Stories

I have been playing around with some research on cloud computing lately. I am using the Google Platform as a base to store and present all the data. I used Google as a Platform when I was doing my social media marketing business. It gave me a ready to go platform to collaborate on without building something from scratch. I am enjoying trying to retrofit it to ...

I am last minute e-filing my taxes because my accountant just told me my extension was denied cause they say someone already filed using my SSN? Whole other issue. So I am working using an online software and it is pretty slow, but that expected because its 4/15. So I ask myself....are they scaling their infrastructure in the clouds?

I was sitting in a pub last night drinking a beer and organizing my home photos so I could share with my ex-wife. I was uploading images in various zipped folders into different buckets in my Amazon S3 storage in the cloud. I was also uploading various zipped folders from my web application development businesss I ran for 8 years. All the project, accounting and business inf...

Came across a nice overview of a core element of Cloud Computing, multi-tenancy. It is a good read, I recommend it.

I am going through my notes of blog ideas from the last couple of weeks and getting a few things out of the way. I have been coding for a while and need to blog. And since I am talking about Google features I want, I have another request. I am using the Google Platform for a research project on cloud computing in my spare time. I am storing my research in Google Docs and organizing my research using...

I have had my Gmail account since the early days. I begged people to give me invites and finally got one. Ohhhh the early days. So my contact list is pretty large, and now that Google has expanded it beyond just a list of email addresses into an actual contact management system. It is pretty simple, but you can actually do a lot with it. I have been working to clean up my contact system and really start using it as a CRM. I really like that I can see the conversation history o...

Been pissed off for a couple days because my new browser tab in Firefox doesn't fit up there anymore because of some new search box.

I am constantly looking for better tools to manage my cloud environments. I have been using Amazon S3 since it first came out. I really saw the potential Amazon S3 had early on, as storage for all my web applications. I ran a web application development company with my now ex-wife for eight years called Original Web Solutions. We were on version 4.0 of our content management system when we dissolved the company. Version 4.0 was a completely SaaS based system and utilized Amazon S3 for...

Was just reading this post about a major Australian Internet outage that left the entire top end of the country without telephone, internet or mobile communications for about 10 hours. Definitely brings attention to a MAJOR problem we will continue facing with our nations infrastructure. I wrote about the outage in San Jose the other day, that affected our company. There nee...

Was just reading this post on CloudPundit - DDoS season regarding several high profile distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The victims include: Neustar's UltraDNS. (Problems with specific regional DNS clusters, with little customer-visible impact.) Register.com. (Severe impact on Web hosting and email customers.) GoGrid. (Severe impact on cloud hosting customers...

I read every day about the need for cloud computing interroperability between providers. Just about all of it is talk. Providers claim they pay attention to this point, however the only major move beyond just straight API's is the Google Secure Data Connector release the other day. I really think interroperability between providers is going to have to be defined, and built by the masses. The developers who rely upon the...

Tags help give me a visual summary of a lot of my work. I deal with a lot of content and it is hard to see the high level view. Tag clouds give us a great perspective of everything from our Blogs to Google Reader and beyond. I don't make enough time to tag all my blog postings. Most of my blog entries are purely shooting from the hip as I have the thought. Otherwise they don't make it in my blog. As I am sure some of you can tell, because when you read...I could use some edito...

Another great post from Dion Hinchliffe @ ZD Net.....Determining the ROI of Entrpise 2.0 Each of Dion's articles leave me processing the links and information for days. Every IT director should be following his blog. Excellent advice as you are trying to figure out how to navigate the migration to Enterprise 2.0 and into the clouds.

I have come across several articles on Google's new Secure Data Connector. Definitely a huge step in legitimizing the usage of Google Docs within a corporate environment. With the Google Secure Data connector you can access data within Google Gadgets, Google App Engine and Google Spreadsheets. It gives you user access control to applications. I was working on an overview of the opportunities Google provides for cloud computing interconnectivity as well (coming in next po...

So I have used Google as a platform for a while. I did several large scale social media marketing campaigns completely using Google as a platform. They just have the best software services, platform services, and infrastructure services. I have been finding the best route to provide a easy, but effective solution for some my mom and brother's technology platform. Google is the logical choice because with a domain I immediately get email, calendaring, document sharing, ...

I have blogged about my usage of EXT JS Framework. I am adopting it for usage at my company right now and plotting the next stages in our event management software products. It has taken me some considerable work to learn how EXT JS works and how to adopt it for the best usage throughout our software. Some simple things just become real hard for me to do. However the separation of the presentation layer is awesome. I truly feel like I have things separated now. I have ...

For some reason I stumble across Dion's articles all at once. They always pop up every couple weeks. Here is the latest one I stumbled across: The emerging case for open business methods I am a big advocate of companies opening up as much as possible. I think business trasnparency and openness can radically change your business in very positive ways. Dion provides some very organized information on evolving your b...

I have been reading up on data center operations lately and what goes into building a data center that a cloud / virtualization methodology could be deployed to provide various public or private cloud computing. I come across many great studies on building Green Data Centers, I was reading this one today: Cloud Computing: Truly Green Data Centers It was a good article talking about Green d...

For some reason today I got a nervous feeling that I have too many Amazon EC2 instances up and running....I was up to 20 instances mid week to support our event in May. I shut them down 24 hours later, but for some reason I got worried that I had left some up and running. I have done this before....left an instance running a day or two longer than I should have. In this economy we can't be spending any more than we have to. And my EC2 budget has been running high, playing with our new...

Hitting on a common problem I have, and just need to talk it out a little bit on here so I can continue finding the right approach. My brother Richard has an accounting firm in Hawaii, and my mom and her partner have an alternative health business I guess you'd call it. They both do well. However they struggle with their web site and Internet presence. I have offered up to help before, but because I am busy or something else happens I don't deliver. This was back more when I h...

Ohhh the acronyms ....gotta love them. So just as I was finishing up my blog post Interroperability at the Software as a Service (SaaS) layer....I clicked open my Google Reader an started reading. I was re-thinking this issue as I was pondering the problems of delivering a full small business solution of tools to my mom's and brother's businesses. Then I came across this post: Read more →

I encounter this problem all the time, but I am doing a fresh round of thinking trying to help my mom and brother with their Internet Operations for their small businesses. When my brother and I were talking about his web site needs, I said... What do you want your web site to do? He said company info, blog, calendar, and kept going from there. To me that is more tha...