Yesterday, the Open Rights Group organised a protest outside the houses of Parliament against the Digital Economy Bill (aka DEBILL). I went along and took a few pictures.

So whats the big deal about the debill, and why are seemingly so many “techies” and “nerds” getting their knickers in a twist about it?

Consumers and companies (including Google, Facebook and ISPs – your broadband provider!) alike are up in arms about the Bill, which proposes that an Internet connection could be cut off if there is suspicion that it is being used for the downloading of copyrighted content.

This is very disturbing:

• Although proof is required before disconnection, the evidence does not have to relate to you: you can be punished for the actions of a friend or even a neighbour who has used your Internet connection.
• Rights holders could have the power to demand that sites they believe to contravene copyright law be blocked by ISPs. Right now, we don’t know what the govrnment will propose, as they have yet to draft their new proposal
• As it is not the perpetrator that is punished, as you might expect, but the owner of the connection, and others using it, cafés and bars may have to stop providing wifi, no more BTOpenZone, FON, etc!

Regardless of what you do or don’t do, you could be punished for the actions of others because of laws put in place by the Digital Economy Bill: if you have unsecured wifi in your home, you could be punished; if you use the Internet at your local coffee shop or library, you could lose access to that connection.

Justice would not be completely out of reach: you could appeal, but you would have to pay for the privilege, and you wouldn’t be eligible for any legal aid.  Reasons for appeal are limited, and unlike in a trial, the onus would not be on rights holders to prove your guilt: you would be responsible for proving your innocence.

This is another example of badly thought-out government policy, pushed through by lobbyists, and constructed by people who just don’t know what they are doing, or what they are talking about.

There are better solutions to the internet download problem, including the record industry evolving its business models to keep up with changes in technology (think Apple iTunes).  Funnily enough, the music industry is thriving with downloads, its the record labels that are suffering – aww the poor “big machine”, its in pain as power shifts to “the little people”.

Those of you that know me, know that I am very much not a tree hugging hippy that believes the government is out to get us; I believe in free markets, I believe in capitalism, and I believe in equality for all.  It is possible for all of those to coexist, anyone that doesn’t think so, is, well, just wrong (and stupid).

If you want to know more about this stuff, I strongly recommend you watch the Panorama documentary recently released, titled “Are the net police coming for you“.

This post is a little on the ranty side, but there is a solution at the bottom

I really really really hate voicemail, I can’t even begin to find the words to describe how much I hate voicemail.  To me, voicemail is one of those technological advancements that should have remained in the last century, let alone the last decade.  Its an old solution to a common problem that still exists today.

This little extract from the Dilbert cartoons should explain part of how the whole “voicemail experience” makes me feel;

(All rights reserved Scott Adams, Dilbert.com)

This really does happen to me, people call me up and either;

1.  Leave long messages – which are better off conveyed in email.

2.  Leave short messages telling me that they’ve sent me an email or to check my email and call them back.

3.  Normal people leave short messages with their details and ask me to call them back.

Ok, so now you’re thinking leaving a short message can’t be a bad thing, and thats surely the point of voicemail… well its not.  Perhaps it used to be, but thats no longer the case.  There are much better ways to convey the information that I have missed your call and need to give you a call back – yep, a text message.  One would also be able to read the sms message and process the information in a much shorter time frame than dialing into voicemail and listening to the message.  Inefficient and stupid, simple as.

So i’ve tried a number of different things over the years;

1.  Turn off voicemail completely – only to get people whine that “oh, I tried to leave you a message but there was no voicemail”… thanks for informing me of what I already knew… yes, I turned my voicemail off, yes it was on purpose, and yes, if it was important enough, you’d have found SOME OTHER WAY to get the message to me.

2.  Explicit asking people to leave a “SHORT MESSAGE” – this worked initially, but people soon reverted back to leaving long messages.

I had pretty much given up trying to find a solution.  Then one day, salvation came, unexpectedly.  I was calling a customer and they were busy, but instead of getting asked to leave a voicemail message (which I don’t tend to do either!) a little recording started to play “this person cannot take your call, please try again later or send a text message”, on repeat.

