Tag Archive for 'cork'

Psst! You wanna buy a data center?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 17/4/2008
in cix
. 9 Comments

Well, ok not an entire data center but my share of the CIX data center.

As I have mentioned before, I am moving to Spain in July. When I move, I will no longer be able to make a meaningful contribution to the further development of CIX and in that scenario it would not be helpful of me to hold onto my shareholding.

This is an opportunity for someone with a passion for data centers/hosting to purchase an interest in Ireland’s newest and Greenest data center at a very early stage in its business life. The buy in price now will be cheap compared to how much the shares should be worth in a couple of years.

Because of its strong focus on energy efficiency from the outset, and the open approach we took in the build, CIX has received a lot of very positive publicity. This has obviously translated into goodwill, business enquiries and servers in racks.

Whoever buys the shares will need to be able to commit serious time to further growing CIX’s business (and therefore their investment).

For the right candidate with the correct technical skills my business partners would be willing to be very innovative around how the funding is set up so don’t think big money to buy into this.

If you are interested in this opportunity, drop me a mail or give me a call to discuss.

Enterprise wikis reviewed

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 1/4/2008
in review and wiki
. 28 Comments

Long story short, PBWiki is yer only man.

Why?
I was chair of the it@cork Conference organising committee last year. The committee is made up of volunteers who are all busy with their day-to-day jobs so getting times to meet which suit everyone is always challenging.

To help with the organisation I rolled out a private wiki where we posted meeting minutes, kept track of action items, posted to-do lists and updates on (potential) speaker status’. The wiki was a hosted PBWiki and it was a great success.

It was then decided to rollout a wiki to facilitate the organisation and running of all it@cork committees and subcommittees. The wiki software needed to be able to:

  • handle multiple wikis (one per committee/subcommittee)
  • handle user and group permissions
  • give stats around wiki usage and
  • be cheap or free (it@cork is a not-for-profit)!

I searched around and discovered that Atlassian’s Confluence enterprise wiki product has a free community license specifically for not-for-profits. PBWiki, and SocialText didn’t have any mention of a free Enterprise class offering on their sites so I didn’t really pursue them.

Boy was that a mistake! The setup of the Confluence wiki was far from straightforward. It took two of us the best part of a day to simply install it. Remember that as I was doing this for it@cork, this was not billable time. I was installing it on my own server and because Confluence requires TomCat as its webserver it had to run on a separate port to Apache. This meant several people couldn’t view it in their organisations.

Worse though was that once it was successfully installed, it was a disaster. Uptake and use of the wiki was minimal because the UI was appalling.
A couple of quick examples:
- a simple task which requires many steps, adding (or removing) users to/from groups goes like this:

  • Go to Administration
  • Scroll to bottom of page and click on Manage Users (why not dynamically have the most used menus at the top or failing that use general stats to move most used features to the top, or have two (or more) columns of options so no scrolling is required)
  • Click Show All Users (why? why aren’t they all listed by default?)
  • Click on the user
  • Click on Edit Groups
  • Select Groups and click Join (or Leave) - there is no feedback to tell an admin that this action has been saved

Editing groups doesn’t appear to be possible at all i.e if I want to remove 7 people from a group containing 25 people, I have to go into each user profile (using all the steps above) and remove them individually. It should be possible to do it in one simple step from within a Group Admin page.

Confluence backend

Other problems with Confluence included the fact that there are almost no stats around use of the wiki available and there is a bug in the users and groups which meant that the permissions applied to the groups were not percolating down to the members of those groups. A pretty serious bug I’m sure you will agree.

I Twittered recently that I was looking to get off Confluence and onto another Enterprise wiki platform and within minutes Ross Mayfield, Chairman of SocialText had contacted me (despite being on vacation!) offering me a SocialText wiki for it@cork. Yes please I said (poor guy, I nearly bit his hand off!).

The backend of SocialText is far cleaner, simpler and more intuitive than Confluence.
SocialText wiki backend

However, for completeness sake I also contacted PBWiki and when they heard this was for it@cork, they immediately offered business edition wikis at no cost. This was spectacular news as it@cork were already familiar and happy with PBWiki.

The PBWiki backend is the cleanest and simplest of the three (it is also the only one which fits vertically on a 1024×768 screen).
PBWiki backend

Not only that but when you compare the edit screens of both SocialText and PBWiki, PBWiki definitely comes out ahead in usability.

So we have a winner - PBWiki.

What surprised me in this is that when I Twittered looking for an alternative to Confluence, not one person suggested PBWiki. I have no idea why this is. PBWiki has both Enterprise class functionality and a UI which is completely non-intimidatory. I predict no issues with uptake by users this time round.

By the way, I did also try out DekiWiki and Twiki but I ruled them out quite early on.

UPDATE: Zoli Erdos posted a response to this post where he highlighted a couple of points I didn’t make clearly enough here:
1. I compared a non-hosted version of Confluence to hosted apps like PBWiki and SocialText. However, hosted Confluence is NOT available under the community license. As this was for a not-for-profit a community license was all we could go for. PBWiki and SocialText had no such restrictions.
2. I tried out DekiWiki but the lack of an ability to create Groups ruled it out quickly.

Live Maps Bird’s Eye now includes (some) Irish towns

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 27/3/2008
in Microsoft and maps
. 3 Comments

Via Clare Dillon the Virtual Earth blog and Martha Rotter on Twitter I spotted that Microsoft’s Live Maps now includes images of Cork, Galway, Carlow, Limerick, Navan & Wexford - cool!

The Bird’s Eye button becomes active when you are over an area that Microsoft has detailed aerial imagery of.

The image below is of Cork City Hall. You can rotate and zoom to see it from other angles and sizes! Way cool.

Live Maps Bird's Eye view of Cork City Hall

According to Clare’s blog post, Dublin will be up soon as well.

Hans Rosling’s talk at the 2007 it@cork conference

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 10/3/2008
in IT@Cork
. 2 Comments

Hans Rosling gave the opening address at the 2007 it@cork Technology in Business Conference.

His talk was incredibly eye opening as the Trendalyzer software he developed shows how the world is “double inversely logarithmically unjust”.

Watch and enjoy!

Reducing your Costs and your Carbon Footprint - presentation

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 6/3/2008
in Green, IT@Cork, cix and energy
. 3 Comments

I gave a talk at the it@cork Green IT event yesterday entitled “Reducing your Costs and your Carbon Footprint”.

The talk goes into some detail on how Cork Internet eXchange, the cork-based data centre I am a director of, achieves hyper energy efficiency.

It is also worth noting that tomorrow’s OpenCoffee session is in CIX. Hope to see you there.

Reducing your Costs and your Carbon Footprint - A Case Study

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 4/3/2008
in carbon neutrality, cix, climate change and energy
. 1 Comment

I am speaking at the it@cork Green IT breakfast event tomorrow morning (5th March ‘08). My presentation is “Reducing your Costs and your Carbon Footprint - A Case Study” and I will be using CIX as a case study on how innovative thinking can lower your carbon footprint and your costs.

The event kicks off at 07:45 in the Cork International Hotel, at Cork Airport and the other speakers are James Governor of RedMonk, whose talk is titled “The Sustainability Imperative: Towards Greener Software” and Mike Hughes of Microsoft Ireland who is going to talk about Windows Vista energy conservation features.

Should be a good event (and you get breakfast!).

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