A techie friend just introduced me to Zimbra, he has recently switched his small company from a hosted exchange solution to a hosted ZimbraCS solution. In the UK you can get a hosted Zimbra mailbox for £3.99 per month, for this fee you get an Ajax web client, seamless integration with Outlook and many other webclients. Mobile messaging, some of the solution providers offer support for Blackberry's some are still working at it. You enjoy shared calendars and a lot of the other collaberative features Exchange offers without the serious support overhead.

Zimbra is still fairly new but has some serious VC muscle behind it so watch this space. My company Redline Software made a concious decision to avoid Exchange due to it's support overhead and the horror stories that have circulated about corrupt database files and elongated periods of outage were also driving factors. Instead we opted for a simple solution called Mailenable that did a great job as a Pop3 server and integrated nicely with Outlook. We lost out on the collabarative features of Exchange but we were a small company so collabaration wasn't a big issue for us. We are still using Mailenable but are evaluating ZimbraCS.

I have just switched my ISP,  I've been with Plusnet for over four years and the first three and a half years the service was excellent. I need an ISP that offers a static IP address so I can host my own personal website and blog. As BT have just bought Plusnet and even though Plusnet are making a lot of noise saying that things aren't going to change i'm not prepared to be a guinea pig, especially not where BT are involved. I hope i'm wrong and Plusnet sort out their recent support issues.

Plusnet's loss is Zen internets gain, they offer an 8mb lite package where you get 2GB downloads and 8 static IP addresses for £18 per month. Their reputation for troubleshooting support issues is good but time will tell.

All I had to do to get a MAC code was raise a support ticket at Plusnet and then listen to a salesman for five minutes try and convince me to stay, then sign up at Zen.

The nokia 2610 is a great phone if you just want to make phone calls and are not very good at remembering to charge your mobile as it has a claimed battery life of 12 days standby or 3 hours talk time.

For the Nokia technical specs click here

It doesn't have a camera or bluetooth and it's cheap, £60 buys the version that can be used with the major networks in the UK, and Orange will do a locked version for £40 pay as you talk The screen is clear but difficult to see in direct sunlight. It has a Built-in hands-free speaker which is important when driving in the UK. As I have only had the phone a few days I will update this post at a later date to give a more detailed account of the 2610.

At last a phone that is cheap and good at one thing.. making phone calls!

Update: I have been using this phone for over a week now...

The Good Stuff:

Battery Life - 7days made / recieved 45 mins

Easy to read display

Asthetically pleasing

small and lightweight

Menu easy to navigate

The Bad Stuff:

Buttons are shiny so fingernails can slide off

Button press not very sure

Annoyances:

When Scrolling quickly through contacts the display doesn't keep up so it is easy to overshoot and dial the wrong number

Menu navigation is bit laggy

Futher Update:
I have been using this phone for well over a year now, no faults and the battery life is still as good as ever. All of the above still applies.

I am probably centuries behind here but today I learnt that you can add rss feeds to your personalised google home page.

I am a big fan of having control over my homepage, In the past I have written simple HTML pages containing links to the sites I use most often, at work I have used sharepoint which is excellent and allows me to edit links in my browser. I was interested to see if google home page offered the ability to add urls, so far I have not found this with the exception of RSS. If the website has a feed and more and more do then it can be added and will appear much like any other gadget. What is more the last three items in the feed will also be displayed, very cool. To do this click the 'Add Stuff' link then click the 'Add by Url' icon, then type or paste the url of the feed in and click Add.

There are multitude of 'Gadgets' you can add to your home page, my favourites are the Time, Weather Forecast and the Virgin Radio Tuner, but there are thousands of others.