Finally, there was a solution out there!  The bad news is that its a setting/option provided by their network operator.  A facility which my provider, Orange, does not.

No matter, I found another way.  This works on Orange, it may be different for your service provider.  Using AT&T’s text to speech demo I created this wav file recording “The person you are calling cannot take your call, please try again later or send a text message”.

Then within the Orange voicemail, there is the option for an “extended absence” greeting, now the major difference between this and a normal greeting is that you can opt to not accept voicemail messages while your extended absence greeting is active.  So using a pair of headphones right infront of the mic pickup on my mobile and some careful timing; now whenever someone calls and I am otherwise occupied they hear the synthised voice of Crystal, asking them to try again later or send a text.

Win   Finally!

Download the wav file: here

Or create your own: here

PS: Yes I know Google Voice would be the other solution to this problem, but its not available outside of the US, and I doubt they will bring the service to the UK, not for a while anyway.

A lot of people have been enjoying the snow, and its the first time in many years that we may actually stand a chance of celebrating a “White Christmas” in the UK… although currently, its looking like the weather in yee old Blighty will return to its normal programming, ie, rain, and we’ll all enjoy a nice gray and slushy Christmas. It remains to be seen.

Personally I’ve not enjoyed the snow, beyond my initial school boy excitement, which lasted a whole 5 minutes, a long time considering. The snow “storm” has caused havoc on the roads, journeys that normally take 15 minutes have taken near on 4 hours recently. Apparently the warnings that the UK MET office had been issuing for weeks never reached the highways agency, and yet again they were “caught unaware”… as my girlfriend keeps asking, upon observing the competition ice rink style road conditions, “so why exactly do we bother paying taxes?”.

Humbug I say!

Ah well, on the bright side the snow did give me something to shoot.

If you are reading this post on a syndicated site, you’ll need to view the slideshow directly on flickr, here.

You can always keep up or engage with me on twitter

On another note, I’ve had a few blog comments complaining about some broken download links, so those have been fixed.

CISCO Lab Software – PacketTracer: now available for download again. Please post a comment, it helps with my page rank (shows activity and relevance), and takes about 2 seconds to do.

Photo Booth (for osx): my solution/fix to the common problem of photo booth not initializing the inbuilt camera is available once more for download.

Enjoys

I came across this TED lecture by Julian Treasure on the 4 ways sound affects us, its worth a watch as a starting point.

My office (like many others) has lots of servers and computers running in it, and lots of background noise.  According to Julian this kills productivity by 60+%… very worrying!  So I started to look for ambient sounds that can play in the background while I work, this was harder than I thought it would be.  Finding high quality both in terms of bit rate (audiophile that I am) and in terms of content was quite difficult.

This is a very nice MP3 and long enough to have in a constant loop without becoming mechanical and repetitive.

Download Ocean Sound (8.16Mb – 5:56 length).

I also came across this podcast on iTunes (iTunes link), which is a regularly updated podcast of bird songs.  One of the issues I found with podcasts and iTunes, is that although there are many ambient sounds and relaxing sounds podcasts listed in the directory, many are no longer updated, and many have broken links within them.

MakeUseOf.com (a blog I enjoy reading regularly) have also detailed some nice free iPhone/iPod touch soundscape applications.  Although they’ve taken a slightly different slant on it, by looking at applications that can help you fall asleep, but still worth a read, and a good resource for direct links to the apps.  My personal favorite, after having tried all the listed free apps, for its sheer simplicity is Naturespace (iTunes link).

