Musings of Rodos

Citrix and VMware have BYOC

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 11:22:00 +0000

I have written before about employee provisined laptops. Well today two articles popped up about Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) programs at VMware and Citrix.

Our "corporate" image is simply a VM that you download off the corporate network and run on your laptop.

It saddens me to report that my employer has been unable to support my desire for an alternate laptop. All sorts of details about FBT and other things that are not really my concern, oh well, welcome to working for a big corporate. Of course, we can't sweat the little things.

There would probably be no problem if I payed for my own device. So I suppose we are more like VMware, although we can't download the SOE as a VM. Nothing a quick P2V would not fix. I like the Citrix plan where there is a budget for you and the conditions of having a support contract and anti-virus are more than reasonable.

I won't give up though. You never know, one day I may have enough money to achieve such things.

Believe it or not

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 12:19:00 +0000

Well this one could not escape my comment.

Check out the story over at IT News about a company choosing Hyper-V versus VMware.

The privately-owned industrial and commercial developer engaged Thomas Duryea Consulting to perform an analysis of the suitability of its environment for virtualisation using VMware technology.

The analysis involved monitoring PacLib’s servers for a month, according to IT manager David Furey.

“They came back with a proposal of about $25,000 in installation costs and another $25,000 in software costs,” Furey told iTnews.

“You’ve got to question whether it’s worth paying $50,000 for that. I know the VMware camp go on about features like VMotion, but for $50,000 I could pay someone to move my virtual machines for me.”

Furey decided instead to look at Microsoft’s Hyper-V, then in beta.

“To us, it looked like we weren’t losing any performance or benefits of virtualisation but we were saving a lot of money,” Furey explained.

“It just didn’t make financial sense to spend all that money [on vmware], when if we want to add more Hyper-Vs, it’s $49 per server.”

Wow, they actually put that in writing. Now I have always considered the guys at Thomas Duryea worthy competiion. The people I know personally there are great people, even if we were/are competitors. It just makes me laugh that they have been named in this farse of a idea to go Hyper-V instead of VMware. If they went with VMware 3i it would be free and give them he same funtionality, well probably better.

Still don't think it will be the first fluff piece we see on the topic. I am sure there is more to the story and its just a good piece of news.

Toys for the next mainstream

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 11:45:00 +0000

Well I have completed the first week of my new job. Looks like there is some really interesting stuff to work on which is great.

Took delivery of some nice networking hardware this week for use at a show. Its a Cisco Nexus 5000 with some sweet Converged Network Adapter (CNA) cards.

What makes this so cool for a VMware geek is that you are looking at where the industry will be in 12 to 18 months time. Currently the networking fabrics in a virtual environment could do with some improvement. We can work with what we have but the VMware admins should not really be the network admin. The network admins don't like the VMware hosts because they all just look like trunk ports to switches, all their usual tools for configuration, monitoring, security and trouble shooting just don't work. An the data center or server admins love the fact that they can save power and space in their data center through consolidation yet they are getting bigger hosts with lots of IO addaptors to support different fabrics.

What is going to make all this look different over the coming year. With the Distribute Virtual Switch (DVS) in VMware 4 combined with Nexus hardware in the data center (such as this Nexus 5000) hooked into Nexus 1000V virtual switch in VMware all running over some nice 10G unified fabric ports we are going to see serious realigment in the big end of town.

Exciting times. Lets hope with the crash of all the financial markets people will have enough money to purchase all of this sweet gear!

Is vCloud the answer to "Does IT Matter"

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:51:00 +0000

Whilst I was in the USA for VMworld I purchased all of the books I had added to my Amazon wish list. Shipping costs to Australia are not cheap, compared to within the states anyways.

One of the books I had on the list was "Does IT Matter" by Nicholas G. Carr. It is an interesting book which works through the idea of how much actual competitive advantage IT investment brings to a company.

One of the observations in the book was very relevant to what I was seeing in the VMware vCloud announcement.

