As you’ve probably read on Jess’s blog, we’re back from Poland and we had a nice time. On Wednesday I was still tired from getting up at 6:30 (5:30 BST) on the previous Monday so we could get our flight! Ah well, we won’t have to do that again for a long time I hope!

Aram beat me to the post and mentioned on his blog that I’ve found a name for the hosting outfit I’ll be running to try and offset the cost of keeping Baldrick colocated: Fused Networks. The main difference about Fused Networks hosting as opposed to other companies is that in addition to the usual hosting ‘plans’, one will be able to customise them and only include what might actually be useful for them — something I would have killed for a few years back!

As for Baldrick himself (itself?), there hasn’t been a single major problem since it was put into colocation! As Debian Sarge is now frozen there aren’t very many upgrades going on and everything really is quite stable indeed. I’m not working much more intensely on my Cerberus control panel software (see Projects), then I’ll start on the Fused Networks site.

In about an hour we’re off to see Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith! We’re looking forward to this film, despite the previous two episodes being really rather crap. OK, we gotta run now!

Finally, the post a lot of you have been waiting for! I must admit I haven’t written as much here as I was originally planning to: I won’t include the name of all the companies I contacted and their responses for example. And I certainly won’t go naming and shaming the companies that didn’t even reply to my queries.

I started by perusing an Ask Slashdot post and the plethora of web sites Google suggests that try to help you answer the question of what to actually ask ISPs… That yielded the rather long list of questions I list below:
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Baldrick, the server that hosts this blog (and quite a few other sites now) was moved to a data centre in London over the weekend. This move should make downtime minimal in the future, since I am paying to have nigh-on 100% Internet connectivity and 100% power availability. Also, fear of having to go into London to fix the server if I seriously muck it up will prevent me from trying out new or dangerous things on the server; I’ve got plenty of machines at home I should be doing that with!

So far, things have been running flawlessly! I am very grateful to my chosen ISP for knowing what they are doing, loving their job, and being technically savvy (something which unfortunately seems difficult to find). I’m still not going to disclose who I’m hosting with until I have my article written up, although I’m sure you can find out quite easily if you’re determined.

Time to update the pages about my machines and network now…

Yet another competition is now on the books: since I’m going to get into hosting to help pay the colocation bills, I’m going to need to name the entity that will be selling these services. If you can come up with a decent name for a hosting company that isn’t already taken, and has a .com and/or .co.uk domain available, you’ll get some sort of a freebie. Suggestions for that also welcome!

I’m now eventually back at work, after having taken a couple of weeks off for holidays and some training provided by Oracle. I’m trying to get used to the routine again, and actually doing some work… The first week we went down to the sunny South of France. Despite adverse weather warnings from the parents, it was actually really nice! We did all the usual things like shopping in Nice, relaxing in the sun, and lots of walking around.

The second week I went on a course in London called Oracle Application Server 10g: Administration I. Unsurprisingly it was about the latest incarnation of Oracle’s Application Server, for running Java and other web applications on. I had to commute to London every day for this (which reminds me I have to claim the expenses…) which wasn’t too bad in the company of my iPod. Unfortunately I had learnt most of the things we did on the course on the job, but it was really interesting to learn how things should be done as opposed to the way things were actually done within Oracle. Very interesting indeed.

During this time I also visited Interhouse Redbus, along with my chosen Colocation provider. I’ll write up a long article about the hunt for colocation once I get Baldrick inserted into a rack and all the kinks smoothed out. Suffice it to say that I was very impressed, and that there is a lot of very expensive gadgetry in that building…

Finally, we visited my brother Jim and his family last weekend, which was really nice. It was great to see the girls, eat some lovely food, go for a couple of nice walks, and the usual outings here and there. Great fun.

In another sudden bout of laziness, another quick tidbits post!

• We’re back from France and the server is back up. Silly mistake involving the watchdog and ~2500 automatic reboots.

• I found a really interesting article about dashes, spaces, and other punctuation, and how to use it in [X]HTML: The Trouble With EM ’n EN (and Other Shady Characters). Did you know there were 14 types of quote? I only knew of 6…

The web site you are reading at this very second is running off my newest machine that I have written so much about: Baldrick. The previous server, Tarquin, has been relieved of its duties until I find something useful for it to do…

For those of you wondering where the name came from: Yes, it is Baldrick from Blackadder. Sam Jenkins suggested that I use the name Bosworth, and later explained that he thought it was a good name for a servant (server). For some very random reason, that immediately made me think of Baldrick covered in grime, and the rest was history. So, Sam Jenkins is the winner of the competition.
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• The British government is once again hallucinating about having “found” a huge poison terror ring. The Register has yet another great writeup: Clarke calls for ID cards after imagining huge poison terror ring. Also, follow the NO2ID to the right if you, like any sensible person should, don’t agree with having compulsory ID cards in the UK.

I would much rather be arrested than carry a compulsory ID card. Just a quick one this time!

Got up this morning, and hurried to my computer to check the shipping tracker page for my server. No updates since yesterday morning, so I thought it was a lost cause and wouldn’t arrive today at all. Oh well. Go about my usual email checking, oldest email first, nothing more than my usual cron mailings, Snort reports, etc… Until I get to the last message from the voicemail system at Oracle (yes, email, phones, and faxing are all intertwined at Oracle). The delivery man came round at 8:15 and could I please give him a call…

So I ring the guy, and he’s still outside (why??); he waited the half our it took me to get out of bed. Whip on my dressing gown and run down the stairs, sign for it, have a quick chat, and excitedly run up the stairs again. Jump in the shower, have a quick breakfast, then whip it out.
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• Someone has made a top-notch remix of the now classic (ever since Bill Gates called us communists!) Copyleft / Creative Commons emblem. I really want one of them stickers or T-shirts they’re offering through CaféPress…

• Sundae Best: A purse with a twist… Perfect anniversary present for Jess?

• An Oracle company email today announced the Oracle Grid Index. One my my co-workers put it nicely: “a whole exercise in spending money for meaningless marketing data, and then sending an email as if anyone is at all interested”. I really am getting very tired of all this Grid crap.

I have just ordered a new server for hosting my web site. The current server, Tarquin, is starting to feel the pressure of running a couple of quickly growing databases and quite a few active web sites that are also expanding rapidly. The plan is to slowly move everything from Tarquin to the new server, which has yet to be found a name. Please comment if you have suggestions!
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