I have to admit, my knowledge of cars is pretty pathetic - I know that my car has a steering wheel, the accelerator pedal makes it go, and it takes 91 petrol.  My eyes glaze over when people talk about their cars.  I was never into cars as a kid, and I have trusted a variety of different mechanics over the years to service my vehicle.  Yes, I have no idea how to change the oil in my car, and no motivation to ever learn. 

On Monday my car was up for a 10k service, a Hometune technician turned up on time, left me a courtesy vehicle, and rang me later to advise what was needed.  Front brake discs had to be replaced (which I was warned about by Firestone when replacing my tyres in January), and an oil change and new air filter.  The seal on the rocker cover gasket was broken causing my car to leak oil.  To my dismay, oil had also splashed onto the cam-belt, which meant it would have to be replaced as well (it had only just recently been done at my 100k servicing).

Hometune straight away admitted that they should've warned me about it when I had the cam-belt done, and since they'd forgotten to tell me, they were going to replace the cam-belt and clean up all the oil free of charge.  They could've easily told me that the oil leak was bad and it damaged my cam-belt and I would've been none-the-wiser.  I would've reluctantly paid for the cam-belt to be re-replaced, and cursed the day when I bought my car.

I'm very impressed with what the integrity they've shown with my last service, and it's nice to know that an industry where we often here about people being ripped off through ignorance, that there are still some good guys about.

Their website: www.hometune.co.nz

 

Disclaimer: I gave Hometune a reference in August 2008, which we received a discount on our next servicing.  I am not receiving anything for this blog post.

About a year ago Mauricio asked me to join the moderators here on Geekzone (which I was rapt about).  Before that time, I was very curious to see what happened behind the scenes here, and was able to get the odd sneak peak from scottpalmer and freitasm through #geekzone chat - I thought it would be helpful to blog about what happens here, for those who are also curious.

The biggest difference for a moderator is how we see posts made on the site, as shown below on one of my own posts:



Across the top we get an extra button (edit) which allows us to move posts and edit the content if we need to (we then append [Mod (N8): Message] to inform the user).  On the bottom left, we have a handful of functions such as Trust (gives a user their Trusted icon), Stick (sets that post as always appearing at the top of the forums) and Hide (useful when spammers post and we need to remove a post).  My favourite link is Ban, which does the obvious.

You will also notice on the moderator's view the IP address that appears under the avatar - for every post the IP address of that poster is saved.

We also have a private Moderators Forum to discuss posts on the site, user bans etc - unfortunately I can't screenshot it here, however, it looks the same as all the other forums here, just with more smack talk between the different moderators.

To finish, my top 5 pet peeves from Geekzone users:

1. SPAMMERS! - what's the point in going through the signup process, for us to hide your post and banninate you forever?  We're not interested in what you are selling (we hide/ban on average one user a day), and your post is normally gone within the hour.


2. Spelin and gramer errors - some days I wonder whether the New Zealand schooling needs an overhaul, with some users lacking the basic ability to put a coherent sentence together. Issues with its and it's plus their, there and they're are common.


3. Formatting - it doesn't take long to add links and images (resize, resize, resize!) to illustrate your post - take the extra 2 minutes, and it helps all of us understand.


4. Complaints about ISP speeds - unless it's a question about your setup or sync speeds, don't post about your ISP being slow.  If you want better speed, swap to a different ISP - it's not that hard.


5. Astro-turfing - if you have a website you want reviewed, or a product to promote, use the correct Offers and Wanted forum - don't pretend to be an independent third party that's discovered this "amazing product" then link to it - it's blatantly obvious: your IP and email address, plus a WHOIS of the domain exposes you for the d-bag you truly are.  Don't do it.

Other than my whingeing above, I enjoy moderating and participating in the forums on the daily basis, and it's always great to put faces-to-names at the Geekzone pizza evenings and other events - I also enjoy regularly catch-up with the other moderators and ex-moderators.

In my time here, I've seen that there are some very clever people contributing to Geekzone, and I look forward to possibly meeting more of you in the future.

I can sum up my experience with iServe's cloud servers in two words: very impressed.  If you are thinking about co-locating a dedicated server in a data-centre, or virtualising some of your current servers, you must check out this offering first.

iServe (a subsidary of ISP Orcon since May this year) has only just recently launched their cloud servers as part of their cloud computing, a name which I feel is a little misleading - to me, true cloud computing is the Amazon EC2, the Google App Engine et al.  In my mind cloud computing is when you upload your application to a platform, and it's served up by a multitude of different servers in different geographic locations to your users.  A more accurate name for iServe would be "Virtual Private Servers with by-the-hour billing", but from a marketing perspective, "cloud servers" is less of a mouthful.

To begin, new servers are quick and easy to provision - enter your details with a credit card and you can have a new server instance up and going within 5 minutes.  If you need more than one server, you can add as many as you need through their secure (SSL encrypted) web console.  The web console also provides access to other admin features for your cloud servers.



