If you are a regular to the site, you may know that I have had some great service from my previous hosting provider, Hetzner. Which may make you wonder why I decided I needed to move the site. Well the reality is it is about the money at the end of the day. When I joined Hetzner earlier in the year I took their Basic package since it met my needs, and I was able to sign up get sorted etc.... very quickly. Plus they are a South African company so getting help over the phone wasn't hard. What I didn't realize what how much space I got from my previous provider.

So I ended up with tight limits on what I could upload. Eventually I exceeded it (mostly with the photos) and started paying extra per month. Now based on how many photos I had sitting to upload I realized that this would get expensive and put a hold on uploading them (until today). Interestingly enough I hardly used any of the other services on the packages (bandwidth never exceeded, no mailboxes used, I have one forward to GMail etc...) so all I needed was disk space. I had thought of using sites like Flickr but it didn't appeal to me too much, and when my wife decided to start her own part time business and she needed a site I decided to look around again for something which would meet both our needs, as with Hetzner I would need another package.

Browsing the Drupal site (which I use for my CMS) I found a list of recommended hosting providers and started to go through that. I found Web Hosting Buzz  through that and was very impressed, and the fact there is a 30 day money back guarantee put me at ease. I signed up for my wifes site first and got that setup and once that was on moved my site across.

To give you an idea of differences:

It's kind of a no brainer for me ;) And I have put WHB to the test already with some interesting support calls and they have come through each time. One such example is I saw SSH access listed on their site (which Hetzner didn't provide) and when I inquired it was setup in minutes for me.

Would I recommend Hetzner still? Definitely but you need to be the right type of customer, the type who needs South African hosting and (ideally) has their own server. Nowadays for personal sites the options (free or paid) overseas are too good to compare.

There is around 200 new photo's up in the gallery at the moment. This is the second last batch of photos from Namibia/Botswana with another collection of photos from Swakopmunt coming up over the weekend.

New photos include

• Seagulls Cry - The best camp site in Swakopmunt.
• The direct dirt road between Swakop and Windhoek - Which is really a great dirt road (I did it in a Diesel VW polo 2 wheel drive with no issues) containing some of the most breathtaking views ever.
• Spitzkoppe - The Spitzkoppe are some of the most beautiful mountains in Namibia with great climbing and camp sites (best in Nam).

So while waiting the eternity for files to be uploaded to the new server I decided to whip out my old faithful Gimp. I started playing around with gradients featuring transparency and ended up creating what looked like a book with a ribbon on it, using nothing more than 3 gradients and a white background.

Well what should go in my book? What words of wisdom can this book hold? How will this book change my life?

Based on the fact I'l feeling a little Cox-y lately I owed it to the big guy to put his pearls in it.

Check it out at DeviantArt

(I really love the way everandeverandeverandeveraneverandever.... runs off the last page)

If you are reading this then you have reached SADev.co.za on our new hosts

People aren’t chocolates. D’you know what they are mostly? Bastards. Bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling. But I don’t find them half as annoying as I find naive bobble-headed optimists who walk around vomiting sunshine Dr. Perry Cox

Just posting a notice here that the August 2007 version of the Microsoft CRM VPC is now out. You can get all the details at my information worker blog.

Sarah Grant noted today on the CRM team blog that support for Dynamics had been added to the MCP logo builder, which is great for me since it means I can now build a logo for myself  Which will be shown with pride on website from now on. But for those reading through rss readers then here is the logo

Houses with Windows ;)

http://gadgetdna.com/?p=339

The first version of rawr bear 

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Review Taglocity is a Outlook 2003/2007 plug in which gives the same idea is tags on blog (like on the right) but to email. Now this isn't really anything special for Outlook as you can get basically this same ability with flags in Outlook. There are three really good features in it though which help it stand out above just flags: There is a tag cloud view at the bottom of Outlook. This is great since you can have easy access to more tags than you can have with flags. However this appears either as a floating window (annoying) or docked (better), but in either mode you can not choose what windows it should show on, so it shows on everything. I'm a power calendar user and really don't need to lose space to tags in an area I won't use them. Next is the auto tag, which works off Bayes to predict what tag should be on what. This is great in idea, but not well implemented. Firstly when I get in to the office in the morning I generally get about 30 emails, which causes the Outlook to lock for 1 to 2 minutes while it auto tags. It does not auto tag blog posts. And in the end it seems to either want to tag everything or tag nothing, maybe thats cause I deal across a lot of different subjects with different tags and it makes it harder but it really shouldn't be. Lastly is the find feature which lets you do proper boolean expression searches based on tags, which is really useful since the result are almost instant. The downside is that it limited to the current folder with no way to search all folders. Anyway after using the professional trial for 14 days it expired and I now have the option to purchase or drop to personal edition. The personal edition has a tag cap which is a problem since I do need a lot of tags, and based on the negative points in the main features I can't agree to pay for it. So in the end it will go the way of the dodo and be uninstalled.

Side Bar Details and downloads on Taglocity can be found at http://www.taglocity.com I used Taglocity 1.1 with Outlook 2007 on Vista. Outlook 2007 was patched with the performance hotfix. This ran on an Acer TravelMate 3270 laptop (Intel Core 2 1.67Ghz, 1.5Gb of RAM, 80Gb Hard drive)