website in different regions. Azure has...
I have been asked to investigate adding a fail over internet connection to one of our offices. Currently this office is connected via a wireless link with our head office. Unfortunately we have recently experienced some poor performance with this connection, this has now been corrected but like all technology there is...
For the past few months I have been deploying changes to my companies database every couple of weeks or so. Over a weekend when the database was not being used I would make a backup of the database, load up visual studio, deploy the database changes and copy a couple of front-end files. My weekends and evenings have...
I am pleased to announce the birth of James David Martin Foster weighing 9 lb 12 on 19th August 2015. Mother and Baby (and Father) are doing well. I am not a baby person, I hate children and I run a mile from other people’s babies. But James performed some magic on me and now I will do anything for him. If you have had...
As I write this I have less than 2 days until the due date for the birth of my first child. Its a very exciting time, but it is also infuriating waiting for it to arrive. Even in the 21st century science can not predict with any accuracy when a baby is going to arrive and we just have to wait for mother nature to do...
Recently me and my development team have been looking at performance and how to improve it. One area of improvement we have identified is with our stored procedures, which we plan to rewrite. But how do we identify which are the easiest to rewrite and which are the hardest? My first thought was maybe to count the...