Posted on June 30, 2011 by Ali Cochran
After 4 years in England I’m pretty used to conversations along the lines of “Canadian? So, um, seen any bears?” or “Do you know my cousin/friend/acquaintance named Bob/Fred/Kevin Smith in Toronto/New Brunswick/Canada-but-I-can’t-remember-the-city”, or this one VERY random moment: “what is your opinion on the pinewood beetle epidemic?”….sorry?!
The fact is that to most people I meet Canada is a wispy concept involving the scent of trees, cold, snow and the odd bear/beaver chucked in (with a sprinkling of hockey obsession of course).
So when I announced that it was going to be Canada Day on Friday – the tumbleweed that blew through the office convinced me that people needed a little guide to help them cope with the Red & White madness that will soon be occurring in Trafalgar Square.
Continue Reading →
Posted on June 24, 2011 by Namuli Katumba
>”If you want Elastic Hosting you need an Elastic Budget…”
I can’t take credit for this little nugget of clarity. That goes to Richard Gardner, one of our Support Engineers. But as soon as I heard him say it, the phrase struck (and stuck with) me.
Everyone but everyone is talking about and investigating Cloud Computing / Cloud Hosting / [insert Cloud term here]. But what I’m seeing over and over again is a lot of confusion as to how Cloud will work for you and your business. Or more specifically how it will magically save you money.
Continue Reading →
Posted on June 16, 2011 by Dave Williams
At Ultraspeed, we believe that the best way to make sure that your product is great is to rely on it yourself, a practice known in the industry as ‘dogfooding’. To this end, engineers like myself have a personal server, provisioned with the same resources as a standard Diskless Simple server, in the same environment that we manage for customers’ infrastructure.
I use mine to host a few medium-traffic blogs and Rails webapps, and one of these blogs is Geekosaur. It’s a place for my ruminations on the state of technology and the Internet, and while fairly successful its daily traffic is hardly going to set the world on fire.
So it was a great (and pleasant) surprise to me that one of my posts about IPv6 ended up on the front page of Slashdot.
Now, if that’s a new name to you, let me elucidate. Slashdot is good for two things; links to the geekiest and most wonderful bits of the Internet, and killing Web servers. ‘To be Slashdotted’ has become a verb, meaning to be saturated with so much traffic that your site becomes completely unavailable.
My experience didn’t disappoint.
Continue Reading →
Posted on June 2, 2011 by Jordan Gross
Ultraspeed are excitedly about to move to a lovely shiny new office. Well, more precisely, about to refurbish a wonderful old space to our exact requirements. Whilst we are lucky enough to have help from the fantastic Tina Bernstein over at Colourliving, many of the decisions on designing an office that is sustainable (which for us means we use components that have longevity and use the minimum amount of power without compromising on function) and doesn’t use materials that are harmful to the environment (i.e. lots of concrete) are actually quite complicated.
There are some obvious and easy wins; reduced flush toilets, aerated showers and A-grade energy appliances, are a few that come to mind. There is also the wonderful fact that the space itself is West facing, making it unlikely that we will ever need air conditioning or any other energy guzzling cooling systems. The Ultraspeed team is used to having vests-at-the-ready for the hottest summer days in the current space, and is undoubtedly looking forward to this being a thing of the past.
There are some trickier issues and decisions; no one seems to actively sell desks made out of recycled or sustainable materials, choosing low energy yet good-to-work-under office lighting is also hard, as is having a ‘hard wearing yet no nasty chemical components’ floor.
Now, if you’re a large firm like the building specialist and consultancy Arup (who built a splendid building a few years back to incredible sustainable standards over in the West End), you can afford to spend many millions on this kind of thing. However, for us at Ultraspeed, spending our money carefully on R&D and the service we provide to customers is the main priority, and simultaneously doing a sustainable office refurbishment within a small budget is no mean feat. But it can be done with some creativity, effort and careful consideration, which any small firm will have in spades.
We’ll keep you updated on our progress via the blog, and look forward to welcoming you to our new space in a few months time. In the meantime feel free to drop us a note should you feel the eco-interior-designer in you stirring, I would happily welcome any ideas or suggestions!