Last week at the Austin Game Developers Conference PEER1 employees spoke with attendees on just how much latency kills when it comes to gaming. What a coincidence! PEER1 just so happened to have a booth at the conference offering “Latency Kills” packages geared towards hardcore gaming providers, publishers, and developers. GREAT!

The conference turn out was even bigger than last year, which PEER1 also attended. There were many great companies exhibiting their products and we all made our rounds to introduce ourselves to each and every one of them, learning about their business and products at the same time.

The 2-day conference was a complete success and we certainly look forward to attending next year seeing many familiar faces, while at the same time making many new friends.

You can view our pictures taken from the conference at any of these websites: PEER1 on FaceBook, PEER1 Community, Flickr, or PEER1 on MySpace.

PEER 1 was featured in a CTV News story televised on April 30th, 2008 about Revenue Canada’s issue with people uploading their tax returns over the Internet through NETFILE, which was logjammed due to lack of IT infrastructure capacity. PEER 1 appears at the 4:10 mark of the video.

While I am a Linux girl at heart, I am constantly watching and reading up on Microsoft and it’s direction – for better and worse. By no means am I against Microsoft or any of it’s products and today, I am watching them even closer after reading an article posted on CNET yesterday titled, “Microsoft: Web at the center, not PC“.

Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has the right idea, the right focus, and I’m very curious to know if his ideas and focus are being backed by the rest of the company. Some argue that this is a little too late in the game for them, but hey..at least they’re keeping themselves in the game, right?

He starts by preparing a memo to be sent to the employees -

“Over the past 10 years, the PC era has given way to an era in which the Web is at the center of our experiences–experiences delivered not just through the browser but also through many different devices including PCs, phones, media players, game consoles, set-top boxes and televisions, cars, and more.”

Further, Ozzie outlines three principles to guide the company in this new era. Chief among those is the notion that “the Web is the hub of our social mesh and our device mesh.” The notion of a Mesh is one that Ozzie has been working on for some time and has culminated in the Live Mesh service that Microsoft detailed on Tuesday. He states that this transformation has been quite the challenge for Microsoft to embrace.

“More than two years ago when I wrote the memo entitled The Internet Services Disruption, much of the company was still focused on bringing our Office 2007 and Vista products to market,” Ozzie said. “Aside from MSN, IE/IIS and our tools groups, it was truly ’software’, not ’services’, that was top of mind.”

But, he said, “since then, we’ve made tremendous progress in our expansion toward ’software+services’–from the long-term quests we’ve undertaken and customer scenarios we now envision, to the great services and service-enhanced software we’ve begun to bring to market, and the amazing projects at various stages within our development pipeline.”

This memo gives us a look inside of the mind of Ray Ozzie and hopefully it’ll be spread through the company and embraced. This article is definitely worth the read.

We have announced the winner of our Growing Pains Free Hosting Contest, with a prize of 12 months of free managed hosting, valued at more than $2400.00!

Tim Mateosian, co-founder of Big Room Studios which is headquartered in Portland, Maine, has won a managed hosting server that includes 1 TB of monthly data transfer and bi-weekly vulnerability scans. PEER 1 received more than 1,000 online entries from viewers of the premier episode of “Growing Pains,” the company’s humorous video-short series.

Big Room Studios specializes in offering combined online services – Web and Print Design, Custom Web Development, Website Implementations using their BRS Core Framework, IT Support and Consulting. Started in 2002 by Mateosian and his brother, the company now has clients throughout North America and the UK.

Mateosian has been a PEER 1 customer for almost six years now and has worked in the hosting industry for more than 10 years, when he started as a hosting reseller. The business grew to include advanced web solutions when his brother, a talented programmer, joined and created a web framework for the firm. PEER 1’s self-managed hosting is the ideal solution for this kind of programming, since the Mateosian brothers require more control over the server environment in order to run their web solutions.

Mateosian was very excited when he heard the news of winning and stated that the timing couldn’t be better! Not to mention, he’s never won anything before!

PEER 1 will be holding a new contest, calling for contestants to create and upload their own “growing pains” video, in conjunction with the upcoming second episode of “Growing Pains” due out in May.

If someone were to walk up to you and ask, “Do you remember what your very first computer was?”, without hesitating we could ramble off the model, the year, the things that we used to do on them, and share fond memories. So, lets hear it – did your computing days begin in the 70’s, 80’s, or 90’s? What was your first computer and what memories do you have of it?

My first computer was an IBM PC jr. It was great and I was the only kid in the neighborhood to have a computer way back then. The IBM PCjr (read “PC junior”) was IBM’s first attempt to enter the market for relatively inexpensive educational and home-use personal computers. The PCjr, IBM model number 4860, retained the IBM PC’s 8088 CPU and BIOS interface for compatibility, but differences in the PCjr’s architecture, as well as other design and implementation decisions, eventually led the PCjr to be a commercial failure in the marketplace.

