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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 1/5/2004 08:15:50 PM
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BODY:
Just a quick update to let everyone know I have changed my blog over to my new domain at http://www.cosmic7600.com/blog
[Listening to: Groove Thang - Zhane - 100% Hits XII (03:55)]
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 1/4/2004 12:50:56 PM
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BODY:
A couple of days ago John and I went to see The Return of the King. What can I say?? Long but fantastic! Legolas looks as good as he did in the last two as well and the movie was pretty much non stop action.
Definately well worth watching and I will definately be getting this one on DVD as well.
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 1/4/2004 12:47:57 PM
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BODY:
It has been a while between postings. Looks like there were some problems getting w.bloggar to see the blogger.com site.... no Idea why......
Well since my last post the www.cosmic7600.com site is up and running. It has a basic site there and improvements are happening all the time. Once I get it finalised I will move this blog over there, but I will post here when I am moving it.
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/31/2003 09:23:55 PM
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BODY:
After many years of being a self professed Internet Junkie I have finally take the leap of faith and registered my own Domain. I now have http://www.cosmic7600.com. Note there is only the two '0''s in cosmic7600 not the three that Tripod made me put as someone had already taken it.
There is nothing up and running on the site yet and I will let everyone know once it is. I was tossign around a couple of idea's for what to do so once I have decided I will post something here. In the meantime it means there is another email address to add to the plethora of email addresses that you can get me on. Pretty much anything@cosmic7600.com will get me along with my hotmail and optusnet addresses.
Have a good new year all!
[Listening to: Groove Thang - Zhane - 100% Hits XII (03:55)]
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/31/2003 09:13:26 PM
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BODY:
This made some really interesting reading, especially considering that here in Australia we are on the last day of the year and I am curious as to whether or not the extra second was added or not? Does this mean that the incredibly accurate count down to the New Year that people always insist on doing is going to be out by one second? Oh no, what tradgedy? There are always enough arguments about this anyway!
I am sure that dramatists out there everywhere will put this down as another sign that we are destroying the Earth with our hedonistic lifestyles. I for one am starting to see some truth in this and have appended another New Year's Resolution to the list.... I am going to start becoming more aware of the environment and what I am doing.
But anyway... Enjoy the New Year everyone!
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/30/2003 07:19:37 PM
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BODY:
I decided that now that I have my credit card paid off yay! I could sort something out about registering a domain name and all the rest. So I spent the morning browsing across different Australian hosting companies. I came across one that had got some really good reviews and had incredibly good pricing called SmartyHost.
Check out their Bargain 50 plan. Apparently their main plan is the 150MB plan and as their servers get full they then sell off the left overs as the 50MB plans at the end of each month.
Anyway I had decided that I was going to do it and this afternoon went back to the web site to plunk in my credit card and make it all happen. Anyone who knows me will know how long it takes me to make a decision about spending money. So anyway what do I get when I go to the site of someone I was about to use to host my domain....
Quite scary isn't it??? Especially as I was going to use them to host my domain but even worse imagine if I had used them and it had happened tonight??? I would be like I kid with the latest and greatest christmas present that had no batteries! :(
@ 7:54pm - They are back up and running now and registration has been completed!
[Listening to: Beautiful Life - Ace Of Base - The Bridge (03:41)]
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/30/2003 10:51:40 AM
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BODY:
Well one of my New Year's Resolution was to get back to the gym and get back in shape. I have decided that the only way I am going to be able to do this is to have a goal or something to exercise for. After my aborted attempt at getting involved with the BRW Triathlon two years ago.... the rest of my team pulled out.... I am going to the USM Triathlon in Robina on the 7th March. I am just in the process of tracking down team mates now Gavin????
Details on the event are here.
[Listening to: Que Sera - Ace Of Base - The Bridge (03:47)]
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/29/2003 08:21:12 PM
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BODY:
I know it's a bit delayed but just prior to Christmas John and I got invited to Shannon and Ross's Christmas do. I just came across a photo from the night on Gav's blog so thought I would snaffle the piccy and put a bit of a spiel on my blog.... Honestly I am quite suprised it took him so long to get it up on his blog. The only think I can think of is that his moving house has caused no end of grief with his internet connection.
