“Me too!” Said the Cloud Provider
May 14, 2013 by Patrick Gill · Leave a Comment
Something that has been present in technology companies for a long time is the “me too” mentality. Company A will come up with an ingenius way to solve a problem that the public has had for a long time. They sell their solution like mad, their stock goes up, their brand becomes a household name, and life will be grand for them. Company B sees this and looks at it like a shortcut to success. They proclaim, “Me too!” and begin offering an almost identical product or solution, brand it a bit differently, and act like they’ve just completely changed what Company A created.
We see this in several industries, but the technology industry is currently the front runner for it, specifically when talking about the “Cloud.” Many companies are shouting, “Me too! I’ve got a cloud too!” and haven’t really defined within the company what “Cloud” means to them. That’s not what Data Cave wants to do.
We want to think differently about how we can best solve a common problem that enterprises and small businesses have. We are working on a solution that we think is pretty neat and well defined within our company. This stuff is our life, it’s our passion, and it’s going to be a great help to a large variety of businesses.
A bit of our secret sauce is no secret at all. Our engineers are working hard with OpenStack, creating one of the best, most stable, and fastest back ends in the industry today. Enormous companies like Netflix, Comcast (in their new X1 Platform), PayPal, and Cisco WebEx are utilizing OpenStack and believe it is the future to centralized computing. We agree, and we’re going to learn everything we can about it to bring it to our customers as part of a package that will work so well, you’ll not even know it’s there.
We can’t wait to show you what we’ve got cooking. We think you’re really going like it.
My Workflow – Internet Browsing
April 18, 2013 by Patrick Gill · Leave a Comment
As more and more of everyday life moves toward the internet, I find myself looking for ways to make my internet browser flow more smoothly. I have been back and forth with browsers, trying to choose the one I love the most. I have landed on Google Chrome for the time being. It isn’t quite as smooth as Safari on my Mac, but I can forgive that due to the expanse of other things it does for me.
There are a lot of reasons I currently enjoy Chrome: the way the tabs work, the syncing features, the speed, the consistency. But I’d like to focus on the extensions I use. I use several (probably no where near close to the number that a super user might) and they help me get the things done that I like to do on the internet.
I probably wouldn’t get along on the internet without Agile Software’s 1Password app. It’s a great password keeper, generator, and with the browser extension it will auto fill for you too! I use the extension to autofill things for me and to be able to generate passwords on the fly. It’s a sweet addition to the full app.
Adblock is an ad blocker extension that will block almost any ad on any website. It’s awesome because once you use it for a while, you forget it’s there. Then when you use someone’s computer that doesn’t have it you see all sorts of annoying adds that attempt to get your attention or distract you from the content you really want to see. Some websites request you turn it off to browse them, Hulu for example, because they make their money from advertisements. But living without this extension is something I just don’t want to do.
I use the bitly extension to shorten and track links I send out on the various social media avenues. Bitly is cool because it will keep track of other people shortening the same link and tell you about the overall clicks for that URL.
Buffer is like a bitly and social media poster in one. I can schedule tweets or statuses and track how well or poorly they do.
This is a sweet extension. This puts a little box on a YouTube page that will let you download the video or just audio and keep it for your very own. I believe it only works on things that are free to the public, so you can grab all the freebies your heart desires. I use it when I find a live recording of a great song and want to stick it in my Dropbox and play it later in the car or something of that nature.
I don’t really utilize this as much as I should, but DuckDuckGo is a competitor to Google’s Search so I feel like I’m sticking it to the man when I have the extension installed in Google Chrome. DuckDuckGo supposedly doesn’t track a thing you do and you’d get better searches with more depth (outside of your bubble, they call it) when you use them for search.
An invaluable extension, FlashBlock blocks the flash plugin until you need it. Flash is very insecure so having it shutdown until you manually tell it to run is a great idea. You can also whitelist websites and even choose to use HTML5 in some cases to view your web video.
