Author name: Jason Slater

Technology journalist and blogger, software developer, ex-IT Manager.

Technology week in view: 31st March 2008

3 Comments / Computers / By /

It is April tomorrow and I’m still wondering where February went? Time is a precious commodity these days and keeping up to date with various interesting web sites can be a challenge in itself and I often recommend that people should look for a feed or subscribe facility on a web site and use a feed reader program such as Google Reader. If you are unsure what a feed is this explanation may help: What you need to know about feeds. This way you can get the information you are interested in, delivered to you, as and when it is written and you don’t have to keep visiting many web sites.
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Technology week in view: 25th March 2008

Networking & Internet / By /

Great Easter break? Have you eaten all of your Easter eggs yet? With two small children in the house we still have quite a few to get through but we’re back at work already and a few hours in it feels like we haven’t been away. The snow is really trying to break through at the moment and the kids promise me I am first in line for a snowball so every time they see a few flakes on go the wellies. It is also that time of year when many of our support contracts come up for renewal. One of these in particular involves a service for remotely supporting the user base and with so many solutions now on offer the question comes down to Which remote support solution to choose? Whilst supporting remote users it may be worth considering the storage space a user takes up and one in particular is storage for user ‘behind the scenes’ data which was discussed recently in Windows User Profile Considerations and talking of remote users perhaps you should consider uninterruptible power – just in case the snow takes your power lines down? If so, here are Eight tips for running a UPS.
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Technology week in view: 11th March 2008

2 Comments / Miscellaneous, Networking & Internet / By /

Microsoft are busy bees at the moment with numerous announcements including Windows Server 2008 is go … which version will you get?, Windows XP SP3 is on the way, Office Live Small Business for free? and Microsoft Office Live Workspace BETA. It looks like Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 may soon be released following on from Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is out on release whilst Microsoft and Apple come to some agreement about push email on the iPhone in Apple iPhone and Microsoft Exchange have a cuddle. Basically speaking, pull email is where you configure your device to check for email at regular intervals whereas push email is where you make an initial connection then the server maintains the connection path and informs your device when new mails are ready.

I have been having my own drama trying to change hosting accounts (Web Hosting with Globat) but have finally settled into my new home with Webfusion. I have now consolidated my various activities onto one VPS which should make backing up and general maintenance much simpler – the sites seem a little quicker too.

At the office, progress is being made in our virtualisation project which is trying to consolidate twelve servers down to just four. We already marked another server down having finally decommissioned the print server and we are making huge progress with the decommissioning of the web server in Virtualisation Update … Web Server. We just have one last piece of software to migrate then we can crack on with the project at full speed.

Finally, Monk and Norris have been out for a picnic in the wireless woods whilst reeling from Monks extremely bad Ethernet joke in Monk102: Token Ring vs Ethernet Networks.

The technology week in view: 22nd February 2008

Networking & Internet / By /

Have you changed the channel? The default channel that is? What channel? The channel on your wireless broadband router! We have and it’s improved our performance in Wireless woes – change the channel. I also changed my default channel at home when it turned out that many of the neighbours routers seem to be invisibly battling out for the default channel on their equipment. There are a number of useful tools out there to help you so check out the Jasonslater.co.uk essential application list where you will see NetStumbler listed – this tool will give you valuable information about your wireless access points. Lets face it – as we run our media streaming we need all the performance we can get out of our networks – which reminds me about something I was thinking about recently – is Video killing the Internet star?.
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The technology week in view: 8th February 2008