What's required for grid computing to take hold on a broader scale is a new layer of software for coordinating all the connected pieces of hardware and a simple interface that hides the network's complexities from users, just as the original Macintosh's graphical interface hid the cumbersome workings of the PC. Many of the major IT vendors, including Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, are working feverishly to construct the required software, hoping they'll be able to spur the spread of grid computing and ultimately profit from it. Should they succeed, the perfection of the grid would mark the final step in the commoditization of computer hardware, rendering all equipment indistinguishable to users. The physical IT infrastructure would be complete-and largely invisible. (Page 41)

This requirement for the wide spread adoption of grid computing that Carr puts forward certainly aligns with the pitch that VMware is making in regards to VDS-OS. Given what they have already done with data center virtualization its likely that may be able to pull it off. Considering the book was written in 2004 we have come a long way in a few years.

Employee-Provisioned Hardware Programs

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:50:00 +0000

Well as I am about to start a new job the whole concept of Employee-Provisioned hardware programs is top of mind for me at the moment. Do I want to be shackled by a corporate SOE that's years behind? I am a knowledge worker. Therefore I am attempting to start with a Mac. Thankfully the company I am starting with is open to this.

So an article "Is it time for Employee-Provisioned Hardware Programs" over at CIO got me thinking about this and virtualisation.

According to an article Gartner estimate 10 percent of companies have a bring your own notebook program and it can reduce costs by 9 to 44 percent. Yet it has not proved as successful as people might have thought, due to support and compatibility issues.

However I think one comment in the article hits it right.

There are tools for PC virtualization that will allow companies to reach out to noncompany-owned devices with full security. That market is still maturing.

The whole reason why I am confident that I can bring my own device to my organisation without it becoming a time sink for me is virtualisation. As I have been using VMware VDI for my desktop since October 07 for all local and remote business work, I just need access to a network and my VDM broker.

I am planning on getting a MacBook. Running Fusion I will be able to have the best of both worlds. I can run the corporate SOE and the IT department can maintain it. I can launch individual apps like Outlook from the SOE VM and even better with reverse association when I click on a URL in Outlook it opens my Mac browser and not IE in the VM. Could you ask for more than that? Well off-line VDI which VMware have coming real soon means that when I am flying I will be able to take my SOE and do corporate work (although this working with Fusion may be a while away).

So I say the tools are here. I will let you know how I go.

Seeing the light

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 13:54:00 +0000

Well I have seen the light. Today I forked out my own money to purchase computer hardware (its much better when someone else is paying ). And what did I purchase, a MacBook. Its for the children, really.

Must say that after a day we are impressed. Use iMovie to create a fantastic short 5 minute film with lots of things that would have been hard on a windows box with Movie Maker. The wireless setup instantly. All devices seam to work and its not hard to use the applications we have tired. The build in camera is nice and the children love it.

Must admit I would not have got it if VMware Fusion was not around so we could run the occasional Windows app however I have worked with Keynote and the other Apple applications in the past and if they are not better they are at least as good. The only real issue is compatibility, which is where Fusion comes in.

Its also nice to use a system where you do not know how to do everything. Learning is always fun and so far, "it just works".

Search VMware Technical Papers

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 22:51:00 +0000

As a VMware geek one of the things I am often doing is searching through the Technical Resources Documents which are found at http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/cat/91

However it can be very hard to find relevant documents. There is effectively no search function and you have to go into the subpage to read the description.

To work around this I created a searchable document which list all of the technical papers, their descriptions and links. Its on one page so you can simply search it for key words.

The document is VMware Technical Resource documents listing at http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-2590

I hope you find it useful.

Catch that firefox

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 22:43:00 +0000

I am a big fan of the FireFox browser. The foxmarks extension which syncs your bookmarks across different computers is very handy.

The best thing though is the keywords for bookmarks. If you have a bookmark you go to a lot you can enter a keyword for that bookmark. Instead of typing in a URL you can enter the keyword.

Forget using the mouse to click on the address bar and then type in some long address, simply do a CTRL-L (or CTRL-T if you want a new tab) and then enter your keyword and hit enter. The keyboard is so much faster.

For people like me who are always looking up reference information on the same pages its a great feature.

Why iSCSI

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 22:28:00 +0000

I really should blog more. Oh well.