Check out this funky invite! Quite funny seeing Shan with a Santa hat, beard and mo but definately a great look for her! The night was quite good and there was large cross section of people both industry, friends and family. Also Ross's band played and apparently Shan got up to sing at some point.
Most interesting attendee was one that I think to date has still not forgiven me for an email I sent in relation to a specific customet. During that email I stated very bluntly what I still believe to be 100% true... In the IT industry at present there are very few reseller organisations that add any kind of value to either the vendor's business or the customer's business. The majority of resellers today purely sit in the middle and attempt to eek a living by taking a skim off the top of pure commodity based expenditure. This is a business strategy / model that is NOT sustainable and will purely end in tradgedy for the reseller. But that's water under the bridge, and, whilst I would love the opportunity to put this case in person I have come to realise that many IT hardware vendors are still desperately clinging to the belief that their products are anything but a commodity. Something that some of the more forward thinking vendors such as Acer and Dell are rapidly dispelling to their distinct advantage.
I think it may be something of karma that the vendor's equipment that was being used that I sent this email to apparently got turfed out and this deal went to a competitor.
[Listening to: Lucky Love (Acoustic Version) - Ace Of Base - The Bridge (02:54)]
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/29/2003 02:59:16 PM
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BODY:
Well having finally got the actual Watchdog code up and running I am now working on the control centre code. The vision behind the control centre section is to have a gui driven application allowing the user to input new part#'s and URL's to watch in a graphical format. As the actual Watchdog program itself will run as a scheduled task under Windows there is no real point in having a gui wrapper for this.
I played around with a number of IDE's and have finally settled on the Borland C# Personal Edition IDE. This seems to offer a good support base through forums and newsgroups hosted by Borland. I also had a play around with SharpDevelop but got quite a number of errors in v0.98 so might revisit it when it has gone to a stable release.
It is quite hard getting used to having a graphical IDE after having developed the first point of it as a command line application. Again I will post the code for the control centre and final scanning engine once all development is completed.
[Listening to: Never Gonna Say I'M Sorry - Ace Of Base - The Bridge (03:16)]
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/28/2003 10:16:18 PM
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BODY:
Yay made changes as per previous post to my actual Watchdog code and suprise suprise the whole thing works!!!! yay!!!!
Now that I have got that done I am off to the Wickham to pick up John and have a relaxing drink. John wants to play Warcraft III when he gets home so I think I can put the development to bed for the night and look at again in the morning.
[Listening to: Wave Wet Sab!Nd - Ace Of Base - The Bridge (03:18)]
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/28/2003 10:10:53 PM
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BODY:
I have just spent hours slaving over the computer trying to get my Watchdog program to insert data back into the database only to find out I have made what appears to be a stupid mistake.
My Lookups table was defined as (VendorSKU,Reseller,Date,Price). Whenever I tried to execute the code to insert new values into this table the program died with an unhandled exception error. Stupid me spent hours looking for alternative methods to connect to the databases without ever thinking to check the query string.
About ten minutes ago out of desperation I fired up Access and created the query directly in Access.... INSERT INTO Lookups (VendorSKU,Reseller,Data,Price) VALUES ('aaaa','bbbb','cccc','dddd'); yes I realise these are all strings and early on in my trouble shooting I converted all fields to strings so I didn't have to stuff around with converting types. After doing that I started getting syntax error messages and the Date section was highlighted. I then changed this to LookupDate and amended the query and things work lik charm. I guess it must have something to do with Date being a reserved word but once I have finished updating the Watchdog code accordingly I will come back and drill down in to this one more.
[Listening to: You And I - Ace Of Base - The Bridge (04:08)]
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/28/2003 01:35:57 PM
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BODY:
Things are getting closer and closer to a final release of this tool and damn I am going to be happy when I have finished writing it.
I have modulrised the components to get the URL and to parse the HTML so it is now an easy thing to add new e-tailors to the list. Just need to slightly modify the regex that has been used as I have found the regex already created does the majority of e-tailors (including ourselves) with some slight tinkering to the phrase that is being looked for.
I have also now added the abiltiy to read in from a dbase. This means rather than have to manually modify the code each time you want to add a new part they can all be entered into an access database.