We use this to function as a quick proxy on/off for when we need to get into our work network from the outside world. It is very customizable and has proved very useful in doing exactly what we need it for.
Ghostery is awesome! It not only tells you what trackers a website has when you visit it, but it will also block those trackers. I used it for quite some time before I realized it could do the blocking thing. Now I LOVE it.
This extension rivals Safari’s “reader” function. It basically takes the content you’d like to read on the webpage and puts it in an article type format with no distraction around it.
Pocket was formally “Read it Later” and is basically a service to put links in a database for an app that you can later go to when you have time and read the articles you’ve saved. With the extension installed, “pocketing” something is just a click away.
Prowl is a Mac/iOS app that allows you to trigger various events and get notifications about certain things. I use the extension to send a link quickly from my desktop browser to my iPhone.
If you don’t know what this is, then I won’t take you down the rabbit hole. This is an enhancement for the website reddit.com.
The Camelizer extension has already paid for itself. Well, it was FREE, but it tells you on various shopping pages what the price of the item you’re viewing has been in the past. This allows you to see if it’s going to come back down or if it is a great time to buy it. It was VERY useful when the price of hard drives shot up after the floods in Asia.
When I see a cool font on a webpage I like to find out what it is to see if I am able to use it later on a Data Cave webpage or when I develop webpages for other clients. WhatFont’s extension allows me to click a button, mouse over a font, and it will tell me as much information as it can with a popup.
There are most of my extensions. I use some of them often and some I use rarely, but they have all proven useful at one point or another. I’m always looking for great ways to make my browsing the Internet more fun and safe and I’m always open to suggestions. I hope this at least gets one’s mind thinking outside the standard browser box and opens the mind to the world of browser extensions.
Wrangling Mobile Email – Mailbox app, Gmail, and stock.
March 6, 2013 by Patrick Gill · Leave a Comment
We have recently made the switch from Zimbra to Google Apps for our main email and document service here at Data Cave. It became more evident over the last couple of years that we weren’t going to have time to maintain our own email server because we were getting busier with new products, customers, and R&D, which is a very good problem to have. For a company of our size, the price was nearly a wash, and we get a ton of (mostly) reliable email and document storage to boot. With that change we also now have at our disposal several good email clients for our mobile devices as well as our desktop computers. I’m most excited about the mobile platform.
Gmail iPhone App
There have been several big changes recently in the mobile email wrangling world that have been, for the most part, pretty exciting. The 2.0 Gmail App (iTunes Store Link) from google has been pretty sweet. It allows you to do most every gmail thing there is, as well as giving support for multiple accounts, though no unified inbox just yet. Last year, however, Google purchased Sparrow, which has been my go-to desktop client of choice, for the simple fact that it’s fast! It seems to do things in the background that the built in Mail client makes you wait for while it completes the processes. I haven’t used Sparrow’s iOS app, but it never got around to doing push notifications, so it didn’t fit in my workflow. Google seems to be adding Sparrow-like features into their own app, but it is still incomplete and I’d like a few more things.
What I want from a mobile email client is fairly simple; I’d like to swipe one way to delete, and the other to archive. I feel like that is kind of a no-brainer and should have been built in to (at least) Apple’s iOS client from the beginning, and certainly by their 6th major iteration of the operating system. But alas, it’s still not there. You CAN flip a switch to allow a gmail setup to do archiving, but then you lose the quick ability to delete. By the way, I think almost everything has gotten good enough at searching that filing email into folders is now a waste of time, for me anyway.
Mailbox App for iPhone
So a new app has just hit the market – Mailbox. It is an iOS only app for now and works exclusively with gmail accounts, but it gives me the ability to swipe one direction for an archive, and it will also let me swipe longer for a delete. This was all I really wanted. Mailbox adds a whole lot more to the mix though. You can short swipe the other direction to move your email to a “later” folder which you do have control of what “later” is. And it will let you long swipe that same direction to place the email in a “list.” To me, these are both GENIUS ideas. You can deal with your emails immediately, or you can pick a time to deal with them later. I try to stay on top of them, so I can quickly do whatever needs done with them, get them out of my inbox, and clear my brain of them as well.