Its hard to have a conversation these days without someone trying to convince me that Fiber Channel is dead and iSCSI is where it is at. Whilst I agree with this in the long term I don't see it in the short term. Sure anyone can get iSCSI working in a lab hacking a few free things together, but thats not comparing apples with apples. You need to compare deploying iSCSI in a best practice environment to a FC one.

Here is my current argument, email me if you think I am wrong or have missed something.

Fiber Channel switch costs. If you only have two hosts, which can be common in a VMware environment, you can get away with no FC switches. Just connect each port of dual dual HBA to each storage processor on you SAN. If you have more than two hosts then you are going to need some FC switches, say $3.5K each. If you are following best practices for your iSCSI you would have a separate switching infrastructure for the storage, these are going to cost you about the same. Let alone what a 10G switch will cost.
HBA cards. Well a dual port HBA card is going to cost you about $2K. Two high end network cards with TOE are going to cost you about $1.6K, thats not a great saving.
A lot of the arguments are based on 10G Ethernet. People are not already running this so they are going to have to go out and purchase bleeding edge switches and cards compared the now commodity fiber channel equivalents.

Now there are lots of other elements to consider but for the big ticket items for the size of installations I see (two to ten servers running VMware) the cost difference is not drop dead argument of iSCSI is so much cheaper than FC.

If it was not for VMware I think FC would be dead a lot sooner than it otherwise would have been, its still got some legs for a while.

Update on OpenFiler

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 22:11:00 +0000

Just an update on my old post on OpenFiler.

I wanted to give iSCSI a play and I notices that the OpenFiler people have a prebuilt VMware appliance, sweet.

Downloaded the appliance, created a new virtual disk and presented it via iSCSI. I then install the Microsoft Initiator and connected things up. It was reasonably straight forward. The only two issues I had was you can't configure anything as iSCSI until you setup some networks and the chap authentication caused me grief for quite a while. Lastly there is very little debugging or technical info for OpenFiler, that I could find. However, I did get it running in a short period of time, that was cool.

A greener data center

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 21:56:00 +0000

Having build a few smaller data centers in my time I have an interest in the topic.

Came across a new organisation The Green Grid. They have an interesting white paper on Guidelines for efficient data centers.

There is some interesting info and its very practical. There is the usual stuff like hot and cold aisles and so on. However it does mention some issues which I have seen in the field but you don't hear reported much such as this one.

COORDINATION OF AIR CONDITIONERS
Many datacenters have multiple air conditioners that
actually fight each other. One may actually heat while
another cools and one may dehumidify while another
humidifies. The result is gross waste that may require
a professional assessment to diagnose.

Google, phpBB and session ids

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 12:47:00 +0000

Okay, an update on that hungry googlebot sucking bandwidth. I ended up emailing google to ask them to slow the bot and got an interesting reply. According to google its the session ids that cause 'problems for our robots'. Google refer you to a posting about removing session ids from phpBB.

Only problem is that the information they refer to is from 2004. If you look over at the phpBB forum there is a knowledge base article "Why doesn't google spider my forum?" This again refers to session ids and has the same code changes, but this one is from 2002.

As its now 2007 phpBB has changed a bit since 2002 and 2004, so its not so simple a change to make. Here is a quick summary of what I found and what I did.

First the change they suggest to sessions.php will not work as expected any more. The line of code they change does not exist any more, its been broken up. Also further down the code after their change the function updates or sets the session data. If it can't do that it sets the session id to a md5 hash of a random number. Also the code for the pages is a bit naughty and references both the global $SID and session_id in the $userdata hash.

My solution to all of this was to at the start of the function session_begin to declare the gobal $HTTP_SERVER_VARS; and the right at the end of the function before it assigns all of the data to the $userdata hash overwrite the session_id there.

