You’ll pay a bit more for Windows than you do for Linux but that’s pretty standard as MS charges licensing fees to the provider.  The cost per hour is actually cheaper on Rackspace than it is on Amazon EC2 but the box you get at Rackspace is not as beefy. As an example, a small server at amazon (0.12/hour) is 1.7GB Ram and 160GB disk (on a 32 bit CPU). with Rackspace, the small windows box (0.08/hour) is 1GB Ram on a 40GB disk (but you can run 32 or 64 bit for your money).

You access your windows server via remote desktop like any other cloud provided windows server.

If you’re looking to spin up a quick windows server, Rackspace is definitely worth a look. I generally run on EC2 but I like having options and Rackspace is now competing is pretty much every category that I need.

They are selling this as a small to medium business solution and I agree with that. It’s also an excellent tool for consultants. You don’t always need beefy to do demos and sell product. Plus you get all of the other Rackspace (and Cloud in general) stuff like dynamically adding resources. You’ll also get Rackspace’s SLAs.

At this price point, you can run a small server (thinking web server here) for less than $60/month. You have to add in data costs in and out of the data center but still that is an excellent starter kit.

LewisC

If you haven’t already, you should read page 1 and page 2 first.

MobiPocket

The free MobiPocket ebook reader used to be produced by a German company but they are now an Amazon subsidiary. The Mobi format is what the Kindle uses as the default format for all of those ebooks. That means that for a Kindle, if you want to view PDFs, you need to convert them to Mobi format. Fortunately, Mobi provides that functionality.

I have been using mobi on my blackberry for a long time now. I mainly used it to read free science fiction books the Baen Free Library. Mobi has upgraded the viewer over the years and has a viewer for almost any platform, including most phones and desktops.

In addition to the reader, Mobi also offers a free Mobi Creator software. I have used the creator to create my own mobi docs in the past but for the most part, if you drag a PDF to the desktop reader, it will automatically convert it to Mobi format.

Regardless of how you create it, it looks good but does not maintain fidelity with the PDF. That means that you will end up with a different number of pages and the fonts will change but you will still have the basic order of the file and you will still have your graphics.

If you have the desktop reader open when connecting your blackberry, mobi will recognize the device and load it for you. Very easy.

Once you get the mobi file to your BlackBerry, reading it is much like viewing a PDF in one of the PDF viewers. You use a file explorer to load documents (call My Library). If your PDF has a table of contents, you will notice the lack of fidelity right away.

The internal links on the TOC still work, they are just formatted funky. You can see how the formatting was lost in the sample XML document. For me, in most instances, this is a very minor issue. Everything else in mobi works the way I need it to. You can navigate with a goto page menu:

Viewing your documents is an excellent experience. Mobi is very readable and the pages load pretty much instantaneously on my Bold.

Search also works well and is fairly fast.

Considering that the viewer and the ability to convert PDFs to mobi format are both free, you really can’t beat this product. Even if you do need document fidelity, this software is a keeper. Buy a PDF viewer and use mobi for those documents that you want to read, not reference. I’m in the process of converting all of my PDFs.

ShortCovers

ShortCovers is not a PDF viewer or converter. It is a social network, ebook reader and a catalog of ebooks that you can purchase. The only reason I am including it here is that for the less technically inclined, it may be an easier way to go. Basically, you read books and talk about them. You can read on blackBerry, iPhone or online and the software remembers where you were so that you can pick back up in the same place later.

I have browsed around and read some of the excepts but I have not purchased any full novels.

Summary

For PDF viewing, I found that BeamReader has some shortcomings. While the cheapest of the the three readers, it doesn’t meet my needs. PDF To Go, as the most expensive (by a lot), has excellent performance and plenty of features. Repligo Reader, though at not much more than BeamReader, has all of those features and more. The performance is impressive. For my PDF needs, when I really need the fidelity that PDF provides, I have decided to purchase Repligo Reader. I think it will be a good purchase.

For those times when readability is more important than fidelity (such as novels or extended reading of reference material), I use, and will continue to use, MobiPocket reader for BlackBerry. It’s free and can convert PDFs (and other formats such as Word and TXT) to the Mobi format. MobiPocket reader is my first choice for reading on the BlackBerry, followed by Repligo.

I mention ShortCovers for its social networking features but everything it offers is also offered by MobiPocket. MobiPocket also has an online store for ebooks.

