Glo Networks Technical Blog (Glo Blog)

The entire team at Glo Networks wishes you all a very happy holiday. Now that the politeness is over let the real party begin; Interesting Links of the Week!

• With the release of Tron you’d have to expect some news from an IT company about how the original film shaped our childhood passion for computers. Thankfully I’ll spare you the inane rabbiting of several nerds. Instead I’ll tell you that the original Tron film’s greatest legacy is Perlin noise. In short it’s a method to help create textures, on the fly, increasing realism and decreasing storage requirements. Both computer games and films still use this technique to this day.
• On the 10th day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, a new IE 0-day [exploit].
• IBM being IBM are making some interesting predictions this Christmas. Ok, so they’ve not been entirely spot on recently, but who is? I for one will welcome our new holographic robot overlords, powered by air breathing batteries.
• IBM promises faster, high capacity, memory, called Racetrack. Ok, so the name isn’t great, but it does look like very promising tech.
• Skype are now reporting that they’ve finally recovered from their major outage problems, which began on Wednesday. I will say that we’re still having the odd sign in problem here at Glo Networks towers, but thankfully it’s nothing customer-service affecting – just incase you wanted to call us!
• When considering Cloud Computing services you want to ensure that you’re not just considering technical requirements. Something that we’ve discovered some of our clients seem to be forgetting is that you need to consider just how much you trust your cloud provider. This week Microsoft BPOS (that’s Business Productivity Online Suite – soon to be Office365) leaked data. Thankfully, this time, it’s not a massive amount – just offline address books.
• With IPv4 addresses getting even closer to running low, and the end of the year coming up, BGPMon.net have published their findings on how well the world is getting on with IPv6 deployment. Whilst we’re not yet publically IPv6 accessible this is something that we’re working on here at Glo Networks. Like many people the problem that we’re encountering is one of a chicken and egg scenario. It’s not just carriers, colocation and dedicated server providers – hardware, software and best practises are still profoundly lacking.

Posted by Karl in General | No Comments »

We currently use Glo Remote to look at a users screen and diagnose a problem. This enables us to effectively cover a much larger area of the country than before (who is going to wait 6 hours for me to drive there!)  with response times in the minutes (average response last month was 3!).

HP Server’s have had something called Integrated Lights out  (iLO), IBM have Intergrated Management Module (IMM) they all do similar things they allow out of band (not running an OS) access to the Server, allowing for restarts, bios updates etc.  However, we haven’t in the past been able to look at a PC at these levels or that are not booting, have crashed, or are off.  All this is going to change in the near future, with new technology being brought in by Intel. It’s calledAMT and is available on Laptops and PC’s with core i5′s and i7′s (there are rumours of it working on lesser processors).

Requirements:

Processor with AMT support.

Intel PRO network card ( again it needs to support AMT)  installed to work with it. Be careful of this  as it won’t work with others!

We are starting to look at this great piece of tech, and once we have got our heads round it we will give you  more of an insight on how this works in the early new year.

Posted by JamesC in General, Laptop Hardware | No Comments »

• The FBI have allegedly ‘planted a backdoor’ in the OpenBSD IPSec framework. Potentially quite important if it turns out to be true as this code is embedded in various hardware and other software solutions.
• Being nerds we love space, so imagine our joy when we saw a giant map detailing every space mission from the last 50 years.
• IBM being awesome are trying to take on Jeopardy winners with their latest supercomputer. You should check out the video, its pretty impressive.
• Ever wondered how a quartz watch works?
• If you can put up with the trailers, and have any interest in games, you should check out the behind the scenes on LA Noire’s body and facial motion capture.
• Yahoo! are! shutting! down! Delicious, Altavista, MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Picks. Some of us here have a soft spot for Altavista and Delicious. It’ll be sad to see them go.
• Looking for something to do with the kids this christmas? Papercraft. It just seems coincidental that a lot of addictive things have a suffix of “craft”; World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Minecraft, Arts and crafts, needlecraft. Papercraft.
• Word Lens Translates Words Inside of Images. Yes Really. It’s awesome.

Posted by Karl in Cool Stuff, General | No Comments »

I would like to say that nothing really happened in the tech world last week, but unfortunately real work got in the way of us browsing the internet here at Glo Towers, even “out of hours”. If you were secretly hoping that it meant that this week was a bumper edition of the Interesting Links of the Week then you’re going to be disappointed.

However, if you are looking for a break from hearing about the UK snow, cold and WikiLeaks, then this is definitely the post to read.

• Last year we wrote an article about working from home, and it turns out that it’s just as relevant this year! Who’d have thought it? Rather then rewrite the whole article in 2010′s vernacular, we’re just going to link to the previous article: Winter Freeze – Wales needs to continue development of remote working to keep business open. I promise that’s the last snow related news you’ll hear from us in this post.
• Acer replaces laptop keyboard with multi-touch LCD. This innovative laptop has got us salavating here at Glo. Being geeks and nerds we can see all sorts of applications, and we’ll be honest; some of those uses aren’t connected to D&D or World of Warcraft!
• Soon silicon chips will communicating via light pulses, rather than electrical charge, thanks to IBM’s nanophotonic technology. We could see it in servers and desktops before 2016, allowing them to operate at much higher speeds. Of course it maybe slightly depressing that this will purely mean that most of the world just gets to see hilarious pictures of cats much quicker.
• I would like to say that in this day and age many people in the world will have played Pacman, but as my younger sister pointed out that number may actually start decreasing. However, if you have played it, and want an edge for your families up and coming Pacman tournament, you may want to read up on the Pacman ghost behaviour. It’s a really interesting article for beginner AI programmers and players alike.
• A mandatory AVG 2011 update released on the 1st of December 2010 left a Windows 7 x64 computers unable to boot. Fortunately there is a fix listed on the AVG website, however for some users this maybe an issue.
• Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) Alpha 1 CD images shipped yesterday. If you’re wanting to check out the soon to be newest version of Ubuntu, check out the download link. You may want to check out Jono Bacon’s instructions on getting it to run off a USB stick, after all it is pre-release “alpha” software.
• Sadly the world is starting to see a return of larger scale Ransomware. If you’re not familiar with it, Ransomware is malware that encrypts your data. Normally the encryption is so up to date that it’s near impossible to crack in a reasonable timeframe, meaning that you generally either need to go back to a backup,  start again, or accept defeat.
• Getting to work with new web technologies is a great talk from David Barrett. Thankfully his slides are outstanding and you can easily follow along without David being present. If you’re professional web developer only just taking a look at all the new cool web tech, or even if you’re an amateur this is a great place to start. Combine this with the HTML5 Boilerplate and you could be really flying.

Posted by Karl in Cool Stuff, General | No Comments »