Hangzhou office.
1 07 2008
Categories : Uncategorized
One month since we launched our youtube downloader
19 03 2008We released a youtube downloader as a demo of our video conversion capability. We’ve processed more than 1500 videos. It is certainly interesting to see what some people have attempted to convert. There were some links to some porn-tube type video sites. Sorry we don’t support those sites (yet.. if ever). However we’re quite happy to see that some people do find it useful.
We’re developing very hard now to release our API to the public and doing more mashups with other web 2.0 services. It is likely to be within April that we will be able to release it.
Categories : ankoder
Our Chis Chan was on TV (for good reasons)
19 03 2008Our senior engineer Chris Chan was interviewed in a TVB news program about WiFi security in Hong Kong. He had found security holes in the Legislative Council.
Categories : Uncategorized
Amazon Web Services downtime.
16 02 2008Ankoder has experienced down time due to a Amazon wide issue. Many other services that relies on S3 are also affected. This definitely raises an alarm for many AWS users. We will consider some alternatives as a failover solution. I had not expect a large network like Amazon with that many users is capable dropping out at the same time.
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=19714&tstart=0
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=19715&tstart=0
Its a pity that we’ve already experienced down time before we annouce our new Ankoder service officially on our blog.
There is a credit percentage from Amazon if they didn’t have 100% uptime.
99.9 is 10%, less than 99% is 25%
But you need to send them an awfully long email to get it.
Credit Request and Payment Procedures To receive a Service Credit, you must submit a request by sending an e-mail message to aws-sla-request @ amazon.com. To be eligible, the credit request must (i) include your account number in the subject of the e-mail message (the account number can be found at the top of the AWS Account Activity page); (ii) include, in the body of the e-mail, the dates and times of each incident of non-zero Error Rates that you claim to have experienced; (iii) include your server request logs that document the errors and corroborate your claimed outage (any confidential or sensitive information in these logs should be removed or replaced with asterisks); and (iv) be received by us within ten (10) business days after the end of the billing cycle in which the errors occurred. If the Monthly Uptime Percentage applicable to the month of such request is confirmed by us and is less than 99.9%, then we will issue the Service Credit to you within one billing cycle following the month in which the error occurred. Your failure to provide the request and other information as required above will disqualify you from receiving a Service Credit.
Categories : ankoder, aws, s3
We’ve been hard at work.
15 12 2007
It has been very busy in the past few months. We were involved in a redesign project, Beautyheaven.com.au, which was subcontracted by Different Solutions. The client was very happy traffic has jumped 4 folds after the launching the new design with SEO and usability improvements. Usually a newly launched redesign would see a slight dip in traffic, but this has not been the case because there’s so much more generated from search engines.
Meanwhile, we’re finding time to work on an inhouse project in the space of video encoding. Our target is to develop a scalable low cost video encoding API based on Amazon’s S3 and EC2. We’re also evaluating the use of SQS and SimpleDB. We already have a simple demo going, let me know if you’re interested to have a look. We will update with more news about our development progress. Have a lovely Christmas and best of luck for the new year!
Categories : RoRCraft
FullCodePress - a website in 24hrs competition.
20 08 2007
On Saturday 18 August 2007, teams from Australia and New Zealand competed to build a fully-operational website for a non-profit organisation in 24 hours. I was a representative member for the Australia team. I am proud to say we came 2nd in this competition and I’ve made some amazing new friends. We produced a very useful website for “The Ripple Effect“, the organisation we’re working for. I hope this website can help them expand their network and get more exposure. I really admire what they are doing for the 3rd world children.
For a full coverage of the event you can follow the youtube videos, flickr stream and all blog posts on fullcodepress.com.
Congratulations to the NZ team, I know how difficult it would be to build a CMS from scratch in 24hrs. It was lovely to meet some cool developers from NZ as well. Here’s a link to their winning entry for the Grampians disAbility Advocacy Association.
Categories : RoRCraft
Our client has raised 3.5m in IPO
20 06 2007
I’m very happy to receive the news from Anchor Resources that they’ve raised the maximum target of 3.5m for the IPO. We’ve launch the site in April with their prospectus. The site is still in its early stages. I’m sure it’ll evolve very quickly and will hear more good news from them.
Categories : Uncategorized
New site - The Property School
12 04 2007
We launched the new website for “The Property School” just in time for the Property & Investment Expo.
This site is our first attempt at using RadiantCMS on production website, and it has been quite stable on MediaTemple. We’re still experimenting with this lightweight CMS as it still lacks alot of vital features like file upload and menu generation. There’s some obvious resource disadvantage with using Rails for this type of small content website. It is a decision to make between productivity and stability.
Anyhow, it was a fun little project for us.
Categories : RoRCraft, sites
Ebenezer Photography launched.
4 02 2007This new site is a joint effort between RoRCraft and Paste. We took care of the development work while Paste designed the site. What makes this website so special is that we are able to achieve alot of visual effects without the use of Flash. The entire website is developed based on javascript with the help of open source libraries - prototype.js, script.aculo.us and simpleslide. By following the web standards way of development, the site is search engine friendly and results in much faster page load.
The administration section is developed in Ruby on Rails. We have utilitised the built in functions from RoR such as the in-place editor, drag and drop list sorting. Therefore we’re able to develop this easy to use and customisable management system in such a short timeframe. The client is very happy to the management system without much training.
This site is deployed on the MediaTemple gridserver, we’ve found the mediatemple deployment gem quite easy to use and its very stable for this type of websites.
Categories : sites
Ruby on Rails job board relaunched.
24 01 2007We have redesigned and launched www.railsjob.com. This is something we want to give back to the Rails community for free. The rubyonrails wiki had just too much spam and isnt a good way to search for Rails developers. We’ve a list of most recently updated ruby developers taken from workingwithrails.com. Anyone can post a job there for free and have their own account to edit and delete jobs. It also has a rss feed feature for job hunters to keep updated easily.
Categories : RoRCraft, sites