Continue reading: Page 1 Page 2 Page 3

Technorati : beamberry, blackberry, books, mobi, mobile, mobility, mobipocket, pdf, pdf2go, pdftogo, repligo

If you haven’t already, you should read page 1 first.

BeamReader

BeamReader, formerly BeamBerry, is produced by SLG Mobile. BeamReader was originally created BeamBerry as a hosted service. It would translate the PDF on a server and stream the output to your device. SLG still offers a service like this (for PDFs and many other document types) and even offers a print service. The newer BeamReader provides a native PDF renderer and they claim to be “the first full fidelity native PDF reader for BlackBerry”.

Unfortunately, I had some major problems with BeamReader while trying to do this review. I admit that I was using a very large file, 3MB – 374 pages. I have several PDFs that are over 20MB. The other tools I used did not have the problems that I ran into with BeamReader.

BeamReader was incredibly slow when compared to PDF To Go and to Repligo. It was really unusable. I loaded the file and then left my blackberry sitting while I did other things to give it time to load the first page. When it finally rendered a page, it would either be unreadable or blank.

BeamReader does support bookmarks (which I think is an important feature). Oddly enough, even though it took a while to display, BeamReader was able to produce the bookmarks for my large document.

I decided to try with a smaller file and had more success. It performed better and produced readable documents.

BeamReader, like the other readers, supports various levels of zoom. BeamReader supports fewer though and I had a harder time finding a zoom level that I could read and that would fit the entire page on the screen. It seemed like the higher zoom levels would degrade the fidelity of the document.

Operationally, BeamReader works like most other software of this type. It comes with a file explorer. Pick the file from a list and it launches. The file manager of this tool (unlike others) will allow you to perform file manipulation such as renaming, deleting and even creating new files. You can also attach files to emails (with OS 4.5+).

BeamReader offers a 10 day trial and costs $17.99 per user. With the ability to create new files, you can create a new.doc file and open with the standard version of Documents To Go for editing. If you need to create new word documents on your BlackBerry, this can save you some money.

SLG claims that BeamReader is the fastest PDF viewing solution for BlackBerries. They may have some kind of benchmarks to make such a claim but that is not my experience.

Repligo Reader

Repligo Reader is produced by Cerience who also sell Repligo Professional and Repligo Server. Repligo Reader is very similar to PDF To Go in performance but offers several additional features.

Repligo rendered pages quickly and in general performed very well. It follows the same standard interface with the file manager and load screen.

Repligo supports bookmarks and multiple levels of zoom.

The rendering was fantastic. Full fidelity and it looked very crisp and clean.

I did run into some issues with rendering in what is called Reading View. For some reason, the graphics rendered OK but the text was mangled. Some pages were partially readable but others were completely unreadable.

A couple of final screen shots of the menu and the file properties screen.

Repligo reader supports search and email attachment support. It costs $19.95 which is significantly less that Docs To Go Premium and only slightly more than BeamReader. It offers features that are missing in BeamReader and PDF To Go and great performance.

Continue reading: Page 1 Page 2 Page 3

Technorati : beamberry, blackberry, books, mobi, mobile, mobility, mobipocket, pdf, pdf2go, pdftogo, repligo

Today’s post is a little bit different than my normal fare. In my quest for mobile productivity, I have been looking for a way to carry my technical library with me where ever I go. While I can upload my PDFs to various Cloud OSes, and I do, I still have a need to access my documentation while disconnected. Plus, I still have to view those documents when I may not have a computer available (although with my EEE PC 1000h, that is rare these days). That leaves me with my phone.

I recently upgraded to a blackberry bold. I’m running the BB OS 4.6.0.167. I also have it fitted with an 8GB SDHC card. The bold allows me wifi access if available and 3g access when it’s not. The CPU in the bold is decent but doesn’t compete with a netbook. Whatever solution I choose needs to be usable from a reader’s perspective (as in flipping from page to page) as well as actually readable.

In this post, I am going to be reviewing 3 native PDF viewers for the BlackBerry: PDF to Go, Repligo Reader and BeamReader. I am also going to add the MobiPocket mobile ebook reader. While it doesn’t do PDF, it does convert from PDF to its native format. Finally, I am going to throw in ShortCovers. While not exactly in the same class as MobiPocket or a PDF reader, it is a way to read ebooks and it runs on a blackberry.

