Dan Benton
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Homepage: http://www.dogsbody.org/
Posts by Dan Benton
Foundation Degree Accreditation
25 May 2013
This week our Director (Mr Dogsbody to you) was asked to be an industry expert for the revalidation of a Foundation Degree in Computing for University Centre Yeovil. This was a fascinating experience which showed the commitment that education has to make to it’s students.
Computing is a fast changing industry. What is taught at a Master’s degree level one year can soon be taught at a Foundation Degree level a few years later. It is vital that academic institutions keep up to date with what is going on in the real world.
The revalidation of Yeovil’s foundation degree came after a complete re-write of the unit specifications for the entire course. Independent people are bought in to help with the revalidation and make sure the content is at the right level. As part of the event the panel get to talk to students at the institution as well as local employers that hire them. The day showed how it was possible for the students to learn what the employers needed while employers could gain skilled people and support the local economy.
What impressed us the most was how the Yeovil College and University Centre Yeovil had tied their courses together allowing for an easy progression from an Apprenticeship to a Foundation Degree and hopefully soon a Full Degree. We use Yeovil College for our apprentice scheme and actively encourage all of our staff to further their education 
Press Release: Bracknell Jelly
07 Feb 2013
For immediate release
07 February 2013
Free Jelly Co-Working Event For Bracknell Home Workers and Self Employed To Launch Next Week at Enterprise and Innovation Hub
A revolutionary co-working ‘Jelly’ event for freelancers, home workers and small business owners in Bracknell and surrounding areas will take place at the Bracknell Enterprise and Innovation Hub next week after massive success in the United States.
Set to take place on the second Thursday of every month, Bracknell Jelly is a free event where the region’s self-employed, small business owners and home workers can work, chat and collaborate with each other without having to pay for meeting rooms or office space. It gives local people the chance to get out of the (home) office and work alongside other like minded people for one day every month for free.
The Bracknell Jelly has been organized by local consultancy firm, Dogsbody Technology. Founder Dan Benton said, “For some people it’s having a different chair to sit on, for others it is having someone saying bless you when they sneeze. I was a home worker for many years and know how lonely it can get and how useful having other people around as a sounding board can be. I was inspired after hearing about the success of Jellies in America and decided to organise one in Bracknell as a way of giving something back.”
Registration for the Bracknell Jelly is free and sessions are scheduled every month throughout the year. The meeting room space has been donated by the Bracknell Enterprise and Innovation Hub, giving home workers the opportunity to work in a professional environment for the day without sacrificing internet access or productivity.
Each Jelly is a mixture of work, chat, helping others with business issues, passing on tips and perhaps even collaborating on a new project. There are thought to be around 30 active co-working Jelly events around the UK. Bracknell home workers feeling isolated or lacking inspiration can register for free to attend any Jelly event at the Bracknell Enterprise and Innovation Hub. Spaces are available for the next event, which takes place on Thursday February 14th. To register, visit http://www.bracknelljelly.com
About Bracknell Jelly: Bracknell Jelly is a free monthly informal co-working event where freelancers, home workers and small/micro business owners can and work, chat and collaborate with each other.
About Dogsbody Technology: Dogsbody Technology Ltd is a Linux consultancy company providing bespoke solutions that help clients get the best out of technology. Previous work has involved security control, virtualisation platforms, cloud computing and high availability networking. Its services are not limited to Internet facing technology or networking and it has previously consulted on electronics and automation.
-ENDS-
Press Release: Camberley Jelly
15 Jan 2013
For immediate release
15 January 2013
Free Jelly Co-Working Event For Camberley Home Workers and Self Employed To Launch This Month at Basepoint Camberley
A revolutionary co-working ‘Jelly’ event for freelancers, home workers and small business owners in Camberley and surrounding areas will take place at Basepoint Camberley later this month after massive success in the United States.
Set to take place on the fourth Thursday of every month, Camberley Jelly is a free event where the region’s self-employed, small business owners and home workers can work, chat and collaborate with each other without having to pay for meeting rooms or office space. It gives local people the chance to get out of the (home) office and work alongside other like minded people for one day every month for free.
The Camberley Jelly has been organized by local consultancy firm, Dogsbody Technology. Founder Dan Benton said, “For some people it’s having a different chair to sit on, for others it is having someone saying bless you when they sneeze. I was a home worker for many years and know how lonely it can get and how useful having other people around as a sounding board can be. I was inspired after hearing about the success of Jellies in America and decided to organise one in Camberley as a way of giving something back.”
