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Following on from Outbreak of wordpress, it must be contagious and Wordpress MU in a Corporate environment

Wordpress MU is now a Live service inside BT, for all employees to use !

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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?

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Guess who has just been had by the date format thing between the Queens English and Microsoft English

Query Error: The conversion of a char data type to a datetime data type resulted in an out-of-range datetime value.
The statement has been terminated. Datasource: PINBACK Native Error Code: 242 Executing SQL:

Data was ‘14/05/2008 13:47:30′

the Fix was the Language for the SQL user

Life is full of tools, tips, tricks and technology. However most people fail on the “When to” and “When NOT to” use a particular piece of technology.

For example you would not use a pair of scissors to cut the lawn, or a lawn mower for a hair cut , yet they are both cutting / triming devices !

So why it is we see some people use a full on SQL database to manage the population of a TEN item drop down box and other use MSAccess (and the MSACCESS GUI not a web app) to run a million pound revneue generating mission critical business application for 100 users over 20 sites

The use of Cold fusion is wide spread in many Internet and intranet environments. www.myspace.com is Cold Fusion based for example. It is an interesting thing to setup, the Adobe Cold Fusion server runs in a J2EE container, typically adobe JRUN. So what you have is a J2EE app, which instead of producing the HTML responses, interprets the CFML tags to render the HTML is a dynamic manor.

The use of J2EE makes it somewhat interesting when you have to track down rogue code inside and application. When you look into the J2EE process with standard windows tools yoiu can only see the J2EE code, not the CFML. This makes fine tuning and fixing a suspect application a bit of a black art.

Enter the (Blue) Dragon from New Atlanta. Written in J# (so still java based) it allows CFML 7.01 tags to be interpreted by an ASP.NET engine, will all the .NET benefits around process monitoring, and managing run away CPU and memory.

Time for a POC!

According to The Register, Morgan Sparks, inventor of the first “practical” transistor and one of the reasons your cell phone doesn’t use vacuum tubes, died this week at the age of 91

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/08/morgan_sparks_obituary/

Over the past 4 years I have had to work with some of the best web application developers I have ever met, unfortunately I have also had the miss-fortune of working with some of the worst developers on the planet.
With this in mind, while attending the Microsoft 2008 launch event,  I was very impressed to pick up a book entitled “the Developer Highway code : The drive for safer coding!” 
This book is fantastic, and has hundreds of coding guidelines and server configuration recommendations. And absolute MUST read for any ASP, ASP.NET developer and / or web server support staff.

The best bit, it is available as a free ebook, from Microsoft:
http://download.microsoft.com/documents/uk/msdn/devdave/mic472_dev_highway_all.pdf

Over the past few months I have been getting an increasing number of requests for help to setup WiFi networks. I am not just talking about the initial setup, but many ongoing reliability problems. At first I was blaming vendors as most of the problems seem to be associated with one vendor, Belkin. However as time went by, I realised the issue was not just Belkin but applied to a lot of other vendors too. The common factor seemed to be the use of the default channel number and changing the channel fixed the issue.

Then the penny dropped when I re-organised my AV kit at home. Wireless Video senders, wireless security cameras and some baby monitors also use the 2.4 Ghz band.

So I thought I would do some investigation along those lines. I was shocked at what I found.

Firstly the 14 WiFi Channels (not all are available in every country see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels) have massive overlap, so in a busy area lot of interference will result, reducing the throughput in many circumstances.
Secondly the wireless Video channel could not have a worse frequency allocation, and have the potential to wipe out WiFi signals. Especially as unlike WiFi , which sends in bursts and waits for a reply, an AV sender sends a continuous carrier.
I have created the following diagram to demonstrate the frequency clashes

Click on the thumbnail for the full diagram

Carrying on from my IIS admin via a web service work, i needed to apply IPSecurity restrictions to some of the sites that would be created.

Plently of googling revealed some information about an IISIPSecurity class in .NET 3.0 and above, but i could only rough c# sample code here , and that was for a console app

so after many failed attempts to convert to VB.NET to work with my web service, and even tried the ADSIIIS.dll com interop, i gave up and converted the c# code into an assembly , which works. I know hind sight is 20:20, but i shodul have just done that in the first place

my code is here

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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