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Update on my Fit at 40 challenge

Posted on Saturday 26 March 2011Saturday 26 November 2011 By Mark Wilson

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my Fit at 40 challenge including some of the personal reasons that are driving me to lose weight, keep fit and raise money for The Prostate Cancer Charity.

I said I’d keep people informed on my progress and I’m pleased to say that, this weekend, the scales finally tipped in at 106kg, which is just under 16st 10lb, meaning I’ve lost my first stone!

As for the running, I’m consistently getting out 2 or 3 times a week (usually 3) and adding some cycling in between – I’ve had some problems over recent weeks as I’m running in the evenings when I’m tired/run-down but I am making some progress – my times for the loop around town (about 2.65 miles/4.25 km) have been dropping (although I’d like them to drop a bit more!), and I’m pushing a little further on the weekends too with a run around the local country park (about 3.4 miles/5.5 km).

I have to say that the support I’ve received so far has been amazing – and that support has taken a number of forms – financial, practical, and motivational:

Lots of people have donated at my JustGiving page and many more have promised support when I write to tell them how I’m doing – after all, this is a long term challenge and it’s great motivation when people add a little more to the pot each time I take a (metaphorical) step forward.
Some of of the guys in the street have provided physical support by accompanying me on my runs – it’s good exercise for all of us, and it’s great motivation to make me run (and the light evenings should help more).
There’s also been some great financial support from my family and friends (who would all like to see a fitter, healthier Mark), including one friend and former colleague who surprised me by showing just how well he knows me. Garry Martin has generously offered to match donations from anyone who knows us both, up to a ceiling of £500. There’s a catch though – if I don’t complete the challenge, Garry pays out nothing. That’s because he figured it’s too easy for me to go part way, congratulate myself and say “that’s enough”. He’s right too – so we’ve agreed some realistic and challenging targets that I need to meet. I need to get down to 14st 7lb by my 40th birthday next year, and run at least 3 races of 10km or above. That’s going to be hard, but it’s also realistic – and achievable… although I’d like to hope that I might exceed these targets too.

The next challenge is the Harrold Pit Run, on 30 April, before my big push for the BUPA London 10K on 30 May – I’m hoping that I can shed at least another half stone over that period too, as lugging my not-inconsiderable bulk around must be making things harder!

If you’d like to support me in my quest, either as a one-off sponsorship, or as a “micro-donation” of £1 or £2 each time I lose a chunk of weight or run a race, please visit my JustGiving page. If you’re a UK tax payer, please check the option to add gift aid (which means your £1 is worth £1.28 to charity). If you know Garry too, then remember that your donation counts twice (your £1 plus gift aid, is effectively £2.56 when Garry matches it).

Thanks to everyone who has supported me so far – and thanks for your continued support.

It’s worth hunting around for updated software for mobile data devices

Posted on Wednesday 23 March 2011Monday 21 January 2013 By Mark Wilson

Back in 2007, I wrote about the fun and games I had getting a Vodafone PC card working with Windows Vista and I revisited the topic in 2009 with Mac OS X. Thankfully, things have moved on since then but, a few weeks ago, I was issued with a replacement modem for mobile data, as part of a change of mobile operator. The new device is an O2 Business USB Modem 889 and the fact that it’s a USB device rather than a PC card is great (it means it works with more of my computers) but the software it ships with is awful, presenting a Windows XP-like skin, even on my Windows 7 system!

Since my computer was rebuilt to corporate standards a few weeks ago, I’ve been making a concerted effort to avoid installing any unnecessary components (although somebody has put an in house “display manager” on the build, despite there being a perfectly good one that’s just a Windows+P keypress away, and HP’s printer driver for my company-supplied OfficeJet 6310 at home installed a pile of crapware). My intention was to simply install drivers for my USB modem, then follow a colleague’s advice to create a dial-up connection with the HSPA modem as follows:

Modem initialisation to +cgdcont=1,"IP","mobile.o2.co.uk"
Dial-up number to *99#
Username and password for the dial-up connection set to o2web and password

The problem with this is that my colleague was setting his environment up inside a virtual machine, using virtual network drivers to map to the underlying host’s hardware. I’m running directly on the hardware (non-virtualised) and I couldn’t find the drivers for my device.

