Sun server's rockin' out

We’ve had the Sun Fire x4200 in the office for a few weeks now, and have been really coming to love it. So much so that we figured it was probably time to write a bit of a review about the box. The Sun box is around $10,000 CAD, and has

• 2 dual-core Opteron processors


• 8 GB of RAM


• 2 72GB SAS drives


• Sun’s glorious lights out system

I’m sure there’s other stuff in there but that’s kind of the key stuff.

So, we turned around and said, “What about Dell?” Sounds reasonable enough, Dell is known for making competitively priced server hardware. (We’re going to ignore for a moment, the countless suggestions we’ve been given that the Dell boxes are way less reliable than the Sun gear.)

For a comparably spec’d system (it’s a bit tricky when you’re looking at Opteron’s on one box, and Xeon’s on the other), it turns out that the dell box is perhaps a couple hundred bucks cheaper. ($200 or $300, I think). After having seen how well the Sun lights out manager works, my take is that the Sun box is worth the extra couple hundred bucks just for that. Add to that the stories we’ve heard time and again from other companies and their Dell hardware failure rate, and we’re pretty comfy with the notion that Sun’s no longer the expensive choice in the market.

One caveat: The x4200 does have a dead fan in it already… now it’s one of six fans, so it’s no big deal, but it’s still disappointing for a $10,000 machine.

Watcha running?

Fedora Core. FC5 managed to install beautifully right out of the box. No wrestling with drivers, etc. to detect all the hardware (though in fairness, if you’re using an older Linux distro, Sun provides all sorts of documentation on what drivers, etc. you need to get to ensure it’ll install properly on the box). Even setting up Xen was just a few minutes of work, and all of a sudden we’ve got a quad-core box running a hypervisor for virtualization… and it’s been stable (no hiccups) since we powered it up.

What about performance?

Well we’ve been playing with it for a bit, and we’ve been pretty impressed there, as well. Unsurprisingly a quad-core Opteron box tends to be pretty fast. The only complaint we’ve had is that the Rails stuff we run doesn’t seem to work particularly quickly in 64-bit mode. I could be entirely wrong here, so any suggestions/advice on 64-bit Linux + Opteron + Rails, would be appreciated.

One thing that’s getting us especially interested, though, is Solaris 10. We quickly installed 64-bit Fedore Core on the box, since it’s been our production environment on all the other servers, but after having seen some of the network-stack performance numbers on Solaris, we’re thinking pretty seriously of running Nakama on Solaris 10 in the not-so-distant future.

Conclusion
So that’s it, there’s my review. It’s been a pretty great addition to the office, and we’re glad Sun’s Try and Buy program sent one our way. If you’re looking for a 64-bit, Opteron-based box to run either Solaris or Linux, we’d recommend it pretty highly.

pref-share stupidity... angel money in Canada.

(Cross posted to our Globe and Mail blog)

If you looked at the slides I linked to in my previous post, you'll notice that I said a few things about both angels AND VCs in Canada. Let me be clear: there are great angels, and great VCs here in town and elsewhere in Canada. We're even lucky enough to have one of the best VC's behind us. That said, there's still a lot of stupidity when it comes to financing a Canadian software startup, and I think it actually starts with angels...

At Ambient, we were lucky: our first angel money came from one of my former bosses. He skimmed our slide deck, and wrote me a cheque. The legals on the deal were about 3 pages. Months later, over coffee one day he said, "You know, you probably need some more money." We walked back to his house, printed out the legals on the first deal, changed the dates, and he wrote me a cheque for the same amount.

There are stories of the Google founders getting money from an angel who quickly wrote a $100,000 cheque to "Google, Inc." The gents realized they had to quickly incorporate, and get a bank account to cash the cheque! (Not dissimilar from our situation... why did we choose the bank we did? Why at that bank's main branch? Because our first angel's cheque was drawn on an account there, and we figured this would speed up the cheque clearing process. Honestly!)