I am currently in the process of writing the code to dump the results back out to the database so it can be used for monitoring or watching a history of price changes over time. The next step is then to write a gui around the whole thing. It's all coming along well though!
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/27/2003 11:43:28 PM
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BODY:
Is Moby not the most awesome artisit??? I am sitting here listening to a CD of his that was done back in '99 and still find his music to be the most awsome stuff out there! Just about every song he writes hits a nerve somewhere... That's something very rare for me with music.
That and read his biography in the insert... he has some pretty amazing comments in there!...
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/27/2003 06:10:39 PM
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BODY:
Well we are having some major issues with this at the moment. Trying to retreive data from the database is becoming more of an issue than I thought it was going to be .... :( Whilst C # handles interent connectivity quite well it seems to have taken a step back when accessing databases. I guess this is part of the learning curve though so all is well.
[Listening to: Find My Baby - Moby - Play (03:59)]
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/27/2003 02:59:31 PM
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BODY:
I currently seem to be having some problems with this section so if anyone has some advice I would love to hear it..... trying to connect to an Access database but with C# having the line:
using System.Data.OleDb;
I get an error message that says The type or namespace name 'Data' does not exist in the class or namespace 'System' (are you missing an assembly reference?). All the documentation I have read seems to indicate that there is something that needs to happen with a link to a dll file but for the life of me I cannot work out how to do it!! :(
*** UPDATE *** This seems to have something to do with compile time references. Unfortunately Snippet Compiler that I am using at the moment does not seem to want to give me the abiltiy to pass command line options to the compiler. I really don't want to have to compile manually each time I want to use it but it looks like that might be the only option :(
*** UPDATE *** Problem solved. I guess I am going to have to start compiling this project from the command line to get all the options to work. I found an article on stardeveloper that said I needed to reference the right librarieis. so now need to compile with the /r:System.dll;System.web.dll;System.Data.dll added. Once the whole thing is running with the dbase lookup I will post full source for review.
[Listening to: Break & Enter - The Prodigy - Music for the Jilted Generation (08:25)]
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/27/2003 02:03:32 PM
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BODY:
Well now that the festive season is over John and I have the joyous task of looking for a new place to llive. The property we are currently in is up for sale and we have had the folks at Natasi Real Estate show several people through the place. That is a whole other story if anyone is interested! Needless to say I think we scared off one set of potential purchasers when John answered the door in nothing but a doonah and face full of make up!
According to the folks at Ray White the owners of the property go through this process once every six months or so but never actually end up selling. Suffice to say it is a very nerve wracking experience living in a house when you have no idea if it is going to be sold out from underneath you! The folks from both Ray White and Natasi have been very good about the whole process though so we will see what happens.
Below is a picture I found on the web at Realestate.com advertising the place. The lawn has grown a little since they took that so I guess I need to cut it! :( If you look closely you can also just see my car peeking out from under the house on the right hand side. That big section of white.
It looks like they are trying to sell our lease with the property so it looks like we might have the option to stay! Yay! It would save us moving.
On the other hand though, I am thinking it is time for us to move back into the city. I am kind of getting a bit sick of the suburbs anyway. It is great having all the space but I either have to bus or drive in to work each morning and in the half asleep state I tend to be in first thing in the morning it's not a lot of fun. Combine that with the fact if we both decide to go out on the town for a big night it is a $15 cab fare each way, and, well there is a lot of benefits for moving closer into the city.
Just moving is so much damn work!!!!
I just can't beleive they are after $300k for it. Whilst the house is quite nice inside it does need a bucket load of work done to the outside to bring it to anywhere near that much! The stairs for a start need replacement especially the front stairs where they are a bit wonky on the way up. They then need to do something with the downstairs area to decide whether it is purely going to be covered car parking on whether they want to enclose it and finally need to get rid of them damn possums. Now I should probably put the address in here 118 EKIBIN ROAD OR RD in ANNERLEY. That way any possible purchaser doing a web search on the property can get this site and see what needs to be fixed on the place!!!!
