On Friday I seem to have lost my server. One minute it was there and working perfectly, and the next it was just gone.  Of all the things that could have happened, it was the damn RAID controller that died. In fairness, it was old. Like, REALLY old. I've had the card for the last seven years, and I bought it second-hand on ebay. I used a mirrored drive to store the websites, data, some documents and all our backups, so there was a significant "Oh shit" moment there. So I took the card out and plugged one of the drives into a PC to see if the data was still in-tact and luckily it was. Phew! While all this was going on the server primary drive died too. I still don't know why, and that caused me no end of hassle because I had in-advertantly stored the SQL database for my blog on that drive. Fuck it, I was going to have to install the whole damn server again. ::sigh::

So instead of re-installing Windows Server 2008 R2, I decided to install the Release Candidate of Windows Server 2012 (or Windows Server 8 if that's what it'll be called).  There's a free trial version up on Microsoft.com right now, and I'll be in a position to upgrade that when it gets released (provided I can downgrade the edition from DataCentre to Standard).  The installation process was a dream, and very very quick. I installed the full GUI version, though Server Core is available and will be the way to go in the near future. Then I started moving data around the place to make it a little more logical, and that's where I made my first mistake. Microsoft have a new file system with this version which they've called ReFS. It is a far more secure file system than NTFS, but has some limitations which I didn't figure out until after it was installed... mainly that you can't store SQL Server Databases on it. How fucking stupid can you get? The vast majority of servers with SQL Server installed will want to store their data on the new secure file system, and they can't. That's a major fuckup from my perspective. Anyway, I removed ReFS and used a standard NTFS mirrored drive for the data and all seems to be working fine so far. I have moved the IIS root directory to the mirrored drive, as well as the SQL Server Instance. Backups are now going there too, and everything is as usual backed up to Memopal.

The server software itself is nice enough. File access across the network is noticibly faster, particularly to Anna's laptop, which was starting to concern me with Windows Server 2008. Whenever she opened a large file (think 400Mb AVI), there would be a five to ten second pause before the file started working in Windows Media Player. Now that lag is down to about two to five seconds, so I'm pretty happy with that. IIS 8 is excellent, though the .Net framework 4.5  is still in beta and will likely be so until the actual release. I had the usual problems installing blogengine.net... how fucking hard can it be to specify each setting and requirement somewhere on their damn website? In all my years of using blogengine.net I have yet to come across an upgrade to a version which happened without some fucking mal-formed web.config error somewhere. Still, it's running now and running pretty well.  I'm not all that happy with SQL Server 2012, but that is likely because I haven't had time to tune it properly and that the IDE RAID array is a little slow.

The IE9 Release Candidate is finally available and up on microsoft.com.  Unfortunately it’s vaunted speed and rendering capabilities can’t cope with certain sites. Such as the IE Blog on MSDN ;-) You have to scroll way way down to see the content!

Really interesting development from ScottGu today. Microsoft have announced a new program called WebsiteSpark, which basically provides some tools to allow fledgling web developers get off the ground.  Tools include licenses of VS2008, Expression Studio and Expression Web, and a license for Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

Nice tools, and they’ll only cost $100 for three years of use.  After that three years, you can opt to purchase them direct from Microsoft.

Announcing the WebsiteSpark Program - ScottGu's Blog

Its very interesting to me how our obsessions with technology become so all encompassing.  I should probably re-phrase that: I sometimes wonder just how obsessive I need to be to keep up with things that are happening on the Internet.  I find the rate of development and change sometimes to be too much to keep up with.  Let me share with you a case in point, and the trigger for this post.

I use Twitter, which is a very popular micro-blogging service.  It allows me to write concise blog entries in a very short format (like text messaging on phones).  Twitter limits you to posting no more than 140 characters, so you sometimes have to be creative to limit ideas to such a concise format.  You also get to see the entries (tweets) of people you have chosen to follow, and these networks of followers can rapidly get pretty big.  Keeping on top of it all sometimes is harder to do than you would think. There's a lot of noise on Twitter, and not much decent signal.  However, there are some excellent sources of information on there if you search hard enough. 

Twitter has an open API which allows developers to build programs that interface with Twitter. I use a couple of those to keep track of what is going on : WittyTwitter, and Twhirl.  WittyTwitter is a program I have done some development with, and have submitted a couple of bug fixes to the code.  I'm not all that active in developing it, but I use it a lot and follow its development closely.  For the last two days I have been getting errors with Witty.  It can't log in to Twitter, probably because of a bug in the Twitter API endpoints.  I also haven't been in front of my PC as much as usual.

