The technology week in view: 8th February 2008

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.

I am still considering the Dell Vostro after my previous post “the low cost Dell Vostro” but I haven’t encountered many people who have implemented them yet. If you are unfamiliar with the Vostro range they are a range of laptops and desktops from Dell which are designed with the small/medium enterprise in mind (with a low price point to match). My plan for the next few months however is to try and make real progress with our Sharepoint installation after considering whether Sharepoint is the way to go? There are a number of open source platforms for content management based systems, intranet systems and document management systems but Sharepoint really looks like it could make a huge impact in our business – I see it as an evolution of data management from simple user based shared folders to something that makes more sense of the information presented to it.

On a lighter note, the boys at the Abbey have been busy as Monk and his IT Junk not only reached his 100th cartoon panel but also moved to a new hosting platform at http://www.monkandhisitjunk.com./

Finishing on a tip, if you are curious about your broadband throughput then you can use an interesting online checking service that will let you Test your Broadband speed from and to various different servers around the globe. Have a great week.

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