Category: General IT
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Some thoughts on the Hodge Review
Here are my immediate thoughts/hot-takes on the Hodge review of Arts Council England. First, some quick ones: Of particular interest to me… Given my background and the work I’ve been doing of late, I’m really interested in the proposed reform of reporting requirements and the publishing of a data and reporting strategy. The current system…
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Not the f*** off bot
Often AI powered chatbots frustrate customers – Oura’s chatbot is actually useful.
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Transforming Collaboration During COVID-19
A blast from the past this one! During 2019 we stated rolling out Office 365 – putting Teams front-and-center. By the start of 2020 the roll-out was largely complete – but training wasn’t fully ramped up and staff were still getting to grips with things. Then COIVD hit, and office staff all suddenly had to…
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“What idiot did this?”
How often have you looked at a setup and said one of these? And how often have you found yourself in a situation where you are setting something up and thought: You’ve got to start from where you are Resource pressures are ever present. If we have the time, we don’t have the money. If…
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CrowdStrike – there but for the grace…
I’m writing this a few days after the global IT outage that pulled TV stations off the air, grounded planes, and made it tricky to purchase your morning coffee. And more seriously prevented 911 calls from working in Alaska. Where I work was largely unaffected. Our servers kept running, payments kept being processed, and staff…
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When product renaming and auto-updating f**k things up
A quick and dirty post today – in short – if you think you are using Azure App Proxy, and all-of-a-sudden your users are reporting Gateway Timeout error – check if your on-prem Azure App Proxy services are stuck. Kill any errant processes, you’ll see these stuck services disappear, and then you’ll have new services…
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Should we sell an NFT?
No. Or at least that’s my opinion! NFTs are the new thing – and there’s money to be made – so should cultural organisations be “minting” NFTs? NF what? Firstly – what is an NFT? “Non-fungible tokens” are an attempt to offer a way of proving ownership over a digital asset. Proving ownership over physical…
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My supplier has been compromised – should I still use them?
One of our suppliers was recently hit with a ransomware attack (or “cyber incident” as the new euphemism has it). As a result their systems were offline for several weeks. During this time they were relatively open to their customers about what had happened – they acknowledged it was ransomware, that they were in discussions…
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Password advice
These days we need passwords for everything – from accessing our work PCs, to reading messages on Gmail, to buying things on Amazon. It used to be the case that as long as you avoided easily guessable passwords you’d be fine – unfortunately those days are long gone. Read on for some advice on what…
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What happens when disaster strikes?
Back in 2012 I was faced with a failed RAID array for one of my clients, and had to go through a disaster recovery procedure. Shortly after I wrote a blog post for my (then) employer (ICT Partnerships), detailing what happened. Below is the original post as it was published in 2012: One of our…
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Matt Kirby 