Julian's Blog

Hawaii shaken by an earthquake yesterday

We had an earthquake yesterday that hit around 7am, Sunday morning.

It went for around 20 seconds or so. I was in sleepy mode and I didn't think it was going to be a big quake so I didn't bother moving out of bed.

Maybe if it shook harder right at the start then I would have done something.

In Australia, I only felt one earthquake. Nothing much happens in Australia. It was only a really small one that lasted like 1 second where I saw the room move left.

Earlier this year in Hawaii, I felt one similar so when the quake yesterday came around, I thought nothing of it. But then it kept going.

15 or so minutes later there was a similar sized aftershock and that took out the power.

Power was out in my area of the island from around 7:30am and only came on late at night at 11:30pm. It was kind of disappointing as the radio reports said they expected all the power on the island to be back on by early evening.

Throughout the power-outage, LavaNet's internet service stayed online as we have backup power and run generator tests once a month.

Our customers in the outer islands (who didn't have power outages) were still able to use their internet service.

When power came back I checked to see if I had internet connectivity at home. Mostly to check the news. Disappointment as the cable light blinked constantly showing a lack of connection from Oceanic's cable service... And they expect us to use their digital phone service in cases of emergencies?

It made me realize that it's pretty important to have a standard phone service in Hawaii. And it helps to have an ISP which is dedicated enough to keep their servers up and running, providing uninterrupted service during a major natural disaster.

Leveraging Free Software presentation

Thanks to those of you who came to my Open Source Pizza presentation at the University of Hawaii tonight. It was really nice to talk in front a receptive crowd with great questions afterwards.

Here are the slides from tonight's presentation:

OpenOffice.org Impress format - 2.2 Mb download

Adobe Acrobat PDF format - 1.5 Mb download

LifeType 1.1 is out

LavaNet 'Ohana Blogs uses the GPL licensed blogging platform called Lifetype.

Recently they released version 1.1 which brings about new features.

I'm hoping to upgrade as quickly as I can.

All the templates that have been installed are compatible and the 2 additional plugins installed.

What would need to be tested in isolation is the upgrade process (especially of the database modifications).

The theming and 'look' of the site would also need to be looked at which may or may not turn out to be the biggest work load.

LavaNet Instant Messenging service?

When Google launched their Google Talk instant messenger, probably the best thing that they did was that they used the Jabber protocol.

Jabber is best known as "the Linux of instant messaging" -- an open, secure, ad-free alternative to consumer IM services like AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo.

It also meant that they saved countless engineering time and dollars in NOT creating their own proprietary instant messenging protocol. And if you don't like the official Google Talk client, you can use any Jabber client that takes your fancy.

Internally at LavaNet, we've implemented and use heavily our own Jabber server using Free software. There are many benefits of this such as: being able to create and administer our own chat rooms for our work departments; turning off logging of conversations and

Previously, we had been heavy uses of AOL's AIM service.

A real crappy situation as AIM is not encrypted and AOL is the type of company which likes to log your usage and post it on the internet.

Something that we at LavaNet could do is offer a LavaNet Instant Messenging service to the public. I doubt the larger ISP's on the island would bother looking into such a service. They have other things to worry about.

As a smaller ISP we can do such things and discuss them with the public. Anyone interested? Any there other services (especially those which can be implemented Freely) that our customers would like to see? Feel free do drop us a line on our Forums.

This is new LavaNet.

PodPress is a podcasting plug-in for Wordpress

Wordpress already has nice built-in support for podcasting. That's what was chosen to be used for the LavaNet 'Ohana Podcasts.

I found out about a nice plug-in called PodPress. It's something to look into for the future.

Incidently, LavaNet 'Ohana Podcasts is also now listed on iTunes as well as some other directories that I can't recall submitting to. Has anyone had a listen to the podcasts? What do you think? You can also submit comments for each episode.

I'd like to have Planet Feed Reader for LavaNet 'Ohana Blogs

I'm more a tech person. So when I think of things, I tend to think of things from a technical perspective.

Something that I want to have with the LavaNet 'Ohana Blogs is the concept of 'Planets' using the Planet Feed Reader.

What is Planet?

Planet is an awesome 'river of news' feed reader. It downloads news feeds published by web sites and aggregates their content together into a single combined feed, latest news first.

Maybe it helps if you take a look at some such as Planet GNOME or Planet SUSE.

Planet is particularly popular with Free and Open Source Software projects. Part of this is that the FOSS community really embraces the web and FOSS developers tend to be pretty tuned in and write in blogs.

I'd like to get the LavaNet Systems department more involved in writing blogs. Besides myself, only Michael really has an active blog. So we could really open up the communications line with customers on the up and coming aspects of LavaNet and have a Planet for the Systems department. Planet Support would work nicely too.

But potentially we could have other Planets that are more generic and open to everyone. I think it's something unique that I haven't seen the Planet software used for in a large scale (non-tech communities using Planet).

Anti-Spam Commenting plug-in added to LavaNet 'Ohana Blogs