Imapenguin Blog

Upgrading to rails 2.2

Michael — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 14:55:17 +0000

We’re busy testing our apps on rails 2.2 now that it’s out.

Things are going very well. We’re here to help you with yours if you need us, send an email to support@imapenguin.com

Help in upgrading to Ununtu 8.10

Michael — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 17:36:38 +0000

As most of you know, Ubuntu 8.10 is set to be released next week.

As usual at Ubuntu upgrade time, we’re here to help with questions and issues.

Drop us a line at support@imapenguin.com anytime.

So long spiresales, we hardly knew you

Michael — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:12:34 +0000

37 signals launched a “Deals” feature in Highrise that we’ve always thought should be there. Since spiresales was our attempt to give this to highrise, it doesn’t make sense for us to soldier on with it.

It’s a good thing really, having deals in highrise is where it belongs and it gives us penguins time and resources to concentrate on what we’re best at: delivering great solutions with Open Source software.

Spiresales update

Michael — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:26:23 +0000

We’re thrilled that so may of you are interested in a sales tool to go with Highrise. Let me assure you that we are plugging away at this.

We’re currently working on performance. We ask Highrise for some things in a number of our page views and sometimes this really slows things down. For example, this afternoon, Highrise seems to be responding particularly slowly. Since some of our views ask for data in real time, this is seriously affecting the performance of our application.

We’re currently working on some Javascript functions that allow our pages to load and then have individual components which are asking for live data display a “getting data from Highrise” so that you the user know what’s going on.

We’re looking for some smart folks to join our team as we ramp up on this. Please let us know if you are interested at jobs@imapenguin.com

Swtching from typo to wordpress

Michael — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:24:55 +0000

We’ve been using typo for the blog for years now, but after not being able to login after an update for days, the camels back is broken. We’re importing the content into wordpress and moving on. Pardon our dust as we do that.

Whole Disk Encryption for Mac OS X

mike — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:42:00 +0000

We’ve been encrypting our Ubuntu laptops for a while now, but there hasn’t been a good whole disk encryption option for the Mac until today. RSA is a little behind schedule in the release, but it’s out today.

Installation was a snap. Encrypting the boot drive was easy as well. 5 mins of your time and the takes care of the business in the background while you work. Reboot when it’s done (about 90 mins later for me) and your drive is secure.

Sweet.

We’re switching to passenger

mike — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:43:00 +0000

Mongrel has served us well for the past year or so, but the simplicity of deployment in passenger along with the ever reliable apache has lured us into extensive testing. We’re getting slightly better performance numbers from passenger over mongrel with about 2/3 of the memory footprint. Please let us know at support@imapenguin.com if you see any wonkyness with any of our services. As we migrate over night.

Spiresales

mike — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:57:00 +0000

We’ve been working on a super simplified sales tool for small and agile sales teams. It currently uses Highrise by 37signals as the contact manager.

Here’s a quick screenshot prior to a designer getting her hands on it (and proof that we need a good designer):

It’s currently in invitation only Beta. You can sign up for the waiting list here.

Help Wanted

mike — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 19:40:00 +0000

We’re looking for Linux Admins and Rails developers for:

Hard work

Interesting problems to solve

Dangerous journeys

When proprietary data formats ruin your productivity

mike — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:25:00 +0000

For the past week, my main multi-paged mindmap has been held hostage by my NovaMind mindmapping software. It contains project tracking details I’ve been working on for weeks. It worked great until earlier in the week when an update to the Novamind software was released. Now it crashes on open. Emails with tech support have been exchanged, nothing. It looks like my data is lost. The cost to me is considerably more than the $129 I paid for this software.

This brings me to today’s thought we should all pause and consider. How much of your data is locked up in a format you don’t have any control over? Is it in a web service that could close their doors tomorrow without a data export option? Do yourself a favor and give it a thought for a second or two.

From now on, all of my critical data stays in Open Source software (even wordpress is open source) and Open Data formats. I know better, and I’ve been bitten. Shame on me.