Archive for March, 2009

Dear Lazyweb: Software for groups and organisations

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

I’ve been involved with various organisations and charities over the past few years, and the two main problems they have all faced are:

  1. Lack of participation
  2. Dissemination of information

Whilst 1) can only truly be overcome by having the right people, both can be improved by collaboration – something which is tackled by many pieces of software.

A charitable organisation I run at the moment – an after school club at my children’s school – suffers from both these problems, and one way we are seeking to address them is by becoming a virtual or shudder egroup. Physical meetings will always be required, but things like distributing minutes, drafting and review of documents etc. are perfect candidates for solving online.

However the options on offer aren’t that great. Google Apps is the main one, but complete overkill for what we want which is a mailing list and document sharing/editing/review capabilities. Google Docs is perfect for the latter, but we don’t really want hosted e-mail, calendar, chat etc. I know you can turn them off, but the mailing list requirement still isn’t met. Even if I keep e-mail enabled, people don’t always want yet another e-mail address/account to worry about.

Personally I would just set up a wiki and mailing list and be done, but while this is perfect for a technical project e.g. software (that’s how Ubuntu got started), there are more problems:

  1. (Lack of) technical knowledge
  2. Administration

Of course there’s a learning curve to anything new. Google Docs gets rid of some of this by behaving in similar way to other applications, but it is still a new way of working. A wiki – although completely natural to me – will be completely alien to some if not all the other members. Compounding this problem is that I intend to step back from the organisation this autumn (after three years), and don’t really want to remain as sysadmin.

Having written all this, I’m now coming to the conclusion that for this particular problem sticking to the old way is the best solution, but I’m still interested if any decent (and hosted) solutions that help run groups exist, or if you help run a non-technical group (i.e. LUGs don’t count!), what do you use?

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Posted in Browsing, Personal, Ubuntu | 7 Comments »

Financially Viable?

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

Recently, and probably unsurprisingly, I’ve been playing with Amazon EC2 and in particular the Ubuntu Server beta. So far I’ve been thoroughly impressed with its flexibility and power – especially the new management interface – although I’ve not really explored beyond short lived test instances. I did wonder about migrating this server over to a long running instance, but my back-of-a-napkin calculations showed that I would be spending at least four times what I am currently paying for my Linode.

Now Dustin Kirkland has made that job much easier using his ec2-cost utility in screen-profiles (use the PPA if you’re not on Jaunty). It can be used with screen-profiles, or used directly:

$ /usr/share/screen-profiles/bin/ec2-cost  --detail

================================================
Estimated cost in Amazon's EC2 since last reboot
================================================
  Network sent:  0.420872 GB   @ $0.10/GB
  Network recv:  0.327810 GB   @ $0.17/GB
  Network cost:  0.104329
------------------------------------------------
  Uptime:        141 hr  @ $0.400000/hr
  Uptime cost:   $56.400000
------------------------------------------------
Total cost:      ~$56.50
================================================

Hmm – $56.50 for 141 hours? Doesn’t really compare to $19.95 for ~720 hours (+ lots of transfer) in an average month, but it won’t stop me from using for short tasks/tests.

How much would you have spent?

Just for clarification, I know comparing EC2 to traditional hosting is akin to apples and oranges – I had no intention of moving my own server over after my napkin calculations, but I just wanted to share Dustin’s useful script.

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Posted in Ubuntu | 4 Comments »

13.1 Miles Later…

Sunday, March 8th, 2009

Remember I mentioned previously about my “Delusions of Grandeur” having entered myself for a half marathon? Well, this time last week I was nursing aching muscles (and knees, and arches) having completed the Haweswater Half Marathon in 2 hours 13 minutes and 10 seconds. I placed 477 out of 511 finishers, and 328 out of 342 males. However I never entered expecting to place particularly highly – I’m happy to a) finished it and b) finished it in a time better than I expected (based on my training runs, I expected to finish around 2:14 and I set myself a goal of 2:20).

The race atmosphere is fantastic, and the course itself was beautiful running alongside Haweswater. I’ll definitely be entering another – I’m thinking about the Keswick Half Marathon, and considering the Brathay Windermere Marathon(!) over the next few months.

My longest training run before the race was 10.6 miles, so I was really feeling the last couple of miles, but I ran the majority of the race alongside a nice guy from Durham – John – who kept me going.

These Shoes Are Made For Running

I’d already been thinking about some new running shoes, but David’s comment reminded to actually do something about it, so I went to Lakes Runner in Ambleside to do the whole gait analysis thing (apparently I’m neutral) and came away with a pair of Brooks Glycerin 6 which are definitely more comfortable than my old Asics.

Let Down By Technology

Unfortunately my Garmin Forerunner 50 let me down 4.5 miles into the race, or rather the Footpod did, so I had no instant pace/distance readout and had to rely on the mile markers. Not a bad thing, but I did miss it. I believe it was the battery, because it has been working since I replaced it, but I don’t believe I’d used it enough to drain the old one. Ho hum.

Lessons Learnt

  1. Structure my training more
  2. Ensure I’ve run the full race distance at least once
  3. Taper off more before a race
  4. Check my batteries!
  5. Blog about it in a timely fashion… :)

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Posted in Fitness, Running | 4 Comments »