I spent most of Dec 2006 and a little bit of Jan 2007 in Australia, my wife and I flew into Melbourne on the 9th Dec. It was my first visit and is now my favourite city in Oz. Mebourne is significantly cheaper than Sydney and has a lot more to do than Cairns. A taxi driver told me 4 million people live in and around the city but it didn't have the in your face crowds of Sydney or London and felt a lot more relaxed. One night we ate on the Tram Car restaurnt that tours round the city whilst serving up meals, the food was good considering the size of the kitchen and we had a good banter with the table next to us, the waiters were friendly, the meal and drinks are all inclusive for Aus$100 / £40 so it wasn't even expensive.

A couple of days later we went for a meal at the Flower Drum, which is billed as the best Cantonese restaurant in the southern hemisphere, I have no way to verify the validity of this but the food was fantastic. We booked three months in advance and could only get a thursday night, so book early to avoid disapointment. The highlights of the meal were a waiter arriving  to make your peking duck pancakes for you, the steamed oysters and the beef in black bean sauce which melted in the mouth. The only problem is we wont be able to order a chinese take away for months now we are back home.

I met up with and old friend David who I hadn't seen since I was sixteen, he has been living in Melbourne for seven years and graciously he offered to accompany us to a couple of his favourite restaurants. The first was a Japanese restaurant and the second a Vietnamese, the food in both was great and the bill was tiny working out at around £10 a head for lots of food. A lot of the Melbourne restaurants have a BYO licence and a bottle shop nearby, so if you like wine you can afford to spoil yourself a little.

We also took a Tram down to the beach at Port Melbourne and took a boat down the Yarra river to Williamstown both  trips were pleasant if not eventful. Kilda beach is also a short tram ride away and has a lively night life and a nice beach and some good shops. We stayed in the Langham Hotel in Southbank which is 5star and was only Aus$200 / £80 a night, the hotel was great the staff were friendly and it was well located for exploring the city, it also has really nice terrace with a pool overlooking the Yarra river, I would highly recommend it.

After eight days in Melbourne we flew up to Byron Bay for christmas, Bryon is a chilled seaside town with a beautiful beach a few nice restaurants and good pubs and bars, the beach is ranked in the top 25 beaches around the world, and the people are great and very laid back. There are lots of surfers and you can go on dolphin / whale / turtle watching tours if that's your thing. Byron is a great place to sit back and do very little except sunbathe and drink beer. We stayed in the Beachcomber motel on Shirly St, it was plesant enough but the motels and appartments on Lawson St looked nicer, maybe they are more expensive though.

The last part of the holiday was Sydney, we were staying at the Novotel that overlooks Darling harbour, this is a 4star hotel and it doesn't have any frills, we booked harbour view room which is worth the extra dosh as the Sydney skyline is impressive. Darling harbour is a good place to stay if you are holidaying in Sydney, you are a ten minute walk from the shopping district and you can take a boat into Circular Quay (next to Sydney Opera House) the trip only takes ten minutes. A friend of my was getting married on the 29th December, the reception was out past watsons bay, it was a great wedding and I got very drunk.

We were also in Sydney for new years eve and had booked table on a cruise boat so that we could eat, drink, be merry and watch the fireworks in comfort. This was expensive Aus$500 / £200 a head but we firgured it was unlikely we would repeat the experience any time soon. The food was good the beer / champagne kept flowing and the fireworks were impressive.

Alas it was all over so soon, fortunately my wife gave me tickets to Thailand for christmas so I only have to wait till April to see the sun again.

When you are tasked with choosing a new database server, let the business requirements dictate the hardware and license choices you make. I am only going to cover SQL Server 2005 Std and Enterprise editions, if you require less horse power then any modern desktop will be ample. If you require more horsepower then you need to talk to one of the Tier 1 vendors Sun, IBM or HP and you'll need a big cheque book.

SQL Server 2005 Licenses

So lets start with SQL Server Licensing, there are a few different licensing models available, per seat, per device or per CPU. The chances are you will only be interested in per CPU, if your web application is publically available or is an extranet type app you will not have domain users accessing it, a possible exception is an intranet app. From now on I am going to focus on the per CPU licence.

