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Instability of the Indefero's Datacenter

Just a short notice. Our provider is not really happy with the stability of the routing. Basically, they try to get better BGP performance (I have no idea what it really means) and this requires some hardware changes and some experimentations. They are pretty good at doing that within minimum impact, but still, you may notice some downtime here and there. The downtime may not be full as this can come from partial announce of the routes.

Also, they are working on the UPS system because of minor warnings, the UPSes are complaining about fan problems even so the fans are running normally. The maintenance team of the UPS provider is on site to take care of the problem.

I really appreciate how open OVH is when dealing with their internal issues (their bug tracker is simply open to everyone), this is why Indefero is hosted with them.

Update: Everything is under control, no rotuing issues anymore and the UPS are under stricter control for a while.

2500 forges and a better way to develop Indefero

It may be obvious, but I have not developed Indefero the best possible way. That is, I forget to correctly tap into the vast amount of information I have from the hosted forges.

Up to now, I am collecting only a minimal amount of information from the hosted forges. These statistics are more business related, that is, I need them to correctly run the hosting. These includes when was a forge active the last time (for backup), the storage used (capacity and backup planning), etc. I do not really care much about the rest. The forges are your private area, I am not looking at them.

But how to improve the software without knowing correctly its usage? Yesterday, someone submitted some comments through the open survey and then, suddenly I had this bell ringing in my head:

My plans for Indefero 2 are good but they are not connected with the reality of the software usage, because I have no ideas about this usage.

Back to square one and this time I am not going to throw the dices without a clear goal. So, I am going to build a real well defined statistics collector to know a bit more how you use and what you use when working with Indefero.

Better knowledge of your Indefero usage will be good. I will be able to streamline the frequently used part and focus the development where it matters. So Indefero 2 will wait a bit and for a good reason this time.

Oh, by the way, we crossed the line of 2500 active forges, yeah!

Planning in Indefero

Planning is not available with Indefero at the moment, but I am actively working on it. Why? Because I need it to coordinate my work with the nice people who agreed to work with me for the version 2 of Indefero. I will be eating my own dog food. So the first iteration of the planning will be very simple but following the advices of Mike Cohn in Agile Estimating and Planning.

During the next few days, you will get preview of my work in the form of screen shots together with my ideas on getting these features implemented the right way. You can see below that at the moment the translations are not completed.

Speed up the creation of your projects

The users of Indefero on the hosted platform tend to have an important number of projects. 40 or 50 projects is not uncommon. When you create a new project, up-to-now, you had to tune it to match your needs after creation. If you create a new project each week, this is annoying, you need to repeat again and again the clicks and input.

To solve this problem, you have now the ability to create a new project and reuse another one as template. This way, you can reuse your last project or have a special ''template project''. As on the hosted platform, the number of projects is not limited, it costs you nothing to have the template project lying around.

Back from vacations, lesson learned

They were good, really good, at least from a personal point of view. They were bad, really bad, from a technical point of view. Basically, I was able to enjoy some really good vacations because a failure in my way to synchronise my data prevented me to work and correctly perform technical support. I will slowly answer again your questions within the next few days, please be patient.

So, I learned something to not reproduce these failures in the future, the something is:

• Ensure to stop working with my desktop tools and switch to the laptop at least 3 days before leaving;
• Setup a web based technical support area to be able to answer even on the go through my mobile phone or a crappy GPRS connection;
• Get a general status page where you can see the status of the systems in real time;
• Get better status of the servers integrated in the general status page.

So, a big part of that will be performed this week, then I will work again on Indefero 2.

Update: Still some lag, still 154 unread emails in my inbox. Arg! With the very slow holiday WE, I suppose I will be able to have everything back in order.

A week of vacations

Just for your information, I will be on vacations for a week from now. I will keep an eye on the different services through mobile notifications. Support tickets will be a bit slow. Also, I am not fully satisfied with the notifications with respect to the backup system, that is, I had to reset it this week but I got no notifications of downtime, this is really not nice at all. From here, I cannot control it, so please, download your backups this week and this will be my top priority when back at work the 26th of July. Thank you for your comprehension.

Notice, stupid email situation

Just for your information, because of a stupid bad synchronisation between my desktop and my laptop, I cannot read my emails at moment. Not fun. I am going to reroute my emails for a while the time to get back access to my email account. If you are expecting an answer from me, please wait a bit more, the time I get everything in order. I will put here an update later today.

