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September 13, 2005
The generator game
I just happened to get into work early, around 6am, and we were unfortunate to experience a power outage at around 6.30am due to "high voltage underground cable fault". Being the only member of staff in at that time, I was quite understandably shaken by the lights going out. Then with a big puff of black smoke, no less than 3 seconds later, our rather large diesel generator kicked in, phew.
"Right" I commented out loud "What do I do now?" I had a look round the office and I realised that I left the lights on in the kitchen, and I thought it suitable to turn them off. I had no idea the amount of diesel in the tank - as I was unsure as to how long the generator had been run since the last time it was filled, although I know there is enough diesel to keep the company running for about 18 hours, but was that just the computer rooms or does that include lights, laptops, base units and monitors?
Again, being on my own gave me the ability to think out loud, "let's have a look to see whose left their monitor on" I began to count, turning them off as I found them 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 … I quickly lost count.
To my point, and I refer back to Jim’s previous blog "According to PC Pro an average 50-person business could shave £5,000 off its annual electricity bill by implementing a 'Switch IT Off' policy." – This has a greater relevance when it comes to services. I don’t know the exact maths, but just by turning off your monitor and base unit it could give the generator an extra couple of minutes running time which could mean the difference between running out of diesel and potentially losing core services (Unity Web, Talis Base, Talis.com, email, phones etc…) and giving our electricity provider a chance to power our building back up.
The quiet after the storm;
During the morning there was another power failure, and on inspection of the generator room, it gave the following metrics: Ran for 1 hour 4 minutes leaving approximately 17 hours of diesel – I have one further question - in light of the imminent fuel crisis; how do we refill our diesel tank?
Posted by at 11:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 09, 2005
Alto La Vista, Baby
I returned to work following a week off to find I'd received a bunch of new disks as part of my MSDN subscription. Among these was the latest build of Windows Longhorn, recently renamed Windows Vista.
I’ve been meaning to try Microsoft's new O/S for some time but I’ve been lacking a spare PC with sufficient grunt. So, having recently installed a copy of VMWare Workstation on my laptop I thought I’d try it in a Virtual Machine instead.
To my surprise the installation went reasonably well, the only problem being a 640x480 resolution with 4-bit colour and no network connectivity. This was cured following a bit of tinkering and installation of VMWare tools.
Internet Explorer 7.0 seems pretty stable, the tabbed browsing and support for RSS sorry Web Feeds is also welcome, but I still prefer Mozilla Firefox.
I thought it would be interesting to try some Talis apps. Talis Prism seems to work with no problems as does Talis List and Signpost.
I also tried Talis Alto, which seems to work fine, despite Vista failing the Alto compatibility Test.
All in all it's been a pretty successful experiment. Performance considering it's running in a Virtual Machine is impressive and so far I like what I've seen.
Finally, please excuse the bad pun in the title of this post. You can blame Adrian for that.
Posted by jimprince at 04:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
