OK, so we’re not the biggest site in the world but we have a fair amount of data, a fair amount of users and speed is very important to me so it’s important everything is as fast as possible. A few people have asked what our architecture is and I thought it’d make an interesting [...]

In addition to the power for servers, a huge cost we have is cooling them. 6kW of servers is going to require some chilling. Our data room has air conditioning and it works very hard for a living particularly in summer where the heat differential on the aircon exchanger outside is lower. In a big [...]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Leaving-Microsoft-Change-World-Entrepreneurs/dp/0007237030/

My rating: 9/10

A great read overall… not quite Three Cups Of Tea, but inspiring nonetheless. Unlike Greg Mortenson, John Wood started out from a very strong position as a senior exec at Microsoft. It’s fascinating to see how he uses lessons from his past life working with highly driven people like Steve Ballmer to create [...]

Background

Our system does a ‘review’ of messages after our operators save them. It checks for things like fields not being filled in where they normally are, but most importantly it checks for spelling mistakes and typos.

We used to use the Telerik Radspell spell checker component in a back end web service. It worked adequately but [...]

Simple one, this one…

We wanted to see exactly how much power we were using, and wanted to be able to display this information to staff.

First off, you need a monitoring device. I opted for the CurrentCost Envi with the optional data lead (and two more sensors as we’re on three phase!)

Next, you download the driver [...]

Normal Polling

Let’s start with normal polling. The browser simply runs some Javascript on a timer that repeatedly checks for new data on the server. The problem with this is there a trade off between latency and bandwidth. If you were to use a timer that ran every minute your server load would be minimal…. but [...]

On our web platform, when you get sent a ‘U2U’ message, whether it’s from a colleague, or notification of a phone message, you get a little flashing envelope icon in the toolbar. Clicking on this takes you to your inbox. All of this is pretty much as you’d expect. The count of unread messages is [...]

Our call agents have a pretty hard job. They answer around 300 calls per shift, and probably 50% of those calls are for unique clients. It’s not the same as say a call centre for Barclays where you answer the phone in the same way every time. Most of the time, they’ll have to answer [...]

For proper interfacing between computer and telephone, the computer system and the telephone system need to know which operator is on which extension.

On each machine we currently keep the extension in c:\extension.cfg. The ‘CTI’ program that forces the webpages to ‘pop’ uses this to know which extension it’s on and which extension to listen [...]

(Disclaimer: Yes, I know there are ways to ‘let SQL do this for you’ but they’re bloody complicated, and I have a really nice, even hash key to use so it’s simple!)

(Disclaimer 2: This is a pretty long post.)

So, after a few years of usage gathering data, SQL tables can become pretty large. Especially if [...]