Mark Roddis

Well according to Direct line Insurance, it’s when you call it a thank you!

The letter below is one I have now received on several occasions

If you look at the offers on here you will see that nothing is being given away for free. These are the same promotional offers used by the venues listed in many many publications. Indeed some of them are the same as what those venues send me directly and in some cases, I can get a better offer off the side of a crisp packet.

So why is this a big deal?

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Every now and then we like to have a day out into London. Sam loves checking out the National History Museum whilst Mum likes the shopping.

Normally we drive into Peterborough (because our local train service is somewhat unreliable) and then catch the train from there.

We discovered some time ago that a Family Railcard would save us a small fortune on this journey in return for a £24 fee.

So when I travel into London at peak times during the week, it can cost me as much as £80 return. Travelling off peak however brings this down quite a bit so an off peak ticket on the weekend for the 3 of us comes in at £65 all in. But use the railcard and this cost comes down to less than £40 for the three of us. Bargain!

But I discovered today that National Express East Coast who run this service have started charging to reserve seats on their service. The cost? £2.50 per seat per train. So for the return trip to London that adds £15 to the £40 fare.

That’s a 37% increase!!!

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Well the bad news is that I never made it to Berlin this year after Sam came down with Pneumonia at the very last minute and was admitted to hospital.

So for those who expected to meet me there, sorry to have missed you but hopefully I will get a chance to attend next year.

I can’t believe they are still pushing this nonsense.

Even after they have just discovered a huge Mac based bot net and even though the number of viruses for Macs is growing by the day, they still push ads like these.

Remember, if you have a Mac, you still need to protect yourself. There is a reason why the AV vendors make products for you to.

Didn’t see that coming did we?

But now things are about to get interesting and assuming this deal is allowed to go through, this could actually be the deal that makes Sun great again.

Why?

Speaking from what my customers and I do and see, when somebody deploys a Microsoft SQL database package, it is typically deployed onto an Intel server from the likes of HP, Dell etc.

When somebody deploys a DB2 database it goes onto IBM hardware.

But what about Oracle?

Well for a long time, the preferred platform for small to reasonably large deployments was Linux (Red Hat to be precise but not essential) running in Intel hardware. This was actually Oracles own preference for a long time.

What do you think Oracles preference is going to be moving forward?

It’s not rocket science is it?

Where my cat gets it from

Well having just spent a truly great long weekend in New York with Teresa, I can’t believe just how many photos i took.

Anyhow they are now up on the photo album so have a look

If you have read my biography you will have noticed that one of my specialities is server virtualisation based on the modern hypervisor approach that is offered by vendors such as VMware, Microsoft and Xen to name but three.

Last year, the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) undertook to put together guidance on this emerging technology in the form of one of their Technical Notes and pulled together a substantial team from across the industry. I was honoured to be part of that team

This technical note is now available to download from their Technical Notes Archive on the CPNI public website (no registration required) and whilst aimed very much at CNI (critical national infrastructure) providers, it should be interesting to anybody looking at using virtualisation.

it is also interesting to see that even though this document is only a few months old, the technology has moved forward in leaps and bounds making some of the observations seem odd.

So download the document, have a read and do with it as you see fit. It is their for everybody’s benefit and even if you only take one thing away, it’s been worthwhile:

Direct download link:

CPNI – Security considerations for server virtualisation

I saw this today by Keith Loutit and thought wow.

This is a very clever time lapse video/photo sequence that is really unlike anything else I have seen.

Make sure you check out his website for more cool stuff.

I really should have saved this for Wednesday (April the 1st) but we went to the London Science Museum this weekend to see the new Wallace & Gromit World of Cracking Ideas exhibition

I have to admit that the big kid in me found it as much fun as Sam (aged 6) did and as it is running until November, we would recommend a visit if you are in or visiting London

But there were 2 things that really stood out but I will let the pictures speak for themselves.

You will find a full set of photos of the event over in my photo album.