my world of IT

Voice recognition is already here so why am I making so much of a fuss about it? Well at least for now we are still very limited as to how we can use voice technology with our phones – most of the time we are limited to issuing simple commands to open applications or run searches. Even Apples Siri technology… Read more

One of my goals of this site is to raise the profile (even if just a little) of the issues that UK schools face throughout the year. One such problem is how to deploy remotely accessible services (VPNs/Terminal Server/Citrix VDI/or the famous Home Access Plus+) in a secure but low cost manner. Obviously a key part of these services is security… Read more

This site maybe new with very few people reading it but all the same to those that do – Happy New Year!

If you have ever found yourself setting up your Internet service provides email on your preferred email program (Outlook/Thunderbird/Windows Live Mail/ect) and wondered which settings you should use (POP3 or IMAP) here is the definitive answer. IMAP – plain and simple, here’s the why….. Persistent connection With POP3 you will find that every few minutes your email program will download… Read more

After the previous article looking at the merits of a Solid State drive in a server I had a root around the Internet and found out that normal 2.5″ (Notebook PC sized) SSDs are nearly at the £1/1GB magical price point. The particular drive I’m looking at is the OCZ Technology 120GB Agility 3 from dabs.com which currently ships (free… Read more

For a while I’ve been wondering just how well a PCI-Express Solid State drive would work inside a standard off the shelf rack mounted server. Finally I have been given the chance to find out and as it turns out everything works quite nicely. The solid state in question is a OCZ Revo Drive 3 x2 240GB (from Novatech) and the server is a… Read more

Looking at the Vision 2011 video Microsoft obviously has some pretty nice ideas to where phones are going, lets take a look at what those could be. Hardware Thinner, lighter, longer battery lives and smaller bezels – sounds like the latest fruit flavoured device but future phones won’t just end there. In the vision 2011 video we can clearly see in… Read more

I’m no fan of Linux – in fact I go out of my way to use Microsoft IIS at work to host internal websites, additionally I’m no fan of Dell – again I prefer HP in every single possible way. But even with this for some strange reason over the past 4 years or so I always have done and… Read more

I am a self admitted strong fan of HP server hardware and in this video I’ll give you a tour around one of our servers at work. There is one little error in the video about ‘common slot power supplies’ – although the DL165 G7 is a great bit of kit the power supply isn’t of the new HP common… Read more

This is old news really but either way HP have updated a number of server models to include the new AMD Opteron 62xx processor series. The beefiest of all being the Opteron 6282SE which comes with 16 cores each packing 2.6ghz of clock speed. Naturally this kind of speed comes at a high TDP (in this case 140W) especially when… Read more