Computing – Page 10 – Graves On SOHO Technology

Blog Hosting Quality Update

December 27, 2010
Michael Graves
Computing, Meta

Recently Pingdom published another in a series of reports documenting their findings about the reliability of various large blog hosts. It seems that in the months of October & November 2010 Google’s Blogger platform managed perfect (100%) uptime, while tumblr (96.81%) was the least reliable blog host.

As I am a WordPress user, and I started this blog at WordPress.com, it’s interesting to note that WordPress.com was the second best host, with 99.99% blog uptime and no single outage lasting more than four minutes. That seems impressive to me.

X-Marks Lives!

For the past couple of years I've been enjoying Xmarks. Xmarks is a browser plug-in that provides secure, cross-browser and cross-platform bookmark & password sync. Xmarks makes it easy to move from desktop to laptop or netbook and have all…

Cage Match: Cloud vs Virtual vs Hosted

October 31, 2010
Michael Graves
Computing, VoIP

To me the term “cloud computing” itself is so vague as be just about meaningless, yet it carries with it all kinds of connotations.

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now,

From up and down, and still somehow,

It’s cloud illusions I recall,

I really don’t know clouds, at all.

– Joni Mitchell

I have so many questions.

Does “cloud” imply virtualised?
What’s the difference between a cloud host and a virtual host?
What advantages are offered by cloud hosts vs physical hosts?
Or a cloud host vs a VPS?
How do cloud architectures differ?
How does cloud hosting differ as applications scale up to very large?
Or down to very small?
Are there applications that should not be run on cloud services? Why?

xiph.org Presents A Digital Media Primer For Geeks

September 27, 2010
Michael Graves
Audio, Computing, VoIP

The xiph.org foundation have just released a 30 minute video that they call A Digital Media Primer For Geeks. This video is a great overview of the basics of digital media. It's nicely written and very clearly stated. Given my…

Notebooks, Netbooks & Tablets…Oh,My!

September 16, 2010
Michael Graves
Computing, Travel

This post is inspired by the recent release of the HP Mini 5103. I’ve been carrying its predecessor since April, and meaning to share my recent experience with netbooks, especially in the light of the coming onslaught of tablets.

There are aspects of my working life that lands me squarely in the category of “Road Warrior.” Business has me visiting customers locations all over North America, and occasionally locations overseas. This very fact of my routine travel has dictated that I carry a laptop. Remember that my employers business is broadcast graphics equipment, so our laptops are on the more capable side of things…meaning more powerful, bigger & heavier. Recently our staff have started carrying “mobile workstations.”

Blogging In Transition: A Host Of Issues – Act Three

September 2, 2010
Michael Graves
Computing, Meta, networking

There’s nothing like your site going down routinely to lend a sense of urgency to the search for an alternative hosting solution. While my circumstance was not quite as dire as that pictured right, it certainly felt similar.

The newly live server at VPS.NET was crashing at least once every day or two, but it remained live while I poked around the TKL web site investigating the other hosting providers that had partnered with the project. The biggest was Amazon’s EC2, but recent events lead me to shy away from Amazon for my own purposes.