This is one of those bullet point update posts. Seems I’m only really getting time to blog on Sundays at the moment.

• Amobia and Frogfoot Joburg Office

  We have office space and data-center space in Joburg now and we are busy setting up our network. We’ll start with two /23 networks and the usual recipe of border and aggregation routers, netflow probe, switches and Xen servers. All that remains after that is to setup some VoIP phones and we have a “shake and bake” office ready for the first three or four people.

• Teraco

  The Teraco data-center project is moving forward. Most of the infrastructure planning and shopping is done. This week involved mostly some spreadsheet jockey work on the financials and finalising the switch fabric design and purchasing. We have some cool 3D rendered views of the floor plan.

  Parts of the design have a bit of theatrical flair (:
  Picture the view walking into the reception area, looking past the plasma screens with all the environmental stats, past the stylish seating, through fire-proof glass (that’s only made in Belgium at about R8k/sqm or something like that) down the main corridor with a uniform view of row upon row of black server cabinets all the way to the back wall. The room is dark and the only light comes from the aircon floor grills. You get the space ship landing-strip picture, right? Now all we need is that movement sensor suspense effect from Aliens. (;

• Teraco Switch Fabric

  I’ve been spending a fair amount of time looking into Ethernet switch fabric options for the Teraco data-center in the last three/four months. It’s been painful. Most vendors still want to sell you 10yr old technology, ugly spanning tree solutions, mixed layer2/3 complexity for redundancy with very few giving any thought to solid redundant and rapid failure convergance layer2 (only) switching (which you would think is obvious). I consider myself a semi-expert all all the Metro Ethernet lingo and features at the moment.

  I looked at HP, Huawei, Cisco, Extreme, Juniper, Foundry and some lesser brands.

  We have not finalised the switch fabric purchase, so I’ll not say too much, but Extreme has some pretty cool kit. I’ll restrain myself from commenting on the state of the other brand’s offerings.

• Adobe CS3 Launch

  I attended the launch of Adobe’s new Creative Suite software a week or three back. It was supposed to be some Rock concert theme. They had to go stuff it up with hip hop acts. Why can’t they put a warning on the invite saying: “extremely lame music involved”.

  I did not stay long… but I can say two things..
  1. I’m a bit worried about the monopoly created in the design software world (A+Macromedia)
  2. You get the idea the Apple + DTP/design market is not that big judging from the reseller stands.

• GeekDinner

  The last GeekDinner at the Wild Fig was a great success. We’re busy planning the next one. The date is set and the venue should be announced soon. Go add your name to the list.

• Amobia Wireless School Connectivity Project

  The wireless schools project is moving forward. 75 schools have equipment installed. We are in the process of commissioning all the VPN links, adding email services for all the Tuxlabs and adding content on the WAN (like Wikipedia). The last step will be to add Internet access.

• Looking for Beta testers for our Amobia hotspot product

  Amobia currently has a number of Wifi Hotspots at our Potchefstroom franchise. We recently improved the system with quick signup tools, much nicer looking web interface, credit card and debit order payment options.

  I think we have an interesting business model. It supports franchising, non-variable cost to the end user.. which I think is cool, I don’t want to be guessing which hotspots are ripping me off. It uses a profit sharing model with incentives on traffic usage and sales transactions.

  We have a roaming agreement with Uninet who has about 800 hotspots in Cape Town.

  If you are in Cape Town or Stellenbosch and interested in the hotspot game, contact Amobia.

  I think the Wifi hotspot business is going to be fun in the next few years. Lots of room to innovate with interesting challenges and problems to solve.

• New Blio FXS/FXO modules

  Blio has completed the design and manufacturing of it’s FXO and FXS PBX modules.
  Yes, they are compatible with the Digium cards, made locally and much (much) cheaper. They will be on the Blio online shop very soon.

  

  The modules are designed for our Blio 1U IP PBX project, which is moving forward nicely. We are currently waiting for the final version of the (primary) “motherboard” PCX to be manufactured. We’ve already sold two PBXs (-:

• My first Ubuntu install

  You would think that I would have installed Ubuntu before now, but I’ve been a Debian man for the last 10 years. Two weeks ago I was pondering my options for a home PC (not for me).. Apple or Linux. Apple may have resulted in less “Joe the tech support guy” work.. but let’s face it, Apple just don’t have the moral high ground.. so Ubuntu won.

  I paid about 1/4 of the price of an entry level Mac and got more memory and disk space.

  After a minor initial setback with some dodgy Kingston memory I installed Ubuntu 7.04 in about 1 hour (while doing other things) and everything “just worked”.

  Over the weekend I played around with Ubuntu. I’ve never been a Gnome fanboy, but it’s not bad. You can pretty much configure anything with a right-click.

  Oh, and I can report the user(s) are also happy. I’m impressed.

  I think the time has come for the Wintento users to stop bitching and jump ship. If you look back in ten years and you can say “I switched to Ubuntu/Linux in 2007″ you may just save a bit of face. Like looking back on very bad fashion choices.. Windows people will have to deal with their children thinking they were complete retards for running Windows after 2007

  If that statement annoys you no end then I can only grin.

• My opinion on (not so) recent hype events

  Bullard has half a clue, at least he knows what a blog is. The rest is noise.

  De-Lille is not as far off as you think. I don’t agree with her ideas for fixing the problem, but “digital crack” is a concern. MXit, crackbook, 2nd life, world of warcraft. They all suck up lots of (possibly) productive time.. I guess it’s no worse than a generation of TV addicts, but I don’t think we should ignore the risks. I spent a good part of my life playing Civilization, looking back, I was pretty addicted. I’m not going to comment on her ideas for censoring blogs, ok, I will, she must be smoking socks with high polyester content.

  The aggregator wars… who cares?. Muti is pretty cool, I don’t really see the point in the others.

• Contemporary music sucks

  Maybe I’m getting old, but my head hurts from the music on kfm and 5fm. Why do they have to play this hip hop crap?. I just picture The Rat dancing to anthems of mindlessness.

  Thank goodness for the sane people at Radio 2000 who still have a clue.

  I’ve realised I can’t listen to the music in the Stellenbosch bars/clubs anymore, I think it’s part of the reason I stopped drinking. It’s just too painful.

• Google encyclopedia salesmen

  Now that we have Wikipedia, you don’t get door to door encyclopedia salemen anymore right? Kinda, but now we have the Google recruitment army contacting you two or three times a year to offer you jobs. They must have contacted the whole of CLUG by now, but I don’t see anybody flocking to Google. I have my reasons, but I wonder why none of the people I know are interested. I guess in some ways they have attained (do no) evil empire status.

• Metro Ethernet and Neotel

  We had a meeting with one of the technical people at Neotel last week. They seem to be doing good things. The Metro Ethernet market seems like an exciting ride over the next few years, SNO, municipality projects, more and more interest in digging up roads and putting down fibre. Interesting times for the Internet industry in Cape Town.

• Trip to, Sweden, England, France, Spain and maybe Prague and California

  Textbook midlife crises stuff.. go run with the bulls in Pamplona.. we’ll see, it’s not my idea, but it could be fun.. I’ll need to get a bit more running fit. I’m trying to plan a trip around my 30th birthday (in July). The catch is combining it with some business trips and nailing down some of the many variables for booking dates. Nothing confirmed yet.

• Endeavor

  I have a meeting with two people from Endeavor tomorrow morning. They seem to find and support “high impact entrepreneurs” in developing markets. No idea how they tracked me down, but it seems like a bit of an interview of sorts.

Must go to sleep now.