Inspirational Technology

Local Arizona company and Grid7 Tempe neighbor VSocial has relaunched their site and announced they’ve raised a $1.5 million first round of funding. They also made Techcrunch. We had a great conversation with Brad Webb, Vsocial CTO in Venturecast #5. It’s great to see our local companies picking up some momentum.

Grid7 Venturecast #8 with Fred Mapp is now online. Fred is a bit different guest for us as he’s the former CIO of AMD, American Express and Honeywell. Some pretty big players in the industry. It was an interesting conversation to hear some of the lessons he’s learned from managing IT in some very large organizations.

Desert Code Camp is coming up Oct. 28 in Phoenix. The last Code Camp was actually pretty disappointing due to the complete lack of hallway interaction and the heavy Microsoft orientation of the sessions. All I really care about is meeting smart people who are doing cool stuff, finding out about the latest Microsoft technology is something I can do online. This one looks like it might be a bit better so we’ll see how it goes. If nothing else, the Phoenix Ruby community will be out in force and there are a number of sessions on Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

Paul Graham has published a great essay titled The 18 mistakes that Kill Startups. This has been circulating quite a bit, but it really is a must read for anyone who wants to start a technology company. Paul always has great insight into the mechanics behind early stage companies.

I pretty much never play video games anymore, but I just came across these videos of people trying out the Nintendo Wii system and if those are real, there’s no way any of the other systems can touch the level of experience that this thing is going to bring. Watch the video of the older Japanese couple trying out the golf game to see how this thing can reach out beyond the typical gaming audience. It looks like fun, immersive, get up and move around kind of fun. That is something I can go for. The more I see of this, the more it looks like Nintendo could very well hit this one out of the park and redefine the entire experience of console gaming.

We’ve just released the latest Grid7 Venturecast with Jason Barney founder and CTO of iTool. iTool was acquired by Onvia and Jason eventually went on to achieve great success in Real Estate and is now the founder of the Groove Cellar recording studio in Gilbert Az.

This is a notable venturecast on a few levels. In my opinion, it’s the most interesting one we’ve done so far. Jason does a great job of sharing the experience gained from leading a venture backed startup and also ties it together with the knowledge he’s gained by achieving success in a completely different industry. It’s also interesting because Jason is no longer in the tech industry and that gives him a different perspective and willingness to discuss things that others would probably avoid.

Of less significance, this is the first venturecast where I actively participated in the interview. Normally I just listen, but I always ask so many questions after it’s over, that we decided to change things up a little from here on and have me actually talk. We’ll see how that goes, I tend to clam up when things like microphones are around.

This podcast was recorded in Groove Cellar Studios using professional grade mics and cool stuff like that. We normally just record with the internal Mic on a Macbook, hardly high tech. Before the recording, Jason also gave us a fascinating tour of the studio. I wish we could have recorded that on video, it was really interesting.

One final note. I was personally involved in the very early stages of iTool, but left to found another company before the service went live. Sean also worked for iTool at one point in time. So we’ve both known Jason for a long time and that’s certainly reflected in the recording. Hopefully the discussions with missing context aren’t too problematic.

I’ve been looking around at ways of encrypting file systems on servers. dm-crypt seems like a good way to go, however the big question for me is how do you handle key management? It’s great to have the data encrypted, but that key still needs to be on the system somewhere or else you hang if the system restarts. That was something that always bugged me about SSL certs that required a password to decrypt them when the webserver started. In order to have a self sustaining system you had to put the key somewhere which obviously defeats the whole point of encrypting anything. So if you had to build a system with application code encrypted on the drives, how would you manage keys?

If you ever try to add a new hard drive to a Parallels virtual machine and you get the following error.

Unable to get the geometry of the virtual hard disk. Perhaps file os.hdd
is not a valid virtual hard disk image file.

The first thing you should check is the file permissions. If the file is set to be read only this is the error that Parallels will give you. It’s confusing and not obvious at all what the real issue is in that case.

Last month I spent two days studying disk geometry trying to figure out why my images weren’t working when it was just a simple permissions problem. I reported this, so hopefully a future version of parallels will include a less confusing message for such a simple problem.

BarCamp Phoenix or what was formally known as the refresh unconference is going to be held Dec. 9 at the University of Advancing Technology in Phoenix. Unfortunately, the wiki page for the camp is currently down. I’ll post an updated link as soon it’s available again.

Introducing Virtualization Daily, a new site dedicated to news, information and my opinions about computer virtualization and virtual appliances. Basically it’s shares what I’m watching and thinking as I work on building out our platform for JumpBox. If you have any interest in how virtualization is being used and just what the heck I’m talking about when I talk about virtual appliances, it might be worth a subscription to learn a little more about this emerging area.