Andy's Blog

As Robert F. Kennedy once famously said; “we live in interesting times”. Now as most of you probably know ‘living in interesting times’ is not necessarily the best of places to be. This, however, is definitely where we are at work.

A product that has taken an inordinately long time being delivered to the customer has now, on the eve of its launch, been shown not to be able to deliver what it promised…. by a country mile! Instead of supporting the 500 concurrent users it supposed to be able to do, it can only just manage 83!

For the past week teams of guys here, including my fair self, have been working around the clock to re-engineer the architecture and understand where it failed. But it doth seem that the Gods are against us. I present to you the prosecution against the Gods;

• At the same time the failure was found, the computer room air-conditioning has failed and now requires teams of developers to blow on the servers in an attempt to keep them cool whilst tests are ran.
• The only person who knew the local administrator password on the servers, at the hosting company, has disappeared on holiday.
• Key personnel from our Company also disappeared on holiday BEFORE the problems occurred (hmmmmm)

Not a huge list I grant you, but at the end of 18 hour days it doth seem somewhat suspicious to already paranoia ridden minds.

Ah well, I am in work on my lonesome trying to figure out the best way to cool down a server room which is slowly cooking servers…. as I said to my manager; “This wouldn’t be happening if we were using Linux”.

…his response was VERY rude!

Well, true to form I managed to muck up the configuration on my shiny new domain name and didn’t hit the right buttons in the GoDaddy domain management interface. The result? The blog was here but no-one could see it!

I am still working on my paranoia; that in fact it was a conspiracy by ICANN to silence me and not let my voice out into the series of tubes that is the Internet.

It is here now for your general amusement, bewilderment and apathy. This does of course mean that I also need to update it too :-/

…now how does these ‘category’ things work?

Well, after a looooong absence the Andy Stewart blog is finally back. Let’s face it the original one was hardly updated on a frequent basis, due to no small part to my laziness. This lackluster also seems to have permeated to my management of the domain ‘andy-stewart.com’, which while I was looking the other way was half-inched from underneath my nose (it is a very big nose, so this task isn’t as hard as it sounds).

Despite some wailing, beating of chests and snivelling on my part – the powers that be, who control the whole series of tubes that is the Internet, decided I really didn’t deserve it and passed my old domain onto some global conglomerate with evil desires on the world (..or possibly some other bloke called ‘andy stewart’). I secretly think that what actually happened is that ICANN actually *READ* my old blog and thought; “ooooh crumbs! we can’t let that kinda rubbish out”

But as they say, you can’t keep a bad blog down; and here it is re-launched on the world, with a new domain name, new engine underneath it and a sparkly new look. Some things may change as I get more used to wordpress and I find new ‘themes’ that I think may suit better – but one thing will remain constant… my inability to update this on anything that looks like a regular basis or the standard of written english when I finally do put pen to paper!

Word up to Mr Fitchett who for some bizarre reason still keeps occasionally referring to me in his blog (yep mate, I actually *do* still read your blog on a worryingly regular basis), so in an effort to actually deserve his faith that anything changes in my life I will attempt to bore you all to tears with the details.

So, till the next post….. (don’t hold your breath!)