Archive for the 'secantus' Category

Cool Tool of the moment : Hamachi

Thursday, November 2nd, 2006

I downloaded Hamachi today. What is hamachi? A very simple, secure way to connect a group of PCs together in a shared, private network. Its very slick, has good installation help and works just as expected.

Now we can all connect together and also connect with our (small number) of PCs and servers that live in the office.

You create a network, members join the network by entering a password and once they are on the network you have as access to their machine in an identical fashion to a machine on the same subnet. You can also access a web-server if they happen to have one running.

Its another piece of the jigsaw that includes hosted subversion, hosted servers, hosted email and calendar and hosted DNS management.

Posted in Business, Ideas, Startups, Web 2.0, irishblogs, networks, secantus | 3 Comments »

Amazon EC2 - Mindblowing access to compute power

Monday, August 28th, 2006

I’m just catching up on my blogs and the one thing that rocks my world is news of Amazon’s new web service EC2. They’ve jumped the gun on Sun and Google to provide a global grid facility to anybody with a credit card. USD$ 0.10 (10 cents) an hour gets you,

… the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth

You get prebuilt Linux instances to layer your own images on and free interconnect to your S3 storage.  We already use S3 so this is going to increase the security of our application, improve scalability and make it cheaper all in one go!

Total cost for a years worth of compute power 0.10 * 24 * 365 = USD$ 876. Moving stuff from out current hosted environment to our S3 storage was going to cost us a fortune but this could have a radical impact on our most significant cost, bandwidth, where’s that spreadsheet…..

Posted in Amazon, EC2, SOA, Software, Startups, Virtual Storage, Web 2.0, Web Services, secantus | 1 Comment »

Hosted Gmail for Secantus.com

Wednesday, July 19th, 2006

I recently received an invite to participate in the Google for your domain service. This is a Google email account and calendar that can be given a specific domain identity. In our case the identity was for secantus.com (soon to be putplace.com). During the beta period you get 25 free email accounts, a management console and a calendar for each user.

Setup consists of updating your existing MX records to point to the Google Mail Servers.  Its slickly done and tells you whether you have configured them right or not. You can brand the interface replacing the Gmail logo with your own and of course you get a free IM client (GTalk) to boot.

We’ve been using it for the past week and are more than happy with the service. The only issues to date are with the Gmail Notifier program which doesn’t recognise hosted email accounts (it expects an @gmail.com account). This has been reported on the Google feedback forums.

One nice touch, when you sent email through another client (e.g. Apple Mail or Thunderbird) it appears in your sent items on the gmail hosted account, sweet!

Posted in Business, Google, Software, Startups, Web 2.0, secantus | No Comments »

Quick GWT Toolkit review

Thursday, June 1st, 2006

John writes about the GWT Toolkit on the Secantus blog. As a result of his investigations we are sticking with the Yahoo Toolkit for now.

Posted in AJAX, Software, Web 2.0, secantus | No Comments »