The outage this morning resulted from a failed core network component upgrade in Isomedia’s network.  For reasons yet unknown, the upgrade caused the piece of equipment to turn all ports down and they had to manually turn them back up to restore service.  The outage lasted approximately 50 minutes.

I appreciate the transparency I’ve gotten from them thus far.  Unanticipated stuff happens at times but they reacted quickly. They will now do these updates during regular maintenance windows just in case.

An date outage at Isomedia’s co-lo facility affected us this morning.  I don’t know much in the way of details because none were given on their site other than it was restored at 6:50 AM.

What is Cloud Computing?

If you’re reading this from a PC, you’ve got a computer with an operating system and probably dozens to hundreds of applications that you use to do whatever it is you do with that PC.  Bringing up a web browser and reading blogs is just one of them.

If you want to write a letter, you’re going to probably bring up Microsoft’s Word and compose it.  Whatever it is you want to do, chances are it will require some application that you paid some company for.  An application that may from time to time require upgrading, and eventually you’ll have to pay for that.

Or, instead you could use what is called a thin client, this is just a program that allows you to connect to some remote computing facility and use your keyboard and monitor as if you were right there.  In our case, Eskimo North uses something called ‘NX’ to provide that functionality and we are also working on providing that capability to some other thin clients.

Using this, let’s say you wanted to write a letter, now your computer no longer has to be equipped, instead you’d connect to us with your NX thin client, go to Applications->Office->LibreOffice Writer, and compose your letter.  If you setup a printer, then you could print from that program on our server to your printer.  Alternatively, you could setup Google Cloud Print and print to a cloud printer.

With this situation, you no longer have to pay for a word processor, or upgrade it when it’s obsolete, or so any sort of hardware or software maintenance beyond what is necessary for your thin client to work and that is minimal.

An additional plus, you wouldn’t need to learn MacOS, Windows, and Linux OS’s and their applications as the interface and application would be identical no matter which platform you are working from.  Eventually we hope to expand this to any HTML5 compliant browser equipped device which will open it up to smart phones, tablets, etc.

A larger cloud computing provider would have a huge network of computers providing the service but it would be transparent to you.  Ours is still pretty small but we’re working on that.

There is an advantage to small.  A huge network of millions of inter-networked computers is also a huge network to properly secure.  When you put something on Amazon’s or Google’s clouds, who knows how many computers your data is spread across.  Hopefully they are all secure, and I hope the same for my network but it does seem like that job grows with the size of the network and it is frankly those concerns that have prevented me from offering some new services I would like to offer, I need to get the security issues nailed down first.

One thing we do differently here is that we don’t mine your data to target advertising to you or for any other purpose.  We view your data, you content, whether it be web, e-mail, files in your directory, as yours and respect that.  I hope this is a viable commercial model, a model for those who wish to have their privacy and the ownership of their content respected.  Only time will tell.  You all vote with your feet.  I just want to be clear that what I am building here is quite different from what others are building in that respect.  I always appreciate your feedback.

In case you might be curious where I originate this stuff from.  This is my disaster of a home office.  Stylized just a bit to hide some of the muck.

The speaker on the shelf there, I bought when I was still living in an apartment about thirty years ago.  Sounds like crap but hard to kill.

The crooked photo with the orange in it I took back when I was playing with 35mm photography, same for the picture to the left of the tigers, that’s Snoqualmie Falls.  The tigers are a commercial print.

The table is much larger than it looks, about 4×6 feet.  The monitor is a monster old 21 inch tube Viewsonic which is old and sick and blurry.  The focus control can’t focus the screen everywhere at once, I can have the center focused or the edges but not both at the same time.  It eats about half the table all by itself.  Some year I’ll get a modern LCD monitor but funds have been tight so I live with it for now.  It’s supposed to be capable of 1440×1920 @ 80Hz, but in reality it will only do that resolution at 60 Hz, so I run it at 1600×1200 @75 Hz which gets the flicker down to where it is tolerable.  The higher resolution really doesn’t do any good with the focus problems it has anyway.

The wireless router on the 2nd shelf connects the Kodak ESP3.2 Printer to the left.  Some lady at Walmart told me she had three of them and they worked wonderfully for her so I bought one to replace my aging printers that no longer print functionally.  It was a real pain to get to talk but I finally did get it working mostly.  Occasionally it goes out to lunch and requires a power cycle to talk again.

Numpty Physics

Numpty physics is a fun little game where you draw objects and they are then animated to interact according to known laws of physics to achieve some game objectives.

To play this game you need to have NX setup and connect to shellx.  From the Gnome Desktop, Applications->Games->Numpty Physics.

I’ve sent mail to folks to encourage you to try NX to connect to shellx if you haven’t yet because it opens up so many new tools and features.

For those of you who haven’t done so yet, please see:

http://www.eskimo.com/shell/gui.html

It does pain me when people leave without having any idea all of the new things that are available here.  If you develop web pages, there are two tools on shellx that you should be aware of, KompoZer and KLinkStatus.

KompoZer

KompoZer is a web editor that is very similar in terms of look and feel to Dreamweaver.  Dreamweaver has more bells and whistles but this has most of the basics you need and it’s included with the service, no need to buy and install expensive software on your computer.

KompoZer can edit files locally or FTP publish.  That means you can use it to edit your websites here locally and any changes will be made live instantly.  You can also use it to ftp publish, which means you can use it to edit your websites elsewhere as well.

KompoZer features a WSIWIG “Design” view, a syntax hi-lighted “Code” view, or a split screen in which you can see any changes you make in the code immediately reflected in the design view, or changes you make in the design window reflected in the code.

KompoZer has tabbed files so you can open up your CSS in one tab and HTML in another, and JavaScript in third and readily switch between them.

KompoZer can be invoked from the Gnome Desktop as Applications->Programming->Kompozer.

KLinkStatus

Google attempts to provide a good experience for the end user and to that end, they tend to rank sites which are technically correct higher than sites that have HTML errors or dead links.

Content on the web comes and goes and moves around.  As time passes, a percentage of links become invalid for one reason or another.  The page is gone and there is a 404 error.  The page is redirected to somewhere else.  The server is gone and the page times out.  Manually regularly checking link status is a tedious job that consumes a lot of time and often tends not to get done.

KLinkStatus to the rescue.  KLinkStatus will crawl even a large site in just a few minutes, smaller sites in seconds, and find all broken links turning a once tedious chore into a trivial snap.

KlinkStatus can be invoked from the Gnome Desktop as Applications->Programming->KLinkStatus.

MySQL databases are available to anyone with an account here; to obtain one all that you need to do is send e-mail to support@eskimo.com.  Include a password for the database.

The databases can be manipulated using the mysql client on shellx.eskimo.com.

From the shell server use mysql -h mysql.eskimo.com -u (your login) -p

… it will prompt for your database password.

From web pages, refer to the host as ‘localhost’, the mysql server, Apache web server, and ftp server all share the same host.

The mysql version as of this posting is 5.1.66.

Mozilla Sunbird is a cross-platform calendar application, built upon Mozilla Toolkit. It brings Mozilla-style ease-of-use to your calendar, without tying you to a particular storage solution.

Scribus is an desktop open source page layout program with the aim of producing commercial grade output in PDF and Postscript, primarily, though not exclusively for Linux.
While the goals of the program are for ease of use and simple easy to understand tools, Scribus offers support for professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, easy PDF creation, Encapsulated Postscript import/export and creation of color separations.

The program ccal, a curses based calendar, journal, diary, to-do list program has been installed on shellx.eskimo.com.