Setting up BIND locally on XP

BIND looks to have very good install instructions at: http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/ch5/win2k.html

but it seems like the "run as service" option has moved in XP. However, running locally on 127.0.0.1 address it did not seem to stop it if I ignore the errors that there are too many privileges. I would never do this in production, but then I would tend to run *nix there rather than XP.

I found the trick to be go to a command and run: C:\windows\system32\dns\bin\named-checkconf.exe

and check for any errors in your C:\windows\system32\dns\etc\named.conf (that you have create yourself compared with fedora that gives you a cache servers out of the box).

So, I can now dig rather than nslookup and us my own DNS server. I found different DSL providers seem to be really mean on caching their names and do not update them as fast as I would like.

dig @127.0.0.1 mazhire.com any

Mazhire is ready for car hire rental orders

We have launched a new car hire rental website at: http://www.mazhire.com and there is city level content on each major city in the world. This includes cities such as Brisbane, Austrlaia to larger ones like London, UK.
Here we can bring our own content and ideas per city to help anyone planning to rent or hire a car. Now that the back end is all sorted out, there remains lots more work including JSON, widegets, xml editions and other exciting ways to hire cars online.

I have added my bookmarks

I am now keeping a del.icio.us link roll in my blog so you can all see what sites I like. You might find my tagging interesting but it makes sense to me.

Is Ruby beyond Java?

I just bought the Ruby and Beyond Java book from Foyles in London. I have played with Ruby on Rails but after reading blogs I think a bit of reading is in order.
I cannot help but think scripting is not the answer here but I really miss what Notes/Domino provides in the web world. I like the idea of just creating a field once and getting Create, Read, Update, and Delete without too much work. Struts, Hibernate, JSP and Tomcat involve a lot of typing and it does take time. Maybe my issue is getting Notes like flexibility from a relational back end but I do want to think on this issue for a while and I suspect there is no easy answer here.

Farewell and thanks for all the fruit

After a wonderful full 6+ years at IRIS and then IBM, I have decided to go out on my own. I will be starting with a week in London, UK where I just flew into - the superbowl is on but I guess I miss the million dollar commercials here.

Thanks to all my wonderful friends and workmates at Westford and beyond. I had a really nice last week and had a chance to talk to almost everyone and wish them well.

The new support site my team was working on will continue to change the IBM world for the better and Notes/Domino is going to continue to be the leader in groupware. I had a unique opportunity to see how truly professional software is written, tested and supported and learned and grew so much there.

The last project I worked on really drove home the importance of the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern. It is really important that complicated web applications or portal sites have a solid pattern in place from the start in order ensure quality code. I also learned that the View should be given to two different skill sets: user interface (UI) and development. It is probably possible to have the html and backend code generated by the same person but I expect this to be the exception rather than the rule.

I also really appreciated the UI team that can produce really clean compliant XHTML code. Having such a clean base to build on really makes all the difference when putting together complicated sites. I also learned just how important the UI team was in the development process and would encourage all UI teams that are working in the web space, to be able to provide XHTML rather than just photoshop or png files. If you cannot produce the HTML, then the chances are slim the development team will make a site that looks how you intended.