Its been two weeks now, and while working, rather than having the news or music on in the background, I am mainly using the ocean mp3 listed above.  Its working well for me, and as long as it does, I’ll continue to do it

I find that I’ve evolved past a state of caring about the “mac vs pc”, and “windows vs linux” arguements, or paying much attention to what OS I’m running or how its configured.  These days, all I want is for things to work properly, very quickly, without stalling, and with absolutely zero drama.  So yes, I’ve ditched all my PCs (and millions of screens) with XP, linux, and BSD and exclusively work on my Macbook running OSX – why?  It ticks all those boxes for me.  Don’t get me wrong, I have XP on here too, running virtualiased under Parallels – whatever gets the job done

Anyway, here is some fun from the boys and girls on Apple’s “get a mac” campaign – brilliant as always

Enjoys

I particularly like the last one

Made me laugh

Outlook configured at each location, all syncing to Exchange with logmein.com also running for remote access/working, all of this is key.  Multiple monitors is also an essential requirement, 6 at the office in Mayfair, 3 at the office in Stanmore, and 2 at home.

6 screen setup in Mayfair

Oh how things have changed! Over the last few months, I have begun working purely on my Macbook, the fact that its an Apple isnt the thing to note here, it could be any form of laptop hardware (although I do love my macbook).

I now have one screen at each location (other than at home where there are two), and I simply hook it up and work with dual screens.  The change did require a little forced acceptance on my part, as I was so conditioned to using all 6 screens.  This way of working does make a lot of sense, especially if you are in IT, you carry your “tool of the trade” with you everywhere.

At home there are 2 screens, as there is a desktop in my room, to be fair, its also hooked up to the projector, and is only/mainly used for watching movies while in bed.

Visiting my sister at Microsoft the other day (she works at TVP in Reading for MS), reassured me that there was logic in this line of thinking.  They too (for the most part) work on laptops with additional monitors.  That said, at the Google HQ on Buckingham Palace Street, they all have deployed desktops (spent the weekend there a while ago for BarCamp).  So who is “doing it right”?  As always, its a case of each to their own.  I am preferring this way of working (although on one occasion, I left my laptop at the womans, only realising when I got home, and had to drive 45mins back to her place to pick it up).

Anyway, the advantages of working like this, for me;

• No worrying about configuration changes – its the same machine.
• The same point above applies for applications/data (although I sync my docs between my server and the macbook using livesync constantly).
• Less cost – only need one machine and a few screens – the 6 way rig is going up for sale.

The major disadvantage is felt now that the weather is getting better, as I am back out on my motorbike, and having to carry a backpack on the bike is highly irritating!  Although this is a problem “challenge” that can be overcome with a little engineering.  Oh that and I need to buy 2 or 3 more power packs for my macbook; connecting and disconnecting the power adapter at each location is getting tiresome – yes, I am lazy “efficient” like that!

[1] – yep Livesync also works on my macbook

Yep, thats right, we all have it, you cant get away from it, and its name is email.

Over the next few days, although it may turn into weeks, I’ll make some time to chew the email cud, and throw out some of my thoughts and rant-ish musings on the subject.

Lets lighten the mood somewhat now methinks, with our friend, well, hes my friend anyway, Dilbert.

My personal pet hates when it comes to email

I realise these are my pet hates, but feel free to hate them too, the more people hating them, will lead, lets hope, to fewer people doing them, and onward to the victorious world of “better email”. Hmm, well, I guess anythings possible, right?

To start with theres little point talking about spam, and the fact that supposedly my girlfriend is unsatisfied in bed, or that some Nigeria prince, if there were such things, would like to give me millions of dollars. So lets not. Any intelligent person has by now discovered “the spam filter”, just deal with it, and live with it.

Technical side note: If everyone would just check the damn SPF records on all email/domains before relaying them, spam would for the most part, go away. End of said technical side note.

Now, I’ve not ranked these, perhaps I should, then again, perhaps I’d rather scribble (or type) out this post and go watch a film?

