http://www.richardwalker.com.au Mon, 07 Jun 2010 10:06:34 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en It's been a while since an update. Needless to say, I've been a busy chap the last few months... the work I'm doing with my Sydney client turned a particularly busy corner, alongside gearing up a new business so I've essentially been buried up to my eyeballs in work! Exciting new ... http://www.richardwalker.com.au/2010/06/07/long-time-no-see/ So I got a call from Raj at Telstra Complaints yesterday. They're dropping the two hardware charges ($399 a piece) and the early termination fee ($341). He didn't mention the month of wireless access I was charged for (incorrectly) so I'll have to chase that up. All things considered though, ... http://www.richardwalker.com.au/2010/03/05/v-is-for-victory/ Dear Telstra, After much deliberation (about 7 seconds) I have decided to shift my voice services to iiNet, in addition to my data services. This is for a few reasons: 1) They're cheaper. 2) Their support is great. 3) When I called, I spoke to Adrian from Perth, not Raj from Mumbai, and Adrian ... http://www.richardwalker.com.au/2010/01/29/open-letter-to-telstra-grrrrr/ Lately I've had the pleasure of playing around with Ruby on Rails, undoubtedly THE name that comes to mind when you ask about rapid application development in Web 2.0. My first impression was that it was going to be a pain to learn the ins-and-outs, and that I was in for ... http://www.richardwalker.com.au/2009/09/22/mvc-frameworks-and-modern-web-development/ A good friend/ex-colleague of mine and I got into a discussion recently about some of the woes that accompany being a tech guru in a small business. The number one issue at hand was communication - trying to interpret the needs of the business (and the managers) and create a ... http://www.richardwalker.com.au/2009/08/20/communication-issues-in-small-business/ Can someone please explain to me why Microsoft/Bing are spidering sites in large volume, from 65.55.0.0, and not identifying themselves as a bot/spider in their user agent? While you're at it.... explain what sort of impact this has on perceived conversion rates when the conversion:impression ratio ends up being a million ... http://www.richardwalker.com.au/2009/08/14/bing-bing-bing/ So, with the little Vaio P now running a 3D accelerated desktop and working all awesome-like... I decided the 4200rpm 60GB drive had to go, as this was an obvious performance bottleneck. I bought a Runcore 32GB 1.8" ZIF SSD from Solid State Central for $159 and waited a long and ... http://www.richardwalker.com.au/2009/08/13/runcore-32gb-ssd-into-a-vaio-p-win/ Picked up one of these fantastic pieces of hardware earlier in the week. It came with Vista Home Basic, which ran... poorly (refraining from use of expletives and vulgar metaphors). I promptly wiped the lot and put on Ubuntu but then ran into the issue of hardware support... turns out the ... http://www.richardwalker.com.au/2009/07/24/ubuntu-904-on-the-sony-vaio-p-with-desktop-effects/ There's a decent performence boost to be obtained by coupling apache with lighttpd, a lightweight (hence the name) web server with great features and a ridiculously small footprint. In this example.... we're configuring lighttpd as our forward-facing (port 80) web server, which will use mod_proxy (proxy module) to send any dynamic ... http://www.richardwalker.com.au/2009/06/26/using-lighttpd-with-apache-to-serve-static-content/ Thankfully, these lessons haven't been learned the hard way - not entirely anyway. I'm not referring to my own web services - I don't provide any of these. I'm referring to a particular web service I use to create and lodge invoices electronically. Granted they are working hard to restore their services ... http://www.richardwalker.com.au/2009/06/22/providing-web-services-lessons-learned/