Friday, August 19, 2005

(more) Hamachi is as cool as I thought. I'm using it within my developer VM's to push code to client staging servers, setting up private p2p VPNs to tunnel ssh, SMB, http, vnc and doing checkouts via darcs/svn/etc. directly from one machine to the other. This is going to save saving me a lot (!) of time. Oddly enough, the biggest users of hamachi are gamers looking to set up their own private multiplayer servers. Of course, gamers adopting cool new tech is not odd. What's odd is that from reading the forums you don't get the sense that projects like iFolder are getting excited about hamachi... but they should, since iFolder gets to be much closer to Groove once you remove the firewall restriction. Of course, *many* apps become hugely more interesting once you add easy firewall traversal to them. And consequently many services become much less valuable if this is easy, like hello.com, gotomypc, video conferencing etc. Hamachi is highly disruptive tech at the pricepoint of free. Microsoft knows this, of course, and is planning to build p2p vpn's into Vista. But why wait till 2009 when all your friends and client's servers have it deployed? :-) Hamachi is Windows-only at the moment, with a linux version imminent. 10:22:06 AM      comment []  trackback []

ANTs Music (?) Adding a thin veneer of commercial support on top of a mature open source db and changing the name seems like a good way to fail in the database market (see Red Hat Database, Great Bridge et al) because you really have no barrier to entry and little separating you from the free version. EnterpriseDB is going pretty far past the veneer stage by marrying sql dialects from market leading RDBMS with the Postgresql db engine. That seemed like a novel idea when I heard about it, but I guess they weren't the first: ANTs offers an In-Memory Data Server that also implements Transact SQL and PL/SQL compatibilty. At 2k/server/yr for their Quickstart program, ANTs and EDB are actually probably targeting overlapping markets, so it would be interesting to find out how (whether?) customers like the ANTs migration path. ANTs is offering their compatibilty layer in concert with an optional services engagement to do the data migration, something mass-market EDB doesn't have the luxury of relying on. As an aside: It's seems anachronistic to only offer a database server via a direct sales force... I wonder why ANTs doesn't bother to have a free version for non-commercial or non-production or limited-production use? I can't imagine that giving a limited version of your product to people who wouldn't ever pay for it could have a downside, especially when that's standard practice in the db market. 10:13:23 AM      comment []  trackback []