Recently, we have become a member of ASCII Group, Inc. This partnership will allow us to be more aggressive in pricing for product and services. We are looking forward with our partnership with ASCII Group, Inc. Click on the logo below for more information.
Came across something interesting today… A hosted blog site called JournalSpace recently had a data melt down. They had no backups—only a RAID 1 configuration (mirroring). So basically, when the data was corrupted/overwritten—the second drive copied the problems. Here is a snippet from their website:
Journalspace is no more.
DriveSavers called today to inform me that the data was unrecoverable.
Here is what happened: the server which held the journalspace data had two large drives in a RAID configuration. As data is written (such as saving an item to the database), it's automatically copied to both drives, as a backup mechanism.
The value of such a setup is that if one drive fails, the server keeps running, using the remaining drive. Since the remaining drive has a copy of the data on the other drive, the data is intact. The administrator simply replaces the drive that's gone bad, and the server is back to operating with two redundant drives.
But that's not what happened here. There was no hardware failure. Both drives are operating fine; DriveSavers had no problem in making images of the drives. The data was simply gone. Overwritten.
The data server had only one purpose: maintaining the journalspace database. There were no other web sites or processes running on the server, and it would be impossible for a software bug in journalspace to overwrite the drives, sector by sector.
The list of potential causes for this disaster is a short one. It includes a catastrophic failure by the operating system (OS X Server, in case you're interested), or a deliberate effort. A disgruntled member of the Lagomorphics team sabotaged some key servers several months ago after he was caught stealing from the company; as awful as the thought is, we can't rule out the possibility of additional sabotage.
But, clearly, we failed to take the steps to prevent this from happening. And for that we are very sorry.
So, after nearly six years, journalspace is no more.
A very unfortunate situation that could have been easily preventable. This happens more often than reported. We can all learn from the mistake at JournalSpace and their cander to tell there users what actually happened. They have posted a way to try and recover your posts from Google cache. As of this time, the site is up for sale on eBay.
I am a big fan of Netflix. Recently I purchased a Netflix Player by Roku. For $99.00, this box is awesome! Basically, some of the titles on Netflix are available for play on demand—either on your PC or through a box like the Roku. The Roku player is wireless and takes about 10 minutes to setup. Once it is setup, you can stream movies that are available on demand to your TV over the internet via wireless internet connection. I was skeptical when I first purchased the unit. I was worried about the video quality, especially since I have a web server and two VOIP phones sharing the same internet connection. The performance is awesome! I would recommend this unit to anyone who enjoys their Netflix account! I hope more titles are made available in the future—which Netflix claims will be the case…
I decided to try out a new editor for my blog. Microsoft has released a new client called Windows Live Writer 2009. This software is available as a Release Candidate (which is why we are seeing some bugs). I am actually using it for this post--we will see how it goes. Anyway, during the setup the software asks to post a temporary entry to your site and notifies you that it will be immediately deleted. The reason the setup does this involves checking the site theme of your blog. My site uses MovableType as the blogging server software. Whenever Windows Live Writer 2009 tries to delete the temporary entry--you will still notice the entry on your site. This is quite cumbersome, but the fix is very easy. You will need to go into MovableType and rebuild your site. After the rebuild, the temporary entry will be removed from your site. Windows Live Writer 2009 removes the static temporary entry from MovableType but fails to remove the cached entry--this is why a rebuild will correct the problem simply. Microsoft has acknowledged this problem and is working to correct it.
Happy New Year everyone! Hope everyone has a blessed and exciting 2009!
Not to long ago—a company would never imagine trying to run a graphics intensive application such as a hospital Radiology PAC system, Autodesk applications and Solidworks. Citrix is working on a project (that is available as a Tech Preview) called Apollo 3D Accelerated Bitmap Remoting. To quote Citrix:
Apollo 3D Accelerated Bitmap Remoting, a new Citrix technology that leverages graphics processor hardware acceleration to efficiently deliver high end 3D professional graphics both OpenGL and DirectX over DSL-like network connections. Most customers’ graphics needs are already well met by SpeedScreen Progressive Display, a revolutionary technology introduced in Citrix XenApp Presentation Server 4.5 and also included in XenDesktop. However, working with large 3D graphics models often requires the added computational power of a graphics processing unit (GPU). Apollo 3D Accelerated Bitmap Remoting enables standard PCs and desktop appliances to edit and manipulate large CAD/CAM, geospatial, and medical imaging models. Apollo 3D Accelerated Bitmap Remoting for XenDesktop provides an ideal new way of delivering graphics-intensive DirectX and OpenGL applications such as Autodesk Inventor®, Autodesk Revit® Architecture, Bentley MicroStation™, Dassault Systèmes Solidworks, Catia and Delmia as well as 3D PACS to your most demanding users while keeping application software and data in the data center.
This is very exciting technology! Below is a video demonstration from Citrix Summit 2008.
