Karls Blog

Just got back from a flying visit to our NSW and QLD branches, so been a little quiet last few days! But someone did email me about this story I blogged about last week. I've got a few mins now to clear up a few bits of (mis)information that story that got distorted along the way, and hopefully give you all a few interesting tidbids :)

Firstly and foremost, from the Computer World article, the author got the companies wrong. Sure, we have a hosting business, but we use mostly Intel cores now. Our role was actually working with the good guys at Swimming Australia. See, SAL (Swimming Australia Limited) have a very kewl application that collects a whole bunch of timing information from timing devices at all their swimming meets. This includes things like the Olympics and Commonwealth Games, all the way down to the under 10 Championships at your local pool. Now a whole bunch of these results are available on their web site, with ALL of these results being available on their Intranet and Extranet. Including historical data, its around 8GB of data with a number of different 'views' into the data (like 'fastest men under 16 100m freestyle' or 'fastest 3 women any age 200 backstroke' etc). Its all build on the .NET 1.1 Framework, using our custom code gen tool (that I spoke about last week). To make sure the web site, Intranet and Extranet are all speedy as can be, we preprocess all this information whenever we get new data.

During any major swimming event like the Olympics or World Cup, the site is taking quiet a pounding as thousands of similtaneous users hit the site performing all sorts of searches, so getting data up quickly is a really concern. So, all round good guy Dave (wheres yr blog man?? :) from Intel leant me a Bensley SDK to see how this would all work in 64 bit land. All I can say is WOW!!!

Old machine spec is 2 x P4 3.2 Xeons w/ 2GB RAM, Win2k3 and SQL 2k

SDK spec is 2 x Dual-Core processor w/ 2GB RAM, Win2k3 and SQL 2k5

The old processing time was (as it suggests in the title ;) 27 min 35. Now 4 mins 51. THATS MAD IMPROVEMENT! Sure, the SQL upgrade had something to do with it (I've got figures here somewhere where we ran in 32 bit land on the box and can post if anyone is keen), but the majority of that boost was the hardware. DAMN THIS NEW INTEL STUFF IS QUICK :)

As a side note, when we originally got the hardware, it was around Grand Prix time. One of the Intel engineers thought it would be funny to change the fan start up - I kid you not but when this box starts up, it revs like a F1 car!

PS - I have a large box sitting under my desk - think it may be another surprise from Intel Dave ;) More soon!!!

Its always funny to read articles like this one from CNet (and MANY other sources):

http://news.com.com/Symantec+sees+an+Achilles+heel+in+Vista/2100-7355_3-6095119.html?tag=nefd.lede

"Researchers at Cupertino, Calif.-based Symantec examined the new networking technology in recent test releases of Vista, Microsoft's next major operating system release, according to the report. They found several security bugs and determined that Vista's networking technology will be less stable, at least in the short run, than Windows XP's, the report said."

OK, that sounds kind of scary to the average Joe, until you read a little further down:

"Symantec researchers put the networking technology in Vista under a magnifying glass to determine its exposure to external attacks. The team said it found several flaws in build 5270 of Vista and even more in earlier test versions. However, these were all fixed by Microsoft in build 5384, the version of the operating system that was publicly released in May as Beta 2."

So what you are telling me is that, the current BETA (Beta 2) has NO KNOWN SECURITY HOLES, but the old (Alpha and Beta 1) had some? Why the hell is this news? ITS A BETA!!! Hello!!!!

The thing this article does tell me is that a) reporters sensationalise anything they can and b) Microsofts Security Development Lifecycle is working :)

Saw this interesting tidbit (which seems to be my word of the week ;) on Jespers blog that Microsoft was buying WinInternals (who also own the SysInternals site):

Microsoft PR here : http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/jul06/07-18WinternalsPR.mspx

WinInternals PR here: http://www.winternals.com/Faq.aspx

For those of you who dont know the SysInternals tools, they have some amazing tools I use regularly like FileMon, ProcessMonitor and their fantastic AdminPak. Mark also has a comment on the move in his blog here. They make some amazing products, and I was actually wondering a few weeks ago if this would happen...

Saw this on Benns blog, and loved it :)

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/scp_v3/viewer/index.php?pid=16598&rn=49750&cl=594775&ch=61492&src=www.yahoo.com

It just shows in such a simple way how a professional presentation can help in so many ways!

And on that note, I know that I've been anything but professional the last 3 weeks on my blog ;) Dave L was missing my musings ;) We've had some huge going-ons at WDG, that I seriously found my self so time poor. But the good news is I'm back on top of it and have a bunch of blogs posts to do.

I promised Dave from Intel that I would write about the performance work we did with Swimming Australia and Intel. The article got it a little wrong, so I will elaborate a little about what we did.

I'm doing a presentation on 'Best Practice Web Development' on Thursday, details can be found at the WDG web site. Since I only have 15 minutes, I will delve into as many details as I can, but I also want to do regular blog posts about what we do that works for our clients, and even some things that dont.

Finally, I have a TONNE of new info on our implementation of TFS across the organisation. Lots of people have talked about it, very few have done it so I hope to share some interesting tid bits.

More soon :)