Plymouth Hoe

April 3, 2008 in Lifestyle, Tech | 1 comment

Sorry it’s been a quiet few days on here, it’s been a busy week for me in Real LifeTM. This week I have completed my CVOICE training which means i’m on the path to becomming a Cisco Certified Voice Professional (CCVP). I’ve got this exam and my F5 exam comming up shortly so need to hit the books!

Anyway my friend over at fluxbox.co.uk took some fantastic panoramic pictures of Plymouth Hoe, for those that haven’t experienced this first hand it’s amazing in the summer to go there and relax. Check out one of his panoramic photos spanned across my monitors below: 

Plymouth Hoe 

Also, if you haven’t checked out my mate “Bedders” blog then do it!, we always said “put it in the podcast”, but he’s chosen the forgotten art of writing to air his views… he’s also throwing in some recipes for good measure.

Cisco 3845 and ISDN/SRST.

March 30, 2008 in Tech | Tags: | No comments

Another Saturday, another day at work having fun with the fleet of Cisco devices that I manage.

Todays candidate: Cisco 3845 ISR Router - I must admit this is a pretty decent piece of kit, a single box solution that does all the normal networking and WAN connectivity but also can operate as a simple PBX and a voice gateway. Pop a ISDN card in, slap on a voice config and your laughing (or not!).

Tip of the day…If your ISDN PRI just doesn’t want to come up (and the endpoint won’t register in call manager) check the following.

1) Do:

debug isdn q921

If your circuit is in good shape you should see lots of debug mentioning that it wants to come up. You can also check by doing

sh isdn status

You’ll see that it’s sat in “TEI_ASSIGNED” mode.

2) shut/no shut your PRI. This will force it to go down and back up, this can sometimes bring it back in to life.

3) If all else fails then:

no mgcp

mgcp

This will force the gateway to pull down a config from the call manager and usually this will make the PRI register.

4) To check it’s registered do:

sh isdn status

You should see it in “MULTILINK_FRAME_ESTABLISHED” mode, this is expected behavior. To check calls are passing correctly do a: debug isdn q931. If you make some test calls you’ll see the traffic coming in and out. Remember to see this output you’ll need to do a term mon and remember once you’ve finished to do a no debug all!

Lunch time I think… and who stole my hour of sleep this morning!

My Inbox.. or what’s left of it!

March 25, 2008 in Tech | Tags: , | No comments

I only keep two primary e-mail accounts, my personal and my work, but between them I was having to trawl through a mountain of e-mail, twice, daily. My inbox was overflowing with all kinds of e-mails, stuff I was going to do sometime but forgot.. it was taking me ages to find what I was looking for… then along came GTD. 

GTD (getting things done) is methodology for organising your life, tasks and e-mail in to manageable work chunks and prioritising accordingly. It has a defined labelling system and associated heirarchy. Whilst this might of been great if I’d adopted this in the beginning, it’s quite hard to retrofit an organisation system, just like trying to retrofit air conditioning or heating in your house, it creates a lot of mess and everyone gets annoyed. 

So I chose to simply become ruthless… if it had no immediate use it was trashed, not archived, trashed. E-mails that contained important information (defined as billing, accounting) was archived. That was it, no stupid chain e-mails, pictures of cats…. all gone. 

Now my inbox (both at home and work) is a crystal clear workspace, the only e-mails that are stored are ones that I’m currently actioning, and even then I don’t store whole conversations… what’s the point when it’s already tagged on to the bottom of the e-mail.

My workflow and productivity has improved and I’ve found I can actually find information faster because any information I do have I’ve had to think about and file away.

Perhaps it’s time you gave your inboxes a little spring clean! 

Datacenter Cooling Issues

March 22, 2008 in Tech | Tags: , , | 2 comments

I can’t be the only person who’s come in from the freezing cold British weather to a toasty warm datacenter and thought “why doesn’t someone just open the window?”.

The fact of the matter is that cooling datacenters use huge amounts of energy and as the density of processors goes up, so does the load on the cooling system. So now I lay down the challenge… design a new way to cool a datacenter!

