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2017
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General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) resources
Useful sites for GDPR resources
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is coming! Keep calm and don't panic, there are plenty of resources to help. In my current work I help various organisation prepare for the commencement of GDPR on we have found many useful documents, posts and courses helpful.
This post is a collection to resources that either they or I have found useful. I will try and keep this updated as new resources become available.
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AWS Elasticsearch and SQS Return 403 Forbidden Error
Fixing 403 Forbidden errors when writing to AWS Elasticsearch and SQS
Back in 2011 we were developing an application on low-powered edge devices that sent messages using AWS SQS. During development this all worked fine but as with most things when it got to the real world testing we started to get problems.
When sending...
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2016
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How Do Machine Learning Models Improve Over Time?
The main question following 'Machine Learning for Humans' talk in Cambridge
Last week I presented a talk on 'Machine Learning for Humans' at Cambridge DDD Nights (the slides are available together with the talk abstract is on my original post
Following my talk the burning question was about how these machine learning models...
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Amazon Redshift in Cambridge
After Amazon Web Services' Redshift was first launched in 2012 it became the fastest growing service in AWS's history (according to Werner Vogels at AWS Summit 2015).
To make such an impact Redshift obviously fulfilled a pent-up need. As a Data-Warehouse...
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Machine Learning for Humans in Cambridge & Peterborough
A Year with Machine Learning
A year ago I was an interested bystander to the field of Data Science and Machine Learning. From that perspective it seemed that there was a lot of magic involved - the high priests (mathematicians) with pages full of strange symbols and black box code that proclaimed "trust me for the answers".
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2015
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Barn Owl Wireless Makes The Papers
New Statesman highlights Barn Owl Wireless
One of the really interesting projects we have worked on over the last few years is Barn Owl Wireless. It has been live for several years and is it good to know that it is finally getting some of the recognition it deserves.
Our customer Martin Lishman is one of the premier manufacturers and distributors
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2012
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Is it time to move from SQL Azure to Amazon RDS SQL Server?
Assessing Amazon's new offering
I am aware that Microsoft appears to be dropping Azure, renaming SQL Azure as SQL Database, but for the purposes of this post I will stick with the old names.
In the middle of 2011 we shipped a brand new system to a customer. This system required...
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2011
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Contract – ASP.NET MVC, Azure, Amazon Web Services and More
Wanted: A contract programmer
It’s been a busy year for Catalyst Computing. We’ve been involved in some great projects and worked with some wonderful people. There’s an opportunity arisen to work on one of those projects with some of those wonderful people…
The original system...
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Guerrilla Warfare? In Brum
Guerrilla Tactics - Performance Testing MS SQL Server Applications
Tomorrow (Tuesday 12th July) I am in good old Birmingham NxtGenUG giving a talk on a Guerrilla Tactics approach to performances testing. Not how you would like your project to be but how to cope when they are not.
Below are the links to the slide...
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2010
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SQL Server Profiler Impact: GUI vs Server-side
Experiments with SQL Server Profiler
After a recent talk at Cambridge NxtGenUG I was asked what the effect on SQLServer performance of gathering a trace in batch mode as opposed to using the GUI.
The obvious answer, as always with these things, is “it depends”. But I was intrigued to...
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Generating Customer Records
A script to generate test data
For the demos I created for the Guerrilla Tactics session I am doing at NxtGenUG I decided I was rather bored of the usual test data of Customer 1 …. 99999. So instead adapted a script we have used in the past to anonymise client data.
It is quite...
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Guerrilla Warfare?
Guerrilla Tactics - Performance Testing MS SQL Server Applications
Tonight (Tuesday 26th October) I am giving a talk on a Guerrilla Tactics approach to performance testing. Not how you would like your projects to be but how to cope when they are not.
Below are the links to the slide, demos and other resources. I...
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A Grand Performance
Guerrilla Tactics - Performance Testing MS SQL Server Applications
Last night (Monday 13th September) I did gave a talk on a Guerrilla Tactics approach to performance testing. Not how you would like your projects to be but how to cope when they are not.
Below are the links to the slide, demos and other resources...
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SQLBits Speaker Training
A day with the SQLBits team
Firstly thank you to the SQLBits team and Microsoft for putting on the Speaker Training yesterday and particularly Simon Sabin and Guy Smith-Ferrier. It was a great day only marred by the awful traffic conditions getting there and back. Even though...
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How to steal a Terabyte of Data by Floppy disk
Looking at increasingly portable storage
“Why are they banning USB sticks?” a colleague of mine at a client complained. New company policy was that any USB drives had to be encrypted and would only work on company machines. “After all,” he continued, “you could still steal data on a floppy...
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NxtGenUG Nugget – T4 Coventry
Avoiding Boredom Using T4 (the Text Template Transformation Toolkit)
I am doing a Nugget on T4 at the NxtGenUG meeting at Coventry on 12th July 2010. The main event talk is Dave Sussman on How Clean is your ASP.NET?
The Nugget is a brief introduction to T4: what it is, what you can do with it and how it can make boiler plate coding far less dull and error prone. There have been a few minor changes since the nugget I gave in April. The demo project is VS2010 and uses a EF4 model rather than WCF data services model.
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NxtGenUG Nugget – T4 Cambridge
Avoiding Boredom Using T4 (the Text Template Transformation Toolkit)
I am doing a Nugget on T4 at the NxtGenUG meeting at Cambridge on 14th April. The main event is Jesse Liberty on Building A Highly Extensible, Decoupled Silverlight Open Source Application.
The Nugget is a brief introduction to T4: what it is, what you can do with it and how it can make boiler plate coding far less dull and error prone.
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