Miscellaneous, Networking & Internet / By /

I have been busy sorting out several nagging little problems recently. Firstly, I was battling with my own Blog hosting at Jason Slater Weblog after an unfortunate incident with the virtual server which caused the hosting platform to stop working. Fortunately, after a great deal of digging around in search engines (and an awful lot of Goggling, see Are you Goofling, Goggling or Gooping?) I managed to get it working again and it’s always surprising when the problem turns out to be something quite simple as I explain in How my Linux network unreachable problem got fixed. Secondly, our first proper VISTA machine went into operation recently, in our graphic design studio, and trying to get fonts transferred from the old XP platform posed a bigger challenge than it should. Have you ever had trouble installing fonts under Vista from a network share? There is a relatively straightforward work around to cure this problem but I’m sure there will be many more VISTA adventures in the months to come especially with SP1 on the horizon. Then of course there was Wireless woes – change the channel where our wireless access point has been misbehaving but a small configuration change kicked the problem into touch.
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The Technology Week in view: 28th January 2008

Networking & Internet, Phones, Software / By /

This week Microsoft Powershell gets put under the spotlight in Power Shell. If you’ve heard of PowerShell (it used to be called Monad) or you haven’t but you are using Microsoft server systems then you really should be reading more about it so pop it onto your radar now. Powershell is an interesting technology that on the face of it doesn’t indicate much but lift the lid and it really is a revelation. The power of the thing and extensibility is surprising – you’ll soon be loving cmdlets. Here is a little tip if you have been receiving the Event 400 Powershell message in the event logs.
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The technology week in view: 21st January 2008

Computers, Networking & Internet, Phones / By /

Recently, I have been evaluating a new product, PacketTrap, which integrates a number of network management tools into a common graphical user interface. It also contains a number of useful reporting features that can be accessed using a gadget driven dashboard. Some interesting things you can run with PacketTrap are Ping Scan, SNMP Scan, WMI Scan, TFTP Server, Syslog, Whois, Wake on Lan, DNS Audit, and several others. A few days ago I used the product to assist in identifying then fixing a problem with a network infrastructure switch – not the easiest of things to sort out in the middle of the day – especially when users just want to get on with their work. PacketTrap does a great job and in my opinion should be on every technicians radar.
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The technology week in view: 11th Jan 2008

CES, Networking & Internet / By /

Most technology news you may read this week is tied up with reports from CES – the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and the GizmosforGeeks team have been hard at work reporting on all the juicy new gadgets. I haven’t been so lucky to visit and instead have been at work at the office trying to sort out a number of technology issues – however a few interesting things have popped up. The new Everex Cloudbook, a potential challenger to the Asus eee PC is promised to hit the shelves in Walmart by the end of this month – in the USA at least. The UMPC is an ideal machine for the non-technologist, and indeed for the technologist, with its no-nonsense low-cost approach offering just the applications that are really required – I really believe the UMPC, personified by the ASUS eee PC, will be successful.
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The technology week in view: 4th Jan 2008

Miscellaneous, Networking & Internet, Phones, Site News / By /

First off, Happy New Year – the title should really have read “the technology fortnight in view” but frankly not a lot happened in my technological world over Christmas (except for a frightening increase in blobs of plastic lying around the place), and anyway – who’s counting? To kick off 2008 I found a great tip if you’ve ever lost the switch to classic view or switch to category view section in Windows XP, here it is: Classic View and Category View in Windows XP Control Panel. By the way did you hear about or take part in the Highlet campaign? It was fun while it lasted but hopefully, I’ve written The last word on Highlet … for now anyway. I also read on the news that a major high street retailer is filing a profit warning due to poor sales over Christmas. I wonder if this could have anything to do with an increase in online sales? Possibly.
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The technology week in View: December 21st 2007

Networking & Internet, Phones / By /

Christmas is around the corner and the New Year only a few steps away. Busy times lie ahead for technology and IT but before that no doubt a number of gadgets are going to appear in stockings around Cristmas trees this year. Imagine my surprise when A missile launcher arrived in the post this morning. I actually got sent a USB missile launcher by McAfee as part of their ongoing promotion for their data protection products. It is a motorised soft-missile launcher that you can have endless fun targetting in on your chosen nemesis then releasing a barrage of fire upon them.
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