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Jungle Disk; The Only Way To Do Cloud Storage

On Monday, July 6th, 2009, in Business, Hacking, Technology, by Justin

The Problem

After reading about Authorize.net’s fun holiday weekend adventure of a fire in their data center, I decided that I better find a solution to automatically backup my servers data and database dumps to an off-site location just in-case the unthinkable ever happened.

Basically what I have is full drive images taken weekly and daily MySQL and Microsoft SQL database backups that need to be stored off-site. I have known about Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for months but it is difficult to setup and requires custom coding and integration via their API. Also, all this gibberish of AWS key, AWS hash, AWS username, and such just flustered me. I also caught wind of Mosso Cloud Files which is a service by RackSpace. While Cloud Files looks very promising on its own, it again requires API integration to automate the backup process.

Tah Dah… Introducing Jungle Disk

There must be an easier way? Then I stumbled across Jungle Disk. Jungle Disk combines the power of using Amazon’s respected infrastructure and reliability, but packages everything into a nice and easy GUI and web interface. But Wait… That’s not it… Order today and you also get full integration with Rack Space Mosso Cloud Files as well. Sorry, that was my tribute to Billie Mays.

Jungle Disk allows you to create disks of either flavor; S3 or Cloud Files via their beautiful ajax rich web interface. Also through the web interface you can create additional users and assign them permissions to disks for $2 per month per user extra. Then simply using their client applications you can push files to the cloud. Their client applications are available for almost every popular operating system; Windows, OSX and Linux.

Jungle Disk Benefits

Highly Scalable Infrastructure With Multiple Datacenters Equals Reliability
Cost Of Entry Is Essentially Nothing
Pay For What You Use
Unlimited Number Of Disks
Multiple Users With Permissions
Secured SSL Encrypted Storage

Private Storage Only

The one thing Jungle Disk does not do is double as a Content Delivery Network (CDN). All files pushed to Jungle Disk are private and cannot be accessed by the public internet. If you need CDN capability Jungle Disk is not your solution, try Amazon’s CloudFront instead. Unfortunately, CloudFront requires API integration and all that gibberish I spoke about above.

Pricing

The cost is $2 a month base ($2 for each additional user) and a pay for what you use model. Amazon S3 storage is $0.15 per gigabyte and data transfer is $0.10 for uploads and $0.17 for downloads per gigabyte. Rackspace Cloud Files is also $0.15 per gigabyte storage and bandwidth is currently unbilled. That’s right, free bandwidth when using Mosso Cloud Files.

Conclusion

Jungle Disk was absurdly easy to implement and the only complaint I have was that I had to restart the Windows 2003 servers after installing the client. But that is more of a beef with Microsoft and their shitty operating systems then Jungle Disk. Their support is amazing! I had a few questions after signing up, and I kid you not, thirty seconds after I created my support ticket I already had a response from some fellow named JungleJosh. I highly recommend Jungle Disk, not only for businesses and corporate users, but also for personal (school documents, photo and video libraries) backups as well.

Jim Cramer Blames Obama For The Recession And Implies He Is A Communist

On Monday, March 2nd, 2009, in Business, Politics, by Justin

I am sorry, but I have to rant a little bit about the show on CNBC Mad Money with Jim Cramer. After today’s slaughtering of the financial markets; the DOW closed down 299.64 points (4.24%), I figured it might be interesting to watch Mad Money with Cramer and see his thoughts and reaction.

Immediately Cramer started blaming president Obama, spewing nonsense about him wanting to run this country into communism, personally driving the United States economy into recession and droning on and on, every sentence he spat out frustrating and infuriating me further. It reached a climax when I found myself yelling and swearing at the TV and Cramer.

So, let me just vent a bit and say this to Cramer. For the love of god, how long has Obama been in office? Right, two months, and your blaming him for the financial meltdown because? Kramer, you might want to reflect a little bit and blame the previous president, who deserves the brunt of the blame for getting us into this situation to begin with.

We have all been hit personally and financially by the current economic turbulence and recession, I bought Apple stock at near high levels, but blaming Obama is just a cop out, and quite honestly a douche move.

I leave with a few choice and angering quotes from Kramer’s show today.

“Everything this president touches, all get’s crushed.”

“The rath of Obama…”

“Can any group be saved from Obama’s wealth destroying?”

