chrislomax

Again, 1Password.

It allows you to login to multiple workspaces so you can have your family plan and your work team plan at the same time.

There is a cost but I can guarantee that it’s saved me more in time than the cost could ever amount to.

I’ve never used an insecure password since using it. All completely random and it’s so easy to use.

The different vaults means I can grant my little boy access to the stuff he uses whilst having my credit card and server details in other vaults without fear that he can access them (more the credit card details). I just need to get the wife into using it now...

She didn’t buy an iPhone in a non branded box, it’s how Apple sent the replacement phone.

I thought it was weird when we got the replacement though.

I’m not 100% on whether it was refurb or brand new. It came in a non branded box without a charger etc. The phone looked brand new.

I’m going to install the app to check what the CPU is running at.

It’s still ridiculous that she was running 10.x fine, she only updated because someone sent her some emojis that her phone didn’t understand and now is it’s running like crap

My wife had a phone replaced off Apple about 6 months back because it was shutting down for no reason about 40% battery life.

She’s recently upgraded from 10.x to latest version. She’s noticed an actual decrease in performance to the point where she’s nearly punching the phone. It just locks up for no reason.

I’d like to blame this on the battery or age of the phone but I can’t. It is an iPhone 6 but it is only half a year old.

I believe that this phone should be able to handle the latest release just fine.

She’s now looking at upgrading the phone.

Sorry yes I was referring to the personal backup plan.

We use b2 at work for our corporate offsite backups and I can’t praise it high enough.

We’ve had it running for over a year and it’s just been set and forget.

We use cloudberry as the backup tool and it’s been great.

B2 is obviously our third line backup for when all else fails but I have confidence in it and it’s cheap.

How does this beat Backblaze? I pay $5 a month and I’ve no data caps?

I know I can’t start at a dollar but I can’t imagine many people backing up 0-10gb a month and that’s it

I didn't know any of that so I appreciate the comment.

I think my next "fun" app will be a real time app using as many of the "new" technologies as possible.

I've been stagnant far too long now and it's beginning to show

What size of projects are they?

We do a lot of integration projects with our clients, ie integrating with CRMs / ERPs and the timescales on these projects is usually about 10/12 weeks. I enjoy this project turnaround as it means I'm never stagnant on the same project for long and I get to experience new things.

I imagine the projects for a Fortune 500 is 1 or 2 years long with thousands of man hours?

EDIT: Clarified a question

I think this is what frustrates me. We've slowly started reducing the amount of Windows machines in our cluster as the licensing for SQL went from £160 a month per CPU up to £240 per CPU in the space of 2 years.

This is unacceptable.

We can't run a business trying to guess what this will be in another 12 months time.

Resource is a big issue, I recently fired up a small Linux box on Digital Ocean as a test; it's 512mb with a small CPU. The machine barely runs at any overhead when dormant. A Windows box is using 1GB before the operating system has finished loading

We are based in the UK. I don't know if it's the clients and the type of work we are filling but we seem to be migrating a lot of people from Wordpress so typically they expect everything to still run on Linux.

Our clients are normally ones who have come from a small background and are growing quite rapid, this customer is almost certainly on some type of Linux offering.

It's probably a mix of the clients we target and the geographical location.

Thanks.

I know this is something I can do right now but a few things I wanted to look at was node.js and Angular.

I'm definitely in need of catching up on some new techniques, I've been so engrossed in doing paid work that I've not had time to pick up a book and get back to the fun bit of programming

While I agree with some of these points the biggest one for me is client adoption.

All clients assume everything is run in Linux. I don't even know why this mindset is so popular.

When we develop something and the client wants to host it I can guarantee (more or less) that the platform is Linux and they want to know why the software we have written doesn't work on Linux.

I know there is Mono but I always use IIS to run our software as that's what I am used to and that is the platform is is meant to work on.

I do love .NET, I've used it since it was launched. I do want to have a change though. I just don't know what language to dip into next.