There are a few caveats to the new app though -
Firstly, you have to give the Mailbox company access to all of your emails in order for them to filter correctly. Kind of scary, but they say emails are encrypted while they’re on Mailbox’s servers and not readable by anyone, human or machine. These guys seem trustworthy, but you never know. Luckily I don’t have any personal, nor business secrets to hide.
Secondly, when Mailbox app launched, the company did something that has been, so far, unique. They implemented a reservation system and allowed only as many new clients on to their servers as they could handle. This helped the servers not to become overwhelmed. But think about this: if you are depending solely on the Mailbox servers to deliver your email, and those servers crash, you’re not going to get your email. This is a new company venture for their company and so far they’ve only had a few outages, but you’d better have a backup plan or you may find yourself in an email pickle.
There are many blogs out there that are more in depth about how you should deal with your email, but I try to keep it simple with this list:
1. Allow me to archive and delete from the same window.
2. Be fluid and easy to work with.
3. Be reliable and available.
4. Be fun to use.
I feel like we’re getting closer, but we’re still not quite there…
How are you guys doing it? We’re always up for hearing a better way. Tell us in the comments.
Oh, and hey Mailbox guys: I know of a great Data Center if you’d like some DR or Colo. Let’s make a deal!
CES Product Round-Up
January 24, 2013 by Patrick Gill · Leave a Comment
The world’s largest tradeshow, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), kicked off 2013 with a bang by unveiling numerous interesting (and nerdy) technology products. Some technology, such as TV, grew, while others, such as tablets and laptops, shrank. Here are some of our favorite developments. CES typically demonstrates advances in hardware, but 2013 indicates a shift away from hardware and toward total integration with improved software.
More Bendable Glass
Corning unveiled bendable glass, which may be available on smart phones and tablets as early as 2014. This is very exciting news for anyone who has ever dropped a device and shattered the screen. While the glass still has the potential to break if bent too deeply, it is certainly a great step into more functional and durable devices, which could lower business costs when the company has to replace an item due to a damaged screen.
The Largest USB Drive
Likewise, Kingston has developed what is “officially the largest USB drive available on the market,” according to Midweek. The one Terabyte version of the DataTraveler HyperX Predator 3.0 USB Flash Drive will be released in early 2013; however, the 512 GB version is already available and is priced at $1,750. While this and the Terabyte capacity (price is yet to be determined) could be considered costly solutions to data storage and protection, consider the fact that you can back up your entire computer with a tiny thumb drive. Since the device is so small it will also give greater mobility to big data and increase data storage options and flexibility.
Deca-Dock: Multi-dock Charging Station
Griffin Technology introduced a multi-dock charging station that can charge and synchronize 10 iPads at once. It also features a lockable security bar to reduce the risk of theft. This station will help simplify the management of devices, such as iPads, which are becoming very common for corporate use.
Hardware’s Bottom Line: New hardware advances are simplifying daily business activities and making data and the hardware itself more durable and secure.
“CES has traditionally been all about hardware, with a particular emphasis on television,” said Chia Chen, SVP, Mobile Lead, Digitas North America. “But this year the ecosystem of software, apps, and content became a crucial part of the show.”
Connectivity and Apps and Content, Oh My!
The Herald Online stated that “with the exception of TVs, the most buzzed about capabilities focused on the connectivity, apps, and content related to [cell phones, tablets and laptops], beating out other features such as size, display, network, and processors/speed.” This suggests that the consumer is becoming more aware of how devices work and the many more technical aspects that allows devices to operate at their maximum potential.
