Back in Business

Covalent Technology is back in business. My goal is to turn this company around – solve the financial crisis that has long haunted my Excel spread sheet – before the end of this year, before I move on to another venture.

Our Covalentia Community Portal is back, newly hosted at VPSLand.com. Like I mentioned previously, the price that they’re charging is relatively cheap and they provide excellent support and fast response. I’d recommend this company to anyone who wants to try out Virtual Private Server. But if you just need a simple ASP.NET hosting, well, you can come to us. It’s not FREE, but it’s so cheap that it becomes negligible or relatively FREE ;) Contact us at support@covalentia.net (we have a new e-mail now, it's no longer support@covalent-tech.com).

On the MOCCIS Trading project, I managed to sort all the problems out. In fact, I’ve learned a lot about IBM DB2 and I might consider putting it in the next release of Covalentia. NOT!

And finally, my Enterprise Innovation Fund (EIF) from the Ministry of Science, Technology & Innovative Malaysia, has been approved. It took them 5 months to evaluate and I don’t know how long they’ll take to disburse the money. 6 months perhaps? I asked for RM 250K (~USD 71K) but the total amount approved is only RM 177,020.00 (~USD 50K). I’m not sure how they came up with that figure, on what basis etc. But why not just round it to, say, RM 177K or 178K? Oh well, in any event, I’m just glad and I hope that the fund WILL be disbursed. This money will be used to buy me a lot of lunches and dinners that I’ve skipped. And the rest will be used to further develop FREE Covalentia. I’d say, may be, 10% of the total amount. Hmm that should be more than enough eh?

Oh, and if you guys would like to donate, to add up to this amount (help me fill my belly with food and more food), DO NOT hesitate :)

New Hosting For Covalentia.Net Community Portal

We are in the process of moving the contents of our lame server to a real hosting provider, from BolehLand to VPSLand.com. The previous provider wasn't real, our server was hosted under a FREE plan not available anywhere else in the world :) Unfortunately, some network guy in the company which happens to be the largest ISP provider in Malaysia, audited the network and detected our unused-and-not-supposed-to-be-there network and decided to close it down.
Fudge.

Oh well, in any event, this migration process will take awhile, perhaps a week or so. I've never used a Virtual Private Server before, and I think that it's kinda cool. So, why not try it out. And the price isn't that expensive (I can still afford it, well, may be I have to skip a few breakfasts and lunches in a month, that'll do) at USD 38 per month, equivalent to approximately RM 136.80 per month.

Donation anybody? Help us out so that we can continue to provide FREE Covalentia. Stay tuned ;)

Have You Seen It?

If you haven't, check it out. The latest Covalentia Version 2.2 at http://www.covalentia.net ;)



Oh, by the way, here's a reply from exabytes regarding the previous hosting issue:

I wrote:

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Dear Exabytes,

I think you should clearly state in your website that the MySQL supported is version 4, and not the latest version 5. Version 5 has been around for quite sometime. If you only put just 'MySQL', a lot of people will assume that it is the latest version.

In regards to my client's hosting (www.danial.com.my), my app runs on ASP.NET 2.0. So, to host on Linux is not an option. My solution now is to advise them to either terminate, refund their money and look for another hosting company, OR pay an extra RM 380 per year for your Microsoft SQL database service. We'll let you know then.

Reply:

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Hello Cozta,

Thanks again for your feedback.

I have reported your suggestion to our management for further review.

Hope to hear for good reply from you.

If you have any enquiries, please do not hesitate to contact. Thank You!

[Censored]
--------------------
Customer Service Manager
Exa Bytes Network Sdn Bhd

Web: http://www.exabytes.com | http://www.exabytes.com.my
Helpdesk: http://support.exabytes.com

Yeah. Whatever.

When a Good Day Turns Ugly

Of late I’m working on two projects – The Great Hunt Community Portal and Danial Portal (www.danial.com.my). Both portals will be running on my latest version of Covalentia Version 2.2 which I haven’t released. The Great Hunt Community Portal, a new Employment and Project Outsourcing Portal, was initially scheduled for a soft-launch today. However, due to the recent upgrade of Covalentia (due to the recent release of ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX 1.0 RTM), I have to postpone the proposed launch date, hopefully before the end of this month. And, I will post the project’s source codes on our Covalentia Community Portal. Yes, you heard me right, I will reveal everything, how it is done etc. So, stay tuned ;)

As for the Danial Portal (www.danial.com.my), if you’re in Malaysia, switch your TV on to channel 1 (RTM Satu - Saluran Info Anda ie. Saluran Propaganda BN), and watch the new local cartoon series, Danial, every Tuesday at 7.00 PM GMT +8. Covalent Technology has been awarded by MediaCal (www.mediacal.com.my) to develop this portal using our Covalentia platform. Everything is going well until today after we signed up for a web-hosting solution from exabytes.com. Well, they claimed that they’re the no. 1 web-hosting company (don’t they all do so?), but still they can’t give me what I need. I need ASP.NET 2.0 with AJAX 1.0 and MySQL Server 5.0 to run Covalentia. If you look at their website, it is stated there that they do support MySQL (without stating which version that they support). And it turns out to be MySQL Server 4.1.22. I could switch to Microsoft SQL 2005 instead (since Covalentia supports both Microsoft SQL 2005 and MySQL 5.0 as well as PostgreSQL 8.1+), but I have to pay extra (which they don't tell on their website too).

I admit that it is partly my mistake. I should’ve asked first before signing up. But, being a customer (in this case I am when usually I’m the vendor), and a customer is always right, I think exabytes should highlight CLEARLY in their website what version of MySQL that they support. And they should put the extra payment that I have to pay to use Microsoft SQL 2005 too. I just hate hidden charges. I mean, what’s wrong with putting all the information up there? It’s not like somebody is gonna get killed if you tell the whole world how much you charge extra or if you use the old MySQL Version 4.1. And you claim you’re the no. 1? Geez.

DRAGON

That's the name of our server :)

Perhaps, LAME is more appropriate. I'm thinking of adding more RAM to it, say another 256 or 512 MB, if I can find one in the unused Red Hat machine.

Server Reinstallation

The Covalentia community portal will be offline for a few more days because the lame server is currently with me, and not at the data center. I’m backing-up all the files and reinstalling everything from scratch. Take a look at the specs (and try not to laugh):

• Clone PC – not a 1U Rack Server
• Some ASUS main board
• Pentium 4 1.7GHz
• Normal 40GB Hard Disk (Neither SCSI nor SATA and forget about Hot-swap & RAID)
• 512 MB of RAM
• Some 10/100 MB Ethernet PCI Card

So, now you know why we need fund :)

And the CodePlex site is down as well. Keep it comin'.