1. Emails with no subject – I’m going to just start deleting emails that come in without a subject from now on, or add the subject, “OI, YOU FORGOT THE SUBJECT”.
2. Long emails – its always good to hear from friends with long updates, and those aren’t really what I would call “day to day” emails, nor the long emails that I hate. How many times have you had emails for meetings, outlining the agenda, and all the points to be covered, with a little breakout on each point? Well, if we’re going to do the whole thing on email, I may as well stay in bed, whats the point of going to the meeting. Its not complicated people, email to outline high level points, then pick up the damn phone or fire up a video call, or arrange a meeting (although unnecessary meetings are another pet hate, perhaps theres another post in there somewhere).
3. Emails reminding me about your email – its in my process queue, I’ll deal with it on *MY* time, unless of course you’re paying for the privilege of an immediate response.
4. People who treat email as an immediate form of communication – *phone rings* “I sent you an email asking you to call me 5 mins ago, and I’ve not heard from you”… well, was it that hard for you to just call me? It cant have been, as you managed to work out what all the scary buttons on the phone do in 5 minutes.
5. Responses from people, where they haven’t answered my original question or addressed the original issue that I had emailed them about in the first place. Come on!
6. When a reply contains anything that looks like, or could mean something like, “I sent you another email about that stuff earlier, see that email”. Clearly you have time to waste! You could have simply replied with the answer to my specific issue, but instead you refer me to a previous email. So you spend the time sending a reply and typing out words, but don’t bother actually being any help, what-so-ever… links to point 5.
7. Signatures – you only need to send your signature with all your info, your logo, measurements, blood type, CV, family pictures, your corporate disclaimer and whatever else you’ve decided that you need to share with me; *ONCE*. If you’re initiating the communication, include it on your original email only, theres no need to stick it on every single reply, or is there? Perhaps you’d be so kind as to explain why to me, no, really, I want to understand this. To be fair, until recently I was guilty of doing just this, until it dawned on me, just how utterly pointless it was.
8. That stupid, irritating, and more useless than the right honorable Gordon Brown when it comes to fiscal policy; please consider the environment “tree logo” – who the hell thought this thing up?! Its an email, I’d only need to print it if I *NEEDED* a hard copy, i’ll press print if I need to, I don’t need to be reminded by a silly little green tree asking me to “consider the environment”.

Righto, that’ll do for now. I know there are many many more, and perhaps one day we shall all work together to compile a big book eBook (the little green tree logo people got upset), and pass them into law, or should that be eLaw? Perhaps we could call it “the ebook of knowing how to use email, and if you break them, we’ll break your internets” – people are always complaining that the “internet is down” anyway, therein lies a rant for another day I think!

Watch out for the follow up to this, which will be more useful, I’ll go into how I actually deal with the masses and masses of transactional and business emails I get on a day to day basis. It’ll be worth it, you’ll see, email management is becoming one of the most important soft skills that you can have these days.

Anyway, for now, Hamlesh out.

Computer software giant Microsoft has announced plans to open its own stores, at a time when many other retailers are struggling in the economic downturn

BBC news article…

My thoughts;

MS are moving more towards services and away from software, and more towards hardware/providing platforms rather than software. The big issue at MS atm, and they recognize this internally, is that they don’t, and everyone knows that they don’t innovate.

The surface is the first interesting thing from an innovation pov to come out of MS for a long time. They’ve provided a hardware platform, and are letting others dream up the applications/uses. The restaurant application on the surface is very cool, and you can already see uptake (the vegas flirting app is just stupid imo!).

The retail stores do well in the US, and aren’t a new thing there. Just seems like an extension of the same thinking applied in the UK. Whether or not it will work here remains to be seen – but the Apple stores do well, not because of “fan boy” mentality, but because you can go and get help from a human being – not a call center that wants a credit card number before they can help you (consumer support side).

Apple puts a lot of time, energy, and money into building its community, and it pays off, not just for the brand following – but also for the fact that most apple users go from beginner to intermediate level very quickly – the workshops and classes they run are free, and useful.

Where do you get that with MS? Perhaps they will try and offer more of the same. Hopefully we’ll see some more innovation, rather than just reinventing what others are doing and calling it their own.

