Choosing A Managed DNS Provider

Recently Endurance International Group had a major outage, taking down many websites hosted and managed by providers such as Bluehost, Hostgator and JustHost. Our site was one of those, but of even more concern was that they were also providing our DNS (Domain Name System: mapping human readable url’s such as www.clarusft.com to IP addresses […]

Think Global, Act Local

We put out a press release today announcing that Tod Skarecky is joining us to head up our US business. Please see Tod Skarecky to head US Business. To add some background around this. For a while now it has become clear to us that the US is our most important market. As we are […]

The Lean StartUp and LinkedIn

For those of you not familiar with the Lean StartUp concept, I can recommend the recent HBR article “Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything.” The article points out the the value of “experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, iterative design” and introduces concepts such as “minimum viable product” and “pivoting“. Some of the ideas […]

CloudBees: The extra member of the team

In football, the home team supporters energise their players by showing appreciation of good plays and creating an intimidating and distracting atmosphere for the opposing team. This advantage can be so great that is likened to having an extra player in the team, referred to as the ‘twelfth player‘ in the team. In many traditional […]

Business cards, Libor-rigging and Self-Interest

Going through my old business cards the other day, I spotted one for Tom Hayes, a Short Term Interest Rate Derivatives trader. Immediately it set me thinking whether this was the same Tom Hayes mentioned in the recent Libor-Rigging settlement at UBS. An Internet search did not throw up any categorical evidence that it was, […]

Accounting with Kashflow

I have been meaning to write a blog on my experiences with Kashflow for quite sometime, so finally here it is. Firstly why did I select Kashflow for my accounting needs, when every accountant will tell you to use Sage and I had previous experience of using Sage. Well to put in simply, I could […]

99Designs: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

99Designs is a crowdsourcing platform for graphic designers. We were interested in a new logo for Clarus and also curious about the modern 99Designs platform, so we hosted a ‘competition’ for the design of a new logo. We chose a ‘Silver’ competition (£339),  received 219 entries from 64 different designers, and are very happy with […]

ShareLaTeX

I recently stumbled across a little piece of magic, ShareLaTeX. I had just switched OS on my work laptop which meant reinstalling LaTeX again. It’s a windows machine, and I was also keen to be able to use my Mac Mini at home, so I started to look into using google drive with LaTeX. Whilst […]

Starting an Internship Programme at a Startup

In the UK, the notion of an internship is fairly new (to me at least). It was not straight forward to set up a program, so I share a few of the key steps I have found to be useful. The documents “Common Best Practice Code for Quality Internships” and “Internships that Work: A Guide […]

Getting started with LaTeX in WordPress

To get started with writing math within WordPress, I thought I would try using the JetPack plugin, it appeared to be the easiest to install (hosting on bluehost). This was not a good use of time, I should have just tried to get mathjax up and running, which in the end was not too complicated. […]