Geek - 2

For all but the extremely lucky in the IT world, there comes a point when you realise that your backup procedures are somewhat inadequate. Backups are often not taken into serious consideration by management, and with the modern more-with-less attitude to IT departments, nobody really has the time to maintain backup procedures.

I had my wake-up call yesterday, mid-afternoon, when we suffered a series of unexpected and unlikely failures that ultimately combined to cause serious file-system corruption on the disk that houses an important database's master database file (.MDF). With the database gone, but the previous night's backup and the transaction logs (.LDF) intact, recovering the database to the point of the incident wasn't particularly easy for someone who's not a DBA.

Every Christmas, a whole bunch of presents arrive from our various vendors at the office, quite often chocolates, or some chocolate related theme.

I seem to wind up receiving a new toy to play with at the office around this time of the year too: Last year it was the Google Mini 2.0, and this year it's a pair of Sun Fire X4600 servers.

I've always had a penchant for Sun hardware, and while we're normally an HP shop at work, I was able to convince the powers-that-be that these two servers would be ideal to replace our horrible ML350 G4 based SQL server, which was chosen before my time.

It was one year ago today since I started a little experiment, and that little experiment has since grown into somewhat of an outlet for my thoughts and frustrations. In fact, through the hundred-odd articles of the past year there's been a fair bit of relentless bitterness unleashed upon the masses.

Chumby!
He was once a little green slab of clay. Chumby!
You should see what Chumby can do today. Chumby!
He can walk into any book, with his pony pal Pokey, too.
If you've got a heart then Chumby's a part of you.

In the wee hours of the morning, I was privileged to receive an invitation to purchase a Chumby — not a Gumby — through their “Chumby Insider” product launch. Needless to say, I was excited!

Alas, it wasn't meant to be…

People don't seem to realise that computer programming is an artistic discipline rather than procedural office work. Those outside of the field would probably scoff at that remark, after they've put together a pivot table within excel. Just because you can cook doesn't make you a chef.

Your average manager fails to understand the difference between someone within an artistic job and someone with a procedural job — the difference being that to accomplish their goal one designs and constructs while the other follows list of tasks. Just because you're a mechanic doesn't make you an automotive engineer.

Several people have urged me over the past month to look at the a new web service known as Spock. I avoided doing so, partly because I'm sceptical of anything named after Star Trek characters, their little blue man logo reminded me of every horrible Web 2.0 site, but mainly because it sounded like yet another social networking site — another way for “trendy” people to justify their pathetic friendships publicly. These sites seem to be taking over the minds of once rational people as SMS speak once did, like an incurable sexually transmitted fungus that is making everyone itch but nobody is willing to openly talk about how bad the problem is.

Spock however, isn't exactly a social networking site. It looks like one, and acts like one, but it's main goal is to be a search engine for people. To this end, Spock sucks the lives out of existing sites such as LinkedIn, MySpace, FaceBook and other such CamelCased “network” sites, and carefully plucks out information to build personal profiles with complex metadata rather than just a flat index as Google would.

The world just got a little bit smaller… again.

The one thing that occurs to me lately is that getting healthy can be very expensive. Oddly, I always knew that eating healthy was horribly expensive compared to buying junk food, but now I realise the cost of things to help you be healthy are equally expensive.

I love my empty calories, and as my metabolism is slowing down like the rest of my family, I'm regaining the pot-belly I once grew while I baked myself in the sun at a resort in Pattaya back in 1992. Get me another watermelon juice, slave!

It's time to put an end to all that, and get a bit of catabolism going, beyond just walking everywhere. I've been saying for months that I should start running, but I couldn't motivate myself. Cyclocity instead encouraged me to cycle, and unfortunately for them I wound up buying my own bike.

My family lived in Hobart for the first three years of the 1990s. It was there that I met Nick, who is ultimately to blame for my addiction to adventure games. Nick encouraged me to try Space Quest Ⅰ, and from there we ended up playing stacks of graphical adventure games together.

Over the past few months, I've been able to revisit these old and nearly lost gems, with the aid of software emulators such as Nick's NAGI for the old Sierra AGI games, FreeSCI for the early 1990s Sierra SCI games, and finally ScummVM for those brilliant LucasArts games of the last decade.

Since writing about how I monitor Dynamics AX batch processes from a more technical perspective, I have been asked how to set up monitoring for a complete Dynamics AX system.

Many years ago, Scott introduced me to Nagios, an open-source product designed to be able to monitor anything. At the office, we use it to monitor practically everything, and to fulfil Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, such as monitoring temperature or backup reliability. If we could, we'd monitor the coffee machine with Nagios.

Naturally since we've built our monitoring around this system, we use this to monitor our Dynamics AX environment too. Much of the information here could be adapted for monitoring other systems too, but the focus of this article will be simple monitoring for Dynamics AX.

I recently watched “Who Killed the Electric Car?” which offers an interesting perspective on what happened to GM's EV1 — possibly the first practical electric car to appear. By its final generation, the car boasted the lowest drag co-efficient of any production car in history, clocked a top speed of nearly 130km/h (but was in reality limited because of gear design), and had a maximum range of 120–250km per full-charge.

The EV1 was amazing technology for its time, and not a bad looking car either, but for various reasons GM destroyed the cars and moved on to much more important things like the producing gas guzzling pile of junk known as the Hummer, and joining the Global Climate Coalition to help sway negative Kyoto Protocol sentiment. They had to do something special since they destroyed several tram-ways last century.

So, what happened to the electric car anyway?

People who know me here in Brussels will roll their eyes at this article, possibly within reason. Yes, this is a blog entry about a bloody barcode. Yes, I work for a company that works in the AIDC industry. No, however, this wasn't inevitable, and I knew about it a long time ago but tried to avoid fashion: I'm not a fashionable guy, to say the least.

As requested by Scott (of Smile in Europe fame), I'm going to temporarily join the Japanese mobile phone fad of adding a QR Code 2D barcode to my blog. There is no way in hell, though, that I'm having it tattooed to my skin!

Just under a month ago, we completed an upgrade of our Axapta 3.0 SP5 KR3 system to Dynamics AX 4.0 SP1. For those who don't know, Microsoft Dynamics AX is the new name for Microsoft Business Solutions Axapta.

During the upgrade, we ran into many problems, so I thought I'd write up the highlights so others in the same position could benefit. I don't seek to condemn the product, in fact I think the product in general is very good, however I believe this information should be available to help others out. All of these problems have been presented to Microsoft, at least a month ago, and I've also provided my solutions where applicable.

Okay, so I broke my blog. Again. I really should stop tinkering when I have no time to fix things I break. If you're reading this, I obviously got it working again.

Internet Neutrality is a nasty subject, and something I have strong feelings about. So much so, I support Save the Internet. However, there's something else that really rubs me the wrong way.

I'm referring to the ongoing control of the Internet by the USA. While I understand the yanks have a long history with the network, but the time came many years ago for them to relinquish their grasp over the network and allow it to become more autonomous and internationally unbiased.