I was out of the office on Friday and a little birdie has just reminded me that I missed partaking in the celebrations that are Sysadmin day. On Sysadmin day legend has it Sysadmin's demand more ego massaging than normal to such an extent that it take days for their swollen egos to return to normal and they can …

We have been suffering some staff problems recently, everybody we hire has a name that is already in use elsewhere in the company. So we have decided to reorganise the Black Marble name space, initial thoughts included post name numbering , but nobody could agree if the numbering base should be zero or one and Richard …

Incase you haven't found out already Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 is out for download , ours has just finished downloading and I will update on new features over the next few days. b. Technorati tags: Visual Studio

Rik sent me this to illustrate the pain of not having a new server within the last week and has suggested that we may need to move to this if his demands of a bi-weekly addition to the server farm is not met. b. Technorati tags: Humour

Well it was bound to happen , we have split my blog posts off on its own. As ever BM Blogger's is the aggregate blog. I feel all alone in a big empty space , no doubt I will fill it up soon. enjoy. b. Technorati tags: Black Marble

Scientific American has a interesting article on a Data Center in a box. Basically it is a standard shipping container full of Sun Servers. I am our our IT manager would like one! it should fit on any house's driveway, a stylish addition to any home. It is an interesting spin on the old IBM data recovery model where …

After posting yesterday about useful tools for development I stumbled across another little gem of a utility. IE7Pro is much more of a usability-enhancing tool but it has a wonderfully handy tool nestling within - Save Current Tab As Image. If you need to do grabs of pages for documentation or presentations and the …

As web development gets more and more complex having the right tools to help you figure out what's going on is essential. I thought I'd do a quick post on the ones I find most useful. In no particular order, then, here they are. Virtual PC This one is a godsend, because as we all know, running multiple versions of …

It may surprise some but I am a huge fan of board games, I feel that they can provide a great social event and some of the newer games produced over the last 10 years, are truly sublime. However I did not expect to see the World bank trying to fight poverty by producing board games, especially commissioning a game …

I spent a while knocking my head against a problem with a SharePoint server farm that's worth posting about. It's also worth a big hats-off to our Technical Support Coordinator at Microsoft Partner Support who dredged up the article that finally pointed us in the right direction. The problem I'll post later about our …