Using the USB ID Repository, I was able to check that my device was a Sierra Wireless (1199) device (actually, the label on the device would have helped there too) and I was also able to see from the markings on the device that it is a Compass 889. After checking out the Sierra Wireless website, I found updated software for my modem, even a version for my carrier (O2) but nothing that seemed to offer naked drivers without any additional applications. As it happens, the latest version of the Sierra Wireless Aircard Watcher installed without any issues and it seems much better than the software that O2 originally shipped with the device – although it’s interesting to note that this device is now officially end of life, despite mine only having been shipped in recent weeks.

I guess the main point of this post is to say “hunt around” – you may find that there is updated software for your device, from either the OEM or the carrier, that provides a better experience than the version shipped out-of-the-box.

[Update: I had cause to download the Sierra Wireless Aircard Watcher again tonight and it seems the download location has changed in the last couple of years]

Rescheduled: Connecting on-premise applications with the Windows Azure platform (Windows Server User Group)

Posted on Wednesday 23 March 2011Monday 11 April 2011 By Mark Wilson

Last week, I wrote about a Live Meeting I was running for the Windows Server User Group (WSUG), looking at using Windows Azure Connect to connect on-premise server infrastructure with Microsoft’s public cloud offering.

If you tried to attend that meeting, I’m sorry, but due to some logistical difficulties that were outside my control, the meeting was unable to go ahead at the advertised time and, although we e-mailed everyone who had registered, I’m sorry if you didn’t get the message until it was too late.

I’m pleased to say that this event has now been rescheduled for the same time (19:00 – although by then we’ll be on BST not GMT) next Monday (28 March 2011).

Please accept my apologies for the short notice we gave last night, and please do register for the rescheduled meeting.

[A version of this post also appears on the Windows Server User Group blog]

Why the consumerisation of IT is nothing to do with iPads

Posted on Tuesday 22 March 2011Thursday 24 May 2012 By Mark Wilson

Last week, I wrote a post on the Fujitsu UK and Ireland CTO Blog about the need to adapt and evolve, or face extinction (in an IT context). IT consumerisation was a key theme of that post and, the next evening, at my first London Cloud Camp, I found myself watching Joe Baguley (EMEA CTO at Quest Software) giving a superb 5 minute presentation on “‘How the public cloud is exciting CEOs and scaring CIOs; IT Consumerisation is here to stay'” – and I’ve taken the liberty (actually, I did ask first) of reciting the key points in this post

Joe started out by highlighting that, despite what you might read elsewhere (and I have to admit I’ve concentrated a little to heavily on this) the consumerisation of IT is not about iPads, iPhones or other such devices – it’s a lot bigger than that.

In the “old days” (pre-1995) companies had entities owned called “users” and, from an IT perspective, those users did as they were told to – making use of the hardware and software that the IT department provided. Anything outside this tended to fall foul of the “culture of no” as it was generally either too expensive, or against security.

Today, things have moved along and those same users are now “consumers”. They have stepped outside the organisation and the IT department is a provider of “stuff”, just like Dropbox, GMail, Facebook, Twitter, Betfair and their bank.

Dropbox is a great example – it’s tremendously easy to use to share files with other people, especially when compared with a file server or SharePoint site with their various security restrictions, browser complexities and plugins.

If you’re not convinced about the number of systems we use, think back to the early 1990s, when we each had credentials for just a handful of systems. but now we use password managers to manage our logons (I use LastPass) for systems that may be for work, or not. For many of us, the most useful services that the company provides are email, calendaring, and free printing when we’re in the office!

So, how does a CIO cope with this? Soon there will be no more corporate LANs and where does that leave the internal IT department? Sure, we can all cite cloud security issues but, as Joe highlighted in his talk, if Dropbox had a security breach it would be all over Twitter in a few minutes and they would be left with a dead business model so actually it’s the external providers that have the most to lose.

