I was walking through the hallowed halls of very well know Search Machine Company earlier this year when out of the corner of my eye I saw IT! I had heard about them I have myself spent some time researching them but this was the first time I had ever seen a real REPRAP.

Damn you lucky (Company name omitted due to contract I had to sign to even be allowed in those hallowed halls) workers for having a company that let you do this kind of thing at work ( Do you have any open positions I would even learn PERL ). Obviously this was being built in the 20% time, but they had a whole corner of the office was set up with an electronics lab that would make grown men weep, in fact I nearly did. If it had not been for the fact I had to go for a meeting I might have hidden in the toilets and waited for everyone to go home so I could play with it, but from what I know they are all vampires and never leave the office.

That said I would be just as happy with a little desktop CNC sometimes as a developer you just want to create something tangible.

Will post links below when I have sorted out the mess of links that is my favorites. This is a good start:http://buildyourcnc.com/default.aspx I like this site coz its .NET ;-)

Ok so you have got this great website which you have spent a high percentage of last 6 months writing. It goes live and becomes the next twitter. The pages are small but the graphical designer has made it a thing of beauty and therein lies the problem. Its chewing bandwidth and it is looking like you are going to have to get 4 new servers for the data center just to deliver out the static images, not to mention the old horse of a load balancer that is getting asthma trying to keep up with demand. Plus half your customers are from across the pond which would mean possibly setting up a new co-location just to get a reasonable display time over there.

Where to turn and quick without killing the budget, I have had similar issues in the past believe it or not but I had already planned for them and as a boy scout being prepared is always good. Content delivery networks seem like a last resort but if you plan well from the beginning a switch to a CDN can be painless and an almost enjoyable experience.

We use Akamai but there are a number of providers out there all of which provide a good service. In regards to planning I can only give you one hint. If you are putting your images in a directory called Images in your project I will have to show you the error of your ways.

From the start of a project always plan to have your images on its on subdomain. “What!” I hear you cry, its own sub-domain, but why. By having your own sub domain you have a really nice way to separate your dynamic from your static content. At the beginning you will be able to set up some servers in your own farm running Lighttpd of similar lightweight webserver, yes on linux I know but sometimes you have to bite the sour apple.

The other good think about separate domains is in theory you can maintain your graphics in their own source code environment which means your graphic designers can have their own SCM system and processes, which works really well in bigger teams. When it comes to the time to upgrade to a CDN it can be as simple as creating an account, doing a little config and then repointing your subdomain to the CDN. Some CDNS load the content on demand from a library server, which would be your old image server, and only access the stuff that is actually being used. Which of course saves you the effort of maintaining all the images online via FTP or something similar. I have seen this architecture in action and trust me, it makes sense to get this in on the ground floor.

If you are planning on being big think big!
No I don’t use a CDN for my blog, but maybe one day I might have too!

Having trouble with you SSPI context, Gettting errors like „Cannot generate SSPI context” in visual studio when your laptop is not at work. Look no further the answer is simple.

Do you remember that you wanted to connect from the database from another machine and you turned on TCP/IP in the SQL server configuration tool most likely about the same time you started having issues. There is your problem if you are no longer on the network it can’t get the SSPI context. Just make sure that the Protocol for the alias name you are using is set to named pipes and the problem will go away.

Don’t start messing around with the accounts under which the server starts that will only cause more headaches. You could however at a push just turn off tcp/ip but then what fun would that be ;-)

 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811889/en-us