Siri Meets Her Match: More Voice
Forbes contributor Raj Sabhlok is looking forward to voice integration software becoming mainstream in the business world. “With voice integration and voice-to-text functionality, the technology holds promise for productivity boosts in areas like sales, support and many administrative functions. Customer service reps can process orders or solve support problems by simply communicating by voice. Think of an enhanced Siri for business, where answering the phone, dictating a letter or creating complicated spreadsheets will be done solely by voice commands.”
Driving Technology
Likewise, auto technology is also on the rise and expands upon the display screen and GPS systems that are available in many cars today. To come is an increased level of voice activation and integration with your smart phone. “The use cases go way beyond just telling you how long it will get from point A to B,” Krish Sailam of Phunware.com said. “They will include much more predictive tech, e.g. – you are stuck in traffic, the car will message your office you are 10 minutes late, and re-route your desk calls to your car. It may also pick a calming sound track for your hectic morning commute. It can also route you to the florist for your anniversary based on your calendar reminder.”
Software’s Bottom Line: Voice integration will streamline business activity and increase corporate productivity.
Know Your Customer
January 22, 2013 by Patrick Gill · Leave a Comment
Something that irritates me beyond belief, and probably many others, is when some type of salesperson makes a cold call to me without doing research on my company first. Especially when that information is readily available on this thing we call the Internet.
With any situation in life, you can usually tell when someone has done their research and when they are just winging it. When it comes down to it, people care a great deal about themselves, so it’s fairly easy to figure out what key phrases you can say to a person to let them know that you have taken at least SOME interest in them and what it is they and their company specialize in. Buzz words and reading a script DO NOT WORK. In fact, buzz words can turn someone off these days quicker than anything else.
Take a look at any current successful company. They put in Layman’s terms exactly what their product is doing and how its features will benefit you, the consumer. If I’m given some type of product literature and it is a clearly vapid attempt at making something simple sound sophisticated by use of “buzz words” I am immediately disinterested in purchasing the product. You are now fighting an uphill battle to get what could be a stellar product sold to my company.
If this weren’t such an annoying problem, then this search would yield much fewer results.
Now, I understand that company websites can be vague, and probably for good reason. Maybe they don’t know what their product looks like yet. But that’s when you do a bit of research and have good product literature to give them. The most precious thing, in just about any industry, is time. And most of the time you value your time higher than theirs. So streamline what you’re doing and what you’re saying and maximize the effectiveness of the time you have with someone. Hit the bullet points and if they want to discuss further, then let that happen. But please be a good judge of whether your customer has time for you or not. This will make more efficient use of your time and theirs.
The bottom line? KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER. They are the lifeblood for you and your company. Without them, you wouldn’t have much of a company, would you?
6 Apps to Help You Survive the Zombie Apocalypse
December 18, 2012 by Patrick Gill · Leave a Comment
The end is near. There are only 3 days until the world ends. Or so says the Mayan Calendar, zombie theorists, and other highly “credible” sources. We have considered several end of the world theories and realized that Data Cave is where we want to be in the case of a zombie apocalypse. We are fully equipped with:
High walls with minimal windows- Building-in-building design
- Video surveillance
- Powerful generators
- Remote location
- Humvee
All of which, we believe a zombie could not defeat. We realize that not everyone has access to Data Cave, in the case of a zombie apocalypse. In order to keep you prepared, we gathered a list of the top 6 apps that will keep you safe, should zombies overtake the world.
This app gives you a map of critical resources such as gas stations and grocery stores to keep you nourished during the struggle. The app also highlights critical danger areas such as police stations and hospitals that may be overrun with zombies.
It’s better to be safe than sorry. While many TV shows have depicted the zombie apocalypse, we cannot be certain what it may bring. In the case that the zombies align with ghosts, this app will give allow you to see what the naked eye cannot. (Note: It’s ghost detection software competency can neither be confirmed nor denied. Use at your own risk.)