CIOs have to compete with external providers. Effectively they have a choice: to embrace cloud applications; or to build their own internal services (with the main advantage being that, when they break, you can get people in room and work to get them fixed).

Ultimately, CIOs just want platforms upon which to build services. And that’s why we need to stop worrying about infrastructure, and work out how we can adopt Platform as a Service (PaaS) models to best suit the needs of our users. Ah yes, users, which brings me back to where I started.

Photographing the night sky

Posted on Monday 21 March 2011Friday 4 May 2012 By Mark Wilson

Last Saturday saw a “supermoon” – where the Earth’s moon is both full and in perigee–syzygy and so appears larger than usual. I went out to try and shoot some images of the moon over the river but it was too high in the sky for the effect I was really after and it slipped behind some clouds. Later on, the sky cleared and I got out my longest lens to take a picture of the moon (albeit without anything to put its size into context) and this was the result:

I was pretty pleased with this – especially when I compared it with one taken from the International Space Station! – although some of the other shots in the press showed an aeroplane silhouetted agains the moon, or the moon appearing more “yellow” as it rose. It’s just a straight shot from my DSLR with a 500mm lens, tripod mounted, at a mid-aperture (f11) and slow-ish 1/125″ shutter speed, with ISO set to 200, and with exposure compensation set at -5 EV (to stop the moon from “bleaching out”). Other than a crop and saving it as a JPG, that’s about all it’s had done to it.

But taking photos of the night sky is not usually so straightforward and, previously, my best results had been using a similar setup, but shooting in daylight. The image below was taken a couple of summers ago, whilst on holiday in France:

For this shot, I used an entirely different technique – it was actually taken with a clear blue sky, in the evening, converted to black and white and then the black clipping was increased to make sure the blacks really were black.

Anyway, back to the supermoon – nice though it is, anyone can take pictures of the moon – but what about planets in our solar system? Without a telescope?

Saturn Joe Baguley tipped me off that Saturn was just down and to the left of the moon at that time and sent me a link to his shot, in which Saturn is just 12 pixels wide but its rings are clearly visible. My response: “Wow!”. I went back outside with my gear and tried to replicate it but it seems that, on this occasion, his Canon 5D Mk2’s pixel density beat my Nikon D700’s – 12 pixels wide at 400mm equates to 15 pixels at 500mm, but with 2,400,000 pixels per cm² on the 5D vs. 1.4 on the D700. That meant I was looking at something just 9px wide and that sky was very, very dark… maybe I need to go out and buy a telescope (for my sons of course!).

(Thanks to Benjamin Ellis, who inspired me to go and take pictures of the moon on Saturday evening, to Joe Baguley for permission to use his picture of Saturn, and to Andy Sinclair, who suggested I should write this post. The two images of the moon used in this post are © 2009-2011 Mark Wilson, all rights reserved. The image of Saturn is © 2011 Joe Baguley, all rights reserved. All three images are therefore excluded from the Creative Commons license used for the rest of this site.)

Adapt, evolve, innovate – or face extinction

Posted on Wednesday 16 March 2011Monday 28 May 2012 By Mark Wilson

I’ve written before (some might say too often) about the impact of tablet computers (and smartphones) on enterprise IT. This morning, Andy Mulholland, Global CTO at Capgemini, wrote a blog post that grabbed my attention, when he posited that tablets and smartphones are the disruptive change lever that is required to drive a new business technology wave.

In the post, he highlighted the incredible increase in smartphone and tablet sales (also the subject of an article in The Economist which looks at how Dell and HP are reinventing themselves in an age of mobile devices, cloud computing and “verticalisation”), that Forrester sees 2011 as the year of the tablet (further driving IT consumerisation), and that this current phase of disruption is not dissimilar to the disruption brought about by the PC in the 1980s.

