james kahn’s scratchpad

Well, Clariti just seem to keep nailing the Citrix awards.  This year we scooped up Citrix Pacific Partner of the Year at the Citrix Summit.  The third major Citrix award, three years in a row.  Not bad for a Queensland integrator.

I’m looking for some help here - where should I buy a .com.au domain?

I usually use GoDaddy for all my domain registrations, as they’re cheap as.  Unfortunately that don’t seem to do .com.au’s.  I’ve checked MelbourneIT, and they’re bloody expensive.

Can anyone recommend a good, cheap registrar for .com.au domains, that preferably include a basic DNS and email forwarding service in their registration fee?

This past weekend I switched away from Firefox, and started using IE7.  And I’m glad I did.

I’ve been using Firefox for years now - since version 1.0.  I actually got switched on to it by my non-techy wife who started using it around version 0.8 after reading about it on a news website.  And it’s been good.  Pages have loaded, links have been clicked, bookmarks have been saved.  Until the last few updates.

For some reason, Firefox started … stopping.  It didn’t crash, or hang, it would just occasionally stop loading pages on all the computers I loaded it on.  Even after stripping all the extensions I was using out of it, it still misbehaved.

So, lo and behold, I switched.  I was told I needed five reasons (thanks Paul) but one is enough for me.

Internet Explorer is okay in its default installation, but it’s more like a puny wimp of a browser.  IE7 needed some ‘roids for real web surfing!  Plus, I’d become far too familiar with some Firefox features and extensions I couldn’t live without.

After a quick round of googling I discovered the holy grail for IE users - IE7Pro.  Despite the poor grammar on the otherwise slick website, IE7Pro is fantastic.  Ad blocking, download manager, spell checking, inline search, and bookmarks synchronisation between PCs (ala FoxMarks for Firefox, my killer feature for Firefox).  I’m hooked.

Try it.

There is an excellent blog post over at The Simple Dollar on what we actually want vs how we spend our money.

I’ve been thinking along these lines a lot recently.  Go read it.

Apparently Border Collies are meant to be the smartest dog out there.  Why can’t ours figure out that when it’s raining, they can go in the carport, rather than lay in the mud!  Bloody hell!

After yesterday’s Mike Patton Appreciation Day announcement over at Dan’s blog, I’ve been inspired to announce today as SAN Engineer Appreciation Day.

Today, spare a thought for the often-grumpy, always-cynical SAN Engineers. Especially if you’re a pre-sales engineer trying to drop an HBA to fit a customer’s budget.

They appreciate gifts of Fibre Channel cables and old servers.

When up in Cairns on a business trip, I managed to drop (read: snap in half) my company provided flip mobile phone. It was a pretty basic phone, with a couple of annoying little characteristics, such as it’s incredibly laggy interface.

Well, after showing the results of my work to my boss, a new phone landed on my desktop pretty promptly: a Nokia 6120. It’s not particularly expensive, but it is a very, very cool little phone. As well as having all the standard gee-whiz features that phones have these days, such as bluetooth, 3.5G data connectivity and music player functionality, it’s a smartphone in disguise. It runs Symbian S60.

I managed to scour the web for push email functionality for the 6120, and happened upon RoadSync. RoadSync interfaces with Microsoft’s ActiveSync, including full support for push email.

After loading it to the phone, it was less than 5 minutes to set it up. It just works, beautifully. The interface is snappy, phone attractive, and it syncs my calendar and email like a dream.

Battery life and general phone sexiness is better than Windows Mobile.  And what’s best, all the BlackBerry boys in the office are jealous ;).

I remember sitting in class when I was six years old, repeating after the teacher - full stop, capital letter.  It’s a basic rule for written English.

Here’s a not so universal rule, that I learned in high school - Comma, one space.  Full stop, two spaces.  It doesn’t bear much relevance to handwriting, but it does on computers.  Do it!

Just a quick one.

My thoughts on VDI have had a shake up after a few recent presentations from some vendors - it is starting to look very good, with some tangible advantages over Presentation Server in certain scenarios.

After spending too long away from making a post here, I’ve decided that trying to target my blogging just to Infrastructure Management is far too restrictive for me.  I’m not a professional blogger, and have no desire to be.  I’ll just blog about whatever I like.