What IaaS Means To You These days Infrastructure-as-a-Service has almost become as common-place as the ubiquitous Software-as-a-Service. Particularly in the last decade as the concept of Cloud Computing has evolved to become a more mainstream, affordable and sensible option. Small organizations looking to leverage economies of scale are no longer faced with stacking costly servers … Continued
boot2docker – Remote Docker daemon boot2docker is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Tiny Core Linux made specifically to run Docker containers. It runs completely from RAM, weighs ~27MB and boots in ~5s. boot2docker is required if you want to do any work with docker images on a Macintosh. This includes building images and running containers. … Continued
Azure Machine Learning This month, Microsoft GA’d their offering into the cloud machine learning space, Azure Machine Learning. For those that have done data mining in analysis services, both the workflow and the mining models should be familiar. In A Breath If you haven’t already been briefed, machine learning is often used as a way to … Continued
Same Same, But Different Lately, I’ve been working with SQL Azure a lot more. For some of our simpler projects the differences aren’t that palpable, but the more data centric applications have started to tease out some of the more notable differences. Over next couple of months I’ll write up some of the more glaring … Continued
Lost Art I’ve always found it odd, that very few web developers spend much time getting deep into HTTP and some of its goodies. Even though HTTP is a technology that is at the core of all web apps (and most mobile ones!), a lot of its benefits aren’t fully leveraged. Case in point, ask … Continued
Monthly Slogan: It’s Never Been Cheaper A lot of our clients use cloud services like Microsoft Azure, Amazon WS, and the Google Cloud Platform. Some are doing BI tasks (think analytics services and storage) while others are hosting their production sites (think 24/7 scaling compute instances). What continues to surprise me is the cadence of recurring price … Continued
Which This? If you’ve worked with JavaScript for while, you’ve likely been made aware of the unique power and confusion that comes with the “this” keyword. We’ve been using TypeScript in some of the single-page applications we’ve been working on, and it has a helpful syntax to help you manage the “this” keyword. Examples Consider … Continued
An odd issue came up recently where the Search Host Controller Service on a single web front end was stuck in the ‘starting’ state (as shown in the CA -> System Settings -> Services on Server). Couldn’t locate anything in the event log that showed why it didn’t start. And the final oddity: the service … Continued
The longer you stay in software, the more technologies you’ll likely see become commoditized. Things that once used to be quite difficult, specialized, and costly inevitably become simple, accessible, and cheap (if not free). Some examples of capabilities that have been commoditized might include: Antivirus CMS’ Source Control Advanced hosting/infrastructure (e.g. Geo-redundant storage, elastic computing, … Continued
Installing assemblies into the GAC is no longer straight forward. In the good ol’ days it used to be as simple as dragging a file into the Assembly folder. Or using the gacutil.exe. Neither is available any longer. According to various posts out in the wild wild web, the updated .NET 4 version of gacutil.exe … Continued