I'll never leave .NET though as it's where I really started programming (after VBA...). I've just discovered Umbraco too which I've just fallen in love with.

Recommendations on languages I can try would be appreciated. I don't like this minefield we are in at the minute, I never know what is going to stick around and what is a fad.

Interesting, it's probably the type of software I would build and enjoy building.

I never thought the market could be so niche to barbers though, guess that trend hasn't made it t'up North of UK

Ironically the website does not work on mobile.

I think I was expecting it to be a normal forum layout but faster. I must admit, it didn't feel faster. The fade feels like a cop out on speed and acting as a mask.

Also when going onto the forum, I was clicking links but nothing was happening? Then I would click the home button and the last button I had clicked would then activate, like it was a click behind?

The home layout reminds me of hootsuite, I find the layout too cluttered. I'd imagine you would get used to it and you would know where to look eventually but I must admit it wasn't very intuitive.

The plus points are that I do think the world needs an overhaul on forum software, it's tired and hasn't changed much in 15 years. I don't think this has been done in vain.

The feature set looks good I just don't think you need the fading transitions and so much information all over the place. It needs simplifying; in my opinion.

Sorry I didn't make it clear at all!

We had 3 months where we had 20 minutes of downtime. The edge router was ~15 minutes and there was a denial of service on a machine in the same portion of the network which took a few minutes to isolate.

That is the only downtime we received in our 12 month initial contract which started Feb 2013 and ended Feb 2014 (we are on a rolling contract now).

So (20 / 12) = 1.6 minutes a month averaged. For arguments sake it puts us around the four 9s in availability a month.

How do you find node performs on those $5 boxes?

What's your traffic like on it?

I've not used node before but it is a language / tech that interests me

I'm interested as I have a customer who pays around £200 a month per dedicated box at the minute for nearly half the spec. They are true dedicated boxes though and the network they are on hardly ever goes down (roughly 20 minutes downtime in 3 months due to an edge router firmware upgrade gone badly wrong).

The provider is transparent though and the issue hasn't happened previously or since.

The 16GB RAM package at £100 a month is just amazing if it really is that stable.

Do you do any type of redundancy between DCs / networks? How did you find their redundancy tools if you did?

I did it for two reasons really; I wanted to test out DO as a service to see what it had to offer (at $5 a month at my own expense it's written off easy) and I like to learn new things.

I'd done a similar thing on AWS before on their free platform but you only got 100GB a month transfer. This is eaten up quickly on streaming videos.

I'm mainly a .net dev on Windows boxes but I would like to expand my knowledge a little further nginx etc. Most of the open source technologies run best on Linux so I like to dabble in the prompts a little for experience.

I setup an old computer in my home recently and installed Ubuntu as a home media server. The setup ended up costing me £8 in a new RAM stick and about a week of messing to get it working how I wanted. I could have purchased a NAS with it all installed for £200 but I just enjoy the challenge. It's a welcome break from programming sometimes, it's a kind of downtime.

Also, VPN packages start at $9.99 a month if you pay month to month (the savings are the longer term contracts) so the way I see it I am halving that cost and learning at the same time.

I see quite a few hosting on DO, how does that suit you for a production environment?

I've heard the structure is becoming more stable now?

I have a VPS with them but it's purely for a USA VPN to watch Netflix through so it doesn't always need to be up

EDIT: Typo

Yes and No. How do you know that something that doesn't fit now won't fit on the next iteration?

Can you honestly say you haven't built a site before that you wish you had built differently? I know I have.

These regrets make us make better decisions in future and to that end I always plan for bigger.

Although I'm a fan of not over complicating things; generally when you re-build something for someone and they see the potential of their new site then 1 of 2 things happens.

1, They let the site go stagnant again like their previous site. 2, They want to build more on top of their site.

I always build a site like a client is going to come back to me for more work. I never work on the expectation to build and forget.

In most cases, the client ends up coming back to me for more pages. I've generally built this in a CMS so I charge 1 hours work for something that takes me 30 minutes to sort out for them. There is a client service there where I am doing them a service. I make 30 minutes profit per page (at a min charge of 1 hours work at a time) and everyone is happy.