[Listening to: Voodoo People - The Prodigy - Music for the Jilted Generation (06:27)]
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/26/2003 11:40:39 AM
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BODY:
John and I went to bed about 2am this morning in the normal Christmas mood.... ie.... somewhat drunk and very, very full! We had just gotten to sleep when John heard noises coming from the lounge room and woke me up. When I went out I was just in time to see a possum running from the lounge room to the kitchen. I chased it into the Kitchen to try and get it to jump back out the windor, but it ended up missing the jump landed on the floor and the bolted off into the house.
We were unable to find the possum after this so I just assumed that it must have lapped back around the house and gone out the door. We ened up returning to bed and were qickly back asleep.
At about 5am this morning I woke up to something brushing past my feet at the end of the bed. When I looked down it seemed that the possum was still inside and was now sleeping on the end of the bed. The landlord won't let us have a cat but it looks like the possums have finally decided we aren't going to do them too much harm and are now being friendly.
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/25/2003 03:46:27 AM
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BODY:
Yes definately something I would never have the patience for or the artistic ability. A really funky looking tapestray from John's parents. When you look at the real thing the shading and stuff has all been done in 3D....
[Listening to: When Time Will Come (DJ Tiesto remix) - Motorcraft - Various Artists - God's Kitchen Vol.2 (Journeys) [UK] Disc 1 (05:43)]
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/25/2003 01:40:30 AM
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BODY:
Eeek it's 1:39am in the morning and John and I are still cleaning / cooking!!! John had to work tonight so we had to get it all done when we got home.... just lucky I snoozed this afternoon!
[Listening to: Playa Sol (Scan seeker mix) - No-One Driving - Various Artists - God's Kitchen Vol.2 (Journeys) [UK] Disc 1 (08:09)]
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/25/2003 12:19:30 AM
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BODY:
My little utility Watchdog has just gone to version 0.3. In this version we have got the whole price capture being done using regular expressions and the code is now modularised to have a getURL procedure and a parseHT procedure.
Now all I need to sort out is the read write stuff to read in a list of part #'s and URL's from a text file and a write function to write the prices back out. In the short term this will be done using our site for prototyping and then I think I will add in the functionality for other sites after that.
Long term goal is to create a nice little gui for this using SharpDevelop and then we are ready to go live. Yay! My first C# project is nearing completion!
[Listening to: Elements - M.I.K.E. - Various Artists - God's Kitchen Vol.2 (Journeys) [UK] Disc 1 (06:28)]
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/24/2003 11:04:17 PM
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BODY:
Well I am really getting in to thsi blogging thing and have just downloaded the w.bloaggar client! Damn good little program. Have set up the Windows Media Player Plugin...... helps if I read the destructions before trying to use it! :(
[Listening to: Food For Thought (Humate's pop mix) - Kim Saunders - Various Artists - God's Kitchen Vol.2 (Journeys) [UK] Disc 1 (05:08)]
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/24/2003 10:35:22 PM
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BODY:
I just had the wierdest experience on Instant Messenger. Picture me sitting at home on the net working on Watchdog (yes my app now has a name) when I get a messenger window popup with someone wanting to chat. Now I will admit that I had messenger open but here's the funny thing... the person that wanted to chat was not one of my contacts!
Remember my rant from earlier about people using my computer and not telling me what they were doing??? Well it appears that one of John's fellow performers had set up an IM profile on my computer and been chatting with a guy online for the last couple of weeks. Now I had warned them before to make sure they disabled the auto login function on their profile, but, it looks like they didn't do it. I connected to the work network to send a VPN and messenger suddenly detected a new network connection (as it does) and decided to fire up the default profile which just happened to be Synthetiques. Now when messenger fires up the default profile it does not require that a password be entered and just logs straight in.
So here I am engrossed in cutting code and had just sent an email to one of the developers at work when this guy starts chatting to me about what he is doing for Christmas etc. I told him that I was not who I thought he was and went to disconnect when he wanted to start chatting to me. How worrying is it that people have nothing to do on Christmas Eve and sit at home on the net... oops what am I doing! :)
Fortunately I saved the msn conversation for humours sake!