Therefore the end of the function now looks like this, the first lines in blue are the new code.



    if (strstr($HTTP_SERVER_VARS['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ,'Googlebot')) {
        $session_id = '';
    }

    $userdata['session_id'] = $session_id;
    $userdata['session_ip'] = $user_ip;
    $userdata['session_user_id'] = $user_id;
    $userdata['session_logged_in'] = $login;
    $userdata['session_page'] = $page_id;
    $userdata['session_start'] = $current_time;
    $userdata['session_time'] = $current_time;
    $userdata['session_admin'] = $admin;
    $userdata['session_key'] = $sessiondata['autologinid'];

    setcookie($cookiename . '_data', serialize($sessiondata), $current_time + 31536000, $cookiepath, $cookiedomain, $cookiesecure);
    setcookie($cookiename . '_sid', $session_id, 0, $cookiepath, $cookiedomain, $cookiesecure);

    $SID = 'sid=' . $session_id;

    return $userdata;

Only problem I can conceive might happen is that it will insert all of the session keys into the database earlier on and they might not get cleaned up. Doubt it but something to check. In a day or two I should be able to see how it goes.

I tested with wget and without forcing the user agent to googlebot I got ?sid= with real id's in just about every URL in a page. With the user agent specified the same get to a page had an empty ?sid= value. So it looks a go.

Hungry Googlebot

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 12:12:00 +0000

Wow that Googlebot can get hungry. I admin a site and forum for my 4WD club and the google crawler has been sucking up the bandwidth big time. Over 60% of the bandwidth for the month is from Google. If you do a search for "excessive bandwidth usage by googlebot" it turns out there are a few people who are having the problem.

The forum is phpBB so there is a lot of cruft around the messages which has to get sent to Google with every page that they request, even though the content is only small. Some clever person should write some code that determines if the browser agent is a bot and only return a very simple version of the page with the key content and some simple links for it to follow.

Well hopefully it will finish indexing soon ...

DNS mystery

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 22:48:00 +0000

DNS has always been an interest of mine. Reading all of O'Reillys DNS book and joining AUDA when it was founded in Australia. Still a lot of people just don't get it ...

I stumbled across a good DNS checker site http://www.dnsreport.com/. You type in your domain name and it does a full test of everything, especially the MX and mail servers. In the times of increasing SPAM the setup of your MX is becoming real important as many providers are becoming so pedantic about everything being just right.

Its because of MX problems that I found this site. My provider, godaddy.com have some nasty email requirements. Sometimes people get a "553 Bogus helo" errors when emailing people hosted at GoDaddy. Can be hard to get this fixed.

Blast from the past

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 10:43:00 +0000

Well its amazing the things that pop up. I stumbled across a cache of an old page which I had created against Outlook. It was linked to off Bugzilla and got a heap of hits as a result. I think I have a copy sitting around on disk somewhere so I might dig out the version with the images to keep it up for prosperity!

Wow, where have those last 5 years gone!

Getting Television Right

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 06:47:00 +0000

I am not a big fan of television. It can waste a lot of time when one could be doing something so much better. Yet there is some good things to watch. Years ago I saw the Tivo in America. Its a VCR on steroids. Essentially it records to hard disk rather than tape and manages your recording schedule. It took a while for such technology to make it to Australia but eventually it did.

Introducing the Topfield set-top box which is a hard disk TV recorder that works in Australia. The good thing is that its a digital tuner so you get great picture quality. There are two tuners inside so you can watch something whilst recording something else or record two programs at the same time.

Now the big thing that made the Tivo such a popular product was its integrated TV guide. The Toppy (the common name for Topfield units) does not have a program guide service included. Two solutions are available. The first is IceTV which is a commercial solution, that means you get reliability and accuracy. The seconds is TEDS which is a free product (you can get some extra features at a cost) which works just as well.

With an up to date program guide, two tuners and a massive amount of record time a Toppy is a great way to watch TV. Record the regular shows you want to watch. Watch them when its convenient and skip the adds.

Does a Toppy mean you watch more TV, I have not found so. What it does do is allow you to watch better shows rather than just watching whatever rubbish is on when you want to watch something.

Gartner says "Hot, Cramped time for Data Centers"

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:28:00 +0000

Gartner are saying that Data Centers are filling up and therefore getting more cramped and much hotter.

"Gartner predicts that within 12 to 18 months organizations will have to make major changes to accommodate the heating and cooling challenges that come with more processing power."

What major changes are they going to make. You would have to figure VMWare is going to have a big opportunity here. Just look at the rebates one electricity conmpany are giving for server consolidation.

