Who is the cloud for?

Cloud computing is being hyped out of it's socks at the moment. Microsoft being the latest to enter the fray with the launch, or at least preview of, Azure Services Platform. On the face of it the case is compelling, but I'm left wondering if many companies are actually going to make the jump.

Tech startups are an obvious customer for this. My own experience with a simple Rails app I developed (to better manage our employee absence records) and wanted hosting bears this out.

I know next to nothing about linux and setting up and environment to host Rails. I signed up for an account with Mor.ph and my application was running and hosted with the hour. All for $1 a day.

A startup has zero legacy and puts a premium on time saving over anything else so it can focus on delivering it's new product/service to market. I look at Esendex and think that we've probably past the point where it's beneficial.

We, like many companies, have already invested in the infrastructure and personnel to support our IT requirements. Moving to a new infrastructure with less control and lower SLAs (Amazon offer 99.95%) than we're used to doesn't seem to make business sense.

Take a larger organisation than Esendex and the case seems less compelling.

Maybe it's the control freak in me, but I couldn't imagine twiddling our thumbs waiting for our service to come while Amazon resolved an outage.

I suspect there may be elements of cloud computing that we may find use for, archive storage strikes me as one possibility, but a wholesale migration is certainly not on the cards.

So if only startups and new projects are going to use the cloud, is there enough business to go round?

Apple seem a little unfair

Just received notification that my MacBook Pro has shipped. In a weeks time I should take delivery of my new beauty.

Just after that I received notification that the 3 year AppleCare cover for the laptop had started, when it shipped!. I lose a week of cover.

That seems a little unfair to me.

And another thing. Take a look at this order status page. Given today's date is the 22nd October, they seem to be able to see into the future as well.

Maybe I'm just crotchety because I'm waiting.

National Holiday Calendars

Found this great resource for my absence application.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/holidays.html

Outputting a calendar without a gem

Had some fun yesterday with an application I've been working on to track employee absences. One of the requirements we identified was to publish a calendar that could be viewed in Outlook, iCal, etc, showing who was off and when.

As I was using Ruby and Rails, my first thought was to use a gem. I found this one iCalendar — Internet calendaring, Ruby style and was soon publishing the calendar. Marvelous, well not quite.

After giving up trying to setup an internal Linux server to host this application I've been trying Mor.ph. As this was a test project I didn't want to take resources away from the our Ops team, big mistake.

Morph seems really easy to use, I love the batched release process with capistrano, however there was a problem. They don't have the iCalendar gem.

Again this is as much a test project as anything so it seemed over the top to try and get them to host it. It occurred to me that I could use an ActionView template to achieve the same thing.

Here it is:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
<% @absences.each do |absence| %>BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:<%= absence.starts_at.to_datetime.strftime '%Y%m%dT%H%M%S' %>
DTEND:<%= absence.ends_at.to_datetime.strftime '%Y%m%dT%H%M%S' %>
SUMMARY:<%= absence.employee.name + ' - ' + absence.absence_type %>
END:VEVENT
<% end %>END:VCALENDAR

The code to render the view is dead simple:

@absences = Absence.find(:all)
headers["Content-Type"] = "text/calendar"
render

And being Ruby on Rails, I have a nice functional test that confirms the output.

Only tinge to the cloud is that I'm having a bit of a problem getting the timezone to appear in a format that Outlook recognises, any thoughts welcome.

US Carriers finally realising how to stop SMS spam?

This cropped up in one of my feeds today. Verizon are increasing wholesale SMS charges by 3cts to around 5.5cts.

http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/messaging/1879.html

No doubt there will be uproar from the US mobile community but I say, bring it.

Charging spammers is the single most effective way of stopping them. Stop them and you'll drive acceptance and usage of useful and desirable messaging. The kind that has a real value to the recipient.

iPhone MMS, a request to O2

Just received another of those awful text messages from O2 because someone has sent me an MMS message. Tried the web link in the SMS from my iPhone and it was a dreadful, dreadful experience.

Questions to O2:

1. Why is this web site not iPhone or even just mobile phone optimised? You are the only carrier who carries the iPhone, with much fanfare, so surely making it work across your web estate, especially in this instance where the first instinct is to pick up the message straight away.
2. You know I have an iPhone so why not convert the MMS to an email and send it to me, missing out the whole sign-in, pin, UI disaster in the first place? You've even got my email address already, I'd just need an SMS to confirm I want this feature enabled and we're away.

Do get in touch if you'd like any help implementing this. Esendex has all the skills and experience required.

Google alerting yourself

I have many Google alerts set up for tracking the web activity around Esendex and associated keywords and of course I track the term 'Adam Bird'.

It's quite entertaining seeing what 'you're' up to. I'm, among other things, a singer/songwriter, photographer and Gillingham FC fan.

A new one popped up today that is my favourite to date.

I'm so proud!