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ITWire: LAMP is a popular suite of packages for dynamic web apps which run fast, scale well and give greater user experiences. Here’s how to get started in PHP yourself. You’ll find it dead simple even if you’ve never programmed before.

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My favourite speculative, scientific fiction author Harry Harrison is now blogging. This is quite timely as this week I have been re-reading “Rebel in Time” which I last read almost 20 years ago and it is still engrossing, smart and sharp. In fact, even moreso, considering Harrison writes about such then-fantastical concepts like a camera which records its images on an electronic card instead of film!

ITWire: Open source is a hot buzzword, but do you know what rights actually are granted to you when you accept the license conditions of a free software package? Or, maybe you’re a developer and you want to release your software but don’t know what the different licenses mean. Here’s an easy-to-read guide to the three main players.

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I regularly get requests from people looking for a staffing/employment/recruitment database. Thus I’ve decided to write one. This will be a good opportunity for me to distil squillions of good ideas on what makes a perfect recruitment system, as well as experiment with XAML and data visualisation.

Thus, Open Recruitment is born

Check out www.openrecruitment.net to see it evolve.

A terrible thing happened. I gave my mail server a routine reboot (I figured it had been a month or more since its last reboot) and OWA disappeared. Or, rather, the page just kept timing out.

Yet, the services looked healthy. The event log looked healthy except one little message that gave a clue. OWA was no longer configured correctly; it was attached to the wrong web site.

This fired off a lightbulb in my head: a couple of weeks ago I renamed “default web site” in IIS to a more meaningful name because I was about to host a few more domains. I hadn’t expected this to cause a problem – everything had been running fine. I guess the changes hadn’t really kicked in until the server reboot.

Happily, and after a few tense moments, the problem was resolved with a few PowerShell cmdlets that I found on Technet’s coverage of the Exchange management shell, namely:

• Get-OwaVirtualDirectory -Server servername to check the services installed.
• Remove-OwaVirtualDirectory -Identity "owa (Default Web Site)" to remove the existing OWA virtual directory
• New-OWAVirtualDirectory -Name "owa" -WebSite "websitename" to recreate the OWA virtual directory
• Get-OwaVirtualDirectory -Server servername to check all is well.

Phew!

I visited the web site of a company alleging to be experts at communications solutions, Sonofon, www.sonofon.com.au.

The first thing I noticed was the “Untitled document” heading on their web site, never a good sign of things to come.

I wrote to the advertised “info@sonofon.com.au” e-mail address listed.

Oh! It bounced back straight away. Apparently info@sonofon.com.au isn’t actually a valid e-mail address at the sonofon.com.au domain.

I thought perhaps the FAQ may have more information. Obviously Sonofon don’t actually get asked many questions, or if so, the demographic is the Latin-speaking populace.

Not to worry, here’s some other e-mail addresses. I tried writing to accounts@sonofon.com.au. It looked like a good starting point.

Oh! It fails too. At least this time the address obviously exists, but just hasn’t been set to allow mail from unauthenticated users.

Ok, last ditch effort – let’s try the other two e-mail addresses advertised – billing@sonofon.com.au and service@sonofon.com.au.

By crikey, they don’t exist either.

Ok, this is beyond a joke. Sonofon are wasting my time. Not only do they not deserve my business but obviously they don’t want it anyway. I’m happy to oblige. After all, Sonofon have demonstrated they’re not communication experts. Do I really want a company looking after my telephony when this is the quality of their work?

Maybe I’m off the track; perhaps “communications” has a different meaning to Sonofon. Maybe they’re the guys you want when you’d rather liquidate your business than grow it.

ITWire: Microsoft’s spin on the current noise about OpenXML is that it can enable interoperability between Windows and Linux. Pragmatically, that’s true. And here’s some reusable Linux code and libraries striving to achieve it.

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Sorry to put up advertising, but I have a rack-mountable Compaq ML350 server for sale

Please do let me know if you’re interested. It’s in great shape and performs very well. I’ve used it for Windows Server 2003, VMWare Server, Microsoft Virtual Server 2007, Lotus Domino, SharePoint, and other purposes.

Processor
1GHz Intel Pentium III
32Kb primary memory cache
256Kb secondary memory cache

System Model
Compaq ProLiant ML350
System Serial # H143FSJ19020
Chassis serial # H14FSJ19020
Enclosure type Tower

Main circuit board
Compaq 0825h board
Serial # H143FSJ19020
133MHz bus clock
Compaq D04/F04 System ROM 03/13/2001 BIOS

Drives
36.41Gb hard drive capacity – 3 x SCSI drives, RAID 5
COMPAQ CRD-8402B CD-ROM drive
3.5” floppy drive
Quantum DLT4000 CPQ DRV SCSI tape drive

Memory modules
1152Mb installed memory
DIMM #1 has 512Mb
DIMM #2 has 512Mb
DIMM #3 is empty
DIMM #4 has 128Mb

Other
RAGE XL PCI Video card
Compaq 64-bit/66MHz dual channel wide Ultra3 SCSI adapter (2x)
Compaq smart array controller
ServerWorks (RCC) PCI to USB open host controller
HP NC3163 fast Ethernet NIC

If you’re planning on taking a Microsoft exam soon be sure to check out this great offer for a free second chance if you fail first time – http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/offers/secondshot/default.mspx

ITWire: A simple piece on the fundamental concepts of users and groups in Linux. Sure, you can add users with a GUI, but what really happens behind the scenes? Here’s the low-down on just what makes a user exist.

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