SQL Server 2005 now ships for x32, x64 and IA64 Itanium processors. The price is the same for each at around £4500 for a Std licence and £16000 for an Enterprise license. MS multicore policy is to base this on the physical number of CPUs and not the number of cores. This is important because Intel and Amd are delivering more MIPS by adding cores instead of going after higher clock speeds. When choosing a server it makes financial sense to rember this, for example:

               2005 Std Edition License for a Quad CPU server will cost 4 x 4500 = £18,000
               2005 Std Edition License for a Single CPU Quad Core will cost 1 x 4500 = £4,500

This example is extreme and a single cpu with four cores may not yield the same performance as four CPU's but it does illustrate how making an informed hardware purchase can keep the server licence costs down. It is also worth remembering that opting for a 64bit server has been shown to yield 200% performance gain in real world applications. If you are building a server that will be dedicated to running your database then choosing x64 should be a no-brainer unless you have some sort of corporate policy that prevents it. If you intend to run other apps then you should check if they are available in x64 versions. As a rule it is a good idea to just run SQL Server on its own. Std Edition will support a maximum of four CPU's and Enterprise is unlimited.

Server Hardware

RAM or Memory if you prefer is a key component of any database server and it makes a big difference to performance. SQL server 2005 Std and Enterprise both support the maximum provided by the OS. If you choose Std Edition then Windows 2003 x64 R2 is the best OS choice. It supports up to 4 cpu's and can address up to 32GB of RAM and costs less than £700. If you have chosen Sql Server Enterprise edition then the recommended operating system is 2003 Datacenter x64 it is cheaper than Enterprise at ~£2000 and will support up to 64 Cpu's and 1 terrabyte of RAM for more info on os licensing use this link. 2003 Server Comparison

AMD or Intel? I don't think there is a huge difference in performance if you need a dual cpu server, if you are building a quad then AMD's Opteron performs better but you can only scale up to eight cpu's where as Intel offer 32 cpu solutions.

SCSI, Fibre Channel, SAN or SAS ? SAS probably it will future proof better you can have over 126,000 drives, prices are a little high at the moment but should fall, fiber offers good performance and the price is good now but I think it will give way to SAS. SAN's are big money but offer the highest performance. SCSI is starting to look like it is on the way out and limits the number of drives to around fify on a four channel card. SAS Architecture

SAS Articles:
http://www.serialstoragewire.com/Articles/2004_1026/5_vitesse_it_insights_1004.html
http://www.techworld.com/storage/features/index.cfm?featureid=1319&pagtype=samecatsamechan

Application Workload

OLAP or OLTP? What sort of application(s) are going to be accessing the database, if you are going to be doing large numbers of transactions then random disk access is going to be your I/O bottle neck and you will want lots of low capacity high speed disks. If you are building a data warehouse for reporting then you will need to store more data and access will be more sequential so less disks with a higher capacity and a lower speed will make sense. If you are migrating from an older Sql Server then you probably can guage what sort of capacity you require. If not you should do some rough calculations double the results and add a bit more for luck.

Availability and Scale

If your application is enterprise level, has thousands of concurrent users and terrabytes of data and must be available 24/7 365 days a year then you are going to have to shell out the extra £££ for an Enterprise licence. Enterprise has a whole host of features that support availbility and managing very large databases that Std does not. If you have hundreds of users and the buisness does not require the system be available 24/7 and will permit out of office hours down time then Std will be fine.

Server Lifetime

Lifetime of the server? Generally you should be building a server that will give you a guaranteed three years service, it may turn out to be five years before a replacement is needed, a lot of the warranties offered will be five years so this is probably as long as is sensible for a production server. It is almost certain that after three years technology will have of moved on significantly enough to  mean that upgrading to a server twice as powerful server will cost the same or less as the server you are just about to purchase.

