Archive for category Work

Whats a cooking?

Feb 22

Posted by Sam Hamilton in Work | No Comments

Good question, two things really.

One – the company I spend most of my time working for sprang back into profit in January which is fantastic considering how rough the seas are out there for exporters from China! Talking to some people it has come at just the right time as everyone is wondering either in the back of their mind or in the front if the company will survive these dreadful economic times. Now that profit is back and we have some great help with our accounts and cash flow forecasting I am sure that we can hold steady in the wind.

Two – I have started a test to see what happens, I want to see just how effective writing content alone will be, so for this purpose I have bought a bunch of fresh domains all within my celeb niche and I am currently looking for someone to write content for them. I will do the usual things for a blog, let the posts do the talking and see how quickly fresh, non-duplicated content takes to grow the blogs to a good size. The last test I did was picture content alone with a title – it took only 1 week for the blog to go from 20 to 100 visitors a day and stay there for all time, that particular blog has had no updates since early November and has now started to gain more traffic from images.google.xxx. doubling the traffic over the last couple of weeks. My tests always seems to cost me money but don’t really make me any – perhaps that should be the next test…

Live Website?

Dec 28

Posted by Sam Hamilton in Work | No Comments

OK so the week has been and gone, and instead of getting two websites live we have only managed to get one ready and working. Learn masses about testing systems and how you need to be able to have a exact copy of the site somewhere else so that you can test before it goes live. Sounds simple but with OFBiz things never seem to be.

Launching our website is a few tickets away from completion, hope to have it up and running before Chinese New Year when everyone disappears for holidays.

Landmark

Dec 8

Posted by Sam Hamilton in Work | No Comments

D-day is nearly upon me. The day when we finally move the companies website from our current 3rd party supplier (Channel Advisor) to our own OFBiz / Rackspace / Akamai website. While Channel Advisor’s website has done us good for the last 3+ years its time to move onwards and upwards with something, well customisable.

OFBiz has proved to be a great platform for our warehouse and its really exciting to see the improved systems and processes take something to the next level. Working with developers who’s first language is not your own is always a challenge but I think the end result has been worth it.

The first site to go live is our JV’s site quickly followed by our own, should be a great week!

Company Hires 101st person

Sep 21

Posted by Sam Hamilton in Work | No Comments

Just a quick post to say that the company has now hired their 100 and 101st employee! Its almost 4 years to the day that we started too.

How a year in China changes everything

Aug 24

Posted by Sam Hamilton in Open Source, Work | No Comments

So this time last year I was planning on building a distributed IT system across many small offices with a maximum of 30 people in each. This year we are consolidated in one building on two different floors with all the servers in one room. Amazing change.

But to be honest it does not really change the overall IT plan that much. Our customers are still spread out all over the world and we now have staff members on three continents – not bad for a 100 person company.

The one thing that has changed is what software we use – we are driving firmly away from Microsoft and into the hands of Linux and open source software.

We are working with an Apache project ERP system called OFBiz with help from the great guys at Hotwax Media – the improvements we have seen from in our warehouse are just amazing.

How to handle user authentication has also become clearer with the help of a Redhat project called FreeIPA. This really looks good enough to replace our current Active Directory setup.

Finally Rackspace, my personal favourite managed hosting company went public and is about to open its Hong Kong data center. Servers already ordered!

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Distributed IT Network Backups?

Oct 23

Posted by Sam Hamilton in Work | No Comments

I am currently building the foundation of my companies new IT network, its looking very open source heavy, very cisco based and also very distributed. Think five sites and only little old me to do most of the “heavy lifting”.

I have a great second but sometimes we need time off – thats fine and good but what happens to our backups? Well at the moment there really is only one server of any importance that we need to backup & so I gave this job (mainly becuase the server is in his office) to my assistant. Well what happens when he goes on holiday and the worst of the worst comes I cant get to the site to change tapes?

Well becuase its a one tape backup – the backup just keeps on writing to the same tape – backuped ok, good course not!

We use Rackspace for our customer facing servers & so I keep tabs on them. Their CTO of webmail.us recently blogged that they use Amazon’s EC2 for backup & it got me thinking. Thats quite a nice solution for me too – all the backups of various things in all the various offices can all just backup straight to EC2.

Um.. going to chew on that for a while

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OFBiz, PostgreSQL and a worldwide audience

Sep 19

Posted by Sam Hamilton in Work | No Comments

So we were starting to talk to Netsuite about replacing our systems with theirs, I have to admit I do like the idea of one complete system from one person. It was just before they were going public so they wanted all the business they could muster and we had a “good” price until we got into extra storage space. I mean what does 1GB of storage space cost these days even if you do run Oracle databases like they do to at Netsuite. Well it just made the whole deal crazy the scale out plans made the deal practically blow up and this is with me supporting the integrated system totally and really thinking about the cost savings, it just no longer made sense.

Well fortunate as luck would have it we bumped into someone using OFBiz to run their warehouse here in China. To cut a long story short we then started working out how we could use it including getting me up to speed on Java which is a technology I have never touched. The fun begins we hire our first developer, we think which databases to use and we work out if this thing scales.

The database is an easy choice after a short amount of reading, postgreSQL is a clear winner – why? Well really it comes down to data integrity. We are not building a social media site so really we are not going to end up with huge amounts of database writes after all, instead we are going to end up (in a few short years) with TB’s of data.

The interesting part of the mix is that we need to have multiple database sites which include USA, UK, Hong Kong and China. The USA, UK and HK sites will be the ecommerce backbones and then also China as we need to ship the goods – the packing stations in the warehouse get PDF files of the address which can be quite large so a local server there keeps the speed and productivity up.

Let me explain why three data centeres – first you always have a primary data centre so for us this will be Hong Kong as this is physically closest to Shanghai so for any internal tool this need to be as fast as possible. We build out tools such as Alfresco and Clearspace in Hong Kong plus also a copy of OFBiz as all the customer and order information is inside, this node can also provide service to any Asian ecommerce customers.

The US and UK sites are the main points of ecommerce so these sites primary function is to host anything customer facing and provide services using global load balancing to ensure that each customer is getting just about the fastest response from our servers.

Having customers in 9+ primary and 50+ secondary countries really makes delivering a great experiance to them all hard.

Thats all for now – lets see how this gets on.

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eBay and VeRO

Jul 1

Posted by Sam Hamilton in Work | No Comments

Over the last couple of weeks I have been deeply involved with something that eBay calls VeRO – bascially this is a way that eBay pushes the responsilbity of checking for fake, patent or trademark infringing goods back onto the owners of those trademarks. The rights owner simply sends in an email to VeRO and eBay removes the item and warns the seller of those goods to contact the rights owner and sort it out.

For the most part the system works – execpt when you want to fix the “enfringment” and get it removed from your eBay history. At this point eBay basically make you get the rights owner to contact their VeRO contact and tell them that they made a mistake. You see eBay cant get involved in the fight – but the strick hoops they make you and the rights owners go through to get it removed is just well silly.

If the rights owner emails my eBay account manager that does not count, if they email customer support at eBay that also does not count – it has to be directly to VeRO. What a pain! Come on eBay – if a rights owner contacts you any how does it really matter – making them jump through more hoops just is sensless – especially when neally all the rights owners dont even know their own contact at VeRO.