I’ve just set up my blog with Twitter Feed and this post should appear on my Twitter account in the next three hours… lets see if it does!

A peerage is a collective of persons of the nobility assigned by the sovereign.  Peers are divided into five ranks (in order of importance):

1. Duke
2. Marquess
3. Earl
4. Viscount
5. Baron

How do I gain a peerage?

As I understand it peerages are only gained by inheriting them or by being given one by the Sovereign.  I also understand it that peerages can only be given to judges or ministers.

How should I address a peer?

• Duke – your grace
• Marquess – the most honourable
• Earl, Viscount, Baron – the right honourable

Any peer, with the exceptions of Dukes and Duchesses may also be referred to as Lord or Lady.

How does a peer get into the House of Lords?

Until 1999 all persons holding a title in the English peerage automatically entitled the holder to a seat in the House of Lords.  In 1999 the House of Lords act was passed which in removed the hereditary nature of entitlement to a seat in the House of Lords and moved to a system of election by preference for new appointments.  As I understand it the votes are made by the current members of the House of Lords.

What about honours?

These are assigned to various individuals for outstanding achievements or contributions as decided by the Sovereign on the New Years Honours list and the birthday honours list.

Further details:

http://www.parliament.org/

http://www.honours.gov.uk/

We’re currently experimenting with a number of different CRM systems, including Sage’s ACT!, SalesForce.com, 37 Signals’s Highrise and Microsoft Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2007.

After a number of weeks playing the different options, we’ve come to the conclusion that BCM for Outlook 2007 is the best solution for us.  A short review of each of the others:

Sage ACT!

It looks like Sage, feels like Sage, and runs like a dog like Sage.  The search feature is terrible and although it does “plug in” with Outlook it doesn’t do it very well.  On the plus side, you only have to pay a one-off fee for the software license (this is a desktop piece of software).

SalesForce.com

After my trip to FOWA London 2008, I had Force.com “Software as a Service” ringing through my head.  SalesForce.com is an online tool which does integrate with Outlook.  However, the main downside for us is the cost, which would have worked out at £3,000 per annum with our current number of users.  Coupled with the not-so blown away feeling we had after using it, we’ve filed this one under B.

Highrise by 37 Signals

We’ve used Basecamp in the past, and thought that Highrise could be the solution to our CRM needs.  You can export your Outlook contacts to CSV and import them into Highrise, but after using it for two weeks it was just another thing we had to open up every day, login and keep running.  It doesn’t have direct integration with MS Outlook or our Exchange setup, and for this reason we decided to chop it.

So why BCM?

Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2007 provides an extra set of menus and options to manage your Business Contacts, Accounts and Projects.  It provides a central repository of contact information with custom fields all nicely in Outlook, which every member of staff keeps running in the background during the day.  Plus we have a whole bunch of licenses under the Microsoft Action Pack scheme.

Challenges

After setting up a trial on one of our machines we decided we were happy enough to try it across two users’ machines.  BCM gives you an option to “Share your database”, so we set that up and all seemed well.  Only when I logged on later that evening to check my mail did I discover a major flaw – the other PC was off and BCM could not load the database.  Of course, the data is stored locally on the master user’s PC.

After digging a little deeper I discovered that BCM installs a new instance of SQL Server Express Edition 2005 on your machine called MSSMALLBIZ.  I downloaded and installed SQL Server Management Studio Express and successfully connected to the instance, and found the database.  I ran a manual backup of the database, copied over to a spare Windows 2003 VM instance I had running and loaded it up on SQL Server 2005.

This all seemed a bit easy until I tried to connect my Outlook BCM to the new server – not found.  Hunting around on the web a bit more I discovered that the local SQL Server instance was running on a non-standard SQL port, 5326.  My VM instance was running on 1433.  After changing the default port to match what BCM was expecting, it connected up and away we went.

Having to do all of that dirty work feels a bit like I was bending BCM to work in a multi-user environment, so I’ll be very interested to see how it fares over the coming weeks.

I decided it was time to take the plunge into the cloud and at the same time reshuffle a few things in my connected world.

The Windows Home Server now turns on at 5am, and all PCs (plus my laptop if it’s plugged in) turn on and back themselves up over the network.  The home-server turns off at 7am until 7pm – saving a good deal of power consumption, the planet and my energy bill.  I used to use the WHS add-in PowerSwitch, but that only gives you one set of times, and I wanted two.  I looked into creating my own extension for WHS, but solved the problem with two scheduled tasks and the useful “Wake the machine up for this task” checkbox setting.

I’ve been experimenting with Live Mesh for the past couple of weeks and I’m pretty happy with it so going all in.  Adding most of my personal documents to my mesh and then syncing with the main PCs that need them.  For shared documents across my home network I’m syncing them on the local PC drive that is mapped to the home-server.