NOTE: The images in this post are actually smaller than what is displayed on the blackberry. To see the original resolution, click on the image. The BlackBerry Bold as a resolution of 480×320.

PDF To GO

PDF To Go by DataViz is the current market leader for native PDF viewing on Blackberries. The more recent versions of BlackBerry come with the standard version of Documents To Go, a native MS Office compatible toolset that let’s you view and edit MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint files on your device.

If you upgrade to the premium version, you get the ability to create new documents in those office tools and you get a native PDF viewer, PDF To Go. The upgrade is not cheap. $49.99 for a 1 year license or $69.99 for a perpetual license.

PDF To Go has a decent interface. It’s a pretty standard interface for a BB; pick a file from a file manager, load it up, render the page.

PDF To Go renders faster than any of the other tools I tried. It is followed very closely by Repligo but just edged it out. I was loading a very large document. On smaller documents, there was no noticeable difference between Repligo and PDF to Go. Render time is important when reading. As you navigate from page to page, you don’t want a long wait. Even though PDF To Go was the fastest, it was still a slow process going from page to page. When going back to a previous page, it had to re-render it (as if it is not caching the rendered pages).

Once the page is rendered, it is very small. That is because the PDF is maintaining fidelity and is meant for a much larger screen. All of the tools allow you to zoom in and out. PDF To Go has the ability to zoom to various predefined levels.

The main purpose of a PDF is to maintain the fidelity of layout and graphics. A PDF view MUST be able to view documents as meant by an author. PDF To Go does a very good job of this, even at various zoom levels. The final image below is also a special mode called Word Wrap. In word wrap mode, you will lose fidelity and graphics but it is easier to read the text.

PDF To Go has some basic help. Select help from the menu and you can view key shortcuts as well as some simple documentation on using the reader.

On the downside to PDF To Go, besides how expensive it is, is the fact that it does not support book marks, nor does it support a Go To Page feature. For small documents, that might not be much of an issue but for larger documents one or the other is a must. I don’t want to (slowly) render through a couple of hundred pages to get to what ever it is that I am interested in. PDF To Go does save your last location so that when you reopen a PDF, you will return to the same page where you left it.

Continue reading: Page 1 Page 2 Page 3

Technorati : beamberry, blackberry, books, mobi, mobile, mobility, mobipocket, pdf, pdf2go, pdftogo, repligo

Falling some somewhere between software and a platform are Cloud Desktops (also called a Cloud OS). These desktops run inside a browser and are accessible from any desktop with an internet connection.

A cloud desktop offers word processing, spreadsheets, development tools, networking tools and more. While relatively immature at this time, we can expect this market to grow significantly in the coming years, especially as more and more smart phones and ultraportables hit the real world.

Microsoft LiveMesh offers free storage, machine synchronization and a cloud based desktop. iCloud and g.ho.st both offer complete, robust desktops (including browsers, applications and storage) completely in the cloud. The greatest benefit to a cloud desktop is that all of your applications and data is accessible from any computer. The downside is that with no internet access, you have access to none of your data or applications.

EyeOS is a completely open source cloud OS that you can download and install in your own data center. It offers all of the expected functionality and installs as a simple PHP application on your Apache web server.

The nice part about these platforms at the moment is that most are completely free. Sign up, login and you have a virtual desktop off in the clouds. The business model of most of these (such as iCloud or g.ho.st) are subscriptions for enhanced services and extra capabilities (such as bandwidth or disk space).

The other significant aspect of these cloud desktops is the ability to run desktop quality applications, such as word processors and spreadsheets, from a phone. Business at internet speeds and internet availability.

It remains to be seen whether cloud desktop catch on but SaaS in general is here to stay. It’s easy to use, cheap and covers just about any category of software that you might use.

Throw in a pair of virtual world gloves and goggles and it’s almost like science fiction.

LewisC

Technorati : book, cloud computing, cloud os, definition, webos

You could wait for Microsoft Azure. That’s MS’s services based, cloud OS. It’s still mostly fog at this point though. Fog, vapor? Get it?

Anyway, there are a few Cloud desktops that you can start using today. They run in a browser, offer desktop apps like word processing, email and file storage. Below I discuss three different desktops that are usable today (even though they may be in beta or alpha). All three of the desktop solutions below are either offered as an open source download and/or are free to use online.

