5 years, the time is flying. In May 2007, I created Céondo Ltd, in September 2007, active trading started and in August 2008, I started to pay myself a regular salary. Wonderful time and even better time to come, after 5 years of working hand in hand with the industry, I finally know where I can make a change, where I can really add value and make the work of the chemical and process engineers easier, safer and faster.

Many thanks to all my customers up to now and of course, all the people I have been in contact with during these 5 years, you gave me a lot and I hope you have the feeling I gave you a lot too. The next 5 years are going to be fun!

A small notice to inform you that Elveos.org is using Indefero:

Elveos.org is a crowdfunding website for open source software. You are a free software developer? Elveos gives you a way to get paid for your work. You are a free software user? Elveos let you fund the features you need.

It reminds me KickStarter but more open. It is very nice to see offers targeting the OSS community.

Can you remember the old days? Life was simple, everything worth something was simple Netscape Navigator. Then Microsoft decided that the web was important and they took over the world and took a nap. Reborn from the ashes of Netscape, Mozilla brought us Firefox. But then, Google decided that the web was too important not to have their own browser, here we are, Chrome is the new leader.

• Chrome: 50.92%
• Firefox/Geco: 22.60%
• Safari: 17.54%
• Android: 6.12%
• Opera: 1.64%
• Internet Explorer, less than 1%...

Click on the image for a larger version. These are the results of a nearly 100% traffic burst from Hacker News this WE. They are the trend setters as early adopters. They are going to jump on the next Chrome, Firefox, IE, Netscape Navigator when it will come. But here, for the first time I wonder. Who could be the next? Can it be that we reached the goal of the Mozilla Fondation of a competitive field, where several players are taking the lead based on their merits? Could it be that the fragmentation resulting of the different form factors is the reason we will never see again a 80% market share for a single vendor? I hope so!

If you noticed a slow down in the past minutes, one of the routers of our provider had some issues. This slowed down the services for a short period of time. As you can see on the following graph, suddenly our GET requests to monitor the response time of the services went bong. 20 second response time, this is the equivalent of dead...

But I must say, this is where I am really pleased by our provider, OVH. They immediately explained what was going on: a card of the router crashed hard or died.

At the moment, we move a bit the VMs (Virtual Machines) powering up our PaaS (Platform as a Service). The platform has one virtual machine receiving the code updates and then the Cheméo application is updated from it. The application itself is running on another VM behind the web server. The work we do is to disconnect the web server from the application. So, at the end we get :

• 1 VM with the web server answering your requests;
• 2 VMs with the Cheméo application servers — they are doing the work like pulling the data out of the database;
• 1 VM hosting the code and building the new application code which is then deployed on the previous 2 VMs.

This seams a bit complicated but the advantage is that it is very easy to add new application server VM to handle more requests.

Anyway, the split requires moving component here and there and synchronizing the data, this does not work always as expected and this why, one thing you can expect for sure is a bit of downtime during the next few days.

For your information, we are in the process of migrating Indefero's main backup server on our new infrastructure. The new infrastructure has been running for a while and we are satisfied with the stability.

We are going to do at the same time a server upgrade, moving away from Ubuntu and back to the roots, that is Debian. Once the backup server will be up and running smoothly, the main server will follow.

Update: Got a bit of instability at the same time... upgrading here and there an old server is difficult. Time to get the migration to a better system completed!

As a nice end of the year present, Cheméo is now running on Céondo's private Platform as a Service (PaaS). This is a huge change compared to the previous system. After the normal period of ironing out the system, the infrastructure will be more robust and flexible to allow fast iterative development. The goal is simple, Cheméo must become the reference for chemical engineering data. We are not targeting biological activity but only chemical and process engineers. 2012 is going to be fun.

The Decane is a simple molecule but also the name of our new database server. It is a 24GB RAM/240GB SSD server with a lot of power to provide blazing fast data processing. In the next few days it will go through the standard Ganeti setup and the Indefero PostgreSQL database will be migrated over. Depending of the performance, we may migrate more database VMs on it.

This is the first time I am putting a server with SSD drives in production. I have been an heavy user of SSD drives for my desktop/laptop systems in the past two years and I must say, I will never go back to traditional drives, but of course, the amount of data stored is not the same for desktop and for a server.

So, yes, performance increase of Indefero is on the way!

Update: Decane just joined the Ganeti cluster:

# gnt-node list
Node             DTotal  DFree MTotal MNode MFree Pinst Sinst
node1.ceondo.net   2.7T   2.2T  11.8G  4.0G  8.2G     4     0
node2.ceondo.net   2.7T   2.4T  11.8G  2.9G  9.2G     5     0
node3.ceondo.net 194.3G 194.3G  23.6G  147M 23.4G     0     0

Update 2011.11.09: Base backup of the postgresql database is on the way, this is a huge rsync job and this is of course slowing down the system. Please be patient... thank you.

