raincity studios

I remember five years ago trying to explain the Bryght / Hostmaster (I worked with Adrian at Bryght on Hostmaster billing and testing and making things work on production!) vision of building your own network of Drupal websites at the push of a button at many Drupal gatherings. All Drupal sites working together, easily updatable and working in your own cloud (or Bryght's cloud if you wanted to pay Bryght). People thought I was crazy :-). Only a few folks like Ethan Kaplan of Warner Brothers Records  and Jonathan Lambert of WorkHabit (and others who I have forgotten, forgive me) got it.

Now in 2010 with Aegir coming to fruition and multiple commodity clouds from build-your-own to using others' like Amazon's cloud and RackSpace's cloud, it's finally making sense to many many people (e.g Emma Jane Hogbin's vision of a cloud for every town)

Thanks to Adrian for continuing to implement the vision! Thanks to Adrian's collaborators and funders over the years: Koumbit, Raincity Studios, Chapter Three, the list goes on and on. Thanks especially those who continue to fund Adrian (go Development Seed and others go!) and the team of Aegir open source implementors, documenters and testers. The reality of open source is that code doesn't get written, documented or tested if there's no funding for it directly or indirectly.

Go Aegir go!

[This post was prompted by Adrian's Tweet:]

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i just deleted the last remnants of hostmaster 1 and the work from my bryght / rcs days off my drive. The End.

 

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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'll be assisting Fearless, Dave and Kris with the "mobiles for DTES residents and artists donation drive" tomorrow. Let's get together and donate and have some fun!

[Cross posted with permission from the Fearless Blog]

Donate your old mobile phones to help DTES artists share stories, and tap into life, jobs & family

How can you help?

1. Your used mobile phones - preferably with video, camera, wi-fi
2. Cash donations (* tax deductible) or new phone donations
3. Conversation - tell your friends on your blog, twitter, etc. - post a badge

Action Plan:
First, Gather phones!

Collect all the unused mobile phones at your office and home - dig into your boxes of stuff, ask you friends! Digital cameras gratefully accepted too.

Next, Arrange Pick-up:

• Let us know via Twitter: Fearless City, email: info (at) fearlessmedia (dot) ca, Phone/SMS: 604.644.4349, Voice mail: 604.682.3269 xt 8320
• We'll come by on purple Yahoo bikes on Tues. Dec. 23rd & 30th to collect your devices
• We'll take your photo, bring treats, and thank you publicly with a link

Or, Drop-off (after Tuesday, 23rd) at:

• Roundhouse Community Centre - 181 Roundhouse Mews
• Pathways - 390 Main Street (kitty corner from the Canegie)
• Raincity Studios - 1 Alexander St. @ Water st.

Want to be a drop-off point? Let us know.

Even send by Postal Mail to:

Fearless City
c/o DTES CAN
PO Box 88023
418 Main St
Vancouver, BC V6A 4A4

Notes:

• Remove your chip, and clear your contacts before donating (all phones will be completely cleared before released).
• Please include chargers and accessories - used digital cameras also welcome
• Unusable phones will be donated to FreeGeek for reuse and recycling

Who is Fearless?

Fearless is a Vancouver Non-Profit group providing tools, resources, and cultural outreach to artists and residents in the improverished Downtown Eastside neighbourhood. Fearless is a project of the DTES Community Arts Network (CAN)

More:

• About Fearless City
• Fearless City wiki
• Fearless City community site
• Fearless City Youtube channel
• Fearless City Flickr photos
• Fearless City Flickr group
• DTES on Wikipedia

Thank you for your support!

Post a graphic on your site with this handy code snippet:

<a href="http://fearlesscity.ca" title="Donate phones to Fearless to help Vancouver downtown eastside artists and residents" >
<img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3194/3121575464_8a062db061_m.jpg" height="240" width="195" alt="Donate phones to Fearless to help Vancouver downtown eastside artists and residents">
<p>Donate used mobile phones to help DTES residents and artists at fearlesscity.ca</a></p>

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.

I am glad I can finally announce that Raincity Studios has acquired Bryght. Needless to say I am stoked and already enjoying working with my new colleagues. Working with Bryght has been great, the best job of my life and I am sure it will be the same at Raincity.

From my Raincity acquires Bryght story on bryght.com:

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We can finally take the wraps off something we have been cooking up for a while. Raincity Studios has acquired Bryght (press release)! The expanded company will operate under the Raincity Studios banner and the Bryght name will live on through the hosting products (i.e. Bryght Light Sites and Bryght Virtual Private Servers will continue). Raincity Studios will also continue Bryght's work in leading edge technology like Jabber / XMPP and OpenID. And of course, all Bryght guys are now Raincity guys!

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