Registration for the Camberley Jelly is free and sessions are scheduled every month throughout the year. The meeting room space has been donated by Basepoint Camberley, giving home workers the opportunity to work in a professional environment for the day without sacrificing internet access or productivity.
Each Jelly is a mixture of work, chat, helping others with business issues, passing on tips and perhaps even collaborating on a new project. There are thought to be around 30 active co-working Jelly events around the UK. Camberley home workers feeling isolated or lacking inspiration can register for free to attend any Jelly event at Basepoint Camberley. Spaces are available for the next event, which takes place on Thursday January 24th. To register, visit http://www.camberleyjelly.com
About Camberley Jelly: Camberley Jelly is a free monthly informal co-working event where freelancers, home workers and small/micro business owners can and work, chat and collaborate with each other.
About Dogsbody Technology: Dogsbody Technology Ltd is a Linux consultancy company providing bespoke solutions that help clients get the best out of technology. Previous work has involved security control, virtualisation platforms, cloud computing and high availability networking. Its services are not limited to Internet facing technology or networking and it has previously consulted on electronics and automation.
-ENDS-
Christmas Shutdown & Giving
09 Dec 2012
Camberley Christmas
Is it really December already!
Just a quick post to say Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you over the holidays.
We’ll be taking some time off over Christmas, however we’ll continue to be monitoring our customer’s servers 24/7 as usual
Our office will be closed on the following days and response to emails maybe slower:
Mon 24th Dec 2012 – Office Closed
Tues 25th Dec 2012 – Public Holiday
Wed 26th Dec 2012 – Public Holiday
Thur 27th Dec 2012 – Office Closed
Fri 28th Dec 2012 – Office Closed
Mon 31st Dec 2012 – Office Closed
Tue 1st Jan 2013 – Public Holiday
We considered sending Christmas cards or presents this year for our customers but we’re really not sure you want another bit of paper cluttering up your desk or some chocolates to add to your snack shelf.
This year we have made a donation to two charities instead; they are:
Crisis – A national charity for single homeless people. It’s not nice being homeless at any time of year but winter has got to be the worst time. Now imagine being homeless, in winter and alone. Crisis does amazing work to both help people in this situation and help stop people from getting into this situation and we are very happy to help them.
Creative Commons – A non-profit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. We are sure you have all heard of Creative Commons. Many people use it on a daily basis but few really think about the work that goes on behind the scenes to make CC work. Knowledge is a powerful thing and any tool that allows people to share knowledge while retaining protection in this mad legal world that we live gets our vote.
We hope you all have a great winter and see you in the new year.
Sponsoring Project Honey Pot
26 Oct 2012
Dogsbody Technology is a proud sponsor of Project Honey Pot with the donation of over 40 mail server addresses and some raw cash to the project.
Project Honey Pot allows us to track the reputation of all of our customers servers. They would do this without donations from us but it’s the least we can do to support such a great service.
To quote their website…
Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.
If you run servers yourself, we encourage you to signup to the project, monitor your IP addresses and donate an MX record or a link from your site.
Radio Interview: Rural Broadband Speeds
03 Sep 2012
As more and more people work from home, both full-time and just for overtime, home broadband speeds become more and more important.
We were invited to join a discussion on the BBC Surrey breakfast show to talk about broadband speeds in Surrey…
Storing data online (do you really want me to say “in the cloud”?) means that we need to be connected to the Internet to access it and amazingly there is still a large part of the population that doesn’t have that sort of access.
What’s your opinion? Do you think this is a big concern?
We Are Hiring
16 Aug 2012
Yes, Dogsbody Technology is hiring its first member of staff!
If you are a 16-19 year old with good grades in and around the Camberley area that would like to work for a small Linux specialist company then please do get in touch.
Full details are on our jobs page.
We Are Growing
16 Jul 2012
It’s an exciting time at Dogsbody Technology. After a couple of years of working from home we’ve decided to move into an office. And a very nice office it is too.
Our new address is:
Dogsbody Technology Ltd.
377 – 399 London Road,
Camberley,
Surrey
GU15 3HL
We’ve moved into Basepoint Camberley which offers serviced offices and unlike many office providers is owned by the profit making arm of a leading UK grant charity. It’s nice to know that the rent we now pay is ultimately going to a good cause.
