Geek

Canada / Geek / General / wtf — View Comments
14
May 10

Mobilicity Launches… on GoDaddy

Mobilicity, a new mobile phone carrier is launching in Canada on May 15th, 2010. Starting in Toronto, then covering other major cities like Vancouver, and Montreal, the service is competitively priced with unlimited plans for calling and text messages at around $35 dollars (CAD) a month, which is pretty sweet.

After seeing some buzz on Twitter about Mobilicity, I went to their website, which was so slow I thought I was on dial-up.

This amateur stuff from a Telecom?
No… It can’t be.

But after seeing a database connection error (This means shit is broken for all your non-techies) I realized something was really up.

Check this out:

# host www.mobilicity.ca
www.mobilicity.ca has address 173.201.38.96
# host 173.201.38.96
96.38.201.173.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer ip-173-201-38-96.ip.secureserver.net.

Huh? Secureserver.net is….

# whois 173.201.38.96
 
OrgName:    GoDaddy.com, Inc.
OrgID:      GODAD
Address:    14455 N Hayden Road
Address:    Suite 226
City:       Scottsdale
StateProv:  AZ
PostalCode: 85260
Country:    US
 
NetRange:   173.201.0.0 - 173.201.255.255
CIDR:       173.201.0.0/16
OriginAS:   AS26496
NetName:    GO-DADDY-SOFTWARE-INC
NetHandle:  NET-173-201-0-0-1
Parent:     NET-173-0-0-0-0
NetType:    Direct Allocation
NameServer: CNS1.SECURESERVER.NET
NameServer: CNS2.SECURESERVER.NET
NameServer: CNS3.SECURESERVER.NET
Comment:    Please send abuse complaints to abuse@godaddy.com
RegDate:    2009-09-18
Updated:    2009-09-18

Its GoDaddy. A telecom that hosts its website on GoDaddy.

Yikes.

Brainstorming / Business / Geek / General / cloud — View Comments
30
Apr 10

Clouds and The Fate of the Help Desk

As an efficiency nut there’s one thing that makes me really happy about Tablets:

The Help Desk will be going away.

It’s important to understand the meaning of the term “Help Desk”. I don’t just mean people who sit around all day with headsets, answering phone calls. It turns out there are a *lot* of people employed in IT whose job it is to just keep the lights on. Vendors, Integration specialists, Sysadmins, and the guy whose entire job it is to  click the right button to clear the printer queue. Entire countries have devoted a lot of resources to greasing the gears of computers. They all work in a Helpdesk somehow.

CTO’s and CIO’s are starting to appreciate that their function at a company isn’t about technology implementation – it’s about how technology can help their business. Who cares if your OS is running Windows or Linux if all you need is a Word processor (and Solitaire). It’s become totally irrelevant.

What matters is the applications that are delivered to the end user; everything else is just implementation dogma. The people doing these implementations are Help Desks too, they’re just a few degrees removed from the end-user and prefer snazzier titles like ‘Application Services Engineer.’

It’s gonna take awhile. The PC will be around for a long time and people still need to type. But as we shift to tiny, integrated, crash-proof devices we need help desks less and less. The intuitive nature of the computer will suggest that it’s no longer important to be adept at using them. Not only that, but as we cycle through generations of people, the technical citizens will supplant the technical immigrants

Analysis / Brainstorming / Geek / General / Ideas / cloud — View Comments
18
Feb 10

Carbon Computing

Being able to outsource all of your computing needs to an external provider is absolutely fantastic for developers and some businesses. While not running your own infrastructure is much cheaper, it also makes the amount of energy and associated ‘costs’ of computing very opaque.

There are quite a few issues with the transparency of costs in the cloud computing space. This includes no transparency into the cost of electricity, and where that electricity is coming from. To date, there is no public database of electricity markets, datacenters, and hosting providers which lists how much carbon per kWh of electricity is being output. In ICT this is a massive issue, because of the sheer amount of energy our industry consumes.

“Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is both a problem and a potential solution in the war against climate change. Currently, computers are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than airlines. Greenhouse gas is growing exponentially and we expect that ICT will produce double the emissions of the airline industry within five years with no end in site. ICT can provide a solution to climate change by reducing carbon emmission in the world through telecommuting and other means.”

Here in British Columbia we get most of our electricity from renewable hydro-electric power. Hydro-Electric is one of the lowest forms of reliable low carbon output electricity generation available. It goes without saying that providing computing services using energy generated this way would mean less CO2 / kWh but also less CO2 per compute cycle.

We need several things to make this happen

1) Start measuring how much power ICT is using on a per server / component basis
2) Develop resources that track carbon output per kWh in different states & provinces and provide that information as a service
3) Determine where your computing resources are located and track on a per machine level the amount of carbon being output
4) Calculate how much carbon you’re using.

Those are pretty audacious goals, but I think we really need to start keeping track of carbon output for power. By tying that into the different services we use on a regular basis, we can make carbon part of the social and actual cost of using services. Hopefully that will help buy us enough time and money to develop the carbon neutral power solutions we desperately need.

Development / Geek / General / howto / sysadmin — View Comments
12
Feb 10

Unfuddle Git Backups – How to Actually Use Them

I really like Unfuddle. The service is easy to use, and there are a lot of great features in there. The documentation is… lacking, however.

One of the things I like is the ability to get a full backup of all my project data, repositories, etc in a single tarball. You can even ask them to keep a copy in your own S3 account.

To create a backup do the following

1) log into Unfuddle and goto the Project page.
2) Click the ‘settings’ tab then
3) Scroll down till you see link that says ‘Request a backup of this project now’ link. Click it.

In a few moments you’ll get an email, and you’ll see a new link on the right hand side of your project settings page that includes a timestamped backup. This backup is a tarball that contains all the GIT repositories and some other files like a backup.xml file which looks like all your tickets.

To use the git dumps run the following

mkdir reponame
cd reponame
git init
git fast-import < ../my-unfuddle-backup.git.dmp
git checkout master

You’re done!

If you’re using subversion repositories there is documentation on how to use these repo backups on Unfuddles website.

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