As of this moment (Sunday 24 Jan 2010) Telecom's XT network has been down for me for over 24 hours. Whenever people in my household try to use it we get a "Network Busy" error. I dion't know how far the outage extends. As I haven't heard anything about it the outage could be quite localised.
You may have heard about Google Wave. It's a new technology being developed by Google. Google describes it as:
A few posts ago I talked about the importance of backups. A recent article brought this to my attention again though it was discussing Disaster Recovery rather than just backups:
I mentioned in the post about our phone system that we can access our phone system when working remotely. In fact, we can access our entire computer system when working remotely. We have full access to our file server, phone system, mail system, printers, and other IT services when away from the office. We use a very good piece of security software called OpenVPN to accomplish this.
Sometime ago I wrote rather disparagingly about Telecom's XT network. Recently while travelling I have found it useful as the data side of it is far faster than the CDMA network. My phone (a Nokia E75) comes with inbuilt GPS. It has its own GPS application but I installed Google Maps and use that instead.
The importance of good backups was driven home to me again recently when our tape drive failed and I had to replace it. I decided that it was time to upgrade our tape drive to a newer model with greater capacity as recently our backups have been requiring more than one tape. I purchased a reasonable second hand tape drive through Trademe. This drive can backup 200 gigabytes of data (or 400 gigabytes of compressed data) which is quite a step up on our previous drive which did 20gb (40gb compressed). The cost of the tape drive and some new tapes to go with it was a little under $1000.00. Well worth the expense when the alternative is possibly not being in business!
I moved on to Telecom's new XT network earlier this week and I am wondering if this is a good move. I have noticed that sometimes my phone rings when calls are incoming and sometimes it doesn't. Just a few minutes ago I received a call. The phone didn't ring - I only happened to glance down at it and see that there was a call. When I answered it, the quality was appalling. I had to step outside before I could hear the person on the other end properly. They kept fading in and out.
There has been a lot of talk about Voice Over IP (VOIP) phone systems in the past few years. A VOIP system basically allows you to make calls across a computer network (like the Internet) instead of using landlines provided by Telecom or other telecommunications companies. The cost of calls on a VOIP system can be far lower than those made through a landline provider. Obviously this is very attractive to business.
As I said two posts back we use the Community Edition of SugarCRM as our Customer Relationship Management system. SugarCRM is very good and it has a good community behind it. There have been a lot of modules written that extend SugarCRM in various ways, many of which interact with other online systems.
Lisa and I recently hosted a small online meeting using DimDim. DimDim is an Open Source web conferencing tool. As with all open source software it is freely available for use. In fact, the DimDim people go a step further and will allow you to host conferences using their software on their website for free.