 

I have just replaced my personal webserver, I was running an AMD64 3200+ in a standard tower case, it sounded like a hairdryer and if you placed your hand near the fan outlet it felt like one. I checked out what the recommended psu would be for this system just to get an idea of it's power consumption. I used this  PSU-Calculator  and it came up with a rating of 192 watts for 50% cpu utilisation.

I wanted something quieter and cooler that used less electrons, so checked out the Via ITX mobo's. ITX motherboards are tiny at only 12cm x 12cm and the VIA ones come with an embeded CPU and HSF. I opted for the VIA EPIA EN15000 and a Morex Cubid 3688 case with 1GB ram, a Laptop DVD RW Drive and a 2.5" Laptop drive. I use this as a webserver 24x7 for hosting this blog and I use it as a desktop at home. I have installed Visual Studio 2005 Pro and have had no performance problems. As a desktop it feels just as responsive as the old machine. It is not suitable for video rendering so I do this on my Duo Laptop but I only need to do this occasionally so no big deal. I know this system uses less than 60W because that is the rating on the external power supply. I estimate that at Idle it is using ~20W and it will be at Idle most of the time.

 

The other benefit is desk space the case is only W 20cm x D 27cm x H 7cm or roughly half the width of a standard Hifi separate with similar height and depth. The motherboard comes with onboard graphics, sound and GB Lan it also has four USB ports, S/Video and a RCA port which can be used for TV/Out or SPdif. The embedded processor is Via's 1500mhz C7 according to VIA this cpu at 100% utilisation uses only 12 Watts and has an average power consumption of 1 watt. How green is your desktop/webserver ?

 

It seems great minds think alike :)

Over the last few weeks I have been listening to the archive of Hanselminutes, a new(ish) dotnet developer podcast by Scott Hanselman. Scott is the kind of developer who can't resist a beta and is currently reporting his progress with Vista via his blog. The shows are usually 20-30 mins and cut straight to the chase giving us developer types the sort of content we crave, so point your podcatching client at the show and enjoy.

 

I did some digging into the upcoming Open XML formats and found a great article by Ted Pattison explaining the changes MS have made. Essentially the new docx format is a zip file containing a bunch of other files mostly XML files that make up a word document ms refer to this as the 'Package'. Ted has written a great article that explains how it all hangs together in some detail.

So why did MS go to all this trouble? Well folks like me want to be able to programatically work with Word documents on the serverside so we can automate certain processes. The old binary formats supported by previous versions were unfriendly so we tended to use the word object model or VBA to do this. These were not very performant and less than 100% reliable. So according to Ted the new formats will allow manipulation of word files without installation of Word via some new .Net classes. To start with this will not be straightforward, first you will have to familiarise yourself with how a docx package is structured, but I imagine some coding gurus have begun work on this already and by the time Office 2007 is released you will be able to purchase a 3rd party component that will make indenting paragraphs a snip.

We have a need to manipulate bookmarks so we can inject data into documents prior to converting them to PDF's. I am on the lookout for worthy open source projects that are attempting to undertake this task, I would gladly make a contribution to their efforts in order to reap the rewards :o)

Another great article that goes into more detail

A project with example code on how to create a simple docx from scratch.

http://boulter.com/blog/2004/08/19/performant-is-not-a-word/

I have been using Google Spreadsheets to see how useful a tool it really is. I uploaded a small Excel sheet that I built for the purpose of testing out the GS application.

Unlike Excel in GS you have to insert extra rows and columns as and when you need them. You can perform multiple inserts by highlighting multiple rows, then right-clicking and selecting insert 5 below or above. I attempted to select 30 and insert 30 below then 60, 120, 240. When I tried to insert 240 something broke because the 240 rows did not get inserted and there was permanent Updating... message. Maybe this is just a glitch or maybe you cannot work with this many rows. I noticed that Internet Explorer's memory usage rose to ~80mb typically this is about ~20mb.

My conclusions are that currently they are only suitable for light duties, where online access and or collaberation is needed. This may with time and effort on googles part change.