Post Syndicated from Laurie Denness original https://laur.ie/blog/2010/11/monitorcontrols-utilties-for-monitor-management-on-windows/

When I ended up using Windows to power the overhead information screens at Last.fm, I lost the ability to have a one line crontab entry that shut the monitors into DPMS standby (and wake them up) when we’re in and out of office hours. Makes no sense wasting power, but more importantly shortening the length of screens having them on when the office is empty.

I didn’t think I would have any issue finding a utility to place the screens in to standby mode. I didn’t; but unfortunately they were either not free, massively complicated or simply didn’t work.

So I found a code snippet online, fired up a copy of Visual Studio and compiled two exe files; MonitorOn.exe and MonitorOff.exe. MonitorOff sends a signal to all attached monitors on the system to go in to sleep mode, and if you move the mouse you can wake them up as normal. Or you can run MonitorOn which will send the signal manually. Simply place these into the Windows Task Scheduler, and you have a simple, effective way to manage your information screens.

You can download MonitorOn and MonitorOff here.

Post Syndicated from Laurie Denness original https://laur.ie/blog/2010/09/leaving-last-fm/

I’ve spent 3.43 years at Last.fm, which seems almost like a lifetime. For a long time, I couldn’t ever imagine leaving; every morning I would wake up excited to go and face new challenges and do fascinating new things. In the last 6-12 months so much has changed, as Last.fm gradually slips out of being a startup to being a company that, for better or for worse, has to make some money. I will certainly think twice before working for a company that has anything to do with the music industry… it’s a pain of a situation.

I’ve babysat the wonderful creation that is Last.fm through launches (both expected and unexpected), crashes (always unexpected), overheatings (and break-ins, and power failures… All the kind of thing that should never happen to a datacentre) and plenty of blood, sweat and tears.

It’s been an amazing experience, working with some of the most amazing people I have ever met (some of which have come and gone), but it’s time for me to help another startup through getting up at 4am to fix databases and exciting scaling questions.

And that will be Etsy; another website that has an awesome product that I love, plenty of traffic and graphs that point upwards and a bunch of guys who are passionate and have an awesome method of working. I’m really excited about getting involved and learning things again, as well as enabling a different group of passionate users go about their day to day business. I’ll still be in London, but popping to NY on occasion.

Let’s hope the next 3.43 years will be just as exciting.