Andy then goes on to cite a resistance to user-driven adoption of [devices such as] tablets and XaaS [something-as-a-service] but it seems to me that it’s not CIOs that are blocking either tablets/smartphones or XaaS.

CIOs may have legitimate concerns about security, business case, or unproven technology – i.e. where is the benefit? And for which end-user roles? – but many CIOs have the imagination to transform the business, they just have other programmes that are taking priority.

With regards to tablets, I don’t believe it’s the threat to traditional client-server IT that’s the issue, more that the current tranche of tablet devices are not yet suitable to replace PCs. As for XaaS (effectively cloud computing), somewhat ironically, it’s some of the IT service providers who have the most to lose from the shift to the cloud: firstly, there’s the issue of “robbing Peter to pay Paul” – eroding existing markets to participate in this brave new world of cloud computing; secondly it forces a move from a model that provides a guaranteed revenue stream to an on-demand model, one that involves prediction – and uncertainty.

Ultimately it’s about evolution – as an industry we all have to evolve (and innovate), to avoid becoming irrelevant, especially as other revenue streams trend towards commoditisation.

Meanwhile, both customers and IT service providers need to work together on innovative approaches that allow us to adapt and use technologies (of which tablets and XaaS are just examples) to disrupt the status quo and drive through business change.

[This post originally appeared on the Fujitsu UK and Ireland CTO Blog.]

Connecting on-premise applications with the Windows Azure platform (Windows Server User Group)

Posted on Tuesday 15 March 2011Monday 11 April 2011 By Mark Wilson

When Microsoft announced Windows Azure, one of my questions was “what does that mean for IT Pros?”. There’s loads of information to help developers write applications for the cloud, but what about those of us who do infrastructure: servers, networks, and other such things?

In truth, everything becomes commoditised in time and, as Quest’s Joe Bagueley pointed out on Twitter a few days ago, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) will become commoditised as platform as a service (PaaS) solutions take over and there will come a time when we care about what hypervisor we are running on about as much as we care about network drivers today. That is to say that, someone might care but, for most of us, we’ll be consuming commodity services and we won’t need to know about the underlying infrastructure.

So, what will there for for server admins to do? Well, that takes me back to Windows Azure (which is a PaaS solution). For some time now, I’ve been keen to learn about integrating on and off-premise systems – for example getting application components that are running on Windows Server working with other parts of the application in Windows Azure. To do this, Microsoft has created Windows Azure Connect – a new Windows Azure service that enables customers to setup secure, IP-level network connectivity between their Windows Azure compute services and existing, on-premise resources. This allows Windows Azure applications to leverage and integrate with existing infrastructure investments in order to ease adoption of Azure in the enterprise – and I’m really pleased that, after nearly a year of trying to set something up, the Windows Server User Group (WSUG) is running a Live Meeting on this topic (thanks to a lot of help from Phil Winstanley, ex-MVP and now native at Microsoft).

Our speaker will be Allan Naim, an Azure Architect Evangelist at Microsoft. Allan has more than 15 years of experience designing and building distributed middleware applications including both custom and off the shelf Enterprise Application Integration architectures and, on the evening of 22 March 2011 (starting at 19:00 GMT), he’ll spend an hour taking us through Windows Azure Connect.

Combined with the event that Mark Parris has organised for 6 April 2011 where one of the topics is Active Directory Federation Services (AD-FS), these two WSUG sessions should give Windows Server administrators a great opportunity to learn about integrating Windows Server and Windows Azure.

[A version of this post also appears on the Windows Server User Group blog]

A few things I learned when I “lost” my mobile phone

Posted on Tuesday 15 March 2011Thursday 30 April 2015 By Mark Wilson

A few weeks ago, I lost my mobile phone. Well, not so much “lost” (I was pretty sure I’d left it in the office) but I realised that I had “misplaced” it. I’m on a SIM-only 30-day contract and my handset is an-aging-Nokia-thing-running-some-awful-Symbian-operating-system so I wasn’t that concerned but the 72 hours it would take me to be reunited with it was too long to risk if someone had taken it as their own, so I called the mobile operator (O2) and put a block on the SIM.

