Notes

Featured image for “How Opal saves me money”

How Opal saves me money

Sydney is currently rolling out a new contactless smartcard ticketing system across its public transport network. The trial launched in December 2012 on ferry services and started rolling out to trains and buses in 2013. A lot of the criticism of Opal hasn’t been about the technology but has rather been around its fare structure and lack of multi-modal fares.

Featured image for “Reserving your Entrée before you fly on American Airlines”

Reserving your Entrée before you fly on American Airlines

American Airlines now allow all First and Business class passengers to pre-order their meals before their flight between 30 days and 24 hours prior to their scheduled departure. I have a few American Airlines flights in First coming up and decided to take a look at how this service works. How to do it Step 1 – Access your reservation

Featured image for “Amazon EC2 speed and latency from Australia”

Amazon EC2 speed and latency from Australia

On November 13, 2012, Amazon launched a new region in Sydney. I recently had a requirement to provision an application within Amazon EC2. The web based application was going to be accessed primarily by Australian users, and as a result I wanted to know which of Amazon’s 7 public regions would be likely to provide the lowest latency for users

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F5 BIG-IP health checks and HTTP errors

When a web site or application becomes too large to run on a single server, it’s frequently placed on multiple servers with a load balancer in front of them to spread the load and also to remove faulty servers from the pool. The F5 BIG-IP is one such load balancer. To ensure that faulty servers are removed from the load

Featured image for “The insecurity of security questions”

The insecurity of security questions

One morning I discovered that Apple had introduced predefined security questions that you can’t customise. I’m not a fan of these, and in this post I explain why.

Featured image for “Clearing the local DNS cache on OS X Lion”

Clearing the local DNS cache on OS X Lion

As someone who works in the hosted services industry, I frequently need to access web sites or other systems that are in the midst of a DNS change. When a change occurs it’s easy enough to flush the recursive DNS servers that I use, however the operating system itself also caches the DNS results. This means that even though the

First look at Parallels Plesk Panel 11

Last week at World Hosting Days in Germany, Parallels announced the preview of the latest version of their hosting control panel – Parallels Plesk 11. This week the preview was made available for service providers to download and evaluate. Having used Plesk for 10 years now I was eager to take a look so I installed the software on a

Adele’s Someone Like You on Piano

I really enjoyed this piano duet of Adele’s “Someone Like You”. Kyle Landry and Frank Tedesco play it very well.

Featured image for “Hosted Exchange – Undeliverable Mail”

Hosted Exchange – Undeliverable Mail

I’ve installed and configured Microsoft Exchange numerous times before, however I recently had a requirement to install Microsoft Exchange 2010 SP1 in Hosting mode for a client. Exchange hosting mode is designed for those who provide Exchange hosting services to multiple tenants or organisations within the one platform, and is the successor to Microsoft Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC). Being

Featured image for “Upgrading from Kindle 2 to Kindle Touch”

Upgrading from Kindle 2 to Kindle Touch

I am and always have been an avid reader. I’m almost always in the middle of a book, or have just finished one and am looking for the next book to read. This wouldn’t be so difficult, except for the fact that I travel regularly. One book often isn’t enough to last for the entire trip and there’s nothing worse

Notes