I’ve though quite a lot about it and I believe that the hot aisle/cold aisle set up of recent is past it’s sell by date. The hot aisle has been getting just a bit too hot recently, with air movement remaining relatively static which can’t be doing the servers any good, whilst the front is nice and cold the backs of them (where power supplies and the like live) is just getting hotter and hotter.

There are two aspects I’d like to see introduced in to datacenter design:

1. Remove the hot aisle and directly exhaust the air - Use solid doors on the rear of racks and duct air straight out of the top of the rack and out the datacenter. Rather than having the heat hanging around this would remove it all together from the datacenter and would also pull more cool air through the servers. People might argue that this would lead to a lack of flexability but lets be honest, how often do you decide to move your racks around?… Never.

2. The use of natural cooling sources such as water. In London most of the tier 1 datacenters are built within reach of the River Thames, why not use this as a source of cooling? A constant flow of lower than air temperature water. Even if you didn’t directly harness the water you could drop a heat exchanger in to the Thames and use that to dissipate some of the air conditioning heat.

Datacenter design hasn’t changed a lot, I think it’s about time we thought “outside the box” a little, don’t you?

And now the news…

March 16, 2008 in Lifestyle, Tech | Tags: , , | No comments

As you might of guessed from the size of my blogroll on the left I do read a lot of blogs. This has only been a recent change though… welcome to the world of Google Reader.

My way of catching up on the news was to visit a few sites, such as BBC News, The Register etc, a few times a day, manually typing in the web addresses. This was good for a while but it did end up wasting a lot of time, I couldn’t tell what was new and ended up revisiting the same sections of the websites many times.

What I needed was a way to keep track of what I was reading and have that delivered to me on demand… enter the world of RSS.

Now my first experiences of RSS wern’t that great, I’d download a desktop reader and it would import all the stories. Ok that was great but it ended up like e-mail, I’d just have to plough through them daily and it wasn’t enjoyable. 

Google Reader changed all that…Google Reader is an online application, avaliable anywhere and is incredibly lightweight and fast to use. It makes extensive use of AJAX to create a very good expereince. Once I started using the keyboard shortcuts such as space bar to scroll and move to next story I was flying thorugh my news at an incredible rate.

Unfortunatly Google Reader also has a dark side.. it recommends more blogs that you might find interesting, at first this was great, I was discovering blogs and articals I would of never found.. but soon the blogs built up. Whilst I still find it enjoyable to use I do wonder if I’m consuming a bit too much news… is that possible?

Closing thought.. this is my Google Reader stats for the last month:

 ”From your 38 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 6,034 items, starred 14 items and e-mailed 0 items.”     

Apple Launches iPhone SDK / C’mon RIM!

March 16, 2008 in Tech | Tags: , , , , | No comments

It was a little later than expected but at an Apple special event on March 6th, Apple launched their iPhone software roadmap.
 
Apple appears to be going for a full on onslaught against RIM by introducing many of the features found on the BlackBerry range of devices such as remote wipe.
 
We must however take a step back, a lot of the “enterprise features” that Apple have introduced such as push e-mail and contacts, are already present with RIM and the BlackBerry, so Apple is merely playing catch up.
 
The power of this SDK will come through in the applications that developers create. Demonstrated at the event were some hardware accelerated 3D games which looked amazing running at approx. 30FPS, and some practical applications from salesforce.com and a medical company.
 
Already a French company, Int13, have demonstrated a game ported from Symbian/WM to the iPhone and it does look pretty fun! See a video here.
 
This is where the iPhone will start to shine, a lot of people merely put up with their static featureset that comes by default on their phones, the iPhone continues to evolve and I hope that now with the SDK this will continue.
 
Would I recommend an iPhone to a friend? I get asked a lot as an early adopter what I think of it, it’s a great device and it has really helped to have the Internet “on the go”, but sometimes I worry about how fragile the unit is, or the contract price, which even though it now has a double allowance of 600 minutes and 500 texts, is still a way off some of the “negotiated contracts” my friends have.
 
I still love it though…