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/23/2003 08:25:34 PM
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BODY:
I was playing around with some scripts on the unix box at work to do some screen scraping from some other sites to compare prices. After getting it up and running using cron jobs, wget, regex and shell scripts one of our Microsoft developers challenged me to port the whole thing to .NET. Well here is some proof of concept code doing a scrape of just one part number and displaying the result to the screen. The important details have been blanked to protect the innocent!
using System;
using System.Collections;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
using System.Net;
using System.IO;
public class Watchdog
{
public static void Main()
{
StreamReader urlStream = null;
// Get the URL
WebRequest urlToFetch = WebRequest.Create("http://www.xxxxxxx.com.au/Scripts/xworks.exe?PART:xxxxxx#Tof");
WebResponse urlResponse = urlToFetch.GetResponse();
// turn into readeable string
urlStream = new StreamReader(urlResponse.GetResponseStream());
string urlString = urlStream.ReadToEnd();
// display web content & Pause
// Console.Write(urlString);
// Console.ReadLine();
// now grab price line from string using Regex
Regex regex = new Regex("Price Inc GST
((.|\n)*?)", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
Match oM = regex.Match(urlString);
string resultString= oM.Value;
Console.WriteLine(resultString);
Console.ReadLine();
// now to extract the price using normal string manipulation
// first get starting and end points of price
int startpoint=resultString.LastIndexOf(@"$");
int endpoint=resultString.LastIndexOf(@"");
// now the actual extraction
string price=resultString.Substring(startpoint,(endpoint-startpoint));
// now write it to make sure we got it
Console.WriteLine(price);
Console.ReadLine();
}
}
What have I learnt from this whole thing! Firstly a hell of a lot about using regex within C# and secondly a deep felt respect for the flexibility of some of the URL handling capabilities of C#.
The todo list from here is to:
- Incorporate the ability to read a bunch of vendor sku's from a text file
- Dump the results back out to another text file to alow easy import into a database for crunching.
I must say I am very impressed with teh capability within C# to quickly and easily access Internet resources. The whole thing from start to finish with minimal real world C# experience took about 4 hours.
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/23/2003 11:44:37 AM
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BODY:
I guess this posting is probably of no interest to anyone other than me!!! I have finally finished my Christmas present shopping, and even better, it wasn't on Christmas Eve! yay! That means I can relax for the next couple of days.... well kinda.... John and I need to go food shopping again tonight to get all the veges and fruit organised for Christmas day. Meat and other non-perishables was yesterday and booze on Saturday.
We got the last of our Christmas lights sorted out last night. There is a huge wooden archway in our house with evenly spaced vertical panels about a foot long at the top. We now have lights intertwining the panels and up the pillars on either side. It perfectly frames the Christmas tree and if you turn all the lights out and just look at the tree through the archway it looks really cool!
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/22/2003 02:47:36 PM
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BODY:
Y2K Take 2! Here we go again, another series of Y2Kish problems that are threatening to cause software to malfunction, planes to crash, buildings to collapse and your computer to start barking like a dog! Well some of that was exageration....
The first time this debacle came around it was the biggest anti-climax I have ever witnessed. Millions of companies spent millions of dollars ensuring they were compliant and to our great, collective sigh of releif nothing happened. Whilst it was a great weight of everyone's shoulders that all the frantic patching and redevelopment had not gone in vain, it left the IT industry looking like that famous little boy who cried wolf.
Now, almost 4 years later, not having learnt our lesson the first time around we are going to go through this whole saga again! Surely it would have better to sneak in quitely and deploy patches rather than winding up looking like fools saying... "oops we missed one".... I notice there was a sharp drop on the PTC share price.... almost $4 down to $3.76. I wonder if that might have anything to do with this announcement! ;)
Well now that this flaw is public let's please all prove that we have learnt something and leave some systems unpatched! That way when everything comes crashing down on Jan 10th we can turn around and say "we told you so, that's what happens when you slash our IT budget!".
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/21/2003 06:37:01 PM
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BODY:
Okay so it's the christmas season and you know what comes shorty after that? That's right New Years!!! New Years with all those damn resolutions that none of us ever keep but everyone insits on making year after year! This time round though I am going to be different.... this time round I am going to make my News Year's resolutions now so that I have the next eveleven days to break them and by the time the New Year rocks around I will be in a condition to keep them.
