Website for picking Servers

dell-serverI’ve been tasked with the job of finding a new server for a client, normally I love this kind of job but today its really not going particularly well.

The problem? I know what the client wants/needs but explaining that to the companies with the servers is rather difficult. Either I have to sit on the phone with a sales droid who doesn’t know what they’re talking about or I have to go play with a website which doesn’t work the way I think it should or the worst, go through thousands of spreadsheets trying to puzzle out what goes with what.

So far Dell has the best website I know of for configuring servers, but it still doesn’t do it right because it makes you make decisions up front that if you’re “just shopping” you can’t really make upfront. Obviously this all depends on the way you will be doing your shopping, but let me go through the way I would like these stores to work.
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The worlds a Twitter…

twitter_logoI’ve finally given in and gotten a twitter account (dale_nunns). I’m not entirely sure how it all works or what I’m supposed to do with it, but it sounded cool, looked cool and is something new to play with.?The final push came from a friend who we share offices with, he was showing me a cool new website design he’s working on that has Twitter integrated into it and was telling me about the communities that Twitter helps build and generally evangelising it a lot, so I thought I might as well give it a try.

So you’ll notice that there is now a “Dale On Twitter” section on the widget bar to the right of this site that’ll show my latest “tweets”, I’m not sure how well its going to work or how long I’ll keep “tweeting”, but I’ll give it a try.

Twitter is a sort of cross between?between IM (Instant Messaging) and perhaps Facebook’s “Status” field with some added web 2.0 social networking stirred in for good measure, its nothing particularly fancy. But you can “tweet” from cell phones, PDA’s and other devices. Tweets are limited to 140chars so you can’t type your new epistle which is probably a good thing.

I love this one comment on their about page “…?While our business model is in a research phase, we spend more money than we make.”, in answer to the question “How do you make money from twitter?”. I have to agree that really is an odd business model.

In case you’re wondering what a tweet is, I’m not entirely sure if I’ve got the terminology correct… but as I understand it one message that you’ve sent out via Twitter.

Idea: Small Tablet PC

This morning while making notes in my paper notebook, I started day dreaming… wouldn’t it be cool if I could replace this notebook with a Tablet PC? I do currently own a Tablet PC, an ageing LG LT20 Tablet PC, but its too big for what I want.

I want a Tablet PC the size of a A5 piece of paper about 2cm thick that’s got the processing power of an EeePC or a MSI Wind, it has to have instant on though and have a good battery life.

(In the famous words of the Top Gear Hosts) How hard could it be?

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IBM PC turns 27 today.

IBM PC (model 5150) - From Wikipedia

The original IBM PC turns 27 today… That’s older than me !!!

While I wasn’t around when this computer came out, I spent plenty of time in my later years (around age 13-15) taking them apart and making them work again. You could get these machines for free or really cheap then and they were fun to modify and hack. Friends and I over clocked one, expanded the RAM and put in a huge 200MB drive. I even learnt assembly on one of the later clones.

These machines were solidly built and were practically indestructable, we always joked if we ever need armour plating for anything the cases used on these old IBM PC’s would be perfect.

Wired Magazine’s Birthday Article
Old Computer Museum’s IBM PC Entry
IBM PC Wikipedia Entry

Apple’s new product – iTV

iTVSo if you’re a Apple fanboy you’ve probably already heard about there cool new piece of hardware coming to a TV near you… sometime in the not too distant future…
What is this new device? oooh well it’s kinda like a mini MacMini… you plug it into the network or let it join your wireless one and then it’ll stream music/video/photo’s from iTunes…

I currently use my MacMini for this, it’s plugged into my LCD TV and acts as a sort of “entertainment PC” and plays all the stuff I have on my desktop Linux machine. But this new little box is smaller than a MacMini, doesn’t need a keyboard, mouse or anything and will have things like component video out.

So as you can tell I want one.. and I want one bad… the bad news is they’ll only be coming out sometime next year and they not going to be extremely cheap but probably less than a MacMini.

You can read more about it here and here

My (not so) new toys…

I’ve got a problem that I really like buying computers, and while I don’t always have an exact use for them when I buy them I normally find something for them to do.

A few weeks back (about 2) I went round to a company called Bridgeport Technical Services. These guys sell refurbished computers. The nice thing is the machines are rather cheap and they don’t come with any Operating System so they perfect for installing Linux on to.

So I bought two machines, although I really wanted to buy alot more.

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