EyeOS

EyeOS is an open source cloud desktop that you can download and run in your own data center. Download the software, install it and you have an instant Cloud OS and remote desktop for your organization.

EyeOS will install on any web server that supports WordPress or Drupal. EyeOS is a PHP application and does not require a database. Just Apache and PHP 5. Installation takes about 10 minutes and that includes the download time.

You can try it out by signing up for the EyeOS free server at EyeOS.info. You probably won’t want to host a large organization here but it runs well enough that I use it. If you don’t want to run it on your own servers and you don’t want to take the risk of using a free server, you can sign up for paid professional EyeOS hosting with safehosting.

You can get much more information from the home page or from the EyeOS blog.

Some applications that ship with EyeOS include:

• Office Tools (word processing, spreadsheet, presentations, calendar, etc)
• Games
• File Explorer and Archive Browser
• Note pad
• Network Tools (RSS reader, Internet Browser, Email, FTP, IM)
• Multimedia (mp3 player, video player)
• Desktop Widgets

View a demo of EyeOS.

iCloud

I first mentioned iCloud a few months ago in this blog. iCloud is a product of Xcerion. iCloud is a very nice, very stable cloud based desktop. I think it has the richest interface of any of the current crop of cloud desktops. On the flip side to that, EyeOS is more responsive when using it.

iCloud is not meant to be a download. It is a cloud service. You signup for an account and use the desktop. I’m honestly not sure what the business model is. The parent company offers a cloud OS called XIOS. Here is the blurb from the web page:

Xcerion Internet Operating System/3 (XIOS/3) the clean, carefree, zero-footprint XML-based OS, running within the browser. Since the OS and its applications executes in the browser it also works offline. The Internet OS boots itself (takes around 3 seconds) and runs in the primary memory of the computer. As soon as the browser is shut down, the OS disappears from the computer. Using XIOS/3 you never has to think about installing patches, updates or new versions of software again. The OS updates itself. You may also access your applications and documents from any Internet connected computer.

After playing with it for a while, I have to say I really like the look and feel. Check out the video below. It is a very rich OS.

iCloud comes with all of the tools that you would need (and expect) on your desktop.

• Office Tools (word processing, spreadsheet, presentations, calendar, etc)
• Games
• File Explorer and Archive Browser
• Note pad
• Network Tools (RSS reader, Internet Browser, Email, FTP, IM)
• Multimedia (mp3 player, video player)
• Desktop Widgets
• Application Development Tools

iCloud offers a basic interface for mobile access. I was able to reference my documents from my Blackberry which is a nice feature.

View a demo of iCloud.

g.ho.st

The award for coolest name (and URL) would have to go to g.ho.st. Yes, that’s actually a URL.

g.ho.st is built on an open software stack but is not a downloadable project. You signup and use it much like icloud. Actually, very much like iCloud. You get some file and email space with the other two services but I am not sure exactly how much. g.ho.st spells out exactly what you do get: 5GB of file space and 3GB of email storage. You can get an additional 1GB of file space for each user you refer who signs up.

I believe the business model is going to be built around selling extended services. For example, you will be able to upgrade file storage beyond 5GB by paying a subscription fee. They may also offer some professional level applications.

g.ho.st comes with pretty much the same tools and applications as EyeOS and iCloud but with some tweaks.

• Office Tools (uses zoho and google docs)
• Games
• File Explorer and Archive Browser
• File Storage on D.ho.st Drive
• Note pad
• Network Tools (RSS reader, Internet Browser, Email, FTP, IM – meebo)
• Multimedia (mp3 player, video player, Internet radio – last.fm and Pandora)
• Desktop Widgets
• Application Development Tools
• Login management

g.ho.st offers a detailed interface for mobile access. I was able to reference my documents and files from my Blackberry which is a nice feature.

As a side note, the company is a unique blend of collaboration is a hard situation. From the web site:

G.ho.st is a collaborative company meaning that G.ho.st relies heavily on its partners to provide the outstanding technology and services that G.ho.st delivers to its users. G.ho.st partners with its users, with Web-based service and software providers, with developers and with hosting companies.

Collaboration is at the heart of what G.ho.st does. The G.ho.st team is itself a rare Palestinian-Israeli collaboration. Ghosts go through walls and the very first wall that G.ho.st goes through is the 425 mile wall that Israel has built in the West Bank between itself and the Palestinians and which physically divides the G.ho.st team into two. However the Internet and collaboration between human beings transcends all physical boundaries.

