I usually don’t have much call for business cards. Internally they’re not much use, and I don’t get to many conferences. But it’s always a bit uncomfortable at business conferences when you don’t have cards. So at the last minute I decided to get some for Lotusphere. But rather than having the hassle of sorting cards out through work I decided I this was the excuse I needed to play with Moo.com, a service that allows you to create personal business cards through their website.  
 
I have to say I’ve been impressed by their service.  
I started by making standard business cards. As they’re work related I decided to use photos I took around the Uni last summer. Moo makes the job incredibly simple. You can either upload photos or pull them in from a number of external services, including Flickr. So 10 minutes later I had created a dozen different designs and they were heading off to the printers. 

They’re not cheap, but the cards are printed on good quality card and the quality of the photos is pretty decent. Moo also like the ‘little touches’. The box came with a ‘buzzword bingo’ card of stupid phrases that you should try to slip into meetings.  
 
 
I was so impressed with the service I had to give their mini moo cards a go. These are half height cards and each card can feature it’s own photo or phrase. Again I decided to use the Flickr import routine. This time selecting random photos from 2011 photo sets of everything from airshows to gigs. This time the cards are designed more as a personal card with twitter and Flickr addresses 

I grew up in Middlesbrough, a small town in the North East of England. It’s one of those ‘salt of the earth’ towns. To outsiders it doesn’t appear to have much going for it. But in general the people are brilliant and they have a pride in the area that you don’t find in many of the more affluent areas of the UK.

Teesside in 1900

Like many industrial parts of the UK, it’s been in decline since the 60s, as successive governments have stood by and watch it’s industries die. Teesside was built on steel, shipbuilding, and petrochemicals, and had a rich industrial heritage for example steel from Teesside has been used in construction throughout the world. (Sydney Harbour Bridge is built with Teesside steel and even the new Wembley Arch is Teesside steel).

Wembley Arch

Today a critical blow has been struck against the area. Corus ‘mothballed’ their steel plant at Redcar ending 150 years of Teesside steel production. Closing a plant that until a bunch of useless bankers caused a world recession, was profitable making high quality specialist steel, but now is yet another one of their victims.

Many on Teesside rightly feel that they should be bailed out. They didn’t cause the recession and unlike the banks, used to make real money for the country. Also Teesside, unlike the South of England, did not experience many of the benefits of the ‘boom’ times of the last 30 years. The only new businesses on Teesside have been shops and call centres. So while the government is happy to bail out those that created the problem, 1700 honest hardworking Teessiders now face a bleak New Year. This cannot be right.

Apparently Stephen Fry is having problems with Vista in a rather public fashion.

When I installed Vista as a Boot camp installation I was so relieved to see it, it was almost pleasant, but I can understand Fry’s annoyance. You see Microsoft have a secret weapon to make us University staff enjoy the Vista, their awful ordering process.

In October Microsoft released Vista under it’s ‘Ultimate Steal‘ programme. This provides University staff and students with incredibly cheap software. Since I have a Mac Pro with 10GB of memory, I was getting sick of XP (32bit) only seeing 2GBs so decided to ‘upgrade’ my Boot Camp partition to Vista 64bit Ultimate – all for the princely sum of £40.

Unfortunately, what Microsoft didn’t advertise was ordering through their online system (provided by Digital River) would be the single worst web experience I’ve had since I started using the web pre-Netscape 1.0!

This is Microsoft’s idea of service:

On the day of release, no Vista was listed on the catalogue page. But since it required you to register to prove you work for a Uni, I register anyway to get my username and password.

The confirmation email containing a validation link telling me to keep my password safe – but it did not explicitly tell me what the password was! (Although it’s pretty obvious i.e. http://url?stuff=stuff&pass=number)

Despite not being listed on the main site, Vista did appear on the on the ordering screen (listing OSX as a valid upgrade system!)

Selecting the 64 bit version for download I decided to save £10 by not purchasing the physical media. At no point was there a warning informing me that the physical media was required to upgrade from a 32 bit OS, but more about that later.

A confirmation followed informing me that my card details had been accepted and to download three installation files, save the serial number and print out the installation instructions. The only problem was, there are only two files and no serial number!!! The page helpfully informed me that I could download the files again at any time from my order screen.