The Army trains its troops to be prepared and survive many conditions. This highly pragmatic app offers you their field tested survival tips ranging from the psychology of survival to water procurement. You may need to become “army strong” and this app gives you the skills you need to achieve this.
4. Zombie Booth
In the ever digital age, it is likely that the zombies will have access to smart phones and computers, if smart enough to use them. Should you find yourself in mobile or electronic communication with a zombie, use the zombie booth app to create an appropriate avatar to dupe the living dead. By transforming your appearance to resemble that of a zombie, you may buy yourself time to decide your next move.
As we said in our last zombie-related blog, it is much easier to defeat a zombie when you know they are coming. Should you lack video surveillance, this app will provide you with basic motion detection software and can even serve as video surveillance system, both of which will help you elude zombies in your immediate area.
6. How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse
Are you adequately prepared to survive a zombie apocalypse? This app will test your knowledge to see just how adequate your zombie survival skills are. It asks you questions and will help you prepare appropriately for the impending zombie takeover.
6 Reasons Data Cave Will Survive the Zombie Apocalypse
December 11, 2012 by Patrick Gill · Leave a Comment
With December 21, 2012 fast approaching, the end-of-days worriers are going to get progressively more fidgety. Well they, and you, needn’t fear if your data is at Data Cave. We’ve got this zombie apocalypse under control. Your data and disaster recovery site (I think zombies count as a disaster) will be safe and sound. Here are 6 reasons why you want to be at Data Cave during a zombie apocalypse.
1. Zombies suck at scaling walls.
Fact: The reanimated have very few skills. The skills they do have involve moving forward (slowly in most cases) and finding food. They don’t have problem solving skills and they aren’t very resourceful. Data Cave has very few windows. This is designed from a security standpoint. The only entry is through steel security doors with card reader access and we rarely hand out cards to the undead. There is no way to get through a window on the ground level. And only in one case have I seen a zombie carrying a ladder…
2. Building in building design.
Fact: Concrete, one inch rebar reinforced walls are fairly strong. In fact, our walls are built to withstand an EF5 tornado. Walkers are a bit less powerful than 200 mile per hour winds. But they wouldn’t have to get through just one wall. No, they would have to demolish two, and in some cases three, to get to your data (and our brains). We’re confident that this won’t happen.
Getting to know us – David
November 13, 2012 by Patrick Gill · Leave a Comment
As I’ve said before, what I think makes us different from other data centers is our team. If someone is working at a “job” and they clock in and clock out and think nothing more of the industry we’re in other than the 8 hours a day, 5 days a week that they’re at work, then I don’t really want them handling my crucial data. We’re not like that. Let’s see why…
Let’s get to know David, our Director of Network Operations, a little better. David spent many years in the trenches of a fortune 200 company, handling large amounts of data, and strained-to-the-max networks. This helped him get his hands filthy with networking and computer knowledge, which built on his already robust knowledge of programming and love for everything tech.
Like many kids in 1978, David begged his father for an Atari 2600. He resisted his efforts, preferring to wait until he could afford a home computer, until he finally bought a Commodore VIC-20. David grew bored with it, and wanted to run better games, so he asked his father to “upgrade” to the Commodore 64. He told him that if he could write a program that ran the VIC out of memory, he would. David undertook writing a Dungeons & Dragons character generator, and filled up the 4.5 KB of usable RAM on the VIC within months. (It took 20 minutes to load the program from the cassette tape drive!) Good to his word, David’s father bought a C64. And, of course, David became bored with the tedious nature of the character-generation program, and never finished it.
So two things were immediately evident to him; he loved gaming, and he had a knack for programming. His love for both blossomed from there and he began to follow that path. He went to Purdue University to pursue a mechanical engineering degree. Purdue at the time had a Unix lab and David would spend hours working and learning languages such as Fortran, Pascal, and C. There were several PDP-11‘s for the engineering department to use and David found an administrator there that he was able to shadow and learn more about programming.
