blog.species5618.net » Technology

A step away from the norm

Lee Hampton-Whitehead — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 09:51:02 +0000

Still not sure exactly why, but i have been considering a tatto for a few months. However I don’t get the traditional tattoo artworks, gothic imagery, skulls, names etc etc.

So the hunt was on for something different, original and most of all very me.

Thought about various electronic references, ohms law, resonant frequency or Q formulas, but a bit to obscure for main stream people.

So along came bar codes, plenty of forums later, I started to look at standard type 39 barcodes, but to get something meaningful in, and have a chance of it scanning, it would need to be VERY long
So 2D barcodes had to be considered, QR Code seems to be the current 2D format that most people recognise, and is supported by plenty of moble phone scanners.

Still has to be quite large to scan, but it just had to be done.

After 2.5 hours sat in a Gloucester tattoo studio, I now have a QR Code Tattoo, best of all it scans too!
Though i am not sure if Greg will ever do another QR Code.

More andriod

Species5618 — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 08:50:35 +0000

Testing geotag feature in android wordpress app

Test test

Social networking and teenagers

Species5618 — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:26:27 +0000

Over the past few days I have seen teenagers using social networking (facebook in this case) in a interesting way.

On Saturday (14th June) morning, a 19 year lad (Karl Hampton) was killed in a car accident. Within hours his friends had created facebook group (R.I.P Karl Hampton) which 4 days later had 270 members and 80 heart felt comments?? on his wall

CEX CON

Species5618 — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 08:50:16 +0000

I walk past a CEX shop on the way to the office from the buis stop every morning. If an attack of boredom strikes, of the need to get a TECH fix, I have a wonder in.

I have never understaood their pricing structure, in the past i have seen

2nd hand Wii’s 30 quid more then a NEW one next door
Pink DS 40 quid more than a new on, in stock in Argos

yet today??I was surprised to see them selling SIM packs for 3.99 or 4.99 which are available in the high street for free, or 1.99 (in the case of THREE, and that was direct from a THREE shop)??

What is High Availability? When do you need it? How do you create it and how do you measure it?

Species5618 — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 14:04:46 +0000

I am busy designing and building infrastructure for various “as a Service” service offerings

Web as a Service (IIS)
Data as a Service (SQL and Oracle)
Middleware as a Service

So I thought I would float a few questions

What is High Availability?
When do you need it?
How do you create it?
How do you measure it?

DISCUSS !!

[UPDATE]

Here is my two penneth,

Webservers Extreme

Species5618 — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 20:10:49 +0000

Just in case anyone wondered what I actually do for a living, I build world class web hosting platforms. We are talking up to a Terabyte of content and 8-10 Million hits per day. So when a friend of a friend said he was having trouble with a site getting 190,000 hit per day, i did a detailed analysis and made some recomendations.

Then I hear they have been and done something completely different, and possibly daft.

Well I say good luck to him

Disk based backups and Earthquakes

Species5618 — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 10:05:43 +0000

About a month ago I was in an infrastructure meeting discussing backup strategy. The conversation was around disk based backups such as near store and Virtual tape libraries.
So I asked the question “do we know how these disk based backup system cope with earth quakes?”
As yesterdays data could be on the same disk that is being access today, a disk level corruption could be “interesting”
As the point in time I got laughed at, “Earthquakes, yeh right !”

Does not seem such a silly question now does it !

From BBC The biggest earthquake in the UK for nearly 25 years has shaken homes across large parts of the country.”

Curriculum Vitae

Species5618 — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 11:16:21 +0000

What make a good technical Curriculum Vitae?
The Internet is flooded with differing opinions,
The only consistent thing seem to be lots of white space to aid reading and the following points in order

Personal details
Career Objective/Summary
Personal skills
Summary of skills (the technical page)
Work history (listing the most recent position first)

Outside of that, 2 pages, 4 pages, or 10 (if you have enough relevant content)
So lets say you have 4, will one of the 2 pages max HR / PIMP people chuck it straight in the shredder.?? Or you don???t have time to tweak a CV for a particular post, and they are looking for a skill you have left out to make it fit 2 pages.?? Catch22

Suggestions on a postcard !

Digital TV

Species5618 — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 11:27:22 +0000

HORRAY

Currys, Dixons and PC World are to stop stocking analogue televisions and will instead promote “integrated” sets with built-in digital Freeview tuners.

Nintendo DS WiFI

Species5618 — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 10:50:15 +0000

My son got a copy of the Nintendo DS transformers game for XMAS, and decided to try out the WiFi features over the weekend.
I had heard the some WiFi routers and access point do not work well as the DS wireless if not fully WiFi compliant. They aren???t kidding, more like not RFC compliant in many areas.
NO support for NON wep security
A TCP/IP stack that does not confirm it has taken the DHCP address it was offered and then does not respond to ping, instead it just uses it and says nothing, so the next new device connects to the network, gets the same address, and the DS gets kicked off,