Switch Systems Blog

Youtube: one hour per second

Kris Sum — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 08:19:21 +0000

Youtube have an awesome series of infographics based on the fact that “every second, one hour of video is uploaded to youtube”.

See for yourself at www.onehourpersecond.com

Comet accused by Microsoft of selling counterfit recovery CDs

Kris Sum — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 14:34:43 +0000

ArsTechnica Reports on a High Court filing in the UK by Microsoft that Comet created and sold “more than 94,000 sets of counterfeit Windows Vista and Windows XP recovery CDs” source: Microsoft News Centre.

The recovery discs were being sold to customers for £14.99 when customers already have a recovery partition on their computer with the ability to create rescue media.

Comet have responded stating that they were acting in the interest of the customer, due to the policy change that OEM Microsoft operating system installs would not ship with recovery discs.

Exeter Impact Awards

Kris Sum — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 17:06:47 +0000

Congratulations to all who were shortlisted for last nights inaugural Exeter Impact awards held by the University of Exeter. An enjoyable evening with good company, good food, and even a few laughs!

Thank you to all of the RKT team for all their hard work in putting the event together.

Christmas Opening Hours

Kris Sum — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 12:29:45 +0000

Our opening hours over christmas and new years will be:

Friday 23rd December
09:00 – 13:00 (Half Day)
Saturday 24th December
Closed
Sunday 25th December
Closed
Monday 26th December
Closed
Tuesday 27th December to Friday 30th December
09:00 – 13:00 (Half Day)
Saturday 31st December
Closed
Sunday 1st January
Closed
Monday 2nd January
Closed
Tuesday 3rd January
Open as usual

As usual, our out-of-hours emergency contact number will be available 24/7, and we will be regularly checking phones and email so please leave a message if you need to contact us over the festive period.

Stay tuned for our exciting new newsletter, which should be arriving soon!

Kris’ datacentre exploits go largly un-noticed as he avoids imploding the internet …

Kris Sum — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 16:20:49 +0000

So last friday’s datacentre upgrade went well I thought, no cuts or bruises, no data loss… plus I got to the data centre in 4 hours which is pretty good going from down here in the south west!

After signing in, I walked up to the cage where our servers sit. I took a couple of sneaky pictures – i wasn’t sure whether I was allowed to take pictures or not inside the ‘secure area’!

Above: yes people, this is what the internet looks like! Dry air-conditioned floors with raised floors, cable raceways, secure cages and flashing lights.

So the plan was to take out our old 4U VMware server and replace it with two newer, smaller (1U), and much more powerful machines. Then I remembered this server was racked at the top of the cabinet, making it’s removal a very carefully executed operation!

Above: that’s quite high. and that server is v. heavy!

In goes our new gear:

Job done!

Many thanks to the entire Switch Systems team for all their planning and preparation work, making this complete hardware change an operation which only resulted in 90 minutes of downtime (not that I think anyone noticed, as our existing contingency measures meant everything kept running anyway!)

Thailand HD manufacturing shortage expected to last 3-6 months

Kris Sum — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 15:50:50 +0000

From “The Register“, Western Digital are sending in divers to help recover some of their flooded HD manufacturing gear. Analysts estimate that 48 million less drives will be shipped in the last quarter of this year because of the devastating flooding.

bbc weather website beta

Kris Sum — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 19:43:32 +0000

The new website for the bbc weather service is shaping up quite nicely

Microsoft Productivity Future Vision 2011

Kris Sum — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 12:22:06 +0000

Microsoft have done another ‘vision’ video, this is thier 2011 future vision of office productivity. Nice.

Dynamics CRM update brings shiny new features…

Kris Sum — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:29:09 +0000

The new November Microsoft Dynamics CRM update brings facebook and twitter style social feeds (activity streams, walls, etc) to CRM, better windows phone 7 support, tighter integration and more.. There’s also the promise of Firefox/Chrome/Safari support in the first half of 2012 (yippee!). Check out the video posted.

An alternative to Synergy for PCs on microsoft operating systems…

Kris Sum — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:05:47 +0000

Recently released was “Mouse without Borders“, a Synergy like program which lets you share one keyboard/mouse/monitor across multiple computers. The killer feature of MouseWithoutBorders is that you can copy&paste, drag&drop files (!), and lock/logon multiple workstations simultaniously. Unfortunately it only supports up to 4 devices, but it’s definately worth trying out.