Driven-Monkey

This is a quick update on a fairly major decision that I made a couple of months ago. Back in early Febuary I resigned from my position as Business Analyst and Lead Developer for TechCertain, and at the start of March, I started a new position at LayerX, working with an old friend of mine, Mike Lowen.

The main reason for this change is that the position is much closer to what I enjoy about working with computers. The work is varied and challenging, and I feel the decision was a very good one. I have already worked on a couple of interesting projects, with the main one being theCloud, a hosted services platform that we will be releasing in May. I hope to post a few things about stuff that I am working on or things that I have learnt (without revealing any work secrets of course) but I will leave those for another day.

This also means that I will be moving back to Hamilton sometime in the next few weeks, so hopefully I have a chance to keep updating through the move, but things dont always go to plan.

I’m pretty sure that there are only 2 people who read this blog carefully, and out of those 2 I would say that about 50% of them just click ‘next’ on their feed reader, however I thought I might try and get a bit of publicity for a new site I’m going to be writing for.

One thing I have been following very closely for a long time now is Android. For those of you who don’t know what Android is, it is an operating system made by Google, aimed at smart phones, but also moving into lots of other devices as well.

I have now signed up to be a contributor to a new site, www.newzealandroid.co.nz. I’m aiming to try and shed some insight from what I’ve found about Android (hopefully have more insight when I can actually BUY an Android handset). If you want, check it out. The site isnt open yet, and I’ll post again once it is.

This site, along with a couple of other sites, have all now been moved to a nice new shiny server. Once I finally got around to setting everything up it hasnt seemed too bad, and looks to be right back to where it was a week ago before moving over.

So a couple of weeks ago I mentioned the Mono Migration that my work was attempting in an effort to reduce costs and enable us to move our product onto EC2 as we are looking at some new projects that require us to be able to expand our system quickly and easily.

Since then we have had quite a lot going on at work, and are only just starting to focus on the migration again, so here’s where we are up to at this stage.

Firstly. we are going to move the database from MS SQL Server 2000 to PostgreSQL. This in itself will be a massive task as there is no easy way to move the hundreds of stored procedures over (or so I’m told, I havent looked into it much yet). Once this is done we will be running the code as is against the new database and hoping that it works. I’ll let you know once that is done and where we are going from there.

On a side note, this blog along with a couple of others hosted on this server will be moved to a new server before the 30th of September. As long as everything goes smooth there should be minimal downtime for the site, and I should be able to keep all the info currently on here. I’m going to be backing everything up just in case though.