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So I do a bit of writing, not just for my many websites, but I’m working on a novel and a couple of screenplays. Needless to say they’re a lot of work. Discounting the research and ideas the novel (according to my Celtx Tools global word count) comes in just over 65,000 words. A lot of effort I have no wish to lose.
I could (and do) backup locally, but there are plenty of online backup services that give me some off site piece of mind (what happens if someone steals all my computer gear or the house burns down?). Text files are small and there are plenty of services who offer free options so you don’t even have to splash any cash. My preference, for the moment at least, is Dropbox.
It’s the nicest of the implementations I’ve seen, it can sync to multiple computers (so you can work on more than one machine and have local backups on those machines too) and it even offers version history.
Now, I’m somewhat paranoid when it comes to my files and data, I don’t like trusting it to other people as I’ve written before. That doesn’t mean I can’t put files online, it just means I need them to be secure. Just because whichever company says it’s safe, scout’s honour, doesn’t mean it is. So I encrypt my files before I load them.
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25th November
Everything seems to be moving into the cloud, which is to say solutions hosted by an external company and provided as a service. The cloud is all very well, but have we got the infrastructure to support it?
Most business have internet access for a variety of reasons these days, but going forward more companies are offering you Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing. The benefits are obvious: you don’t need to invest in hardware or the expertise to run it, you just pay a monthly or yearly fee for however many users you have, it means any size company can afford the latest and best technology to help their business. The problem is it relies on your being able to access the services whenever you need them. And there’s the rub.
The most cost-effective internet connection is ADSL, even for bigger businesses you can get multiple lines bonded together to give you more speed. The problem is that ADSL isn’t really fit for business use. Sure, you can get business packages, you might even get service level agreements (SLAs), but at the end of the day they all fall back to BT (or Openreach, technically, who are the Railtrack of communications, they own and operate all the lines). And the problem is that while BT have guarantees in place to fix a voice line in hours, an ADSL service/line can be out for up to two days. Imagine that impact on your business when none of your staff can get to any of your hosted services, which could be everything from email to phones to documents and beyond.
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20th November
I’ve been thinking of building myself a little PC for a while. Partly I like the idea of a small PC, but also I was looking for lower power consumption. My Mac Pro, although a great machine, ran 180W idle. It also took a long time to boot, so I wanted something I could leave in sleep and just wake to use. That basically meant going mini-ITX.
I spent a lot of time researching cases, motherboards and CPUs. The mini-ITX segment is growing, but still fairly small. I was trying to balance four things: power consumption, noise, size and performance.
They’re not easy things to match and there were some trade-offs.
The Decisions
I saw and pretty much set my heart on the Antec ISK 300-65 case from the start. It was tiny, looked good, was pretty cheap and included a fanless 65W power supply. Unlike most other cases its size, it provided space for two 2.5†HDDs and a slimline optical drive. I wanted two drives to match my old system; an SSD for boot and a regular disk for storage. I wanted to avoid a regular-size ATX PSU as they don’t make them below 300W and even the 80Plus units aren’t efficient below 20% of their power draw (just why does no one make a 150-200W one?). So 65W was my goal power usage (ideally I wanted 30W idle).
I really wanted an i3 system. The i3 530 has onboard graphics and I saw plenty of articles with it idling around 30W, but it could jump up real fast (with a TDP of 73W). It seemed to offer a great balance of power and performance. I almost committed to it, but found that none of the boards offered 2560×1600 output via any of their ports. The chipset can do it, but not one the motherboard manufacturers offered it.
This was a problem as I wanted to hook this thing up to a 30†monitor at some point. It would mean an additional graphics card, which basically guaranteed me being over the 65W. So I turned to AMD.
I already have a 5050e in my HTPC and know how little power they use and heat they produce while still offering a good level of performance (remember, I found a dual-core Atom almost did everything I needed for day-to-day running). So I knew one of the newer X2 chips would do it (I could have plumped for a three- or four-core chip, but extra cores only really count when doing things that need/use them — usually transcoding video — higher clock speed is better for general use and the X2 offered better speeds). None of the AMD chips competed with the i3 on performance for the money (or performance per watt).
Finding a motherboard was a problem though. There just aren’t that many mini-ITX boards around and of those, only two or three are AMD. They were all way more than the Intel ones, which negated the benefit of the cheap CPUs. In the end I found the Asus M4A88T-I, which was relatively new, but seemed to offer what I wanted it. I had to settle for SODIMM RAM (usually used in laptops) and I didn’t get dual screen graphics, but I did get a 2560×1600 output from the onboard ATI HD 4250.
I also knew the stock CPU coolers were OK on AMD (having used one on a build for my brother), whereas the Intel ones for the i3 came in for a lot of stick in the articles I read and I couldn’t find a good low-profile replacement.
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15th September
It’s been a while since I’ve updated the Book Review plugin, mainly because it was complicated to write and with each release of WordPress I largely had to rewrite it. And because most of the code it used emulated core WP functionality there wasn’t a lot of help anywhere to guide me how things had changed.
I fell back on using the More Fields plugin.
In WordPress 3 though, came the option for Custom Post Types. So, earlier in the week I rolled up my sleeves and, with the help of come excellent tutorials (mainly this one by Justin Tadlock), wrote a custom post type specifically for Book Reviews.
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28th August
For those people who don’t know, Google Apps is Google’s answer to an office suite. Microsoft Office is probably the most recognised of these tools, but there are plenty of others for different platforms. The current drive is for online, web-hosted versions, which require no installed software and only a browser to run.
I recently ran a trial of Google Apps as a possible replacement for our incumbent solution of hosted Exchange and Sharepoint, along with normal copies of Microsoft Office. I didn’t expect it to replace the desktop applications, but mainly replace our email, calendar and intranet services and possibly provide some extra functionality for light users. Having completed my trial and made my decision I thought I would write up my experience here to make it more generally accessible.
Our situation
We weren’t unhappy with the existing solution, but the difference in cost was enough to convince me to take a trial and see what it was capable of. The applications needed to match existing functionality in the core areas and be seamless. It also needed to be very reliable.
I wasn’t entirely new to Apps, I use the free version for one of my personal domains.
We have a head office and a number of branches. The branches only have one Office user, who primarily only uses email and calendaring with Outlook, in part because they don’t have Office installed.
At head office the use is much greater, everyone using Outlook email and calendars, shared documents on Sharepoint and use of many of the Office applications, using some of their power features.
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24th August