In sixteen years of mobile phone ownership, this was my first experience of this process, and I learned a few things along the way – hence this blog post.

O2 sent me a new SIM (to use in a spare handset, or in mine, should I find it again) but there were no details in the envelope that told me where/how to activate the SIM. It turns out that I could do that on the My New SIM section of the O2 website.

As it happens, my phone was handed in at work, and I got it back in a few days. I can’t have two SIMs active at the same time, but I could keep one of them as a “spare” for future use.

I spoke to an O2 representative, who lifted the bar on my original SIM. O2 advised me that this could take up to 24 hours although, in practice, it was a much shorter time (about 30 minutes) but my calls were still on permanent divert to voicemail. What they hadn’t told me was that they had also barred the last handset that my SIM had been used in (based on the IMEI) and that could take up to 72 hours to lift. Again, it didn’t take that long in practice and, after a few hours, and a couple of phone resets (to force the network to recognise it), my full mobile service was restored.

Why paper.li is just plain wrong

Posted on Monday 14 March 2011 By Mark Wilson

When I first saw paper.lilast year, I thought it was an interesting concept. Kind of like the Flipboard app on my iPad, although nowhere near as attractive, but universally available, picking the most popular updates from my Twitter and Facebook “friends” and presenting them to me in a newspaper format. I quickly grew tired of the format though along with the increasing number of tweets telling me that “The Daily<insert name of person>Â is out” – I can see the value for an individual but tweeting about it just seems a bit spammy. (Sorry if you’re one of the people that does this – if you think there is some real value, I’d be pleased to hear your view.)

More worrying though is the way that paper.li seems to misrepresent my views and opinions when it “retweets” me…

I work for a Japanese company and spent a lot of Friday and the weekend thinking of colleagues whose friends and family might be affected by the recent events in Japan. For that reason, I was appalled to see a ZD Net article last Friday questioning whether the iPad 2 would be hit by supply problems as a consequence.

I can see why the writer/publisher put this out (perhaps it is a legitimate concern for some) but really, in the big scheme of things, does a shortage of NAND memory matter that much, given the scale of the human disaster in Japan?Â Any iPad 2 supply chain issues strike me as a “first world problem” and,Â even though the earthquake/tsunami did strike on iPad 2 launch day (presumably why this was newsworthy to ZD Net), couldn’t the publisher have held back, if only for reasons of taste and decency? I tweeted:

RT @ZDNet: Will the earthquake in Japan ding Apple’s iPad 2 rollout? http://zd.net/ibvmgp ^MW FFS get a grip. Bigger issues at stake here!

(If you’re not familiar with the FFS acronym, don’t worry, I was just expressing my frustration.)

I think that tweet is pretty clear, I’m RT (retweeting) ZD Net’s tweet about their article, with a comment – in the socially-acceptable manner for the Twitter community (the “new-style” RT built into Twitter misses the ability/potential added value of a comment).

Unfortunately, when I saw paper.li’s version, it was completely out of context:

It simply grabs the title and first few lines from the link and credits the person who retweeted it (me)Â as the source. Not only does this appear to be crediting me as the author of the article, which I would be uncomfortable with, even if I did approve of the content but, in this case, IÂ fundamentally disagree with the article and would certainly not want to be associated with it.Â

Paper.li does include the ability to stop mentions, but that misses the pointÂ – by all means mention my tweets but they should really make it clear who the original source of an article is and, where that’s not possible, include the whole tweet to ensure that it remains in context.

And it seems I’m not the only one to see issues with the way in which Paper.li uses the Twitter API, disregarding the social networking element of Twitter. Then there’s the fact that some people thank others for mentioning them in their paper.li edition (which, of course, was entirely automated).

Indeed, I’d go as far as to say that the way paper.li handles retweets is sloppy and demonstrates a lack of knowledge/understanding on how platforms like Twitter really work – they are (or should be) about conversation, not broadcast – and that’s why the newspaper format is reallyÂ not a good fit.