Tag Archive - Montreal

Social network relationship (this is not twitter)

January 10, 2011 in , , , , , , with 17 Comments

Been a while (and it seem I’ll be starting a lot of my new posts like this) since I’ve come here. Events have moved my live – it has changed, maybe evolved.

One of LabsPhoenix’s contract is ending soon (a big one) and I find myself contemplating the opportunities in front of me… and those missed. I’ve seen my social network wither and agonize while I developed business relationship in the telecom industry.

My first step, a baby one, is to deactivate the automatic push/transfer of all my twitter update to this site. Paraphrasing Sylvain Carl, each networks has its intended audience. This blog is not my twitter feed, is not my facebook page, is not my linkedin profile – Note the denomination I’ve used for each.


I’ve recently completed interesting lab with VMWare (soon to be VCP), with DRBD, with Zimbra, with Zabbix, with glusterFS, with a custom deduplication Storage appliance, with Soekris board, with RouterBoard (from Ubiquity Networks), with… They will be published in the next few days.

This blog is alive – again. Thanks to the hundred of feed users who keep me listed ;-)

Ephemeral urban art ; Business open as usual
Business open as usual – Ottawa

Those days

June 28, 2010 in , , with 180 Comments

Sometime, its those kind of days. You know, one where you should be staying in bed:

– Won’t be going at DEFCON this year. Friend wedding planned on the same date.
– Won’t be going to Linux Symposium this year. Got MY wedding planned very near the date.
– I’ve received a letter from local court… unpaid parking ticket (which they never left, and they issued 25 days after they took my plate number)
– (…) and the day is still very young.

Going further.

March 22, 2010 in , , , with 99 Comments

I’ve finished my talk at ConFoo.

Considering I’ve had to prepare the slide in OmniGraffle (no Microsoft product on my laptops in Montreal, Open Office Presenter isn’t really production ready and I’m not into KeyNote), 12 hours before my talk (yeah, heard about something called ‘Real-Life Work’?), and that I didn’t even know who would be present (some big name in the rooms) – I think I’ve managed quite well. I mean, I didn’t died.

Then, my life got strange. Again.

I’m back in Montreal for consulting contracts. The opportunity was just too great – My company is growing at an alarming (lets say interesting?) rate. But that isn’t really surprising, I’m putting lots of time in my projects ; they very rarely fail.

So I’m back in my old place, which I’ve never really left. My plant are still here. They, however, didn’t survived. But still, as loyal subjects, they didn’t even try to run away. My old habit were also waiting for me.

Working freak hours, jumping from coffee shack to tea lounge, then to unnamed lounge..

I’m now full of crispy stories.
– I’ve learn the code to the back room of a Second Cup.
– I’ve saw a guy pitch to a VC (same second cup). Laugh at the ridiculous attempt, he asked me to do better, I’ve pitched LabsPhoenix. He asked me if I wanted to meet one of his partner… guess I wasn’t that bad, but then, I have a running business & the other guy was trying to sell a Ponzi scheme.
– Saw the lowest of human nature (guy buying an hooker service – didn’t know people actually bought those services) and the prettiest (guy was asking a girl if she loved him).
– Domino’s Pizza seem to be aware of my return – they sent me a letter saying that they missed me and gave me a good rebate. When I’ve left, they must have had to fired an employee… lost of income from this strange benefactor that was buying 2-3 pizza a week. Something like that – I’ve always felt a responsibility over the well faring of that business ;-)
– Now that guy that asked the girl if she liked him is crying behind me, while I’m writing this. Come-on, how do you want me to finish a post if you keep changing your story. YOU OWE ME!

And I’ve got a big back log of pictures I was planning to publish. So you can expect them in the next couple of days. At least one a day – for at least one day.

And now that I have a car (due thanks to the ‘big’ sister, which GAVE me the car!), I’m seeing a new world of opportunities : I can get to work faster, work longer and get back home after the close of public transit. You see, sister, you are my enabler ;-).

I’m having fun writing this. Been a long time, I’ve had fun writing on this blog. It did also died waiting for me to come back. Went from those 3k/months viewer to about 200. Nice drop, but then, Ive got around 100 souls linked to my RSS-feed. In the next weeks, I’ll be spamming you guys ;-)

Hard schedule

December 5, 2009 in , , , , with 141 Comments

Big big week-end – lots of stuff to do. In fact, way too much stuff vs the time I have to do it. I don’t know how other entrepreneur does it.

Anyway, in the top of the list, I’ll be going to a ‘wine & cheese‘, to Montreal to meet my family, to the church to meet the priest. But, as always, I also need to work. So Sphinx, Chef & Puppet, MySQL Multi-master replication, MySQL snapshot + recovery….

… not counting the fact that a new website is underway for my enterprise (Les Laboratoires Phoenix), that I’m dealing with a designer for new logo and business cards, that my accounting is being entirely re-done to ‘account’ for my migration to a corporation, that I need to finish 3 projects drafts by Monday morning (for the R&D papers), and that I need to complete my invoicing for November.

.Don’t know how others does it, but I guess they just do. Like I’ll be doing this week-end.

Cutting-edge of Cloud Computing

November 25, 2009 in , , , , , , , , , , with 17 Comments

Just got off the bus in Montreal, Québec. This is a lightning visit, in 48 hours, I’ll be back in my office in Ottawa. But, right now, I’m taking a drink in one of my favorite downtown coffee shop and I’m planning.

The next few hours will see little sleep and lots of action ; More precisely I’ll be deploying lots of hardware (2 IBM SAN, 2 core servers, 2 switchs, 2 APC, 5 branchs servers – supporting up to 20 ‘leaf’/virtual servers), and then somes (3 couples of 2 systems in high redundancy (wackamole IP ‘fencing’, shared-storage through DRBD). All that will go in ‘my’ new 48U cage @Hypertec (old nortel building) to act as a demo for some clients.

Once that’s completed, the true fun start: A very big part of this infrastructure is going to be self-healing, failure resitant and high performance. We are speaking of :

  • automatic & dynamic launch of new ‘branch’ systems (xen dom0), without having to do anything more than to rack them (no OS install needed, can be upgraded by rebooting them),
  • high redundancy at the leaf level (xen domU, automatic migration toward less used dom0),
  • failure resistace through bonded interface, multi-path & multi-host fiberchannel SAN & controller…

    • This is going to be solid, scalable, fast : the holy grail of a lot of service provider that are aiming at automatization of their ‘hosting’ business. The result of a lot of planning and testing ; the cutting-edge of cloud-computing.

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