Thunderbird and Google Apps - Mail/Contacts/Calendar.

Google Apps for business is great and MS Outlook is the most widely used communications portal in business, two statements of fact which need a third to highlight a problem and the reason for this post - They don't interface correctly.

Although Google Apps provides comprehensive Exchange configuration with seamless mail, contacts and calendar it's only good for the iPhone, desktop mail is relegated to IMAP with calendar and contact sync flaky at best (if at all) and certainly not accommodated comprehensively by Outlook (2011). Not much help to the organised amongst us who like everything in one place, I mean come on, it's 2011, communication platforms should communicate with each other.

Hosting in style with OpenPanel

Moving up from simple vhosting the next stage has to be an ISP style platform functioning as it's own DNS offering full on multi-domain functionality with combined eMail and W.H.Y, all quite achievable via CLI fun and games but it is 2011, time is short and rewarding as it might be for the geeky amongst us we all succumb to and enjoy (expect?) a more stylish and smoother way of doing things these days. It's all Apple's fault, but in a good way and for todays task in hand we present the elegantly intuitive Apple-esque hosting platform from OpenPanel.

The Story of Linux - Commemorating 20 Years of the Linux OS

Welcome to the Jungle

I recently attended to a spot of cloud admin for a fast moving media delivery client. They already host data on Amazon S3 and after having dedicated VM problems decided to migrate their web front end across to a couple of MS 2008 EC2 instances. With sticky sessions scripted and running happily across two load balanced AMI’s thoughts moved toward an easier method for updating replicated copies of the inetpub.

NFS - A Home from Home

The holy grail for enterprise clients are networked home directories, for many reasons, but most importantly they provide a centrally managed location for sys admins to take care of precious user data, you know, all those comedy email attachments and JPEGs from last years holiday in Benidorm, that important, business critical stuff we backup daily, weekly and monthly for them.

Word Up - An Amazon EC2 LAMP for Wordpress

AWS EC2 is a virtual server platform hosted in the Amazon cloud which you manage yourself. It offers builds around MS Server 2003 to 2008 as well as varying flavours of Linux and is priced intelligently on a “per use” basis. You can choose the server location and either build your own for upload or choose from one of the many pre-configured Amazon Machine Images (AMI’s). 

In this post I’ll provide an overview of instances and run through a base Wordpress installation to an Ubuntu LAMP.

LTSP - Back to the Future

During our Linux for Business Workshop we demonstrate Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) technology, and it’s fun to note parallels between what was, what is, and what’s going to be, as it seems the old saying is indeed true in that nothing is really new and “What goes around comes around”.

A “client/server” model was the original method of computing. Resources were held centrally and computing (processor) time allotted to remote terminals. Technology has of course evolved and now we have more computing power in a digital watch than was once delivered from the monolithic mainframe systems that used to spit out punched cards to the bespectacled analysts of the 70's.

Listen in Colour

Just because something is more technologically advanced doesn't mean it's intrinsically better, in a lot of cases this can be true however we had a recent discussion about the Kindle and I won't lie, I hate the things. For me a book is more than the mere words it contains, I treat mine as respected artifacts and can't imagine reading (for leisure) from anything else. Digital text is cold and transient (and where do you put your bookmark?). 

Messagical - The Newton iMessage Pad3

Today Apple launched a surprise product as both a thank you to long time Mac fanatics and to address the staggering demand for the iPad2 which they are struggling to meet.

The new product is actually a revamp of an old favourite and those who have a history with Apple will immediately recognise the Newton, Apples 'vintage' iPad and the worlds first tablet computer, released way ahead of it's time in the late 1980's.