I’m not a “fan boy” of either. I like my mabook, never gives me any trouble, then again, nor do my Windows machines, or my Ubuntu laptop – each to their own, horses for courses, $insert_cliche_saying_here;

• Sold part of my IT business
• Had a major outtage on a heavily used platform – thanks to Microsoft
• Celebrated XMAS
• Garage that screwed up my old SAAB finally paid up – replacement SAAB 95 sourced
• Feeling the crunch; cutting the costs within my IT company in a big way
• New venture/business is formed and underway – pipeline building nicely
• Going to the gym again!

Need to start blogging on a regular basis again, as you all know, I have so many interesting things to say

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi1se9rH7S8[/youtube]

I had issue with the old Apple adverts, mainly as they are framed in such a way to suggest that “PC” is “Microsoft”, where a PC is actually a hardware/computing platform running soime form of operating system.

Anyway, an old arguement that doesnt need rehashing.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id_kGL3M5Cg[/youtube]

Southpark version, and again, the guy that made it doesnt realise that “Computer” is a computing platform, and that his MAC is also a computer – unless thats a general “Computers Suck” message at the end of course!

To clarify – I use MAC OS, Windows XP, Slackware, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, Debian and a whole load of other operating systems on a daily basis, so I’m not being a biased “interweb idiot”, just sharing some funny/interesting vids

This would be the “wordle” of my blog (click for the bigger version).  Thanks to Paul Johnston aka pjnet for bringing this service to my attention.  Very cool way of displaying just what a blog/body of text/rss feed/site is all about.  Go check it out – http://wordle.net.

For me, it was a real suprise to see “financials”, “FSA”, and “markets” in such big letters – I always think of myself as a tech entrepreneur with an interest in the markets.  It would seem that i’ve been talking about the markets a lot recently, both here and on twitter… then again, so have most people!

Dear oh dear… right, the markets are a “free market economy”, so the market sets the value of assets and companies, by banning shorting financials, in one sense it can be seen that the FSA has said “these financials cannot go down in value”, or another way to look at it, is that even if you hold physical stock of these financials, they cant now decrease in value (on the short term anyway), as one of the main mechanisms has been banned.  This means that the price can ONLY go upwards, a shortage in volume on the market will drive the demand higer and higher – causing this rally and upsurge in the financials.

Now, dont get me wrong, in many ways I think this is a good move by the FSA.  They have created huge amounts of money for the financials in the short term (very short term).  I would imagine the logic is that once there has been enough of a rally the ban shall be lifted.  This is essentially just buying time, if the FSA don’t lift the ban on shorting, then the markets will find another mechanism to drive down the price and reflect the true/perceived value of those stocks.  In the short term traders are out to make money, this rally wont last, the financials were valued low for a reason, a lot of them are over leveraged, and their balance sheet value is greatly exaggerated.

It is indeed a very interesting time on the markets, especially for a novice like me, I am learning a lot through observation, and have been able to predict a few events before they happen in an intuative type of way.  This is crucial for markets success.

Please, I want to hear your thoughts, and get some debate going – you know how to get hold of me

This was presented to TED (http://www.ted.com) a little while ago.

[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3889308539794987829&hl=en[/googlevideo]

Anyone that has a blog or any other website where visitors can feeback information / comments etc know the problem with comment spam. A “captcha” (the funny little image you get asked to type in) is one of the common ways to protect against this. Spammers are now overcoming this by setting up free p**n sites (i’ve censored this out as to not upset the google bots). So on these sites, before seeing the picture, they ask you to validate a captcha, which is pulled in real time from a blog, and feeds the right response back. Now thats kinda clever

The presentation is on youtube, and if you have over an hour to spare, I recommend you check it out (if geekery interests you, which if you’re reading my blog, it does).

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAEMjD4J55E[/youtube]

@BarackObama is following 30,599 with 30,012 followers on Twitter while @hilaryclinton follows *ZERO* with 3,822 followers.

Obviously there are some people on Obama’s campaign with a serious understanding of web based, and dare I say it web 2.0/3.0 technologies. They have no doubt implemented the twitter API in a very effective way – but think about the effect this has on the perceptions of people. They’ve even improved his visibility by capitalizing the first characters of his name.

