Tag: Work

Categories
Life Mountain Biking

Recent Tech Discoveries (July 09 edition)

Some Recent Tech Discoveries I thought I’d share:

The Good:

Windows 7 RC – writing the blog post from it – excellent OS (and that says a lot coming from me!)

Ubuntu 9.04 -What can I say – wow – is the OS market hotting up or what? Right when they said the Browser will be the O/S – we’ll we aren’t there yet (well not until Google’s Chrome OS anyway…)

Spotify – sure lots of people know about this one now but great streaming music service. Kind of like a commercial radio station where you get to choose the playlist. But native version for Linux would be nice (netbooks will make this kind of porting happen organically now I suspect??)

Bitly – specifically the Bit.ly Sidebar for your browser – very clever. You’ll notice I’m starting to use more bit.ly links in my blog posts but for Twitter they are essential.

The Bad:

ebox – Not a good move to just try and install this on a Ubuntu box (tried this at home) screwed lots of stuff up. Nice idea but if you want to try it out use a seperate box. It looks good and the concept is a great idea but I think its a bit too flawed for me right now (sorry ebox devs).

Denyhosts (prevents brute force attacks on SSH by adding IP addresses that repeatedly fail to login to a black list – in /etc/hosts.deny)  silently stopped working some time ago on my Ubuntu server (due to an upgrade of Python by the looks of things). Following the fix on this forum thread sorted the problem although I found the file you need to change is:  /usr/share/denyhosts/daemon-control-dist rather than the one mentioned.

The Ugly:

HMG Info Sec standards (or rather the OTT implementation of) – I probably can’t say any more or I’ll get burned in acid (its a long and painful story…!)

More posts to come. Enjoy the summer everyone. I intend to on a ride around Litchfield tomorrow – embedded Google Map to follow no doubt…!


Categories
Cycling Life

General Ollie Update

2009 has been pretty busy so far – as you can see from the lack of activity on here! Its almost 3 months in ’09 and this is my first post!

For those of you interested in what I’ve been up to…

At work – we are in our busy end of FY period, I’ve been going to Brussels quite a bit for a project for the European Commission. Experienced a first – a meeting/workshop with (almost all) the EU Member state countries which was really interesting.

Lots of other exciting projects kicking off at the moment – looks like I will continue to be busy well into the next FY, which is good. Fingers crossed the economic downturn isn’t used as an excuse/ is a cause for cutting back on environmental and climate change projects.

On a personal level (also linked to work) Kat and I signed up to participate in trials for a new type of improved home thermostat (‘chrono-proportional’) for the EST (its a project that work are running).  It involves putting a few temperature sensors up indoors (and one outside) and we submit weekly gas/elec meter readings. These will monitor the effectiveness of our current thermostat – then later in the year we will have a new type of thermostat fitted and we’ll do the monitoring again.

The improved weather means I’m out on the bike alot more now which is good news, have also combined the riding with my new toy (which I got for Christmas) a Digital SLR camera – I’ll probably post up some photos soon.

Recent/Interesting Web Links:

Came across www.goodguide.com which is a product comparision site which lists how ethically produced,/green/healthy products are. Bit US specific at the moment but worth keeping an eye on.

An article on The Guardian’s (Free) Open Content API and DataStore. In fact the whole http://infosthetics.com website is worth a look at.

I’ve started playing around a bit with Twitter – have to say I was (and still am a bit) skeptical of this – so we’ll see how long I use it for. So far I have linked it with my Facebook status messages. Perhaps there’s a way of linking WordPress to it so it can announce new posts?

Thats it for now – hopefully it won’t be as long until my next post!

Categories
Environment Technology

Some recent browsing (Green Issues, SOA, Dashboards)

Some sites that I found interesting recently…

I’ve been looking at quite a lot of Green IT/Business type issues recently www.climatechangecorp.com is a good site (even if it does heavily promote its events on the content).

Carbon Calculators article: http://www.climatechangecorp.com/content.asp?ContentID=5119 Its disappointing it mentions AEA only in the context of providing the emissions factors – we actually do a whole lot more including building online carbon/emissions data platforms (and calculators) ourselves.

Great article from Adobe on Web 2.0, SOA etc – gives a great overview: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/articles/web_end.html

Sun Microsystems came into to talk to us about their Java CAPS recently and it looks really interesting. We’ve already started to look at NetBeans IDE more closely (particularly the PHP plugin and its SOA/Business Process (BPEL) diagram/visualisation to BPEL XML code features…

See http://www.sun.com/software/javaenterprisesystem/javacaps/index.jsp

Dashboards, Flex with PHP etc:

One of my current projects is update our (data) visualisation and dashboard piece of our offering – as such we’ve been researching whats out there that we could use to enhance our technology stack:

Flex and PHP http://devzone.zend.com/article/3580-Building-Dashboards-With-PHP-and-Flex

Zend Framework/Adobe Media Remoting – http://corlan.org/2008/11/13/flex-and-php-remoting-with-zend-amf/

Interestingly Microsoft seem to be about to launch a new Dynamics AX product which is focused at Environmental data management – interesting to see the main IT vendors start to move into the space that we’ve been in for some time. This is really good news as it will give more deployment and integration options moving forward (eg for customers already using Dynamics).

Categories
Open Source PHP Technology Web Development Zend Framework

New Zend/AEA Framework based Intranet deployed @ work

Today we put live the new Intranet at AEA which has been Kat’s major project (should get to spend more time with her now its launched!) with some support from me and impressive efforts from the dev team.

Previously we had a static HTML Intranet which wasn’t really serving the needs of the business as well as it could. The new site is based on the AEA Framework – which I’ve blogged about a bit before. Essentially an extension of the Zend Framework glueing Silverstripe and other 3rd party components together with a single sign on approach (in this case we are also using LDAP to do logins from our current Novell infrastructure). We built on our HTML content crawler tool to hoover in the static HTML into the Content Management System.

Over time we will leverage the framework to create more efficient web 2.0 style business processes and work with PPC to combine it with other off the shelf tools that they specialise in; and hopefully push it globally across the group…

I’ve also had some exciting news this week which I will share when I can.

All exciting stuff!

Categories
Environment Web Development

New AEA website

Really impressed with the work my colleagues have done on the new AEA website (http://www.aeat.co.uk). This also includes the ecopath website which will be vastly expanded in due course.

AEA home pageI can’t claim to have been hugely involved (other than some bits and pieces behind the scenes) although this is partly because they kicked off the project whilst I was in Paris (talk about quick turn around!). The plan is to move it to the Silverstripe CMS in due course which will make management and updates easier.