A Day in the Life of a Tech Startup Founder

So began a fleeting romance with the world of UNIX systems.

EveryCity initially started out in the front room at my mother’s house in Greenwich, where Duncan and I brainstormed the concept, designed the initial product offering, put together the sales literature and won our first few clients. With the concept validated, we immediately moved into spacious offices at Studio 18 Bluelion Place at London Bridge, taking the 1st floor with space for 8 desks.

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“You don’t look anything like your average sales director … which I mean as a compliment”

I attended the ecommerce expo at Olympia last year, where I was introduced to the marketing director of one of the UK’s larger hosting providers, who made this remark to me. It got me thinking. I took him at face value – so what exactly did he mean? On one level it was obvious: I imagine for most people the idea of a sales director is someone smart, clean cut, in a suit and tie with a massive watch; I am bearded and at the time was wearing a flat cap, t-shirt and jeans. But it was the fact...

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3 Apps That Will Boost Your Productivity

We’ve all had those mornings. You know, the ones where you walk into the office and sit down to start but then…you just don’t know where to begin. Or the days when you get so caught up with the small tasks like finding a hotel, or compiling a list, or making a reservation… that you don’t actually get down to what’s important. Let’s be honest – there are so many productivity killers, it would be impossible to list them all. Instead, in this blog post I’m going to reveal the three apps that have boosted my productivity, and that...

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Windows XP is Dead

Artist credit Harvey Finch. Windows XP is dead. Or is it? Microsoft may want to pull the plug on its now 12 year old operating system (eons in computing terms), but it seems the world’s once most popular desktop system still has a little fight left in it; perhaps hanging on by a carbon fibre rod rather than just a...

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12 Things I Wish I’d Known When I Launched my Tech Startup

Starting a business is fun, challenging and rewarding, and ultimately you hope it will lead to a sustainable and profitable endeavour for all involved. However, there are always things you learn along the way that you wish you’d known at the beginning. So, here are 12 things that I wish I had known when starting EveryCity, which by sharing, I hope will help you reach that success point even sooner. I’d love to hear your learnings too, so don’t forget to post them in the...

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6 Takeaways from TechHub’s Branding Event

On Tuesday night I had the pleasure of attending TechHub’s “Stop Chasing! Harness Your Brand to Find Your Customers” event. A bit of a mouthful? Yes. Worth going to? Definitely. The event consisted of five speakers: Rosa Glover from TechHub, Jane Cunningham from Pretty Little Head, Simon London from KidRated, and Cat Totty and Jamie Le Grice from moo.com. There was wine, there was beer, and there was an abundance of tech startups – the EveryCity team and I were in heaven! The only thing missing was pizza, but I guess nothing can be perfect. These were my six...

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illumos watch – December 2013 & January 2014

Hi all, welcome to my second illumos watch blog post. As I missed December due to the festive period, this January edition will include updates from December as well. Some big news is that Nexenta have released their fork of illumos-gate to the wild, with complete history and changesets. This is great news for the community, as there are a lot of improvements, including slow drive ejection code. Looking forward to giving this a...

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illumos watch – November 2013

Hi Folks, welcome to the first illumos watch blog post, where each month I’ll be sharing some of the latest developments in the world of illumos, OpenSolaris, SmartOS and OpenIndiana! As this is the first post, I’ll include a few from earlier months that I thought were noteworthy...

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Everything you ever wanted to know about RAID (Part 4 of 4)

Part 4: Performance Benchmarks An overview of RAID RAID Levels RAID Hardware & Software (including ZFS) Performance Benchmarks Welcome to Part 4 of our series of blog posts on RAID – Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. In this post, we’ll be going through the performance benchmarks we’ve performed using both Hardware RAID and ZFS Software RAID. Since our entire platform uses SAS Host Bus Adapters and ZFS RAID, rather than using Hardware RAID cards, we’ve split the tests into two sections. The first section covers a fair comparison between HW RAID 5 and 10 plus ZFS RAID 5 and...

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Everything you ever wanted to know about RAID (Part 3 of 4) – RAID Hardware & Software (including ZFS)

Part 3: RAID Hardware & Software (including ZFS) An overview of RAID RAID Levels RAID Hardware & Software (including ZFS) Performance Benchmarks Welcome to Part 3 of our series of blog posts on RAID – Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. In this post, we’ll be talking about Hardware RAID cards, as well as Host Bus Adapters, and finally Software RAID such as via...

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Everything you ever wanted to know about RAID (Part 2 of 4) – RAID Levels

Part 2: RAID Levels   An overview of RAID RAID Levels RAID Hardware & Software (including ZFS) Performance Benchmarks Welcome to Part 2 of our series of blog posts on RAID – Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. In this post, we’ll be talking about the different RAID levels available, which are basically the different ways RAID can lay out your data on disk to improve performance and/or reliability. There are a bafflingly large number of RAID levels available, and we won’t cover all of them. You can get a full breakdown on Wikipedia. Here are the main...

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Everything you ever wanted to know about RAID (Part 1 of 4) – Overview

Part 1: An Overview of RAID Back in 2008 we wrote a tiny blog article about RAID 1 vs RAID 5 performance. This turned out, rather bizarrely, to be one of our most popular blog articles. We’ve been doing a lot with storage over the past few years, so we decided to write a series of blog posts on RAID. In this series we’ll cover: An overview of RAID RAID Levels RAID Hardware & Software (including ZFS) Performance Benchmarks RAID: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks RAID is a method of providing data security and/or improving performance by distributing data...

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Two Factor Authentication with Google Authenticator on SmartOS

Google Authenticator is a Two Factor Authentication application for mobile devices, which can be used to enhance login security, such as SSH logins to servers. I recently blogged about doing this with Yubico Yubikeys, but what’s really neat about Google Authenticator is the fact that you don’t need to carry around anything more than just your mobile phone, something most of us have with us at all...

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Tuning ipfilter on SmartOS

Recently we were having some connectivity issues between EveryCity and the Joyent Public Cloud in Amsterdam, and as part of the troubleshooting I built iperf3 and fired it up to perform some tests. Rather quickly, I hit some strange errors: [root ~]# iperf3 -c 95.131.y.y -u -p 5779 -b 1m -t 10 -i 1 -f m ; done Connecting to host 95.131.y.y, port 5779 [ 4] local 37.153.x.x port 35482 connected to 95.131.y.y port 5779 [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth [ 4] 0.00-1.01 sec 96.0 KBytes 0.78 Mbits/sec [ 4] 1.01-2.03 sec 112 KBytes 0.90 Mbits/sec [ 4] 2.03-3.00...

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Windows Updates slow, takes hours after reboot updating registry under QEMU KVM

Hi Folks, Another blog post primarily aimed at helping people searching for a particular problem. I really struggled to find anything on this, and I hate that, so when I found the problem and the fix, I thought I’d share. Basically, if you’re running Windows Server 2008 under QEMU KVM, sometimes after a Windows Update it can get stuck for hours updating the registry. It will sit there for hours fiddling with things under Registry Machine Schema: 7444/17432...

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