So resolutions for me... in no particular order:
1) I will stop smoking - this has been on my resolution list for ages but has never happened. This year it will! I had a BBQ with come clients the other day and one of the guys there said some quite interesting. He was a reformed smoker and he said that just after you quit the first thing realised was hot completely and utterely a past time smoking was! So here we go.... by Jan 1 the smokes are out the door!
2) I will go back to the gym - Again something that is probably on everyone's New Year's resolution list but this time it will happen... I promise!
3) I will read at least one non-fiction book a week - This is something I reckon I can keep. I used to read fiction non-stop and am slowly starting to get more and more into non-fiction, especially stuff relating to technology or sales (obviously).
4) I will priortise better and make more room for friends and family - Not something I am good at as work tends to take up a fair percentage of my time, but nevertheless something I need to do.
5) I will reduce / stop eating meat - I was vegetarian for quite some time and I think it has a whole raft of benefits. I need to get back to that right after I finish the big mac I am gobbling now! seriously though I do need to reduce the amount of meat in my diet. As I am and know I am a person of extremes I know this will entail me going off meat completely.
So there we go. Now that I have exposed these New Year's resolutions do broadly I have no option but to keep them.
Thank you all for your time!
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/21/2003 05:14:11 PM
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BODY:
John and I are having our first Christmas together in our own house! yay! On Saturday we went our shopping for a tree and decorations. You can see the result below. This is one of the funky new fibre optic trees that seem to be all the rage at the moment.... at least it was neigh on impossible to get anything that wasn't fibre optic and flashy!
On Christmas day we have my family (mum, dad, sister and brother in law) coming over for lunch followed by some friends for dinner to help demolish all the left overs. I have a feeling it is going to be one of those boozy, pissy, christmas days where I wake up with one hell of a hang over the next day! We love Christmas!
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Definately well worth watching and I will definately be getting this one on DVD as well.
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 1/4/2004 12:47:57 PM
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BODY:
It has been a while between postings. Looks like there were some problems getting w.bloggar to see the blogger.com site.... no Idea why......
Well since my last post the www.cosmic7600.com site is up and running. It has a basic site there and improvements are happening all the time. Once I get it finalised I will move this blog over there, but I will post here when I am moving it.
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AUTHOR: Eric Fernance
DATE: 12/31/2003 09:23:55 PM
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BODY:
After many years of being a self professed Internet Junkie I have finally take the leap of faith and registered my own Domain. I now have http://www.cosmic7600.com. Note there is only the two '0''s in cosmic7600 not the three that Tripod made me put as someone had already taken it.
There is nothing up and running on the site yet and I will let everyone know once it is. I was tossign around a couple of idea's for what to do so once I have decided I will post something here. In the meantime it means there is another email address to add to the plethora of email addresses that you can get me on. Pretty much anything@cosmic7600.com will get me along with my hotmail and optusnet addresses.
Have a good new year all!
Quite scary isn't it??? Especially as I was going to use them to host my domain but even worse imagine if I had used them and it had happened tonight??? I would be like I kid with the latest and greatest christmas present that had no batteries! :(
@ 7:54pm - They are back up and running now and registration has been completed!
Check out this funky invite! Quite funny seeing Shan with a Santa hat, beard and mo but definately a great look for her! The night was quite good and there was large cross section of people both industry, friends and family. Also Ross's band played and apparently Shan got up to sing at some point.
Most interesting attendee was one that I think to date has still not forgiven me for an email I sent in relation to a specific customet. During that email I stated very bluntly what I still believe to be 100% true... In the IT industry at present there are very few reseller organisations that add any kind of value to either the vendor's business or the customer's business. The majority of resellers today purely sit in the middle and attempt to eek a living by taking a skim off the top of pure commodity based expenditure. This is a business strategy / model that is NOT sustainable and will purely end in tradgedy for the reseller. But that's water under the bridge, and, whilst I would love the opportunity to put this case in person I have come to realise that many IT hardware vendors are still desperately clinging to the belief that their products are anything but a commodity. Something that some of the more forward thinking vendors such as Acer and Dell are rapidly dispelling to their distinct advantage.
I think it may be something of karma that the vendor's equipment that was being used that I sent this email to apparently got turfed out and this deal went to a competitor.
That and read his biography in the insert... he has some pretty amazing comments in there!...
