acquia

More shaky backlight video from the fantastic combo of the E75, Qik and 3.5G. this time mobile and web related pontifications from Boris Mann of Bootup Labs (and fellow co-founder of Bryght). Check out the video after the jump or read my stream of consciousness pseudo-transcript :-) !

1. Please port Maemo to Qik, and Nokia please buy Qik; just like Nokia should have bought ShoZu :-)
2. Miss604's Denial of Service of Attack
3. Bryght - the first hosted Drupal, first Drupal as a service, 5 years ago
4. Bryght partnership with Workhabit - 50 servers, Cisco routers, pre cloud, we had DOS attacks and Workhabit's awesome Gary, Aaron and Jonathan fixed the routers
5. DOS cannot be fixed completely but it can be minimized through various means including taking out the DOS IP addresses at the router level, taking your site down is not a solution, shows that real hosting companies need to own their infrastructure or have DNS separated
6. Drupal Gardens aka "Bryght done right" aka "Bryght in the cloud is not using Aegir
7. But Drupal Gardens does use Drush
8. Bryght didn't use Drush, we used python for lots of historical reasons To upgrade 1000 Drupal sites e.g. from Drupal 5.1 to Drupal 5.2 sites I ran hmupdate.py (or was it hmupgrade.py? it's fuzzy now!) in a for loop over the 1000 Bryght Drupal web sites
9. Aegir has commoditized Bryght (former Bryght guy, Adrian Rossouw, developed Aegir; Adrian rocks)
10. The entire Bryght Drupal as a service is available in a box i.e. commoditized
11. The awesome Emma Jane Hogbin has advocated a web infrastructure e.g. a Drupal cloud for every town
12. A Drupal cloud for every town is a way to attract businesses because you can spin up a free (government pays for it, far better than bogus tax breaks) scalable, modern, SEO optimised website for a business or non profit in 5 minutes
13. Dreamweaver doesn't cut it - Technologists have failed because there is still no Dreamweaver for 21st century but wordpress.com is close and Acquia Gardens when it's 1.0 will be even closer
14. Does Qik have a business model? Yes bundling with handset
15. Schmap is annoying and irrelevant
16. Iphone 4.0 is highly relevant :-)
17. Apple Gaming network is huge - Could Tiny Speck use it for Glitch? Yes! How porous will Apple make it? i.e. will it play nice with other social networking sites? probably not in the near term but maybe in the long term
18. iAds - based on HTML5! Big ! Will make HTML5 "the voice of the new web dev generation"
19. Multi-tasking - it doesn't matter, it comes down to UX; area where Nokia is lost (except possibly Maemo! go Maemo go! p.s. I hate the name Meego much prefer Maemo!)
20. User Experience of multi-tasking is what's important and having to install a 3rd party task manager to make Symbian multi-tasking work is a really, really bad user experience
21. Yet another shout-out to Jan Ole Suhr for the awesome Gravity Twitter App - best mobile Twitter app on ony platform, only available on Symbian for the moment
22. Took Boris "83 clicks" to pay for Gravity, sad but true :-) ! Nokia, please fix!
23. Maemo potential is so much greater than Apple iPhone and Symbian because it's Linux and because it's truly open from the get go rather than openness being bolted on like Symbian :-) !

Shaky pontifications without borders video

May 15, 2009 was my last day of work for Raincity Studios and with it of course my involvement with Bryght ended as well. It's been a great ride! Thanks to all the Bryght Gals, Guys, customers, investors, friends and of course the folks at Raincity Studios. I am certain that the "Bryght Children" will in their own way (in a small "Fairchild children" way, haha!)  continue to make their mark  (e.g. Rilli, Bootup Labs, and I predict many many more). My next post will be about my new job but for now a few random thoughts and reflections (apologies to the great people I have omitted!):

• I'll never forget moving day into the first Bryght offices at 525 Seymour with the folks at EQO (also gone).
• Bryght Light developed by Adrian and the rest of the Bryght team was and is a Drupal milestone. I can't to see what the fine folks at Lullabot and Acquia  and WorkHabit and the other fine folks doing Drupal hosting come up with. Not to mention what happens with Development Seed, Adrian and  the other folks developing Aegir. Aegir definitely ups the proverbial Drupal hosting 'ante'.
• Speaking of WorkHabit, I will always be impressed by their VPS hosting partnership with Bryght. As far as I know Bryght VPS was the only Drupal-centric VPS hosting from a Canadian company, one of the few in the world and probably the first. Nobody did it better. Thanks to Richard, Gary of WorkHabit, incredible system engineers and sysadmins: Narayan Newton and Ben Holt. Learned some great lessons:i.e. always iterate, automate and listen to the market!