“Bolsheviks and the banks…”

Steve Jobs Steps Down Temporarily for Heath Reasons – Trading Halted Tomorrow Morning

On Wednesday, January 14th, 2009, in Business, Technology, by Justin

Steve Jobs, who is Apples CEO, will take a medical leave of absence until the end of June. Tim Cook the COO will take over for Steve as the CEO in the interm.

Steve Jobs today sent the following email to all Apple employees:

Team,

I am sure all of you saw my letter last week sharing something very personal with the Apple community. Unfortunately, the curiosity over my personal health continues to be a distraction not only for me and my family, but everyone else at Apple as well. In addition, during the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought.

In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day to day operations, and I know he and the rest of the executive management team will do a great job. As CEO, I plan to remain involved in major strategic decisions while I am out. Our board of directors fully supports this plan.

I look forward to seeing all of you this summer.

Steve

Additionally, Tim Cook will serve as interim CEO

Mint.com, Financial Tracking And Planning The Web 2.0 Way

On Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008, in Business, Technology, by Justin

Free Personal Finance Software, Online Money Management, Budget Planner and Financial Planning | Mint.com

I recently heard about Mint.com from a buddy who was using it. Mint.com allows you to provide financial login, username and password, details and it will automatically pull transactions, balances, and all sorts of additional details from your various financial institutions. Then it will organize everything and provide an amazing amount of statistics, graphs, and money saving tips. At first I was very skeptical about providing any financial login details to a third party, yet alone a web application who purpose is to make a profit. As I dug further reading articles, and Googleing, I quickly realized Mint.com is very trusted company, with copious amounts of funding backed by the who’s who in silicon valley. In addition, Mint.com cannot actually complete/charge any financial transactions and they anonyomize every user, only asking for e-mail, zipcode, and a login password. After all, in reality we should be more worried about trojans and keyloggers grabbing financial institution login details then Mint.com.

So I took the big plunge, signed up, and provided my login details for my checking, savings, and major credit card accounts. Instantly, the application filled with details about my spending habits and income sources; details I never spent the time to calculate but were nonetheless eye opening and tremendously informative. $112 last month eating at Chipotle, over $300 in gasoline in November, $25 this month already at iTunes.

I spent about a good hour looking over all my transactions, properly tagging, and assigning the proper category to each charge and credit. After that, I was able to get an amazing snapshot and graph view of my spending habits, and which categories I can and furthermore need to cut back on. Finally, they have a powerful alerts feature which can send e-mails or even SMS text messages based on a variety of conditions such as a large deposit, a large withdraw, a payment due, or an interest rate changed.

Mint.com is an amazingly powerful financial tracking and planning tool, I highly recommend it. The benefits of Mint.com would be even further magnified if used by a small business, allowing the business to track income, expenses per category, and tag transactions as tax deductible. If your still unsure about security at least just sign up for an account and tinker around and browse the interface without providing any financial institutions details.

Billionaire & Mavericks Owner Mark Cuban Sued By The SEC For Insider Trading

On Monday, November 17th, 2008, in Business, by Justin

Billionaire Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, was sued by U.S. regulators over claims he made illegal insider trades four years ago in shares of Internet search company Mamma.com Inc.

Read The Full Story

Did Rackspace Get A Steal On SliceHost?

On Saturday, October 25th, 2008, in Business, by Justin

According to this article, Rackspace paid $16.5 million for both Jungle Disk, and Slicehost together.

Since I have little expertise or knowledge about Jungle Disk, I am going to factor it out, and focus exclusively on Slicehost.

The article claims that Slicehost has more than 15,000 active slices. Doing some guesses at the math, let’s say on average each slice pays $43 a month, the cost of a 256MB ($20), 512MB ($38), 1024MB ($70) slice combined, divided by three.

That equals $645,000 per month in reoccurring revenue, or $7.7 million per year in gross revenue for Slicehost alone.

If the above numbers are anywhere close to correct, as I suspect they are, it seems like Rackspace got a killer deal.

Apple Has A Really Strong Quarter

On Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008, in Business, by Justin

Key Points:

Revenue $7.9 billion for Q4

Profit of $1.14 billion, or $1.26 per diluted share for Q4

Gross margin of 34.7% for Q4

Almost 25 billion dollars in the bank

Shipped 2,611,000 computers, 11,052,000 iPods, and 6,892,000 iPhone in Q4

iPhone total sales beat RIMM (Research In Motion) for the first time in Q4

200,000,000 downloads from the App Store

Apple is 3rd largest mobile phone supplier world wide, according to gross revenue