January 19, 2024

Linux Distro Comments

I have been asked by a few people recently what I think is the best Linux distribution and with most things the answer is not clear cut. My answer has been “well it depends”, which is always met with the person questioning me rolling there eyes and giving me that look as to why I can’t I ever give them a straight answer. But my issue with the answer is that I am currently running several distributions at home and if I can’t settle on a single one how can I tell you what Linux is best for you without some background information.

June 25, 2023

Dune Universe Books

Although there are only six Frank Herbert Dune books, with the addition of the Brain Herbert & Kevin J Anderson prequels and sequels there become quite a few to read. Below is a list of them in published order (which is likely the way they are expected to be read but as I didn’t write them that is only my hypothesis). From what I have read elsewhere (but can’t remember so please don’t take as gospel), the prelude and legends of dune were written from the notes left by Frank Herbert and were used to get everything together to finish the story (which resulted in the Dune Sequel books).

June 9, 2021

Contributing To A Blog

Writing content that other people will want to read is a skill that takes practice and is quite different to writing personal notes or technical documentation. This site is an internal playground to practice but that doesn’t mean that you should not strive to produce something that could be displayed externally. I have written a few guidelines that I think are important. However these are not all hard and fast rules and are only some pointer to get you started on the correct track.

April 10, 2019

Robin Hobb's Elderlings

I have recently picked up the Robin Hobb’s books again. I remember reading the stories about Fitz, the Fool, princes, castles, potions, magic and adolescence before I went to University. I remember getting hooked on the books and not being able to put them down. I saw a copy of maybe Fool’s Assassin or Fool’s Quest when I was looking a book store for a gift and after reading the blurb and checking the backstore realised that a lot had happened that I had either forgotten about or never actually read.

December 22, 2018

2016 MS SQL HA Cluster

Introduction In our production environment we have a SQL 2016 cluster in HA using availability groups. This is a new (to me) method of providing High Availabilty and comes with significant differences from the SQL 2012 Failover cluster we had before. As I am familiar with SQL and DBA work (but trying not to be our DBA) this is something where I felt I had a bit of a skills gap.