Obama FTW.

David Hinson recently introduced me to friendfeed.com, its a socweb aggregation platform, and its built very cleanly and has support for a large number of what we would call web 2.0 socwebs. I signed up (to actually use it), and created my various associations with different platforms.

The result made me actually laugh out loud!

On every single major platform, my nick is “hamlesh”. Its frigging annoying that Spock decides to add some random characters after you nick/name (stupid thing, I’m god damn unique damn it!).

If you are using freindfeed, please add me, unsuprisingly, yes, my nick is “hamlesh” on there too Friendfeed is an important step to the emergence of a unified socweb platform, much like the work Google are doing with opensocial, the space is looking very exciting at present – damn it, I should live in SV!

So, as these platforms grow do you think we’ll start seeing the emergence of socweb “camper”/”squatter” type operations? Much like with domain names, where the desired (and in a lot of cases random!) socweb nicknames will be grabbed, held on to, and then sold on to whomever wants them… people do all sorts of crazy things for a few bucks.

Hopefully I haven’t just given birth to a pain in the ass idea! I guess the major deterent will be the actually AUP of these platforms, then again, this will cause more work as they’ll have to enforce these things.

Anyway, thats all for now, queue the “you utter barstard” comments from some of my geekier mates

My views of our Fuhrer; over tax the car, cars are bad although short haul flights are worse for the environment, congestion tax is about reducing congestion and not about revenue generation, yes you should use public transport, although its more expensive than driving, even with my brilliant congestion taxing policy/revenue generation/tax, and I use taxis to get around, use public transport, not for me thanks, Ken Livingston… *breath*

The car park I use on Park Lane is also a transit location where cars that have been evading the congestion tax are clamped, picked up and taken to. Walking from the car park to the office this morning, this made me feel all warm inside.

Begs the question… is the Westminster council on a mission to rid our streets of crappy Porsche “cars”… I feel ill even associating the word “car” with P…

It is a widely known fact that within the Hindu faith, the cow is a revered and sacred animal.  I say widely known, but apparently the Secretary of State, and the RSPCA are unaware of this.

I have written what follows with great care to maintain the facts, and to put my personal feelings aside.

Bhativedanta Manor, the Hare Krishna temple in Watford is home to many Cows under the ISKCON Cow Protection Programme.  The temple has a number of working cows and bulls, who are well looked after, work the land, and provide milk used in the day to day worship and food preparations.

A year and a half ago, one of the cows was injured when a bull jumped on her back, vets and animal welfare professionals were called, and their professional advise followed.  The prognosis was that the cow would pass away naturally in a few days due to the nature of her injuries.  However she has been making a slow and steady recovery for the last year and a half, well cared for by the temple monks, and visited regularly by a number of vets and animal welfare professionals.

Last week a vet from the State Veterinary Service came to conduct a test (presumably for foot and mouth) on a number of cows at the temple and assed the injured cow’s position.  The vet was informed on the Hindu faiths position on cow care, and the progress in recovery she has made over the last year.  He indicated on his departure that nothing further would probably come of his visit, given the manner in which the temple has continued to care for and nurse the cow back to health.

On the 12th of December the temple was visited by senior members of the RSPCA, escorted by the police, they were served a warrant, stating that the cow would have to be euthanised in due course (not immediately).  During the visit the temple monks were given the impression that they would have the opportunity of taking legal action to stop the murder of the cow, or at the very least have their say.

This morning the RSPCA and police visited the temple barn with a warrant, without due notice the cow was murdered.  The senior RSPCA officers had delayed and distracted the monk caring for the cow, to allow his colleague to murder the cow.

My thoughts

I struggled while writing the “article” above, and it is constructed so that the average member of the public can read it and understand what follows.

I am, what most would understand as a Hare Krishna, a member of the Hindu faith.  Frankly, and simply put, I am angry, very very angry, and as this disseminates throughout the Hindu community, everyone else will be getting angry too.  It is one thing to put down an animal that is infected, and proves a threat to other animals and the human populous at large.  But to sneak around and murder a cow who’s condition and health had been steadily improving, who had been well cared for, regularly visited and assessed by independent (not of the Hindu faith) vets, this, this despicable action will not stand.