We got really lucky with our angel money.

What normally happens in Canada? Well... I've had members of one angel group suggest in the early days that they'd invest maybe a half million dollars, valuing our company at about $400,000. "Um... so you want me to give you 55% of the company, in the first round, before VC money, for a half million dollars? Um. No. Thanks for coming out."

I've heard angels say to myself and others, "Why would we invest now, when we can invest along the VCs at a later round when the risk is lower?". Excuse me? You're going to invest alongside the VCs? Maybe the whole notion of angel money being there to help get companies TO those later stages was unclear.

Now, my favourite story: I was talking recently to a principal at a startup that's raised several hundred thousand dollars from a group of angels in Toronto. These angels actually asked for preference shares in the company. What does that mean? Well, in practical terms, it means a whole lot more money given to the lawyers in the early stages of a company, to draft complicated investment instruments that give angels a whole bunch of rights they wouldn't otherwise have as common-share holders. Why is this so funny? Well, most venture capitalists are going to want pref-shares when they invest, and they're not going to want to deal with the structure that the angels before them have put in place (good rule of thumb: new money carries a whole lot more weight than old in any negotiation).

So what's the practical outcome of all this? All the money that the company had to spend to give the angels pref shares gets thrown away as the new structure is put in place by the VCs. There's a tonne of animosity between the angels, the founders and the VCs because of this process, and ultimately nobody feels like they've come out ahead.

My advice? Avoid this like the plague. If you're seed funding your company from angels, friends/family, etc. either pick a valuation and issue them common shares, or use a simple, clean convertible debt structure to take the money. If the legals are more than 10 pages, be careful, more than 20, and just avoid it altogether. If you're confronted by a group of angels that wants to take you down the pref-share structure, run (don't walk) away. We got this advice time and time again, and we followed it... and we've been tremendously grateful that we did.

What does this sign mean?

What does this sign mean?

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NuBreast

NuBreast

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Yoga is fun.

Yoga is fun.

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Chapters.indigo.ca has search issues...

I wanted to see if the book "I, Woz" or "iWoz" depending on where
you've seen the name, was in stock at any of the stores so I might
pick up a copy.

I figured searching for "woz" would get me either hit. Well I got two
hits, but NEITHER one happened to be the book. Searching for "i, woz"
yielded the same two hits. I had to search for "iWoz" to get the
book. How strange. Substring searching doesn't work on their website?
Strange.

Sweet ride :)

Wheeeee

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on sale?!

That better be good juice... :)

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Hanging out at U of T again... :)

(Cross posted to our Globe and Mail blog)

I was invited to give a presentation at U of T today, to the Masters of Engineering in Telecom's Advisory Board. A group of terrific people including friends Bob Myers and Brian Collie (founders of Chantry Networks, a wifi company that was sold to Siemens) happen to be organizers or on the board.



Also there was Tim Lee, a terrific VC over at GrowthWorks. The MET board asked us to think about the answers to a few questions, as people building startups:

1- Why do you believe in your idea?
2- What's the value of your idea?
3- What are the challenges of building a startup in Canada?
4- What are your thoughts on Canadian competitiveness in technology?

Anyway, I thought I'd give you a link to the slides I presented this morning... hopefully it's good reading :-) The slides are here.

All comments are greatly appreciated.

We launched... and .mobi

Alright, so we launched Nakama... woot :-) Finally we can get some real feedback on Nakama, and how we make it do the things you'd like it to.

We're pretty excited, so if you'd like to head over to Nakama.ca you can sign up and start using Nakama now. All you need is a cellphone. If it's a cameraphone, even better, and you'll be able to not only watch other people's pictures and videos, but publish yours up too.

We've been pretty focused on creating the best user experience... from super-simple upload of pictures and videos, from any phone, with any carrier, to being able to view pictures and videos (c'mon, you know you get bored on the train :-), also on any phone, on any carrier... we think we've got something that'll both help you, and help entertain you, and we'd love to have you take a look.




