Shame it arrive late and i missed it, Due to the reliable delivery system that is “pupil post” , but the local Jnr School ran a “ICT information evening for parents” this week

The note went on to say this….

“A true story which happened in Gloucestershire during the February holiday..

A 10 year old girl was attending her aunt’s wedding, by the time of the reception she was board and her aunt [an IT consultant] spotted her sitting quietly in a corner with her hand-held games console. The aunt enquired what she was playing to which the girl replied ‘don’t tell Mum or Dad, but someone round here has a wireless network and I’ve logged onto the internet’ “

Unfortunately I missed the event to see what stance they presenter took on children and the internet, but I recently had a similar discussion with an English teacher from a local secondary school and was pleased to hear their personal view point was the same as mine.

Over recent years I have too much negative press about the Internet being a dangerous place. The real world is a dangerous place, but you instinctively know NOT to walk done a dark alleyway. That same level of self preservation needs to be instilled into today’s internet users. The internet is a community, and like any community (physical or virtual) it has places you would rather not go. With this in mind I believe you should not try and stop your children from using the internet, but instead encourage safe, knowledgeable and managed used of the internet.

My son for example was not only made to sign an internet use agreement when he started his secondary school, but also, in his first week was not made to read a leaflet on internet safety, but had to produce one. For me that was a fantastic approach, just reading a leaflet would may have gone in one side and out the other, but i am fairly sure some of it actually sank in.

At the end of the day the Internet, Mobile phones, Media player are here to stay, we must embrace the new technology and educate accordingly.

Due to the fact it is on my task list, I have been pondering the decision points for deploying a new web based application and supporting infrastructure. At a first stab there must be 400 questions which may be in the mix. The trick is to work out which ones are Critical to success, which ones have no impact, which ones can be linked and therefore become a single decision with many results. Does the implementation mean some of these decisions can be made after Go live (VMware lets you add extra resource to a guest operating system)
How much input can the business customer provide?
How much input can the application developer provider?
What assumptions can you make?

How much dynamic processing is going to take place, (this requires MORE CPU than static)?
How many page impressions per hour are going to be required?
How many hits per page are required?
Do they need to host large Files, podcasts, video etc?
Do they need to RUN reports on the Data?
How many concurrent sessions are going to be supported (this may impact memory)?
Is the developer using any .NET memory intensive data manipulation?
Do they require Web HA or a WEB farm?
Do they require SSL?
How do you deal with SSL in Web HA or a Web Farm?
How do you deal with Session state in Web HA or Web Farm?
Will they require HA or web farm in the future, (your design must scale out)?
Is the application data read or data write intensive?
Is the Application Developer trusted to write safe code?
Can you lower the .net trust settings to protect the Os from the application?
Are file uploads required (this can impact scale out)?
Local or NAS based content (NAS content will require extra identity configuration)?
Where do you keep the web server logs?
How long do you keep web server logs?
What level of logging do you use for the Web server?
How much pro-active monitoring do you do?
How much Local disk space do you need?
What extra .NET assemblies are going to be required?
What extra COM components are going to be required?
Does the developer understand he is not going to get console access?
Does the App need scheduled tasks?
Does the APP use DTS and / or SSIS?
Does the App need a large TempDB?
How big is TempDB?
How big are the database logs files?
Does the App need to partition the tables?
DAS or SAN for the data disks?
IF SAN, one big LUN or lots of LUNs (does it make a difference)?
Does the app need database mirroring or Failover cluster?
IF Database mirroring is done, is it HA or high perf?
If database mirroring do you use a witness for auto failover?
Does the app take a data feed from someother system?
is this a linked server?
is this a SSIS job?
is this a regular bulk import?
Are there any BLOB object being used?
Can you trust the App developer to setup indexe on appropriate columns and with correct fill factors?
I will add more when I think about them !

Been working on a small probelm with major web site with few collegues

The site uses tomcat and cocoon to generate HTML using XSLT from XML based content. However the XSLT in cocoon is VERY CPU intensive, and recent increase in web traffic (cause by some very effective marketing campaigns) to the web site has caused the platform to become unstable

Enter My 8 legged friend, SQUID
Squid has a very small binary foot print (10Meg), a small memory footprint (12Meg and does not interfear with windows in any great way. When configured to sit in front of the IIS web server, tests on a POC server increased the throughput of rendered HTML from 12 requests per second taking almost 4 seconds to first byte, to a whoping 300 requests per second and 400mS to first byte.

Wow, now to fine tune the install and sort out on the Live platform

Just been pondering the internet and downloads etc and this news item sprung to mind www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/22/burnham_dcms_filesharing/  in which the government are threatening to put legislation so that ISPs stop their customers taking part in illegal downloads. This is like asking the police to stop every drink driver by stopping every vehicle on a busy motorway and breath testing every driver and all the passengers just to be sure.

The ISPs cant even do a decent job of stopping SPAM either from or to their networks, what chance to they stand of stopping peer2peer activities.