You may also have heard us talk about more people in the office. We have moved in with fellow tech company Orcare Ltd. a web development agency that builds sites using the Umbraco CMS. It’s a great partnership and one that has already pushed opportunities in both directions.
So if you are in the area and fancy a chat then do feel free to give us a call and pop in. Let us know in advance and we’ll even make sure the (beer) fridge is stocked with your favourite drink.
ISO27001 Certification
06 Jun 2012
We are often asked to make sure we source servers or products from companies that are ISO27001 (or ISO9001) certified. While it’s good to have a stamp to prove that a company has attained a level of standard I feel there is often confusion over what this certification means.
Luckily, Alec Muffett, a friend of mine wrote a lovely piece on his blog about Google receiving ISO27001 certification for their Google Apps products…
ISO27001 is good to see stamped upon a vendor’s product and business processes – however it is emphatically not a “seal of security approval” – not at all.
The promise of 27001 certification is that a vendor has considered and documented various security risks and threats which would impact their offering – and has established a process to continue this in an ongoing fashion – and then has had the documentation of that understanding cross-checked and validated by an external agency.
In sporting metaphor: a vendor (in this case, Google) gets to design their own high-jump bar, document how tall it is and what it is made of, how they intend to jump over it; and then they jump over it and the certification agency simply attests that they have successfully performed a high-jump over a bar of their own design. The design documents and jump technique do not need to be made public.
So what would be really interesting would be if Google publishes their security requirements, their standards, their policies and risk assessments, so everyone else can see what kind of high-jump they have just performed – how high, how hard, and landing upon what kind of mat?
It would be that which would inform me of how far I would trust Google Apps with sensitive data, most especially with regard to the provisions they must make for “lawful access” to data by government actors.
Dogsbody Technology helps you cut through all the layers of sourcing new infrastructure. Talk to us to find out how.
There is Jelly in the Cloud
08 Nov 2011
Dogsbody Technology is a home run businesses. We don’t have offices to tie us down and can work anywhere we wish. While this is great for getting work done it does get a little lonely sometimes.
For the last year we have attended Berkshire Jelly, a co-working meetup in Crowthorne where people that work at home can meet up and work in a communal environment.
Unfortunately the current organisers (Hazel McLellan and Lyn French of findgoodcustomerservice.com) who originally sourced the location and set this event up have had to move onto other things so we are very proud for Dogsbody Technology to take over this brilliant event.
We are re-naming it Crowthorne Jelly but it’s the same event you all love and of course it’s FREE!
What is Jelly?
Jelly is a casual monthly co-working event, where home-workers, freelancers,small business owners and office based people who every now and then want a change can get together with their laptops once a month to meet new people, work, chat, share ideas and ….be inspired together in a social environment.
Jelly is a mixture of work, chat, helping others with business issues, passing on tips and maybe even collaborating on a new project.
Jelly is NOT networking – the aim is not to meet new clients, pitch your business or try to sell to anyone -there are plenty of excellent networking events in the south east to do that.
Jelly was started in the USA and is now increasingly popular in the UK with over 30 active co-working Jelly events already and more starting every month.
So if you’ve ever felt isolated in your home office/ work office and want to meet some other like-minded people in a different work environment, then Jelly is for you – it’s free so give it a try and come along!
What does it cost to attend?
It is FREE to attend, all you need do is bring money to buy yourself tea/coffee (there is an honesty box). You can bring your own packed lunch- at the moment we’re investigating the option of ordering freshly made sandwiches on the day – more to follow, so watch this space.
Do I have to stay all day?
No, people turn up at any point from the starting time onwards, introduce themselves to the organiser, plug in their laptop and access the wifi. There’s no obligation to be there from the start to the finish, so you can fit jelly in around other commitments like the school run. Obviously the more people that stay for longer the more vibrant and interactive the day will be.
Do I qualify?
As long as you have a laptop to keep you busy and you’re a business person then you qualify. The more variety of people the better! Even if you’re still researching a business you’re more than welcome to come along for inspiration.
What do people do at Jelly?
Anything you can do quietly and independently, so anything on a laptop. Other Jellyers will appreciate you taking phone calls outside the room if your mobile rings.
Its the ideal time and place to catch up on all those little jobs you keep meaning to do but never get round to. You could do stuff like:
- Accounts
- Catch up on some reading/ writing
- Emails
- Online housekeeping
- Blogging
- Updating social media profiles
- Commenting on blogs
- Tweeting