Update: Ok, I can read again the emails you send me now (Tuesday 11:30 Berlin time), but I still cannot access my previous emails. Stupid... but at least you can contact me again.

Céondo Ltd is looking for great people

Just a short notice, to help getting Indefero 2 out of the door, I am looking for talented developers and designers for contracted work in July/August. If PHP has no secrets for you and/or if you like good design, drop me an email.

The pay is good, the work is interesting and all the commits in the Indefero code base will be done in your name, you get a nice reference work for the future at the same time.

For the requirements:

• you are really good at what you do, some references are welcomed;
• you can invoice me (yes accounting must be done following the rules;
• you can give me your hourly rate as a starting point.

If you are a PHP developer, the work can start now, for a designer, it is also fine to start only in August.

Update: Found 4 great developers, still looking for a designer. Indefero 2 is going to be great.

Nothing New Week 4

As last week was a great week for Cheméo, I need now to take care of a lot of things I left a bit behind when rushing to get everything ready for the annual meeting. The best thing to do is again a new NNW, so here it is, the Nothing New Week 4.

My goals are (and for once they are in the right order of priority):

• clean my 10 cm high stack of papers in my physical inbox;
• go through the 131 unread emails in inbox (and the other 400 read but not cleared);
• get my accounting in order (I still have 20k€ of invoices to issue, so this is critical);
• plan the work for the version 2 of Indefero which I want to go out by the end of August;
• plan the work for Cheméo, especially how to manage feedback from the companies using it. As Indefero is a free software without intellectual property attached to it, the companies using it can without any problem post their needs on the open tracker. With Cheméo, this is not possible as some feedback needs to be handled in private or semi private way. I will need to figure out the right way to do that.

At the moment, I am still really impressed at the synergies I get from developing Cheméo and Indefero at the same time. I learn a lot with one project that I then apply to the other. In terms of quality, they are now definitely better than if I would have developed only one. But I must say, I do not think it is possible to go beyond two projects and I have no ideas if this can last. Anyway, if this cannot last, this would be the results of having many customers. With customers comes money to hire the right people too, so...

Updates:

• Cleaned my physical inbox.
• Cleaned my professional email inbox.
• Migrated my desktop + laptop to the latest Ubuntu (so ugly design but changing to the stock Gnome theme fixes it).
• Had to do the daycare for my youngest son, the poor little one year old had during two days between 38.5⁰C and 39.6 and at the same time it was really hot here (nearly 30⁰C), this slowed down things.
• got nearly all my invoices in order. This means the cash to run the company for another year without even invoice a single time, yeah! My minimal cash value is 6 months and I try to always be above 9 months.

Left to do:

• Resetup of some of my development tools on my desktop and laptop.
• Use more VMs to develop. They are cheap and cost nothing when not in use. This means I can easily use them for testing (way cheaper than EC2) and it will save me a lot of time when reinstalling my systems, as I will not touch them. I think I will move more and more my development tools in the cloud. When I am offline, I usually write my ideas down as I enjoy these distraction free moments.

Cheméo at the CAPEC Annual Meeting in Denmark

What a week, I went to Denmark for the traditional annual meeting of CAPEC. My goal was to gather feedback on Cheméo, especially with respect to the modelling part of it. The other part of Cheméo is the documentation part and is basically a convenient way to search and access physical and chemical data.

This documentation part was really well received. Many engineers are at the moment using Google when trying to get information about chemical structures, the ability to get a specialized one stop place to get access to these information was really appreciated. One of the critical factor was speed but also the direct link to the data source. They are going to use Cheméo as way to search but then double checking with the original source. They think Cheméo as a Google for chemical properties.

The modelling part is more complex, as you can read in the overview, but I was able to run an informal session showing how it works. With one of the company engineer, we created a model and refined it in about 15 minutes and at the end he told me that doing the same with the tools he has take him nearly a full day. A future happy user and ready to become a customer.

It is always extremely hard to evaluate the value you bring to the users of your software tools but it is also a critical part to then set the price point and derivate from it a sustainable business. This is why the modelling/analysis part of Cheméo is going to be free from now until October this year. The goal is to get people to use the software on real problems and be able to provide us with feedback on where we need to improve and for them to really evaluate the value we bring. This is the non scientific part of the business but it needs to be done right to keep the scientific part happy.

The next 6 months are going to be fun.