Following on from a series of recent Windows Updates, a couple of our servers had a problem running Server Manager (“Server Manager has stopped working”) and SQL Management Studio (“Failed to Load penimc.dll”). The details of the Server Manager error were in the event log: Application: ServerManager.exe Framework Version: v4.0.30319 Description: The process was terminated […]
I was listening to some talking about being agile and lean in software development. The conversation was very interesting, but there was an underlying theme of urgency and efficiency that I found troubling. There is nothing wrong with delivering quickly, but we should never forget that “you can only go fast if you go right” […]
I don’t “do politics” and I apologise that this is political – but not in the sense that I am interested in promoting the interests of any particular political party. I just want to highlight the flavour of democracy in the UK. Did you ever wonder how important the boundaries are in a general election […]
One of the most famous tales in Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman must be the story of the Cargo Cult. The story concerns a group of people who, due to a war, had an airbase planted nearby. They saw all of the airplanes arriving with lots of amazing stuff on board, so when the airbase […]
Choosing tools and technology can be a formal process that locks you into your choices, or a chaotic process where nobody knows what the choices are. The correct way to document a decision is to supply just enough information to explain why the choice was made at this point in time, what alternatives were considered, […]
I was investigating a number of maintenance plans that were taking serveral hours to complete and I noticed some optimizations that could be made to the plans without actually affecting the behaviour very much. The maintenance plan after the fixes is: Check Database Integrity Maintenance Cleanup Task Rebuild Index Clean Up History Back Up Database […]
Most JavaScript developers are very familiar with the Immediately Invoked Function Expression (IIFE): (function () { var x = ‘loaded’; console.log(x); }()); In this expression, we create a function that wraps all the enclosed code in its scope, and at the end we execute the function with the parentheses. If you aren’t super-careful though, you […]
This example is based on an article posted yesterday on the Google Testing Blog, a very interesting article but with one mistake. No Yes Notes I have had to estimate the true values of the three items with no value label The most likely question the chart will be answering is “what are the most […]
I’m a long time user of HAProxy, but I’m currently working on getting Brocade set up to do similar work in our Sydney data centre. We send most of our traffic to a web farm, but there are one or two exceptions, which we detect by host name. To send traffic to different servers or […]
We have a smart website that allows a single mutli-tenant application to server requests for thousands of different domains. The content is keyed from the host name, so you only see the content for the website you are visiting. The volume is handled by a pair of HAProxy servers that sit over a web farm. […]