On Friday night I had the urge to fire up Visual Studio and tomorrow (Monday) I move house. What’s with that? Why am I in a programming mood when I have boxes to pack and shelves to take apart? For the last few weeks I have been too busy with other things to do much programming or when I had the time I felt more like...

I listen to the dot net rocks podcast and they ask this question every show. (If you don’t listen then you should!) I don’t know what my answer would be as there are so many gadgets and cool things that I like the sound of. I might get a surface pro 3, it’s a tablet with attachable keyboard that’s more powerful than my...

I have done a few interviews from both sides of the table, I’m not very good at either but thought I would have a go at answering my favourite questions. Describe an IT disaster and what you did to turn it around? The question is all about the turn it around bit. I’ve had lots of answers that emphasise the problem...

Let’s continue looking at a database schema for storing details of every Star Trek Episode. If you are new to databases, a schema is just the design of the structure of the database. We have three tables, Episode, EpisodeWriter and Writer. See my last post for more details of these. It has been suggested that a slight...

My last post proved quite popular so I am wondering if I can combine a post about IT and Star Trek. Years ago I used to have lists of Star Trek episodes, which included such information like original air date, production number, episode title and brief description. One thing that was hard to keep track of was how many...

As a break from my usual topics I am going to talk about what I did over the weekend. I am a huge star trek fan, so me and my wife Laura went to Destination Star Trek, a convention held in London. This is a picture of us in costume, my wife created a tribble costume (A tribble is an alien race that just consists of a...

Like many systems administrators I watched as the news came out yesterday about the latest version of windows. What would it be like? What would it be called? Would it be better or worse than previous versions? I was shocked when the name of the new operating system was revealed to be Windows 10. What really!? At first...

I want to learn Development and eventually move into a development role. But what is the difference between development and what I already do? Put simply Development or programming is the creation of new programs, websites or databases. IT Operations or System Administration is the administration of existing servers,...

You may not have heard of Nagios but it has saved my bacon quite a few times. Nagios is an open source server monitoring application that runs on many linux flavours. I can’t remember exactly when I first installed nagios but I am guessing it was sometime in 2007/8. My boss gave me a book about it (which I never read)...