Checking the source of the download page thinking that there was some unclosed tag, there was no link to the missing file anywhere on the page. However, the download urls for the two files followed an obvious pattern, but creating a manual link using the pattern didn’t return the missing file. I downloaded the two files, hoping that the confirmation email would contain the serial number and link. But that would be too easy. 

Logging on to my account there was a nice order summary page, but no files. Not even the two I already had. There was also no serial number and the link to the full invoice didn’t work either, throwing up a username password screen that took me back to the ordering system.

(I did re-try a few times and once I did get an order page does – but no links and no serial number)

As you could imagine I was a little bit annoyed by this point. But the only option was to use the online feedback system. It was one of those systems that make you go through the FAQs before reaching a feedback page. Eventually I got a feedback box and sent one of those, ‘I’m fairly technically capable and the sort of person who doesn’t want to waste tech support’s time, so yes I really have a problem’ emails, I outlining all the problems I’d experienced (so far).

In fairness to Digital River, I did receive a fairly prompt reply (within 24 hours). Unfortunately, instead of answering my problem, the reply directed me back to an FAQ telling me to download the files from my order page!!!!

Since I’m ever so slightly less famous than Stephen, and a tad less witty, I don’t see the point of Twitter. So my frustrations at that point weren’t made public, but Stephen’s twitter feed sums up my feelings at the time. But despite this, I replied politely asking them to re-read my previous email and answer my problem.

Three days later I received an email from Microsoft with a serial number and a link to the missing file. I suspect the instructions Digital River published on the download page were wrong. But with a broken online system and awful technical support and no further help, it was very frustrating. 

Even after receiving this final email,  Digital River’s system, although now listing the serial number and the missing Vista install file, failed to list the two files on the confirmation page – god knows how you get them if you didn’t download them at the time.

However, since I had all files, I didn’t care.

Remember I mentioned the instructions on the download page? Me neither. Luckily I’d printed them out, because there was no way to call up this page from the account pages. 

Running the installer unpacked Vista to a local XP directory. It was at this point Vista kindly informed me that to upgrade from XP 32 bit to Vista 64 bit, required physical media because I needed to reformat the partition!!!! ARGHHHHH.

So back off to the support site again, but nothing. Assuming it was my mistake I went through the ordering process – but at no point in the ordering process was there any warning that I needed the physical media and I couldn’t find any options to amend my purchase to add the media. The only option appeared to by to purchase a second Vista license. 

At this point I’m ready to do something I never do – use a pirate copy, figuring that I’ve paid for it already. However, not wanting to give up, I discovered a tool that could take the unpacked Vista files to create a valid install DVD. Once I had the DVD, everything worked flawlessly.

In fairness to Microsoft, they did contact me a few days later asking about my problems and it does appear the Digital River site is now (mostly) working.

After all these problems, I had a rather unique Vista experience, I was actually really pleased to see it!!

I’m setting up this new domain and I’m having to setup my own domains and since Media Temple don’t handle .co.uk’s, I couldn’t set them up when I purchased the server space. So while I was waiting for a dns change to be propagated from a UK registration service. I wanted to test that I had configured the server correctly for the new urls and discovered a remarkably useful ‘hosts’ file in both Windows and OSX that allows you to override your dns server and redirect urls to ip addresses. Remarkably useful and I don’t know why I wasn’t aware of them.

On Windows there’s a file called ‘hosts’ in 

c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

You can edit the file using a text editor and add in your testing servers url and the ip address to direct the browser to. e.g.

127.0.0.1       mywebsite.com

OSX also has a ‘hosts’ file in /etc/hosts

Again you can edit the host file by using 

sudo vi /etc/hosts

and then add the required host definitions.

Welcome to my new blog. Through this blog I’m going to document the many trials and tribulations of being a Domino-based web developer. 

I work for the Learning Technology Development Unit at the University of Hertfordshire developing their on-line Domino based learning environment, StudyNet. 

With so many good blogs on this subject already available, why another one? Well, to be honest, I’ve been all too happy to consume the expertise provided by other bloggers so I thought it was about time to I add my thoughts and hopefully they’ll be of help to new developers getting started with Domino