Update 2011.11.09 20:00 UTC: Ok, the new server is now acting as a warm standby for the database, this will allow fast "failover" to the new database server after the testing period.

Update 2011.11.10 10:28 UTC: The main application server will be unavailable for a short amount of time the time to connect it to its virtual LAN to communicate directly with the warm standby over a private network. Done.

Update 2011.11.10 11:46 UTC: Now that the connection at the switch level is supporting the VLAN, it needs to be configured at the host and vm level. This will again trigger short downtime here and there.

Update 2011.11.10 12:50 UTC: Ok, now setting up a second warm standby which will take over the current one on the new SSD powered server once it will start to act as master. Done.

Update 2011.11.10 13:34 UTC: Ok, things are running as expected, around 21:00 UTC today, Indefero will be stopped for about 15 minutes, this will ensure that we have the warm standby with the latest version. The warm standby will be brought online as master and then the web app will connect to the new master on the new server. Immediately, I will start to populate the new warm standby. Basically a bit of cascading.

Update 2011.11.10 19:20 UTC: Too tired to do the cascading, it is never good to do so when not really fresh. I will perform it tomorrow, ok it will be during the day, but it will be only about 15 minutes of downtime. So expect a downtime of maximum 30 minutes between 09:00 and 12:00 UTC on November 11.

In the past 24h, I have been testing the latest developer version of Indefero on projects.ceondo.com and I must say, I am pretty pleased by the stability of everything. Congratulations to all the developers involved in getting this done. The only problem is that it requires some heavy migrations and update of the database storage and I must say, I do not like that.

So, some read only tests will be done tonight to check how this can be done without disturbing you too much and if things are going well, the upgrade will be performed. The upgrade can take a very long time. Yes, upgrading 3000 databases is a bit painful.

Anyway, if you take at the new version on projects.ceondo.com, I suppose you will accept this small annoyance as it will bring you a lot of goodies.

Today, the 27 of September, around 23h00 Paris/Berlin time some of the background processes of Indefero will not run. Our provider is performing some network maintenance.

Basically, they are rewiring our private network, which means that the background communication between the components will be cut. This also means that some website which have data routed over the private network will not function. The total maintenance time is expected to be about 15 minutes. Thank you for your comprehension.

This is a great pleasure to welcome Bayer as a new customer. Bayer being big, in this case, I am talking about Bayer Technologies and Services also known as BTS.

Happy days, on Friday the complete family moved into our new home, after nearly a month of living in short terms solutions like friends, rented furnished apartment and hotel. I am writing this note connected from our new DSL connection (a bit slow with 3 Mbps) and I am setting up my new office.

This week will still be a not very efficient week but I expect to get everything back up to normal speed by next Monday. The really good point is that once I get my desk and desktop setup again, I will be able to sit correctly and also reuse my Dvorak TypeMatrix keyboard, this is what I missed the most during the past weeks.

Thank you all for your patience, especially the non answered emails since Friday, I will go through them again during the next few days.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is with a great pleasure that I can announce the availability of Indefero 1.0. Indefero started as a small project 21 months ago and grew to be now a very robust and easy to use system to manage your projects and code. Like hundreds of users of the hosted version and many more on the server install version (GPL), I manage all my projects with it.

Indefero is not anymore a simple software project, it is also a nice community of users and contributors, a business project and everything done while keeping our values at the center. We keep things simple, we keep respect among the developers and users and we keep the fun with us.

You can try Indefero now and tell me what you think about it.

The last "Nothing New Week aka. NNW " was more than 3 months ago, the state of my paper work and inboxes requires a new radical week. As usual this will include:

• 0 emails in my inboxes (business, open source and personal);
• all the paper work for Céondo.

The refocus of the last NNW was good. Indefero is growing nicely and now making money and the launch of Cheméo this weekend marks a good turn to keep providing high value, high quality services on the web.

Now, as I am on a good track with Cheméo, I want to push a bit more this week, here is what I will try to achieve:

• first pre-release of Indefero 1.0;
• update of my 10 year old microcms to have the foundations to get a blog for Cheméo and a better Pluf website.

We will see what I get done...

This is with a great pleasure that I am launching Cheméo today. Cheméo is a search engine for chemical properties and is developed to serve the chemical and process industry.

At the moment the Cheméo database stores more than 100,000 components and will grow based on the availability of high quality experimental data.

I am especially pleased to release Cheméo as it is my first project in close collaboration with Dr Claude Leibovici. Claude has more than 30 years of experience in the field of chemical property, starting with a thesis in quantum mechanics and following with a career in the oil and gas industry.

You can try it and do not hesitate to tell me what you think about it.