Now, with all the great stuff that's happened around our launch, what's been the one massive thorn in our sides?

Well, we've got Nakama.ca, but we wanted to register Nakama.mobi. In fact we have registered Nakama.mobi. The .mobi domain just opened up this morning. It was SUPPOSED to open up last week, but the cadre of genius (yes, that's sarcasm) that is dot-Mobi managed to screw that up. David's got a post on this dot-mobi debacle over here.

What's worse? The way the whole thing got assigned. We originally pre-registered the domain with EuroDNS. My advice? Don't ever use them unless you absolutely have to. Their service is terrible, and you can expect to wait several days for them to get back on customer service emails.

We ended up registering the nakama.mobi domain with a few other registrar's, including GoDaddy, and Dotster. Remember that we pre-registered with EuroDNS over a month ago. Which registrar managed to get us the domain? Dotster. Unbelievable. To their credit, the GoDaddy folks even gave us a phone call, told us that we didn't get the domain (heheheh), and asked if there was another name we wanted. After spending 15+ mns on hold with Dotster to find out what was going on, and days waiting for EuroDNS to reply to an email, we were amazed by Godaddy. Next time we need a domain, we're choosing them for sure.

Anyway, enough of me... go sign up for Nakama :-)

Don't worry... it won't hit you... :)

I hope...

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It's not the SAME shirt...

See... you can KINDA' tell Dave's is navy... er... maybe it's not so obvious... :)

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It's not the SAME shirt...

Dave's is navy... mine's black...

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Getting ready to go live

(Cross posted to our Globe and Mail blog)

It's a bit of a pushed weekend here at Ambient. We're getting ready to launch Nakama to the world on Monday. That's right. We're opening it up... which means a whole lot of last-minute "are we ready?", "how does this scale?", "did you fix that help page?" discussions are running around.

That said, we're also pretty excited. We're about to launch to the world, and get real feedback... good, bad, ugly (really, we're hoping for the good, but would really appreciate the "hey, guys, fix these 3 things..." kind of notes).

No, we're not doing a bit-splash launch... yet... that's why we're looking to hire the right marketing lead to help us create the buzz and splash we want later... right now, we want real use, and tonnes of feedback.

It's strange, though, and we can tell we've grown a lot as a company over the last few months. When we launched our closed beta, there was a lot of lost sleep in the days leading up to our launch date. Right now, things are silently humming along, and while there's still a mix of stress and anticipation, there's also a sense of knowing calm... there's a lot of work to be done, but it's a known quantity, and that makes a huge difference.

We'd love to have you swing by and sign up for the beta... you'll get an invitation link on Monday.

Anyone get Toronto Hydro Wireless to work for them?

(Cross posted to our Globe and Mail blog)

I can't get the WiFi working on my Nokia E61 (like the E62 that Rogers and Cingular offer, but with WiFi and European 3G), and it was too slow with my Mac to really find out if it was working or not. Anyone else had a different experience?

Anyone who's ever wondered why I'm not convinced WiFi/WiMax is going to replace good-ole-cellular-wireless-data for 5+ years? This is why. I pop my SIM card into a phone and I get EDGE/UMTS/HSDPA/whatever... I try to get this WiFi stuff working... and... well... it hasn't. Yippee.

Anyway, back to work :)

David at AMA event

They knew what they were getting themselves into when they asked him,

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the Mozie on In...

In Niagara.

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the Mozie on In...

In Niagara.

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Hello Dean

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Interdisciplinary thinking

(Cross posted to our Globe and Mail blog)

Peter Dawson sent me a link to an interesting Harvard Business School article about interdisciplinary work in universities. It talks about the benefits that arise when you put students and reseachers across a variety of disciplines together. Similar to The Medici Effect, a book written by a former HBS student, about why innovation tends to spring forth when you bring together a bunch of people with wildly different focuses/worldviews.