Servers are available as Windows (Server 2008) or Linux (CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, openSuSE or Mandriva), with 512Mb to 4Gb of memory, and between 1 to 8 cores.  With the web console I can configure a very basic Windows Server machine with 1 core and 512MB of memory, and if I need more power, I can add more resources in real-time by dragging up the sliders (see image below).  Since the billing is done by the hour, I can upgrade the server for a short period of time, and then downgrade it again once the extra grunt is no longer needed.  The basic machine in my example will put you back 11¢ an hour ($79.20/month ex GST) with a 4Gb 8 core behemoth costing 0.53¢ an hour ($381.60/month ex GST).

Other resources such as additional network interfaces ($1/month per IP) can also be added and bandwidth is charged as you use it - national traffic is free, international is $1.75/GB.



If you want to use the server purely for backup or archiving purposes, and don't need it running 24/7, it can be put into standby mode, and regardless of its powered up resources, the charge is only 1.5¢ an hour ($10.80/month ex GST) per server.  With the low standby fee, you could completely pre-configure web/database servers that can be quickly brought online should primary servers fail. You can also save a standard image of a server, so if you need to provision multiple copies of the same server, you don't need to setup each one from scratch.

Another useful feature in the web console is servers can be powered up and down automatically based on a timed schedule, and you can receive an email notification when your server powers up.



Security is paramount when running your own server, and the web console allows you to configure incoming and outgoing firewall rules.  By default all incoming connections are dropped, and all outgoing connections are allowed.  If your server has multiple network interfaces, rules can be applied to both, or specified separately for each one. Savings are made as you don't need to run another server just as a firewall, plus there is no danger of accidentally putting in rule that locks yourself out of your own server (not that I would ever admit to doing this).  There is a short wait of 5 minutes after each save to allow your changes to propagate to iServe's firewalls.



Remote access is achieved through VNC (new servers default to VNC) which, through the web console, can be locked down to a specific IP address or subnet.  If you prefer Remote Desktop, this can be setup on the server, and secured using the firewall rules as above.

Through a Java applet in the web console, you are able to VNC to the cloud server through your browser, a handy feature if you are on-site at a client's premises and don't have the security permissions to VNC/Remote Desktop directly and need to do some work on the server.



We are currently running the 3Bit main website off a cloud server (IIS7 and SQL Server 2008) with a handful of other test sites.  I recently tested the capacity of one of our custom SMTP email relays, and to do this I created another cloud server, setup the programs I needed, and bombarded the SMTP server with 20k emails in a minute.  Once I had finished, I deleted the cloud server, quickly and easily and all for a very low cost.  For us as a web-hosting provider, it gives us another useful tool to add to our shared hosting and dedicated co-located servers that we are currently running out of Maxnet's data-centre.

To conclude, I've been impressed with the flexibility of the web console plus the per hour basis of the billing.  We've only been running a cloud server for just three weeks, and in that time the performance has been very good, and the support I've received from Scott Quinlan, one of their lead developers, has been great.  I hope that as more people begin to utilise these cloud servers that iServe continues with this same high level of service.

I highly recommend you sign-up and try out a cloud server for yourself.

On Stuff yesterday it was reported that the New Zealand Breast Cancer Foundation last year spent 43% of its revenue on administration costs.  In a similar vein, from the highly publicised Dancing with the Stars series, 40% of all the revenue gathered from text and the 0900 vote line was also spent on administration (source: Scoop).

While it is reasonable to have overheads for staff, office lease, telecommunications costs etc, where does the line get drawn for reasonable costs vs extravagance?

The Stuff article reminded me of a Voice-over-IP phone system we installed for a well-known charity around 2 years ago (we have since sold the VoIP part of our business to another party).  For me, this was an eye opener on how different charities were in reality to how I envisaged them to be.

Charity A (as I'll refer to them) purchased a brand new four storey building in a reasonable area.  Since it was old and in a state of disrepair, the decision was made to gut it, and refurbish it completely.

Here is where my issue begins.

The final product was amazing - the office had high quality carpet and fittings, air-conditioning in every room, a fully furnished kitchen with appliances for staff and visitors, and automatic opening glass doors between the different common areas.  All of the internal glass was also etched with Charity A's logo.

The building and fit out was, in my eyes, suitable for a top NZ company, not for a charity that is supposed to be helping and investing as much of their dollars into the people that really need it.  Charity A could have easily gotten away with much less, and better used the money saved.

Has this whole experience made me cynical? To a point.  What it has highlighted is you need to be careful who you are donating to, and don't hesitate to ask how much of your donation is actually reaching the cause.

Charities should be looking to have trustees who have experience running successful businesses, they know how hard it is to get a business started, and should help rein in unnecessary spending.  Every dollar should be spent as though it were their last.

Remember: a charity doesn't necessarily mean they are there to help the community, it just means they don't pay out profits to shareholders.