Author Archive

Cloud computing in Canada

Sunday, April 6th, 2014

After a few amazing years of ignoring this blog, I'm back. I'm attending a conference about cloud computing in Canada called The Cloud Factory in Banff. What an amazing venue the Banff Centre is! Just published an article about the future of "the cloud" and Canada. I expect big things to ...

The (copy)fight against digital culture, and intellectual privelege

Monday, November 10th, 2008

It takes (sci-fi) author Cory Doctorow to put it sufficiently lucidly: the internet is designed  to efficiently and inexpensively copy information and has flourished as a result, therefore traditional copyright in the age of the web is a direct attack on the digital culture which has given rise the web. ...

What a month – I have a new boss

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

September was a great month. BitNorth was awesome, videos of content to come soon at Bitcurrent. Akoha had a great launch at TechCrunch and will hopefully inspire a new generation to "play it forward." Syntenic hired a new Ops manager who brings some great unix and virtualization chops.  September is also yielding excitement ...

A cartoon guide to new Google web browser

Monday, September 1st, 2008

Well I was thinking Amazon's SAN in the cloud was going to be the biggest web application news of 2008. But that just got trumped by Google's new web browser, touted by many as an "operating system for the web." Wow. Open source, heavily influenced by popular web technologies such ...

Personal update

Sunday, August 17th, 2008

Heri at Montreal Tech Watch broke the news that my web infrastructure services company Syntenic has a new (beta) webpage. I have no doubt that my amazing wife's blog pulls in more visitors than I do, so I am hoping to reverse that trend with a slick new design! I also ...

Search gets smarter, we get stupider

Monday, June 30th, 2008

A lot has been written lately on how intelligent search will solve all kinds of problems, most recently in The End of Theory, Chris Anderson of "long tail" fame confuses the abundance of low hanging fruit that "big search" and biotechnologies provide with the ability to really understand and extract ...

Cloud computing – linear utility or complex ecosystem?

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

Reuven of Enomaly speculates on whether there will be an analogue of Moore's law for cloud computing, looking to coin "Ruv's law." I would like to see more detail on what it would postulate, presumably a linear relationship between growth in cloud computation and time. I think we would also ...

Awesome Magnetic Visualization

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

Semiconductor's Magnetic Movie is a stunning, if questionably accurate visualization of magnetic fields and their interactions. Worth a watch: Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

Goaltender, Bitcurrent, and Miscelania

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

Finally got www.goalr.net into the Heroku private beta which will allow the private domain and e-mail functionality that our "Goaltender" application relies upon to both gather our weekly goals and followup on them. Just posted to Bitcurrent on the future of cloud computing. Business has been moderately insane (in a good way) ...

Blitzweekend project: getting real with GoalR

Saturday, March 1st, 2008

Ever since I attended 37 signals "Getting Real" workshop I've want to put some of their design principles to the test. My company is Syntenic, a boutique consulting and services shop primarily focused on web operations, performance optimization via application delivery controllers (load balancing and server offload) and 24x7 high ...