Trigger Finger

My real job is as a Systems Specialist running one of the world’s largest retail websites. It’s a huge operation which requires a knowledge of the whole scope of today’s typical enterprise technologies. The size of the environments and breadth of scope is what keeps me interested and enthusiastic as I typically get to play with anything and everything. However, from an operations perspective, one big problem is performance monitoring and getting the metrics you need, when you need them. In the past we had a huge bunch of hacks and scripts stacked up like a house of cards, just to get a few measly bits of performance data. I was yearning for a single, supported solution that could give us wide-ranging and ‘live’ performance data on any component of our environments, whilst not creating any kind of performance overhead. continue reading »

I am pretty stunned by this collection of imagery from shown in great detail at New Scientist. continue reading »

Despite looking so cool, calm and collected throughout the trial, each of the four accused were fined 930,000 big ones and 12 months of ‘grip the soap hard’ time.

I can’t understand it myself, the defence should have been so simple. Challenge the prosecution to find any torrent on TPB that couldn’t be located by google. Case closed your honour!

So a lot of the new design is in place, but there is still a lot of more minor tweaking to do. There are a lot of things I like personally about the new look, not least the ease of reading and the clear division between content, the other items such as tags and comments. continue reading »

The old tf.erzz.com - Teenage black!

Though its only been a couple of months since we last updated the look, I was never quite happy with it. SO many different tidbits of information that had no boundaries and required real brainpower to visually seperate. continue reading »

The Mac Pro is ‘Out for Delivery’ according to the TNT tracking page so that means, with luck, it should be in my sweaty anticipatory palms by this evening. In between refreshing the tracking status every five minutes I will start off this article which will cover many things. continue reading »

Wow, what an great laundry list of features coming to version 3.0 of the iPhone firmware. Copy and Paste, MMS, Stereo Bluetooth A2DP support and Search (spotlight) are amongst a huge overhaul of the iPhone.

For more info check http://live.gizmodo.com/

Almost Free?

Having placed my order for a new 2009 Mac Pro, I have set myself (and my wife) a goal of making it pay for itself in 12 months.

For someone who has 40 hours a week to work on such a thing, that doesn’t seem like much of a challenge. But I have a full time job and a 10 month old son, so the most I will be able to give to such a project is at best a couple of hours a day! But I have a few angles to attack this on.

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Total War with extra musket!

Time to try something new, I thought. Maybe it will suck, maybe not, who knows, who cares?

A live blog review of Empire Total War starting with my pre-release expectations through to some point in the future where I get bored of the thing – genius right? We will see, but here it comes

2nd March 2009 13:00 – Expectations
I am a big fan of the Total War series, not to the point of building my own mods and doing the virtual equivalent of painting my own soldiers, but I have thoroughly enjoyed almost every one of the series.

Starting all that time ago with Shogun Total War where my breath was taken away by SO MANY stick figure soldiers on the battlefield and being introduced to that seemingly vast campaign map. continue reading »

As always after a move of the site and a redesign I have been paying a little more attention to the stats than usual, as it’s pretty funny to see some of the stuff in there.

To give an idea of scale the site gets about 2500 visitors per day and so is by no means some great revelation in terms of user habits, but still some interesting stuff. continue reading »