Herewith some random Bryght photos to end it off in a visual style! Ciao Tschüß!

I have updated this site from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 using Acquia Drupal that on github I checked into github earlier this week (comment on Acquia's forum). No glitches except an Drupal contrib image module update problem (which I fixed by ignoring since I only had 4 images)

Richard said I have until January 15 :-) so here goes some randomly ordered predictions which are worth what you paid for them!

1. Social Media microniching and microcontent-fication continues to grow rapidly. Twitter and Seesmic are just the beginning. Old skool bloggers like myself continue to blog and to write large pieces but even for us it's the exception rather than the rule.
2. Drupal fervent, creativity, acquisition and expansion continues because Drupal 6 will unleash the creativity of the world. Go Acquia go! Go Raincity go!
3. Apple introduces 3G iPhone not at Macworld but in the spring. Rogers finally brings the iPhone to Canada in time for Christmas 2008. They won't be onboard for the Apple Spring announcement because they still don't "get it" , but they will have no choice for Christmas 2008 since all of the 3G handsets Rogers sells s*ck and nobody will buy them since unlike the iPhone they are unusable and no better than non 3G sets feature wise. [Hope I am wrong about Rogers!]
4. Speaking of "get"-ting it. Translink (or whatever they are called now), start to get it. True feedback comes from BOTH their old very slow 20th century skool approach (e.g. Translink Listens is a farce for the Internet Generation because you a) never see the results or b) know anything about the people behind the very vague and not useful polls but ok for the old fogeys) AND from social media like an official blog, a flickr account and facebook (heck maybe even twitter and Seesmic: e.g. twitter-ing system outages and delays or facebook statusing them would be a lot better than their current very slow 20th century haphazard way of telling us the SkyTrain is down or buses are delayed). The unofficial Translink Attendance at Transit Camp was very encouraging; I'm predicting this type of stuff will become officially supported in 2008.
5. Apple sub MacBook. It won't be the return of the Newton and it won't be a big iPhone, it'll be cool (small, instant on and useful) and again it won't be introduced at MacWorld. [Again hope I am wrong here! Hope it comes sooner]
6. The era of dumb non presence aware "high ceremony" audio and video is over. Go SightSpeed, go Lypp, go Iotum! All three will prosper in 2008. Skype will too since they are ubiquitous for both.
7. Nokia will continue to have the best hardware for mobile devices but unfortunately not the best software. An awesome N93 video cameraphone successor will be introduced that again only early adopters will use and find usable.
8. No usable mobile interface that is nearly as usable as Apple's touch interface emerges in 2008. Fingers crossed for 2009 [hope i am wrong about this one too]
9. Truly Open Hardware combined with truly Open Software - the trend started by Open Moko, Chumby (I've bought a chumby and am mulling some fun but extremely bogus hacks for it :-) !) and Bug Labs continues. Hopefully someone will introduce something like The Bug that is less clunky and uses a more malleable dynamic language like Ruby or Python (I am sure somebody will hack The Bug to use Ruby or Python or some such but it's not the same as having something designed from the ground up to use Ruby or Python as its development environment rather than clunky, "strait-jacketed by typing" and verbose Java). [and yes even though it's "clunky" and Java, I am saving my pennies for my own Bug! ]
10. Canon introduces an ISO 25600 camera to compete with the Nikon D3 and a 5D replacement with sensor cleaning and clean, usable ISO 6400. I'm saving my pennies (coz I'll never like flash photography although I love the Strobist).
11. Nokia or somebody smart buys ShoZu. The rest of the world will start to see the advantage of a "straight to the web from the camera" workflow that ShoZu pioneered (Eye-Fi is inferior to ShoZu because it doesn't suspend/resume upon connectivity interruption/resumption but it's good enough and it works everywhere and I am getting one of their cards pronto! See my earlier Eye-Fi plug). Why not build ShoZu into micro SD cards ? Just a thought :-) !
12. 3G and WiFi are now mature enough for a "straight to the web from the camera" workflow for video too. Why should you have to wait? Why can't video be uploaded directly to the web from your camera like you can with photos with ShoZu and Eye-Fi? There really is no reason other than file size and early adopters will start doing that in 2008.