Worth a read!

Talking to strangers... and why you should do it

(Cross-posted to our Globe and Mail blog)

So I'm finally back in Toronto... oh how I've missed it. After a week in Los Angeles, seeing a horizon that isn't a greyish-brown makes me happy (it's the little things, I guess :-). It was a great week, and I met a tonne of terrific people from operators, potential partners, like-minded wireless folks, generally cool people that happened to be down at CTIA, and even hung out with some competitors... (c'mon, they're not all bad :-)

As soon as I got back to Toronto, though, it was off to Niagara (yeah, poor me, I know :-). Actually, I had dinner at the fantastic Wellington Court on Friday, and then on Saturday noticed that one of the couples I noticed on Friday over dinner happened to be sitting right next to me at lunch at Henry of Pelham... which was enough of a reason to strike up a conversation. It turns out that it was Marilyn Bodogh and her husband. She's a former competitive athlete (Curling), who's now running for the Mayor of St. Catharines.

What's interesting to me is that she had somewhat similar gripes about St. Catharines as I do about Toronto... similar, but different :-) Marilyn mentioned that St. Catharine's has a lot going for it: Brock University, great people, wineries, etc. and yet it's (generally speaking) a dying city... the best and brightest tend to leave before or after going to university. I'm not sure what her plans necessarily are to solve some of these issues, but I like the notion of trying to exploit the strengths that are already there to make the city stronger.

My similar gripe about Toronto? Between the University of Toronto, Waterloo, and York University, we've got a bunch of good schools in the neighborhood. So why isn't there a strong tech cluster here? (I'm a geek, my bias is tech, sorry :) A Silicon Valley VC once asked me, "Can you get really great talent in Toronto?" I was taken aback and replied, "Sure... Waterloo and U of T are key recruiting grounds for Amazon, Microsoft and Google... there's terrific engineering talent here." (Notwithstanding that we're looking to fill our lead-engineer role so let us know if you've got anyone in mind :).

Anyway, just another friendly tip: talk to strangers... sometimes you'll meet really interesting people... personally, it's refreshing to meet a politician I really enjoyed speaking to... :-)

Say hello

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Now THAT's quality!

Quality Cars.

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It exists!

Roscoes House of Chicken and Waffles. Wow. Heheh

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Memories of Fresh Prince

Red Rooster

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Ramen and edamame

My hotel is in little Japan.

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Disney building?

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Day two CTIA keynote

Peter Chernin at FOX

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Culture shock and sanity check.

(Cross posted to our Globe and Mail blog)

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Thought you might find that amusing :-) ... just in my hotel room... got some more work to get done before I head out to one of the CTIA parties this eve... heading to the Finnish Consul General's home, apparently... should be fun.

Also just got off the phone with our board (yeah, I was an idiot and didn't realize I'd be out of town when we scheduled it). One more reason to build a board? Sanity checks. We think we've made a lot of progress over the last 30 days... and we think we're going to make some great progress over the NEXT 30 ... but maybe not as much as we'd thought. After some discussion, it's clear that some of our initial targets were pretty unrealistic. It's okay... we naturally try to stretch pretty far, and sometimes don't realize that we're stretching even farther than is realistic. No big deal: the discussion with the board made this crystal clear. Sanity checks... another great reason to have open, frequent, honest discussions with your board. I love it. :)

Cal trans in Los Angeles

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BlackBerry strangeness

Two new icons just appeared in my Apps folder on my berry: Yahoo!
Messenger and BlackBerry Help.

I didn't sign up for them... They just kinda' showed up randomly.
Anyone else see this today or recently. (Weirdly, I was chatting with
someone at RIM a few minutes before I noticed this weirdness.)

Admittedly, it IS cool that they just showed up over-the-air.

Anthony at CTIA

Geeking out in Los Angeles

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Why can't there be free wifi at CTIA?

