Are you fascinated by new technology? Do you like playing with computers and other electronic devices to find out how they work? Can you solve problems?
If you can, then you should think about working for Gradwell.
Your responsibilities will be processing customer orders, predominantly configuring and dispatching VoIP Telephone hardware, maintaining our stock, processing deliveries and assisting the support and operations teams.
We’re very pleased to announce the launch of twittex - a simple prepay service that delivers Twitter updates from your friends to your mobile phone via SMS. twittex is currently available on all UK networks. SMS messages are charged at 10p each, including VAT.
Up until 14th August 2008, Twitter provided a free SMS alerts service for its users in the UK. From inside Twitter, you could register your mobile phone, and decide which of your friends you wanted to follow via SMS. The cost of providing this service for free was one that Twitter couldn’t continue to carry, and the service was withdrawn as a result.
At Gradwell.com, we’d recently launched a new service news website so that our customers could be kept informed of alerts and maintenance of our major services (broadband, email, hosting and VoIP). The new service published updates to Twitter, so that our customers could use Twitter’s SMS alerts for when they were away from their computers. With Twitter no longer sending out SMS alerts, we needed an alternative. So we built twittex!
To get started, create an account at twittex.com, add your mobile phones and your twitter accounts, and some credit (£1, £5, £10 or £20), and you’re all set.
One of the things we do in Gradwell is write an internal blog. We include three things:
Unfortunately we can’t make the whole internal blog public, but it is interesting to use a new tool I found, Wordle to produce a “word cloud” for that internal blog. A word cloud is an image made from your blog text which gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the text:
We can also compare that to the word cloud that you get from the public Gradwell blog:
It’s good to see the themes are consistent:
We’d be interested in your feedback as to how we’re doing, via our online survey. Thanks!
By now, on websites like the BBC News, you will probably have read stories about a serious security problem that was recently found in many of the DNS servers commonly used on the Internet. Some of our customers have contacted our Support phone line asking for more information about Gradwell dot com’s response to this problem.
Gradwell dot com has been aware of this issue with DNS servers since early July, thanks to a story posted on the popular Linux.com website. We immediately checked our DNS servers, and determined that our nameservers are not vulnerable to this attack, using the testing tools published by the security researcher who discovered this issue.
If you run your own nameserver at all, the current advice from security experts is to ensure that you have upgraded it to the very latest version available. I personally use Linux Weekly News‘ excellent weekly security round-up page to keep track of all the reported security updates for the different Linux distributions; your Linux distribution of choice will also publish regular security advisories.
I hope this clarifies the situation for our customers. If you do have any concerns that I have not addressed, or at any time believe you’ve spotted a security problem that we haven’t addressed, you can raise an incident with our Customer Services team in the usual way, or contact me directly as firstname.lastname@gradwell.net.
Best regards,
Stu
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Stuart Herbert, Technical Manager, Gradwell dot com Ltd