We're just back in from a long night of moving our servers to a new datacenter. We are proud to announce that with the move, our hosting became greener. The new datacenter is powered by sustainable energy (mostly wind farms).
Apart from the greener energy supply, it is also a highly energy efficient datacenter. By using Cooling Alleys ™ and Smart Cooling Software ™ the servers are cooled better than in conventional datacenters, using less power.
Another simple but effective measure taken in the datacenter: lighting is activated by sensors that register movement. Only the alleys where people are working get illuminated.
Besides all these energy efficient measures, the datacenter has a N+1 redundancy strategy, making it very reliable. All things considered, we decided to go for it. And we're in good company: Q-Music (one of the bigger radio stations in Holland) hosts their audio and video streams at the same location.
About a week or two ago, we decided to go for a Mac Mini Server (Snow Leopard Server) for our office environment. Since our switch to Macs about a year ago, this was the next logical step. Our goal was to use this server as a mail, chat, file, and print-server.
We started installing and configuring the Mac Mini Server, having little to no experience with the way Snow Leopard Server works. All our servers so far were either Microsoft of Linux based, so enough knowledge on server configuration in general, but no specific experience with the GUI provided by Mac OS X. Having read various articles on how easy to configure and how well integrated into the GUI all aspects of the Snow Leopard server are... we never saw wat was coming our way.
We found a few good articles and tutorials on setting op the server for first use, and we followed those closely. Everything seemed to work as advertised, but then the first little crack in the euforia came to light: All configuration panels were painstakingly slow. Server Preferences, Workgroup Manager and the Server Admin, all displayed the same behavior: endless spinners waiting on... what exactly? We figured out that all panels seemed to be waiting on some authentication process, based on Kerberos.
At this point, we started to suspect something was wrong with either some DNS settings (polling is a well know characteristic of invalid DNS settings), or with the authentication mechanism. So we tailed all logs we could find on the Mac Mini Server. We discovered that the server could not resolve the .local domain which we used at that time. Once we found that, we Googled for the .local domain and Mac OS X, and voila: There were a few blogs and even a Knowledge Base entry by Apple on using the .local domain. Seems .local is being used by Apple for Bonjour (previously Rendezvous).
So we changed our local domain from .local to something else, and most of the problems disappeared without a trace. Made us wonder though - considering all effort put in the GUI - why Apple did not include a simple this domain is reserved by Apple-warning when entering the .local domain.
We got an interesting offer by the 'World Servants' from our own region (Velsen).
'World Servants' is an organisation that dispatches groups of volunteers to countries such as Ghana and Malawi to build schools and other facilities, especially in areas where people can't afford to build these themselves. That's a great initiative, and definately worth sponsoring. Especially considering the fact that the volunteers have to pay for the tickets, the building material and all other costs themselves.
They thought of a great win-win situation, by buying a large advertisement space in the local newspaper, and then selling parts of that space at a higher rate to companies. We decided to go for quite a chunk of that advertisement page, and created a swell advertisement to fill all that space. We hope a lot of other companies did the same.
If you'd like to know more about this group, they do have a website: www.worldservantsvelsen.nl
I just recently watched two YouTube videos on subliminal persuation, by Derren Brown (a mentalist). The subject of the videos was marketing and advertising. As a company that does brand marketing and design as well, I was astounded at what he demonstrated. You'd probably like to watch it before reading on.
What happened in the videos is that Derren used subliminal persuation to 'prime' the creative minds of two marketing-guys. Then he put them under time pressure to design a brand, slogan, the whole thing... resulting in a very predictable design / idea.
It really made me wonder how big the influence is of our daily impressions on design.
Perhaps time pressure is the key to what happened, half an hour is nothing in terms of a creative process, especially when brainstorming is involved. Our process is to create several designs, adjust them until they rock, then put them away. The next day the designs are the same, but the feeling about the designs may differ. That is when we decide to go with a certain design, modify it, or completely redo it.
I believe that creativity is the process of creating something new, fresh, exciting. That process might include combining existing designs and thoughts into something different, still making it new, fresh, exciting...
What's your opinion on design and inspiration?