Between that and mobile data being dead-slow, this isn't cool. It was admittedly pretty bad in Vegas, but you'd hope the mobile operators would set up a whole bunch of temporary picocells...

Music, content and alternative models

CTIA MECCA Los Angeles

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Mobile Web 2.0 talk

Interesting but unfortunate title

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The next session.

It's all about the consumer.

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Live from CTIA

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Small, smart features.

(Cross posted to our Globe and Mail blog.)

So I'm on the plane... sitting back in steerage, of course, and up
until a moment ago I had my laptop open on my tray table, monitor at
a comfy viewing angle, just typing away.

All of a sudden the guy in front of me decides it's time to lean
back. Okay, no biggie... the laptop monitor's going to get folded a
bit forward, and while it's not necessarily as comfortable, it's not
a HUGE issue.

Except... it's hard to read a laptop screen when it's not at the
right angle... the contrast gets all screwed up, and it becomes a bit
of a chore. Luckily, Apple has an "Invert display" feature.
Everything white is black... and everything black is white. It's kind
of cool. Definitely not how you want to watch a movie, but does an
amazing job of making everything crystal clear and readable.

A tiny little feature... probably something that someone at Apple
implemented because it just took a second to do... and it turns out
to be incredibly useful.

Now that's a great way to build software. :)

MacBook weirdness and Nexus sadness

(Cross-posted to our Globe and Mail blog.)

Hanging out in the Air Canada lounge at Pearson, and connected to the
internet using my cellphone, since my MacBook Pro absolutely refuses
to connect to Bell Datavalet hotspot that's in here. It's uncanny.
**everyone** else in here has perfectly working Internet. Anyone else
have this particular problem? I've seen this before in the Toronto
lounge with this laptop... works just fine in the Vancouver lounge
(can't remember about Montreal).

If anyone else has either had this problem, or has noticed that their
MacBook Pro works fine in the Toronto lounge, please let me know...
either have to gripe to Apple or get the Airport card in my laptop
fixed. Le sigh.

On the note about sighing, I asked the US customs agent when Nexus
(the biometric system to speed up customs clearance) when it's going
to come to Toronto. It's been in a pilot state in Vancouver for a few
years now, and I was kinda' hoping to see it soon here. His response,
"Never." I said, "No no... seriously..." "No. Never. It's not going
to come to Toronto. Ever."

Sigh.

Oh well, off to CTIA in Los Angeles for a couple of days. Should be
fun. :)

Pocky is deeeeelish

And the coffee is loverly too says Adriana.

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Is it my turn to rant?

(Cross posted to our Globe and Mail blog)

Okay, so there's something that's been on my mind for the last few days (and it's been on the minds of more than a few of my friends as well, it seems), so let's talk a bit about technology and discrimination.

Recently Dave and I went up to U of T to talk to some incoming grad students about what we're working on. We were joined by a bunch of other cool Toronto companies including friends of our at Radiant Core and Ideé. Afterwards we stepped out, and Dave and I had a drink with Greg Wilson (the prof at U of T kind enough to organize everything) and Jane Zhang from Parnership Platform.

I don't know what exactly started it (I'm pretty certain it's something I said), but we quickly found ourselves talking about how women are discriminated against in technology, both in the workforce and in school. Greg's written a great post here with some of his thoughts on the topic.

Full disclosure: My mother's a computer scientist. She grew up in Sri Lanka, worked hard to go to England to study (at a time when the climate in the UK wasn't particularly friendly to women or minorities), and finished at the top of her class. I grew up always knowing my mother to be a strong, smart, career-woman ... there was never the thought in my home that women were any less good at math, science, or anything than men.

Extended disclosure: Leila Boujnane, the CEO of Ideé, is both a close friend and on our board. She's written a post with her thoughts here. Andrea LaFayette is also on our board, and we are phenomenally happy to have her here. Two incredibly smart, strong women who didn't let anything get in their way... and have done very well in technology. Not to mention Ann... a key member of our team here at Ambient... what I'm getting at is: I've been lucky enough to work with a bunch of super talented people, and many of them women, so I haven't perhaps seen the bias as much as I've heard people talk about it.

