Chris Murton

About me

Sun, 27 Oct 2024 12:00:00 +0000

My name is Chris Murton and I live near London, UK. I work both as a Technical Architect designing, deploying and supporting effective solutions on Amazon Web Services and as a freelance radio presenter and tech-op.

IT

My background is in managed hosting and public cloud on Linux and Windows environments from designing production ready, highly resillient solutions all the way through to supporting them. I’ve also worked on designing and implementing advanced performance monitoring and event management systems.

AWS

Serverless including Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions and DynamoDB
Orchestration with CloudFormation and Terraform
EC2 auto scaling and ECS on EC2 and Fargate
IAM
Amazon S3
RDS and Amazon Aurora

Containerisation

Docker
Earthly

Distributions

Amazon Linux
Ubuntu
Debian
RedHat
CentOS

Databases

MySQL
PostgreSQL

Monitoring

Datadog
Amazon CloudWatch
IBM Tivoli (OMNIbus, ITM 6.x, Netcool Impact)
Zabbix
Nagios

Programming

Python
Node.js
Perl
Bash scripting
PHP

Radio

I’ve been working in radio since 1999, originally setting up and running an Internet-based radio station which went on to continue running for 6 years.

I have extensive experience using Genesys, Myriad v2.6 (Live Assist and Voicetracking), RCS Master Control, Linker and Selector (Live Assist and Voicetracking) and Zetta including scheduling, advert/traffic imports and editing/managing of clocks. I also have experience using Burli, Barrcode BCX and OtsDJ.

On-air

Glow Radio, 2024 - present

Sunday mornings (10am - 2pm).
B Radio Berkshire, 2021 - present

Cover presenter and Saturday mornings (10am - 1pm).
B Radio Hampshire & Surrey, 2021 - 2024

Presenter of Saturday mornings (10am - 1pm).
107 JACK fm Berkshire, 2014 - 2017

Presenter of Saturday mornings (8am - 12pm) and “JACKing up the 80s” on Sunday mornings (9am - 12pm).
Reading 107, 2011 - 2014

Presenter of the Evening Show (Monday - Friday, 7pm - 12am) and Saturday Mornings (8am - 1pm) plus holiday cover of weekday mid-mornings.
Time 106.6, 2007 - 2012

Hosted Early Breakfast (weekdays 4am - 6am) and Saturday Breakfast (6am - 10am), including cover for most weekday dayparts including Breakfast and Drivetime. Broadcasts across Berkshire and South Bucks.
Oxygen, 2009 - 2011

Host of weekday mornings 9am - 12pm playing Fresh Hits for the UK. Online radio station accessible worldwide.
Kestrel FM, 2010

Evening show cover for holidays.
Ocean FM, Spain, 2008 - 2009

Presented the Full English Breakfast (weekdays 7am - 10am) on Ocean FM covering Mojacar, Garrucha, Vera and Turre in the southern region of Spain.
Radio Verulam, 2004 - 2006

Looked after the Early Riser show during two FM RSLs in 2004 and 2006, heard in St. Albans and surrounding areas.

Behind the scenes

Heart, 2009 - 2010

Tech-op of network shows including Club Classics and “The Saturday Show with Emma Bunton”, as well as playing out the Phase 2 migration of the One Network stations.
95.8 Capital FM, 2007 - 2010

Tech-opping for a wide variety of shows including “Capital’s Dance Anthems”, “The Capital Breakfast Show” and playout of various pre-recorded presenter shows.
One Network, 2007 - 2009

Tech-op/producer role for “Party Anthems” and “Club Classics” shows with Gaz Wesley, as well as tech-opping for “Sunday Nights with Jason Donovan” and Kevin Hughes.
talkSPORT, 2006

Learning the ropes and cutting my teeth tech-opping for the Alan Brazil Sports Breakfast.

Voiceover work

107 JACK fm Berkshire

The voice of ‘JACKtivities’ promoting local events in and around Berkshire.
Reading 107

Voiced a series of promos for forthcoming live music events and gigs.
Pure FM

Voiced a full package of sweepers and cuts for the student radio station for the University of Portsmouth.
Purple Radio (previously Purple FM)

Recorded a series of liners to complement the existing on-air package at the University of Durham’s student radio station.

CloudWatch isn't just for the cloud

Fri, 07 Apr 2017 20:00:00 +0000

Amazon CloudWatch is an inexpensive way to monitor your solution in AWS and due to the extensive set of metrics provided for every AWS service out of the box, it’s easy and quick to adopt. Granted it’s not going to replace your enterprise monitoring solution overnight, but for those who haven’t got the time or justification to spin up their own Nagios/Zabbix/OpsView solution it can do basic event monitoring and alerting.

How to rid yourself of AWS API access keys

Wed, 22 Feb 2017 18:00:00 +0000

It’s fairly legacy these days to use hardcoded IAM Access Key ID and Secret Access Key values to call the AWS API, which has spawned a variety of different ways to obtain and utilise IAM credentials. Wait, what’s wrong with hardcoded credentials? The issues are numerous, some of which have come to the surface because of data breaches. Dev put AWS keys on Github or leaked access keys resulting in a $6,000 bill for starters.

Who needs a Homelab anyway?

Sat, 18 Feb 2017 13:40:00 +0000

I’ll start this post by setting out my stall - I’m a self confessed geek. I tinker, tweak and enjoy experimenting with new technologies. The arrival of my daughter a couple of years ago did reduce my tinkering time drastically but I digress. There was a time a few years ago that the keen IT hobbyist would have to invest serious time and money to feed their habit, namely in:

A potted history of TV-am

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In the 1980s, I have vivid memories of waking up early in the morning and watching ‘Good Morning Britain’. TV-am, the first commercial breakfast show in the UK, was broadcast from Hawley Crescent in Camden Town, London. The only building in London with eggcups on it’s roof was built from scratch. TV-am started off life unsuccessfully as around the time it was due to launch, the BBC launched a rival service.

All about the Big Breakfast

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The Big Breakfast first hit our TV screens on September 28th 1992 with a completely alternative style of breakfast show. It was ground-breaking television. The Big Breakfast was to be beamed to us daily between 7am and 9am from Lock Keepers Cottages, Old Ford Lock, London. Channel 4 had purchased these cottages which had stood disused for a long period of time and had significant amounts of graffiti and internal damage.

A misspent youth

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 13:25:00 +0100

Once upon a time when I was at secondary school, the computers in the library were protected with a program called Applock. Very Windows ‘95 it was too. The utility was written by Anaplastic Software in 1994 and was available as Shareware with an option to buy for $12.50, which my school had done. The company seems to be long since gone, but you can still download the application from some places on the Internet.

PlexPy - for the curious

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 13:25:00 +0100

Well before Netflix, Amazon Prime Video et al. were a thing, I’ve been running Plex Media Server at home to ship media of all types (photos, music, TV shows and movies) to various devices around the house. I got so fed up with physical DVDs chewing up space in the lounge I went through and ripped every DVD we own to digital and subsequently cleared out two drawers worth of plastic and shiny discs - so I’m fairly invested.