Gogrid

As much as I like Amazon EC2 the fact that it does not support windows has been a large hindrance to me seeing 50% of my current projects require Windows Server. Hence I have moved to Gogrid.com. So far the impressions are good, it’s stupidly simple to get up and going with a virtualised server. The pricing is reasonable. Will provide more feedback as I use the service more and more.

O2 and customer service

I have had various issues with O2 over the last year or so. The latest being connectivity with my O2 XDA. Unfortunately since O2 are not offering to cover the unit since it is > 12 months since I bought the unit (received another swapout last January when it was just under 12 months) I had to go through their Retail head office who stonewalled me.

 The issue is now with a unit called Customer First in Limerick. Lets see what happens….

Disruption in the Application Server Market

Gartner were predicting last year that there would be major disruption in the app server market in 2008. Listening to Rod Johnsons talk in Ireland recently would lend credence to this. Apparently Morgan Stanley does not use any application servers now. Instead they use Tomcat to expose their web apps. Certainly in my experience I don’t know anybody using Websphere out of choice!

Dell Gives Up On… Dell

Reading this headline on the Exolving Excellence blog. Hopefully Dell will now be forced to stop crowing how they are a lean company. But, lean isn’t just about reducing waste. The Toyota Production System is also about “respect for people,” meaning your employees, suppliers, and customers. Dell definitely scores higher on “reducing waste” than they do on “respecting people.” http://www.leanblog.org/2006/06/once-again-dell-is-not-tps.html
 

I would probably feel angrier with them if I did not know how they operate having worked for them in the past. A combination of analysts and shareholder pressure along with the massice tax breaks from North Carolina to build the plant there were large factors. Also Austin is Michael Dell’ home town!

WordPress as a CMS

At the moment the content for my company’s site is managed with CMS made simple. Whilst this is fine for a technical user I still think that for non tech people who want a website there must be an easier way. Looking into this I came across this site: http://www.webunload.com/ which is powered by wordpress!

 I then found this article detailing how to modify wordpress into a cms simple itself. http://www.webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/wordpress-theme-hacks/

 The other product I’ve been considering porting saastek.com to is Atlassian Confluence which is a Enterprise Wiki. Although it is a commercial licence I use Atlassian JIRA for issue tracking and am very impressed with it.

Amazon EC2 getting started guide

This caught me out for a few minutes this morning going through the tutorial

 The documentation cites ami-5bae4b32 as the image name of the getting-started image, getting-started.manifest.xml

PROMPT&gt; <strong><code><span><strong>ec2-describe-images -o self -o amazon</strong></span></code></strong>
<code><strong><em>IMAGE ami-5bae4b32 ec2-public-images/getting-started.manifest.xml amazon available public</em>
</strong>IMAGE ami-68ae4b01 ec2-public-images/fedora-core4-base.manifest.xml amazon available public
IMAGE ami-69ae4b00 ec2-public-images/fedora-core4-apache-mysql.manifest.xml amazon available public
IMAGE ami-6dae4b04 ec2-public-images/fedora-core4-apache.manifest.xml amazon available public
IMAGE ami-6fae4b06 ec2-public-images/fedora-core4-mysql.manifest.xml amazon available public
IMAGE ami-61a54028 &lt;your-s3-bucket&gt;/image.manifest.xml 495219933132 available
</code>

I tried this name and could not get my image to run, on running the command  ec2-describe-images -o self -o amazon it turns out the image name is actually ami-2bb65342

D:\Program Files\Amazon\Authentication>ec2-describe-images -o self -o amazon
IMAGE   ami-20b65349    ec2-public-images/fedora-core4-base.manifest.xml
amazon  available       public
IMAGE   ami-22b6534b    ec2-public-images/fedora-core4-mysql.manifest.xml
amazon  available       public
IMAGE   ami-23b6534a    ec2-public-images/fedora-core4-apache.manifest.xml
amazon  available       public
IMAGE   ami-25b6534c    ec2-public-images/fedora-core4-apache-mysql.manifest.xml
        amazon  available       public
IMAGE   ami-26b6534f    ec2-public-images/developer-image.manifest.xml  amazon
available       public
<strong><em>IMAGE   ami-2bb65342    ec2-public-images/getting-started.manifest.xml  amazon
available       public</em></strong>
IMAGE   ami-36ff1a5f    ec2-public-images/fedora-core6-base-x86_64.manifest.xml
amazon  available       public
IMAGE   ami-bd9d78d4    ec2-public-images/demo-paid-AMI.manifest.xml    amazon
available       public  A79EC0DB

 Hope this might save somebody some headscratching

The Amazon Cloud

Being a relatively new company we’ve been looking at cost effective ways of hosting applications in dev and test for clients as well as hosting applications used internally in SAASTEK such as JIRA, KnowledgeTree, etc etc.

These are the options that seem to be out there

* Purchase a server, configure it and use as dev/test server – Cons: Expense of purchasing a server, workload of maintanance, etc, etc

* Purchase dedicated hosting from a service provider – Cons: Fixed fee makes it difficult to justify the outlay at this stage, especially for Java hosting

* Purchaser virtual hosting – This is a more viable option, can match usage to resources used

* Cloud Computing – Namely the Amazon Cloud computing services, EC2, S3, etc etc.

At the moment I’m looking at the Amazon solution. After some research it seems possible to host a Windows Server instance on Amazon.
Here

The plan is to use the following image of WS2003 and run it on Fedora Core 6 as per this article
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=592&categoryID=101

Firstly though I’ve toyed around with getting a standard image provided by Amazon up and running, it’s really quite straightforward:
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/2007-03-01/GettingStartedGuide/

Once the WS2003 instance is up and running and I install a prototype system under development onto the instance I should be able to carry out a proper cost comparasion between the different hosting options.

Take 2!

Well..

 After having a blogger.com account for several years lying dormant I’ve decided to have another go at keeping a blog. My interest has been piqued by wordpress and their use of semantic web technologies so I’m hoping to learn a bit more about that as I (hopefully) add more content. 

 Apart from that I’d like to track the technologies I’m actively using as well as experimenting with.