14 July 2013

New Synth.nl website with HTML5 Media player

I just launched a new version of the Synth.nl website. The design is still the same, but under the hood it is now based on Joomla 2.5 where the old website was based on Joomla 1.5. I did make some adjustments to the design as well. It should load a bit faster now. I did rearrange some content: The interviews, reviews, pictures and videos are now accessible directly from the main menu. I think they are easier to find this way. But there is also some new stuff.

First of all I incorporated a new mailing list. It is now easy to subscribe and unsubscribe directly on the website from the 'newsletter menu' under the main menu. This is the first newsletter from the new plugin. I did delete all the old logins since it was full with spam accounts. Please make a new account for yourself if you want. It is now a bit harder for spammers since I use a Captcha verification.

The biggest change is the new HTML5 media player on the website. I used to have a flash player on the old website and got some complaints in the past because not all browsers support flash anymore. Especially on Ipads. Now it should work in all browsers.

I also uploaded new sound excerpts of 5 PrimiTiveS tracks. They are all 5 minutes long. So you get a good 25 minute impression of this over 70 minutes long album that I made together with Remy. I guess that should be enough for you to decide to buy it and support both me and Groove Unlimited my record label.

You can find the new player and PrimiTiveS excerpts on this link http://www.synth.nl/PrimiTiveS

Please help me to test the new website for errors. If you find anything please send me an E-mail on michel@synth.nl

Thank you very much for all your continued support!

09 July 2013

Virtiso Hosting Platform and my Work

A couple of you have heard that I started a new company and asked my what I was doing. I thought it would be nice to explain that a bit in a blog post here. First of all my new company is called Virtiso BV and is based in The Netherlands. I'm in the IT business as long as my memory goes back and in the ISP business since 1996. I have seen it all and done it all so I think I know what I'm talking about. I have also been an entrepreneur for the last 18 years. My main business is helping Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) with their IT needs. Whether it is advice or helping them to build a website, webshop, a groupware solution for E-mail, Calendars and Contacts or other Private Cloud Based solutions. To facilitate all this I build a small VMWare based hosting platform. Here you can see 8 Sun X4200 servers that have ESXi 5.1 running on them. On those physical servers I can run many virtual servers. And that is where my business is going now. Renting out both managed and unmanaged virtual servers.

For the geeks I also included a picture of the backside of the rack. The machines are all on rails by the way so I can roll them in and out easily for maintenance. These servers are located in the datacenter BIT-2A of the company BIT BV in Ede. This is the company I started together with my partner Henk in 1996. We are both still share holder, but no longer active in the operation. BIT has grown onto larger customers with high demands. With my own company I'm focussing on the market below. Small entrepreneurs, freelancers and companies with smaller IT needs or companies that just need decent webhosting without 99,99% SLA needs. Even so I tried to setup my platform as redundant as funds allow. There are two netscreen firewalls, double internet feeds, the VMWare platform is fully redundant and I also rent storage on a very redundant NetAPP cluster from BIT.

Here is the management platform. Here is also some storage that I use for backups only and the servers to manage the Sun cluster. The network stuff in in the picture on the lower right. Here you can see the switches and firewalls. BIT provides me also with redundant powerfeeds with both UPS'es and Diesel generators on both the A and B feed. So I guess this platform is not too bad :) Do let me know if you are reading this and think that I can help you out with something. I'm specialised in VMWare, Microsoft and Ubuntu Linux but I'm also very experienced with Kerio Connect, Control en Operator. Very cool products. Do look them up if you never hear of them on http://www.kerio.com. These product I also rent out as a managed service.

Next to this technical stuff I also design websites, build webshops and develop software. For the graphical side you probably have seen my 3D animations as well. That is another hobby I run next to my music stuff. For this 3D stuff you need a lot of computer power as well. Even rendering out a small animation takes a long time. For this I'm also building a platform in BIT's datacenter. This is a seperate platform from the hosting platform. I will show you this in the near future as well. I hope to find some customers as well for this in the graphical business. So I would say if you know someone who is looking for rendering capacity do let me know as well. And if you are looking for a datacenter in Europe/The Netherlands do check BIT out :) http://www.bit.nl. OK I hope it is a bit clearer what I do now. The website for my new company is hardly finished btw so I'll post that later when I think it is suitable :) If you have questions do ask of course :) Just send me an E-mail.

08 July 2013

New E-live 2013 website online

Twice a year Ron Boots from Groove Unlimited (my record label) asks me to make a new design for his festival. On the 19th of October the yearly E-live festival will take place again in Oirschot in The Netherlands a little town near Eindhoven. This time I parted with the purple color we had the last years and switched to blue. I made a new headline graphic with the artists that are playing this year. I hope you like it. Do have a look at the nice line-up if you like electronic music and buy your tickets in time. You can find the website on http://www.e-live.nl. Ofcourse I will be present as well during the festival possibly with a stall to sell CDs but I'm not sure about that yet.

01 July 2013

Bellerob - Paper Planes Fan Video

Bellerob did it again! This time he made a very nice video with the track 'Paper Planes' from the PrimiTiveS album by Remy and Synth.nl Enjoy !