Nixta Sinks

I'm a Microsoft developer at heart at the moment. The major reason is partly professional, and partly principled. In my youthful hippie Risc OS Acorn Archimedes days, I sang a very different tune. But I became practical and dull and my idealism faded alongside my youth.

The easy professional part is that for some 6 years now I've been working with ESRI products. Their rich library or spatial application functionality is all COM based, hence limited architecturally, but also limited to the Win32 platform, whose primary and by far the best development environments are Microsoft based.

By the time I got to the party, things were pretty stable. Then along came C# .Net.

I'm something of a snob when it comes to object orientation (I believe that most OO programmers don't really know how to use it properly, and still think that Smallworld Magik is the best OO language I've used, although a lot of colleagues didn't understand what I was doing with it), and so I spent quite some time shying away from such half-arsed implementations as C++. Add to that my principled objection to programming languages and frameworks that preclude you actually programming (COM or UI programming in Visual C++, memory management in the year 2000), and also my interests tending more to software interaction and presentation rather than realtime applications (though we're getting into chicken-and-egg territory here, and for God's sake don't mention my current project), and I clearly must love C#. No, it's not the best OO language out there, but it's about the best compromise and meets nearly all of my criteria, except for runtime class mutation.

So when it came time to decide that I was fed up with the drone of the PCs in my living room, I didn't buy new fans for them but instead decided to turn them off and find a hosting provider.

Finding a Windows hosting provider that provided an even half-decent level of functionality hasn't been simple the last few times I've looked, but this time I found 3Essentials.com. I'm so far (fingers crossed) utterly impressed. All queries answered within 30 minutes, live chat, good knowledgebase, cheap (though not cheap enough for Skankmeister "2.5 Gigabytes, tuppence upyerarse" Penn), .Net, Perl, Python, plenty of space and bandwidth.

What it does mean is that Nixtasinks may suffer transitional problems - see the Flickr doolally at top right for an example... Hopefully not for long. I've just got to work out how to control the SQL Server DB at the host's site...