Our faith and beliefs have been completely disregarded by the authorities, had they followed the correct legal channels, and given us the chance of representation, this would have been a different matter entirely.  The temple devotees were not even given the right (given by law in this country!) to perform “the last rights”, or any other prayers for the soul of one of Krishna’s sacred cows.

Given my affiliations, I am refraining from voicing much of what I really feel, but this will not stand!

I’ve found a few gems over the last few weeks, here we have Dean Evans on his opening lap of a 2005 Lotus Trophy race at Bathurst. Want to be impressed? Dean climbs from 14th to first before he reaches the last corner. The most amazing thing of all is how he manages to avoid the wall and the 13 other Lotuses at the same time.

Enjoy!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQOnOXXc-ps[/youtube]

The real major change of the weekend past is that I have moved back from Reading to St.Albans. This has made me a little sad, although the move itself was stressful (training course during the day, frantic packing and moving at night, very little sleep), the hardest part was moving away from my housemates that I’ve lived with for just under 3 years. You really start to feel like a family after that much time.

Righto, enough nostalgia for now, time to head to the office

The key things I was predicting, and to be honest anyone that really understood the industry at the time would also have known;

• Supplying power (electricity) would be the biggest issuefor the London data center space.
• Effectively cooling servers/data halls, would be a close second.

The biggest problem with cooling is the heat transferal capability of air, companies like spraycool have finally commercialised and are bringing to market water cooling technologies that case modders and enthusiasts have been playing with for a long time. Its strange in a way as the old IBM mainframes and VAX20 systems used to use water cooling, or “cold water cooling” well before the days of i386 and the Intel/AMD infrastructures we are used to today. Air cooling at the time made sense, at least now we are starting to learn from some of the wisdom of the past.

Anyway, the reason for this ranting; We’ve (a few of us select battling entrepreneurs) have been working on a plan to build a datacenter, or at least a chain of datacenters, for the market of tomorrow. What will the data center scape look like in 2 to 3 years time? Well… I’m not going to share that now am I I was right two years ago, and I’m sure as hell going to be right in a few years time! Hopefully this time people would have learnt that the way of the Hamlesh is the right way \o/

Recent new data center build announcements;

TelecityRedbus has begun construction on a new $100 million (£50 million) data center in Central London. The Powergate facility, will include 50,000 square feet of space and open in the second quarter of 2008, will be TelecityRedbus’ eighth data center in London.

“Google, welcome to Iowa!” With those four words, Iowa Gov. Chet Culver ended months of speculation this morning and confirmed that Google will locate a major data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa. The $600 million data center will provide 200 jobs for the local economy, and “will have a tremendous impact on Council Bluffs, western Iowa and the entire state,” Culver said.

I noticed today that Orange (the greatest phone network in both the known and unknown universe) are now selling a PAYG handset for £9.99, inclusive of VAT and delivery! I kid you not, £9.99, I can’t find the words to liken that to anything, its just, well, crazy. I wonder in another 9 to 10 years what that we value so highly today will become a disposable commodity.

You can get this same phone, from Orange for £4.99, inclusive of VAT and delivery! Using a cashback service such as Quidco, thats £4.99 for a mobile phone… no contract, no nothing, just top it up (I think they even come with £1 of call credit).

Obviously I’ve just ordered a few, leave one in the car, and have a few spares for when we have guests from abroad.

• Life is just a series of events following each other.
• Persistence is incompatible with failure.

I’ll have to find some time to elaborate at `some point`.

I currently share a large house in Reading with 6 other people (the place is huge, so much so that I have my own server room, with a rack in it!).  Two of the guys I shared a house with last year.  One of the two girls that lives in the house, until yesterday thought I was 30 odd… we’ve lived in the same house for almost 4-5 months now… granted I leave home at 0530 and dont get back till 2300+ on a regular basis, but we still go to the pub from time to time, or play poker.  Oh and btw I act like a complete child when I am not in “work” mode, a very hyper child that enjoys jumping off of buildings and doing other crazy things… yes… indeed.