The beauty of this method is that I am not coming back to a site in a year and wondering how I built it. Did I put navigation on every page? Were there differences on some pages?

I say Yes to not over complicating, I say No to not over complicating at the expense of making it complicated again for yourself to modify in the future.

EDIT: Typo

Although I generally do not post something that is not constructive to an article, I have to say, I bought the same magazine when I was younger with Borland on and that is what made me want to become a programmer!

I was amazed when I read that point. The only difference is that I couldn't get anything to build in Borland. I started out in BASIC making my motherboard beep to tunes in a BAT file.

The problem does ultimately lie with the tie in, I can appreciate that. I suppose my question was almost rhetorical as I know where the problems lie.

I wanted to redevelop our CMS in MVC (we missed the MVC train by about 2 months so it's Web Forms) as I like how much more lightweight it is but to be honest, I would rather completely redevelop in another language as it would help our adoption rate with our clients.

The painful thing is, I know how powerful our CMS is (to our clients at least) but it's such a hard sell.

We normally deploy onto our own cluster BTW as we roll out core updates through our own servers so everyone feels the benefits of new modules and admin updates etc so the hosting is generally taken care of.

It pains me if I am honest. Our CMS is built on .NET and it's like an uphill battle selling it as it's on IIS and it's .NET. I have played around with the idea of reworking it into an open source language and open source database but I would miss Visual Studio and the language a lot.

I don't get all the hate?

I signed up as it does look interesting. Some people say it's been round for a while, I didn't know about it.

Tried to sign up and got a "Federation error"! Excellent

You might not need [Insert Library Here].

Although this is true, you don't really need any library. The problem comes when you start to need that library. You make a decision to not use it at the start of the project and then the dependency of lower level JS functions grow and it turns out you do need it. What do you do then? Go and get a copy of jQuery and start to rewrite all your functions?

Hindsight is the problem here, I'd rather make the decision to use the (relatively) low sized jQuery library and not have to worry about how the project grows.

As the old saying goes, "It's better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it".

Simple one really and probably most common. Realise a data integrity issue on DB, try to load from backups and notice that the backups have the same integrity issue. Find a backup from about 2 weeks previous where data is intact and piece together the good pages from the daily backups and the 2 weeks old one.

All in, took 4 days and a new server where the hard drive had stored bad pages on the DB. We lost 2 days of orders (they were processed through to the internal systems though so not really lost)

Lesson learned, validate backups and check page integrity when backing up

I guess you're right in a respect. I think I trusted this to be right though, I never imagined that you could change something so dramatically to the point where it isn't even the same product any more.

With Chrome having such a good level of sandbox and Google being proud of that I didn't think it would be so easy for someone to release an extension that basically acted as malware.

I do in general have really good browsing habits, I just need to re-evaluate who I trust.

I'm assuming you are the developer?

Now I see these pages I can see you were quite transparent about the eco links update. I still didn't see it though.

It's a shame it went in this direction as I used it all the time.

I noticed this about a month back. I was browsing the web one Saturday morning and spotted an "Eco link" next to the search results. Most of them were big sites, like Amazon and eBay etc.

I immediately emailed one of our SEO guys with a snippet of the page and said, "we need to know how to do this in Google, it must be a new feature". I stupidly assumed it was a new feature Google had rolled out. When he replied that he can't see it I started googling the problem, most of the results pertained to Malware and I was shocked, I'm a very careful browser in general.

When I started digging around it was only then I started switching off my plugins 1 by 1 and the eco link went when I switched off the browser resizer, I was honestly shocked. I knew the developer wasn't supporting the plugin any more due to funding but I didn't think it would go in that direction, I expected it to just fade away.

No, I didn't read the updates on the product. I don't have time to read updates on products, especially plugins. After reading his comments on there, there is no remorse for his actions. He is nothing more than a simple malware spreader, he should apply for a job at SourceForge.