Brent Kearney » Raves

Calgary’s Best Internet Cafe: The Purple Perk

Brent — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 23:07:21 +0000

I’m spoiling the secret, but some things are too good to keep to oneself: the best place in Calgary to get a free wireless hook-up for your laptop is on 4th Street SW, between 22nd & 23rd Ave, at the Purple Perk Coffee Market. It isn’t an Internet cafe per se — there are no terminals that you can borrow — but its a perfect setup for wireless-enabled laptop owners. There are plenty of comfortable tables, all with electrical outlets in the baseboard, and there is a strong and free 802.11g signal. They even have good food! Their free wireless network is fast too — I had a video conference on it using iChat, and it was as smooth as it is on the high bandwidth connection at the office. In fact, if I lived in Calgary, it would probably be my office. I have a feeling that the Purple Perk and I will have a long and gratifying relationship, even though I only visit the city a couple of times per month.

Dreamhost: The Best Hosting Service on the ‘Net

Brent — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 19:05:02 +0000

For nearly a year, I leased a server for hosting websites, mail and DNS for web projects and consulting clients. It was expensive, but I thought it was necessary because I needed maximum control over the environment in order to run whatever web apps I needed and to create custom configurations to meet the needs of my clients. Then I discovered DreamHost.

DreamHost is a web hosting company that leverages open source software and mad geek skillz to bring you almost all of the benefits of having your own leased server environment, but for shared hosting prices. This is a company that really gets it when it comes to web technologies. They understand that their users know that vhosts, DNS entries and open source software does not incur the costs that most hosting companies charge for, so they include these things for free, even in their cheapest package. It’s over the top.

While you can’t directly control Apache directives, the sysadmins have created a full featured setup that lets you achieve pretty much anything that you would want to do anyways. For example, you can use their custom-made and very functional control panel (included free with all plans) to setup a vhost with your choice of these server-side environments and/or services:

Full Shell and/or FTP access
Ruby on Rails
Perl/CGI via mod_perl
PHP4, running as CGI or not
PHP5, running as CGI or not
A MySQL host with unlimited databases
Frontpage extensions
.htaccess password-protected directories
Quicktime and/or RealAudio/Video streaming servers
Jabber instant messaging
IMAP and/or POP3 services, with virtually unlimited user accounts
Automatic “one-click” installation of numerous popular open source programs, like WordPress, phpBB, Joomla! CMS, Gallery, MediaWiki, Webcalendar and more…

Their cheapest plan ($7.95 USD/mo) includes 1TB of bandwidth, 20GB of disk space, unlimited MySQL databases, 75 shell/ftp users, 3000 email accounts and unlimited extra domain and sub-domain hosting. As if thats not enough, as an incentive for sticking with them, they increase your bandwidth quota by 8GB per week and your disk quota by 160MB per week.

The icing on the cake is their referral program: they give you $97USD for everyone that you refer to their service (if they sign up), or 10% of what your referred customers pay plus 5% of what their referred customers pay.

My only concern with this company is whether they can afford to stay in business at these prices, and whether they can keep upgrading their infrastructure at a rate that matches the customer growth that they are surely experiencing. Having said that, I encourage anyone who is either looking for new hosting or wants a better deal on their current hosting to check out DreamHost.

Apple Core-Duo Intel iMacs

Brent — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 08:59:53 +0000

The sweet new machines from Apple, the Intel “Core-Duo” iMacs, are more than just blazing fast. They are also the easiest to use, best designed personal computers on the market.

That statement sounds like its coming from a raging Mac zealot, but its not. Having made a career in information technology, I have installed and configured thousands of computers of all types over the last 10 years. None have compared to the iMac in terms of ease of use, functionality and well thought-out design. I have so far seen 3 complete novices who were able to take them out of the box, and get online within a few minutes. For people who have little or no computing experience, I couldn’t recommend anything else.

The first thing that people ask when they look at the iMac is, “where is the computer”? The Intel iMac has a profile of only about 5cm wide, making it the thinnest “fat client” I’ve seen. Here is a profile shot comparing the new iMac with a Sun thin-client terminal:

The thin client has no CPU or hard drive in it, but the iMac is a full featured PC packed into a similarly sized casing. Sort of like a laptop, but the iMac offers desktop performance with an SATA hard drive and a ATI Radeon X1600 graphics card with 128MB of fast video memory.

The iMac has sufficient ports for most users to attach pretty much any kind of device. On the back you’ll find 3 USB 2.0 ports, (there are 2 USB 1.1 ports on the keyboard), 2 Firewire 400 ports, a gigabit network port, digital audio out and in, and Apple’s freaky video-out port. You can use an adaptor for the video-out port to connect to pretty much any kind of video device: SGVA, RCA, S-Video, DVI, etc..

Other notable features of the hardware include the built-in iSight camera, the new Apple Mighty Mouse, and a tiny remote control for Front Row.

The real treat with these machines though, is the software that they run. I will post a subsequent article on Mac OSX and the little surprises that came with the new Intel Core-Duo iMacs.