That may not make a difference in your business decisions but I think it’s a pretty cool note.

View a demo of g.ho.st.

Summary

So there you go. I wouldn’t say that Cloud OSes are a mature niche as of yet but I think the field will grow. If you are ready to start playing, here are three very robust and usable environments.

LewisC

Technorati : cloud OS, cloud computing, remote os, web os

3Leaf Systems enable a “cloud computing” environment to be built from low-cost commodity servers by providing virtualization of CPU & Memory for an entire server farm. With 3Leaf technology, a group of servers can look like one big server that has one pool of CPU processing and one pool of memory that can be dynamically allocated and/or repurposed to applications as needed, without any modifications to operating systems.

This is a very cool concept and one that I will be watching very carefully. Doing this at all is slick but doing it so that it performs will be a real trick. I can see how you could make this transparent to applications. I mean, even that would take a tremendous amount of engineering but it’s doable. To make it transparent to an OS is just kind of amazing. I’m trying to picture a hyper-hypervisor. A virtual machine that would manage the resources of many computers?

The 3Leaf Systems Virtual Computing Environment™ enables the dynamic allocation of commodity server resources in a manner transparent to existing operating systems, applications, data center operations, and security paradigms.

Using virtualization techniques, enterprise data centers have resolved the problems of over-provisioning and excessive hardware and software platforms. The 3Leaf Systems’ V-8000 aggregates network and storage resources, enabling dynamic allocation of I/O bandwidth when and where it is needed to further enhance virtualization utility and manageability.

You can get some white papers on the concepts and coming products.

I’ve contacted the company and they followed up with me. As soon as I have some available bandwidth, I’m hoping to get a podcast with some of their engineers and get some details about how this works.

I could see something like this really moving cloud computing (especially private clouds) into the mainstream.

LewisC

Technorati : 3 leaf systems, cloud computing, clustering

Here is a quick 3 minute video showing how to use the iCloud day planner.

And here is a little bit longer demo (5 minutes) of the OS itself.

LewisC

Technorati : cloud os, desktop, web 2.0

Technorati : , cloud computing, cloud os

My first thought on using it was that it was a clone of gotomypc. I’m not a user of gotomypc so I can’t say for sure but it looks that way. The big difference is that gotomypc doesn’t have a free version or online storage. I think the integration, storage and synchronization services are what make Mesh a unique tool.

Being an MS product, you might expect there is no Linux support. You would be right. There is MAC OS/X support though and Windows Mobile is on the way. I would be a lot more excited if they planned to support blackberry. But, it is still a great way to stay in touch with my desktop, laptop, work computer and the non-linux database servers in my lab.

This is what my home desktop looks like from the Live Mesh Desktop:

You can access a live mesh remote desktop from any computer that can run IE. The computer you are connecting FROM does not need to be running Live Mesh at all. Just log into your account at livemesh.com and login. You can then connect to any device in your mesh.

When you log in via a browser, you get a device screen where you see all of your devices and can connect to new ones. Your device names are not the actual hardware identification. You get to give them friendly text names.

If you open your live desktop, you can create folders to store data in the cloud. You currently get 5GB of storage for free,. You can create multiple directories and automatically sync those directories to the devices of your choosing. As an example, I created a Documents directory. Anything I put in that directory is automatically propagated to my work computer, my laptop (BIGDOG) and to one of my database servers (which has partially become my son’s computer).

This is my Live Desktop:

I haven’t really noticed any speed differences between the IE connection and the Remote Desktop tool. I prefer to use the remote desktop but I can’t really say why. Here is what my db server looks like, first in IE and then in the remote desktop tool:

IE:

Remote Desktop:

If you notice in some of the above shots, Mesh windows have a side window with tips and information. I snipped that window out of some of these shots. It’s kind of annoying but usually provides helpful information. I could see in the future, if this becomes a pay service, that ads might be placed there to support a free version.

This is the text of the help window when connected to a remote desktop:

So that’s pretty much live mesh. It offers synching and free storage (more than mozy even) as well as a remote desktop that is accessible from a browser. I think this just shows how much cloud computing will be integrated in everyone’s life and not just in business.

LewisC

Technorati : desktop, live, mesh, microsoft, remote, storage

Technorati : cloud coomputing, live mesh, microsoft, remote desktop, synchronization, utility computing