Dec 21

10:03 AM

Over and out

Time to step away from the work cycle. Feels slightly strange not doing my morning calls. Wishing you a very Happy Christmas and a Superb 2025.

Dec 19

9:25 AM

Brainstorming

Something that I feel strongly about but with the like of GPT and Claude, while brilliant at getting the information less so good at actions. I want AI to be integrated into my applications that instead of thinks it does. Ironically a lot of development to make this happen.

Dec 17

9:45 AM

Widevine and Playready Working

Got the encoding and playback with Widevine and Playready (these are two DRM profiles supporting Google & Microsoft Devices). Fairplay which is the Apple DRM profile needs a different setup, using MediaLive to ingest the stream to MediaPackage which applies the DRM profiles, tomorrow will be CDN playback as we need to ensure we have geo restrictions in place.

Dec 13

10:30 AM

AWS Media DRM

Today I am building an AWS Workflow for brodcasting the Grammies to an online audience. There are a number of consideration for this, ingesting the live feed to AWS, securing it (DRM) for authorised playback, and then the customer side, geo location, active accounts or to ensure that the feed is only accessible to the correct audience.

Dec 11

10:36 AM

Lambda Execution using SQS

Today I have been debugging a LAMBDA function that is failing after running 500 times, the reason behind it in the end was that the concurrency was set to high and was reliant on a 3rd party service which was unable to handle all the requests. Lesson learnt. Now runs as sweet as a nut.

Dec 10

10:10 AM

AWS IVS

I’ve been setting up an AWS-based workflow for streaming a live sports event to global audiences. Key considerations included: integrating Amazon IVS for real-time video streaming, configuring CloudFront for low-latency content delivery, and deploying Lambda@Edge for geo-restriction and authentication. Debugging IAM permissions for the origin bucket in S3 took some effort, but the system is now secure, performant, and scalable.

Dec 09

11:14 AM

Tracking JS

As we build out more and more of the functionality of workfeed, useful stats is obviously of huge important for clients, so have started to add in click and view tracking using javascript. What counts as a view though, have gone for 3 seconds for now

Dec 08

3:53 PM

Debugging Free SSL Certificates

I have been helping a friend get there business started, which I hosted on AWS, they are now running solo and are using ShowIT to host a simple website. However the Free SSL Certificates are proving to be a bit of a pain to install. And how they handle verifcation on CNAME Records.

Dec 13

12:06 PM

Cost Savings

Perhaps the most important part of AWS and the nature of its billing is ensuring you have the correct alerts (anomaly detector) to ensure you are using your services correctly. This client has asked me to review their AWS Spend. A fair amount in here to unpick. Will keep you posted on my recommendations

Dec 13

12:29 PM

Installed Plesk

Today we now have Plesk running in a production environment. We run lots and lots of servers and at last have our own plesk server running, which is being used to host some of the smaller websites. And also development environments. We used to give each client their own nano instance on ec2, which while over kill allowed use to separate church and state. If you are after some super cheap reliable hosting for your basic website like wordpress or laravel. Also moving sites away from GCP so can consolidate our billing. Drop us a line if interested.