Multiple users?  I can shared mesh folders with anyone.

If Live Mesh dies or goes offline (or I lose connectivity) I’ve got the latest sync of all my files on 2-3 different machines.

If my PC dies I can bring it back to life from the home-server.  If the home-server drive fails the backups SHOULD be mirrored across on the external USB drive.

What I’m not moving to the cloud

Media mainly, just because it’s so big and I have little need to access it everywhere.  Recorded TV from the media centre lives locally, music lives on the home-server (apart from iTunes – yet to solve that problem).  Photos currently reside on the home-server too, but I’m going to start syncing them.  The only bummer is that I’d like to use Flickr, but then some of them I want on Facebook, and then I want to look at them on the media centre.

Bring on OpenPhoto…

I’m spending two days in Docklands attending the Future of Web Apps 2008.  Here are my thoughts on the first day…

Introduction

Ryan Carson – very good
Two Simon’s – pretty poor

The Future of News

Kevin Rose, Digg
OK

Future of web apps

Edwin Aoki, AOL
Short but OK

Languages Don’t Scale

Blaine Cook & Joe Stump
Very good technical presentation.  Scaling up and scaling out, the latter being the only effective way to scale. Thinking carefully about where the data & services are in relation to the client. memcached used heavily.

The future of web apps

Kevin Marks, Google
Pretty dull

Mobile Future

Stefan Fountain, Soocial
Very interesting presentation.  Future is mobile, not necessarily “mobile phone”.  Current web topics will go further and further down the stack until they become invisible, like electricity, TCP/IP, HTTP, the Internet and even services like Twitter.

Colliding Worlds, Jabber

Blaine Cook
Didn’t listen to a huge amount of this one, catching up on email.

How to take your community to the next level

Strange site idea, but some good ideas to build community on the net. Was half listening and half reading my new book The Productive Programmer from O’Reilly.

Final sessions – skipped these, cold kicking in and wanted a shower and some down-time before heading out for dinner

Observations

Conference is well run, lots of nice detail, forenames are the most prominent item on the badges, so easy to introduce.  Lack of chairs/tables means you have to sit next to people you don’t know and get chatting (met two people over breakfast this morning).

You get 2 free coffees, 2 free meals and 2 free beers. They track this by punching holes in your badge.

Each badge has a barcode which stalls scan to track who visited them.

There’s free stuff if you’re cheeky and get in their early.

What’s hot

Twitter, almost every presentation referred to it, and everyone was using it on their laptops
Google Mail – again, visible on laptops
Anything made by Apple, particularly Macbooks and iPhones

Being mentioned

Cloud computing, the buzz phrase, but I don’t think the industry can define it yet
REST APIs
Software as a service

Amusing Points

The Microsoft Lounge is in one corner of the expo floor, and diagonally opposite it (the furthest away) is the Sun lounge.
Microsoft have brought Microsoft Surface.  Incredibly cool, but I don’t see how it has a direct link to “The Future of Web Apps”.  But it is cool.

I like reading, learning in fact.  Books, blogs, podcasts, courses, discussions.  If I can learn something, I’m interested.

In our goals for 2008 we’ve both got down to read a book a month.  Jenny isn’t doing too well but once she gets hold of Audio Books I reckon she’ll be away.

So far I’ve read the following titles this year:

• The way of the wild heart by John Eldredge
• Talent is Never Enough by John Maxwell
• The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck

And I’m half way through Playing for Pizza by John Grisham (my first Audio Book).  Next to my bed is Anointed for Business by Ed Silvoso which I am yet to start.

Books on my list for the rest of the year are (most of which are in my drawer ready):

• History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
• God at Work by Ken Costa
• Money, Sex and Power by Richard Foster
• 360 Degree Leader by John Maxwell
• Fit to Be Tied by BIll Hybels

I’m sure some others will make it onto the list before 2009 arrives.

So when do I read?  Mostly late at night, especially if Jenny turns in early.  Otherwise holidays are great reading opportunities, I read most of The Road Less Travelled in Switzerland this Easter.  The odd hour at a weekend makes a nice break from work.  I’ve tried hard to get through good meaty books which make me think, otherwise the only things I am reading about are technical bits and bobs, which in the grand scheme of things are of no great consequence and within 6 months will probably be old news anyway.

Pick up a book, read a magazine, listen to talk – do something that makes you think.  And learn, keep learning.  That’s my approach to life.  There’s so much out there to discover!

5:30am this morning I turn on my PC.  Windows takes ages to start up and the System process is hogging 100% CPU and almost maxing out the page file, then BSOD (Blue Screen of Death).  Reboot.  Same again. Reboot. Same again:

Errors reported in KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR which suggests a memory problem. Which is not good.