In chatting with an old friend from school, the big "problem" she's seen as a computer programmer in the real world is that guys tend to be geekier than women... and often less interesting to talk to, as a result.

I'm not talking entirely out of the side of my mouth... I mean, I am a minority, right? So what about racial discrimination in technology? Well, a pretty significant number of the people (teachers, profs, employers, advisors, investors) who've helped me over the years have been middle-age white guys...

I actually went to a South-Asian technology event a few years ago and nearly left in disgust when a hugely successful South-Asian CEO started in on a "you can be successful too" pep talk. Here's a man who built a massively successful technology company, got a tier-1 Silicon Valley VC to invest in them before it was widely done, and built a phenomenal team to get them there. What I wanted to learn from him is what he did to get there, what he learned. I didn't need or want the pep-talk.

Given the number of minorities working in technology, here, in Boston, in Silicon Valley, I'm still firm in my belief that technology's a meritocracy. Do fewer women decide to get into computer science? Absolutely. Why? I'm not sure. My kid sister grew up in a household with an electrical engineer father, and computer scientist mother. I went the tech route, and she went the med-school route. Did anyone pressure here into it? Quite the opposite, I'd argue :-). It was just her choice.

I'm not saying that discrimination doesn't exist... I'm saying that it's not nearly as large a factor in technology as some might suggest, and moreover we don't get that far by complaining about the obstacles that are in our way... we get a LOT further by pushing hard. In her post, Leila mentions that in every 100 people, there're 99 who will hold out their hand and help you... and 1 who'll get in your way. As she says, "Seek the 99, ignore the one."

I think we need success stories to tell... of the woman, of the immigrant, of whatever minority, succeeding. We need more Meg Whitman's, Carly Fiorina's (yes, despite faults, I'm a fan), Selina Lo's, Vinod Khosla's, etc... and the only way we get stories like that is to have people that push hard and reach out to those with arms outstretched.

If you're interested, Dr. Telly Whitney, the President/CEO of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology will be in Toronto and speaking at IBM's CASCON conference in October. I'm looking forward to hearing what she thinks :)

Good days and long ones...

(Cross-posted to our blog at the Globe and Mail)

We just had an interesting person show up at the office to chat with us and talk a bit about what we're up to... someone I think (this is a first impression) would be a pretty interesting addition to our team. Interestingly, as we walked out of the office after our chat, he asked me "So, are you enjoying it?"

The question was interesting to me because it got me to stop, pause and think a bit.

I've got a few friends who were pretty enamored of the idea of trying their hand at a startup, and only a few of them are still at it. It's pretty easy to see the romantic side of building a startup... late nights that lead to blinding success. In a time where we idolize people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, it's not hard to get wrapped up in that kind of thought.

The reality of it (except for a supremely fortunate few... who I've only heard of, and never met :-) is that building a startup's hard. Working for a startup's hard. The days are long, the pile of work never seems to get any smaller, and if you don't do something... it just doesn't get done... That applies to each and every person that works at a startup.

Everything takes longer than you think it will, from hiring people, to raising money, to building and shipping a product. So how do you deal with this? Build an advisory board. No exceptions. Get wicked-smart, experienced (i.e. done this before) people, and ask them for their help and advice.

Believe me, you'll hear stories about the days they didn't know how they'd make payroll, or that time a major account looked like it was about to fall through. Stories like that tend to scare the hell out of you. They should... but they should also get you to realize that they got through it, and now they're sitting on your board.


Dave was working from home today... gotta' love Mac's with iSight's.

