Jul 24

JumpBoxNewLogo.gifAlmost one year to the day since we founded our company I’m proud to announce the availability of the JumpBox 1.0 platform and our library of open source server applications. We conducted an extensive beta program over the last eight months during which we iterated and refined the product based on real customer feedback. Thirty thousand downloads later we’ve delivered a promising first step towards our grand vision of simplifying the delivery and management of server software.

If you haven’t already downloaded one and tried it out, you can get any of nine open source server applications and have it running in less than a minute. And you can use it indefinitely at no charge if you don’t mind having our navigation at the top. This library is growing each week so if there’s something you’d like to see in there, let us know.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the beta, the hundreds of OSS developers that contributed to the projects in the library and to all our our friends, family and investors who have provided the capital and encouragement that has enabled us to manifest the JumpBox vision into reality. We’re up in Portland, Oregon right now at the O’reilly Open Source Conference. Given our goal of making Open Source accessible to the masses, there’s no other place in the world we’d rather be right now to make this long-awaited announcement.

-sean

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Jul 20

I want to go in the Philippines. This is just amazing:

They should let those guys out for at least a day just for the quality of choreography. I can see the warden now, “no it’s one AND two and three and four.” Solid.

Jul 17

I just upgraded my version of Parallels from 2.5 to the latest version 3. VMware had upped the ante when they added snapshots to VMware fusion on the last time around but Parallels matched their bet and then raised by adding multiple snapshots. If you haven’t used either product, snapshots is basically a way of preserving the state of a VM right from the virtualization console so you can easily revert back to it and undo any changes you’ve made without having to clone the entire disk image using an external tool. It also saves space since it just stores the delta from the previous version.

I had misunderstood thinking that Parallels just did multiple serial snapshots but it actually can do multiple branching snapshots. It’s a bit like lead climbing and placing pitons on your way up the rock face so you limit your fall. VMware gives you one route up the face and more importantly, one piton which you can continuously unhook and place right behind you. Parallels gives you unlimited routes up the face with unlimited pitons so you can choose to fall back to any previous position on the climb or jump to any point on an entirely different route.

You can also think of it like this: remember that movie Sliding Doors with Gwyneth Paltrow (hot) where there’s dual realities occurring simultaneously? In Parallels 3 you can branch a VM indefinitely and grow multiple realities from the same VM. The coherence features and offline file explorer stuff they’ve added in this release is nice, but multiple snapshots is the killer feature now that VMware will have to match if they hope to keep up with Parallels in the desktop virtualization space. We’re partners with both companies so frankly, having this kind of competition elevate the level of play is thrilling to see.

Jul 13

This is just awesome. The hall monitor from highschool is apparently in charge of our HOA now. The last one is particularly comical. I can think of a couple situations they haven’t accounted for though… clearly needs to be an addendum to this. Feel free to submit any rules you’d like to see and I’ll suggest them to our HOA.


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Jul 11

I had two different friends last week “lose the keys” to their own web site. One situation was a disgruntled admin who thought he had leverage and decided to make demands and the other was an accident where the developer left the country for a 2yr mission in an isolated city in South America without leaving behind the server/domain credentials nor a copy of the code. Both sites were static and I was able to use the free HTTrack tool to suck down a copy and mirror them on my server. We were able to reclaim the domain for one and on the other we’re hosting on the .net alternate while we wrestle control back from the rogue ex-employee. This scenario got me thinking though and I submitted an idea to Cambrian House which is now in the running in this week’s tournament. The idea simply is this:

Automate everything I did for my friends last week. I’m starting to think that this situation occurs more frequently than expected and not everyone has a friend with a server and the knowledge to copy a site remotely, mirror it and pursue the domain reclamation process. There is an opportunity to make a online service that allows the victim to immediately snapshot a copy of his/her site, mirror it on an alternate URL and get assistance with the process of recovering the domain in the event that it’s been lost.

My question is: does this idea seem viable? Market big enough? If it did exist how would you go about promoting awareness of the service to the people afflicted with this problem? Not that we have any extra cycles to pursue creating this (that’s why I submitted to CH). But here’s the official entry that’s in the tournament:

SiteLiber8: regain control of your orphaned site

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