Archive for October, 2009

Oursky Team on Google Wave

October 19th, 2009
wave

Almost everyone in Oursky got the Google Wave invitation last week so we’re ready to do some real test on how well it works within team collaboration.

Instead of using a combination of emails, IRC, Trac (Wiki) and DropBox for collaboration, we tried to use Google Wave for a few days last week for:

  • A chat room for general collaboration
  • Team cooperation on the iPhone Application Development
  • Brainstorm room for use cases of our new WorkFlow project

Here are a initial summary of thought:

  • The major problem now is the performance and stability of the software, it is known as Wave is still in preview, not even in beta!
  • It is not easy to track the unread conversation now, some UI things should be improved on this one.
  • When you reply the last message, the reply doesn’t indent, it is kind of very wried and consider as a “bug” by most people as I know.
  • Why real time typing? It might be useful for real-time collaboration on documents but it is a very serious distraction and affect productivity since it tends to attract your eye-balls

Despite the many un-statisfication on the stabilities and performance, Google Wave, frankly looks most promising to us on it’s extensibility compare with other communication tools (like email). For example what if we integrate our version control system and ticketing system in Google Wave so that we can discuss the features and do code review on it? My guess is the success of Google Wave largely depends on how easy for developers to extend so that people can start doing more and more useful communication on Wave.

Rackspace Cloud Files or Amazon Simple Storage Service?

October 9th, 2009

We were comparing Rackspace Cloud Computing (Cloud Servers and Cloud Files) with Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3, SQS) which we have been using it for over a year, both for our clients and internal projects.

We started by comparing Cloud Files with S3, mainly because:

  1. The pricing are similar when you consider we’re serving visitors from Hong Kong through CDN, and
  2. Amazon CDN – CloudFront seems not working really well in Hong Kong, having latency issues since it’s launch and that hurt websites that serving a lot of small files.

So we did a little experiment to compare is Cloud Files’s CDN better? We find the result might be interesting for someone else so we posted here but it’s by no mean scientific or authoritative, bear in mind that we’re testing it in Hong Kong and all we want to compare is how well it serve static small files for website. Feel free to contact us if you want to know about other factors we’ve been thinking about.

Environment

  • Firefox with FireBug
  • PCCW 4MB Business Internet Connection
  • To load FONCEPT frontpage with 21 images, 3 CSS, 11 Javascript.(yea we know we shouldn’t have so many Javascript files…

Flash Loading (sec)

Trial	| S3 Performance (with CDN)	| Cloud Files (with CDN)
1	| 6.58				| 2.56
2	| 7.08				| 3.19 
3	| 7.34				| 5.48
4	| 6.59				| 3.15
5	| 8.36				| 3.76
6	| 7.40				| 3.28
7	| 7.03				| 4.19
8	| 9.28				| 3.93
9	| 9.00				| 3.57
10	| 8.80				| 3.98
Average	| 7.75				| 3.71
S.D.	| 1.02				| 0.79

Observation

  • Cloud Files take longer time just to give 404 sometimes (> 1sec), a wild guess is the CDN is not caching for non-existed files.
  • [anything else?]

Welcome! Daniel — Our web solutions evangelist.

October 9th, 2009

Always thinking about start-up, Daniel Cheng joins the team at Oursky after completing a master degree in Management Science from Stanford University. He will be responsible for our Sales and Marketing work and assist our clients in addressing their needs.

With an additional staff, our team is going to be increasingly capable in fulfilling your needs. Lets us know whenever we can help!

Feel free to contact Daniel at ydcheng@oursky.com or call us if you need any help.