All the way from Cambridge » Work

Today the Compellent kit gets installed…..

pctony — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 08:14:39 +0000

The Library compellent kit gets installed. Looking good so far.

CARET – We’re looking for two developers.

pctony — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 12:08:19 +0000

My current employer CARET, part of the University of Cambridge, are looking for two intrepid folks to come and join us as developers here in Cambridge.

There are currently two positions, one as developer here, and one as a more senior developer/architect here.

I have been at CARET for just short of 6 months, and during that time I have almost adjusted to the academic way of life.

New Job: Day 1

pctony — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 11:19:48 +0000

I completed day 1, at Caret yesterday. All in all things went really well. It’s just so painful having to start over from scratch, learning new systems, what’s where, who’s who, what not to do etc. Especially coming from a company where I had grown to know all of the clients, their environments, quirks etc. So slow.

But by far the hardest part of the new job was writing a poster to go in the kitchen, entitled “About Me”. Bah, I really do not like writing about myself in that style, I find it hard not to sound like a knob, which most of you know I fail at most of the time anyway

I now cycle to and from work each day, which shockingly means I cycle 15m a day. Bloody hell! That’s a lot. Right? For someone who is used to getting a train, tube, bus, cab everywhere for work it sure feels like a lot of work for no gain each day. But I’m hoping that over time I wont notice the cycle quite so much. Here’s hoping anyway.

Flash on a TS/Citrix Server

pctony — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:33:48 +0000

I have been battling to get this working, properly when deployed on a Windows 2003 SP2 or above server.
Earlier this afternoon I found this article buried in the Adobe forum, guess what, it works! Much to my amazement.

One for the ‘note-to-self’ category

Download the latest Flash uninstaller on this page, and place it somewhere on your hard disk (C:\Temp is a good place)
Open a command prompt, navigate to the folder where you placed the uninstaller and run it with the “/clean” option, like this: “uninstall_flash_player.exe /clean” (without quotes – thanks Adobe for so clearly documenting any command line options for this tool…NOT !)
Click the Details button. If it lists any files as “Delete on reboot”, then reboot now. Otherwise, just carry on.
Download the EXE installation package from here
Use the Control Panel Add/Remove programs method to install it. This ensures that the Windows install notification API triggers correctly (as opposed to executing change user /install in a command prompt).
Use regedit and find the following key: HKCR\CLSID\{D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000} (on 64-bit Windows this one is located under HKCR\Wow6432Node\CLSID\{D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000})
Remove any permissions for the Everyone group. click Advanced and tick the box to propagate the permissions to all child objects.
Add the Everyone group and give it “Read” permissions on the key. Again, click the Advanced button and propagate the permissions to all child objects.
Repeat steps 6 to 8 on the subsequent key, called HKCR\CLSID\{D27CDB70-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000}

Works like a charm, now I have TS server that is grinding to a halt with all the Flash and Shockwave content running. Bah.

webroot – wow how good?

pctony — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:56:30 +0000

Earlier today I was on the end of yet another presentation. Only this time I walked out wanting to buy the service(s) on offer. Webroot are a provider of hosted email, and web filtering tools. My employer currently uses an alternate solution, but sufficed to say after today’s meeting we may be looking elsewhere.

The product is far superior to that of all it’s competitors. 24×7 support, true TLS support, BC capabilities, mail archiving and LDAP support. The presentation literally blew me away with the features, quality of the product and more simply the speed of the portal.

I am hopeful this will be the end to a few of my bugbears with the current supplier.

Sat by the pool looking out to sea…

pctony — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 11:53:41 +0000

I am currently look out to sea from the side of the pool here in Cyprus. The north Africa coast line cannot be seen, though I am told it is only a little beyond the horizon. I am waiting for my client to pick me up, so we can go and finish off the work.

The weather is incredibly hot, I have not seen a single cloud since we descending through them on our approach into the airport on thursday. From here I can see 3 large tankers waiting to empty their cargo of fresh drinking water [1] – they dont seem to have moved in over 2 days. Odd considering the state of the water in Cyrpus.

I leave tomorrow afternoon, which wont be a moment too soon. Whilst I am away on business trips I dont really feel all that relaxed and with the extremley slow pace of life in Cyprus I just dont like being here. Bring on tomorrow afternoon, and my 5 hour flight home.

Hmm home. Proper tea, wind, rain, English sun, and my wife. Yeah.. hmmm home.

[1] – http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080716/od_nm/water_dc

Travlleing to Limmasol, Cyprus

pctony — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 01:15:45 +0000

I’m off to to Cyprus late next week (for work, alas). Not to keen on the place really, Limmasol reminds me (in the touristy parts at least) of Blackpool. If you’d spent 18+ years in Blackpool you’d probably rather not be reminded of it either.

I will be flying with BA, passing through T5 at LHR. It seems that the initial bugs have been ironed out, and baggage seems to be making it to same place as the passanger. Which is a good thing, the heat in Cyprus at the moment is quite staggering and fresh clothing is going to be a must.