This one is from BlestaLabs.. that dark little corner of the office where we do R&D.

Watch the video first, and then scroll down for some details.

The video is below, as usual you can make the video full screen, and be sure to turn on your sound! (If you like music, no narration this time)

Let’s face it, we’re nerds, and we like to push the limits. We spend a lot of time making things run properly, you know, in the back-end. Nice and efficient like. So, what a better way to test Blesta v3 than on a credit card sized computer, right? So, we ordered some Raspberry Pi’s and waited 6 months for them to arrive.

I took one of them, and installed Debian Wheezy, Apache 2, PHP 5.4, and MySQL server 5.5 and slapped an alpha copy of Blesta v3 on it.

The Raspberry people were nice enough to ship ones with 512MB of RAM (upgraded from previous 256MB versions) but it’s obvious that the bottle neck with running a web server on a Pi is the ARM processor. As recommended, I installed php-apc, and that improved things noticeably along with some other tweaks. To improve things further I might try lighttpd, or another light weight web server, but overall performance is pretty good!

And there you have it, the next-gen Blesta on a Raspberry Pi. Hey, if it’ll run on a Pi with a tiny processor and an SD card for a hard drive, it’ll run on your web server.

Don’t fall for the lie, PI is better than cake anyway.. and it’s real! Some of you gamer nerds know what I’m talking about.

Tags: blesta 3 | cake | pie | raspberry pi | v3

I’ll have another post on Blesta, probably next week. If there’s something in particular you’d like me to touch on or want to know about, email me at sales and I’ll consider it for my next post.

It’s Friday afternoon and we are starting to wind down for the weekend, so I think I’ll just reflect on the past couple weeks.

Last Thursday a short while before noon the power went out in the whole building. The power was out for several hours, and we were on generator power. I didn’t realize that the generator doesn’t power the lights, or some of the wall outlets.

I sent out this tweet.

This picture doesn’t quite capture the creepiness of it all. I was unable to capture the subtler red glow in the furthest reaches of the building, or that rambling squiggly-squaw sound that zombies make. Maybe I imagined that last part. I did, right?

It was kind of exciting, the generator kept everything critical up and running (Like blesta.com) and we didn’t have to refuel it. The power eventually came back up and everything switched back over like it’s suppose to.

There was only one problem. My linux computer was plugged into an outlet that was not on generator power, and my battery backup ran out of power.. and it would not boot back up. Dead. On top of that, one of the hard drives was making a cyclical click or screeching sound. Not good.

Being the sort of guy that backs up everything, I thought this would be no problem. A couple new hard drives, kick off the R1Soft restore CD and I’ll be back to normal in a few hours. Nope, the R1Soft backups are corrupt. Well, not the /boot partition, just the / partition — that’s like everything I need. They let me down, big time.

It was a long night, or early morning depending on how you look at it, but I was able to recover everything from the drives with a little linux shell magic. I did have to do a fresh install of the OS, but an upgrade was long overdue anyway. I had my data back.

Someone will ask, so I’ll tell you. Blesta code was never at risk because it’s in several different geographic places at all times.

Do you have backups? Multiple backups? Backups of your backups?

Alright, I hope everyone has a great weekend. v3 alpha is rapidly approaching.. looking at the tasks and there are only a few left. Stay tuned. If you’re a developer and there’s something you want to build on v3 for personal or public use let me know. You might be eligible for the alpha.

Tags: dark | hard drive | linux | power outage | zombies

We thought we’d follow @liquidweb on Twitter so we could stay in the know. Since then, they’ve managed to plant a Liquid Web Hero inside our HQ. Who’s watching who?

It’s all good though, we don’t mind.. we’ve been blinded by his sheer awesomeness, captivated by his strong work ethic, and amazed by his dedication to all that is right and good.

We snapped a few shots lest you make us out to be liars.

Pictured here is the LW Hero (foreground) and Cody, our Lead Developer (background). Such level of awesomeness has arguably never been captured in a single photograph before now.

The LW Hero, warming up to a brainstorming session. This guy is tough, at first he underestimated the mass of the marker, and I had to fetch it out of the ceiling.. from the 2nd floor of the building.

What photo shoot is complete without a little Super Mario Bros 1-up action?

Anyway, a big thanks to Liquid Web! They were kind enough to send us one of their highly sought after Heroes and for that, we are eternally grateful.

You can visit Liquid Web at www.liquidweb.com

The vending machine in our lunch room is notorious for taking your money and teasing you with a bag of chips dangling from the slot where it should drop. I suspect there’s a pretty high, 20%-ish “you aint gonna get what you want” rate on this clearly aging food dispensing unit. (Vending machine in lay terms) Sometimes shaking works, but we’ve heard that humans don’t always win in these situations.

A few times a week there’s usually a typical post-it note venting displeasure to the vending machine guy over the loss of money. Yesterday there were a lot of these, and I found this one in particular to be really funny.. largely because the evidence is overwhelming.

Well, Danielle.. I don’t know who you are but I hope you are one day reunited with your ABBA-ZABA, we feel your pain.

The team at VPS.NET was kind enough to send over one of their amazing little robots. Here he is right after I took him out of his anti-static (To prevent electrical issues during transport) bag.

A closeup..

The little guy wasted no time and promptly got to work. I switched the flip from “node management” to programming, and he started away filling in the stub methods for some objects in the new Blesta 3.0 that’s currently under development. Took him a few minutes to learn the Dvorak key mappings (He comes with native QWERTY support only) but once he got the hang of it, it was a sight to behold. I should have taken video.

He also loves to get into things. He finished up all his work early, and I caught him playing with the paper clips. Crazy little guy!! What a personality.

So, a big thank you to VPS.NET and all the staff! Nick, Ditlev, Terry, Carlos, and the rest, well done!

I’m happy to announce that www.blesta.com has a new look. The last design went largely unchanged for about 2 years, so we were long overdue for a facelift.

There may be a few issues with missing content, or the occasional broken page but we’ll have that all cleared up in the next few days.

So, what do you think?

A beta version of the CentovaCast module has been released. For more information, or to download the module, visit this thread on our forums.

Our friends over at Vision Helpdesk have been hard at work, they just launched v2.3.2 with Blesta integration! Now you can create invoices in Blesta directly from Vision Helpdesk, and I’m told they’ve got login share working too.

Continue »

Tags: api | blesta integration | support | vision helpdesk

We’ve been cooped up inside, cranking away on code.. so we thought Labor Day weekend might be a good time to get out and do something that didn’t involve a keyboard. We went cart racing at K1 in Anaheim on Saturday and it was good times all around. Continue »

Blesta won the saasdir.com award for Top 25 most popular for August. Check it out and place your vote for us for September!

Yesterday we announced support for VPS.NET on our forums, and it turns out Blesta is the first billing app to make use of VPS.NET’s new API. You can read about it on their blog too. VPS.NET has a unique node based VPS offering where more nodes mean more VPS and we’re proud to be the first to offer support. Continue »

Blesta won the saasdir.com award again, for July 2009. That’s 4 months in a row! Check it out and place your vote for us for August.

Blesta won the June 2009 saasdir.com award. That’s 3 months in a row! Check it out and share some vote love.

Blesta won the May 2009 saasdir.com award. That’s 2 months in a row! Check it out and share some vote love.

Blesta won the April 2009 saasdir.com award for best Accounting / Financial software. Shiny. Check it out and share some vote love.