You're in the army now
Mess Hall
Grubs Up. A free for all about anything that comes our way.
To Gwibber or not to Gwibber
Jul 11th
Note: Thanks to segphault (at) gwibber I can revise my whole post and and say that gwibber is my client of choice. Check the comments for his response to find out how to use the client properly.
So as some of you already know I’m a strong advocate of Ubuntu as a desktop environment.
With the release of 10.04 they have now included a new social media client called Gwibber. My first foray into using it was rather unsuccessful but i recent have revised my opinion.
By default its a rather bland and unimaginative to look at but it does handle a large number of social networks as it stands it currently covers
- Flickr
- StatusNet
- Qaiku
- FriendFeed
- Digg
- Identi.ca
Head in the clouds
Mar 31st
So we have now relocated our servers. After a lot of searching we decided that we would give a cloud solution a go.
We eventually plumped for using the rackspace cloud service.
We found that the Server package was ideal for what we needed. An on demand service that allows you to spin up a server in minutes.
Essentially its a mico hypervisor for you to create your own servers at will.
So far it has been excellent.
The servers holding the cloud up appears to be US based but the response times have been so good you would thing you are working on a box in the next room.
The choice of OS for the Servers is very good and covers quite a few of the big distros.
There was one hiccup in the whole thing in that they require manual verification for account activation. This is fair enough but it took 2 days and 2 contacts made by myself to get them to activate for me. I suspect that this is due to my being in the UK and a lower priority rather than the feeble “Oh we are a bit short staffed at the moment” I got of one of the chat support staff.
That said everyone I have spoken to has been very polite and professional. The ability to test the chat support has been good and shows that ther are very responsive.
The admin panel is a little raw. But its clean and to the point. Also from the look of it they are continually working on it to keep up with the requirements of the customer
The only let down I can see is that there is regular maintenance happening to the cloud wich can cause downtime. So if your after stability I would stick with a traditional set up.
However If your looking for flexibility the you definatly want to consider the cloud.
There is also a wide variety of tools available for you to integrate your own platforms/solutions with the cloud.
The options and possibilities are immense.
So for your enjoyment I am going to attach some marketing bumph for you to enjoy
Dell – ightfully Tedious
Jan 29th
So on Monday I thought that it was about time I upgraded my PC. My current one from circa the millennium and to be honest is past being long in the tooth. Now there is nothing actually wrong with my PC for a 9 year old model, it does everything its supposed to (as long as I stick to Linux or XP, vista just kills it). The problem is that everything else I have bought since then doesn’t want to work with it.
The whole thing started at Christmas. The in laws bought us a very nice electronic version of Trivial pursuit. Lots of fun.. but we couldn’t access all the features as you needed to upload a catalogue of questions from the website to get it all running properly. After about 2 hours though I find out that I need to have USB2.0 as a minimum.
Now in the year 2000 my computer was pretty up to date just having USB never mind USB2. This is also where the story gets a bit repetetive as I now have a camera and 2 mobile phones and an MP3 player that all demand USB 2 in order to work.
Anyway, I gritted my teeth and told myself that its fine I can live with it…
Until I end up running out of hard disk space. A few years ago I did upgrade and put in a second drive to give me a then impressive 160Gb. I’m astonished that I managed to use it all. God knows where its all gone.
An the final straw that broke the camels back is my monitor. I am still working with a 17″ CRT. Its absolutly massive… It takes up so much of the desk that my nose almost touches the screen.
So after about 0.5 seconds consideration i popped over to dells website. Now all things considered (and the fact I’m skint) I decided to plump for one of the basic 530 range. I was astonished how cheap the damn things were. finally my eye settled on the one I was looking for. A quad core for £500. I was pleasantly surprised.
So i decided to sign on the dotted line. and take advantage of the “Buy now Pay later” finance… its only £500 and its better in my pocket than in theirs I thought. So this was on monday and I thought all was going fine.
By tuesday I began to get nervous waiting for some update as to the progress of my finance application and order.
By wednesday I was a bit miffed… didn’t they want my money. So this morning I rang them.
“We’re sorry … didn’t you get the email” NO i replied. “We need you to send in some documents to confirm your identity”. I couldn’t believe that it had taken a call from me to get the ball rolling. And the excuse of “the email must have gotten lost” is beginning to wear a bit thin nowadays. I can distinctly remember giving them no less that 3 telephone numbers that I could be contacted on during the application process.
This makes me wonder if I’m going to have to call them to remind them to build my PC and ship it. I will bet ny amount that they wont hhesitate for ne single second when it comes time to collect the money in 6 months time.
I’m all in favour of large companies. But they need to remember that its the little people that made them large in the first place and, that without a little customer service, we can make them quite small again.
I just hope the build quality of my PC isnt as disappointing as the service.
