November 2008 Archives

If your IT department is being squeezed by the downturn in the economy but still needs to add let's say a storage area network (SAN) then why not do it yourself (DIY). Sure you could contact your favorite hardware vendor like Dell, HP, IBM etc., but when you compare the costs of an off the shelf product compared to the DIY project you'll realize big savings, in our case around 50%.

My company currently has a need for SAN. Based on our needs we decided to go with a 24 TB SATA in 4U form. Total cost for parts, taxes and shipping $9,500 Canadian. Comparable vendor systems start at around $30,000.

We generally buy Supermicro boards and chassis as they're good quality at a good price. Our operating system (OS) of choice is FreeBSD. Here's the basic specifications we used.

A lot has been written about cloud computing in the last year and each day seems to bring news of a new player in the cloud arena. So what does the cloud have to offer search engine companies like Hyperix? Well that depends on how deep our pockets are. After all, we need a lot of bandwidth, processing power and data storage to run any real search engine. And as we don't have deep pockets, nor an angel or venture firm backing us we've had to be find creative solutions and innovate where possible.

Up to this point we've been focusing solely on the technology we're using that will differentiate ourselves from any other vertical search platform entities out there. We've got our own small web crawling cluster setup which we've used for some time to test different web crawlers, collect and parse data and measure a variety web crawler values which determine how many CPU cycles, RAM, bandwidth, and storage is necessary to create the vertical search indexes we want. We've also been focusing on the quality of the data we're crawling, the algorithm which ranks the pages crawled, the parsing engines, and the results pages.

Since we've now launched ColabSpace for the space community I would be remiss in not using the service myself.

So here's the link to my personal wiki space on ColabSpace. It provides a little background on myself along with some projects I'm working on. As well I'll occasionally post some source code from various project for anyone to reuse.

For some time now SpaceRef has wanted to create an online collaborative service for the space community. It took some time though to try and find the right platform that would allow us to provide the community with the appropriate tools so they could in turn create rich interactive collaborate services.

I'm happy to say that we've now launched our new service called ColabSpace under our brand OnOrbit.

The goal of the service is to provide the tools that will allow users to effectively collaborate on a project increasing  productivity so that any given project moves ahead in a timely manner to conclusion.

For the platform we decided to use Deki, a social enterprise collaborative platform from MindTouch. Why did we use Deki? For starters it was because of its ease of use. If you want a simple wiki then it will do that. At first glance it looks just like another wiki, but under the hood it's a robust platform, where only your imagination is the limit. If you want to create some really cool collaborative mashup services then Deki provides a wide array of extensions allowing you to plug in to services like Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Mantis for developers, Chat, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL and Google services such as Maps, Calendar, Apps including Docs, Spreadsheets and nearly a hundred more services.

The platform also comes with it's own scripting language called DekiScript which allows you even more flexibility in modifying your service and cretaing your own extensions. As well if you've already got a MediaWiki, Confluence, PBWiki or other wiki then odds are MindTouch has the conversion tool that will allow you to import it into ColabSpace.

In July I compared Brightcove to YouTube and said I would provide feedback after a few months. Well yesterday I received an email from Brightcove informing me that our free OnOrbit corporate account which was based on advetising revenue sharing was being discontinued as of December 17th and I had the option to become a paid customer.

Now getting back to the my previous post where I was comparing traffic each service generated all I can say is that YouTube has continued to blow Brightcove out of the water. In fact not too long ago I posted a video to YouTube that got picked up by Wired and the next thing we knew it had 249,026 views and we saw our subscribers jump dramatically. So now that we have to make the decision on Brightcove I think YouTube has already made it for us. So in the future you'll see all our videos on our YouTube channel. And now that you can view them in their pristine hi-res version, so much the better.

There are many reasons why I haven't updated my blog in some time. It's not because I wanted to neglect it, it's because of the following reasons.

I don't usually blog about my personal life but for the people who know me it's no secret that my fiancée is ill and has had a very rough summer into the fall. Combine that with two projects I've been working on, when I can, adds up to little time to blog.

My fiancée Sylvia's health has improved just a little, in other words she is stable enough that Ive been able to focus a little more on work.

The two projects I've been working on are ColabSpace for OnOrbit/SpaceRef and Hyperix a vertical search engine platform. I also have responsibilities at the Mars Institute which adds to my workload.

I'll elaborate more on this projects in my next post, but suffice it to say, I'm back.