About Openfiler

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 07:26:00 +0000

Thinking about creating labs for VMWare the kicker is the resources needed to create a SAN. If you are going to play with DRS and HA you need to have the resources SAN based. With the support for iSCSI the Openfiler product could be a good testbed. Load it onto a old server with some disk space and you can have a simple SAN in a box.

Harry Potter and the perfect number

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 11:10:00 +0000

There is one point in the latest book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the half Blood Prince, that we discover that seven is a very magical and perfect number in the wizarding world. No wonder J.K. Rowling left half of the story out of the latest edition for it to be completed in the final seventh book.

Don't misunderstand me, I enjoyed reading the book; once I waited for my eager 10 year old to complete it first. However I really did feel, more than any of the other books, that this book had two purposes, the greater of which was the setting up of the final chapter in this epic adventure, book number seven.

I look forward to the next installment where the story will hopefully come to a conclusion if not end.

Dipping your toe in the pond of podcasting

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Thu, 21 Jul 2005 13:45:00 +0000

The ABC are starting to podcast quite a few of the their programs which I listen to which is just great. At the same time Apple have support for podcasts in the iTunes product. Certainly a way to soak up some of the unused bandwidth on the broadband plan.

I wonder if any of the Churches who put their sermon series online as MP3s are going to add the extra bit of glue to put them up as podcasts. That would mean you don't have to go to the site to see when the new one is up. One day ... one day ....

I will survive

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 12:28:00 +0000

Well today I got my copy of "The Synod Survival Guide" by Robert Tong at my ACL information night. Now I am all ready for the 1st ordinary session of the 47th Synod of the Sydney Diocese of the Sydney Anglican Church.

Okay so I am not quite ready yet; after all its a while away and I don't know much about the business that will be at hand. However at least do know something about how it works and what happens.

I will post updates and information as I stumble accross anything of interest along the way.

For the love of Money!

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 10:32:00 +0000

An interesting article in the SMH by Ross Gittins on our societies love of money.

http://smh.com.au/articles/2005/07/12/1120934245069.html

It’s all about balance in life, not payments
July 13, 2005

There is a case for change regarding annual leave; the rule should be use it or lose it, writes Ross Gittins.

It’s not hard to look at the news and decide the Americans are in the process of really stuffing up their society. Nor is it hard to conclude that where the Yanks go, we follow. What’s hard is to work out what it is we’re doing that’s making our community increasingly dysfunctional.
I suspect it may be a lot of little things, each of which doesn’t seem too terrible, with the cumulative effect escaping our notice. I think we caught a fleeting glimpse of one of them in last week’s contretemps over giving workers the right to cash in half their annual leave.

Forget the fact that, as the Howard Government and the employers were quick to point out, Labor and the unions had been party to similar deals. That just proves most of us are guilty of putting too much emphasis on work at the expense of leisure and, in consequence, family life. Of failing to achieve a sensible balance in our lives.

Think about paid annual leave. It’s an expense governments have forced on employers, starting with one week in 1941 and reaching four weeks in 1973.

With what justification? It’s obvious. People with full-time jobs need a decent break for rest and (literally) re-creation. Those with intellectually or emotionally demanding jobs need it, but so do people with jobs that are physically demanding. We also need time for extended, relaxed interaction with our children during school holidays.

If the justification for this imposition on employers hasn’t diminished - and I’d say that, with the intensification of work and the quickening pace of life, it’s actually increased - where on earth is the justification for letting people take the money, not the leave?

To say, as some politicians and employer groups do, that it makes the labour market more “flexible” and gives workers greater “choice” is to reveal that your values are out of whack.

What it says is that, as a society, we’re putting ever more emphasis on production and consumption, and ever less on leisure and wellbeing.

Why would employers be happy to see workers taking money rather than leave? To maintain production. Why would workers want to take the money? To spend it on additional consumption - or pay off debts from previous consumption.

Of course, a factor contributing to the temptation is that many workers have accrued large amounts of leave. According to a Newspoll survey commissioned by the Australia Institute in 2002, 57 per cent of full-time workers said they’d taken less than all their leave that year.

Of these, 39 per cent said they were saving their entitlement for a future holiday (don’t believe it), while 42 per cent said they couldn’t get time off work and 11 per cent said they enjoyed work or money more than time off.

