You may have noticed some very odd things going on around the site over the past week or so. This is because I have moved this website from a Linux box, which has been very good to me over the past 4 years, to the dedicated Windows server that I got up and running a few weeks ago for Pineapple Boudoir. This posed a few problems, the least of these being that WordPress runs on MySQL and we’re currently using [...]

Pineapple Boudoir is a startup that sells lingerie, candles, sex toys and other products, aimed largely at women. The first challenge was to design an infrastructure to support the web-application and cart. Having previous experience with Windows and the .NET environment we decided to follow this route, based on Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6.0 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005. At launch we are running SQL and IIS on this single server, although we intend to run SQL on a separate [...]

Apart from the Windows Cloud stuff there were some other speakers and demos that interested me, including a neat use of Silverlight at the Hard Rock Café website which you may have seen before as it has been bounded around as the pièce de résistance of Silverlight 2 since about March this year. When you click that link you are presented with the Hard Rock Café memorabilia website, in the middle you will see an image that can be ‘Deep Zoomed’ into [...]

I travelled across to London yesterday to attend the Microsoft Technet event, ‘Technologies to change your business’, the keynote speaker was Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO. He came on stage at around 13:15 and proceeded to do his usual thing, he’s a great public speaker and very knowledgeable about the company that he is running and what they are doing now and what is coming from them in the future. He must have to read hundreds of updates daily from the R&D [...]

After probably six months or so of being out of action, I finally decided to take a look at the bug that was causing comments on Hintofsarcasm not to work. I realised that I made a decision some time ago to change the name of the comment post script, wp-comments-post.php to something that the spam-bots could not get their hands on so easily and install a captcha. When I removed this captcha system in favour of a hash based JS [...]