It’s funny to go and read the wiki article on the PCjr and remember the good old days … as I type this post on my new MacBook Pro. Hah!

So let’s hear it – what was your very first computer?

 The security conference that last year made headlines with a hacking challenge whose winner walked away with a $10,000 prize will reprise the contest next week — this time with more money at stake, the contest’s organizer said today.

CanSecWest, which will run from March 26 to 28 in Vancouver, British Columbia, will feature a second “PWN to Own” contest that pits researchers against a trio of laptops – all patched. All in typical client configurations with typical user configurations. You hack it, you get to keep it.

Each has a file on them and it contains the instructions and how to claim the prize.

Targets (typical road-warrior clients):

• VAIO VGN-TZ37CN running Ubuntu 7.10
• Fujitsu U810 running Vista Ultimate SP1
• MacBook Air running OSX 10.5.2

As you can see, they are all armed with the latest versions of Windows Vista Ultimate, Mac OS X 10.5 and the Ubuntu Linux distribution, said Dragos Ruiu, the conference’s organizer. The first to hack one of the laptops by exploiting a remote pre-authentication code-execution vulnerability in a default service on the notebook’s operating system will take home the machine and a $10,000 prize.

3Com Corp.’s TippingPoint unit and its Zero Day Initiative bug-bounty program is providing the cash, as it did last year.

Do you have a passion for hacking? Check out the full article on CanSecWest here.

Do you want to learn how to program or develop in mySQL? Enhance your skills or brush them up as a developer or programmer. Or just learn the lingo. Tutorials, lecture slides, and problem sets for a variety of topic areas including AJAX, Distributed Systems, Web Security, Languages and a ton of other great classes – at no cost!

Check out Google Code University!

Today, the 5-A-Day initiative was announced in which the Ubuntu community are encouraging everyone to work on at least 5 bugs a day, and users, developers and upstreams can all help. There are also tools to share bugs that have been tended to in email signatures and else. This is an excellent way for everyone to make a real difference to Ubuntu!

So, what the heck is 5-A-Day? Ubuntu’s 5-A-Day means everybody, will do 5 bugs a day – every day. With only five bugs that everybody looks at every day, it will cover a lot of ground.

What you can do? That’s up to you, your interests and your abilities.

• If you’re a developer, you can help out reviewing patches and getting them uploaded.
• If you want to just confirm new bugs, you can do that.
• If you’ve experience with a certain package and want to triage bugs you can do that and forward them upstream if necessary.
• If you know your way around Ubuntu quite well, you can help assign bugs to the right package.

This is a really great idea and I hope to see more communities implement such. This is also a great idea for business to take a look at as far as their internal opertations go.

Take a look at Ubuntu’s 5-A-Day and see what you can do to help!

You read correctly! Get a Free PEER 1 Sandbox Server!

PEER 1 and Microsoft are offering 50 sandbox servers (valued at $1,000 each) free for 30 days, packed full with the very latest MS development software for you to work with. This is a limited time offer and available to qualified applicants only. To become eligible for this rare opportunity, please fill out the online application. If you are selected, a PEER 1 representative will contact you directly with details on accessing your server.

SANDBOX SERVER SPECS:

* 2 x Intel Xeon 5320 Quad-core CPU
* 2 GB RAM
* 1 x 250GB HD

Each sandbox server includes:

PLATFORM

* IIS 6
* .ASP.NET 2.0
* .NET 2.0

* PHP 5.0
* Silverlight
* SQL Server Standard

EXPRESSION TOOLS

* Expression Blend
* Expression Web
* Expression Design

VISUAL STUDIO EXPRESS EDITIONS

* Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition
* Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition
* Visual C# 2005 Express Edition

As a bonus, we are also giving away the following to each Sandbox user that establishes a new Microsoft dedicated hosting account with PEER 1 at the end of their sandbox server trial period:

* Microsoft Expression Web (valued at $299) – a professional design tool to create modern, standards-based sites that deliver superior quality on the Web.

* FREE Microsoft Training (valued at $1099) – A free one year online subscription for Microsoft® Expression Studio & Microsoft® ASP.NET training delivered by Total Training™.

Included in Your Subscription:

o Total Training™ for Microsoft® Expression Studio – 27 hours: Watch and learn as we show you how to take your creative possibilities to a new level using the professional design tools and innovative technologies in the Expression Studio.
o Total Training™ for Microsoft ASP.NET – 23 hours: These training videos will get you up to speed quickly, exploring all of the key features of AJAX and Building Web Applications, and then guide you to mastery level with advanced topics and techniques.

Check out the full details here!

Enforcing your data’s integrity is probably the single most important issue you face when designing a database, right?

Validating user input is one way of keeping bad data from making its way into your analysis and reports. However, it only takes one piece of bad data to create a mess.  Mistakes, such as typos happen (which we all find ourselves doing from time to time).  Granted, you can’t stop every single mistake at the input stage, but it’s the best place to start.

Check out this great how-to here.