a view from afar

Thanks to the incredible incompetence of our soon-to-be new broadband provider DST, my blog may be out of action for a while (10 days is apparently the worst case). DST let the MAC code we provided lapse, and Pipex are refusing to issue a new one. (Pipex actually claim that issuing a MAC code is considered a form of cancellation, so I'm not even sure why we still have a net connection at all.)

Unfortunately, due to the time I'm spending at work lately, I don't have time to move the blog to shared hosting. I intend to do that as soon as I can though... I'm getting ever so slightly sick of the universal contempt that consumer ISPs show for their customers.

I just bought a CanoScan LiDE 25. Apparently I'm not the only person that thinks Canon's scanner software is a crime against humanity. I now use Yep for scanning, so I just need the TWAIN driver provided by the Canon installer. But the closest I got to making it work was seeing it install the files, then delete them immediately after. Yes, that's right. I WATCHED THE FILES DISAPPEAR from /Library.

I think Bart Simpson has the best phrase to describe this software - it sucks and blows at the same time.

My installation guide follows...

I got my first two text messages today - one for this blog and one for www.patchspace.co.uk. I've got the polling resolution set to five minutes and to alert after 30 minutes' downtime, so I was pretty confident it was a power cut (and I was right). It's the second we've had lately, the last was in the middle of the night, before I subscribed to Pingdom.

I guess I was wrong in my last post - the real weak spot in my setup is being on a residential power grid. But then, it's not like I'm not hosting paid-for clients' sites from my home server, so the worst it does it make me look like a fool when nobody can access my blog.

Next step: buy a UPS. (A generator seems a bit excessive.)

UPDATE: apparently the inconsiderate bastard claiming ownership of my ADSL pipe is, in fact, quite entitled to do so - it's my ISP, Tiscali. Their bandwidth throttling is apparently a bit over-zealous. The Reg has more details on it - it's unusual of me to not follow their RSS feed but work has kept me busy lately. Suffice to say I won't be with Tiscali much longer.

Previous article follows...

I normally try to avoid anything that sounds like Java-bashing - every language has faults, and often the real accusation should be aimed the people using languages well past their sell-by date for things they were not designed for. But trying to decipher some of the examples in Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture makes me want to scream. He does explain that he chose Java and C# for accessibility, but it definitely doesn't help clarity, like this extract from page 224 (Compound Key):