However, keen to turn this incredible waste of time into a learning experience, I grabbed the Microsoft Debugging Tools and opened up the DUMP file that gets created when a blue screen occurs (they can be found in %Windows%\MiniDumps\.  This was the output:

ERROR_CODE: (NTSTATUS) 0xc0000185 – The I/O device reported an I/O error.
DISK_HARDWARE_ERROR: There was error with disk hardware
BUGCHECK_STR:  0×7a_c0000185
CUSTOMER_CRASH_COUNT:  2
DEFAULT_BUCKET_ID:  VISTA_DRIVER_FAULT
PROCESS_NAME:  System
CURRENT_IRQL:  0

….

SYMBOL_NAME:  hidusb+504e
FOLLOWUP_NAME:  MachineOwner
MODULE_NAME: hidusb
IMAGE_NAME:  hidusb.sys
DEBUG_FLR_IMAGE_TIMESTAMP:  4791904d
FAILURE_BUCKET_ID:  0×7a_c0000185_hidusb+504e
BUCKET_ID:  0×7a_c0000185_hidusb+504e

So, you see the mention of hidusb?  That relates to hidusb.sys, the Windows driver responsible for the USB subsystem.  Now I’d noticed some problems before with my USB wireless network stick, and each time the machine booted up this morning there was no wireless connection.

I removed the USB wireless, rebooted and hey presto – no crash.  The wireless stick is a Marvell USB device that was about as cheap as they come, so I was asking for this at some point.

Off to Staples, got there as it opened at 8am.  They had a nice array of Belkin and Linksys wireless cards, but none which said Windows Vista compatible.  By this time I had spent almost 3 hours trying to fix this.  So out comes the smartphone, wireless internet, googling “linksys vista support”.  Onto the Linksys website, which is totally unreadable on my phone.

Google again on “belkin vista support” and a useful page listing all of their devices with Vista support notes come up.  Looks good.  I buy the Belkin Wireless-G Desktop card, get home fit it in 10 minutes after downloading the Vista drivers, and all is calm again.

At least I learned how to inspect Windows DUMP files

Yes, we now have a new car!  A sleek panther-black Ford Focus 1.6 Zetec is sitting on our driveway.  Not much else to say about it when a picture speaks a thousand words.

Switzerland, a land-locked country sawn through by the Alps mountain range and containing Europe’s largest lake, Lake Geneva.  We’ve just returned from a 5-day trip staying in central Geneva at the very nice Hotel Auteil.

In Brussels, every other shop could easily have been a chocolatier.  In Geneva, the same could be said but they would be watch specialists.  Geneva, a city full of expensive material pleasures, businessmen in smart suits and wool overcoats striding around on their Blackberrys, glamorous women spending thousands in the many designer stores wearing their Gucci sunglasses and numerous 4/5 star hotels and restaurants serving such well oiled visitors.

My reflections are that business is very important in Switzerland, in fact the protection of business, of wealth and of the pleasures of life are very important.  Anything that tries to intrude on this “idealic” way of life is to be shunned.

And at the same time they were very pleasant and courteous.  The streets were clean, gardens immaculate and car bonnets shiny.  The air was fresh and healthy and a morning would not go by without seeing several people out jogging.

Photos from our holiday can be seen here:

Part 1
Part 2

Well worth a visit.  Next time I think we’ll try skiing.

OK, so it’s been a couple of weeks since my last post of answers to Scott’s developer questions, but here’s the next batch that I’ve been researching…

Q) What is the maximum amount of memory any single process on Windows can address? Is this different to the maximum virtual memory for the system? How would this affect a system design?

A) On a 32 bit system the maximum amount of memory that can be addressed is 4GB (2 to the power of 32). I think that this is the same as the total virtual memory. Any system that requires large amounts of memory (such as a database) would need to consider these restrictions.

Q) What is the difference between an EXE and a DLL?

A) An EXE has an entry point and can be executed in isolation. A DLL (Dynamic Link Library) is a resource used by executables to provide modularised functionality.

Q) What is strong-typing versus weak-typing? Which is preferred? Why?

A) Strong-typing is where the “type” of variables is explicitly specified up-front, whereas weak-typing is where variable type is implied, usually through the operations performed on it (examples are using the variant type and performing Mathematical operations). Strong-typing is usually preferred so that a compiler/interpreter can spot potential errors early on. However if you are writing short scripts or make use of the flexibility of weak-typing, then it can sometimes by preferable to use it.

Well, we’re off to Geneva for 5 days now, so a long break from computing and time to reflect, read, talk, explore and enjoy!