Celsius wins at 2011 UK IT Industry Awards

I'll be talking about how our celsius product won the Infrastructure Innovation of the Year Award at the 2011 UK IT Industry Awards at 06:20 on 12/12/2011 - BBC Radio Cambridgeshire.

BBC Micro is 30 years old!

A great article on the BBC Micro which is 30 years old today http://www.reghardware.com/2011/11/30/bbc_micro_model_b_30th_anniversary/. The BBC Model B was my third computer (after a self-assembled ZX80, and a ZX81 and excluding the school Research Machines RML 380Z which I exclusivly used but never really owned). Those were the days! I remember saving up all my paper round money to go on an Acorn dealer courses for the BBC Micro when I was about 17. It cost a fortune to go on the 5 day course. To their great credit Acorn never invoiced me for that course. I guess sitting at the front and asking all the questions has some benifit. Cheers Acorn!

It's strange now that I'm based in Cambridge and occasionally bump into people who were involved with Acorn / Sinclair in the old days.

Silicon Valley comes to Cambridge

Looking forward to meeting Reid Hoffman (Chairman of LinkedIn) and numerous other of the most exciting and disruptive Silicon Valley companies (Apple, Google...) at the Silicon Valley comes to UK event in Cambridge on Friday. Alquist are one of the showcase companies exhibiting at the event. It should be an interesting day!

UK IT Industry Awards

Great news! We won the 2011 UK IT Industry award for Infrastructure Innovation with celsius, our high definition temperature monitoring solution for data centres. The award was presented to us by TV funny man, Alexander Armstrong.

Alquist's celsius product has been named as a finalist in the British Computer Society & Computing UK IT Industry Awards 2011, in the category of Infrastructure Innovation of the Year.

The UK IT Awards are a platform for the entire profession to celebrate best practice, innovation and excellence. The shortlisted organisations have been selected based on their business success in the past 12 months, and demonstrable high levels of customer satisfaction and business benefits from the users of their products and services, with judges considering each on its merits in terms of professionalism, excellence, innovation and measurable success.

With the announcement of the finalists, David Clarke, Chief Executive Officer, BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, said: “Congratulations to the finalists; the competition to reach this stage of our prestigious Awards is tough. Our Awards are central to our mission to recognise the innovation and professionalism of those working in IT and I’m delighted that every year we have such a variety of high quality entries. They are an excellent reflection of the impact IT has on so many aspects of our information society and the potential IT has to transform business, society and our lives.”

Abigail Waraker, Editor of Computing commented: “I would like to congratulate the finalists. The UK IT Industry Awards are rigorously judged and to be announced as a finalist is a great achievement.”

The award ceremony itself will take place in London on 10th November.
 
See http://www.ukitindustryawards.co.uk/ and Computing Magazine Article

Datacenter Leaders Award winner

I am delighted that our cwww.alquist.co.uk/products.aspxelsius product won the 2010 DataCenterDynamics "Future Thinking and Design Concepts" award. Presented by comedian Rory Bremner at the Lancaster London hotel on Thursday 16 December 2010. For more information please see www.datacenterdynamics.com/awards

Vodafone Sure Signal with Vigor 2820

In order to get my Vodafone Sure Signal to work with my Vigor 2820 router I needed to make the following changes on the Router. The Vigor 2820 is running firmware 3.3.4_232201.

The Sure Signal uses DHCP to get an IP address. I made sure I had allocated a fixed address using the LAN->Bind IP to MAC menu. The MAC address is shown on the Sure Signal serial sticker.

From the NAT->Open Ports menu I added an entry to the list of open ports

I named the entry “Vodafone Sure Signal”, entered the fixed IP address of the Sure Signal (192.168.65.2 in my case, yours will undoubtedly be different) and entered the following port numbers.

TCP   Port 50
UDP   Port 500
UDP   Port 4500

Once all the settings were made it took about 15 minutes before the @ light stopped flashing slowly and the bottom green tick light came on.

The lights now look like this :

(all lights are on and not flashing)

And for the first time in 7 years I have a 5 bar 3G mobile signal at home!

Until now I’ve not been able to get any signal at all. Fantastic, I can finally use my phone!

New iPhone 4

My new Vodafone iPhone 4 arrived today. I was previously with O2 but switched to Vodafone so i could use their Sure Signal Femto Cell repeater.

I was worried that switching networks would be a problem. I’m pleased to report it was very straightforward.

I plugged the new iPhone4 into my PC. iTunes recognised the new phone and restored my old 3G settings. After about 30 minutes of copying files it was all working and my old number was working on the new network.

The only thing I had to do was re-enter my Wi-Fi and email passwords.

It was really easy despite changing networks.

The only annoying thing with Vodafone is that they do not seem to support visual voicemail on the iPhone 4. Apart from that moving networks was very easy.