I’d say that if any further government intervention is called for, it should be a new condition: use it or lose it.

In theory, the economists’ standard model puts a lot of emphasis on the value of leisure. In practice, it’s always being overlooked, partly because of the economists’, politicians’ and businesspeople’s mania for judging progress solely in terms of the growth in gross domestic product - for putting production and consumption ahead of wellbeing.

Remember how, in the 1970s, people used to foresee enormous reductions in working hours and wonder how on earth we were going to occupy all that leisure time?

What a joke when you consider how much longer and harder so many of us work these days. Whatever happened to that crazy idea?

I’ll tell you. We could have significantly reduced working hours - we had the improvement in the productivity of labour to allow us to afford it - but we chose not to.

I’ve no doubt that many production-obsessed bosses are happy with the way it’s gone: everyone - well, most of us - working longer and harder for real wages that are very much higher than they were 30 years ago.

But equally, I’ve no doubt that, had most workers preferred shorter hours to higher real wages - more buying power - that’s the way it would have gone. We opted for the money, not the leisure.

Why? Because - with a fair bit of help from all the advertising and marketing to which we’re subjected - we’ve acquired an addiction to material goods.

Much of this involves our self-defeating struggle to achieve social status - or at least avoid losing it - through our conspicuous consumption. Psychological research shows that we’re not as rivalrous about the holidays we take as we are about our clothes, cars, homes and children’s schools.

In consequence, we “consume” too little leisure for our own good.

As part of this, we’ve come increasingly to think of leisure as something you buy rather than something you have or do. Partly because we’re so busy and partly because leisure equipment - from boats to the latest electronic doodad - can be used to display our status, leisure has become more capital-intensive and less labour-intensive.

Music-making is something you do with a stereo, a walkman, a CD player or an iPod, it’s not a noise you make yourself with your friends. Sport is something you watch on your home theatre, not something you play.

The latest gear is so expensive that we work - give up leisure - to buy the leisure equipment we don’t have the leisure to enjoy. I noted an economist quoting as a laudable example of increased choice the worker who cashed in his annual leave so he could buy a plasma TV.

Capital-intensive leisure tends to be more solitary - watching TV, playing computer games or surfing the net - whereas labour-intensive leisure tends to involve more interaction with family and friends.

It also tends to be more passive, adding to the community’s growing problems with obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes.

Our politicians, economists and businesspeople have yet to learn that what we need in our lives is not more money, but more balance.

21 today

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Sat, 12 Feb 2005 10:56:00 +0000

I am not one for finishing things. It drives my wife a little spare but I think she knows I always have good intentions. I am okay at work, its just around home that it mainly occurs.

Knowing this my mind was drawn to that well worn phrase about habits taking 21 days to form. But I wondered if this was just a myth or something real.

A quick search on the Internet revealed many statements very close to the following.

Research shows that in order for any behavior or action to become automatic or routine, it must be done daily over a period of twenty-one consecutive days.

However for all of the articles, stories and anicodotes which made this claim not a single one gave reference to that Research. I think they are just all making it up! Maybe making this claim is just a habit which people can't break.

That Book

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Wed, 09 Feb 2005 11:39:00 +0000

Yes, it seems that the book of the moment is Dan Brown's 'The Da Vinci Code'.

I have not read it yet, I have way to many other books sitting on my stack of books to start reading. However I want to get to it soon as so many people I meet seem to have read it.

The strange thing is the impact this book has on many people. For some its quite a revelation. However this may be a book that has gone the way of Internet information; so check your facts before you believe everything you read. After all the book is found in the fiction section.

It surprises people that when they look up some of the simple elements of the story which you can verify, that there is some poetic license in use, such as the painting of the last supper. In this light, a lot of the other theories that the book puts forward look even more like mere theories rather than fact.

An interesting response to some of the claims about scripture in the book can be found in this article by Chadd Hafer.

Maybe I will get to the book soon and I can have something I can comment on from first hand experience. Until then I will have to leave it up to others.

1 year in the wilderness.

noreply@blogger.com (Rodney Haywood) — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 10:17:00 +0000

Well after a year in the wilderness there is another post! Will it be another year before the next one? Will there be a barren landscape for another 12 months. Watch this space.