So how'd I answer his question? I gave him the honest answer, "There're long, hard days... and right now we're all in the middle of a particularly big push, so sleep cycles are pretty scarce... But I get to work with some of the smartest people I know, solving problems I think are pretty interesting, building a product I love... and I get up every morning eager to see my team-mates. There's no other job I'd rather have."

dave working from home...

isight on MacBook Pro along with the other monitor make this pretty cool.

Posted straight from my phone with Nakama. Click to see more.

Heading to CTIA?

Just a quick note... I'll be heading to CTIA in Los Angeles next
week. So if you happen to be going, and want to get together for a
drink or a chat, send me a note.

Cheers!

Xen, some slides, and a spreadsheet...

(Cross posted to our Globe and Mail blog)

Kind of a gloomy looking Labour Day here in Toronto... so off to the office I go :-) (Okay, it's not THAT bad... when I left the house this morning, I got a call from Queen Video, saying Prison Break was available... all the guys around the office seem to love it, so I figure it'll be interesting viewing later this eve :).

So what was on today's list? Setting up Xen on Mia, work on a massive spreadsheet (yeah, I'm a CEO and I hate spreadsheets, who'd have guessed :-) ... but at least I got to use Dave's fancy 20" monitor... I think we should pick up a few more for the office now... and get ready for a presentation we're giving to some profs and students at U of T tomorrow. We get to hang out and show off some of the technology we're building, and see if there're some folks we can cajole into coming and working at Ambient.

So what IS Xen, to those less geeky who're reading this? It's a server virtualization tool. Basically it lets a single computer run a bunch of other "virtual" computers inside it. Wikipedia's got a better explanation here if you're interested.

How hard was it to get set up? Well, my Geek-fu is pretty weak these days, and it only took me 10 minutes or so to get it installed and configured on Mia. While a lot of Fortune 500-type companies use virtualization tools to reduce costs, we're looking at it for a totally separate reason: it'll let us use one system for a bunch of different testing purposes all at once... and if we manage to make something crash, well we'll only have crashed one of the "virtual" machines, and not the entire system. It's a nice tool to have, and if even I can get it set up in a few minutes we don't have an excuse not to at least give it a try :-)

Anyway, enough geeking... gotta' finish up this spreadsheet, and then head home to relax with a DVD. :)

Hope you had a great long weekend!

Cool bottle cover...

Well, I suppose it IS a better way... :)

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Distillery District Daycare

now THAT'S a bit sketchy :-)

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A long weekend Saturday, and yes, I'm at the office.

(Cross posted to our Globe and Mail blog)

Sitting down with our pretty new load balancers that one of our board members was kind enough to give us. I have to say, their advice is always invaluable, but that plus the occasional free hardware (saving us thousands of dollars)!?!? There's no question that we're incredibly lucky.

Anyway, truth be told, I was here 'till 9:30 last night as well... it turns out that some things sound easy... until you have to do them... network design / etc. tends to be one of them. Getting the load balancers up and running took the better part of a day (it's one of those things that is always WAY faster the second time around... and this was my first), which is never good. If you know anyone that's got experience architecting bullet-proof network systems, let me know :-)

Also, as I was blogsturbating (a term Paul Kedrosky found for reading one's own blog), I noticed one of our closed beta users has been playing around with Nakama and said (amongst other things) that she didn't need to use USB cables anymore to take pictures from her phone and put 'em up on the web. Always nice to have someone tell you that the stuff you're building is useful to them :-)

We're also going to be opening up our beta a bit wider in the next little while, so if you're interested in taking pictures and videos with your phone, and sharing them easily with others and your online blogs/albums, sign up and we'll look forward to sending you an invite to Nakama soon.

Hope you're all having a great long weekend... I'm going to take the rest of the day off shortly... gotta get Xen up on one of the new servers up first. :-)

Mmm beer

In a can

Posted straight from my phone with Nakama. Click to see more.

Load Balancing sweetness

Posted straight from my phone with Nakama. Click to see more.

Buttercup hiding under Suthas elbow

Posted straight from my phone with Nakama. Click to see more.