This means I have actually missed some information that has been disseminated over Twitter for the last couple of days.  It wasn't much, but there was one product announcement that interested me, and it is something that I need to be aware of from a development perspective.  Here's the catch.  At the end of the second paragraph I went to grab some lunch.  I have returned now and I can't even remember what the product was that prompted me to write this post.  The concept remain the same though.

The interesting thing is that tools like Twitter can exert such an unconscious draw on you (me actually). I wonder what would happen if I were to stop using Twitter for a while?  Someone I follow (a gifted and popular cartoon artist called Hugh MacLeod) decided to stop using Twitter recently, and discovered that too many of his customers actually RELY on Twitter for their business communication. It doesn't say much for the state of a business that relies on something as ephemeral as Twitter.  I'm also not sure about the wisdom either of using such a public forum for business, and certainly not one like Twitter where you have no oversight of the content nor control over its maintenance etc.  However, I could see tools like Twitter becoming more and more used by business as time goes on. After all, many businesses now have a presence in Second Life; the trendy virtual world operated by Linden Labs.

One very good reason why I used to use my own blog was that I could be fairly confident in the security of my code.  I wrote it, and I knew that I had to keep the code as safe as possible from the obvious known hacks.  It also afforded me a chance to learn a bit more about how sites are hacked and what you can do to prevent it.  So it came as a surprise to me today to learn that there was a patch released yesterday to plug a very basic vulnerability in BlogEngine.Net.  I guess we can't all be perfect.  In fairness to the guys, the patch was released the day after it was reported, but its still worrying.

I guess I have to let go of my innate distrust of other people's software and trust that they know what they're doing.  Its either that or I have to start getting serious about looking at the source code I put on my server right from the start. The problem with that is that there is actually quite a lot of code to look at, and the codebase is getting bigger.  I've been looking at the new releases as they come out, and playing with them on my dev server.  However, I have been waiting for a major update before upgrading the code on my live server.  I guess this counted as that!  Anyway, passwords are now changed everywhere... just in case ;-)  Back to our regular scheduled program.

"Thank you for your comment on the purchase you made recently with Sony Style. We are always trying to improve our service, and value customer feedback at all times. We read and try and act on every single comment."  I bought my laptop from them in August, and made whatever comment I made in the survey at the end of the transaction.  How's that for customer feedback appreciation ;-)

... so little time to post.  I've been updating the code behind this site recently, and gotten it to a state that I am completely unhappy with.  I have to re-do the blogging engine, and I have to get a better gallery working with it.  .Text has potential, but it doesn't do exactly what I need it to do.  Its also written in C#, which means I can't build onto it, as I have no knowledge of that language.  So, drawing board, or book in my case.  I need to re-do the image gallery because I discovered recently that there's a thing called EXIF that embeds information in the image relating to the conditions at the time the image was captured.  Information such as aperture, shutter speed, white balance etc.  Its completely cool, but a complete bitch to get this information out of the images and into a database.
My new camera is awesome... been playing with it all week, which is a pain in the arse for getting anything else done.
Radiotherapy starts on April 6th.  Have to get "simulated" that morning, and possibly tattoed too.  The tattoes are going to be very small dots that allow the radiotherapy machines to line up in the same place each time. I'll have to investigate that further though... I don't want them to be too intrusive.

Someone who is dealing with the person I just dealt with mailed me this morning to ask why I left negative feedback.  Wasn't sure what to tell them really, so I just told them what happened.
Smith Barney sent me a password through the post for their site... but no username.
Oh, and the rest of the good news will have to wait until I get back from the doctor.

I've just rolled out a little temporary re-design, using .Text.  I'll see how this works over the next few weeks, and also figure out a more comprehensive integration strategy... or I'll make it all fit together better ;-)

My Sunday morning treat came this morning, in the form of the stats report mailed from my website.  I saw something I hadn't noticed before - some site called "Technorati.com" had referrals to me, and was climbing up the list.  So I went to take a look, and discovered that it is a "conversation engine", that tells you what's being said right now on every site that has something to say.  So, its a search engine for blogs?  It does present some interesting data, but calling it a "conversation engine" is interesting.
Oh, and the prevalence of blogging software is incredible.  I can't believe you can now get so many pre-packaged blog engines, for many different platforms and configurations.