David did a brief stint out of college working for a company doing welding. But shortly after found his place in the M.E. world. There is a bit of checkered-ness in his past though. David thought that Windows’ NT technology was going to be all the rage and completely wipe the competition for years to come. We’ll forgive him for that. Especially for the reason that since then, he has been a Linux evangelist and done much work with RedHat, SuSE, Gentoo, and Ubuntu.
He has a starship’s fleet worth of computers at home (pun intended) and has recently signed up for the Steam on Linux beta. You can also find him (maybe a little too often :)) on Battlefield 3 for XBox (gasp! Still PC derivative – it counts!) under his gamer tag TheRealDunkirk.
The guy lives and breathes technology, and that’s part of what makes the team at Data Cave so awesome and unique in the data center culture; we LOVE this stuff!
Don’t forget to check out the blog on Caleb.
The Worst Web Outages
October 9, 2012 by Patrick Gill · Leave a Comment
There have been a large number of major web outages this year, GoDaddy being the most recent large one. Let’s take a look at 2011 and see what some of the worst outages were.
As you can see in the infographic, there were a number of high level, very visible outages. Outages of such a nature tend to get a lot more attention, mostly negative, than other outages that are behind the scenes. Also, after such mostly stellar record of uninterrupted service, the smallest outage can become a magnified problem in the world of social media. People love to take to platforms like Facebook and Twitter to complain about not being able to watch Netflix, or not being able to purchase X product.
But what would they do if Facebook and Twitter went down simultaneously? Science help us if that should ever happen.
Bottom line: People expect services and entertainment websites to ALWAYS be available. Check out this website for more information on downtime.
My photo backup using iPhoto and iCloud
September 27, 2012 by Patrick Gill · Leave a Comment
I’ve written before about how I lost an external hard drive and thus my personal photos from a stupid decision not to have redundant backups. So, as I should, I started looking at how I was going to protect myself in the future. I have a young daughter and though children have been raised before without capturing every moment of their childhood’s, I didn’t want that for myself. Plus, how will I embarrass my daughter when she starts dating (in 30 years), if I don’t have pictures to go along with the stories?
So my first step was to think about what tools I already have that could help me in this situation. I’m a subscriber to iCloud, Apple’s “cloud” offering that spans many things. In this case, all I care about is Photo Stream. With Photo Stream, any picture I take with an iOS device will automatically, after you allow it to, upload to my personal Photo Stream in iCloud. It will then disperse to any other iOS device linked to my account and store a copy locally on each of those devices. So that gives me my wife’s iPhone and iPad as well as my iPhone. However, there is a 1000 photo limitation. Photo Stream will only keep the most recent 1000 photos (it sounds like a lot, but adds up quicker than you’d expect) until it starts kicking the oldest ones out. So how do I store a library of photos in several different locations?
Photo Stream goes a step further than just syncing to iOS devices. You can now setup iPhoto (or Aperture for “professionals”) to not only download, but upload as well, any photos put in my Photo Stream. There is also a client for Windows based computers that will do the same thing, I think it just stores the photos in “My Pictures” or some location of a user’s specification.
Sweet. So that takes care of my 1000 photo limitation, hard drive space permitting. But I also would like my photo library to be stored externally and in a few geographical locations. So what did I do? Easy: I take my iPhoto library and move it to an external hard drive. I do this at home (with mirrored external hard drives) as well as at work. You may or may not know, but my computer at work kinda sits in a building that can withstand 200+mph winds, always has power, and always has internet. It’s pretty cool. You should check it out.
Anyways, I’ve taken all of my photos in the library that are pre Photo Stream, and made sure they are exactly the same at all permanent storage locations. Any photos I take without an iOS device, I simply stick in my Photo Stream on iPhoto manually and they are magically synced up and life is good.
This is my Apple solution, but I’d love to hear other solutions for Android, Windows, Linux, BlackBerry (haha, just kidding about that last one, RIP Rim) or any other solution you like to talk about!