James Toyer

Author's details

Name: James Toyer
Date registered: May 30, 2010

Latest posts

  1. The Versioning Problem — December 30, 2011
  2. CloudFormation and Chef — December 18, 2011
  3. Fighting the Phantom Restart — December 7, 2011
  4. What a difference a year makes — November 29, 2011
  5. Keeping track of experience — November 6, 2011

Author's posts listings

Dec
30

The Versioning Problem

Where I work, and I’m sure in many places, versioning software has always been a problem. There were different conflicting ways used to version our frameworks and API’s, or worse using no versioning used at all. Effectively, we had our own version (excuse the pun) of DLL hell. I was recently charged with resolving, or …

Continue reading »

Permanent link to this article: http://www.jamestoyer.me.uk/2011/12/30/the-versioning-problem/

Dec
18

CloudFormation and Chef

Over the past month I’ve been toying with the idea of getting Opscode’s Chef to automate the installation of applications on my server stack on AWS, but it wasn’t until last weekend that I actually bit the bullet and decided to make it work. For those of you don’t know what Chef is, it’s a …

Continue reading »

Permanent link to this article: http://www.jamestoyer.me.uk/2011/12/18/cloudformation-and-chef/

Dec
07

Fighting the Phantom Restart

I was playing around with CloudFormation from Amazon Web Services (AWS) tonight (blog posts coming soon™) and remembered an issue we regularly have at work with our Windows Servers; whenever we create a new image from an AMI the machine restarts after it’s created. Now ordinarily this wouldn’t be a problem, but our application deployment …

Continue reading »

Permanent link to this article: http://www.jamestoyer.me.uk/2011/12/07/fighting-the-phantom-restart/

Nov
29

What a difference a year makes

It was back in August 2010 that I joined Adfero, fresh out of University, and since I started work I’ve hardly blogged, if at all, on any of the amazing things I’ve worked on or done. So I thought it was about time I brought people up to speed, and hopefully, with future planned projects …

Continue reading »

Permanent link to this article: http://www.jamestoyer.me.uk/2011/11/29/what-a-difference-a-year-makes/

Nov
06

Keeping track of experience

I’ve recently discovered article on Scott Hanselman’s blog questioning why we still list apps on our CV’s. On further reading it appears Scott was not just complaining about listing apps on your CV but asking why do we not contextualise our experience properly? This got me thinking, am I properly keeping track of all the …

Continue reading »

Permanent link to this article: http://www.jamestoyer.me.uk/2011/11/06/keeping-track-of-experience/

Nov
04

Salesforce ID’s

A while ago (this blog has been sitting in drafts for an age), where I work has been migrating from our in house Customer Relationship Manager(CRM) to Salesforce. This has taken a considerable strain off us maintaining an updating software however, we develop other products that link into our old CRM. At first this didn’t …

Continue reading »

Permanent link to this article: http://www.jamestoyer.me.uk/2011/11/04/salesforce-ids/

Aug
11

SQL CE and the Visual Studio Installer Project

For a while now I’ve been trying to deploy MS SQL Compact Edition with a Visual Studio Installer Project. I know that you can copy the .dll’s required to make it work (as explained here), but when using entity framework things all go wrong. So after what seems like an age of trawling through Google, …

Continue reading »

Permanent link to this article: http://www.jamestoyer.me.uk/2010/08/11/sql-ce-and-the-visual-studio-installer-project/

Aug
02

Redmine and Subversion

Its been a while since I posted a blog, and things have finally settled down, so I’ve had a chance to migrate my Subversion and Redmine servers over to a fresh install of Ubuntu Server 10.04 on VPS.net. If you are unfamiliar with what Subversion is and why you might use it, well the answer …

Continue reading »

Permanent link to this article: http://www.jamestoyer.me.uk/2010/08/02/redmine-and-subversion/

Jul
02

Time Zone Data

I have been searching high and low for a listing of all the major time zone listings to using in a MySQL database. Everywhere I looked I found overcomplicated ways of listing thousands of different time zones, none of which have served the purpose I’m looking for. That is until I stumbled across this blog post …

Continue reading »

Permanent link to this article: http://www.jamestoyer.me.uk/2010/07/02/time-zone-data/

Jun
16

Creating a Server Part 3: Tweaks and Administration

Webmin Config Menu

If you have followed my blogs so far you should have a working, and semi-secure LAMP server.  The next step is to add a couple of tweaks to your system and then install some packages to allow you to administer your server. The purpose of using third party software to administer your server is to …

Continue reading »

Permanent link to this article: http://www.jamestoyer.me.uk/2010/06/16/creating-a-server-part-3-tweaks-and-administration/

Older posts «