Inner Drive Software

Last week, my puppy Parker chewed through a laptop power cord. I ordered the wrong adapter, which I didn't realize until I opened the package. So I got in touch with Dell by email to request an RMA and shipping instructions.

Here's the great customer service part.

I've been helping a client get a custom database application working for a while. The previous vendor never quite completed it, then got testy when the client brought me in.

There are two unbelievably bad things about the vendor's data design that I want to share.

Even though I just launched this blog today, there are entries that precede today's. This is because this blog is really a branch from my personal blog, and I've moved some postings from the old blog to this one.

That is all.

Both of my blogs are now up: the Inner Drive Software blog, in which I will write about matters of professional interest (i.e., software, computers, security, and business); and The Daily Parker, in which I talk about nearly everything else.

All of this required upgrading dasBlog on my servers, figuring out which theme to use, customizing the themes, and configuring the blogs. Despite my initial experience with dasBlog when I first started using it, I think the current version (1.9) is really quite slick and usable. Good work, Newtelligence AG.

I shall now do something completely different, like play with the dog.

I'm David Braverman, and this is my professional blog.

For nearly the past year, I've had a personal blog that included postings about software development and running a software company. Sadly for me, most of the people who regularly read the Daily Parker have no interest in software. This caused two things to happen:

• Whenever I posted something about software, none of the blog readers would read it; and
• This, in turn, discouraged me from writing about software.

The Inner Drive Software blog, therefore, will have two or three posts every week about software development, programming languages, things that Inner Drive Technology is doing (both public and not-so-public), and the software products that we're developing over there.

I welcome comments and suggestions, and I hope you enjoy reading it.

Over the weekend I devoured the aptly-named The Best Software Writing edited by Joe Spolsky. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in software.

I just found out about a server crash at a friend's old company. It seems one of the staff members sent a 2.7 MB graphical file (wrapped in a PDF, wrapped in a MIME email) to 900 people. For some reason, that crashed the Exchange server creating 8.5 GB of transaction logs in just under 20 hours, which overflowed the system drive, which caused the entire server to collapse. At last report, a consultant had cleaned out the transaction logs and most of the message queues, but Exchange was still re-trying some of the addresses.

This problem was, therefore, between chair and keyboard. Whose chair and whose keyboard is difficult to tell.