Meh anyway, enough of my ranting and raving.

“On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you’ll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.”

Bill Gates, as quoted from Fortune Magazine on April 4, 2006.

(Click to enlarge)

Top Left > Bottom Right: Malvern(3 x 21″ CRT); Reading(2 x 21″ TFTs + 2 x CRTs); Reading(2 x 21″ TFTs + 15″ TFT); Mayfair(2 x 21″ TFTs + 15″ TFT); all driven from the same system.

Watch this space, 2 x 21″ TFTs and 2 x 19″ Widescreen TFTs will soon be appearing on my rig at the office

I spent Saturday cleaning the sty that was my room. Spending all my time at work and on the road had resulted in quite an unmaintained mess. Suffice it to say I’ve never seen my floor so clean, not a good thing I know.

Having caught up with all u “housework” on Saturday I caught up on sleep by getting an early night (the extra hour due to the clock change was a bonus). Sunday I was up by 0500 as usual, I headed down to the temple in Watford for morning prayers, and to the office from there.

I had done all that I had wanted to by lunchtime, and wondered over towards my Charlotte Street office to collect post. This is the base of operations for my PA hire company, and as such I’m only there twice a week at most. I grabbed some lunch just off of Soho Square, it was surreal stopping and watching the world go by, its been a long time since I’ve taken the time to do that.

All in all a nice slow relaxed weekend… Stranger things have happened!

Stability results were moderately low which suggests you are worrying, insecure, emotional, and anxious.     

Orderliness results were medium which suggests you are moderately organized, hard working, and reliable while still remaining flexible, efficient, and fun.

Extraversion results were medium which suggests you are moderately talkative, outgoing, sociable and interacting.

changeable, in the middle, suspicious, somewhat traditional, dislikes chaos, down to earth, group oriented, practical… you scored in the middle on the overall factors of this test.

• Success requires obsessive desire; co-ordinated thoughts, aims and actions; concentrated energy, and constant application.  With all this in place, it’s easy to be successful.
• Nobody trips over mountains.  It is the little stones that cause us to stumble.
• The most effective answer to any insult is silence.

There are more, but that’ll do

Oh and I leave you all with this;

The little penguin is me

Things that have happened recently;

• I’ve hired a new chap to work within Berkeley IT on the customer support side
• The PA hire company is alive and somehow taking bookings, though the site isnt finished
• I have another office for my mini empire in Soho on Charlotte Street
• I have sold my MR2 (a very very very sad day!)
• My baby sister has started uni - so shes not a baby, but shes my little sister so sssh

Things I am pleased about;

• I have my physical and mental health (though on the later a lot of people would disagree!)
• Business is growing slowly
• I have the support of my family
• I get to have fun from time to time – racing at Silverstone this weekend

Things that could be better;

• I feel “alone” all the time… my own doing, but you cant have everything you want in live
• Ninjitsu training has taken a back seat recently, need to start going again

Thats about it for now.

I am taking my laptop on Sunday to make sure that no photos are lost!

Hamlesh out.

 

Crappy camera phone picture

What is it?  Well its on a petrol station forecourt and reads “Park here for T-Mobile WiFi”.  The parking bay was marked as “WiFi”.  I thought it was highly amusing that T-Mobile would go as far as to create a designated area on a petrol station forecourt designated just for WiFi.  Desperation? 

I was driving to my mums place last night, in the pouring rain, and was amused to be overtaken by an Ariel Atom.  The guy driving it must have been nuttier than I!  For those who don’t know what an Atom is;

Its essentially a road legal crazy mans car.  Having a 2L engine and weighing less than 500Kg… personally not something I would drive in the pouring rain.  Although it is a car in my dream garage

I managed to snatch a really bad camera phone shot;

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